The latest volume in the Cambridge Histories of Philosophy series, The Cambridge History of Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century brings together twenty-nine leading experts in the field and covers the years 1790-1870. Their twenty-seven chapters provide a comprehensive survey of the period, organizing the material topically. After a brief editor's introduction, it begins with three chapters surveying the background of nineteenth century philosophy: followed by two on logic and mathematics, two on nature and natural science, five (...) on mind and language, including psychology, the human sciences and aesthetics, four on ethics, three on religion, seven on society, including chapters on the French Revolution, the decline of natural right, political economy, and social discontent, and three on history, dealing with historical method, speculative theories of history and the history of philosophy. The essays are framed by an editor's introduction and a bibliography. (shrink)

The Editors’ vision for this volume is that it should be a selection of essays, contributed by the academics who have worked, studied, collaborated and disagreed with Göran Sundholm; engaging in debated issues and exploring untouched areas maybe only suggested or hinted at in Sundholm’s own work. "Acts of Knowledge" characterizes the papers contained in this volume as bringing something scientifically valuable in their respective fields: all the papers present cutting-edge research in their own style, contributing to very lively (...) debates occurring in the literature in logic, philosophical logic and history of logic. But it also hints at Göran’s constructivist background, which has been an influence or a challenge for many of the contributors. "History, Philosophy and Logic" refers directly to Göran's broad interests into the various aspects of the Philosophy of Logic, Mathematics, and Language, their origins and development, especially with the focus on the Modern History of Logic and the philosophical implications thereof. The readers will find scattered all along this volume pieces of -- and reflections on -- all these themes. (shrink)

This volume brings together papers on the theory of reconstruction that pay attention to the humdrum exercise of everyday reconstruction and papers that develop reconstructions of Anselmian arguments with a view to the theoretical problems of reconstruction. We hope that this will provide the readers with an opportunity to assess the merits of the theoretical accounts in the light of the reconstructions and the merits of the latter in the light of the former.

Salomon Maimon, a Lithuanian born philosophical autodidact who emigrated to Germany in the late eighteenth century, plays an increasingly important role in the research of classical German philosop...

phenomenology and logical analysis. John Searle and Bert Dreyfus are for me two of the paradigm figures of contemporary philosophy, so I am extremely proud to have been offered the opportunity to engage with their work. The editors of The Harvard Review of Philosophy, it seems to me, have shown a keen sense of what is deep and important in our discipline by publishing extended interviews with these two influential thinkers. At the same time, writing (...) this article meant entering into a debate between Searle and Dreyfus about the priority of their respective philosophical methodologies, and this, I am afraid, is at best a no-win situation. My strategy, therefore, has been to try to engage as sympathetically as possible with the programs of each philosopher, and to draw from their work lessons that seem to me important for any philosophical account of intentionality and social reality. I have not shied away from criticism; indeed the whole paper is an extended series of criticisms of the work of both philosophers. But I hope they will recognize this for what it is: an engagement with the work of each that is based on the deepest respect and admiration. Before I jump into the fray, I should mention that I owe a personal debt of gratitude to Searle and Dreyfus as well. They were not only my two advisors in graduate school, but were the two main reasons I entered philosophy. Having become dissatisfied with the formal worlds of mathematics and computer science, their respective critiques of artificial intelligence and cognitivism showed me the rich possibilities of philosophy and struck me as a reason to become a philosopher. It is a difficult discipline, sometimes unforgiving; but I am glad I followed them into it. (shrink)

Philosophy, Science, and History: A Guide and Reader is a compact overview of HOPOS that aims to introduce students to the groundwork of the field. Part I of the Reader begins with classic texts in the history of logical empiricism, including Reichenbach's discovery-justification distinction. With careful reference to Kuhn's analysis of scientific revolutions, the section provides key texts analyzing the relationship of HOPOS to the history of science, including texts by Santayana, Rudwick, and Shapin (...) and Schaffer. Part II provides texts illuminating central debates in the history of science and its philosophy. These include the history of natural philosophy (Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, Kant, Hume, and du Châtelet in a new translation); induction and the logic of discovery (including the Mill-Whewell debate, Duhem, and Hanson); and catastrophism versus uniformitarianism in natural history (Playfair on Hutton and Lyell; de Buffon, Cuvier, and Darwin). The editor's introductions to each section provide a broader perspective informed by contemporary research in each area, including related topics. (shrink)

