From all this some unexpected results become apparent:Labriola is not the father of Italian Eurocommunism, but rather a thorough-going internationalist.Labriola might reasonably be called a Marxist humanist. In the light of his acknowledged dependence on Engels, this would seem directly to challenge the post-Lukács tendency variously to blame Engels for dialectical materialism, the Soviet scholastic spirit, or even Stalin.Croce's critique of Labriola is telling and Gramsci's direct response is ineffective in so far as he simply tries to revindicate Labriola the (...) classical Marxist.It is at least curious that Gramsci attacks primarily Croce, the liberal idealist, rather than Gentile, the fascist idealist. Much of the criticism is that Croce does not go far enough, is not immanentist and historicist enough.This, in turn, suggests that one should look for Gramsci's original contribution and his overriding concern in political philosophy and not at all in metaphysics. (shrink)

When Gilson died in 1978, a great deal of his work on the history of philosophy, and specifically God, the primacy of existence or esse over essence, and the impact of Christianity on philosophy had been translated. A significant amount of material, however, has not yet appeared into English. The publication of Medieval studies represents a vital step in bringing these important works into the English-speaking world. The opening piece revisits a battle now won (and won in great measure by (...) Gilson’s efforts), namely the fight to acknowledge the very existence of medieval philosophy and win its place in the academic world. But the article also makes the effort--which becomes a connecting thread throughout the nine articles--to pinpoint the uniqueness of what Gilson calls Christian philosophy. All the articles give an insight into the great synthetic visions articulated by the better-known works of Gilson like The Spirit of Medieval philosophy. "The Middle Ages and ancient naturalism" contrasts Renaissance humanists and Reformers with the medievals on the defining issue of their attitude toward nature to understand who actually stands closer to the Greeks. In his examination of the Latin Averroist Boethius of Dacia’s book on the eternity of the world, Gilson finds that Boethius never expresses the view attributed to Latin Averroism that there are contradictory truths in religion and philosophy. The closing article studies the profound influence of the great Muslim thinker Avicenna on Latin Europe drawing a parallel between Avicenna’s work and that of the great Christian medievals like Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. (shrink)

Neither history, nor historiography, nor other fields of inquiry have essences that determine method, Tucker tells us. However, scientific historiography has been successful, and its progress can be studied empirically and descriptively, as distinct from a “phenomenological” approach focused on historiographers’ own and often misleading self-awareness.

Stuart Glennan, and the team of Peter Machamer, Lindley Darden, and Carl Craver have recently provided two accounts of the concept of a mechanism. The main difference between these two versions rests on how the behavior of the parts of the mechanism is conceptualized. Glennan considers mechanisms to be an interaction of parts, where the interaction between parts can be characterized by direct, invariant, change-relating generalizations. Machamer, Darden, and Craver criticize traditional conceptualizations of mechanisms which are based solely on parts (...) interacting and introduce a new conceptactivity. This essay is an attempt at carving out a relationship between these two philosophical interpretations of a mechanism. I will claim that, rather than being in conflict, Glennan's concept of interaction and Machamer, Darden, and Craver's notion of activity actually complement one another, each emphasizing a missing element of the other. (shrink)

