History of Western Philosophy

Inherited discussions of ‘science and religion’ too much assume an interaction between two historically constant phenomena in terms of stories of ‘progress’ and ‘conflict’. Instead, it is better to recognise long-term and varying modes of tension between three different approaches to nature, pivoted about attitudes to ‘enchantment’ and to transcendence versus immanence. Within such a perspective, it appears that the dominant model of science as ‘disenchanted transcendence’ is a Newtonian one that historically quickly proved inadequate. Alternative and earlier traditions of (...) ‘natural magic’ later returned under new guises and are closer to the essence of the ‘ergetic’ or experimental attitude that lies at the real core of ‘science’. The Newtonian model also implausibly suppressed the realities of motion, time, change, substantial form and secondary qualities. But contemporary physics points towards their restoration and to nature as a vital habit and form-shaping process, as well as to the ‘magical’ character of powers and causes. Magic, rightly understood, is a necessary mediator between religion as theory and science as practice and is a crucial aspect of an ergetic understanding of ‘enchanted transcendence’ which is the most promising perspective for today. (shrink)

The paper aims to show that by abstracting from a specific mythical historical- stylistic context and “ideation” of the notion of the Proto-Slavic deities Perun and Veles, especially in Croatian tradition, symbolic archetypes and abstract notions of form and primordial matter (materia prima) can be extracted from mythical content. We refer to mythical texts and contents according to the reconstructions and materials brought by Radoslav Katičić, and comparative analysis by Mislav Ježić. We distinguish form (1) as that in which identity (...) and possibility of a thing consists, (2) as the reasonableness of judgment and the form of existence, and (3) as the specific structure of a thing, which unites its parts and aspects as a whole and constitutes its internal necessity. These formative notions are relativized and nullified in Veles’ appearances, in which the archetypal notion of primordial matter is encoded. Examples of Platō’s dialogues historically confirm certain aspects of decoding myth as constitutive of philosophy. The above approach also opens a view of the roots of Croatian philosophical thought, which in its genesis can be traced back to Proto-Slavic mythical archetypes. With the implementation of Christianity, the questions of identity, reason and the structure of the whole are raised radically and sharply, as shown by the text of Trpimir’s grant (852). (shrink)

When the University of Glasgow moved to its present location in the 1870s the grand graduation hall, the Bute Hall, was adorned with suitably learned images on its stained glass. One window depicts...

The contemporary crisis of democracy has provoked a steady outpouring of popular and scholarly reflections diagnosing its underlying causes, assessing the nature of the threat, and envisioning diff...

I am deeply grateful to the respondents in this symposium for reflections both subtle and stimulating. A book with the title Democracy Rules is easy to caricature as yet another contribution to wha...

Aristotle’s Metaphysics Θ.8 argument for the priority of actuality to potentiality poses an immediate interpretive problem: the argument uses two distinct tests for priority, one of which threatens to reverse the results of the other. This paper argues that the standard approach to this passage, according to which one thing is prior to another when it satisfies the ontological independence test from Metaphysics Δ.11, fails to secure the argumentative unity of the passage. It introduces a new, causal account of priority (...) which explains both Aristotle’s claims about priority and the way he argues for them. (shrink)