The Hegel Lectures SeriesSeries Editor: Peter C. Hodgson Hegel's interpretation of the history of philosophy not only played a central role in the shaping of his own thought, but also has had a great influence on the development of historical thinking. In his own view the study of the history of philosophy is the study of philosophy itself. This explains why such a large proportion of his lectures, from 1805 to 1831, the year of his (...) death, were about history of philosophy. The text of these lectures, presented here in the first authoritative English edition, is therefore a document of the greatest importance in the development of Western thought: they constitute the very first comprehensive history of philosophy that treats philosophy itself as undergoing genuine historical development. And they are crucial for understanding Hegel's own systematic works such as the Phenomenology, the Logic, and the Encyclopedia, for central to his thought is the theme of spirit as engaged in self-realization through the processes of historical change. Furthermore, they played a crucial role in one of the determining events of modern intellectual history: the rise of a new consciousness of human life, culture, and intellect as historical in nature. This third volume of the lectures covers the medieval and modern periods, and includes fascinating discussion of scholastic, Renaissance, and Reformation philosophy, and of such great modern thinkers as Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, and especially Kant. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.2 (2003) 282-284 [Access article in PDF] Bruce Kuklick. A History of Philosophy in America, 1720-2000. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xiii + 326. Cloth, $30.00. Scott L. Pratt. Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Pp. xviii + 316. Cloth, $49.95. Paper, $21.95. In his earlier works Bruce Kuklick (...) has studied major figures and episodes in the evolution of American thought, most famously the Golden Age of Harvard. In the present book he proposes to tell the whole story. Beginning, as it must, with Jonathan Edwards, Part I traces the long and difficult process by which philosophy gradually distinguishes itself from theology. Part II deals magisterially with the age of pragmatism, from Darwin to Dewey, and Part III with professional philosophy in the twentieth century. Kuklick's account of this latest development, briefly adumbrated in his previous books, is the freshest and (to this retired professional) most engaging part of the narrative. Once philosophy had loosened the bonds that tied it to theology, once sciences like psychology, originally parts of philosophy, had declared independence and set out on their own, and once philosophy's role as counselor to private morals and public policy had been taken over by psychoanalysis, economics, sociology, and political science, philosophers had to discover a new identity for themselves. Inspired by logical positivism and the linguistic ruminations of the late Wittgenstein, professional philosophy came to mean, very largely, a preoccupation with problems of logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, and epistemology. The result was that, apart from undergraduate lectures and occasional ventures into the popular media, what philosophers said and wrote, intelligible only to other philosophers, became irrelevant to just about everything of personal and public interest, and even to the traditional concerns of philosophy itself with the nature of reality and the conduct of life.The eventual arrival in the American academy of phenomenology, existentialism, and deconstruction, in spite of their apparent engagement with "real life" and their appeal to undergraduates, only bred another species of professionals and precipitated the familiar antagonism between analytic and continental philosophy. Late in the last century Richard Rorty, a preeminent analytic philosopher, broke ranks, discovered first Heidegger and Derrida, then William James and John Dewey, and declared himself a pragmatist. He characterized philosophy as a single voice in the conversation of the West, which also included literature, literary criticism, the arts, and all the sciences both natural and humane. But he remains a philosopher of language. The pragmatism of the nineteenth century was a low-mimetic [End Page 282] form of the high-mimetic idealism from which it emerged: from Royce to James. Rorty's pragmatism not only takes for granted the (often implicit) materialism and atheism of analytic philosophy, but is itself a new way of understanding and using language. It has been called, inverting James, an old name for a new way of thinking.But I need to correct this overly simple account. As Kuklick is aware, philosophy in America, though it did succeed in detaching itself from theology, has never wholly dissolved its ties to religion. Royce and James in the nineteenth century and Dewey in the twentieth continued to be preoccupied with religious questions, especially with the apparent conflict of religion and science suggested by Darwin's theory. Religious interests survive, barely, in "critical realism." And even though analytic philosophy would seem to be most comfortable with atheism, more than a few thinkers trained in analysis have combined analytic logic and religious faith. Witness the Society of Christian Philosophers. On the whole, however, professional philosophy has been devoid of religious, socio-political, or existential interest. This should not be surprising. All genuine professions serve an end beyond themselves—as medicine serves health, law justice, and theology salvation. But when philosophy becomes a "profession," it has no end but self-preservation, i.e., creating more philosophers and finding jobs for them.One slightly disconcerting feature of Kuklick's... (shrink)

The book is a collection of the author¿s selected works in the philosophy and history of logic and mathematics. Papers in Part I include both general surveys of contemporary philosophy of mathematics as well as studies devoted to specialized topics, like Cantor's philosophy of set theory, the Church thesis and its epistemological status, the history of the philosophical background of the concept of number, the structuralist epistemology of mathematics and the phenomenological philosophy of mathematics. (...) Part II contains essays in the history of logic and mathematics. They address such issues as the philosophical background of the development of symbolism in mathematical logic, Giuseppe Peano and his role in the creation of contemporary logical symbolism, Emil L. Post's works in mathematical logic and recursion theory, the formalist school in the foundations of mathematics and the algebra of logic in England in the 19th century. The history of mathematics and logic in Poland is also considered. This volume is of interest to historians and philosophers of science and mathematics as well as to logicians and mathematicians interested in the philosophy and history of their fields. (shrink)

