"Brilliant and bedraggled, the picaresque Jewish philosopher Solomon Maimon was one of the great thinkers of the eighteenth century.

The Essay on a New Logic or Theory of Thinking was Salomon Maimon's hard-won success after a lifetime's pursuit of philosophical wisdom, originally published in Berlin in 1794. Timothy Franz presents its first translation, with the goal of allowing the New Logic to be an object of further study, accessible to the philosophical tradition. Maimon's work is the product of philosophical genius, and at its heart it is a serene account of reflection on thought that can instruct anyone (...) to unify the principles of logic, on the one hand, and the principles of our scientific approach to the world, on the other, culminating in a thought-provoking metaphysics and philosophy of religion. Maimon also intended the work to be the foundation of his ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics. However, as a Jewish philosopher from Lithuania, he had learned his subject as a wanderer, and he struggled to be understood by his fellow Jews, by Germans, and by the philosophical community. Consequently, there is a severe tension between Maimon's serene vision and his persona and presentation. Franz translates the text of the New Logic, Maimon's Letters to Aenesidemus explaining himself to thinkers he felt to be close to him, two hostile reviews he vigorously annotated, and the letter to Kant introducing his idea for a critical philosophy of logic. Franz prefaces the work with a brief history of Maimon's philosophical development and an introduction that attempts to reconcile Maimon's presentation with his vision, and to come to understand both of them together. (shrink)

Essay on Transcendental Philosophy presents the first English translation of Salomon Maimon's principal work, originally published in Berlin in 1790. In this book, Maimon seeks to further the revolution in philosophy wrought by Kant's Critique of Pure Reason by establishing a new foundation for transcendental philosophy in the idea of difference. Kant judged Maimon to be his most profound critic, and the Essay went on to have a decisive influence on the course of post-Kantian German Idealism. A (...) more recent admirer was Gilles Deleuze who drew on Maimon's Essay in constructing his own philosophy of difference. This long-overdue translation makes Maimon's brilliant analysis and criticism of Kant's philosophy accessible to an English readership for the first time. The text includes a comprehensive introduction, a glossary, translators' notes, a bibliography of writings on Maimon and an index. It also includes translations of correspondence between Maimon and Kant and a letter Maimon wrote to a Berlin journal clarifying the philosophical position of the essay, all of which bring the book's context alive for the modern reader. (shrink)

Brentano distinguishes between intentionality and reference. According to Brentano, all mental acts are intentionally directed toward something. Some mental acts also refer to something, which is the case when their object exists in reality. For Brentano, such acts, besides their intentionality, have a peculiar relation of similarity to their object. However, there is no mention of Brentano’s distinction between intentionality and reference in the literature. Drawing on some lesser known texts, this paper aims both at showing that Brentano makes such (...) a distinction and at underscoring the philosophical significance of his position. (shrink)

"Brilliant and bedraggled, the picaresque Jewish philosopher Solomon Maimon was one of the great thinkers of the eighteenth century.

Both traditional accounts of hope and some of their recent critics analyze hope exclusively in terms of attitudes that a hoper bears towards a hoped-for prospect, such as desire and probability assignment. I argue that all of these accounts misidentify cases of despair as cases of hope, and so misconstrue the nature of hope. I show that a more satisfactory view is arrived at by noticing that in addition to the aforementioned attitudes, hope involves a characteristic attitude towards an external (...) factor, on whose operation the hoper takes the prospect's realization to depend causally. (shrink)

This book sheds new light on the history of the philosophically crucial notion of intentionality, which accounts for one of the most distinctive aspects of our mental life: the fact that our thoughts are about objects. Intentionality is often described as a certain kind of relation. Focusing on Franz Brentano, who introduced the notion into contemporary philosophy, and on the Aristotelian tradition, which was Brentano’s main source of inspiration, the book reveals a rich history of debate on precisely the relational (...) nature of intentionality. It shows that Brentano and the Aristotelian authors from which he drew not only addressed the question whether intentionality is a relation, but also devoted extensive discussions to what kind of relation it is, if any. The book aims to show that Brentano distinguishes the intentional relation from two other relations with which it might be confused, namely, causality and reference, which also hold between thoughts and their objects. Intentionality accounts for the aboutness of a thought; causality, by contrast, explains how the thought is generated, and reference, understood as a sort of similarity, occurs when the object towards which the thought is directed exists. Brentano claims to find some anticipation of his views in Aristotle. This book argues that, whether or not Brentano’s interpretation of Aristotle is correct, his claim is true of the Aristotelian tradition as a whole, since followers of Aristotle more or less explicitly made some or all of Brentano’s distinctions. This is demonstrated through examination of some major figures of the Aristotelian tradition (broadly understood), including Alexander of Aphrodisias, the Neoplatonic commentators, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and Francisco Suárez. This book combines a longue durée approach – focusing on the long-term evolution of philosophical concepts rather than restricting itself to a specific author or period – with systematic analysis in the history of philosophy. By studying Brentano and the Aristotelian authors with theoretical sensitivity, it also aims to contribute to our understanding of intentionality and cognate features of the mind. (shrink)

