In recent times developments in the natural sciences and in the sphere of environmental politics have compelled social scientists, and also some natural scientists, to rethink the relations that hitherto have been held, in Western thought generally and within particular disciplines, to characterize ‘nature’ on the one side and ‘culture’ on the other. This article considers the history of this conceptual boundary and looks at new conceptualizations of nature/culture, stimulated by developments both in biotechnology and in the ongoing controversies about (...) environmental degradation. It argues that while some of the contributions to reconfiguring, or abolishing, the nature/ culture division have been productive and stimulating of new ways of conceiving the world, there has nonetheless been an unfortunate tendency for social scientists to bring to bear inherited analytic dispositions on biotechnological and environmental matters. Instead of using these issues as means of challenging social scientific disciplinary dogmas and of engaging in constructive rapprochement with natural scientists, social scientists have in their analyses of such matters often merely asserted the hegemony of ‘culture’ over ‘nature’, and thus in effect the superiority of social scientific over natural scientific conceptualizations of the world. Far from overcoming the nature/culture boundary, social scientists have too often merely asserted the primacy of the sorts of subject matters and analytic techniques they feel comfortable with, rather than subjecting their practices to fully reflexive self-scrutiny. (shrink)

Aquinas is often presented as following Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics" when treating moral virtue. Less often do philosophers consider that Aquinas's conception of the highest good and its relation to the functional character of human activity led him to break with Aristotle by replicating each of the acquired moral virtues on an infused level. The author suggests that we can discern reasons for this move by examining Aquinas's commentary on the "Sententiae" of Peter the Lombard and the "Summa theologiae" within their (...) historical context. The author's thesis is that Dominican pastoral and intellectual concerns led Aquinas to argue that moral virtue must necessarily be ordered toward the highest good. Understanding this purpose helps to explain his presentation of moral virtue and its implications for standard philosophical interpretations of his work. (shrink)

This volume continues this discussion with particular reference to medieval philosophy.Inglis shows that the modern historiography of medieval philosophy had ...

This article provides a critique of the postmodernist notion that there has been of recent years a dissolution of the divide between aesthetics and practical activities, between Art and Life. It does so by considering the game of soccer from a phenomenological viewpoint, which shows that the game possesses intrinsically ‘aesthetic’ qualities. The conditions of possibility of such qualities are understood by introducing the idea of the ‘proto‐aesthetics’ of soccer and other mundane phenomena. By considering the proto‐aesthetics of the quotidian (...) we argue that recent changes in the nature of practical life should not be regarded as due to ‘aestheticisation’ but rather as springing from processes of commodification. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:“First the Bow is Bent in Study …” Dominican Education before 1350 by M. Michèle MulchaheyJohn InglisM. Michèle Mulchahey. “First the Bow is Bent in Study …” Dominican Education before 1350. Studies and Texts, vol. 132. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1998. Pp. xxi + 618. Cloth, $110.00.In his The Setting of the Summa theologiae of Saint Thomas, Leonard Boyle represents one of the more interesting directions (...) in the recent historiography of Latin medieval philosophy (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1982). His claim is that if we are to understand Aquinas, we need to pay closer attention to the Dominican intellectual context. With a focus on the moral component of Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, Boyle establishes that Aquinas did not converse alone with Aristotle and Averroes in some philosophical ivory tower as historians often imply, but that he wrote and disputed in light of Dominican goals. This point helps to clarify the context of Aquinas’s texts—a type of historical context not found in the standard philosophical accounts. In the book under review, the first detailed history of Dominican medieval education, M. Michèle Mulchahey supplies a more extended treatment of this intellectual context.Commonly, intellectuals in the high middle ages are presented as spending their lives at universities studying philosophy, conducting disputations, and lecturing on the Sentences of Peter the Lombard. Anthony Kenny and Jan Pinborg present such a picture in their helpful contribution to The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy ([Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982], 11–42). Mulchahey argues that this sort of picture is rather simplistic when applied to the Dominican intellectual life. From the early years of the order, there was to be a “doctor” in each and every local Dominican house (132). One of Mulchahey’s more interesting conclusions is that the schools associated with these local houses were more advanced than has often been thought. For example, each house was to include lectures on the Sentences of Peter the Lombard and on Scripture, that is, on the very texts which historians commonly associate only with the universities (134–136). Furthermore, disputations were conducted frequently at local houses (134, 167) and by the middle of the thirteenth century, the works of Aristotle were often taught (220). Her point is that if we are to understand the intellectual world in which a Dominican like Aquinas spent his life, then we need to be clear about this context and not just about that of the universities.Even at the university, Dominicans studied and lectured at Dominican houses and not at institutions of the secular clergy. For instance, even when Aquinas was a Bachelor of the Sentences and a Master of the Sacred Page at the University of Paris, he lived and taught at the Dominican convent according to the distinct traditions and practices [End Page 361] of the order. Furthermore, select Dominican schools of higher learning, including those associated with universities, produced teachers for local Dominican communities. Mulchahey argues convincingly that the structures of Dominican education came to exist from the bottom up within a Dominican context and not as an extension of the statutes of the universities (351–378).This Dominican context helps to provide a response to an objection that John Jenkins raises to Boyle’s view of the audience of Aquinas’s Summa theologiae—an issue that has important implications for how to read this work. Boyle argued that the Summa arose out of the pastoral needs of ordinary Dominicans and reflects this institutional purpose. Jenkins “rejects” this claim, arguing that Aquinas’s text is so dense and conceptually difficult that it could only have been written for those who were prepared to study the Sentences of Peter the Lombard at the University of Paris. (See John I. Jenkins, Knowledge and faith in Thomas Aquinas [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 81, 89–90.) Mulchahey provides important support for Boyle’s view by establishing that it was the policy of the order to prepare ordinary Dominicans to study the Sentences of Peter the Lombard at the local houses. At a time when there were few universities, the Dominicans established hundreds of sites of higher education at... (shrink)

