A splendid edition. Schneewind's illuminating introduction succinctly situates the _Enquiry_ in its historical context, clarifying its relationship to Calvinism, to Newtonian science, and to earlier moral philosophers, and providing a persuasive account of Hume's ethical naturalism. --Martha C. Nussbaum, Brown University.

Prior thinks that Edwards' argument depends on a metaphysical turn of phrase. Edwards, he says, subsumes "all happenings, or anyhow... all changes, under the idea of the 'beginning to be' either of concrete objects or of abstract ones". We are not to say, "My head began to ache," we are to say, "My headache began to exist." The shift may seem trivial, but actually it is "of the very first importance": Edwards' argument "depends on it." The reason is the following. (...) Edwards says that objects or substances cannot begin to be without a cause; that if they could, it would be prima facie implausible to hold that substances of only one kind, of all the millions of kinds of substance, should causelessly come to be; and that the implausibility cannot be removed by appealing to the nature of what thus comes to be, because until it actually exists there is nothing there to explain anything. Prior agrees with all that. But he holds that it is not impossible that some already existing substances should have a special kind of property which would make it possible for them to change or act causelessly. Of course, if we have to say that a change or an act is just another kind of coming to be of a substance, this too is impossible. Hence Prior thinks that by showing that changes and acts need not be construed as Edwards construes them, he will have made room for the possibility of limited indeterminism. (shrink)

The ‘modern’ natural law philosophers of the seventeenth century believed that conflict was an unavoidable concomitant of human intercourse, rooted in our nature. They understood the normative laws of nature as serving the purpose of setting the limits within which conflict is compatible with lasting social cooperation, thus showing, in effect, how warfare can be turned into competition. The natural lawyers were interested primarily in legal and political problems, not in ethics. But in order to provide reasoned approaches to immediate (...) practical issues, they had to move to a level of abstract theorizing at which philosophical claims about morality were unavoidable. Natural law theory with its understanding of the central underlying problem of human sociability dominated seventeenth-century practical philosophy, and the solutions its various proponents offered generated many of the central concerns of what we know as moral philosophy. (shrink)

The first volumes of the great University of Toronto Press edition of the works of John Stuart Mill, edited by John M. Robson, appeared in 1963, and the edition was completed in 1991. Not surprisingly, it has generated a great deal of discussion of Mill's thought. The bibliography in John Skorupski's Companion to Mill lists some 350 items pertinent to Mill published since 1963, although it makes no attempt at comprehensive coverage of English-language studies and has nothing in any foreign (...) language. No one can keep up with all of this secondary material. It is not the least of the virtues of the Companion that it gives us a broad survey of much of the recent research and thought about Mill. I suspect that some of the articles will not be very helpful to bewildered undergraduates hoping for a boost on an assignment. But all of them will be useful to advanced students and scholars who want to know where we are on Mill these days. (shrink)

This is the fourth volume of the Clarendon edition of Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and the first of three volumes of Commentary. It contains commentary on the text up to p. 327 of volume one - i.e. The Argument of the Frontispeice, Democritus to the Reader, and Partition 1 as far as the end of Section 2, Member 3, Subsection 15: 'Misery of Schollers'. In his study of morbid psychology as it was understood in his day, Burton cites many (...) other writers. No previous edition of the Anatomy has identified all of these or verified all his quotations. In addition to explanatory notes and translations of all the passages in Latin, this edition attempts to locate all Burton's sources in the actual books he himself owned or to which he probably had access. The last of the three volumes of commentary will contain a Biobibliography listing over 1,500 authorities referred to by Burton, many very obscure, and will give not only bibliographical details but information about the writers. (shrink)

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Original Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- INTRODUCTION -- VOLTAIRE -- HUME -- ROBERTSON -- GIBBON -- INDEX.

This, the fifth volume to appear in the "authoritative" edition of The Works of William James, is the first that is not strictly based on a previously published work, although 11 of the 21 essays were included in Collected Essays and Reviews, edited in 1920 by Ralph Barton Perry, and 2 in Memories and Studies, edited in 1911 by Henry James, the philosopher’s son. The selection is based on subject matter, "philosophy in a narrower sense" than was customary for James, (...) and subsequent volumes will include parallel collections of "essays in psychology, in religion and morality, and in psychic research". (shrink)

The doctrine of scientific realism has once again come into the center of attention for many philosophers of science, although of course the approaches, arguments, and emphases have somewhat changed. This book is an excellent entree to the current debates on this topic, as seen by van Fraassen who is probably the most direct and severe opponent of scientific realism. What is at stake is nothing less than the ultimate goal of science and the significance of its theories.