This book is a contribution both to Aristotle studies and to the philosophy of nature, and not only offers a thorough text based account of time as modally potentiality in Aristotle’s account, but also clarifies the process of “actualizing time” as taking time and looks at the implications of conceiving a world without actual time. It speaks to the resurgence of interest in Aristotle’s natural philosophy and will become an important resource for anyone interested in Aristotle’s theory of time, of (...) its relationship to Aristotle’s larger project in the Physics, and to time’s place in the broader scope of Aristotelian natural science. Graduate students and scholars researching in this area especially will find the authors arguments provocative, a welcome addition to other recent publications on Aristotle’s Treatise on Time. ​. (shrink)

Chronos in Aristotle’s Physics: On the Nature of Time argues that Aristotle’s Treatise on Time (Physics iv 10-14) is a highly contextualized account of time in so far as it is not a treatment of time qua time but a parallel account to Aristotle’s foregoing studies of nature, principles (192b13-22), motion (201a10-11), infinite (iii 4-8), place (iv 1-5), and void (iv 6-9) in the Physics i-iv 9. It offers a reading of Physics iv 10-11 with the aim of showing that (...) time, chronos, here has to do with time as an attribute of motion, as an interval, i.e., the type of time that, as Aristotle describes at 218a1, “is taken.” With support from a reading of Physics iv 14 and evidence from Aristotle’s greater philosophy of nature, it argues that time for Aristotle is derivative of the modal change of natural being. Time is then only ever potentially actual unless this change is apprehended, in most cases, by the working together of perception and intellection and, in some cases, by perception alone. (shrink)

This is a translation of the second chapter of F.W.J. Schelling's Abhandlungen zur Erlaüterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre. It is preceded by a brief introduction in which I situate the chapter within Schelling's oeuvre and suggest that it is not only an early articulation of Schellingian Naturphilosophie, but also prescient, anticipating Schelling's later positive philosophy.

ABSTRACT This article considers the second treatise of Schelling's Abhandlungen zur Erläuterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre, a lesser-known work from the early Schelling. Here, Schelling proposes to defend the critical position insofar as it purports to be a system based on human reason, but instead he issues a backhanded critique of the assumption on behalf of the critical philosophers to try and limit the bounds of pure reason by means of their own use of reason. Schelling then offers an alternative (...) way to think about the relationship of mind and matter in nature. This article argues that Schelling's actual explanation of the critical philosophy as a position founded by reasonable minds ultimately belies his promise to defend it, thus calling into question that Schelling's thought prior to 1800 was a mere reiteration of Kantian/Fichtean transcendentalism. (shrink)

