This is a unique, groundbreaking study in the history of philosophy, combining leading men and women philosophers across 2600 years of Western philosophy, covering key foundational topics, including epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. Introductory essays, primary source readings, and commentaries comprise each chapter to offer a rich and accessible introduction to and evaluation of these vital philosophical contributions. A helpful appendix canvasses an extraordinary number of women philosophers throughout history for further discovery and study.

Australian Aborigine Oodgeroo Noonuccal/Kath Walker (1920–1993), having had only a primary school education, came to be awarded four honorary doctorates. An acknowledged poet, she was the first Australian Aborigine woman to have become a published author. Aiming to improve the status of the Aborigine, she became a political leader, and in her writings, made important distinctions between racial integration and assimilation and between just laws and equal rights. She retells Aborigine legends for the purpose of bringing understanding to Aborigine metaphysics, (...) ethics, aesthetics, religion, and socio-politics. Aboriginal philosophy rests on the principle that humanity is one with the universe. Humanity’s task is to preserve the earth, a task which, in view of current climate change, is in need of attention. Aborigine philosophy for her also meant developing habits of sharing, of tolerance, and of acquiring the skill of “deep listening and quiet still awareness.” Among many honors, the United States awarded her a Fulbright Scholarship and the United Kingdom awarded her Member of the Order of the British Empire. Her poetry has been acclaimed and set to music; she herself has been the subject of dramatic performances, but only here is she being acknowledged as philosopher. (shrink)

Ban Zhao’s life and achievements are set here in an historical context and her philosophy in a context of Chinese philosophy. To understand her philosophy is to be acquainted not only with her prose such as Lessons for Woman but with her poetry such as “The Needle and Thread” and “Rhapsody on Traveling Eastward.” Her ethics, for example, is formulated in her advice in poetry to her son as well as in her advice to her daughter in prose. Thus, in (...) order to inquire into her philosophy both her prose and poetry are analyzed. A Confucian, Ban Zhao yet pointed out that Confucianism failed itself when it did not recognize that unless women were educated as well as men, there could be no true balance and harmony in either the family or the state. (shrink)

The outstanding points of The Neglected Canon are that it provides a multicultural anthology of women philosophers: Chinese, European, North and Central American, that it provides a history of women philosophers through selected works from the first century to the beginning of the twentieth century, and that it provides unusual comprehensiveness in its bibliographies, biographies, and introductions to the works. In these three points it offers a more complete text than any yet on the market in this field. Designed for (...) the readership of the advanced college student, it serves as a classroom text for a course in women philosophers, as a supplementary text to introductory courses in philosophy, or in such specific courses as epistemology. It is also designed to serve as a resource for women's history and women's studies. (shrink)

: Julia Ward (1819-1910) and Ednah Dow Littlehale (1824-1904), lifelong friends, wrote and lectured on many of the same issues, traveled across the country to lend support to causes, and taught together at the Concord School of Philosophy. Despite their close association and mutual efforts on similar issues, I argue that their philosophical principles were essentially different, in particular their approaches to an understanding of God, society, the sexes, art, and science.

The philosopher, poet and painter Viola Cordova was the first Native American woman to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy. Like all scholars, she rose on the shoulders of those who came before. Crediting the influence of both Western and Native American philosophical works, Cordova’s aim was to make clear the nature and benefit of Native American philosophy. To achieve this she explained Apache philosophy as well as that of the closely-related Navajo, distinguished the Native American worldview from that of Western (...) philosophy, and demonstrated the beneficial consequences it offers. This introduction to Cordova reveals how significant her Native American philosophy with its dissimilar ontology would be to the philosophical canon, and how if admitted to it, the canon would be truer and more comprehensive. (shrink)

In this volume we provide rich examples of non-western philosophy written by women over the last four thousand years. We begin by defining the scope of our non-western terrain: philosophy created outside the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian traditions. The philosophers who are the subjects of inquiry here hail from places as distant as pre-colonial Africa, the Americas, Asia and Australia. Together with our expert contributing authors we demonstrate through inquiry and analysis how these women philosophers advanced human thought about profound issues, some (...) to include the nature and treatment of women themselves. (shrink)

