Zhizneopisanie -- Kniga znanii︠a︡ -- Ukazanii︠a︡ i nastavlenii︠a︡ -- Kniga o dushe.

Two works: the first is a commentary on Book Lambda of Aristotle's Metaphysics; the second is a section of Avicenna's commentary on the so-called "Theology of Aristotle.

The history of philosophy must identify in each system the determining motifs, the genuine crystallizations present throughout the entire system, and separate them from proofs, justifications, and dialogues, from their presentations by philosophers, to the degree that the latter were conscious of them. It must separate the silently advancing mole of genuine philosophical knowledge from the wordy, exoteric, phenomenological, multiformed consciousness of the subject, that consciousness which is the receptacle and motivating force of these reasonings.

The term ‘consciousness’ is a latecomer upon the stage of Western philosophy. The ancients had no such term. Sunoida, like its Latin equivalent conscio, meant the same as ‘I know together with’ or ‘I am privy, with another, to the knowledge that’. If the prefixes sun and cum functioned merely as intensifiers, then the verbs meant simply ‘I know well’ or ‘I am well aware that’. Although the ancients did indeed raise questions about the nature of our knowledge of our (...) own perceptions and thought, and introduced the idea of an inner sense, they did not characterize the mind as the domain of consciousness. Aristotelians conceived of the mind as the array of powers that distinguish humanity from the rest of animate nature. The powers of self-movement, of perception and sensation, and of appetite, are shared with other animals. What is distinctive of humanity, and what characterizes the mind, are the powers of the intellect – of reason, and of the rational will. Knowledge of these powers is not obtained by consciousness or introspection, but by observation of their exercise in our engagement with the world around us. The mediaevals followed suit. They likewise lacked any term for consciousness, although they too indulged in reflections upon ‘inner senses’ – in the wake of Avicenna's distinguishing, arguably to excess, five such senses. (shrink)

al-Tabīʻīyāt min ʻuyūn al-ḥikmah -- Fī al-ajrām al-ʻulwīyah -- Fī al-quwá al-insānīyah wa-idrākātihā -- Fī al-ḥudūd -- Fī aqsām al-ʻulūm al-ʻaqlīyah -- Fī ithbāt al-nubūwāt wa-taʼwīl rumūzihim wa-amthālihim -- Fī maʻānī al-ḥurūf al-hijāʼīyah -- Fī al-ʻahd -- Fī ʻilm al-akhlāq -- Qiṣṣat Salāmān wa-Absāl.

Dag Nikolaus Hasse & Amos Bertolacci (eds.). The Arabic, Hebrew and Latin Reception of Avicenna’s Metaphysics kitabının reviewü.

RésuméCet article vise à établir que la place centrale d'Avicenne dans l'histoire intellectuelle de l'Islam ne se limite pas aux disciplines de la philosophie théorique, mais que cet auteur a eu aussi une influence profonde et forte sur la conception de la philosophie pratique jusqu'aux temps modernes. J'analyserai l'impact de la conception avicénienne de la philosophie pratique en étudiant les différentes classifications de la philosophie pratique proposées par Avicenne tout au long de sa carrière ainsi que les facteurs motivant sa (...) négligence de la philosophie pratique dans ses sommes philosophiques, sur la base de sa conception des relations entre philosophie etšarīʿa. Pour établir ma thèse concernant l'influence de cet auteur sur la conception de la philosophie pratique dans la tradition islamique, j'étudierai des œuvres majeures concernant la classification des sciences ainsi que les commentaires et gloses relatifs aux deux sommes philosophiques les plus importantes et les plus largement diffusées dans la tradition philosophique post-avicénienne, que sont lesHidāyat al-ḥikmad'al-Abharī's et lesḤikmat al-ʿaynd'al-Kātibī's. (shrink)

Philosopy; Avicenna, 980-1037; criticism.

Nazariyat, Journal for the History of Islamic Philosophy and Sciences, issued twice a year in English and Turkish (Nazariyat İslam Felsefe ve Bilim Tarihi Araştırmaları Dergisi), is a refereed international journal. It publishes original studies, critical editions of classical texts and book reviews on Islamic philosophy, kalām, theoretical aspects of Sufism and the history of sciences. The goal of Nazariyat is to contribute to the discovery, examination and reinterpretation of the theoretical traditions in the history of Islamic thought, by giving (...) special attention to the post-classical period of it. **ISSN: 2148-8088 E-ISBN: 2547-9415**. (shrink)