_Brill's Companion to the Reception of Presocratic Natural Philosophy in Later Classical Thought_ explores both explicit and hidden influences of Presocratic early scientific concepts, such as nature, elements, principles, soul, organization, causation, purpose, and cosmos in Platonic, Aristotelian, and Hippocratic philosophy.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionSchelling and the EnvironmentChelsea C. Harry (bio)Scientists overwhelmingly agree that climate change is anthropogenic, caused by our greenhouse gas emissions.1 Given the evidence that exists, we should be able to convince ourselves to change the everyday behaviors resulting in these emissions. If we hope to save ourselves, other animals, plants, and the environment from a devastating future, then why would we continue to use fossil fuels?The answer here (...) is not an easy one. And yet, the ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle, provides us with a possible cause. In his most famous work on ethics,2 Aristotle argued that being weak-willed, suffering from what he called, “akrasia,” is the reason we do things that we know we shouldn’t do. It is a condition that results when desire wins over reason. For example, I eat a chocolate bar when I know I should eat a salad because my desire for chocolate wins over what I have reasoned to be best for my health. Simply put, reason might be what distinguishes us from other animals and plants, but it is not always our most powerful faculty. It stands both to experience and to reason, then, that rational decision might not be what is going to get us out of this climate crisis. Then, what is?In this special issue, we hear from five contemporary scholars of the 18th–19th century German philosopher, F.W.J. Schelling, an oft-called “protean thinker” whose prolific, sometimes creative, and diverse works spanned over seventy years. A onetime roommate of Hegel and Hölderlin, Schelling’s works are lesser-known outside specialist circles, and yet one finds that his prescient insights continue to have much to offer. This is especially true vis-à-vis the climate crisis, as Schelling was the first post-Kantian philosopher to take nature seriously. He eschewed the modern, Kantian, and post-Kantian trend to focus on [End Page 1] ipseity, the self, and on what we as humans can rationally know. Instead, he returned to metaphysics and argued for a wholistic conception and experience of life—all life. For Schelling, humans are rational as an expression of nature, rather than as an exception to nature. As John Sallis put it so well as he argued for the Platonic influence in Schelling: “For what Schelling rewrites within the text of modern philosophy is a discourse on nature.”3 Sallis then reminds us that in Schelling’s 1809 text, Philosophical Investigations of the Essence of Human Freedom (“Die Freiheitschrift”), he openly criticizes post-Cartesian philosophy generally for its exclusion of nature; “All modern European philosophy since it began with Descartes has this common defect, that nature does not exist for it and that it lacks a living ground.”4 Schelling’s intention was to resolve the defect, and because of his efforts in this regard, his work has something to say to us about our relationship to the environment.The idea to think about what Schelling can offer us in our current climate crisis is hardly new. In 2014, the North American Schelling Society (NASS), hosted by Bruce Matthews and Bard College, thematized its third international conference on “Schelling in the Anthropocene,” asking scholars to think beyond modern philosophy’s legacy of the human/nature divide and to discuss Schelling’s contribution to the anthropogenic environmental crisis we currently face. Since then, published work on this topic includes: Bruce Matthews’s, “Schelling in the Anthropocene,”5 Christopher Lauer’s, “Confronting the Anthropocene,” 6 and Vincent Lee’s, “Schelling and the Sixth Extinction.”7 Other journals have published special issues on related topics, including McGrath et al. Schelling After Theory special issue of Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, McGrath et al. The Many Faces of F.W.J. Schelling special issue of Analecta Hermeneutica, Tritten et al. Nature, Speculation, and the Return to Schelling special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, and Bahoh, et al. Philosophies of Nature special issue of Comparative and Continental Philosophy. While this is by no means an exhaustive list, other contemporary thinkers who have been part of this conversation include: Kyla Bruff, Charlotte Alderwick, Manfred Frank, Markus Gabriel, Iain Grant,8 Lore... (shrink)

This chapter considers Sappho of Lesbos an early philosopher of time. It compares the use of temporal markers, especially “now” (nun) in Sappho’s poetry to Aristotle’s usage of the same term in the context of his treatise on time in Physics IV.10–14. Likewise, it looks at Aristotle’s analysis of phantasia in De Anima III and in the Parva Naturalia as well as Eva Stehle’s reading of Sappho’s Tithonos poem to suggest ways that both Aristotle and Sappho account for an ability (...) to experience the past, what was “once” (pota), in the present, now. The chapter concludes that Sappho, like Aristotle, was a thinker primarily engaged with the existence and experience of natural beings and, as such, of the ways natural beings primarily act and interact with each other in the world. From such an engagement developed a theory of time. Sappho may have been a hidden influence on Aristotle’s understanding of the relationship between being, beings, and time; nevertheless, her poetry is instructive to all of us still grappling with these issues today. (shrink)

This book explores contributions by some of the most influential women in the history of philosophy, science, and literature. Ranging from Sappho and Sophie Germain to Stebbing and Evelyn Fox Keller, this work ultimately demonstrates the impact these non-canonical, sometimes unknown or hidden, sources had, or may have had, on the recognized male leaders in their fields, from Aristotle to Pascal, Kant, Whitehead, and Russell. Chapters reflect philosophical pluralism, both analytic and continental themes, and cover figures reaching across the entire (...) history of ideas in the West, from pre-historic times to the twentieth century. Anyone interested in coming to know or in preparing to teach women in the history of philosophy, science, and literature will appreciate this collection and its myriad insights into the still unrecognized voices of non-canonical sources across these disciplines. (shrink)

Aristotle claimed that man is by nature social. Later philosophers challenged this assertion, questioning whether man is necessarily social or simply socialized. Ibn Bājja, a twelfth-century philosopher from Muslim Spain, and Martin Heidegger, a twentieth-century German philosopher, approached this question in paradoxical terms, claiming in their respective works that despite having been born into social origins (a necessary framework of existential and social conditions), human beings are able—and even mandated—to escape these origins, and thus society, to some degree. Through Ibn (...) Bājja’s book, The Governance of the Solitary, and a portion of Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time, I present what each of these thinkers posit to be a person’s social origins, and the respective epistemological justifications they provide to suggest that man should work to depart from them. To conclude, I appropriate the claims of Ibn Bājja and Heidegger to address the “real world” plausibility and potential benefits—both to society and to man himself—of man’s departure from society. (shrink)