Feminist philosophy of science has led to improvements in the practices and products of scientific knowledge-making, and in this way it exemplifies socially relevant philosophy of science. It has also yielded important insights and original research questions for philosophy. Feminist scholarship on science thus presents a worthy thought-model for considering how we might build a more socially relevant philosophy of science—the question posed by the editors of this special issue. In this analysis of the (...) history, contributions, and challenges faced by feminist philosophy of science, I argue that engaged case study work and interdisciplinarity have been central to the success of feminist philosophy of science in producing socially relevant scholarship, and that its future lies in the continued development of robust and dynamic philosophical frameworks for modeling social values in science. Feminist philosophers of science, however, have often encountered marginalization and persistent misunderstandings, challenges that must be addressed within the institutional and intellectual culture of American philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 413-414 [Access article in PDF] Katerina Ierodiakonou, editor. Byzantine Philosophy and its Ancient Sources. New York: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 2002. Pp. vii + 309. Cloth, $55.00.Talking about, let alone writing on "Byzantine Philosophy" within the English-speaking philosophical community could cause embarrassment. It is only recently that this field has gained a few notable entries in (...) philosophical works of reference like the Routledge Encyclopedia or the Oxford Dictionary—but still it cannot make its way into the histories of medieval philosophy, not to mention the general histories of philosophy. Byzantine Philosophy aims at providing good reasons for changing that tendency and seeks to "persuade [us] that Byzantine Philosophy is worth investigating" (13).The book contains eleven articles, plus Ierodiakonou's introduction and Linos Benakis's review of the current research, read in part at a Conference held in Thessaloniki, Greece in 1997, but it is more than a mere collection of conference papers. Written both by well-established and younger scholars from diverse disciplines, the volume focuses on the explicit or implicit dialogue of Byzantine thinkers with ancient Greek philosophy, one of the two ingredients of Byzantine Philosophy (the other being patristic thought).Ierodiakonou in her introduction prefers to make a few—but penetrating—remarks on the nature of Byzantine Philosophy and its proper study. Her arguments are presented in a non-conclusive form and they are intended to serve as guidelines to further research. While a longer discussion of the issues involved would be welcome by the less-specialized reader, her choice seems reasonable as long as one thinks—rightly in my opinion—that it is premature to embark on general methodological suggestions about how to investigate Byzantine Philosophy, or believes that scrutinizing the texts themselves is a more promising approach at this relatively early stage of research (as perhaps always).With one exception, each article deals at length with a special issue spanning from metaphysics to political philosophy and concentrates on individual thinkers from the patristic era to the Renaissance; the absence of philosophical theology is surprising. Expectedly the presence of Aristotle can be traced in logic: in an eleventh-century humble handbook (thoroughly analyzed by Jonathan Barnes); in Psellos's Paraphrase on Aristotle's De Interpretationeand in the anti-logical movement in the fourteenth century (Ierodiakonou); as well as in John of Damascus's discussion of will (Michael Frede). On the Christian-neoplatonic tradition are founded a nominalistic position of Basil of Caesarea concerning the semantics of proper names (Paul Kalligas); a sixth-century treatise On Political Science (Dominic O'Meara); Psellos's conception of philosophy (John Duffy); and the peculiar case of Chaldaean Oracles and their commentators (Polymnia Athanassiadi). The last article on the Renaissance controversy between Plethon and Scholarios over the primacy of Plato or Aristotle (George Karamanolis) brings the volume appropriately to an end.That Platonism and Aristotelianism nearly monopolize the contributors' concerns is justified but this must not give the simplified impression that Byzantine Philosophy can be exclusively explained against this background. Other Greek philosophical traditions, such as Stoicism, are mentioned as well, and the fourteenth-century interest in skepticism is densely discussed (Börje Bydén on Metochites). The first essay is an informative outline of the Greek-Latin Philosophical Interaction (Sten Ebbesen), whose inclusion in the volume makes a similar survey of ancient Greek-Byzantine philosophical interaction more warranted.The contributors do not confine themselves to resolving specific problems of a Quellenforschung, by identifying parallel texts or recurring arguments in order to establish the obvious dependence of Byzantine thought on Greek Philosophy. In fact, as many articles show, it is the very analysis of patristic and Byzantine texts that makes us return to their ancient sources and also makes clear how this revisiting can deepen our understanding of the texts and the philosophical problems they are trying to present or to solve. When doing philosophy, Byzantine thinkers have ancient Greek concepts in their minds, and quite often have ancient texts in their hands. Now it is up to us to evaluate... (shrink)

This article deals with a set-theoretic interpretation of the Talmudic rules of General and Specific, known as Klal and Prat (KP), Prat and Klal (PK), Klal and Prat and Klal (KPK) and Prat and Klal and Prat (PKP).

This well-produced volume is the Proceedings of the Twentieth International Colloquium of the Société Internationale pour l'Étude de la Philosophie Médiévale, Freiburg im Breisgau 2014. Sixteen cha...