We focus on the question of how expertise as conceived by the Stoics interacts with the content of impressions. In Section 1, we situate the evidence concerning expert perception within the Stoic account of cognitive development. In Section 2, we argue that the content of rational impressions, and notably of expert impressions, is not exhausted by the relevant propositions. In Section 3, we argue that expert impressions are a subtype of kataleptic impressions which achieve their level of clarity and distinctness (...) due to the contribution of expertise. In Section 4, we argue that the expertise in living well not only allows the wise person to assent correctly but also affects the content of her impressions. We suggest that these two models – one’s attitude toward an impression being informed by expertise, and one’s impressions being affected by expertise – might characterize distinct stages of cognitive development. Stoic wisdom is not only a matter of the way one assents to one’s impressions but also a matter of the condition of one’s soul and, consequently, of the kinds of impressions one even entertains. Expertise offers a model of how cognitive and discriminatory improvement through practice and effort can transform the non-wise into the wise. A reading on which the content of impressions is not exclusively propositional illuminates a further aspect of this transformation. If the same propositions are accessible through impressions with different non-propositional content, we can account for cases in which the novice and the expert entertain the same proposition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Women Philosophers in the Long Nineteenth Century: The German Tradition ed. by Kristin Gjesdal and Dalia NassarAlison StoneKristin Gjesdal and Dalia Nassar, editors. Women Philosophers in the Long Nineteenth Century: The German Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 336. Hardback, $99.00."How plausible, [Dalia Nassar and I] kept asking, is it that women published philosophy in the early modern period and then simply ceased to think and publish (...) philosophy in the nineteenth century?" remarked Kristin Gjesdal recently (interview with Richard Marshall, 3:16am [blog], https://www.3-16am.co.uk/articles/gadamer-herder-and-the-womenphilosophers-of-the-long-nineteen-cent ury?c=end-times-series). Not plausible at all—yet this is what historians of women in philosophy often seem to have assumed, judging by the remarkably small amount of scholarship on nineteenth-century women philosophers compared with those of the early modern period or the twentieth century. Eileen O'Neill, for instance, claims that it was "not a particularly friendly century for women philosophers" (1). In fact, as Gjesdal and Nassar observe, women were "significant contributors" to the "thriving intellectual cultures in German-speaking countries" at this time (1). Gjesdal and Nassar contrast Germanic countries to France and Britain in this regard, yet I would add that nineteenth-century Britain too had a vibrant print and periodical culture that created openings for women philosophers such as Harriet Martineau, Anna Jameson, Frances Power Cobbe, and many others. The broader point remains: the nineteenth century has only seemed empty of women philosophers because we have not yet investigated the women thinkers of this period or challenged the canons and narratives from which they have been excluded.Recognizing German women philosophers is particularly important because the vast majority of scholarship on the nineteenth century focuses on the German tradition. Consequently, unless we recover the work of German-speaking women, we will never change the narrative about this period. This makes the present anthology invaluable for both teaching and research. Edited by Gjesdal and Nassar, it contains new translations, nearly all by Anna Ezekiel, of texts by historical German-speaking women philosophers.Regarding teaching, many courses on post-Kantian European philosophy include no women until Beauvoir or Arendt. Such courses typically cover Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger. The editors have clearly designed this volume to enable instructors easily to bring women into such courses, by providing extracts—of suitable lengths for teaching—from women affiliated respectively with German idealism and Romanticism (Germaine de Staël, Karoline von Günderrode, and Bettina von Arnim), Marxism (Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg), Nietzscheanism (Hedwig Dohm, Lou Salomé), and phenomenology (Edith Stein, Gerda Walther). Some of these women are already well-known as political activists, as with Luxemburg and Zetkin, or under the elastic heading of "writers," as with Staël and von Arnim. But this collection presents these women's writings in a new light, showcasing their philosophical side. After all, we have learned to read Marx and Nietzsche philosophically: why not extend the same courtesy to Staël or Luxemburg?For researchers, this collection will likewise be invaluable. Post-Kantian European philosophy has been slow to respond to the wider questioning and broadening of the traditional philosophical canon. It remains sadly common for narratives of nineteenth-century German philosophy to discuss men only—a position that this book makes untenable. [End Page 336] Hopefully it will galvanize philosophers to integrate these women into the historiography of the post-Kantian tradition at last.In the introduction, the editors helpfully contextualize the selected writings, arguing that these women's exclusion from academic institutions led them to philosophize in ways that spoke to general audiences, connected with lived experience, and addressed practical and political concerns. In short, these women did a type of philosophy that was not purified but socially engaged, and can be a model for us today. Thereafter the book consists of sections on nine women philosophers, ordered chronologically. Each section begins with an editorial introduction to the philosopher and her interests, ideas, writings, and interlocutors.The writings included from Staël—whose work spans the period from the French Revolution into Romanticism—are "On Women Writers" from... (shrink)

Can one teach democracy? This question came repeatedly to my mind as I read Jan-Werner Müller's stimulating contribution to the recent literature on the past history, current travails, and future p...