This book presents the views of 22 women philosophers from outside the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian worlds. These eminent thinkers are from Mesopotamia, India, Tibet, China, Korea, Japan, Australia, America, the Philippines and Nigeria. Six philosophers, the earliest of whom predates the Greek pre-Socratics by two thousand years, lived at “the dawn of philosophy”; another six from late Antiquity through the Classical period; five more taught and wrote during the Middle Ages up to the Age of Exploration, and yet five others (...) were active during the modern period to the mid-twentieth century. Most belonged to major philosophical traditions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Zen, or Sufism. The chapters of the book describe the life and views of the philosophers, outline the fundamental features of their respective schools, and contain translations of their writings. The book is intended for scholars of philosophy and women’s studies who wish to expand their knowledge of non-Western philosophical traditions and is ideally suited for undergraduate education. Comprehensive multilingual bibliographies of carefully documented sources offer scholars many promising resources for further research. (shrink)

Julia Ward and Ednah Dow Littlehale, lifelong friends, wrote and lectured on many of the same issues, traveled across the country to lend support to causes, and taught together at the Concord School of Philosophy. Despite their close association and mutual efforts on similar issues, I argue that their philosophical principles were essentially different, in particular their approaches to an understanding of God, society, the sexes, art, and science.

Given research and public interest for conditions related to an extended lifespan, we addressed the questions of what matters and what matters most for subsequent survival past age 80. The data was drawn from the population-based and multidisciplinary Swedish OCTO Twin Study, in which a sample consisting of identical and same-sex fraternal twin pairs, followed from age 80 until death, provided detailed data on health, physical functioning, life style, personality, and sociodemographic conditions. Information concerning date of birth and death were (...) obtained from population census register. We estimated heritability using an ACE model and evaluated the role of multiple predictors for the mortality-related hazard rate using Cox regression. Our findings confirmed a low heritability of 12%. As expected, longer survival was associated with being a female, an apolipoprotein E e4 allele non-carrier, and a non-smoker. Several diseases were found to be associated with shorter survival as well as certain health conditions. Stronger grip and better lung function, as well as better vision, and better cognitive function was related to longer survival. Social embeddedness, better self-evaluated health, and life-satisfaction were also significantly associated with longer survival. After controlling for the impact of comorbidity, functional markers, and personality-related predictors, we found that sex, cerebrovascular diseases, compromised cognitive functioning, self-related health, and life-satisfaction remained as strong predictors. Cancer was only associated with the mortality hazard when accounting for other co-morbidities. The survival estimates were mostly in anticipated directions and contained effect sizes within the expected range. Noteworthy, we found that some of the so-called “soft-markers” remained strong predictors, despite a control for other factors. For example, self-evaluation of health and ratings of life-satisfaction provide additional and valuable information. (shrink)

Punning on names was common in Old Comedy. Aristophanes punned on the name of Lamachus, who died at Syracuse. In the same play he made the famous joke, ‘some went to Kamarina, others to Gela, and some to Katagela’—‘an invention of the poet's from the fact that the men's officers laughed at them’.

Over the past forty years, the health humanities, previously called the medical humanities, has emerged as one of the most exciting fields for interdisciplinary scholarship, advancing humanistic inquiry into bioethics, human rights, health care, and the uses of technology. It has also helped inspire medical practitioners to engage in deeper reflection about the human elements of their practice. In _Health Humanities Reader_, editors Therese Jones, Delese Wear, and Lester D. Friedman have assembled fifty-four leading scholars, educators, artists, and clinicians (...) to survey the rich body of work that has already emerged from the field—and to imagine fresh approaches to the health humanities in these original essays. The collection’s contributors reflect the extraordinary diversity of the field, including scholars from the disciplines of disability studies, history, literature, nursing, religion, narrative medicine, philosophy, bioethics, medicine, and the social sciences. With warmth and humor, critical acumen and ethical insight, _Health Humanities Reader_ truly humanizes the field of medicine. Its accessible language and broad scope offers something for everyone from the experienced medical professional to a reader interested in health and illness. (shrink)

