The issue of time-awareness presents a critical challenge for empiricism: if temporal properties are not directly perceived, how do we become aware of them? Struggles with this problem have cast doubt on empiricism as an adequate account of the origin of our ideas; Kant builds his theory of a priori knowledge on empiricism’s shortcomings with regard to time-awareness. In the first section of this paper I outline the problem of time-awareness for empiricism, along with some recent attempts to answer it. (...) In the second section I explain how a unique empiricist account of time-awareness suggested by Hume’s comments on time in the Treatise avoids the problems characteristic of other attempts. In the third section I discuss some counter-intuitive consequences of this Humean theory. In the final section I introduce and then dismiss one possible defense of the Humean approach based on his rejection of a universal timeline. I conclude that the failure of empiricists to come up with a defensible theory of time-awareness lends prima facie support to a non-empiricist theory of ideas. (shrink)

This is a cross-cultural study in sophistry as a part of the cultural history of the communication techniques and its function as a discourse concept of intercultural exchange of knowledge since pre-socratic time spread over Europe and the Middle East. In each chapter the cultural forms of sophistry and its main proponents are represented from the time of Plato to Renaissance in the cultures of Europe, in North Africa, and in the Middle East.

A general article discussing philosophical issues arising in connection with Aristotle's "Generation of Animals" (Chapter from Blackwell's Companion to Aristotle).

Contemporary caution against anachronism in intellectual history, and the currently momentous theoretical emphasis on subjectivity in the philosophy of mind, are two prevailing conditions that set puzzling constraints for studies in the history of philosophical psychology. The former urges against assuming ideas, motives, and concepts that are alien to the historical intellectual setting under study, and combined with the latter suggests caution in relying on our intuitions regarding subjectivity due to the historically contingent characterizations it has attained in contemporary philosophy (...) of mind. In the face of these conditions, our paper raises a question of what we call non-textual (as opposed to contextual) standards of interpretation of historical texts, and proceeds to explore subjectivity as such a standard. Non-textual standards are defined as (heuristic) postulations of features of the world or our experience of it that we must suppose to be immune to historical variation in order to understand a historical text. Although the postulation of such standards is often so obvious that the fact of our doing so is not noticed at all, we argue that the problems in certain special cases, such as that of subjectivity, force us to pay attention to the methodological questions involved. Taking into account both recent methodological discussion and the problems inherent in two de facto denials of the relevance of subjectivity for historical theories, we argue that there are good grounds for the adoption of subjectivity as a non-textual standard for historical work in philosophical psychology. (shrink)

This book explores the evolution of space and time from the apeiron—the spaceless, timeless chaos of primordial nature. Steven M. Rosen examines Western culture’s past efforts to deny the apeiron, and the present possibility that lifting the repression of apeiron might serve to advance the process of human individuation. In proposing a radical rethinking of science’s underlying notions of space and time, Rosen employs phenomenological philosophy (primarily Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger), supplemented by an original application of the qualitative field of mathematics (...) known as topology. (shrink)

Book Information Psyche And Soma: Physicians and Metaphysicians on the Mind-Body Problem from Antiquity to Enlightenment. Psyche And Soma: Physicians and Metaphysicians on the Mind-Body Problem from Antiquity to Enlightenment John P. Wright Paul Potter Oxford Clarendon Press 2000 xii + 298, Hardback £45.00 Edited by John P. Wright; Paul Potter . Clarendon Press. Oxford. Pp. xii + 298,. Hardback:£45.00.