The first volume of the Mediaeval Commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard (=MCS1) edited by G. R. Evans in 2002 provided the first comprehensive study of those works that house much Latin medieval philosophy from the middle of the twelfth century to Martin Luther in the sixteenth century. Philipp Rosemann rounded out this project in 2007 with The Story of a Great Medieval Book: Peter Lombard's Sentences (Peterborough, ON: Broadview), which serves as an introduction to the second volume he (...) has now edited of the MCS (=MCS2). These volumes provide much of the context for Latin philosophical work in the later Middle Ages, which is arguably the most understudied period of Western thought. Steven Livesey gives .. (shrink)

The Islamic philosophical tradition was the privileged site for the study and continuation of the Classical philosophical tradition in the Middle Ages. An initial chapter on the history of Islamic philosophy sets the stage for sixteen articles on issues across the Islamic, Jewish and Christian traditions. The goal is to see the Islamic tradition in its own richness and complexity as the context of much Jewish intellectual work. Taken together, these two traditions provide the wider context to which Latin Christian (...) intellectuals would turn. The articles are grouped under six topics relevant both to the period and to current philosophical interest: the Islamic philosophical context, the nature of philosophy in the Middle Ages, Neoplatonism and the activity of the soul, creation, virtue, and the Latin reception. Since the nineteenth century Islamic and Jewish philosophy have been neglected in the standard histories of medieval philosophy. The time is right to begin to write a more balanced history of medieval philosophy. In order to begin to write this history, this book focuses on the Islamic, Jewish, and Christian use of - and reaction to - Classical philosophy during the Middle Ages. (shrink)

Many influential stances within the social sciences regard nature in one of two ways: either as none of their concern (which is with the social and cultural aspects of human existence), or as wholly a social and cultural fabrication. But there is also another strand of social scientific thinking that seeks to understand the interplay between social and cultural factors on one side and natural factors on the other. These volumes contain the main contributions that have been made within each (...) of these streams of thought. The selections illustrate to the reader the complexity of the various positions within these streams, and the strengths and limitations of each perspective. A new introduction places these articles in their historical and intellectual context and the volumes are completed with an extensive index and chronological table of contents. (shrink)

This small volume provides undergraduate students in medieval studies or philosophy with an accessible but scholarly guide to the work of Aquinas and the traditions of his era.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Omne Agens Agit Sibi Simile: A “Repetition” of Scholastic Metaphysics by Philipp W. RosemannJohn InglisPhilipp W. Rosemann. Omne Agens Agit Sibi Simile: A “Repetition” of Scholastic Metaphysics. Louvain Philosophical Studies, Vol. 12. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1996. Pp. 368. Paper, BF 1,450.The technical sounding title of this volume could mislead the reader into thinking that it concerns some obscure point of Latin medieval thought, rather than an issue (...) central [End Page 131] to medieval metaphysical speculation. In fact, Philipp Rosemann charts the metaphysical theology of a significant number of intellectuals, ranging from Plato to Aquinas, in a dense and perceptive historical narrative that reaches its telos in Aquinas’s view of the emanation from, and return to, God. Too often historians and philosophers atomize specific medieval issues by treating them apart from the textual, historical, and metaphysical context. The classic case of this occurs when the wider web of metaphysical and monastic concerns is neglected in presentations of Anselm’s argument for the existence of God. Rosemann supplies much of this context in a concise yet detailed discussion of Hellenistic and medieval views on causal similitude, i.e., the degree of similarity that must exist between every cause and effect.The book is divided, as it were, into three equal parts: the first is devoted to the ancient philosophers Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Proclus; the second to Pseudo-Dionysius, Augustine, Eriugena, Peter the Lombard, Avicenna, Averroes, and Albert the Great; and the third to Aquinas. These figures were included for two reasons: first, for contributing views of causal similitude that take into account either a Neo-Platonic emanational causality between different types of beings or/and a peripatetic efficient causality between individual substances; and second, to provide the background for Aquinas’s reconciliation of both types of causality.In the second part of the book, Rosemann presses his thesis that there is a Trinitarian context to Western metaphysical reflection which must be understood if we are to be clear about the history of Latin medieval thought. His point is that within this context intellectuals produced detailed accounts of a hierarchy of beings each of which stands on a scale closer to or farther away from a single divine “being” (111). Individual beings, including physical objects, both replicate and exteriorize various qualities of the divine (115). From this perspective, Latin medieval inquiry into issues concerning causality and the human mind form at the same time an inquiry into the interior character of a triune God (145, 349). For example, it becomes clear why Eriugena claims that a human being has no direct knowledge of his or her individual essence (125). In imitation of the divine, one reasons about one’s concerns, and only then is one able to reflect on this reasoning. Such reflection yields self-knowledge (124–27). Since human self-knowledge reflects divine self-knowledge, human self-knowledge is required in order to inquire into the mind of God. According to Rosemann, the medievals extend to the divine Socrates’ dictum regarding the unexamined life.Recent writers have devoted attention to the Neo-Platonic framework of Aquinas’s project. For example, in his important God in Himself (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), Wayne Hankey has clarified the two emanations that structure the first part of Aquinas’s Summa theologiae: the first a procession of three persons internal to God, and the second the procession of creation. The first plays a causal role in regard to the universe while the second mirrors the metaphysical structure of the first. Rosemann places this intellectual achievement in a more precise historical context, carefully isolates Aquinas’s types of causal relations (280–88), and offers a splendid account of the role played by causal similitude in the emanation and return of individual substances to God (262–77). Individual beings bring about effects that are species-specific to the point that they both lead to the flourishing of the species and represent [End Page 132] the divine. The higher the type of being, the more elevated and individual the degree of representation. For example, while a stone might express external physical characteristics of strength, a human being can obtain a... (shrink)

