In a series of exquisite examples that could only have been gathered by a professional philosopher with an extraordinary respect for young minds, Gareth...

The ontological argument in Anselm’s Proslogion II continues to generate a remarkable store of sophisticated commentary and criticism. However, in our opinion, much of this literature ignores or misrepresents the elegant simplicity of the original argument. The dialogue below seeks to restore that simplicity, with one important modification. Like the original, it retains the form of a reductio, which we think is essential to the argument’s great genius. However, it seeks to skirt the difficult question of whether 'exists' is a (...) genuine predicate by appealing instead to a distinction between having only mediated causal powers and having unmediated causal powers. Pegasus has no unmediated causal powers, but he has mediated causal powers through the thoughts, depictions, and literature in which he figures. This distinction allows us to argue about the existence of God without begging any questions. (shrink)

One of the most striking innovations in Aristotle’s philosophical writing is also one of its most characteristic features. That feature is Aristotle’s idea that terms central to philosophy, including ‘cause’ [aition], ‘good’, and even the verb ‘to be’, are, as he likes to put it, “said in many ways.” To be sure, philosophers before Aristotle give some evidence of having recognized the phenomenon of being said in many ways. Plato, in particular, suggests that things in this world that we call (...) “just” are only namesakes of the Just Itself. But, beyond that, homonymy seems to have been, even for Plato, no more than a source of ambiguity for wordplay. Aristotle is apparently the first philosopher to propose a taxonomy of homonymy and to view the identification and analysis of homonymies as a genuinely philosophical project. (shrink)

This chapter examines the views of death by ancient Greek philosophers including Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato. It suggests that Aristotle offered no cheerful optimism similar to Socrates in his “Apology” and did not provide any arguments about the immortality of the soul like Plato in “Phaedo.” What Aristotle attempted to do was to help us face immortality that can enhance our chances of living worthy lives.

Gareth Matthews suggests that we can better understand the nature of philosophical inquiry if we recognize the central role played by perplexity. The seminal representation of philosophical perplexity is in Plato's dialogues; Matthews invites us to view this as a response to something inherently problematic in the basic notions that philosophy deals with. He examines the intriguing shifts in Plato's attitude to perplexity and suggests that this development may be seen as an archetypal pattern that philosophers follow even today. So (...) it is that one may be won over to philosophy in the first place by the example of a Socratic teacher who displays an uncanny gift at getting one perplexed about something one thought one understood perfectly well. Later, however, wanting like Plato to move beyond perplexity to produce philosophical 'results', one may be chagrined to discover that one's very best attempt to develop a philosophical theory induces its own perplexity. Then, like late Plato and like Aristotle, the philosopher may seek to 'normalize' perplexity in a way that both allows for progress and yet respects the peculiarly baffling character of philosophical questions. (shrink)

We discuss Aristotle's "Categories" as an answer to Plato's One-over-Many argument. For Plato, F-ness is something "over against" particular F things; to predicate "F" of these things is to assert that they all stand in a certain relation to F-ness. Aristotle answers that predication is classification; and there being a classification of a certain sort is a fact correlative with there being things classifiable in the way the classification in question would classify them.

Gareth Matthews suggests that we can better understand the nature of philosophical inquiry if we recognize the central role played by perplexity. The seminal representation of philosophical perplexity is in Plato's dialogues; Matthews examines the intriguing shifts in Plato's attitude to perplexity and suggests that these may represent a course of philosophical development that philosophers follow even today.

This book will be of great interest to philosophers of mind and epistemologists, historians of philosophy and their students, philosophers of religion, and ...

Anselm’s argument for the existence of God in Proslogion 2 has a little-noticed feature: It can be properly formulated only by beings who have the ability to think of things and refer to things independently of whether or not they exist in reality. The authors explore this cognitive ability and try to make clear the role it plays in the ontological argument. Then, we offer a new version of the ontological argument, which, we argue, is sound: it is valid, has (...) true premises, and does not beg any questions against the atheist. However, the new reconstruction of the argument falls short of Anselm’s goal of producing “a single argument that would require no other for its proof than itself alone; and alone would suffice to demonstrate that God exists.” The new reconstruction requires a subsidiary argument to show that God exists in the understanding. The subsidiary argument relies on premises that are both contingent and known a posteriori. However, the somewhat amplified argument, if it is sound as the authors believe it to be, does show that God exists in reality. Moreover, the new reconstruction escapes an important recent criticism by Peter Millican (2004, 2007) against ontological arguments generally. (shrink)

In L. Frank Baum's story, Ozma of Oz , which is a sequel to Baum's much more famous story, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz , Dorothy and her companion come upon a wound-down mechanical man bearing a label on which are printed the following words: Smith and Tinker's Patent Double-Action, Extra-Responsive, Thought-Creating Perfect-Talking MECHANICAL MAN Fitted with our Special Clock-Work Attachment Thinks, Speaks, Acts, and Does Everything but Live As Dorothy and her companion are made to discover when they wind (...) up this man , he is indeed capable of doing all the things of which his label boasts—acting, speaking and even thinking. But as Tik-Tok himself insists, and no one in the story casts doubt on the matter, he is not alive. (shrink)

As John Rist presents Augustine, he was a man who “lived on the frontier between the ancient world and mediaeval Western Europe”. Among the the many who tried to transform ancient thought, Rist tells us, Augustine was “the most radical and the most influential”.

