What is postmodern music and how does it differ from earlier styles, including modernist music? What roles have electronic technologies and sound production played in defining postmodern music? Has postmodern music blurred the lines between high and popular music? Addressing these and other questions, this ground-breaking collection gathers together for the first time essays on postmodernism and music written primarily by musicologists, covering a wide range of musical styles including concert music, jazz, film music, and popular music. Topics include: the (...) importance of technology and marketing in postmodern music; the appropriation and reworking of Western music by non-Western bands; postmodern characteristics in the music of Górecki, Rochberg, Zorn, and Bolcom, as well as Björk and Wu Tang Clan; issues of music and race in such films as The Bridges of Madison County, Batman, Bullworth, and He Got Game; and comparisons of postmodern architecture to postmodern music. Also includes nine musical examples. (shrink)

The conversations generated by the chapters in Music's Immanent Future grapple with some of music's paradoxes: that music of the Western art canon is viewed as timeless and universal while other kinds of music are seen as transitory and ephemeral; that in order to make sense of music we need descriptive language; that to open up the new in music we need to revisit the old; that to arrive at a figuration of music itself we need to posit its starting (...) point in noise; that in order to justify our creative compositional works as research, we need to find critical languages and theoretical frameworks with which to discuss them; or that despite being an auditory system, we are compelled to resort to the visual metaphor as a way of thinking about musical sounds. Drawn to musical sound as a powerful form of non-verbal communication, the authors include musicologists, philosophers, music theorists, ethnomusicologists and composers. The chapters in this volume investigate and ask fundamental questions about how we think, converse, write about, compose, listen to and analyse music. The work is informed by the philosophy primarily of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and secondarily of Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva and Jean-Luc Nancy. The chapters cover a wide range of topics focused on twentieth and twenty-first century musics, covering popular musics, art music, acousmatic music and electro-acoustic musics, and including music analysis, music's ontology, the noise/music dichotomy, intertextuality and music, listening, ethnography and the current state of music studies. The authors discuss their philosophical perspectives and methodologies of practice-led research, including their own creative work as a form of research. Music's Immanent Future brings together empirical, cultural, philosophical and creative approaches that will be of interest to musicologists, composers, music analysts and music philosophers. (shrink)

Studies of affect and emotions have blossomed in recent decades across the humanities, neurosciences, and social sciences. In music scholarship, they have often built on the discipline's attention to what music theorists since the Renaissance have described as music's unique ability to arouse passions in listeners. In this timely volume, the editors seek to combine this 'affective turn' with the 'sound turn' in the humanities, which has profitably shifted attention from the visual to the aural, as well as a more (...) recent 'philosophical turn' in music studies. Accordingly, the volume maps out a new territory for research at the intersection of music, philosophy, and sound studies. The essays in Sound and Affect look at objects and experiences in which correlations of sound and affect reside, in music and beyond: the voice as it speaks, stutters, cries, or sings; music, whether vocal, instrumental, or electronic; our sonic environments, whether natural or man-made, and our responses to them. As argued here, far from being stable, correlations of sound and affect are influenced by factors as diverse as race, class, gender, and social and political experience. Examining these factors is key to the project, which gathers contributions from a cross-disciplinary roster of scholars including both established as well as a wealth of new voices. The essays are grouped thematically into sections that move from politics and ethics, to reflections on pre-and post-human "musicking," to the notions of affective listening and music temporalities, to are examination of historical understandings of music and affect. This agenda-setting collection will prove indispensable to anyone interested in innovative approaches to the study of sound and its many intersection with affect and emotions. (shrink)

ANALYZED THROUGH THE WORK OF FEMINIST AND QUEER THEORIST JUDITH Butler, anthropologist Saba Mahmood, and philosopher Martha Nussbaum, motherhood complicates theories of performativity that separate sex from gender and that equate women's agency with progressive politics. Motherhood should be understood as performative, that is, entailing self-reflective agency but not entirely separable from women's bodies. While motherhood may be manipulated to support patriarchal institutions, experiences of motherhood also inspire fresh interpretations and critiques of anthropocentric Christian theology and Muslim religious texts. (...) Given the political dimensions of motherhood, the appearance of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin as prominent politicians attests to the variety of performativity and the need to protect women's agency. (shrink)