This collection, the first of its kind, brings together specially commissioned academic essays to mark fifty years since the death of John Kennedy Toole.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Marsilio Ficino’s Critique of the Lucretian AlternativeJames G. SnyderIntroductionMarsilio Ficino is perhaps most widely remembered by historians of philosophy today as a fifteenth-century Platonist and Hermeticist who advocated the soul’s flight from the sordid world of matter and body. Ficino’s major contributions to philosophy include his Latin translations of Plato and Plotinus, as well as his voluminous and encyclopedic Platonic Theology, where he argues that the immortal soul occupies (...) a privileged midpoint between God and inchoate prime matter. It therefore comes as a surprise to learn that Ficino, for a time in his early twenties, was drawn to the Roman poet Lucretius, who believed that most people are plagued by the superstitions of religiously-minded fable mongers. During this time Ficino composed a short commentary on Lucretius’ didactic Epicurean poem, On the Nature of Things. In 1417 one of the last surviving manuscript copies of this poem was found in a German monastery by the humanist Poggio Bracciolini after several centuries of dormancy.1 Also, in an early treatise on pleasure, Ficino [End Page 165] argues that the Epicurean emphasis on pleasure as the removal of pain is superior to the crass and vulgar hedonism of Aristippus.2 In time, however, Ficino developed into the Platonist that historians of philosophy are more familiar with today. He turned his back on Lucretius, destroyed his commentary on him, and he became a rigid opponent of those philosophers who, as Plato describes them in his Sophist, “insist that only what offers tangible contact is, since they define being as the same as body.”3Despite the fact that Ficino ultimately rejected Lucretius, and in a letter to the poet Angelo Poliziano claimed to have “followed the divine Plato from my youth,” it appears that he was never able to successfully put the Epicurean poet completely out of his mind.4 The specter of Lucretius—that is, the specter of a potent and fully-articulated materialism and what it entails—casts a long shadow across the eighteen books of Ficino’s Platonic Theology. This work, which was printed in 1482 and remains his most extensive philosophical treatise, gives the impression that Ficino considered Lucretius a relevant and un-eliminated alternative to his own mature philosophical vision. The Lucretian alternative, as it will here be called, aspires to show that anything that exists is a composite of matter and void alone, and that there is no need to countenance the existence of some ghostly third constituent, such as soul, in order to explain adequately the phenomena of nature or consciousness.5 Ficino’s Platonic Theology argues for a profoundly different metaphysical picture of the nature of things. There Ficino wanted to demonstrate the essential immortality of the soul, and to further clarify the best way that it can, as he puts it, “cast off the bonds of our terrestrial chains” so that it may “fly unhindered to the ethereal abode.”6 However, in order for Ficino to accomplish this, he first had to show that the Lucretian alternative is not a living hypothesis, but a dead one. Refuting Lucretius, therefore, is central to the polemical aims and aspirations of this [End Page 166] work, and it is to this end that Ficino addresses several chapters to refuting the materialism of the “vulgar” and “impious” Epicurean poet and philosopher. The Lucretian alternative also explains in part why Ficino discusses, sometimes at great length, the nature of matter and body, especially in the early books of his Platonic Theology. The core argument that Ficino brings against the Lucretian alternative is that its materialist ontology is at best incomplete, and that something else—some ghostly incorporeal principle— is in fact necessary in order to adequately explain the nature of things.Both the Renaissance recovery of On the Nature of Things, and the subsequent role that it played in the advancement of early modern philosophy and science, are familiar to historians of philosophy today.7 Ficino’s fifteenth-century critique of Lucretius, however, is not. Nearly half a century ago Paul Oskar Kristeller noted that in the 1450s Ficino came under the influence of Lucretius, and he further speculated that “a trace... (shrink)

A series of structural constitutional arguments lodged in multiple cases against Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) authorities to negotiate prescription drug prices via the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act threaten the legitimacy of CMS program and federal agency powers.

In addition to being one of the world's most influential philosophers, Aristotle can also be credited with the creation of both the science of biology and the philosophy of biology. He was the first thinker to treat the investigations of the living world as a distinct inquiry with its own special concepts and principles. This book focuses on a seminal event in the history of biology - Aristotle's delineation of a special branch of theoretical knowledge devoted to the systematic investigation (...) of animals. Aristotle approached the creation of zoology with the tools of subtle and systematic philosophies of nature and of science that were then carefully tailored to the investigation of animals. The papers collected in this volume, written by a pre-eminent figure in the field of Aristotle's philosophy and biology, examine Aristotle's approach to biological inquiry and explanation, his concepts of matter, form and kind, and his teleology. (shrink)

This paper is a comparison of some of the central ontological claims on the nature of prime matter of the Renaissance Platonist Marsilio Ficino, and the nature of space of Frane Petrić, the sixteenth century Platonist from the town of Cres. In it I argue that there are two respects in which the natural philosophies of both Platonists resemble one another, especially when it comes to the ontological status of the most basic substrate of the material world. First, both Ficino (...) and Petrić argue for the basic existence of matter and space. Second, both philosophers attribute an “ontological priority” to matter and space over what are seen as the fleeting qualities of the material world. (shrink)