ON MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY presents a concise overview of the key elements of medieval philosophy, this practical and affordable philosophy text will help you understand and identify key ideas so that you can easily succeed in this course. With coverage of Christian, Islamic, and Jewish traditions, this volume aims to draw attention to the implications of medieval philosophy for the present age.

(1997). Philosophical autonomy and the historiography of medieval philosophy. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 21-53.

This volume contains the seminal articles that define the influence of Aquinas within legal philosophical thought. A comprehensive reference for those new to the field, it covers such topics as the relation of virtue to law, the common good, natural law, natural rights and property rights; together with social and political issues like abortion, feminism, homosexuality, environment, civil disobedience and just war. Attention is devoted to the new natural law theory and its limitations, as well as the place of historical (...) context in the recovery of social thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 439-440 [Access article in PDF] John F. Wippel. The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being. Monographs of the Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy, No. 1. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 2000. Pp. xxvii + 630. Cloth, $59.95. Paper, $39.95. In this weighty volume, John Wippel brings together much of the important research that (...) he has carried out on the metaphysics of Aquinas over the last three decades in order to produce as he calls it, a "Summa metaphysicae" based on the original texts of Aquinas (xxvii). Throughout much of the twentieth century metaphysics has been thought to be Aquinas's greatest philosophical achievement. The historical research of Etienne Gilson and Joseph Owens together with the philosophical reflections of Jacques Maritain did much to place this topic at the heart of Aquinas scholarship. Therefore, this volume both represents Wippel's central research interest and brings to a head an entire school of Aquinas studies of the twentieth century. It is the clearest and most detailed account of the subject in the English language, bearing the hallmarks of Wippel's scholarship: clarity in reference to the arguments and attention to textual chronology.Metaphysics here does not mean so much a focus on Aquinas's treatment of Aristotle's four causes or his act and potency as much as a clear presentation of Aquinas's reflections on existence (esse) and the implications that this has for his thought. After an introductory discussion of the nature and subject of metaphysics for Aquinas, Wippel devotes the first part of the book to Aquinas's view of existence in order to unpack what it means to talk about individual things as beings, being in general, and the catagories of Aristotle (73-74). Masterfully, he explains Aquinas's analogical approach to being and guides the reader through the interpretive thicket of Cornelio Fabro, G. P. Klubertanz, and Ralph McInerny. An interesting parallel is presented between Parmenides' problem of the one and the many and Aquinas's philosophically interesting view of the composite manner in which concrete individuals exist (161-170). Since no individual creature is the author of its own existence, but does in fact exist, each finite being must receive existence from a single being that exists necessarily. Wippel highlights this and other approaches that Aquinas takes to clarify relations between the many individual beings and the single divine being that lies beyond the study of metaphysics.Part two is devoted to many of the ways in which Aquinas talks about concrete individuals. Here Wippel explains Aquinas's distinctions between substance and accident as well as between matter and form and how they relate to existence. Part three concludes the work with a treatment of what Aristotle and Aquinas call divine science. This consists of more than a hundred pages on Aquinas's famous arguments for the existence of God (379-500) and a discussion of what human beings can understand about God (501-575). Not only does Aquinas conclude that God exists, but he indicates the limited manner in which human beings can understand the divine. The problem is that if we acquire language in relation to concrete individuals, how can we use words to discuss a being who is not bound by space or time? The solution is to speak of words like "good" and "wise" in an analogical sense. Words like these when applied to creatures are used in a sense that is both similar to but different from the way they are used to [End Page 439] speak of the divine. Reiterating the theme of the one and the many, the name "good" has a single and most excellent meaning when applied to God and a limited sense when applied to creatures.This is an excellent and accessible book for the educated reader and specialist alike which can be supplemented by works such as Wayne Hankey's God in Himself: Aquinas' Doctrine of God as Expounded in theSumma Theologiae (Oxford: Oxford... (shrink)

This book is not addressed to beginning students in philosophy so much as it is addressed to those who, though fairly well-versed in the philosophical tradition, find themselves frankly baffled and brought up short by the writ ings of Martin Heidegger, and who-while recognizing the novelty of the Heideggerean enterprise - may sometimes find themselves wondering if this "thinking of Being" is after all rich enough to deserve still further effort on their part. That at least was my own state (...) of mind after a couple of years spent in studying Heidegger. Then one day, in preparing for a seminar, I suddenly saw, not indeed all of what Heidegger is about, but at least where he stands in terms of previous philosophers, and what is the ground of his thinking. After that, it became possible to assess certain strengths and weaknesses of his thought in terms of his own methodology vis-a-vis those earlier thinkers who, without having dreamed of anything quite like a Daseinsanalyse, had yet recognized in explicit terms the feature of experience on which the identi fication of Sein (and consequently the Daseinsanalyse) depends for its poss ibility. (shrink)