In this conversation, Berkeley-based philosopher Judith Butler offers insights into her understanding of the public sphere and its current transformations as a core dimension of political subjectivity. Beginning with her own understanding of Habermas’ classic, the interview centers around its connection to other classical texts (e.g. of Hannah Arendt) and timely political debates.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Contemporary IlluminationsReading Donne's "A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day through Three Twenty-First-Century PoemsTheresa M. DipasqualeIn his contribution to the 2017 volume John Donne and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Judith Scherer Herz, Jonathan F. S. Post explores "a nearly endless landscape of comparisons and contrasts" that unfolds between Stephen Edgar's 2008 poem "Nocturnal" and Donne's "A nocturnall upon S. Lucies day, Being the shortest day."1 Post's essay illuminates what (...) Calvin Bedient, in the same volume, calls the "great glacier-gloom" of Donne's "Nocturnall," its devastated "solemnity."2 In doing so, Post renders largely moot many questions that have preoccupied critics of Donne's poem: whether or how this poem reflects Donne's experience; whether the woman lamented by the speaker is a fiction or a historical person lamented by the poet; and if the latter, whether the poem mourns the 1617 death of John Donne's wife, Anne More Donne; the 1627 death of Donne's patroness Lucy, Countess of Bedford; or the Countess' near-fatal illness in 1612–13.3 These biographical and historical questions are not without value, but they draw the critic's attention away from more compelling questions regarding the "I" of the poem—a persona who claims not to be a person at all, but an inscription, a grave, "A quintessence" derived or "expresse[d]/... even from nothingnesse."4In this article, I widen and intensify the pool of light cast on Donne's "Nocturnall" by Post's presentist and intertextual analysis of Edgar's poem, examining three of the many other twenty-first-century poems that tap into Donne's poem, allude to it, quote it, adopt its structure, or respond to the anguish it expresses.5 Each of the three I discuss is [End Page 1] luminous in its own right but also a potent critical response to Donne's five-stanza poem. Each teaches something different about Donne's lyric. The poets whose work I consider—Liz Lochhead, Jay Wright, and Meena Alexander—all address twenty-first-century concerns; they grapple with questions and sorrows beyond the scope of Donne's conscious imagining yet latent in his poem. Each picks up where critics leave off when they "assume," as Alison R. Rieke notes, "that the speaker... is a husband or lover, possibly Donne, who experiences grief upon his wife's or mistress' death."6 Each takes up the challenge that Donne's persona issues when it denies that it is either "a man" (30) or any other living thing.In the first stanza of "A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day," this anti-persona observes that "all" other things around it are "Dead and enterr'd" and "yet" that "all these seeme to laugh, / Compar'd with mee, who am their Epitaph" (8–9). If it is an incised text rather than a human being, the poem's "mee" can no more speak than laugh; it is as silent as the grave it marks or as the dead flesh interred there. Indeed, it goes on to claim that it is "every dead thing" and that love's alchemical "art" has "expresse[d] / A quintessence even from" this mass of nonliving objects, this "nothingnesse" (12, 14–15). Struggling to define its anti-essential essence, it declares itself a mass burial site: "I, by loves limbecke, am the grave / Of all, that's nothing" (21–22). An epitaph, dead things, nothingness, a grave: all these are silent. And yet, in Donne's poem, they strenuously assert their nonbeing; they pulse with a paradoxically audible sense of self. After "Compar'd with mee" in the final line of the opening stanza, the reader encounters sixteen additional instances of the first-person singular in the poem's forty-five lines: "my" appears once, "mee" five times, and "I" eleven times. And the "I" issues a directive to readers: commanding, in the opening line of stanza 2, "Study me then, you who shall lovers bee" (10). But those who obey this order, making themselves students of the poem's inscribed nothingness, find themselves dismissed in the poem's final stanza. Having insisted that its "Sunne" will never "renew... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 241-246 [Access article in PDF] News and Views The 1999 International Buddhist-Christian Theological Encounter Barbara BernsteinWilmette, IllinoisThe 1999 International Buddhist-Christian Theological Encounter (IBCTE), also known as the Abe-Cobb Group, met at the Westin Hotel in Indianapolis, Indiana from April 15 to April 18. There were four papers on the theme "Social Violence." This theme followed last year's, which was "Environmental Violence." Each paper was read (...) beforehand; and to guide the discussion, each session was begun by a respondent.It was reported at the first session that the 2000 IBCTE will take place August 3-6 at Tacoma, Washington just prior to the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies International Conference on "Buddhism, Christianity, and Global Healing." The theme for next year's encounter will be "The Economic Factors in Social and Environmental Violence." This theme will build on the dialogue generated by the topics of the previous two years, namely, environmental and social violence. Papers will be prepared by Sulak Sivaraksa, John B. Cobb, Jr., Judith Simmer-Brown, and Carol Johnston. Responses will be made by Stephanie Kaza, David Chappell, Valerie Karras, and Terry Muck.It was also announced at that session that six of our membership will present a panel on the IBCTE at the Parliament of the World's Religions in Cape Town, South Africa in December 1999. That panel will share the fruits of the 15-year history of the IBCTE. Those who will attend this Parliament are: David Lochhead, David Chappell, Schubert Ogden, the Ven. Yifa, Judith Simmer-Brown, and Rosemary Ruether.The following is a summary of each of the eight dialogue sessions at the 1999 meeting: First Paper (April 16 Morning Session) Discussion began with Taitetsu Unno's response to David Lochhead's paper entitled, "Monotheistic Violence." Unno began by examining the relationship between deep personal faith (vertical) and the social/ethical elements of religion (horizontal). This led to further discussion on violence and the construction of "the other." Unno raised the questions: Who decides what constitutes the other? Further, who ultimately [End Page 241] decides if the other is or is not enemy/neighbor? Unno pointed out that, following Matthew 5, if God does not discriminate good from evil, then who can determine who is just and unjust? This comment pointed to the great problem for minorities in North American society.Unno also made some comments on Lochhead's use of liberation theology: If all economic systems are prone to misuse, then does a critique of capitalism do us much good?Lochhead's reply to Unno began with the issue of dualism and non-dualism. Here, Lochhead talked about a "soft" dualism, in that our world is constituted by relationships such that God and neighbor are the names that appear in this discourse. Like Martin Buber's path in I and Thou, dualistic construction comes out of relationships. Lochhead clarified that this dualism is not the same as a hard dualism, which is what Unno referred to as subject/object dualism. This led to the relevant question: What kind of violence is involved in the construction of the other? If God is a name for something beyond me, then how can the construction of the self in relationship to God be a form of violence? And would not this nonviolent, soft dualistic construction hold for any other person or living being? Lochhead then suggested that it is when relationships somehow degenerate into I-it, in Buber's terms, that the construction can become violent.Much rich insight was brought to light when the dialogue opened for general discussion. José Cabezón asked if violence demands the construction of the other? He pointed out that for the human realm differentiation is necessary for human life. Stephanie Kaza contributed to the discussion by suggesting that biological necessity is very hard for people to understand. There can be different bases of knowing, and religious knowing is from a privileged point of view for understanding our relationship with the natural environment. Larry Cunningham reminded us that relationships in Christianity are crucial because... (shrink)