In a career that spans 60 years so far, W.W. Tait has made many highly influential contributions to logic, the philosophy of mathematics, and their history. The present collection of new essays - contributed by former students, colleagues, and friends - is a Festschrift, i.e., a celebration of his life and work. The essays address a variety of themes prominent in his work or related to it. The collection starts with an introduction in which Tait's contributions are sketched (...) and put into context. The eleven essays that follow are arranged in three parts: Part I. Proof Theory and its History; Part II. Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics; and Part III. History of Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics. Each of the essays contributes substantially to one or several of these areas. The authors included are: Steve Awodey, Solomon Feferman, Michael Friedman, Warren Goldfarb, Geoffrey Hellman, William Howard, Stephen Menn, Rebecca Morris, Charles Parsons, Erich Reck, Thomas Ricketts, and Wilfried Sieg. The editor, Erich H. Reck is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Riverside. (shrink)

Interpretive understanding of human behaviour, known as verstehen, underpins the divide between the social sciences and the natural sciences. Taking a historically orientated approach, this collection offers a fresh take on the development of understanding within analytic philosophy before, during and after logical empiricism. In doing so, it reinvigorates debates on the role of the social sciences within contemporary epistemology. Bringing together leading experts including Martin Kusch, Thomas Uebel, Karsten Stueber and Giuseppina D'Oro, it is an authoritative reference (...) on the logical empiricists' philosophy of social science. Charting the various reformulations of verstehen as proposed by Wilhem Dilthey, Max Weber, R.G Collingwood and Peter Winch, the volume explores the reception of the social sciences prior to logical empiricism, before surveying the positive and negative critiques from Otto Neurath, Felix Kaufmann, Viktor Kraft and other logical empiricists. As such, chapters reveal that verstehen was not altogether rejected by the Vienna Circle, but was subject to various conceptual uses and misuses. Along with systematic historical coverage, the book situates verhesten within contemporary interdisciplinary developments in the field, shedding light on the 21st-century 'turn' to understanding among analytic philosophers and opening further lines of inquiry for philosophy of social science. (shrink)

How are ‘philosophy’ and ‘gender’ implicated? Throughout history, philosophers—mostly men, though with more women among their number than is sometimes supposed—have often sought to specify and justify the proper roles of women and men, and to explore the political consequences of sexual difference. The last forty years, however, have seen a dramatic explosion of critical thinking about how philosophy is a gendered discipline; there has also been an abundance of philosophical work that uses gender as a central (...) analytic category. In particular, feminist philosophy has become established as a major field of inquiry, and it is now complemented by related emerging areas, including the philosophy of race and the philosophy of sex and love. For those working in Philosophy and Gender dizzying questions such as the following arise: What justifications were used historically for the exclusion or inclusion of women in political life, and what is their contemporary resonance? How is what counts as knowledge shaped by gender norms? What metaphysical questions about identity are raised by sex change? How might some feminist philosophies risk reproducing racist assumptions about what it means to be a woman, while some critical philosophies of race assume a masculine subject? What does it mean to say that moral theories are gendered? Addressing the need for an authoritative and comprehensive reference work to enable users to answer these and other questions, and to make sense of—and to navigate around—an ever more complex corpus of scholarly literature, Philosophy and Gender is a new title in Routledge’s acclaimed Critical Concepts in Philosophy series. Edited by Cressida J. Heyes, it is a four-volume collection of foundational and the very best cutting-edge scholarship. It features critical analysis of gender as it relates to philosophy of mind and language, epistemology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, social and political thought, aesthetics, and philosophy of science; it is also distinctive in showing how feminist thought has been intertwined in both analytic and continental traditions. The collection reconfigures ‘gender and philosophy’ into an integrated field of inquiry while providing an invaluable resource for scholars in all disciplines who need to know how to think critically about gender. In so doing it responds to recent curriculum developments, while providing a crucial reference guide for theoretically minded scholars across the humanities and social sciences. Supplemented with a full index, and including an introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the assembled materials in their historical and intellectual context, Philosophy and Gender is destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital research resource. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 426-427 [Access article in PDF] Timothy Smiley, editor. Mathematics and Necessity: Essays in the History of Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. ix + 166. Cloth, $35.00.Mathematics and Necessity contains essays by M. F. Burnyeat, Ian Hacking, and Jonathan Bennett based on lectures given to the British Academy in 1998. All concern the history (...) of the philosophical treatment of mathematics, necessity, or both, although there is no single thread running through all three essays.Burnyeat focuses on Plato's understanding of mathematics in the Republic, making use of the Timeaus in particular to defend his interpretation. Plato claimed that in the ideal society mathematics should be studied for a full ten years, which many have thought excessive. To explain it, Burnyeat argues that the role of mathematics is pervasive: ethics and politics are mathematical, because in Plato's view mathematics is a constitutive part of ethical understanding. On Burnyeat's interpretation, goodness is part of the objective world, and mathematics is a science of values. The link between mathematics and goodness in the objective world is forged by the concord, harmony, and unity of proportions, which express the goodness of the Divine Craftsman's beneficent design. Proportions are both intrinsically good and the proper study of mathematics.Burnyeat explains why Plato thinks abstract kinematics (the pure non-sensible counterpart to astronomy) and abstract harmonics lead to knowledge of the good. Abstract kinematics concerns the "harmony of the spheres" described in the Republic. Drawing heavily on the Timeaus, Burnyeat argues that the circular motions of the spheres are motions in the intelligence of the world soul and that there are similar motions in human souls. The world soul and human souls are spatial and have circular motions (invisibility and intangibility make them incorporeal). Souls are the most important subject matter of abstract harmonics—the study of good proportions. A soul that understands the various mathematical disciplines and their relations takes on the harmony and hence goodness of the world soul. Such a soul serves as a model for organizing the social world, a model which properly trained rulers can use to shape a community. Burnyeat's well-argued essay is compelling and exciting. [End Page 427]Ian Hacking's views provide a great contrast to Burnyeat's Plato. Hacking conducts a phenomenological inquiry into why some philosophers have become obsessed by mathematics as a source of philosophical inspiration. He holds that mathematics concerns a relatively minor part of human culture and that the influence of mathematics on philosophy is pernicious; he even describes it as an infection.Hacking examines the views of six philosophers: Plato, Leibniz, Mill, Descartes, Lakatos, and Wittgenstein. Hacking's assessment of the six philosophers is at times disputable, but it is also interesting and stimulating, and serves his phenomenological inquiry.Hacking traces philosophy's infection by mathematics to two factors. A mathematical proof can be perspicuous; that is, a proof can be "grasped," which requires seeing directly why something must be true and being able to recapitulate it. A mathematical proof can also anticipate facts about the world. He thinks that these two factors affect us in two ways: they give us the idea of a priori knowledge, and they dazzle us into unreasoned conviction in proofs. One might respond that, setting aside the feeling proofs give us, we are still justified in being impressed by them. Hacking argues that much of what impresses is based on a misunderstanding of their nature, which he attempts to correct.According to Hacking, a mathematical demonstration involves shifts of meaning that analytically bind the proof and the theorem it establishes. They thereby mutually support each other and provide what he calls self-authentication. The correctness of the proof is supported by the "analytified" truth of the theorem and the theorem is considered true because proven.This bootstrapping feature of mathematical proofs supports Hacking's deflationary account of necessity. Hacking suggests that the "must" of logical necessity rests upon our unwillingness to accept empirical counter-examples to the... (shrink)