Anthony Kenny says it is impossible to want what one already has and knows one has. We present a counter-example and then suggest that Kenny may have been misled by the fact that wanting expresses itself in goal-directed behavior. From the truism that one's behavior cannot be directed toward a goal that one knows one has already attained, Kenny may have been led to suppose that behavior directed toward an as yet unattained goal cannot express one's desire for what one (...) has and knows one has. (shrink)

This lucid survey takes readers on a thought-provoking tour through the life and work of Augustine. Explores new insights into one of antiquity’s most important philosophers Topics Include: skepticism, language acquisition, mind-body dualism, philosophical dream problems, time and creation, faith and reason, foreknowledge and free will, and Augustine’s standing as a ‘Socratic philosopher’.

Epistemology and metaphysics as described by Socrates is the crux of this article. Socrates here is all set to assess the wisdom of the candidates. He goes about arguing as to who is wiser and the various aspects of wisdom. He also elaborates on wisdom as a virtue. The article further harps on the idea of what counts as knowledge and also highlights the differences between Socratic Ignorance and Complete Ignorance.

Students and scholars will find that these essays provide impressive evidence of the persisting vitality of Augustine's thought.

This lucid survey takes readers on a thought-provoking tour through the life and work of Augustine. Explores new insights into one of antiquity’s most important philosophers Topics Include: skepticism, language acquisition, mind-body dualism, philosophical dream problems, time and creation, faith and reason, foreknowledge and free will, and Augustine’s standing as a ‘Socratic philosopher’.

What is often called Descartes' dream problem should perhaps be called Plato's dream problem instead. Certainly it can be found in Plato's Theaetetus at 158b–c. It can also be found in Cicero and, through Cicero's influence, in much of the work of St Augustine.

By ‘the unity of psychology’ I mean something one might also express by saying that the psychology of human beings is part of the psychology of animals generally. Perhaps there are several different ways of trying to trace out the ramifications of the idea that psychology is one. A central consideration, I think, is likely to be some sort of principle of continuity up and down the scale of nature. The idea would be that up and down the scale of (...) animated or ensouled things there are always psychological continuities, never any strict discontinuity. If human beings can get angry, can want to get ahead in life, can see an illusion, can develop an Oedipus complex, then so can some lower animal do either the very same thing, something similar, or at least something analogous. (shrink)

Each of the following might be considered both necessary and sufficient for an organism to count as a psychological organism: (a) being able to do something that requires a psychological theory to explain; (b) being capable of having experiences; (c) being motivated; (d) behaving in ways that are the joint outcome of the organism's beliefs and desires; (e) being capable of instrumental learning, or operant conditioning; (f) being susceptible to classical conditioning. This paper takes up each of these candidates in (...) turn in an effort to clarify what the idea of a psychological organism really is. An argument is sketched for saying that (f) yields the weakest version of the idea of a psycholgical organism, that (e) yields a stronger version, and that (d) yields an even stronger one. What these versions have in common makes them all versions of a single idea. (shrink)

In L. Frank Baum's story, Ozma of Oz, which is a sequel to Baum's much more famous story, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her companion come upon a wound-down mechanical man bearing a label on which are printed the following words: Smith and Tinker's Patent Double-Action, Extra-Responsive, Thought-Creating Perfect-Talking MECHANICAL MAN Fitted with our Special Clock-Work Attachment Thinks, Speaks, Acts, and Does Everything but Live As Dorothy and her companion are made to discover when they wind up this (...) man, he is indeed capable of doing all the things of which his label boasts—acting, speaking and even thinking. But as Tik-Tok himself insists, and no one in the story casts doubt on the matter, he is not alive. (shrink)

In a recent paper Paul Vincent Spade suggests that, although the medieval doctrine of the modes of personal supposition originally had something to do with the rest of the theory of supposition, it became, by the 14th century, an unrelated theory with no question to answer. By contrast, I argue that the theory of the modes of personal supposition was meant to provide a way of making understandable the idea that a general term in a categorical proposition can be used (...) to refer to the individual things that fall under it. Once that idea had been made acceptable, truth conditons for the various forms of categorical proposition could be given without any specific appeal to the ideas of descent and ascent in terms of which the modes had been defined. (shrink)

What is often called Descartes' dream problem should perhaps be called Plato's dream problem instead. Certainly it can be found in Plato's Theaetetus at 158b–c. It can also be found in Cicero and, through Cicero's influence, in much of the work of St Augustine.

An appropriate motto for Augustine's great work On the Trinity is 'faith in search of understanding'. In this treatise Augustine offers a part-theological, part-philosophical account of how God might be understood in analogy to the human mind. On the Trinity can be fairly described as the first modern philosophy of mind: it is the first work in philosophy to recognize the 'problem of other minds', and the first to offer the 'argument from analogy' as a response to that problem. Other (...) subjects that it discusses include the nature of the mind and the nature of the body, the doctrine of 'illumination', and thinking as inner speech. This volume presents the philosophical section of the work, and in a historical and philosophical introduction Gareth Matthews places Augustine's arguments in context and assesses their influence on later thinkers. (shrink)

Translation with notes of Ammonius' Commentary on Aristotle's Categories.