Universal history as an historiographical genre can trace its origins back to the Greek historian Polybius (c. 200–c. 114 B.C.E.), who interpreted the rise of the Roman Republic as the predominant...

At the end of the sixteenth century, a new conception of history appeared that Jean Bodin theorized in France as geographistory. Building on the discoveries of the New World and the subsequent onset of globalization, and drawing on Polybius’s Histories as well as Stoic cosmopolitanism, geographistory aimed to impose a coherent and authentic order (“metre en ordre des choses tant désordonnees”) on the puzzle of fortuitous historical events by appealing to the immanent and material nature of things, presented as a (...) kind of Fortune through which events would realize their universal telos. Configured after the model of the destiny of the Roman Empire, which at his apogee dominated all the world urbi et orbi, the growing world’s unity and universality would therefore providentially substitute for both God’s miraculous intervention and the Aristotelian epic hero’s action; which had failed in the eyes of Calvinists because of the historic fiasco of King Henri IV. In that respect, the poet Agrippa d’Aubigné hoped, with his Histoire universelle, to endow history with a new direction and progress (as Bacon and, still later, Bossuet will do) by methodically combining the parameters of time and space, in the manner of panoptic and rotating Baroque perspective. (shrink)

The French writer, explorer, and historian Constantin-François de Volney (1757–1820) has been interpreted as embracing a Eurocentric Orientalism and a typically Enlightenment progressivist historical understanding. In this article, however, I argue that, far from simply offering yet another rationalistic or teleological historical narrative, Volney set out to refound the historical discipline by erecting historiography on a firmly empirical basis in order to repudiate the idea of historical design altogether. In this respect, his best-known work, The Ruins, or Meditations on the (...) Revolutions of Empires (1791), seems to occupy a special status in his oeuvre in that it did not confine its analyses to the epistemological realm and historiographical practice, but explicitly linked historical narratives and practice to historical developments themselves, ascribing civilizational decline and devastation predominantly to ignorance and blind faith in religion or myths of the past. According to this reasoning, a new, more critical historical practice – akin to social anthropology – would, by making people conscious of their historical agency, liberate historical development itself and ideally bring an end to seemingly unending cycles of political tyranny and social destruction. (shrink)

The Universal History, which had a complicated publishing history from the 1730s to the 1780s, was a commercial undertaking by a group of London booksellers, aimed at satisfying curiosity for reliable information about the rest of the world. It was finally composed of two separate parts, the Ancient and the Modern, which, while eventually published as a single work, were distinct. Its first author was George Sale, the noted translator of the Qur’an, who emphasized the recourse to original Arab manuscripts, (...) although, after his death in 1736, later authors had a different approach. This article looks first at the work’s hostile view of Islam and claim that sympathy to it was a tactic of irreligious thinkers to undermine Christianity. It then analyses the somewhat confused discussion of the Arabs, which varies according to the sources used in the two parts, before highlighting the emphasis on Ottoman despotism. It finally evokes the call in the Modern Part for a European expedition to free North Africa from the Ottomans, destroy piracy in the Mediterranean, and encourage the North Africans to develop agriculture and trade. This call was copied in the best-selling French work, Raynal’s Histoire des Deux Indes. (shrink)