The British movement of Linguistic Analysis is now comparatively mature, although it has not yet greatly expanded from the private circle in which its early pioneers, Moore and Wittgenstein guided its first steps and early mistakes. Its admittedly revolutionary character lies not so much in a new statement of traditional British empiricism as in a new conception of the philosophical activity itself. It is a new philosophy about philosophy, which claims to be more ‘skilful’ in professional method (...) and application than any of its predecessors. It claims not so much to make new statements as to clarify those already and commonly made, and to remove many of them which concern problems which, Analysts allege, arise through plain misunderstanding of ‘the logic of our language’. Philosophy thus becomes a method of therapy rather than a set of fundamental doctrines and Wittgenstein considered that its work ‘is best done in piece–meal fashion in short essays and articles and, most successfully of all, in private discussion’. Hence the movement remained almost completely unknown outside Britain, while inversely it bred itself within a passing atmosphere of insular superiority. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 413-414 [Access article in PDF] Katerina Ierodiakonou, editor. Byzantine Philosophy and its Ancient Sources. New York: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 2002. Pp. vii + 309. Cloth, $55.00.Talking about, let alone writing on "Byzantine Philosophy" within the English-speaking philosophical community could cause embarrassment. It is only recently that this field has gained a few notable entries in (...) philosophical works of reference like the Routledge Encyclopedia or the Oxford Dictionary—but still it cannot make its way into the histories of medieval philosophy, not to mention the general histories of philosophy. Byzantine Philosophy aims at providing good reasons for changing that tendency and seeks to "persuade [us] that Byzantine Philosophy is worth investigating" (13).The book contains eleven articles, plus Ierodiakonou's introduction and Linos Benakis's review of the current research, read in part at a Conference held in Thessaloniki, Greece in 1997, but it is more than a mere collection of conference papers. Written both by well-established and younger scholars from diverse disciplines, the volume focuses on the explicit or implicit dialogue of Byzantine thinkers with ancient Greek philosophy, one of the two ingredients of Byzantine Philosophy (the other being patristic thought).Ierodiakonou in her introduction prefers to make a few—but penetrating—remarks on the nature of Byzantine Philosophy and its proper study. Her arguments are presented in a non-conclusive form and they are intended to serve as guidelines to further research. While a longer discussion of the issues involved would be welcome by the less-specialized reader, her choice seems reasonable as long as one thinks—rightly in my opinion—that it is premature to embark on general methodological suggestions about how to investigate Byzantine Philosophy, or believes that scrutinizing the texts themselves is a more promising approach at this relatively early stage of research (as perhaps always).With one exception, each article deals at length with a special issue spanning from metaphysics to political philosophy and concentrates on individual thinkers from the patristic era to the Renaissance; the absence of philosophical theology is surprising. Expectedly the presence of Aristotle can be traced in logic: in an eleventh-century humble handbook (thoroughly analyzed by Jonathan Barnes); in Psellos's Paraphrase on Aristotle's De Interpretationeand in the anti-logical movement in the fourteenth century (Ierodiakonou); as well as in John of Damascus's discussion of will (Michael Frede). On the Christian-neoplatonic tradition are founded a nominalistic position of Basil of Caesarea concerning the semantics of proper names (Paul Kalligas); a sixth-century treatise On Political Science (Dominic O'Meara); Psellos's conception of philosophy (John Duffy); and the peculiar case of Chaldaean Oracles and their commentators (Polymnia Athanassiadi). The last article on the Renaissance controversy between Plethon and Scholarios over the primacy of Plato or Aristotle (George Karamanolis) brings the volume appropriately to an end.That Platonism and Aristotelianism nearly monopolize the contributors' concerns is justified but this must not give the simplified impression that Byzantine Philosophy can be exclusively explained against this background. Other Greek philosophical traditions, such as Stoicism, are mentioned as well, and the fourteenth-century interest in skepticism is densely discussed (Börje Bydén on Metochites). The first essay is an informative outline of the Greek-Latin Philosophical Interaction (Sten Ebbesen), whose inclusion in the volume makes a similar survey of ancient Greek-Byzantine philosophical interaction more warranted.The contributors do not confine themselves to resolving specific problems of a Quellenforschung, by identifying parallel texts or recurring arguments in order to establish the obvious dependence of Byzantine thought on Greek Philosophy. In fact, as many articles show, it is the very analysis of patristic and Byzantine texts that makes us return to their ancient sources and also makes clear how this revisiting can deepen our understanding of the texts and the philosophical problems they are trying to present or to solve. When doing philosophy, Byzantine thinkers have ancient Greek concepts in their minds, and quite often have ancient texts in their hands. Now it is up to us to evaluate... (shrink)