Aristotle claimed that man is by nature social. Later philosophers challenged this assertion, questioning whether man is necessarily social or simply socialized. Ibn Bājja, a twelfth-century philosopher from Muslim Spain, and Martin Heidegger, a twentieth-century German philosopher, approached this question in paradoxical terms, claiming in their respective works that despite having been born into social origins (a necessary framework of existential and social conditions), human beings are able—and even mandated—to escape these origins, and thus society, to some degree. Through Ibn (...) Bājja’s book, The Governance of the Solitary, and a portion of Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time, I present what each of these thinkers posit to be a person’s social origins, and the respective epistemological justifications they provide to suggest that man should work to depart from them. To conclude, I appropriate the claims of Ibn Bājja and Heidegger to address the “real world” plausibility and potential benefits—both to society and to man himself—of man’s departure from society. (shrink)

Since the last quarter of the twentieth century there has been growing interest in women’s contributions to the histories of science, philosophy, and literature dating back to the very beginnings of these disciplines. This volume offers a contemporary, multinational, multidisciplinary exploration of some of these "hidden figures".

Eugene Anderson (2001) suggests that Western ethical codes be supplemented with eastern non-anthropocentrism in order for Westerners to consider the fate of non-human beings as seriously as we consider our own. In this note I build on the work of Anderson, suggesting points for intersection between the alterity of Emmanuel Levinas with the Daoist reverence for all beings.

Risk communicators often need to communicate probabilistic predictions. On occasion, an event with 10% likelihood will occur, or one with 90% likelihood will not – a probabilistically unexpected ou...

Byrne & Russon suggest that the production of action by primates is hierarchically organised. We assess the evidence for hierarchical structure in the comprehension of action by primates. Focusing on work with human children we evaluate several possible indices of program-level comprehension.

In her book, Method and politics in Plato’s Statesman, Melissa Lane discusses the relationship between political authority and time. Namely, she asks what the source of political authority could be when, in the Statesman, the Stranger tells us that law cannot be applicable in all situations, for all people, in all times. In this paper I agree with Lane that the apparent contradiction in the dialogue between, on the one hand, the temporal laws and, on the other hand, the contingency (...) of everyday situations can be explained only in coming to understand the statesman as a master of kairos, or “right timing”. A mastery of kairos, I suggest, does not mean simply that one is able to recognize when it is the right time to do or say something, but rather it must mean that one is able to create the right time, which involves foreknowledge of universal truth and proficiency in the art of putting things together. (shrink)

Psychopaths routinely disregard social norms by engaging in selfish, antisocial, often violent behavior. Commonly characterized as mentally disordered, recent evidence suggests that psychopaths are executing a well-functioning, if unscrupulous strategy that historically increased reproductive success at the expense of others. Natural selection ought to have favored strategies that spared close kin from harm, however, because actions affecting the fitness of genetic relatives contribute to an individual’s inclusive fitness. Conversely, there is evidence that mental disorders can disrupt psychological mechanisms designed to (...) protect relatives. Thus, mental disorder and adaptation accounts of psychopathy generate opposing hypotheses: psychopathy should be associated with an increase in the victimization of kin in the former account but not in the latter. Contrary to the mental disorder hypothesis, we show here in a sample of 289 violent offenders that variation in psychopathy predicts a decrease in the genetic relatedness of victims to offenders; that is, psychopathy predicts an increased likelihood of harming non-relatives. Because nepotistic inhibition in violence may be caused by dispersal or kin discrimination, we examined the effects of psychopathy on (1) the dispersal of offenders and their kin and (2) sexual assault frequency (as a window on kin discrimination). Although psychopathy was negatively associated with coresidence with kin and positively associated with the commission of sexual assault, it remained negatively associated with the genetic relatedness of victims to offenders after removing cases of offenders who had coresided with kin and cases of sexual assault from the analyses. These results stand in contrast to models positing psychopathy as a pathology, and provide support for the hypothesis that psychopathy reflects an evolutionary strategy largely favoring the exploitation of non-relatives. (shrink)

This paper posits that ethical leadership increases important organizational and individual outcomes by reducing politics in the workplace. Specifically, we propose that perceptions of organizational politics serve as a mechanism through which ethical leadership affects outcomes. We further argue that the modeled relationships are moderated by political skill. By means of data from 136 matched pairs of supervisors and subordinates employed by a state agency in the southern US, we found support for our predictions. Specifically, we found that perceptions of (...) organizational politics fully mediated the relationship between perceptions of ethical leadership and helping and promotability ratings. In addition, political skill was found to moderate the direct and indirect effects. (shrink)

