Online research in philosophy

CONTRASTING PREJUDICES TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD How can one say something false? How can one even think such a thing? Since, for example, all men are mortal, ...

This book contains sixteen essays, presented at the seventh Pittsburgh-Konstanz Colloquium in 2005. It includes historical topics, ranging from ancient Greek thought to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophy, and contemporary topics, including causal pluralism, epiphenomenalism, and causality in disciplines as different as physics and economics.The concept of causation has been elaborated in many ways, with many different philosophical functions, including its problematic relations to the concept of explanation. The essays cover a variety subjects, and the results are quite disparate. McCord Adams's discussion of medieval philosophers on sacramental causation and Norton's challenge to "causal ..

This second Companion deals with the ancient theories of the psyche. The essays range over more than eight hundred years of psychological inquiry and provide critical analyses not only of the ancient discussions of the nature of the psyche and its states, but of such central topics as perception, subjectivity, the explanation of action, and what it is to be a person. In examining the wide variety of psychological theories offered by the ancient thinkers, from the increasingly complex materialism of the Presocratics and Hellenists to the dualism of Plato and Plotinus, the collection demonstrates that psychology had become a wide-ranging and sophisticated discipline long before Descartes.

Scholars in the early seventeenth century who studied ancient Greek scientific theories often drew upon philology and history to reconstruct a more general picture of the Greek past. Gassendi's training as a humanist historiographer enabled him to formulate a conception of the history of philosophy in which the rationality of scientific and philosophical inquiry depended on the historical justifications which he developed for his beliefs. Professor Joy examines this conception and analyzes the nature of Gassendi's historical training, especially its relationship to his career as a physicist and astronomer. She shows how he rehabilitated Epicurean atomism by bringing together the arguments of the Greek atomists and those of his contemporaries. In doing so, he produced an account of the natural world which made it an object of empirical study and mechanical explanation.

v. 1. Description of the torso in the Belvedere in Rome, Essay on the capacity for the sentiment for the beautiful in art, Reflections on the painting and sculpture of the Greeks -- v. 2. The history of ancient art (vols. I, II) -- v. 3. The history of ancient art (vols. III, IV).

This paper argues that contemporary philosophy of mind and action could learn much from the structure of action explanation manifested in ancient Greek tragedy, which is less deterministic than typically supposed and which does not conflate the motivation of action with its causal production.

This wide-ranging history of ancient Greek political thought shows what ancient political texts might mean to citizens of the twenty-first century. A provocative and wide-ranging history of ancient Greek political thought. Demonstrates what ancient Greek works of political philosophy might mean to citizens of the twenty-first century. Examines an array of poetic, historical, and philosophical texts in an effort to locate Greek political thought in its cultural context. Pays careful attention to the distinctively ancient connections between politics and ethics. Structured around key themes such as the origins of political thought, political self-definition, revolutions in political thought, democracy and imperialism.

This original and lively book uses texts from ancient medicine, epic, lyric, tragedy, historiography, philosophy, and religion to explore the influence of Greek ideas on health and disease on Greek thought. Fundamental issues are deeply implicated: causation and responsibility, purification and pollution, the mind-body relationship and gender differences, authority and the expert, reality and appearances, good government, and good and evil themselves.