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...

During the early modern period, a framework broadly attributable to Descartes sought to establish all knowledge on a foundation of indubitable truths that are fully clear and totally certain: intuitions. A powerful challenge to treating these seemingly unassailable intuitions as epistemic foundations is that the only truths which can be known in this fashion are so obvious and useless that they could not produce any other knowledge. Rationalists typically respond to this worry by maintaining that there are substantive intuitive truths. (...) Other natural options are to maintain that tautologous truths can serve as a fit foundation, or to reject this framework entirely. Empiricists like Locke, Hume, Condillac, and Mill opt for these other solutions. While Locke and Hume offer views that revise and refine this framework, Condillac and Mill engage in more radical departures from it. An interesting result of this difference in approach is that we see Locke and Hume subdividing reason between two domains – one in which intuition reigns, and one which is more properly the domain of the senses – while in Condillac and Mill we see two differing approaches – analysis and induction, respectively – to unifying all human reasoning within a single domain. (shrink)

Later Nyāya philosophers maintain that absences are real particulars, irreducible to any positives, that we perceive. The fourteenth-century Nyāya philosopher Gaṅgeśa argues for a condition on absence perception according to which we always perceive an absence as an absence of its counterpositive, or its corresponding absent object or property. Call this condition the ‘counterpositive condition’. Gaṅgeśa shows that the counterpositive condition is both supported by a plausible thesis about the epistemology of relational properties and motivates the defence of absence as (...) irreducible. But against Gaṅgeśa, the sixteenth-century Nyāya philosopher Raghunātha and his seventeenth-century commentators Bhavānanda, Jagadīśa, and Gadādhara identify cases in which the counterpositive condition fails. In this article, I examine the Nyāya-internal debate over this condition. I conclude that Raghunātha makes a compelling case that the counterpositive condition fails. (shrink)

The book under review here is a thorough and enlightening look at how Berkeley's life and philosophy intertwined. The fact that this review focuses on some points where I disagree with the author s...

The logical rule of contraposition as applied to a particular affirmative proposition (I-contraposition), despite its rejection in the medieval Latin logic, had a different history in the medieval Arabic logic, varying from common acknowledgement to total dismissal (it was accepted by Avicenna and by all of his followers in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and rejected by all of Arabic logicians in the late thirteenth century onwards). This paper is a narrative of the fate of I-contraposition in the early Arabic (...) logic. I will study Avicenna’s, al-Suhrawardī’s, al-Rāzī’s, al-Kashshī’s, and al-Khūnajī’s views on this rule. Although Avicenna explicitly acknowledged I-contraposition in a brief note, and in an apparently Meinongian language, the other four figures found I-contraposition problematic and listed some counterexamples to it. Nonetheless, they all attempted to justify Avicenna’s acceptance of the rule by restricting its application conditions. These efforts led to interesting syntactic and semantic analyses but gathered little attention from later medieval logicians. Finally, in the middle Arabic logic, the revised versions of I-contraposition were also declared invalid. (shrink)

John Rogers (G.A.J. Rogers) died on 26th November 2022 at the age of 84. Professor Emeritus at the University of Keele and a specialist in the history of seventeenth-century philosophy, John was on...

From the title, Interpreting Duns Scotus, one would expect to find in this volume a type of meta-study. By this I mean that each article would reveal as much about the author as about the subject,...

Friedrich Albert Lange is usually regarded as a representative of physiological neo-Kantianism or as a forerunner of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism. In this paper I try to reconstruct Lange’s theory of values to argue that his philosophy is better framed as an intermediate point in the development of the two-world theory (facts/values) between Hermann Lotze and Southwestern neo-Kantianism.

For Hegel, poverty is not simply a misfortune, but, rather, a kind of injury inflicted on one class by another. Though Hegel rejects Marx’s theory of class, he nevertheless anticipates Marx’s idea of the exploitation of one class by another. How, though, do we align this proto-marxist dichotomy between rich and poor with Hegel’s official theory of class; his tripartite theory of estates? I argue that Hegel’s wealthy are chiefly found in the ‘mercantile’ estate, and that they are those intellectual (...) labourers who manage, oversee, and organize the production process. (shrink)

Discussions of Leibniz’s view of the relation between God and nature in 1675–1676 has split commentators into two competing camps. According to some scholars, Leibniz was a pantheistic substance monist in these years. However, other scholars think that he was neither a substance monist nor a pantheist. This paper advocates a middle ground between these two interpretations. With scholars in the first camp, it is argued that Leibniz was a substance monist in 1675–1676. However, it is also argued that he (...) was not a pantheistic substance monist, but rather a panentheistic one. This interpretation has at least a twofold virtue vis-à-vis the anti-monistic and pantheistic readings. For one thing, unlike the anti-monistic reading, the panentheistic interpretation is in keeping with the weight of textual evidence, which strongly indicates that in 1675–1676 Leibniz did embrace, and actually argue for, the idea that God is the only substance. For another, unlike the pantheist interpretation, it can accommodate the fact that, while endorsing monism in 1675–1676, Leibniz at the same time rejected necessitarianism. (shrink)

In NE III.10, 1118b1–3, Aristotle says that the “most shared of the senses is that according to which intemperance [comes about], and it would seem justifiably to be shameful, because it inheres [in us] not insofar as we are human beings, but insofar as we are animals”. This statement appears to describe the sense of touch as shameful. This may seem like a strange position for Aristotle to hold, since elsewhere he describes human touch as the most accurate among animal (...) species, which corresponds to our superior intelligence, and as necessary for animal life. In this paper, I argue that Maimonides nevertheless succeeds in showing that Aristotle has a strong theoretical reason for maintaining that the sense of touch is shameful. Maimonides shows that, based on principles of Aristotelian psychology, human touch is indeed shameful because it obstructs intellectual activity. (shrink)