In this Second Edition of her best-selling ethics paperback text, renowned paralegal educator Therese Cannon clearly addresses pertinent case law, rules changes, and other developments involving this important area of the law. Organized in 10 concise chapters, Ethics and Professional Responsibility for Legal Assistants, Second Edition, covers key concepts, including unauthorized practice of law; confidentiality; conflicts of interest; fees; trends in legal malpractice; discovery abuse and other advocacy issues; pro bono work; and more. to help your students grasp the (...) material, the pedagogy features: chapter reviews discussion questions cases for further analysis helpful appendices, including the Model Guidelines, standards, and codes for ABA, NALA, and NFPA. Ideal for use in your next ethics class, this flexible paperback can also easily be used to add an ethics component to your Introduction to Law course, student internship program, or other courses in your curriculum. This superb book is also accompanied by a valuable Instructor's Guide, which provides answers to every discussion question in the text and the specific page numbers to find answers to all review questions. It also contains sample syllabi and references to additional source materials to help you adapt this book to your course. (shrink)

Metamathematics and the Philosophical Tradition is the first work to explore in such historical depth the relationship between fundamental philosophical quandaries regarding self-reference and meta-mathematical notions of consistency and incompleteness. Using the insights of twentieth-century logicians from Gödel through Hilbert and their successors, this volume revisits the writings of Aristotle, the ancient skeptics, Anselm, and enlightenment and seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, Pascal, Descartes, and Kant to identify ways in which these both encode and evade problems of (...) a priori definition and self-reference. The final chapters critique and extend more recent insights of late 20th-century logicians and quantum physicists, and offer new applications of the completeness theorem as a means of exploring "metatheoretical ascent" and the limitations of scientific certainty. Broadly syncretic in range, Metamathematics and the Philosophical Tradition addresses central and recurring problems within epistemology. The volume’s elegant, condensed writing style renders accessible its wealth of citations and allusions from varied traditions and in several languages. Its arguments will be of special interest to historians and philosophers of science and mathematics, particularly scholars of classical skepticism, the Enlightenment, Kant, ethics, and mathematical logic. (shrink)

The thesis of this paper is that Thomas Aquinas offers an alternative model of abstraction (the Active Principle Model) that overcomes the standard objections to abstractionism and expands our view of what an abstractionist theory might look like. I contend that this alternative model of abstraction has been invisible in plain sight, in Aquinas’s references to the mind’s abstractive mechanism as an “intellectual light.” Such language is not metaphorical but rather technical, signaling that intellectual abstraction is to be modeled on (...) the activity of physical light as he understood it from theories proposed by Avicenna and Averroes. The Active Principle Model requires us to rethink Aquinas’s account of how we come to know essences—a process that turns out to be much more tentative and incremental than previously thought. (shrink)

Self-knowledge is commonly thought to have become a topic of serious philosophical inquiry during the early modern period. Already in the thirteenth century, however, the medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas developed a sophisticated theory of self-knowledge, which Therese Scarpelli Cory presents as a project of reconciling the conflicting phenomena of self-opacity and privileged self-access. Situating Aquinas's theory within the mid-thirteenth-century debate and his own maturing thought on human nature, Cory investigates the kinds of self-knowledge that Aquinas describes and the questions (...) they raise. She shows that to a degree remarkable in a medieval thinker, self-knowledge turns out to be central to Aquinas's account of cognition and personhood, and that his theory provides tools for considering intentionality, reflexivity and selfhood. Her engaging account of this neglected aspect of medieval philosophy will interest readers studying Aquinas and the history of medieval philosophy more generally. (shrink)