From the Church Fathers to the nineteenth century, countless libraries bear witness to the quarrels in which scholars, using the exegetical and philological techniques of their times (notably those of etymology), had striven to make out the Adamic vestiges which have remained intact in post-Babelian languages. For them, languages were to remain outside historical time. However, at the same time there existed other currents of knowledge. Authors use diverse metaphors – bodily, botanical, etc. – to formulate a dynamic history of (...) languages. Through the evocation of a few problematic metaphors, which create relationships between diverse forms of temporality employed to indicate the historicity of languages, this study underlines the tensions which presided over the genesis and the early development of linguistic knowledge. The Adamic language, endlessly appealed to, was also regularly called into question, and even outright rejected. No matter: recovering the purity of these origins managed to work as a powerful impetus for historic scholarship, and not only in the seventeenth century. This article was first published in French as “Quelques images problématiques du temps des langues” in Le Genre humain, 35 (autumn 1999–spring 2000): 273–290 (EHESS colloquium on “Actualités du contemporain”). (shrink)

Winckelmann’s work inhabits an ambivalent place in the history of historiography. His Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764) is often referred to as the foundational document of art history, but almost never without the obligatory mention of its rather unhistorical dimension. The aim of the following discussion is to evaluate Winckelmann’s position in the history of eighteenth-century European historiography, especially with regard to the early phase of his career as a historian, i.e. the decisive period between his studies in Halle (...) and his stay in Nöthnitz (1738–1754). During these years, Winckelmann carefully excerpted historiographical literature and dealt intensively with the model of universal history, whose structural patterns deeply influenced his reflection on art historiography. (shrink)

The long eighteenth century was a good time for history and historians. This article considers one of its most original genres, conjectural history, and of one of conjectural history’s most interesting subjects, woman. What made the conjectural history of woman most interesting was not only that it brought together all the elements that were themselves the subjects of theoretical histories, such as language, the arts and sciences, society, religion, and man, but continued to matter politically well into the nineteenth century. (...) Indeed, one might argue that it continues to shape understandings of what it means to be civilized to this day. Following some observations on some of the challenges such a history presented to its practitioners, the essay turns to Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan and his contestation of the eighteenth-century view of the history of woman. It ends with some reflections on the importance of revisiting such histories. (shrink)

Besides geographical boundlessness, the claim to totality that characterizes universal histories comprises a temporal horizon, which reaches from the Creation to the end of the world predestined to Christians. The article examines the role of religious approaches on the one hand and secular points of view on the other in the transformation of eschatology into the idea of an open future shapeable by humans. The analysis focusses first on works by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). While the above-mentioned transformation is usually (...) interpreted as a process of secularization, this article reveals a reliance on religious hopes for the afterlife, also and especially where progressistic expectations for the development of the individual as well as of humanity were articulated. A second step leads back into the early eighteenth century. A frontispiece of 1717 already expressed the idea of an “open future” conceived secularly as a “space of time” to be shaped by human beings according to their own interests and guided by the experiences of the past. The article closes with a discussion of the reasons for the return of religious ways of thinking in the late Enlightenment, which becomes particularly apparent in universal- historical expectations of the future. (shrink)

This article investigates the constructions of Hebrew, classical, and “Northern” antiquities put forward by an eighteenth-century network of Anglo-German scholars. It asks to what extent these constructions propose a cultural equality between these competing “antiquities”, how such equality relates to the contemporaneous conception of universal history, and to what extent this development is driven by emancipatory tendencies within Enlightenment thinking. By discussing the changing approaches to Homer, Old Testament texts, and “early” European literature, the article relates the emergence of primitivism (...) and orientalism to Enlightenment historicism and an interest in the sublime, which produces a growing focus on the importance of authentic culture and the role of the bard-poet. By discussing the connections between the work of Joseph Trapp, Thomas Blackwell, Robert Lowth, and Thomas Percy on the one hand, and Johann David Michaelis, Christian Gottlob Heyne, Johann Jakob Bodmer, and Johann Gottfried Herder on the other, the article illustrates the significance in this context of newly emerging Anglo-German scholarly networks and illuminates lesser-known aspects of Anglo-German relations in the second half of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

