This classic, provocative introduction to classical metaphysical questions focuses on appreciating the problems, rather than attempting to proffer answers.

The discussion of good and evil must not be confined to the sterile lecture halls of academics but related instead to ordinary human feelings, needs, and desires, says noted philosopher Richard Taylor. Efforts to understand morality by exploring human reason will always fail because we are creatures of desire as well. All morality arises from our intense and inescapable longing. The distinction between good and evil is always clouded by rationalists who convert the real problems of ethics into complex (...) philosophical puzzles. In the first part of Good and Evil, Taylor looks for a more meaningful conception by reexamining and rejecting the whole rationalistic tradition that dominates philosophical ethics. The second part provides an empirical explanation of good and evil, noting that one does not have to look too far to find prime examples of the failure of fixed moral rules. Including important commentary on Joseph Fletcher's groundbreaking situation ethics, and Aristotle's virtues (e.g., magnanimity and pride), Taylor rounds out the book by developing a philosophy of aspiration--personal worth as an ethical ideal--to replace the morality of duty. He offers a modified form of situation ethics to fit the contemporary problems we face. (shrink)

Philosophy written in Arabic and in the Islamic world represents one of the great traditions of Western philosophy. Inspired by Greek philosophical works and the indigenous ideas of Islamic theology, Arabic philosophers from the ninth century onwards put forward ideas of great philosophical and historical importance. This collection of essays, by some of the leading scholars in Arabic philosophy, provides an introduction to the field by way of chapters devoted to individual thinkers or groups, especially during the 'classical' period from (...) the ninth to the twelfth centuries. It also includes chapters on areas of philosophical inquiry across the tradition, such as ethics and metaphysics. Finally, it includes chapters on later Islamic thought, and on the connections between Arabic philosophy and Greek, Jewish, and Latin philosophy. The volume also includes a useful bibliography and a chronology of the most important Arabic thinkers. (shrink)

Al-Fârâbî’s thought on intellect was known to the Latin West through the translation of his Letter on the Intellect, through the Long Commentary on the De Anima by Averroes and through some other works. Al-Fârâbî identified the active power of intellect in Aristotle’s De Anima 3.5 as the unique and separately existing Agent Intellect, but the role of the Agent Intellect in forming intelligibles in act in the human soul is by no means unequivocally clear. Further, the apprehension of intelligibles (...) by human beings and the intellectual development of the soul, oftentimes described as an activity of abstracting , seems to be a genuineabstraction from experience, yet it somehow involves the emanative power of the Agent Intellect. This paper works to provide a coherent explanation of the natureof abstraction and the role of Agent Intellect in that activity. (shrink)

After a very brief introduction, Davidson begins with an informed and detailed account of the views of Aristotle and his major commentators, whose writings had enormous influence on the development of the medieval traditions. Davidson's account is supplemented with a critical exposition of the relevant teachings from the Plotiniana Arabica, from al-Kindi, and from a treatise on the soul attributed to Porphyry in the Arabic tradition. Impressive as all this is, it is simply stage setting for Davidson's detailed accounts of (...) the doctrines and arguments of al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes. (shrink)

In a highly original and provocative essay entitled “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology”, published a few years ago, Professors Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow attempt to indicate the scientific importance and usefulness of the concepts of purpose and teleology. Since this essay appeared the suggestions it contains seem to have acquired a significance which was not wholly apparent at that time. This is due primarily to the fact that a somewhat novel and, it appears to some, revolutionary approach to (...) certain problems has arisen in the sciences, an approach which is more or less loosely referred to as “cybernetics,” and among whose outstanding spokesmen are to be found the very authors of this essay—particularly Professor Wiener, whose recently published Cybernetics has been claiming the attention of an increasing number of scientists and non-scientists alike. In his book, it may be noted, Professor Wiener, in tracing the development of cybernetics over the past few years, gives a good indication of the importance he attaches to the earlier essay. He writes, with reference to it: “The three of us [Rosenblueth, Wiener and Bigelow] felt that this new point of view merited a paper, which we wrote up and published. Dr. Rosenblueth and I foresaw that the paper could only be a statement of program for a large body of experimental work, and we decided that if we could ever bring our plan for an interscientific institute to fruition, this topic would furnish an almost ideal center for our activity”. It would seem, then, that an examination of the contents of this essay should not be without interest at this time. (shrink)