'Mass terms', words like water, rice and traffic, have proved very difficult to accommodate in any theory of meaning since, unlike count nouns such as house or dog, they cannot be viewed as part of a logical set and differ in their grammatical properties. In this study, motivated by the need to design a computer program for understanding natural language utterances incorporating mass terms, Harry Bunt provides a thorough analysis of the problem and offers an original and detailed solution. (...) An extension of classical set theory, Ensemble Theory, is defined, and this provides the conceptual basis of a framework for the analysis of natural language meaning which Dr Bunt calls Two-level model-theoretic semantics. The validity of the framework is convincingly demonstrated by the formal analysis of a fragment of English including sentences with quantified and modified mass terms. Separate chapters of the book are devoted to an axiomatic definition of Ensemble Theory and a detailed discussion of its status as a mathematical formalism. (shrink)

The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

Rich sensorimotor interaction facilitates language learning and is presumed to ground conceptual representations. Yet empirical support for early stages of embodied word learning is currently lacking. Finding evidence that sensorimotor interaction shapes learned linguistic representations would provide crucial support for embodied language theories. We developed a gamified word learning experiment in virtual reality in which participants learned the names of six novel objects by grasping and manipulating objects with either their left or right hand. Participants then completed a word–color match (...) task in which they were tested on the same six words and objects. Participants were faster to respond to stimuli in the match task when the response hand was compatible with the hand used to interact with the named object, an effect we refer to as affordance compatibility. In two follow up experiments, we found that merely observing virtual hands interact with the objects was sufficient to acquire a smaller affordance compatibility effect, and we found that the compatibility effect was driven primarily by responses with a compatible hand and not by responses in a compatible spatial location. Our results support theoretical views of language which ground word representations in sensorimotor experiences, and they suggest promising future routes to explore the sensorimotor foundations of higher cognition through immersive virtual experiments. (shrink)

Despite the prominent argument for equal educational opportunity for women inWe examine carefully Plato’s argument for the equal nature of women in.

Despite the language we saw in the previous chapter, which allowed for time apprehension by perception and marking, in Physics iv 14, Aristotle famously argues that time is dependent on nous.

This essay argues that fulfilling the promise of participatory democratic theory requires ways for citizens to reconstruct the world, not simply to improve its governance processes. The concept of public work, expressing civic agency, or the capacity of diverse citizens to build a democratic way of life, embodies this shift. It posits citizens as co-creators of the world, not simply deliberators and decision-makers about the world. Public work is a normative, democratizing ideal of citizenship generalized from communal labors of creating (...) the commons, with roots in diverse cultures. Shaped through contention with forces which threaten shared ways of life and their commons, grounded in an understanding of human plurality, public work has political qualities that unmask sentimentalized civic discourses of modern elites. Public work places citizens, not markets or states, as the foundational agents of democracy. It opens a path beyond the political crisis. (shrink)

The key to taking in Aristotle’s treatise on time is to approach it with the understanding that Aristotle was not a philosopher concerned with time—in questions about time or in delimiting the being of time.

Intolerance, abuse, calling of names because of differences of opinion about religion or politics or business, as well as because of differences of race, color, wealth or degree of culture are treason to the democratic way of life. Merely legal guarantees of the civil liberties of free belief, free expression, free assembly are of little avail if the give and take of ideas, facts, experiences, is choked by mutual suspicion, by abuse, by fear and hatred.Without some kind of oversight, the (...) golem, not God, might emerge from machines … it is naïve to believe that government is competent, let alone in a position to control the development and deployment of robots, self-generating algorithms, and artificial intelligence.... (shrink)

LSJ s.v. πρεσβεω II.3.b recorded, on the strength of Thuc. 5.39.2, the meaning ‘go as ambassador’ for the middle voice, in addition to the well-attested ‘send ambassadors’. The passage, however, does not on inspection support the meaning ; it was deleted from the Supplement to LSJ.

LSJ s.v. πρεσβεω II.3.b recorded, on the strength of Thuc. 5.39.2, the meaning ‘go as ambassador’ for the middle voice, in addition to the well-attested ‘send ambassadors’. The passage, however, does not on inspection support the meaning ; it was deleted from the Supplement to LSJ.