This article examines the definitions of place or location (topos) and as a consequence, space, in Byzantine philosophy, from Maximos the Confessor to Photios. These philosophers draw, on one hand, on the Aristotelian, Platonic, and Neoplatonic sources, and on the other hand, on the Judeo-Christian tradition. Firstly, Maximos the Confessor sets out a novel definition in which place is conceptually inseparable from time, is needed for substances to exist, and in which place is the boundary between the created and uncreated. (...) In Anastasios of Sinai’s writing, God is the archetypical place for all things and is likewise necessary for substances. John of Damascus, in contrast, extends Aristotle’s definition of place in the Physics in new directions, by investigating the place of angels, which is determined by their incorporeal limits. Finally, Photios produces a systematic and astute account of how the properties of the containing and contained bodies come together to make places. The article concludes with an evaluation of these theories, and briefly considers their relationship to theories of place and location in modern physics. (shrink)

A growing interest in Claude Lefort is bringing to light his radical insights on modern democracy, totalitarianism, and human rights. While the notion perhaps most closely associated with Lefort is that of ‘the empty place of power,’ this article offers a reading of Lefort from a unique angle: his concept of the myth of the One. I demonstrate that to Lefort, the phantasmagorical appeal of the One – the desire for harmony, unity and stability – is the force that continually (...) endangers the democratic project, while the distinctive and unavoidable characteristic of democratic society is its ‘inability’ to name itself as One – a coherent and established social self. Thus, the main challenge of society is its symbolic self-institution. The discussion illuminates Lefort’s singular stance in the study of totalitarianism (Arendt), his rejection of the imaginary (next to Castoriadis), his debt to the structuralism scheme (Lévi-Strauss), as well as his conversation with anarchist voices (La Boétie, Clastres) and with psychoanalysis (Lacan). Ultimately, what Lefort coins ‘symbolic division’ condenses the pledge of democracy to embrace a neurotic self, a bodiless body, a nameless identity in an empty space of power. As such, Lefort’s anti-myth of the One promises to be a vexing objective. (shrink)

Résumé Dans cet article, j’analyse quelques passages des Commentaires sur la Physique de Simplicius, Philopon et Thémistius afin de : 1) démontrer que ces commentateurs interprètent la phrase d’Aristote, Phys. III 1, 200b16-17, comme affirmant que « continu » est un terme définitoire du mouvement ; 2) identifier la raison pour laquelle ils pensent que parler du mouvement naturel revient à dire que le mouvement est continu, et que, par conséquent, quand Aristote évoque le continu dès le début de sa (...) théorie sur le mouvement, il ne fait qu’affirmer quelque chose d’évident ; 3) montrer que si l’analogie selon laquelle « continu » est un terme définitoire du mouvement, tout comme « mouvement » est un terme définitoire de la nature et « infini » un terme définitoire du continu, n’est pas parfaite (en effet « continu » n’apparaît pas explicitement dans la définition du mouvement), ceci est dû à l’impossibilité de subsumer le mouvement sous une catégorie de l’être. Pour appuyer ce dernier point, j’utilise une citation d’Alexandre par Simplicius, et un passage de Philopon. (shrink)

Hans Kelsen has been praised for his defense of democracy but that defense has also been criticized, most notably by Carl Schmitt. Leo Strauss was just as critical but his critique has gone unnoticed. Much of this neglect is because the relevant works remained unpublished. In one work Strauss contends that his conception of authority guarantees order and security whereas Kelsen’s notion of democracy leads to anarchy and chaos. This essay is intended to fill this gap by providing an examination (...) of Strauss’ criticism of Kelsen’s democratic liberalism. (shrink)

Many later thinkers in the Islamic world pick up on, and further expand, the idea of intuition (ḥads) as they react to Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā). Focusing on figures from the twelfth–thirteenth century, in this paper we will focus especially on the following points of debate: (1) Avicenna’s idea that intuition is distingiushed from normal (discursive) thought by lacking ‘motion’, (2) The question of how and why different individuals differ in the extent of their intuition, (3) The role of intuitive thought (...) in grounding knowledge: is intuition needed every time a certain item of knowledge is grasped for the first time, and hence without a teacher; and further, is intuition needed as an ultimate justification for all non-intuitive knowledge? (shrink)