In the early twentieth century, many philosophers in America thought that time should be taken seriously in one way or another. George P. Adams (1882-1961) argued that the past, present and future are all real but only the present is actual. I call this theory ‘actualist eternalism’. In this paper, I articulate his novel brand of eternalism as one piece of his metaphysical system and I explain how he argued for the view in light of the best explanations of temporal (...) experience and the present. I argue that his exploitation of analogies between time and modality offer some lessons for current debates about time such as the importance of providing a temporal epistemology. I also extract what I call the temporal boundary problem and argue that it gives rise to an unaddressed challenge for presentists and growing block theorists. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Leaving to one side McTaggart’s notorious proof of the unreality of time, this paper examines his positive account of the way in which reality, thus judged to be timeless, misleadingly appears to us as temporal, something which has been almost entirely ignored in the literature. The paper first examines his complex motivations in taking up the issue. It next considers an early unsuccessful approach, before expounding the details of its complex replacement as set out in McTaggart’s magnum opus, The (...) Nature of Existence. The paper concludes with a consideration of how such endeavours in constructive metaphysics ought best to be evaluated. (shrink)

This paper develops the account of our experience and knowledge of time put forward by Russell in his Theory of Knowledge manuscript. While Russell ultimately abandons the project after it receives severe criticism from Wittgenstein (though several chapters derived from it appear as articles in The Monist), in producing this manuscript time, and particularly the notion of the present time, play a central role in Russell’s account of experience. In the present discussion, I propose to focus largely on Russell’s writing (...) in 1912–3, comparing this with some of the remarks made about memory by Moore in 1910–11. My motivation is twofold. First as a matter of scholarship, to reveal an original interpretation of Russell’s notion of immediate memory and of his view of our experience and knowledge of time over this period. Second as a matter of philosophical curiosity. There has been an increase in interest in temporal experience in contemporary discussions of the philosophy of mind, from memory and the imagination to the temporal aspects of perceptual experience. Russell’s writing in 1912–3 provides us with a philosophically interesting account of temporal experience which has points of contact with contemporary debates. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In American-British philosophy around the turn of the twentieth century, every philosopher and their dog had something to say on time. Thinkers worried about our experience of time, and the metaphysics of time. This introduction to the special issue, Time in American-British Philosophy 1880s-1930s, investigates that obsession, explaining how its philosophers spilled pints of ink on time, and produced the first-ever surveys of time. I historically contextualise their work and explore some of its driving causes, including experimental psychology of (...) time perception, and theological worries over evolution. This article concludes by surveying the rich, wide-ranging papers within this collection, covering time in Shadworth Hodgson, William James, Mary Calkins, Victoria Welby, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, A. A. Robb, Alfred North Whitehead, Norman Kemp Smith, J. M. E. McTaggart, Karin Costelloe-Stephen, Hilda Oakeley, May Sinclair, and George P. Adams. (shrink)

Franklin Perkins' newest book is written for a general audience with little or no background in the Chinese intellectual tradition and it purports to introduce readers to the philosophical views of the third century BCE Confucian thinker Mengzi.

Many anglophone scholars take the early Confucians to be virtue ethicists of one kind or another. A common virtue ethical reading of one of the most influential early Confucians, namely Mengzi, ascribes to him the view that moral actions are partly (or entirely) moral because of the state from which they are performed, be it the agent’s motives, emotions, or their character traits. I consider whether such a reading of the Mengzi is justified and I argue that it is not. (...) I argue that there is no reason to believe that Mengzi distinguishes the moral value of actions that are performed from virtuous and non-virtuous states. Given this, virtue (as a feature of agents) is normatively posterior to virtuous actions. I conclude, first, that this poses a challenge to a wide range of common interpretations of the Mengzi, be they virtue ethical or otherwise, and second, that there might be conceptual space for an account of virtue ethics that rejects the normative priority of virtue over virtuous actions. (shrink)

“I am only what I make myself to be”, Fichte tells us. In this paper, I outline Fichte’s views on sex, marriage and gender, with two aims. Firstly, to elucidate an aspect of his moral theory which has received little attention, and secondly to argue that Fichte’s distinctive stance on selfhood, freedom, and normativity lead to a revisionary account of gender expression and identity, where people can freely carve out their own identity, irrespective of “nature”. In this paper, I therefore (...) outline Fichte’s own views, highlighting what I see as a tension in the texts between essentialism and antiessentialism about gender, before reconstructing a neo-Fichtean view which foregrounds the anti-essentialist aspect. (shrink)

Spinoza’s views on friendship have been a relatively overlooked aspect of his ethical thought. Even though commentators such as Andrew Youpa and Steven Nadler shed significant light on the significance of Spinoza’s views, they do not provide a detailed examination of the possibility of friendship between people who are not similar to one another. In considering to what extent (if at all) a virtuous person can join ordinary people who are dissimilar to her in friendship, my paper attempts to reach (...) a better understanding of the limits, as well as the power, of friendship for Spinoza. First, I show that we can make a meaningful distinction between two kinds of friendship, which I call active friendship and coincidental friendship. Then, I argue that in Spinoza besides these two kinds of friendships, there is also a group of social interactions wherein the virtuous wants to bring the non-virtuous to enlightenment. In examining the nature of these interactions, I conclude that in Spinoza in addition to what we can call the Socratic quest of bringing people to enlightenment, we also find a strategy of insulation, which consists in taking measures so that ordinary people do not pose a threat to the virtuous. -/- . (shrink)