There is a problem with a very common theory of the nature of action. The problem stems from the fact that causation by practical reasons may be a necessary condition for being an intentional action, but it can’t be a sufficient condition. After all, desires and intentions are caused by practical reasons that rationalize them, but they’re clearly not actions. Even if all actions are events or changes and desires and intentions aren’t, the acquistion of a desire or an intention (...) is an event, but it isn’t always an action. If we can’t understand the nature of action in terms of causation by practical reasons, how should we understand it? The problem only arises if you believe that causation by practical reasons is not sufficient. Maybe the kinds of reasons that rationalize actions are different from the kinds of reasons that rationalize desires and intentions. It’s natural to suppose that reasons for A-ing have to be about A-ing. If the mental state that causes you to turn on the light counts as a reason for turning on the light, then the notion of turning on the light has to figure in the content of the cause. You might believe that turning on the light is a means to an end. Or you might just want to turn on the light. If reasons for A-ing are always about A-ing, but reasons for desiring or intending are only about the objects of desire or intention, if they’re first-order rather than secondorder, then maybe the kinds of reasons that rationalize actions are different from the kinds of.. (shrink)

This paper is about the semantic structure of verbal and deverbal noun phrases. The focus is on noun phrases which describe actions, perceptions, sensations and beliefs. It is commonly thought that actions are movements of parts of the agent’s body which we typically describe in terms of their effects, and that perceptions are slices of sensible experience which we typically describe in terms of their causes. And many philosophers hold that sensations and beliefs are states of the central nervous system (...) which we generally describe in terms of their typical causes and effects. For example ‘Brutus’s killing of Caesar’ is thought to describe a movement of a part of Brutus’s body – e.g. the thrust of an arm – in terms of one of its effects, namely, Caesar’s death. And ‘ Hyman ’s visual perception of a table in front of him’ is thought to describe the visual experience I’m having right now in terms of its cause. The object of the paper is to show that these doctrines misrepresent the semantic structure of verbal and deverbal noun phrases. (shrink)

Museum education is a complex and specialized endeavour, even more so when involving partnerships with schools. In this paper, we engage with theories that support understanding of museum-educator pedagogies. Dewey's notion of occupations is explored as offering a better theorization of pedagogical possibilities than that available through ideas associated with identity. Museum-educator pedagogies shape occupations, as the coherence of interest-purpose-meaning. Such shaping is not a purely individual human action, as occupations are social and material, as being-in-the-world. Heidegger's phenomenological understanding of (...) the working of art, critiqued by Schapiro, enables further comprehension of this pedagogical working. Both theories together provide insights into museum-educator pedagogies as expressive of the always challenging art of education. (shrink)

Beginning in the early 1990s, Third World Approaches to International Law scholarship (TWAIL) destabilized the mainstream narrative within international law that its doctrines were constituted by the historic search for order between formally equal state sovereigns. Instead, TWAIL scholars argued that the key constitutive dynamic of the discipline was the colonial experience, which continues to hold powerful sway over the legal architecture of global regulation whereby international law functions to perpetuate inequality and oppression. At the same time, however, TWAIL scholarship (...) regularly posits international law as an emancipatory force that may be mobilized on behalf of former colonized populations and other marginalized social identities. The rise of post-Marxist scholarship, and more generally, the turn to interdisciplinary within the profession in recent years offers an opportunity to analyze this curious paradox and construct alternative modes of analysis for future TWAIL scholarship. In the first section, the paper draws upon a diverse array of TWAIL scholars over the last thirty years to map the argumentative logic within TWAIL literature. In the second section, the paper incorporates debates and insights from complimentary academic disciplines to illuminate some blind spots within TWAIL’s central arguments, and potentially ‘radicalize’ its future possibility of critique against the growing inequality within global governance. (shrink)

Philosophers have often noted a contrast between practical and theoretical reasons when it comes to cases involving equally balanced reasons. When there are strong practical reasons for A-ing, and equally strong practical reasons for some incompatible option, B-ing, the agent is permitted to make an arbitrary choice between them, having sufficient reason to A and sufficient reason to B. But when there is strong evidence for P and equally strong evidence for ~ P, one isn’t permitted to simply believe one (...) or the other. Instead, one must withhold belief, neither believing that P nor believing that ~ P. This paper examines what explains this contrast, focusing in particular on a proposal recently developed by Mark Schroeder across several papers. Schroeder aims to explain the contrast by an appeal to non-evidential, epistemic reasons against belief. But, I argue, it’s not clear exactly what those reasons are, nor how those reasons are to be weighed against evidential reasons. Despite these challenges, I argue that there are grounds for optimism that the contrast can be explained within the broad framework Schroeder provides, and I aim to provide resources to meet the aforementioned challenges. (shrink)

Can a normative reason be understood as a kind of explanation? I here consider and argue against two important analyses of reasons as explanations. John Broome argues that we can analyze reasons in terms of the concepts of explanation and ought. On his view, reasons to ϕ are either facts that explain why one ought to ϕ (what he calls “perfect reasons”) or facts that play a for-ϕ role in weighing explanations (what he calls “pro tanto reasons”). I argue (...) against Broome’s account of both perfect and pro tanto reasons. Other philosophers, including Joseph Raz, analyze reasons in terms of the concepts of explanation and good. On this view, some fact is a reason to ϕ if and only if that fact explains why ϕ-ing would be good in some respect, to some degree. This view avoids the objections to Broome’s view, but should be rejected since not all explanations of why ϕ-ing would be good constitute reasons to ϕ. (shrink)