This article examines Richard Lynch’s metaphysics and finds that he ultimately resolves his account of being in terms of essens—that which denotes the essential structure that a being (ens) has apart from existence. For Lynch, unlike many of his Jesuit contemporaries, existence is accidental to being. Yet, even if essens is distinct from existence, it is not altogether lacking being, but is accorded a certain kind of “essential being,” which is identified with the possible. Lynch thus seems to re-appropriate an (...) essentialist metaphysics that has antecedents in Avicenna and Henry of Ghent’s notion of esse essentiae. More proximate to Lynch is the Jesuit thinker Francesco Albertini, who takes Henry’s metaphysics and conveys it to Baroque Scholasticism. Lynch continues down that metaphysical path which, as we shall see, generated fierce controversy among late seventeenth-century Scholastics regarding the nature of creaturely possibility. (shrink)

By transcendental aesthetic, Kant means “the science of all principles of a priori sensibility” (A 21/B 35). These, he argues, are the laws that properly direct our judgments of taste (B 35 – 36 fn.), i.e. our aesthetic judgments as we ordinarily understand that notion in the context of contemporary art. Thus the first part of the Critique of Pure Reason, entitled the Transcendental Aesthetic, enumerates the necessary presuppositions of, among other things, our ability to make empirical judgments about particular (...) works of art. These presuppositions are sensible rather than intellectual because on Kant's view, all intellection that considers objects of any kind, whether abstract or concrete, must at base connect to actual, material objects with which we come into direct contact; and this we can do only through sensibility (A 19/B 33). Thus the following discussion explores what Kant claims must be true of us in order to make the sorts of aesthetic judgments we make, rather than any particular class or quality of aesthetic judgments itself. On Kant's view, what must be true of us in order to make aesthetic judgments is not different from what must be true of us in order to make any other kind of judgment about empirical objects. This last point is worth emphasizing, in order to correct an interpretation of Kant's account of aesthetic judgment in the Critique of Judgment that wrongly reads Kant as claiming that aesthetic judgments do not have to satisfy the same basic requirements of judgment that any other kind of judgment also must satisfy, such as the synthetic subsumption of such objects under certain necessary and hard-wired concepts of understanding, the internal coherence of such judgments with other, non-aesthetic ones of a more abstract and comprehensive character, the unified consciousness within which such judgments are intelligibly made, and the like. Of course Kant recognizes the special character of aesthetic judgments and unpacks it in the... (shrink)

Though currently marginalised in Western philosophy, tenth-century Arabic philosopher Abu Nasr Alfarabi is one of the most important thinkers of the medieval era. In fact, he was known as the ‘second teacher’ (after Aristotle) to philosophers such as Avicenna and Averroes. As this epithet suggests, Alfarabi and his successors engaged in a critical and creative dialogue with thinkers from other historical traditions, including that of the Ancient Greeks, although the creativity of his part is often marginalised as well. In (...) this article, I offer a new interpretation of Alfarabi’s sweeping volume, The Principles of the Opinions of the Virtuous Community. My focus is the materialism that overflows Alfarabi’s account of soul in general and the imaginative power in particular. The political conclusion of this account is that Virtuous Community does not directly present Alfarabi’s ideal ruler or community. Instead, it offers a materialist critique that prefigures critical theory and post-structuralism and thereby provides guidelines for how to more effectively engage monotheistic communities in the pursuit of social justice – including along the axes of race, gender and sexual orientation. (shrink)

In this article, I explore two neglected works by the twentieth-century Jewish German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left and Natural Law and Human Dignity. Drawing on previous analyses of leftist Aristotelians and natural law, I blend Bloch’s two texts’ concepts of pregnant matter and maternal law into “pregnant materialist natural law.” More precisely, Aristotelian Left articulates a concept of matter as a dynamic, impersonal agential force, ever pregnant with possible forms delivered by artist-midwives, building Bloch’s (...) messianic utopia. And Natural Law resurrects the Stoics’ concept of natural law as drawing on a prehistoric matriarchal utopia, later channeled by earth goddess cults misconstrued by the nineteenth-century German anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen as political matriarchy. I then conclude by linking this pregnant materialist natural law to Dionysus as son of the Great Mother Goddess. Though stigmatized throughout homophobic Western history for his queerness and maternal dependence, Dionysus is also the patron god of Bloch’s hero, the slave revolutionary Spartacus, paramour of a priestess of Dionysus who prophesied his divine mission of liberation. (shrink)