This paper explicates Descartes’ theory of intuition (intuitus). Departing from certain commentators, I argue that intuition, for Descartes, is a form of clear and distinct intellectual perception. Because it is clear and distinct, it is indubitable, infallible, and provides a grade of certain knowledge he calls ‘cognitio’. I pay special attention to why he treats intuition as a form of perception, and what he means when he says it is ‘clear and distinct’. Finally, I situate his view in relation to (...) those of his Scholastic predecessors on one hand and current theories on the other. His view anticipates the contemporary ‘perceptual model of intuition’, though it is much bolder with its promise of certainty. (shrink)

In recent years, the persuasion that Niccolò Machiavelli was a cynical, irreligious devious, ambitious, deceitful, and misogynous man has been gaining remarkable consensus among scholars. The most...

It is a curious fact that while Strauss has a large group of devoted students, and students of students (the ‘Straussians’), who have dedicated enormous energy to continuing his legacy in books and...

This paper presents an original interpretation of the fourteenth-century debate over whether every volitio is a cognitio. This debate, I argue, was at its heart a debate about what constitutes the mark of occurrent mental states. Three participants in this debate – Adam Wodeham, Richard FitzRalph, and John of Ripa – articulated three distinct accounts of the mark of the mental. In doing so, they also developed several philosophical accounts of the intentionality of occurrent affective states.

What are intuitions? Do they exist as distinctive mental states? Do they have an epistemic function? Can we discern specific features that characterize intuitions? Questions like these are widely d...

Fichte assigns ‘intellectual intuition’ a new meaning after Kant. But in 1799, his doctrine of intellectual intuition is publicly deemed indefensible by Kant and nihilistic by Jacobi. I propose to defend Fichte’s doctrine against these charges, leaving aside whether it captures what he calls the ‘spirit’ of transcendental idealism. I do so by articulating three problems that motivate Fichte’s redirection of intellectual intuition from being to acting: (1) the regress problem, which states that reflecting on empirical facts of consciousness leads (...) only to further facts and so cannot yield a first principle; (2) the rhapsody problem, which states that the categories form a haphazard set and so lack necessity unless they derive from a first principle; and (3) the nihilism problem, which states that a first principle cannot lie outside our cognition of it, lest it be the cause of our cognition and, being first, the cause of all our actions, reducing us to machines. Crucially, Fichte’s three motivating problems are in fact aspects of a single problem. Leaving any aspect unsolved spoils putative solutions to the other two. Consequently, Fichte requires a single unified solution to all three, which his doctrine of intellectual intuition provides. (shrink)

Myths are specific accounts of gods or super-human beings involved in extraordinary events or circumstances in a time that is unspecified but which is understood as existing apart from ordinary human experience. Myths are also accounts of the origin of societies and institutions not necessarily subject to rationalization. A totem on the other hand is an animal, a plant or any other natural object believed to be ancestrally related to a tribe, clan, family or group of people as a tutelary (...) spirit. The aim of this chapter is to critically examine the existence and significance of African myths/totems in their association with the environment in Tiv society. Emphasis is particularly on the Ikyalem (green snake) myth and totemic beliefs such as dog meat, Ibohough (Gardenia erubescens), Ivervese (Typlops punctatus) and several others - associated with the cultural history of the Tiv of Central Nigeria. The nature, types and reasons for the formulation of myths, and how the environment pave the way for a meaningful existence of myths in Tivland is also examined. This research is timely and most importantly problem solving, because of the fast disappearance of the knowledge of myths and totems in Tiv society. Data for this research has been collected through In-Depth Interviews, key informants and Focus Group Discussion with elders, traditional heads and other people with good knowledge of myths and totemic beliefs in Tiv society. In addition to this, secondary data were also acquired from existing literatures to collaborate oral information. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:In 1740, Joanna Stephens (fl. 1720–1741) produced a recipe for a tonic that she claimed cured bladder stones. Although she had the support of some notable and powerful men in the medical community and empirical evidence that her tonic worked, it took two years of petitioning, discussing, and even (unsuccessfully) crowd-sourcing before Parliament relented and awarded her the sum she requested to take her tonic public. Stephens’s interaction with the scientific community serves as a case study for how epistemic credibility (...) shapes how communities hear, interpret, and react to testimonies of knowledge claims from marginalized community members. Stephens’s position as an outsider, both qua woman and qua experimentalist, meant that she was effectively and almost immediately written out of her own story by learned and powerful men with who had both vested interests in the cure for the stone and epistemic prejudices that made it impossible for them to hear Stephens’s claim that she had made a discovery. (shrink)