N. Germann and S. Harvey, editors. The Origin and Nature of Language and Logic: Perspectives in Medieval Islamic, Jewish, and Christian Thought. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020. xiii +422 pp. €71,46, ISBN...

The passionate and staunch defence of logic of the controversial thinker Ibn Ḥazm, Abū Muḥammad ʿAlī b. Aḥmad b. Saʿīd of Córdoba (384-456/994-1064), had lasting consequences in the Islamic world. Indeed, his book Facilitating the Understanding of the Rules of Logic and Introduction Thereto, with Common Expressions and Juristic Examples (Kitāb al-Taqrīb li-ḥadd al-manṭiq wa-l-mudkhal ilayhi bi-l-alfāẓ al-ʿāmmiyya wa-l-amthila al-fiqhiyya), composed in 1025-1029, was well known and discussed during and after his time; and it paved the way for the studies (...) of his compatriots Ibn Bājjah (d. 1138), Ibn Ṭufayl (1185), and Ibn Rushd (1198), who each gave demonstrative reasoning a privileged place within the methods of attaining knowledge. Unfortunately, as too often in the history of science, Ibn Ḥazm’s innovative perspectives and contributions in logic have been overlooked or considered with an attitude of contempt. On the one hand, his work has been seen, at best, as promulgating the benefits of studying Aristotle’s logic, so that his contribution is assessed as more didactical than conceptual. And on the other hand, those who do examine his innovations often consider them to be mistaken. As indicated by Chejne (1984, p. 2) contempt towards the logical work of Ibn Ḥazm was also present in its reception by the Eastern philosophers who accused him of deviating from Aristotelian logic and of dabbling in things beyond his capability. However, a reassessment of his work on logic has since begun, by delving into the ways the thinker of Córdoba studied the links between deontic and modal qualification of propositions. In this context Lameer’s (2013) paper on the logical sources of Ibn Ḥazm is worth mentioning; the author (p. 417, footnote 1) observes that, although, strictly speaking, it was al-Fārābī who first drew the parallelism between deontic and modal concepts, it was Ibn Ḥazm who developed it and worked it out in a more precise manner. A primary aim of this paper is to help fill some of these gaps by stressing the role of the work of Ibn Ḥazm in developing a notion of deontic necessity deeply rooted in legal normativity, and in explicitly discussing the transference between deontic and modal concepts. According to our view; the basic units of Islamic deontic logic are what we might call, indulging in terminological anachronism, heteronomous imperatives. As it turns out, the heteronomy of imperatives within Islamic legal systems contrasts with those of the purely moral realm, which seem to be closer to an autonomous conception of moral law. There it concurs again with Leibniz’s proposal to define obligatory as “what is necessary for a good person to do”. In the present paper, we will focus on the heteronomous imperatives of legal systems rather than on the imperatives of the purely moral realm. In this context, the work of Ibn Ḥazm extends the parallelism between the necessity of events and that of human actions stressed by his predecessors. According to our understanding, Ibn Ḥazm’s parallelism can be rendered explicit formally by means of a conditional (or hypothetical) structure shared by both deontic and modal propositions. Moreover, this structure makes apparent that this parallelism displays an underlying system of “degrees”. Indeed, while in the domain of events, given some conditions, it makes sense to distinguish between an event that is more likely to happen than another. Ibn Ḥazm speaks of near and distant possibility (such as the higher degree of likelihood of rain, given the condensation of clouds in December, and its lower degree, when the condensation occurs in summer); and, in the domain of actions, the Islamic notion of weighting actions determines degrees of virtue (or of legal and moral value). So whereas the degree of virtue of performing a forbidden act as determined by the distribution of sanction and reward is 0, we obtain the same value by pondering the likelihood of an impossible event to take place. Furthermore, as discussed in section II.3.2, the system of values at work in the parallelism can be seen as opening the way to a more direct correspondence. Thus, while in the realm of nature, likelihood of occurrence of an event is dependent upon the conditions specific to the occurrence of that event; while, in the realm of jurisprudence, likelihood of performing