Este artículo pretende dilucidar la expresión utilizada por Tomás de Aquino “vuelta al fantasma”, con la intención de esclarecer lo que entiende por “vuelta”. Se argumenta que el marco conceptual subyacente al “giro intelectual” se encuentra en dos fuentes islámicas que fueron ampliamente influyentes en la psicología filosófica latina del siglo XIII, y que presentan conceptos técnicos específicos de la “vuelta” como un tipo de dependencia. Las obras son: Liber de Causis, de autor anónimo; y Liber de anima, del filósofo (...) persa Avicena. Así, este artículo busca recuperar este marco histórico subyacente, examinando cómo estas dos fuentes clave conciben la “vuelta” y cómo Tomás de Aquino incorpora estas fuentes en su concepción de la “vuelta al fantasma”. (shrink)

Model-theoretic 1-types overa given first-order theory T may be construed as natural metalogical miniatures of G. W. Leibniz' ``complete individual notions'', ``substances'' or ``substantial forms''. This analogy prompts this essay's modal semantics for an essentiallyundecidable first-order theory T, in which one quantifies over such ``substances'' in a boolean universe V(C), where C is the completion of the Lindenbaum-algebra of T.More precisely, one can define recursively a set-theoretic translate of formulae νNϕ of formulae ν of a normal modal theory Tm based (...) on T, such that the counterpart `ξi' of a the modal variable `xi' of L(Tm) in this translation-scheme ranges over elements of V(C) that are 1-types of T with value 1 (sometimes called `definite' C-valued 1-types of T).The article's basic completeness-result (2.13) then establishes that ϕvarphi; is a theorem of Tm iff [[νN(ϕ) is aconsequenceof νN(Tm) for each extension N of T which is a subtheory of the canonical generic theory (ultrafilter) u]] = 1 – or equivalently, that Tm is consistent iff[[there is anextension N of T such that N is a subtheory of the canonical generic theory u, and νN(ϕ) for all ϕ in Tm]] > 0.The proof of thiscompleteness-result also shows that an N which provides a countermodel for a modally unprovable ϕ – or equivalently, a closed set in the Stone space St(T) in the sense of V(C) – is intertranslatable with an `accessibility'-relation of a closely related Kripke-semantics whose `worlds' are generic extensions of an initial universe V via C.This interrelation providesa fairly precise rationale for the semantics' recourse to C-valued structures, and exhibits a sense in which the boolean-valued context is sharp. (shrink)

I argue that Thomas Aquinas’s Identity Formula—the statement that the “intellect in act is the intelligible in act”—does not, as is usually supposed, express his position on how the intellect accesses extramental realities (responding to the so-called “mind-world gap”). Instead, it should be understood as a claim about the metaphysics of intellection, according to which the perfection requisite for performing the act of understanding is what could be called “intellectual-intelligible being.” In reinterpreting Aquinas’s Identity Formula, I explore the notion of (...) being “in act” as an intellect or intelligible (intelligibile actu, intellectus actu), his curious comments about an “order” or “genus” of intelligibles, and the relationship of understanding and being-understood. (shrink)

Medieval accounts of diachronically unified consciousness have been overlooked by contemporary readers, because medieval thinkers have a unique and unexpected way of setting up the problem. This paper examines the approach to diachronically unified consciousness that is found in Augustine’s and Aquinas’s treatments of memory. For Augustine, although the mind is “distended” by time, it remains resilient, stretching across disparate moments to unify past, present, and future in a single personal present. Despite deceptively different phrasing, Aquinas develops a remarkably similar (...) view when, in order to accommodate Aristotle’s view of memory to Augustine’s, he insists that an implicit self-awareness “time-stamps” all intellectual acts. According to their shared approach, diachronic unified consciousness is the result of the curious way in which the mind is both drawn into and transcends the temporal succession of its own acts. (shrink)