This chapter expounds Hacking’s project of styles of reasoning more systematically than Hacking himself has done, while the following chapters examine its philosophical implications. I shall show that, in addition to the statistical and the laboratory style described in Chap. 3, there exist other four styles of reasoning that share a set of common characterizing features: the algorithmic, the postulational, the historico-genetic and the taxonomic style of reasoning. All the differences notwithstanding, striking parallels can be drawn between these different styles (...) of reasoning: they emerged suddenly at certain points in time, crystallized around communities that shared certain standards of evidence and represent basic and inescapable forms of reasoning. Finally, I shall argue that there are other ways of thinking that differ from styles of reasoning in the sense of Hacking. What I consider a relevant difference is that only styles of reasoning have strong techniques of self-authentication, techniques that are intrinsic to their forms of reasoning. (shrink)

What is fanaticism and why is it an important philosophical topic? In this introductory chapter, I discuss the way in which fanaticism arose as a central philosophical concern in the early modern period. Philosophical discussions of fanaticism focus on psychological, epistemic, and behavioral dimensions of fanatics. The fanatic displays psychological peculiarities; epistemic defects; and potentially problematic behavioral tendencies. I discuss the ways in which different philosophers have offered different accounts of these three features; offer a brief defense of my own (...) account of fanaticism; and highlight some key questions about fanaticism. I close with an overview of the essays in this volume. (shrink)

Mary Wollstonecraft is an iconic figure in the history of feminism. Yet, from her own time through to contemporary feminism, she has been the subject of controversy. The contested, even contradicto...

In her feminist classic The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir refers to ‘the myth of Woman’ to denote images of womanhood that rest upon and reinforce beliefs in a static, feminine essence. This article aims to understand what makes this myth mythical. The author argues that Beauvoir employs the term ‘myth’ to establish a parallel between the way in which modern men relate to women and the worldview of so-called primitives – who she portrays as ruled by a specific, (...) non-rational mode of thought. Beauvoir could thus be read as appropriating an early anthropological discourse on myth, the representatives of which linked myth to non-Western ‘primitive’ societies, while they depicted Western modernity as haunted by its own primitive-mythical past. However, when situated against this background, Beauvoir’s writings on myth are also shown to challenge the very premises upon which this still influential anthropological discourse rest. Whereas the early anthropologists attributed the survival of ‘primitive’ elements in modernity to a defiance of rationality, Beauvoir’s argument suggests that this is better explained by examining how such elements serve the interests of those allegedly rational individuals and groups in power – who she describes as having employed rationality to defend their mythical beliefs. (shrink)

I discuss a neglected solution to the skeptical problem introduced by Lewis Carroll’s “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles” (1895) in terms of a self-citational inferential license. I then consider some responses to this solution. The most significant response on behalf of the skeptic utilizes the familiar distinction between two ways of accepting a rule: as action-guiding and as a mere truth. I argue that this is ultimately unsatisfactory and conclude by opting for an alternative conception of rules as representations (...) of behavior deployed for various purposes, some theoretical and others practical. This alternative conception does not allow the skeptical problem to get off the ground. (shrink)

Obra que interessa aos pesquisadores na área de filosofia.