an action is dependent upon the distribution of reward and sanction specific to that action (being that, given the choice to perform or not perform a given action, those that will be rewarded are more likely to be performed than those that are not). According to this perspective, the point of the parallelism is that both deontic and modal qualifications measure the degree of an action or event to become actual; that is – indulging once more in anachronism (but this time from the Leibnizian background) – the degree measures how feasible (facile) an action or event may be. This suggests that Ibn Ḥazm’s perspectives already herald the links to probability and possibility explored by Leibniz six centuries later – see for example Leibniz’s (1671, A VI, I, p. 424-26) use of probability in the context of conditional right. Nevertheless, it also shows a crucial difference to the approach developed in the Elementa Jura Naturalis: whereas Leibniz’s studies seek to define what is to be just or virtuous, the logical system of deontic imperatives within Islamic jurisprudence presupposes that what is to be virtuous has already been settled. Determining what is to be virtuous is not achieved by logical reasoning within the system of legal jurisprudence, but by delving into the higher objectives of the Sharīʿa. While developing our point, we will delve into the logical structure of the heteronomous imperatives. This distinguishes our contribution from the existing literature, such as the papers of Chejne (1984), Lameer (2014), and Guerrero (1997, 2010, 2014), which do not provide a logical analysis of the deontic concepts put into work by Ibn Ḥazm. The true antecedent to the present paper is the work of Farid Zidani (2007, 2015), who, so far as we know, was the first to undertake such a task. Some of our own developments and general epistemological thoughts go beyond Ibn Ḥazm’s framework and motivations; mainly those contained in sections II.3.2 and IV. However, according to our view, these reflections suggest that Ibn Ḥazm’s approach has the substance for a broader and deeper exploration of the logic of norms. The paper is structured as follows:I.Ibn Ḥazm’s Logic of Heteronomous Imperatives. After presenting some extracts of the relevant text, we proceed by providing a formal reconstruction of the five forms of deontic modalities. II. A Landmark in the History of the Logical Analysis of Norms. Duties and Modalities. In this section, we study the transferences from deontic to modal necessity and possibility. We briefly compare the deontic system of Islamic Jurisprudence with that of Leibniz.III. Leibniz and Hypothetical Imperatives in Law.IV. Beyond Ibn Ḥazm: Conclusions and the Work Ahead. We will conclude the paper by discussing briefly some conceptual points that distinguish the logic of heteronomous imperatives from contemporary deontic logic. Our final words will discuss deontic-modal parallelism in the context of Ibn Ḥazm’s rejection of reasoning by conjecture and what we call “the internalization of nature.”. (shrink)

Many P4/WC practitioners and theorists privilege the school as a space for thinking and practicing philosophy for/with children. Despite its coercive nature, thinkers such as Jana Mohr Lone, David Kennedy, and Nancy Vansieleghem argue that P4C is a Trojan horse intended to reform the education system from within. I argue, however, that the Trojan horse argument requires us to internalize an incomplete and historically decontextualized understanding of public schools that in turn can reify histories of white supremacy within our (...) CPIs – a consequence that can be particularly harmful when practicing P4C with minority youth. To accurately adjudicate the value of public school classrooms for P4C – especially for those CPIs whose members are primarily Black, Latinx, Indigenous, or other youth of color — I contextualize the Trojan horse argument in the history of race and education in the United States. Through this historical analysis, I conclude that the reformist position becomes increasingly more untenable and that the material history of race and education in fact supports a pessimistic understanding of P4C in education. I end by reflecting on P4C’s need to rethink its privileging of schools as a primary site for philosophical inquiry and caution practitioners against using “social progress” as a justification for how and where they practice their craft. Instead, I encourage them to rethink how and where they practice P4C, based on the local historical and material conditions of the participants. (shrink)

