Proponents of ground, which is used to indicate relations of ontological fundamentality, insist that ground is a unified phenomenon, but this thesis has recently been criticized. I will first review the proponents' claims for ground's unicity, as well as the criticisms that ground is too heterogeneous to do the philosophical work it is supposed to do. By drawing on Aristotle's notion of homonymy, I explore whether ground's metaphysical heterogeneity can be theoretically accommodated while at the same time preserving its proponents' (...) desideratum that it be a unified phenomenon. (shrink)

The essence of artefacts is typically taken to be their function: they are defined in terms of the goals or aims of the artisans that make them. In this paper, an alternative theory is proposed tha...

For Abelard, the notion of “intention” (intentio, attentio) plays a central and important role in his cognitive and ethical theories. Is there any philosophical connection between its uses in these contexts? In recent publications, Constant Mews has argued that the cognitive and ethical senses of “intention” are related (namely, the cognitive sense evolves into the ethical sense), and that Abelard is repeatedly led to focus on intentions throughout his career due to the influence of Heloise. Here I evaluate Mews’s arguments (...) by examining and comparing the cognitive and ethical senses of the term. Although the basis for Mews’s claim seems to be false, I argue that there is nonetheless an important philosophical relationship between cognitive and ethical intentiones in Abelard’s thought, there cognition of which leads to a new and more precise understanding of his ethical theory of intention. (shrink)

This article is currently available as a free download on ingentaconnect.

Le glissement de l’attention du langage parlé vers le langage intérieur dans la philosophie médiévale est bien connu. Ce qui n’a jamais été remarqué est le rôle joué par la reconnaissance des paradoxes et problèmes de signification posés par les caractéristiques physiques du langage parlé. Cet essai examine ces paradoxes et les solutions apportées dans les écrits de Pierre Abélard, de ses contemporains, et de quelques auteurs du début du xiiie siècle.

William of Champeaux is best known as Peter Abelard’s teacher and the proponent of realism of universals. In recent years, many works on the linguistic liberal arts – grammar, dialectic and rhetoric – have been attributed to him. However, at least in the case of the dialectical commentaries, these attributions have been hastily made and are probably incorrect. The commentaries themselves, correctly situated in the time and place when Abelard and William worked at Notre Dame, nonetheless deserve close attention. The (...) commentaries on Aristotle’s De interpretatione are examined here: in them we find a new theory of signification which developed as a critical response to William of Champeaux’s view of the vox significativa, as well as an important clue to the origins of the doctrine of the proprietates terminorum. (shrink)

It has long been known that Jean-Baptiste Du Bos exercised a considerable influence on Hume’s essays and, in particular, on the ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ and ‘Of Tragedy’. It has also been noted that some passages in the Treatise bear marks of Du Bos’ influence. In this essay, we identify many more passages in the Treatise that bear unmistakable signs of Du Bos’ influence. We demonstrate that Du Bos certainly had a significant impact on Hume as he wrote the (...) Treatise. We go on to argue that Hume’s views on morality are an extension to the moral realm of Du Bos’ views on beauty and criticism. Du Bos may also have influenced Hume’s distinction between ideas and impressions. (shrink)

This volume explores the rich history of philosophy of language in the Western tradition, from Plato and Aristotle to the twentieth century. A team of leading experts focus in particular on key metaphysical debates about linguistic content, including questions of ontological status and metaphysical grounding.

This book examines the medieval tradition of Aristotelian logic from two perspectives.

Together, these entail that for every true proposition p, there exists some thing which could not exist and p be false.

Paul Sheehy has argued that the modal realist cannot satisfactorily allow for the necessity of God's existence. In this short paper I show that she can, and that Sheehy only sees a problem because he has failed to appreciate all the resources available to the modal realist. God may be an abstract existent outside spacetime or He may not be: but either way, there is no problem for the modal realist to admit that He exists at every concrete possible world.

British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) has been described as "one of the Finest portraitists of the nineteenth century-in any medium.

The first volume in the In Focus series to examine the work of a nineteenth-century photographer, this beautiful volume examines Cameron's passion for the "divine art" and her "deeply seated love of the beautiful" that are clearly revealed ...

In this review I argue that there are three 'tests' for maxims in Kant: the Categorical Imperative test; what I call the 'Esteem' test; and what I call the 'Temptation' test. The first test is a test for what Kant calls "legality", but what we may call the moral permissibility of acting on a maxim. The second test is a test for what Kant calls "morality", but what we may call the presence of a "good will," or the motive of (...) duty, which is the only motive that elicits our esteem. The third test - which is the subject of this book - is a test for the presence of "virtue," or a lack of conflict between my sensible inclinations and the motive of duty. If there is a conflict and I nevertheless act from the motive of duty, I have strength of will (enkrateia). If there is no conflict, and I act from the motive of duty, then I have virtue. God, who has an "infinite holy will" and who is not subject to sensible inclinations, and Jesus Christ, embodied angels, and possibly other rational finite beings in the universe, who have a "finite holy will" and who lack the propensity to subordinate respect for humanity to sensible inclinations, do not have virtue. (shrink)

The category of sympathy marks a number of basic divisions in early modern approaches to action explanations, whether for human agency or for change in the wider natural world. Some authors were critical of using sympathy to explain change. They call such principles “unintelligible” or assume they involve “mysterious” action at a distance. Others, including Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, appeal to sympathy to capture natural phenomena, or to supply a backbone to their metaphysics. Here (...) I discuss how concerns about sympathetic actions form at least a partial background for differing seventeenth-century conceptions of what it is to explain action. I argue that critics of sympathy generally insist on an “atomistic” approach to action explanation, which makes primitively relational phenomena come out as problematic. Proponents of sympathy, by contrast, allow for a more holistic approach to action explanation, which allows for such basic connections. Hence, divergent attitudes toward sympathetic action in part explain differences in approaches to explanation. I conclude by showing how some of these core concerns fade into the background when in the eighteenth-century sympathy gets psychologised and individualised. (shrink)