In classical Arabic philosophy, the topic of consciousness is commonly associated with Avicenna's ‘Flying Man’ thought experiment. But Avicenna's explorations of the nature of consciousness are not confined to the Flying Man, and he is by no means the only classical Islamic thinker to deem consciousness an important feature of our experience. Consciousness also plays a important role in the epistemology and moral psychology of Avicenna's intellectual rivals, the theologians (mutakallumūn), who represent important sources for Avicenna's own theorizing about consciousness. (...) And while Avicenna's philosophical successor and critic, Averroes, seems to banish consciousness from the core of his cognitive psychology, in doing so he seems to anticipate contemporary efforts to expand the scope of consciousness through the notion of the ‘extended’ mind. This paper examines the varieties of consciousness recognized by Avicenna and several other classical Islamic thinkers with a view to understanding the extent to which their accounts can be mapped on to some of the concepts of consciousness delineated by contemporary philosophers of mind. (shrink)

This paper takes the movement of transcendence in Sartre and examines it in relation to another understanding of transcendence in relation to God circulating in Paris in Sartre’s formative years: that of Karl Jaspers. Through exploring the transmission and reception of Jaspers' thought in French philosophy, different understandings can be advanced as to why he engages with the figure of God as that which we transcend towards, however impossibly, and why he counts Jaspers as a Catholic existentialist.

In 1930, the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg outlined his vision for a ‘new and yet old Bloodmyth’ of the Aryan race.1 His Myth of the Twentieth Century would go on to be a touchstone text of Nazis...

Between the 1960s and the 1970s, Marxism reached its maximum success in Italy, but that phase also corresponded to the crisis of the Italian Communist Party’s cultural hegemony, challenged by both the attacks coming from the New Left and innovative readings of Marx’s works. Marxist historicism, on which the Italian Communist Party had based its cultural policy after the the Second World War, consequently suffered heavy attacks. This article illuminates one of the responses to historicism’s decline, providing an account of (...) the book series La Scienza Nuova, issued by the publishing house Dedalo in Bari and edited by the communist intellectual Mario Spinella, who was able to remain loyal to his party demonstrating, at the same time, cultural autonomy. Also grounding on archival documents, the article posits that Spinella’s aim was to attract New Left readers by selecting books on topics and by authors that were in fashion in Italy and abroad, but incorporating them into a theoretical framework based on Marxist historicism, in order to preserve the latter in an evolving cultural environment. (shrink)

Following Heidegger, Severino called ‘technology’ the lógos that interprets the world according to our fundamental belief in téchne. He considered Giacomo Leopardi to be the only thinker who brought this ideology to its logical conclusion: if we can transform the world, then everything is meaningless. We try to escape this conclusion, but if Severino is right, we cannot. His philosophy thus reminds us that we still aren’t aware of the fundamental meaning of our beliefs. Confronting its arguments may help us (...) become more self-aware and, perhaps, even move us to question the unquestionable. (shrink)

No concept attracted as much controversy, or muddled ideological identifications so thoroughly, as ‘myth’ in interwar France. By the late 1930s, ‘la mythomanie’ was drawing systematic attention from existentialists, Surrealists, ethnologists, sociologists, and nascent fascist movements. This essay reconsiders this polemical and misunderstood moment in interwar thought. It focuses on the intellectuals most central to its notoriety: the members of the Collège de sociologie and their fascination with Georges Sorel. Though interwar mythomania has long been treated as an antiparliamentary cultural (...) politics designed to secure enthusiastic mass conformity, this essay argues that such accounts are incomplete. They misunderstand the deeper philosophical debate unfolding about the conditions of revolutionary agency in a desacralized society. Bringing this debate back into focus helps liberate mythomania from historiographic commonplaces. It emphasizes how, for better or worse, many of those who advocated for new political myths aimed to spur human agency, not confiscate it. (shrink)

Paul Wood’s edited volume, Thomas Reid and the University, exceeds the bounds of its title. This last instalment of The Edinburgh Edition of Thomas Reid, collects artifacts from Reid’s pedagogical...