We consider a paradox involving indicative conditionals (‘ifs’) and deontic modals (‘oughts’). After considering and rejecting several standard options for resolv- ing the paradox—including rejecting various premises, positing an ambiguity or hidden contextual sensitivity, and positing a non-obvious logical form—we offer a semantics for deontic modals and indicative conditionals that resolves the paradox by making modus ponens invalid. We argue that this is a result to be welcomed on independent grounds, and we show that rejecting the general validity of modus (...) ponens is compatible with vindicating most ordinary uses of modus ponens in reasoning. (shrink)

Neoplatonic Exegeses of Plato's Cosmogony JOHN F. PHILLIPS AMONG THE MANY CONTROVERSIES to which the long history of interpretation of Plato's Timaeus has given rise, that concerning the eternity of the cosmos is one of the most enduring and complex, and the source of almost continuous debate from the time of Xenocrates to the present. The importance to all Platonists of a doctrinally consistent answer to the question of whether or not the universe had a beginning in time is (...) made amply clear in the statement attributed to Iamblichus by Proclus that proper understand- ing of the creation of the world is crucial for the entire theory of Nature. Iamblichus here refers obliquely to the orthodox Platonist position that the universe is not a temporal being subject to decay and destruction. The princi- pal problem for all of them, of course, was that, taken literally, Plato's account of the creation in the Timaeus, particularly the passage 27C-a8C, appears to be an unequivocal affirmation of a temporal beginning to the cosmos. Espe- cially troublesome was Plato's use of the verb y~yovev in Timaeus 28b 7, which seems to be an explicit claim for an &QX1] in time. That this passage did indeed refer to a temporal beginning was a point that was made repeatedly and forcefully by the chief opponents of the Platonists on this issue, the Peripa- tetics, who, following Aristotle, read the Timaeus creation account literally.' To.. (shrink)

Gwen Bradford has plausibly argued that one attains achievement only if one does something one finds difficult. It is also plausible that one must attain achievement to be worthy of “agential” praise, praise that is appropriately directed to someone on the basis of things that redound to their credit. These claims pose a challenge to classical theists who direct agential praise to God, since classical theism arguably entails that none of God’s actions are difficult for God. I consider responses to (...) this challenge and commend a view accord- ing to which God’s loving character is not necessitated by God’s nature but is a contingent and difficult achievement. I argue that this view can still satisfy the explanatory ambitions of natural theology. (shrink)

The problem of Time is one of the most fascinating and yet most difficult of those questions to which the human mind applies itself in philosophical thought. Dean Inge, in his Philosophy of Plotinus , has referred to this problem as ‘the hardest in metaphysics,’ and we know that “from the time of Parmenides and Zeno to that of Mr. Bradley and M. Bergson, there has been no other problem that has seemed so baffling as that of Time.”.

• alpha-beta pruning characterizes human play, but it ticed by early chess programmers—Turing, Shannon, Ulam, and Bernstein. We humans are not very good ing the heuristics we ourselves use. Approximations to used by Samuel, Newell and Simon, McCarthy. Proved lent to minimax by Hart and Levine, independently Knuth gives details.

Alan Turing advocated a kind of functionalism: A machine M is a thinker provided that it responds in certain ways to certain inputs. Davidson argues that Turing’s functionalism is inconsistent with a cer-tain kind of epistemic externalism, and is therefore false. In Davidson’s view, concepts consist of causal liasons of a certain kind between subject and object. Turing’s machine doesn’t have the right kinds of causal li-asons to its environment. Therefore it doesn’t have concepts. Therefore it doesn’t think. I argue (...) that this reasoning is entirely fallacious. It is true that, in some cases, a causal liason between subject and object is part of one’s concept of that object. Consequently, to grasp certain propositions, one must have certain kids of causal ties to one’s environment. But this means that we must rethink some old views on what rationality is. It does not mean, pace Davidson, that a precondition for being rational is being causally embedded in one’s environment in a certain way. If Tur-ing’s machine isn’t capable of thinking (I leave it open whether it is or is not), that has nothing to do with its lacking certain kinds of causal con-nections to the environment. The larger significance of our discussion is this: rationality consists either in one’s ability to see the bearing of purely existential propositions on one another or rationality is simply not to be understood as the ability see the bearing that propositions have on one another. (shrink)