Anne Margaret Baxley offers a systematic interpretation of Kant's theory of virtue, whose most distinctive features have not been properly understood. She explores the rich moral psychology in Kant's later and less widely read works on ethics, and argues that the key to understanding his account of virtue is the concept of autocracy, a form of moral self-government in which reason rules over sensibility. Although certain aspects of Kant's theory bear comparison to more familiar Aristotelian claims about virtue, (...) Baxley contends that its most important aspects combine to produce something different - a distinctively modern, egalitarian conception of virtue which is an important and overlooked alternative to the more traditional Greek views which have dominated contemporary virtue ethics. (shrink)

Critical notice of Jacqueline Broad's Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century (CUP, 2002).

The volume is an excellent introduction to experimental natural philosophy and to moral and political philosophy in English-speaking countries in the seventeenth century, but the reader should be aware that other historically significant and philosophically interesting arguments from the period are not addressed.

Book Reviews Anne Margaret Baxley, Kantian Review, FirstView Article.

“Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” juxtaposes elliptical descriptions that reveal the interiorization of commodities in the economy of high capitalism. “Allegory in the nineteenth century vacated the outer world, to colonize the inner world.”32 Each of the exposé’s six sections consists of two parts: “Fourier, or the Arcades,” “Daguerre, or the Panoramas,” “Grandville, or the World Exhibitions,” “Louis-Philippe, or the Interior,” “Baudelaire, or the Streets of Paris,” “Haussmann, or the Baricades.”33The commercial arcade and not the factory is the logical (...) starting point for Benjamin. Paris, like London, the other capital of nineteenth-century capitalism, is an administrative and financial but not an industrial center. Paris is the locus classicus of bourgeois culture, which finds its most conspicuous expression in the arcade. The arcade cuts through and commercializes the residential block. It harnesses the technology of cast-iron “Pompeian” pillars, to offer in its enticing bay windows the latest, most sophisticated form of bourgeois merchandising. Fourier houses his “land of Cockaigne” in a “reactionary modification” of the arcade.34Parallel to the technical innovation of the arcades is that of the lifelike painted panoramas, which serve Jacques-Louis David’s pupils when they “draw from nature.” Politically superior, the city still dreams of the country. “The panoramas, which declare a revolution in the relation of art to technology, are at the same time an expression of a new feeling about life.”35 They drive a wedge between “plastic foreground” and “informational base.” The worker in the literary panorama is “a trimming for an idyll.” Technical innovations in photography reduce the representational significance of painting. Now photography “is given the task of making discoveries”: it explores the sewers and catacombs. It markets events. With impressionism and cubism, painting in turn transcends bourgeois conceptions of realism. 32. “Die Allegorie hat im neunzehnten Jahrhundert die Umwelt geräumt, um sich in der Innenwelt anzusiedeln” .33. Adorno objects to the use of people’s names in these titles and suggests that objects like dust or plush would bemore illuminating. Benjamin retains the names to evoke bourgeois interiorization. Louis-Philippe, however, is anomalous, since he is emblem rather than allegorist; the true allegorist of the “Louis-Philippe, or the Interior” section is the collector. Otherwise, the organization is strictly symmetrical: Benjamin discusses Charles Fourier, Louis Daguerre, and Grandville at the end of the sections in which they appear, the others at the beginning.34. Trans. Jephcott, p. 148. “Das Schlaraffenland,” “ihre reaktionäre Umbildung” . Anne Higonnet, formerly a student at the Ecole du Louvre, is a graduate student of art history at Yale University. Margaret Higonnet, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Connecticut, has written on Romantic and modern literary theory. Patrice Higonnet is Goelet Professor of French History at Harvard University. He has written on the French Revolution and, with Margaret Higonnet, is coauthor of a forthcoming book on suicide in eighteenth-century France. (shrink)

Celia Wolf‐Devine: Descartes on Seeing: Epistemology and Visual Perception. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993, pp. viii + 121. ISBN 0–8093–1838–5. Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan with selected variants front the Latin edition of 1668. Edited, with Introduction and Notes by Edwin Curley. Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., Indianapolis/cambridge 1994, pp. lxxx‐584. ISBN 0–87220–178–3, £27.95, 0–87220–177–5, £6.95. Allison Coudert: Leibniz and the Kabbalah. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995, pp. 218. £68.00. ISBN 0–7923–3114–1. Richard Price: The Correspondence. [Edited by D. O. Thomas (...) and W. Bernard Peach]. Vol. III. February 1786‐February 1791. Edited by W. Bernard Peach.. ISBN 0–8223–1327–8. Henry Allison: Idealism and Freedom: Essays on Kant's Theoretical and Practical Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, 1996. xxi + 217 pp. £30, £10.95. ISBN 0–521–48295‐X, 0–521–48337–9. Terry Pinkard: Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason. Cambridge University Press, 1994. 4451 pp. £40.00 hb. ISBN 0–521–45300–3. Mary Anne Perkins: Coleridge's Philosophy, The Logos as Unifying Principle. pp. 310. £30.00. ISBN 0–19–824075–9. Elzbieta Ettinger: Hannah Arendt ‐ Martin Heidegger £10.95 ISBN 0–300–06407–1 Dana R. Villa: Arendt and Heidegger ‐ The Fate of the Political ISBN 0–691–04400–7. (shrink)