In this fresh evaluation of Western ethics, noted philosopher Richard Taylor argues that philosophy must return to the classical notion of virtue as the basis of ethics. To ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, ethics was chiefly the study of how individuals attain personal excellence, or "virtue," defined as intellectual sophistication, wisdom, strength of character, and creativity. With the ascendancy of the Judeo-Christian ethic, says Taylor, this emphasis on pride of personal worth was lost. Instead, philosophy became preoccupied with defining (...) right and wrong in terms of a divine lawgiver, and the concept of virtue was debased to mean mere obedience to divine law. Even today, in the absence of religious belief, modern thinkers unwittingly continue this legacy by creating hairsplitting definitions of good and evil. Taylor points out that the ancients rightly understood the ultimate concern of ethics to be the search for happiness, a concept that seems to have eluded contemporary society despite unprecedented prosperity and convenience. Extolling Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Taylor urges us to reread this brilliant and still relevant treatise, especially its emphasis on an ethic of aspiration. (shrink)

Averroes asserts in his Long Commentary on the De Anima and in his Long Commentary on the Metaphysics that principles of the science of metaphysics are established in the science of psychology. In psychology, human intellectual understanding is found to require the separate agent intellect for the coming to be of knowledge. The analysis of human psychology establishes that intellect must exist and must be separate from the human being in existence. Moreover there exists potency in those things called intellect, (...) thanks to the argument for the existence of the material intellect. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Philosophy and theology God and natural philosophy Religion and political philosophy.

IT HAS BEEN characteristic of metaphysics, since the beginning of philosophy, to deny the reality of time. The characteristics ascribed to it by unreflective people, particularly that of passage, have seemed so puzzling and paradoxical that the metaphysical temperament has preferred to banish time altogether rather than embrace those paradoxes. Thus Parmenides, the earliest metaphysician, denied reality to all time and becoming, leaving his bleak and changeless conception of reality to be perfected by his pupil Zeno. Plato, too, declared that (...) reality can only be the eternal, describing the strange passage of time in which we mortals live as nothing but that eternity's moving image. Among modern philosophers Spinoza sounded the same note, being unable to think of any reality in which time, by itself, could make a difference, while Immanuel Kant reduced it to a mere form of sensibility. Among recent thinkers McTaggart comes at once to mind, with his proofs that the concept of time is simply self-contradictory. (shrink)

In their penetrating and admirably lucid discussion, “Purposeful and Non-purposeful Behavior,” Professors Rosenblueth and Wiener have considerably clarified the point of view expressed in their earlier paper dealing with the conception of purpose, and recently criticized by me. But while their discussion thus removes some of the difficulties which, I think, stood in the way of acceptance of their position, there yet remain fundamental questions which I do not believe have been adequately dealt with.These authors rebuke me, with justice, for (...) not indicating my own conception of purposiveness, and they add that this omission weakens my criticisms of their view. That the omission detracts from the interest of my paper is doubtless correct, but that it weakens my criticisms of their position is not similarly obvious. I shall, at any rate, attempt to rectify this defect in the present discussion. (shrink)

Al-Fârâbî’s thought on intellect was known to the Latin West through the translation of his Letter on the Intellect, through the Long Commentary on the De Anima by Averroes and through some other works. Al-Fârâbî identified the active power of intellect in Aristotle’s De Anima 3.5 as the unique and separately existing Agent Intellect, but the role of the Agent Intellect in forming intelligibles in act in the human soul is by no means unequivocally clear. Further, the apprehension of intelligibles (...) by human beings and the intellectual development of the soul, oftentimes described as an activity of abstracting (intaza`a), seems to be a genuineabstraction from experience, yet it somehow involves the emanative power of the Agent Intellect. This paper works to provide a coherent explanation of the natureof abstraction and the role of Agent Intellect in that activity. (shrink)