The Hegel Lectures SeriesSeries Editor: Peter C. HodgsonHegel's lectures have had as great a historical impact as the works he himself published. Important elements of his system are elaborated only in the lectures, especially those given in Berlin during the last decade of his life. The original editors conflated materials from different sources and dates, obscuring the development and logic of Hegel's thought. The Hegel Lectures series is based on a selection of extant and recently discovered transcripts and manuscripts. (...) The original lecture series are reconstructed so that the structure of Hegel's argument can be followed. Each volume presents an accurate new translation accompanied by an editorial introduction and annotations on the text, which make possible the identification of Hegel's many allusions and sources. Lectures on the History of PhilosophyVolume II: Greek PhilosophyHegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy offer one of the best points of entry to his philosophical system. The second volume covers a thousand years of ancient Greek philosophy; this is the period to which Hegel devoted by far the most attention, and which he saw as absolutely fundamental for all that came after it. This edition sets forth clearly, and for the first time for the English reader, what Hegel actually said. It forms part of OUP's Hegel Lectures series, presenting accurate new translations accompanied by editorial introductions and annotations.These lectures challenged the antiquarianism of Hegel's contemporaries by boldly contending that the history of philosophy is itself philosophy, not just history. It portrays the journey of reason or spirit through time, as reason or spirit comes in stages to its full development and self-conscious existence, through the successive products of human intellect and activity. Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy proved to be extremely influential on the intellectual history of the past two centuries. These lectures are crucial to understanding Hegel's own systematic philosophy in its constructive aspect, as well as his views on the centrality of reason in human history and culture. The volume on Greek Philosophy covers the first one thousand years, the period to which Hegel devoted by far the most attention, and which he saw as absolutely fundamental for all that came after it. This edition adapts the considerable editorial resources of the German edition that it translates, to the needs of the general reader as well as the serious scholar, so as to constitute an unparalleled resource on this topic in the English language. (shrink)

Philosophical science is a living reality in the personal minds of genial thinkers, bound to their limitations in tradition, experience and mental energy and developed in the dialectic of their spatio–temporal history. In an age of mass pictorial media of communication it is natural and possibly fruitful to present even a purely intellectual doctrine to the public with the visual aids which any exercise in thought now popularly demands. The indefatigable editor of the Philosophical Library, New York, bows to (...) our Zeitgeist in this luxurious volume which tempts everyman to make the acquaintance of the world’s great and thinkers of the past three thousand years. To nearly one thousand illustrations of historic portraits, facsimiles, archaeological diagrams and photographs he has added succinct thumbnail biographies and thematic explanations, which are clearly printed on double–column pages of approximately Demy Quarto format and handsomely bound. In such a presentation personal interest is gained for philosophy, while systematic depth is lost; but doctrinal analysis should be sought, perhaps, properly in the orthodox textbook. (shrink)

Whatever its merits and difficulties, the concept of logic embedded in much of the "new philosophy" of the early modern period was then understood to supplant contemporary views of formal logic. The notion of compiling a natural history of the understanding constituted the basis of this new concept of logic. The following paper attempts to trace this view of logic through some of the major and numerous minor texts of the period, centering on the development and influence of (...) John Locke's understanding of the analysis of the cognitive faculties as the discipline of logic. (shrink)

The Mīmāṃsā school of Indian philosophy has for its main purpose the interpretation of injunctions that are found in a set of sacred texts, the Vedas. In their works, Mīmāṃsā authors provide some of the most detailed and systematic examinations available anywhere of statements with a deontic force; however, their considerations have generally not been registered outside of Indological scholarship. In the present article we analyze the Mīmāṃsā theory of Vedic injunctions from a logical and philosophical point of (...) view. The theory at issue can be regarded as a system of reasoning based on certain fundamental principles, such as the distinction between strong and weak duties, and on a taxonomy of ritual actions. We start by reconstructing the conceptual framework of the theory and then move to a formalization of its core aspects. Our contribution represents a new perspective to study Mīmāṃsā and outlines its relevance, in general, for deontic reasoning. (shrink)

Philosopherd have long stressed a distinction between theory justification and theory discovery based on a belief that justification and discovery are essentially different processes. What makes these two processes essentially different, it was assumed, is that the process of justification is guided by criteria which are expressable as rules, while the processes involved in discovery are not rule-guided. Moreover and perhaps more importantly, it was assumed that tha rules for justification are discoverable a priori by rationalistic logical analysis (...) but an account of discovery, whatever it turns out to be like, will be describable only a posteriori. (shrink)