A common and plausible assumption about the relation between desires and practical reasons—namely, that if øing is an optimal way (or even just a way) for a person, P, to satisfy one of his or her desires, then P has a (normative) reason to ø. This paper discusses that assumption. Although it does not deny that desires are a source of practical reasons, it shows that in some situations, rare though not impossible, P can lack a reason to ø despite (...) having a desire that he or she could satisfy optimally by øing. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 253—278. A Sense of French Politics Politics itself is not the exercise of power or struggle for power. Politics is first of all the configuration of a space as political, the framing of a specific sphere of experience, the setting of objects posed as "common" and of subjects to whom the capacity is recognized to designate these objects and discuss about them.(1) On April 14, 2011, France implemented its controversial ban of the niqab and burqa , commonly (...) referred to as the Islamic veil, in public places. On the coattails of the 2004 prohibition of religious artifacts, including the less concealing hijab or Islamic headscarves, in schools, the veil ban sparked equal outrage across both political and theological spectra, and many on both sides of the debate were quick to inquire about enforcement. As Steven Erlanger reports, “The police do not have the authority under the law to remove full veils, only to fine or require citizenship lessons for those who violate the new law.”(2) While the legal and social implications of this interdiction are ripe for study, the reprisals for breaking the law, notably compulsory citizenship classes, illuminate the strategic governmentality underlying the French government's targeting of the Muslim community, particularly those elements it considers affiliated with fundamentalist factions and/or terrorist organizations, if only through fashion—an integral component of French citizenship. Indeed, in allowing the (fashion) police to mandate instructional courses in citizenship for offenders, France implies that any Muslim choosing to wear the niqab or burqa , perhaps even for those who are already citizens, must not be aware of the subtle nuances of dress indicative of the French citizenry within public space. Furthermore, the degree of instruction requisite to citizenship, which clearly can and must be updated as the state sees fit, cements the imagined relation between citizens and states within the discourses on the veil ban. As Sharma contends, “Concepts of citizenship are the ideological glue that bonds the nation to the state. Citizenship provides the legal framework through which the state performs its role as ruler for the nation.”(3) Speaking for/as the state, French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared in a 2009 presentation before members of the government and other citizens that the burqa “is not welcome on the territory of France.”(4) Although there is nothing unique, especially recently, about a nation-state taking extreme measures to guard itself against what it deems to be threats to its sovereignty, the way in which the ongoing discourses on hijab have (d)evolved, which coincide with recent pronouncements by governmental leaders in Germany, Britain, and France that policies of multiculturalism have “failed,”(5) points toward nationalist reterritorializations, which is also to say physical and ideological re-appropriations, of public space within democratic milieux, which remain predicated upon the mediation of spaces. As Panagia deduces from Rancière, “Democracy […] is not an institutional form of government […], but an appearance whose visibilities and audibilites arise out of the dissonant blur of the everyday.”(6) Ultimately, the veil ban represents a calculated move to regulate the every day, which is to say the micropolitics of, that which is visible and invisible within French society, which makes it nothing short of a struggle to manage (the sensation of) bodies. Re-situating the political within the context of sense, Rancière argues that the fundamental essence of politics lies within the distinction between consensus and dissensus , and whereas most consider politics proper as fundamentally concerned with the fluid operations of the state— consensus , Rancière actually locates the political within events that disrupt the normative sensory order of things— dissensus . He explains, “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”(7) This reformulation of politics centers on agency and, albeit perhaps unintended, representationality and offers a useful formulation for spatializing the discourses surrounding the Islamic veil, which are mired within seemingly senseless policies and practices of objectification. Instituting a normative “regime of visibility,” the French veil ban encapsulates the political economy of agency, now both mediated and representational, under the rule of nationalist governmentalities in increasingly transnational contexts.(8) Adjudicating presence within public space signals a concern with the sensory aspects of agency itself—what Rancière terms the “distribution of the sensible,” which is “a matrix that defines a set of relations between sense and sense: that is, between a form of sensory experience and an interpretation which makes sense of it.”(9) To be concerned with sense is to focus upon the body, and this somatic repositioning of the (fashionable) citizen within the territory of the state augurs the resurgence of nationalist bio-politics within Europe, since, as Hage explicates, “Nationalism, before being an explicit practice or a mode of classification, is a state of the body. It is a way of imagining one's position within the nation and what one can aspire to as a national.”(10) The French government's attempt to make (bodily) sense of public space for its citizens by and through policies aimed against a burqa-clad Muslim minority, which might only apply to “less then 400 to fewer than 2,000” women(11), reveals the necessary, yet mercurial, transmutation of public space into national space through bio-political strategies of sense-making, which, as Hage observes, denotes that “nationalists perceive themselves as spatial managers.”(12) At the center of this concern over public space is the equally contentious dimension of governing female Islamic identity, which has become one of the main critiques levied against Islam from outsiders who view the veil in its various forms as a clear sign of the religion's actual and symbolic violence against women, even if such critiques remain ensconced within nationalist discourses. As Halim and Meyers argue, “Although Western news media may focus their coverage of Muslim women on the debate over whether and the extent to which the veil may by oppressive to the women who wear it, they have exhibited little interest in the physical oppression of violence against women in Islamic countries.”(13) While it falls outside of the scope of this analysis to arbitrate all of the dimensions of this debate, understanding some of the issues related to female identity and hijab within public space are crucial to this study. As these topics are extraordinarily complex, even and perhaps especially within the Muslim community, it is necessary to provide some context concerning the value, purpose, and meaning of the Islamic veil, which has a rich and arduous history. The Art of the Veil At present, there are only two countries, Iran and Saudi Arabia, that require women to wear hijab , which is a decidedly problematic term and concept whose locus is itself caught within a struggle of sensation. Noting the strategic reterritorialization of the term, Berger explains: The choice of the name, hijab , now widely adopted to designate the “Islamic veil,” it itself interesting, although the semantic shift it operates is not directly commented upon by its users. Although the design (both the cut and the symbolic function) of the hijab and the Iranian chador are indeed the same, as opposed, for instance, to the traditional Algerian haik , the word hijab has come to replace the term chador popularized by the Iranian revolution, as a properly Arabic (hence Koranic) designation. This discursive shift points to the successful reclaiming of the national revolution in Iran by a transnational pan-Islamic movement, whose language of reference can only be Koranic Arabic.