The eleventh-century philosopher and physician Abu Ali ibn Sina (d. A.D. 1037) was known in the West by his Latinized name Avicenna. An analysis of the sources and evolution of Avicenna's metaphysics, this book focuses on the answers he and his predecessors gave to two fundamental pairs of questions: what is the soul and how does it cause the body; and what is God and how does He cause the world? To respond to these challenges, Avicenna invented new concepts and (...) distinctions and reinterpreted old ones. The author concludes that Avicenna's innovations are a turning point in the history of metaphysics. Avicenna's metaphysics is the culmination of a period of synthesis during which philosophers fused together a Neoplatonic project (reconciling Plato with Aristotle) with a Peripatetic project (reconciling Aristotle with himself). Avicenna also stands at the beginning of a period during which philosophers sought to integrate the Arabic version of the earlier synthesis with Islamic doctrinal theology (kalam). Avicenna's metaphysics significantly influenced European scholastic thought, but it had an even more profound impact on Islamic intellectual history--the philosophical problems and opportunities associated with the Avicennian synthesis continued to be debated up to the end of the nineteenth century. (shrink)

Buck, Therese This article explores some of the factors that led to Vatican II's teaching that marriage is a covenant [foedus] in Gaudium et spes when, in the 1917 Code of Canon Law marriage is referred to as a contract [contractus]. As a background to the developments in Gaudium et spes, I will first outline the teaching on marriage in the 1917 Code and in Pius XI's 1930 encyclical Casti connubii. This will be followed by the inclusion of marriage (...) as covenant in Gaudium et spes and finally, this article will consider the significance of the concept of marriage covenant in continuity with tradition and developments since Vatican II in the theology of marriage. (shrink)

A ground-motive for this study of some historical and metaphysical implications of the diagonal lemmas of Cantor and Gödel is Cantor's insightful remark to Dedekind in 1899 that the Inbegriff alles Denkbaren (aggregate of everything thinkable) might, like some class-theoretic entities, be inkonsistent. In the essay's opening sections, I trace some recent antecedents of Cantor's observation in logical writings of Bolzano and Dedekind (more remote counterparts of his language appear in the First Critique), then attempt to relativize the notion of (...) Inkonsistenz to self-sufficient theories T which interpret themselves. In effect, I argue that Gödel's diagonal lemma suggests a sense in which metatheoretic notions of proof, well-foundeness and satisfaction are object-theoretically inkonsistent. With respect to Cantor's Inbegriff, for example, the lemma yields that any object-theoretic reconstruction of thinkability generates an antidiagonal sentence , which one can paraphrase asSelf-referential application of the assertion that. (shrink)

In the the passage just quoted from theDialogues concerning Natural Religion, David Hume developed a thought-experiment that contravened his better-known views about chance expressed in hisTreatise and firstEnquiry.For among other consequences of the eternal-recurrence hypothesis Philo proposes in this passage, it may turn out that what the vulgar call cause is nothing but a secret and concealed chance.

Three Canadian institutional animal care and use committees were observed over a 1-year period to investigate animal ethical evaluation. While each protocol was evaluated, the observer collected information about the final decision, the type of protocol, and the category of invasiveness. The observer also wrote down verbatim all verbal interventions, which were coded according to the following categories: scientific, technical, politics, human analog, reduction, refinement, and replacement. The data revealed that only 16% of the comments were devoted to the 3 (...) explicit ethical categories and that most of the comments were technical. However, the analysis revealed that ethical concerns were implicit in both scientific and technical comments; either ethical norms had been translated into scientific and technical language, or some of the scientific and technical comments had an impact on the ethical treatment of animals. The results are discussed in relation to previous nonobservational research that identified potential pitfalls and bias in animal ethical evaluation. (shrink)

The Plight of Humanity in Paul In Paul and Palestinian Judaism, E. P. Sanders argues that, for Paul, humanity’s plight was not the condition that necessitated the solution of Jesus Christ. Instead, the solution was presented to Paul first on the Damascus road, and humanity’s plight was simply the logical corollary to the solution. This study will critically examine the particulars of Sanders’s argument— particularly with regard to Romans 7, Philippians 3, and Galatians 3—and offer some alternative exegetical analyses. This (...) essay will argue that, while the development of Paul’s thinking may indeed have run from solution to plight, the exposition of Paul’s thinking goes from plight to solution. The movement of Paul’s exposition may suggest that his conception of the plight of humanity was born out of his ideational milieu, which must have been fed, at least, by the Old Testament and evidenced, at least, by literature such as 4 Ezra. (shrink)