The present "Studienausgabe" is the fruit of over 40 years of labor on Paracelus [[sic]]. While Sudhoff's monumental edition continued by K. Goldhammer is intended to serve the specialist, Peuckert's aim is simply to make Paracelsus accessible to the philosopher and to the historian of ideas. Like Luther's, Paracelus's [[sic]] German is hardly comprehensible today; hence the editor had to "rewrite" it. The result is sound and easily understandable German. This welcome "vulgarization" should, however, have been compensated by notes: as (...) a matter of fact there are no critical or commenting notes in any of the volumes published as of now. We are promised a glossary at the end of the fifth volume, but even this will not mend the edition's essential shortcoming: a complete lack of any kind of scholarly apparatus. The first two volumes contain the major "medical" writings in chronological order. These earlier texts witness Paracelsus's emancipation from the ballast of medieval science: Galen, Avicenna, etc., and a significant turn towards a new conception of natural science in which speculation and experience are intimately interwoven. In the first volume there are several writings on Alchemy, among them the short treatise on the Three First Principles which was so heavily to influence the "pansophy" of the seventeenth century and even the great mystic of Görlitz, Jacob Boehme. The second volume contains the mature medical texts including the "Opus Paramirum," this herald of later bio-chemical thought. Obviously the real interest of the so-called medical texts lies in their speculative elements and they should be read together with the philosophical texts, making up the third volume. This third volume is rightly centered around the monumental "Philosophia Sagax," the major work of Paracelsus. This is the treatise whose influence reached far beyond the twilight of pansophy until the early and late Goethe and Romantic philosophy. Better than any other, this text demonstrates the uninterrupted continuity of German speculation throughout three centuries. If the resolution of the remaining two unpublished volumes turns out to be as fortunate as those reviewed here, these well-printed books should find their way to the shelves of any library, private or public, orientated towards the study of German philosophical thought.—M. J. V. (shrink)

In this book, a dozen distinguished scholars in the field of the history of philosophy and science investigate aspects of the commentary tradition on Aristotle's De generatione et corruptione, one of the least studied among Aristotle's treatises in natural philosophy. Many famous thinkers such as Johannes Philoponus, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, John Buridan, Nicole Oresme, Francesco Piccolomini, Jacopo Zabarella, and Galileo Galilei wrote commentaries on it. The distinctive feature of the present book is that it approaches this commentary tradition (...) as a coherent whole, thereby ignoring the usual historiographical distinctions between the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the seventeenth century. Frans de Haas and Henk Kubbinga address the Greek commentary tradition on De generatione et corruptione. Simone van Riet's essay is devoted to the Latin version of Avicenna's third treatise of his Kitab al Shifa, which discusses Aristotle's De generatione et corruptione. James Otte traces the intricate history of the identification of the Latin translator of Aristotle's treatise as Burgundio of Pisa. The essay by John Murdoch explores the fortuna of atomistic arguments in the Latin commentary tradition. Jurgen Sarnowsky, Henk Braakhuis, and Stefano Caroti examine various themes in the commentaries that were produced by the so-called Buridan School, that is, John Buridan, Albert of Saxony, Nicholas Oresme, and Marsilius of Inghen. The article by Silvia Donati focuses on the influential commentary by the Expositor, Giles of Rome. The final essay, written by Anita Guerrini, tackles Robert Boyle's attitude in the Origin of Forms and Qualities toward such Aristotelian key concepts as forms, matter, qualities, and mixture. These essays are prefaced by a preliminary survey by Hans Thijssen of Aristotle's text, its Latin translations and its Greek, Arabic and Latin commentaries. (shrink)

This is the second volume of analytical commentary on Wittgenstein's masterpiece, the Philosophical Investigations. Like the first, it consists of philosophical essays and critical exegesis. The six essays deal comprehensively with various themes in Wittgenstein''s philosophy: the relationship between his mathematics and his philosophy of mind; his conception of grammar and rules of grammar; the relation between a rule and what accords with a rule; the characterization of rule-following as mastery of a technique manifest in practice; his notion of a (...) form of life, and of agreement in definitions and judgements; a comprehensive investigation into his account of logical and mathematical necessity and other topics. (shrink)

This book is a rather mediocre and unimaginative summary of the major themes of Avicenna's metaphysics. Chahine makes the attempt to situate him against the background of antique and medieval philosophy, but the ideas themselves are never given a contextual treatment. One does not see what was truly original and significant in Avicenna's philosophy; one is left frustrated by the succession of scholastic lieux communs and only seldom gratified by a beautiful quote. There is a certain amount of (...) information on the ideas of other Islamic thinkers influencing Avicenna or influenced by him, but this cannot compensate for the lack of a really penetrating analysis—M. J. V. (shrink)

The study ascertained (1) whether an observer's scope of justice with reference to either the moral agent or the target person of a moral act, would affect his/her judgements of the ethicality of the act, and (2) whether observer judgements of ethicality parallel the moral agent's decision processes in systematically evaluating the intensity of the moral issue. A scenario approach was used. Results affirmed both research questions. Discussions covered the implications of the findings for the underlying cognitive processes of moral (...) judgements, for the link between judgements of fairness and ethicality, as well as for the debate of ethical absolutism versus relativism. (shrink)

This introduction to the Journal of Business Research special issue on anti-consumption briefly defines and highlights the importance of anticonsumption research, provides an overview of the latest studies in the area, and suggests an agenda for future research on anti-consumption.