Two decades of research on euthanasia in the Netherlands have resulted into clear insights in the frequency and characteristics of euthanasia and other medical end-of-life decisions in the Netherlands. These empirical studies have contributed to the quality of the public debate, and to the regulating and public control of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. No slippery slope seems to have occurred. Physicians seem to adhere to the criteria for due care in the large majority of cases. Further, it has been shown (...) that the majority of physicians think that the euthanasia Act has improved their legal certainty and contributes to the carefulness of life-terminating acts. In 2005, eighty percent of the euthanasia cases were reported to the review committees. Thus, the transparency envisaged by the Act still does not extend to all cases. Unreported cases almost all involve the use of opioids, and are not considered to be euthanasia by physicians. More education and debate is needed to disentangle in these situations which acts should be regarded as euthanasia and which should not. Medical end-of-life decision-making is a crucial part of end-of-life care. It should therefore be given continuous attention in health care policy and medical training. Systematic periodic research is crucial for enhancing our understanding of end-of-life care in modern medicine, in which the pursuit of a good quality of dying is nowadays widely recognized as an important goal, in addition to the traditional goals such as curing diseases and prolonging life. (shrink)

How can we bolster the academic success of low achieving students and provide a more egalitarian classroom setting? This book describes the process of 'untracking', an educational reform effort that has prepared students from low income, linguistic, and ethnic minority backgrounds for college. Untracking offers all students the same academically-demanding curriculum while varying the amount of institutional support they receive. Helpful institutional 'scaffolds' teach the hidden curriculum of the school, allowing students to develop an academic identity and build bridges between (...) high school and college. There have been many plans and attempts to reform schools, but few detailed investigations of such efforts. This book is a highly readable account of a successful school reform effort. It provides systematic research results concerning the educational and social consequences of untracking previously low achieving students. (shrink)

Thought experiments are fictional narratives that widen our cognitive horizons both in the sciences and in philosophy. In the present paper we argue that they can perform this function by bringing one’s perspective into view. Despite being traditionally conceived as devices that transmit true propositions to their readers, thought experiments are also particularly apt to express a specific theoretical perspective through the use of imagination. We suggest that this is a significant epistemic feature that is often overlooked in the debate. (...) After presenting our analysis of thought experiments (Section 2) and of the role that imagination plays in them (Section 3), we revisit Galileo Galilei’s use of imaginary cases in light of our account (Section 4). We show that the main aims of Galileo’s thought experiments are to highlight how different perspectives endorsed by fictional characters affect imagination and to invite readers to actively engage in perspectives that are different from their own. This results in a clash of perspectives which plays a crucial epistemic role (Section 5). Readers of thought experiments do not passively absorb information, but critically assess the other’s perspective. In the final part of the paper, we individuate different ways in which readers can react to thought experiments. (shrink)

Impossible antecedents entered the scene of medieval logic around the 1120s and soon started to dominate this scene, becoming one of the most debated issues from the second half of the twelfth century onwards. This article focuses on theories of counterpossibles from this period and aims to offer an overview of the different responses offered by twelfth-century logicians on whether everything, something, or nothing follows from an impossible statement. Rather than trying to historically reconstruct the positions of the different authors (...) – an operation that may be premature given the insufficient notions we still have of the authorship and dating of sources – I aim to provide a provisional map of the main arguments that were advanced in favour of or against the ex impossibili quodlibet principle. The article also aims to show that the strategies developed by twelfth-century logical schools in their approach to counterpossibles survive in logical discussions of the same topic during the thirteenth and the early fourteenth century, especially in the syncategoremata and sophistaria traditions. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to investigate the problem of existential import in Abelard's modal logic, and to ask whether the system of logical relationships that he proposes for modal propositions ma...

A workshop in Philosophy for Children was offered this summer at Viterbo College with generous support from the Wisconsin Humanities Committee. Dr. Ronald Reed and the author conducted the week long workshop. The workshop was promoted primarily by distribution of brochures to regional schools. Four questions were addressed in the brochure: What is Philosophy for Children?, How will Philosophy for Children work in your classroom?, Why teach Philosophy for Children?, and Who should attend?. This approach was taken as part of (...) an effort at making teachers, principals and parents informed about the basic nature fo a Philosophy for Children program. (shrink)

To help professionals in all health care disciplines grapple with ethical issues, Ahronheim (medicine, New York Medical College), Moreno (biomedical ethics, U. of Virginia) and Zuckerman (Center for Ethics in Medicine, Beth Israel Medical Center) review the history and theory of clinical ethics and present 31 case studies analyzed from medical, ethical and legal perspectives. This second edition expands the original discussions of ethical dilemmas caused by advances in medical genetics, organ transplants, HIV medicine and other developments. The appendix includes (...) Internet references, suggested readings and other resources. (shrink)