Al-Farabi, Avicenna and Averroes, widely known classical rationalists in the Arabic/Islamic philosophical tradition and strongly infl uential sources for Latin philosophy in the High Middle Ages, all thought themselves to be following Aristotle’s lead regarding the intellectual abstraction of intelligibles in the formation of necessary and unchanging scientific knowledge. For Aristotle it is clear that sensation is a potentiality for apprehending or coming to be individual sensed objects found in the world exterior to the human soul. This takes place by (...) way of a separation of the forms of sensibles from matter and a reception of them as an actualization of the senses of the soul. 1 In an analogous fashion, intellectual knowing is a potentiality for apprehending or coming to be in act non-individuated intellectual forms that are somehow in individuated particular sensible things. Although Aristotle says that “the objects of thought are in the sensible forms”, the analogy with sensation breaks down when it comes to the objects intellectually known. The reason for this is that the nonindividuated or universal forms of human knowledge are not in the sensibles in act as they must be in the intellect. 2 Again following Aristotle De Anima 3.4 and 3.5, these thinkers hold for a part of intellect that is passive or receptive of all things and another part that is active in making all things, this latter described as a disposition like light, this as well describing the active agent as acting like light. This second part, which the Arabic tradition called the Agent Intellect, sometimes describing it also as Active Intellect, al-‘aql al-fa‘il, was understood per Aristotelem to be an eternal cause of the intellectual forms in the human intellect. It was accepted that, without a grounding in separate eternal intellect, there may well be generalization or abstraction – in some sense of the 57term? but scientific knowledge understood as true, necessary and unchanging will not be achieved. 3 Of course, in Posterior Analytics 2.19 Aristotle writes of sensory experience and provides the image of a retreat gradually coming to a halt, saying, “The soul is so constituted that it is capable of the same sort of process”. This process somehow establishes the universal in the soul even though perception is of the particular. He describes this as taking place by induction, writing, “Clearly then it must be by induction that we acquire knowledge of the primary principles, because this is also the way in which general concepts are conveyed to us by sense-perception.” These are “first things” or primary principles or premises required by demonstration. And the Arabic tradition understood Aristotle to hold for the necessity of demonstration in the formation of scientific knowledge, something that stringently requires not only proper syllogistic form but also first premises that are known to be true, not just supposed or simply generalized on the basis of experience. 4 For the Arabic tradition, Aristotle?s doctrine of intellectual understanding required the involvement of that separate Agent Intellect to provide a solid foundation for human scientific knowledge by way of intellectual abstraction. (shrink)

Born in 1126 to a family of Maliki legal scholars, Ibn Rushd, known as Averroes, enjoyed a long career in religious jurisprudence at Seville and Cordoba while at the same time advancing his philosophical studies of the works of Aristotle. This translation of Averroes’ Long Commentary on Aristotle’s _De Anima_ brings to English-language readers the complete text of this influential work of medieval philosophy. Richard C. Taylor provides rich notes on the Long Commentary and a generous introduction that discusses (...) Averroes’ most mature reflections on Aristotle’s teachings as well as Averroes' comprehensive philosophical views on soul and intellect. It is only in the Long Commentary that Averroes finally resolves to his satisfaction the much vexed issue of the nature of intellect, Taylor shows. (shrink)

This valuable reference work synthesizes and elucidates traditional themes and issues in Islamic philosophy as well as prominent topics emerging from the last twenty years of scholarship. Written for a wide readership of students and scholars, The Routledge Companion to Islamic Philosophy is unique in including coverage of both perennial philosophical issues in an Islamic context and also distinct concerns that emerge from Islamic religious thought. This work constitutes a substantial affirmation that Islamic philosophy is an integral part of the (...) Western philosophical tradition. Featuring 33 chapters, divided into seven thematic sections, this volume explores the major areas of philosophy: Logic, Metaphysics, Philosophy in the Sciences, Philosophy of Mind/Epistemology, and Ethics/Politics as well as philosophical issues salient in Islamic revelation, theology, prophecy, and mysticism. Other features include: •A focus on both the classical and post-classical periods •A contributing body that includes both widely respected scholars from around the world and a handful of the very best younger scholars •"Reference" and "Further Reading" sections for each chapter and a comprehensive index for the whole volume The result is a work that captures Islamic philosophy as philosophy. In this way it serves students and scholars of philosophy and religious studies and at the same time provides valuable essays relevant to the study of Islamic thought and theology. (shrink)