(14) While the hijab is certainly a point of contention within various countries dealing with immigrant Islamic populations (of which France has the largest in Europe as part of its colonial legacy in Algeria), it is clear that the veil is a historically contextualized artifact of Muslim identity with a variety of manifestations, even as forces outside of and within Islam seek to codify its actual and symbolic value. Ultimately, the varieties of hijab , including the full-faced burqa and niqab , are complex assemblages of meaning that speak to the multitudinous flows of Islamic identities over time and space. As Gökariksel and McLarney observe, “Wearing a certain style of veil may simultaneously be a disciplinary practice crucial to the cultivation of piety (Mahmood 2005; Gokariksel 2009) and a gendered performance of social distinction in terms of class, taste, and urbanity (White 1999; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Gokariksel and Secor 2009) or of ethnicity and race (Dwyer 1999).”(15) The ideological marketplace from which the varieties of hijab ebb and flow serves both as a reflection of the ever-present materiality and dynamic functionality of spiritual economies, which are derivative of the equally ubiquitous flows of transnational capital driving agency and representationality within our historical moment. Keeping these dual, yet deeply interconnected, capital ecologies as the site of exploration for how the veil is represented within public space, one might begin to sense what lurks behind such veiled agendas. Examining the symbolic and representational nature of the Islamic “veil” in its various forms, this project situates the decidedly political contestations of public space at stake in the French ban alongside recent condemnations of multiculturalism as calculated efforts to re-distribute the sensible so as to valorize national identity within increasingly transnational and globalized socio-economic spaces, which collapse exchange values between distinct, yet interwoven, economies of (cultural/material/spiritual) capital. As the discourses on the veil rely upon representational imag(in)ings, it seems fitting to explore the political economy and art of the veil through the phenomenon of street art, which, much like hijab , is a complex assemblage of meaning of sensation mired in representationality and capital exchange. As street artists have taken up hijab in various forms, the movement offers a lens with which to situate critical responses to the veil debate across both spiritual and material economies. Situating this street art both aesthetically and historically, Lewisohn explains, “'Street art' is a sub-genre of graffiti writing and owes much to its predecessor. Though there is a good deal of crossover between the genres, they are distinct and separate in their own right.”(16) Evolving out of the graffiti explosion of the late 1970's and 1980's, street art broke the unspoken rules of the artistic underground by challenging and re-examining one's sensory experience of art in public space by experimenting with both content and form in ways that harken back to the Situationist International, which as a collective challenged one's experience of urban space through various media and experiential phenomena. Again, Lewisohn observes, “It's important to note street art's break with the tradition of the tag, and its focus on visual symbols that embrace a much wider range of media than graffiti writers would use.”(17) From stencils to prints and murals to one-liners, street artists developed a reputation for critical social and political commentary, and while it is certainly the case that not all street art is intentionally political, in challenging the normative “regime of visibility,” as Rancière puts it, of public space, street artists—even if unconsciously—call into question the common sensory experience of the politics underlying the formation of (nationalist) space.(18) Indeed, Rancière refers to the partisan sensory managers as “police,” who ultimately forge “the rules governing the circulation of appearances, of their visibility and audibility, and the proper distribution of bodies therein.”(19) As such, one can sense that street art's relationship with the police is tenous for a variety of reasons. Writing about his own experience as a street artist, Shepard Fairey observes, “With street art, there's no committee deciding whether I can put my work up on the street, there's no censorship, and I have total freedom of expression, and that concept of freedom is expressed just by using the street as a medium.”(20) As Fairey and other street artists demonstrate, the medium, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, is the most glaring aspect of street art's message, and even as it now finds itself in galleries and usurped by private collectors, the ethos of the movement remains relavent to politics as it is, first and foremost, concerned with the configuration and experience of space. Just as examining the punishments for breaking the veil ban can map the terrain of French politics, a representational genealogy of street artist's deployment of hijab and female Muslim identity can assist in mining the depths of public space as a site of bio-political control and contestation in light of recent events in France and the rising tide of anti-multiculturalist rhetoric across Europe, even though the Islamic presence there is radically heterogenous. Using the work of Shepard Fairey, Princess Hijab, br1, and Banksy, this paper sets out to answer a number of key questions concerning the deployment of hijab, and female Islamic identity in particular, within street art as a movement now integral to and critical of the economies of exchange underlying global capitalism, which as a force of influence cannot be underestimated as a driver in the resurgence of nationalist biopolitical governmentalities. Although there exists a litany of artists to choose from, the aforementioned quartet of designers integrate hijab into their work in a seminal and critical fashion, and all have been working with the veil in some way prior to the French ban, which grants some additional context to their usage of it as a symbol in regards to the breakdown of multiculturalism across Europe, even if unconsciously. Although each artist depicts various amalgamations of hijab in their respective corpus, they share common tropes that raise significant questions concerning the veil debate, namely: what are the conditions of possibility for hijab to become a marker of Islamic identity within public space? How can we make sense of the representational topologies within street art's utilization of the hijab and female Islamic identity in light of the French ban? How might these aesthetic imag(in)ings simultaneously inhabit and combat normative discourses concerning hijab , multiculturalism, female Islamic identity, and public space? With these considerations as a backdrop, it is first necessary to outline more fully the hijab as a representative marker of female Islamic identity. The (Veiled) Writing on the Wall