Social practices are a key concept in Raimo Tuomela’s work on sociality, they help us understand many aspects of sociality, including customs, traditions, and institutions. The key elements in his analysis of social practices are we-attitudes and pattern-governed behaviors. I am sympathetic to Tuomela’s approach to sociality to the extent that it recognizes and spells out many sufficient and necessary conditions for different types of social activity that together make up sociality. I agree with him that the complexity and multiplicity (...) of human agency, both when acting individually as well as when acting collectively or cooperatively, indeed calls for such an analysis with multiple sufficiency conditions. I especially appreciate his acknowledgement of the role of habits, customs, and the like for sociality. His three most recent books all pay attention to this aspect of human being. In this paper, I will zoom in on this aspect of Tuomela’s work and look at how he integrates habits, customs, and skills. In Tuomela’s words, I will zoom in on pattern-governed behaviors and social practices. On the one hand he gives them an important role and mentions customs often, as the “collective counterpart of habits” (Tuomela, Raimo. The Philosophy of Social Practices: A Collective Acceptance View. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511487446, 2002, p. 121). At the same time, the analysis of habits and customs left me wanting. I will argue that they are too strongly dependent on and are integrated in a context in which we-attitudes are the key explanatory element. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment &Responsibility, Volume 33, Issue 2, Page 201-216, April 2024.

This article investigates Abelard’s defence of the compatibility between universal bivalence and the existence of future contingent events. It first considers the standard strategy put forward by twelfth-century commentators to solve Aristotle’s dilemma in De Interpretatione 9, which fundamentally relies on Boethius’ distinction between definite and indefinite truth values. Abelard’s own position on the dilemma is then introduced, focusing on a specific deterministic argument considered in his logical works that aims to demonstrate that, given the determinacy of present-tense propositions such (...) as ‘“that Socrates will eat tomorrow” is true’, future contingent events such as that Socrates will eat tomorrow are determinate in advance. In addition to presenting Abelard’s reply to the argument, the article offers an analysis of his notions of contingency, determinacy, and future events, and a comparison between Abelard’s position and other twelfth-century discussions on future contingents. (shrink)

La confrontación entre Heidegger y Husserl que ha dominado hasta fecha reciente la interpretación filosófica debe ser revisada a la luz de las indagaciones de Husserl sobre la protofacticidad: Ella concierne a una ontología del mundo de la vida que es afín a la mundaneidad heideggeriana: Los protohechos constituyen un horizonte de sentido ya instaurado, que el yo debe reconfigurar en su praxis. Esta protofacticidad inmodalizable alberga un núcleo de protocontingencia que da cuenta no sólo de la contingencia fáctica de (...) las categorías experienciales, sino también la del mundo, del ego y de los entes finitos: En tanto procesos o sujetos a cambios cualitativos en sus características esenciales su modo de ser se caracteriza por una permanente apertura esencial. Ambos pensadores sostienen la contingencia esencial del mundo, de la que sólo puede dar cuenta la experiencia fáctica hic et nunc de un ego encarnado y mundano.The confrontation between Heidegger and Husserl, ever present in philosophical debates, should be reviewed in the light of Hus-serl’s late inquiries into protofacticity. Concerning the ontology of the lifeworld, it addresses some of the issues of Heidegger’s characterization of Dasein as being-in-the-world: Protofacts constitute an already given sense-horizon, which the ego must re-configurate in its praxis. This unmodalizable primal facts host a core of protocontingency that accounts for the factual contingency not only of the categories of experience, but of the world, the ego and of finite beings: Understood as processes or subjected to qualitative changes in their essential structures, their mode of being is characterized by an essential openness. Both thinkers sustain the contingency of the world, for which only the hic et nunc factual experience of a mundane, incarnated ego can account. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The current article deals with the correlation between virtual and physical reality as they concern the body. The thesis of this article is that the lived body transposed into virtual reality becomes a body without organs in Deleuze’s terms, i.e. the lived body, a sensitive field of sensorial events immersed in a lived space, becomes a virtual body made up of intensities, of pure forces or magnitudes within a vector space, thereby losing its affective qualities. Furthermore, lived and virtual (...) bodies build up a correlation bridged not by intentionality, as phenomenology would maintain, but by sensation. Virtuality is thus characterised by both the loss of corporeality and the simulation of the lifeworld. But how can the split between the real and the virtual body be bridged? On the one hand, in Deleuze’s conception of sensation, real and virtual collapse into one another so that the real world ‘resonates’ with its virtual double. On the other hand, Merleau-Ponty’s concept of form relates both realities in terms of a correlation of signification between the physical and the existential realms. With recourse to the notion of structure or form, I will argue that the phenomenal and the virtual do not represent different modes of being, but are bound by a correlation ruled by sensation as a system of intensive forces. (shrink)