Among Plato's works, the Statesman is usually seen as transitional between the Republic and the Laws. This book argues that the dialogue deserves a special place of its own. Whereas Plato is usually thought of as defending unchanging knowledge, Dr Lane demonstrates how, by placing change at the heart of political affairs, Plato reconceives the link between knowledge and authority. The statesman is shown to master the timing of affairs of state, and to use this expertise in managing the conflict (...) of opposed civic factions. To this political argument corresponds a methodological approach which is seen to rely not only on the familiar method of 'division', but equally on the unfamiliar centrality of the use of 'example'. The demonstration that method and politics are interrelated transforms our understanding of the Statesman and its fellow dialogues. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker appeals to the idea of moral-epistemic disappointment in order to show how our practices of moral appraisal can be sensitive to cultural and historical contingency. In particular, she thinks that moral-epistemic disappointment allows us to avoid the extremes of crude moralism and a relativism of distance. In my response I want to investigate what disappointment is, and whether it can constitute a form of focused moral appraisal in the way that Fricker imagines. I will argue that Fricker is (...) unable to appeal to disappointment as standardly understood, but that there is a more plausible way of understanding the notion that she can employ. There are, nevertheless, significant worries about the capacity of disappointment in this sense to function as a form of moral appraisal. I will argue, finally, that even if Fricker can address these worries, her position might end up closer to moralism than she would like. (shrink)

This book offers a major reinterpretation of the `secularization' of medieval ideas by examining scholastic discussions on the nature of the common good. It challenges the view that the rediscovery of Aristotle was the primary catalyst for the emergence of a secular theory of the state. A detailed exposition of the content and the context of late scholastic political and ethical thought reveals that the roots of medieval 'secularization' were profoundly theological.

The practice of evidence based medicine has changed the role of the physician from information dispenser to gatherer and analyser. Studies and controlled trials that may contain unknown errors, or uncertainties, are the primary sources for evidence based decisions in medicine. These sources may be corrupted by a number of means, such as inaccurate statistical analysis, statistical manipulation, population bias, or relevance to the patient in question. Regardless of whether any of these inaccuracies are apparent, the uncertainty of their presence (...) in physician information should be disclosed to the patient. These uncertainties are not, however, shared by physicians with patients, and have caused a direct increase in patient responsibilities and mistrust. Only when disclosure of uncertainty becomes commonplace in medical practice will the physician/patient relationship evolve to a level of greater understanding and satisfaction for both the physician and patient. (shrink)

All illness represents a state of diminished autonomy and therefore the doctor-patient relationship necessarily and justifiably involves a degree of medical paternalism argues the author, an American medical student. In a broad-ranging paper he discusses the concepts of autonomy and paternalism in the context of the doctor-patient relationship. Given the necessary diminution of autonomy which illness inflicts, a limited form of medical paternalism, aimed at restoring or maximising the patient's autonomy is entirely acceptable, and indeed fundamental to the relationship he (...) argues. However, the exercise of this paternalism should be flexible and related to the current 'level of autonomy' of the patient himself. An editorial in this issue comments briefly on this paper. (shrink)

The first comprehensive study of Nietzsche's earliest book, The Birth of Tragedy, this important volume by M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern examines the work in detail: its place in Nietzsche's philosophical career; its value as an account of ancient Greek culture; its place in the history of German ideas, and its value as a theory of tragedy and music. Presented in a fresh twenty-first-century series livery, and including a specially commissioned preface written by Lesley Chamberlain, illuminating its enduring (...) importance and relevance to philosophical enquiry, this accessible study has been revived for a new generation of readers. (shrink)

Consider orthodox motivational judgment internalism: necessarily, A’s sincere moral judgment that he or she ought to φ motivates A to φ. Such principles fail because they cannot accommodate the amoralist, or one who renders moral judgments without any corresponding motivation. The orthodox alternative, externalism, posits only contingent relations between moral judgment and motivation. In response I first revive conceptual internalism by offering some modifications on the amoralist case to show that certain community-wide motivational failures are not conceptually possible. Second, I (...) introduce a theory of moral motivation that supplements the intuitive responses to different amoralist cases. According to moral judgment purposivism (MJP), in rough approximation, a purpose of moral judgments is to motivate corresponding behaviors such that a mental state without this purpose is not a moral judgment. MJP is consistent with conceptual desiderata, provides an illuminating analysis of amoralist cases, and offers a step forward in the internalist-externalist debates. (shrink)