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This chapter contains sections titled: Rationality as a Property and Rationality as a Source of Requirements Rationality and Normativity Requirements of Rationality Reasoning References Further reading.

A. Fyrigos, professor of Patristic and Byzantine Philosophy at the «Universitas Gregoriana» and specialist on Barlaam the Calabrian (ca. 1290–1348), has recently edited B.'s anti-Latin works —twenty one works in number—written on the occasion of the ecclesiastical-political negotiations he held in Constantinople with the legates Francesco da Camerino and Richard of England during 1334 and 1335, focused on the Filioque and intended to promote some sort of union between the Eastern and Western Church. This edition, which is prefaced by a (...) highly erudite philological and historical «Introduction», has been unanimously received by the scientific community as «an excellent, exemplary work» and «un contributo so stanziale alla storia degli studi barlaamiti» and the study of the first half of the Byzantine 14th century in general; and rightly so, because, at long last, due to the la borious and succes sful efforts of its author —who devotedly concentrated himself during the past three decades upon the famous Calabrian—, it enables us to approach and appraise B.'s Orthodox thought through his own writings, by putting aside the distorting exposition of it by Gregory Palamas. As far as I know, F.'s masterpiece has been reviewed no fewer than eight times. On my own part, I shall try to shed more light on B.'s texts by focus ing my attention on an aspect of great interest to philologists as well as historians of theological and philosophical ideas, namely, the question of the sources and literary patterns of B.'s Κατά Λατίνων. F. prudently notes (vol. I, p. VII) that in editing the texts «ha volutamente con centrato la sua attenzione sull'aspetto filologico e storico di essi», by putting aside the philoso phicotheological one, which, albeit closely related with the former, represents a clearly distinct aspect of any text. The parallels (marked by «cf.») as well as the cases of dependence (noted by «see») and imitations of various ancient, Patristic and Byzantine Greek texts noted here have primarily to do with the latter aspects, although it goes without saying that they often reveal hidden sides of the former. Let it be said in advance that B.'s texts are so rich in explicit or implicit encapsulations of ancient Greek as well as Patristic expression modes and ideas that a reader who is eager to scrutinize them more than F. and I have will certainly find many others. (shrink)

I. Since the appearance in 1902 of Benedetto Croce's L'estetica come scienza dell' espressione e linguistica generale, the problem of the ontology of the work of art or aesthetic object - what kind of thing it is and what its mode of being is - has come to occupy a central place in the philosophy of art. Moreover, a particular conception of the identity of art objects is at present a driving force in some quarters of the art world itself. (...) As Harold Rosenberg so well points out, Minimalist or Reductive Art has attempted, sometimes quite self-consciously, to establish the autonomous physical reality of the work of art by empty ing it of all expressive and representational content. ! What is the ontological problem? One rather crude way of stating it is to ask where the work of art or object of aesthetic contemplation 2 exists. Is it, to pick some examples, to be identified with the material product of the artist's labors which exists spatially "outside of" and independently of artist and beholder? Or does it exist only "in the mind" of the beholder or the artist? Is it either one perception of a beholder or a series of his perceptions? Or is it the class of all percep tions of either all spectators or all "qualified" spectators? Put another way, it would be a question of whether and to what such purported names as 'Beethoven's Fifth Symphony' refer. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Summary Of The Spoken Responses By The Poets To Their CriticsJohn HollanderMark Strand responded to Charles Berger’s comments by mak-ing appreciative remarks about the kind of attention his work had received, adding that he did occasionally in writing perceive “glimmers, in the kind of attention I pay, to what Charles Berger has spoken of.” With regard to certain aspects of prior intention, he said that “vague formal imperatives got (...) fulfilled in the writing” and that knowing at the time “the rightness of what I’ve said,” I was nonetheless able to “know the meaning of what I’d said only weeks afterward.” He also acknowledged the kinds of allusiveness which Berger had adduced in his writing, speaking of how and when in the course of writing the resources of his particular sort of echo and allusion seemed to make themselves available.He then turned to the specific question of one of the sequences of poems that Berger had discussed, the “Great Dog Poem No. 2.” He averred that in choosing a dog as speaker he had “not just meant to be funny” [he avowed later on in his remarks that his poems frequently began with “dark humor”] but had also sought for a mode of introspection more original than the fashionably solemn ones of so much contemporary poetry: “I could look within and bark.” With respect to the final line, he observed “I like to finish with a flourish, to pretend I’m Laforgue or Rimbaud,” manifesting “a desire to be a symbolist poet.” With respect to that concluding verse, “I feel like the end of a gorgeous line,” he added that if a dog said that—particularly “a [End Page 189] platinum retriever”—it could not be self-pitying. He spoke in general of the relation of high and low in the poem (a dog named “Rex,” and so forth) and of the relation of this sequence to a much earlier poem of his called “Eating Poetry” in which the speaker is likewise a dog.With regard to formal design, he concluded by saying that in general he tended to start poems “with rough drafts in blank verse” which he then “roughened up” in various ways, preferring as he said “cadences” rather than “measure” in the framing of lines. But he added that in the De Chirico poems he had read, he felt that if one wrote a villanelle, one should keep strictly to the form, without changing words in the refrain lines, and keeping to the iambic meter, saying that “I don’t think you should cheat” under those circumstances.Strand concluded by thanking Berger for the precise nature of his critical attentiveness.John Hollander started out by acknowledging with pleasure that Eleanor Cook’s analysis of his “Owl” had certainly helped him to understand it better; he observed that he felt he had only started to write what he called “real poetry” in his third book, when he had first written a poem he could not understand at the time, and only came to understand years later. He remarked that “The relation of poet and critic as framed by this panel is this: good criticism is a poem’s best friend. We all depend on our friends to point out to us things about ourselves we may not know or acknowledge; although their cousins and other familial relations are other poems, our poems’ best friends are pieces of critical writing.”He was particularly grateful to Cook for pointing out things he hadn’t himself seen—such as the question of the terminal words in the first stanza—but which as a result of the critical insight he had to acknowledge. And this brought up the crucial question of intentionality at the practical rather than theoretical level: in the case of such observations by critics and acknowledgments by poets, it would seem that the writing of a poem could have an intention of which the writer would be unaware. Hollander adduced the analogy of dreaming to poetic composition, paralleling the question “Did you mean to write that?” with (to anyone reporting a dream) “Did you mean to dream that?”He then observed about the... (shrink)