Pain perception arises from a complex interaction between a nociceptive stimulus and different emotional and cognitive factors, which appear to be mediated by both automatic and controlled systems. Previous evidence has shown that whereas conscious processing of unpleasant stimuli enhances pain perception, emotional influences on pain under unaware conditions are much less known. The aim of the present study was to investigate the modulation of pain perception by unconscious emotional pictures through an emotional masking paradigm. Two kinds of both somatosensory (...) (painful and non-painful) and emotional stimulation (negative and neutral pictures) were employed. Fifty pain-free participants were asked to rate the perception of pain they were feeling in response to laser-induced somatosensory stimuli as faster as they can. Data from pain intensity and reaction times were measured. Statistical analyses revealed a significant effect for the interaction between pain and emotional stimulation, but surprisingly this relationship was opposite to expected. In particular, lower pain intensity scores and longer reaction times were found in response to negative images being strengthened this effect for painful stimulation. Present findings suggest a clear pain perception modulation by unconscious emotional contexts. Attentional capture mechanisms triggered by unaware negative stimulation could explain this phenomenon leading to a withdrawal of processing resources from pain. (shrink)

The West's foremost translator of the I Ching, Richard Wilhelm thought deeply about how contemporary readers could benefit from this ancient work and its perennially valid insights into change and chance. For him and for his son, Hellmut Wilhelm, the Book of Changes represented not just a mysterious book of oracles or a notable source of the Taoist and Confucian philosophies. In their hands, it emerges, as it did for C. G. Jung, as a vital key to humanity's age-old collective (...) unconscious. Here the observations of the Wilhelms are combined in a volume that will reward specialists and aficionados with its treatment of historical context--and that will serve also as an introduction to the I Ching and the meaning of its famous hexagrams. (shrink)

Persoonlijk verslag van de zoektocht van de beroemde auteur naar de essentie van haar leven.

Die Phänomenologie Husserls ist nicht nur als ein metaphysikkritisches Unternehmen, sondern als eine kritische Wiederaufnahme aristotelischer Themen aufzufassen. Denn die Frage nach dem Sinn des Seins führt Husserl anfänglich dazu, eine transzendentale Phänomenologie als eidetische Wissenschaft zu entwerfen, welche die aristotelische Ontologie auf formale und materiale Regionen erweitert. Später aber führt sie Husserl nicht nur zu einer Revision der Beziehungen zwischen Phänomenologie und Metaphysik, sondern zu einer Erweiterung des phänomenologischen Bereiches auf Fragen der letzten absolut gegebenen Urtatsachen, die eine phänomenologische (...) Metaphysik ausmachen. Dabei unternimmt Husserl eine kritische Rehabilitierung der aristotelischen Ontologie, indem er die materiale Ontologie sowohl mit einem ‚Unterbau‘ als auch mit einer ‚Krönung‘ versieht: Sie gründet auf einer apodiktischen Urfaktizität, die eine affektive Lebendigkeit aufweist, und gipfelt in einer Gottesauffassung, welche die erste Philosophie Aristoteles in einer praktischen Wende wieder aufnimmt. Die anfängliche Trennung beider Disziplinen wird somit in Richtung einer Phänomenologie überwunden, die eine phänomenologische Metaphysik miteinschließt und dadurch ihre Spannbreite neu definiert. (shrink)

The notion of nature is central not only to Abelard’s theory of cognition and to his treatment of universals, but also to Abelard’s modal logic, to his discussion of future contingents and to his theory of conditionals. In this essay, I emphasize how the notion of nature—despite its pervasiveness in Abelard’s philosophy and despite the attention that has been paid to it—still raises puzzling questions to interpreters. One of these puzzles has to do with Abelard’s idea that different individuals may (...) be “of a same nature,” a claim that according to some is hardly compatible with the nominalist position he endorsed. Another interpretative issue is raised by Abelard’s claims in De Intellectibus that substances have more than one nature, and that we might consider things as being of a different nature depending on which of their properties we pay attention to. Given Abelard’s essentialist framework, his assertions on the multiplicity of natures associable to a single individual may sound perplexing. Other issues that I take into account are Abelard’s attribution of natures to non-existent things such as chimaeras or horned men, and his remarks concerning the accessibility of natures to our knowledge. (shrink)