In this paper, we seek to answer two questions: (1) what does boardroom diversity stand for in the strategic management literature? And, (2) is there a significant relationship between boardroom diversity and corporate social performance. We first clarify the boardroom diversity concept, distinguishing between a structural diversity of boards and a demographic diversity in boards, and then we investigate its possible linkage to social performance in a sample of S&P500 firms. We find a significant relationship between diversity in boards and (...) social performance. This relationship is moderated by diversity of boards. Our results also reveal the effects of the specific variables that make up the diversity of boards and diversity in boards constructs. In particular, gender, and age have a significant effect on corporate social performance. Some important measurement issues are raised and discussed. (shrink)

This essay outlines the transformation of the ostensibly mundane example of two hands touching each other in Husserl’s Ideas II into the pivotal concept in Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of flesh and notion of embodied subjectivity. By focusing on the contexts in which the example appears in the works of Husserl and of Merleau-Ponty, it seeks to explicate Merleau-Ponty’s fascination with Husserl’s example, its role in the development of his own thought and in the conceptual shift in his late works on the (...) body. I explore the various stages in the metamorphosis of Husserl’s example of touching hands, originally used merely to differentiate the sense of touch from that of sight, into Merleau-Ponty’s radical concept of flesh that overturns “our idea of the thing and the world, and... results in an ontological rehabilitation of the sensible.”. (shrink)

This paper focuses on a crucial question of social ontology addressed by Gerda Walther, namely, whether a social community has its own reality over and above that of its members and its cultural “products”, such as language, religion, infrastructure, and works of art. Walther has a nuanced answer which combines elements of phenomenology and Marxism. She praises Marxists for drawing our attention to the “community as such”, taken as an object distinct from its members and their relations. She maintains the (...) thesis, defended according to her by “certain socialists and Hegelians” (which presumably includes Marxists), that communities have their own reality. However, she develops it one step further, arguing that these social structures are “higher-order” unitary realities that exist over and above their members and cultural products. In addition, she enriches this realist position from a phenomenological point of view by identifying with precision the kinds of mental act on which communities are founded, namely, “unifications” and “we-experiences”. As such, Walther’s theory is an early encounter between phenomenology and Marxism, prior to Trần Đức Thảo and Jean-Paul Sartre, and thus deserves much more attention than it has received in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the complex relations between aesthetics and phenomenology as they show themselves within the core locus of their interplay—the realm of the visible and the invisible. To do so, the paper examines a specific case study, a Rembrandt painting—A Woman Bathing in a Stream (1654)—through which the discussion illuminates the interconnected and inseparable relationship between aesthetics and phenomenology in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the visible and the invisible. The reading addresses both dimensions of the visible: the (...) essential intersubjective aspect of life and its complex visual representation in art. To achieve this, the paper first explores Merleau-Ponty’s late aesthetic ontology—a phenomenology that perceives the aesthetic realm, particularly the visible domain, as originating from human corporeal existence, thereby redefining the act of seeing and the concepts of the visible and the invisible; I show the manner in which invisible elements permeate our visual experience in the Rembrandt painting and in seeing as such. The paper also reveals the unique ontological role of painting and the painter in unveiling the aesthetic world, and in guiding the philosopher toward a vision that true philosophy—phenomenology—must embrace. The paper concludes by rethinking the significance of aesthetics, and especially, the arts, to phenomenological thought, and the necessity of phenomenology to aesthetic thought. (shrink)

This essay offers a new understanding of Merleau-Ponty's notion of the Other, the problem that revolves around it, and its far-reaching repercussions by shedding light on aspects that usually go unnoticed in the interpretation of his late thought in these regards. I show how Merleau-Ponty's emerging ontology in his late writings opens anew, in a complex manner, the problem of the Other, transforming it in a way that dismantles, to begin with, traditional epistemological questions regarding the Other, as well as (...) principal difficulties regarding the Other's appearance within the realm of phenomena which have occupied phenomenology from its very beginning. I demonstrate how Merleau-Ponty's late writings in fact bind the problem of the Other with the question regarding the very limits of phenomenology and the realm of meaning as a whole. (shrink)

Applying the characterization of ‘rumour’ to designate transmission of unconfirmed information or to designate political initiatives reflecting a particular configuration is a way of indicating that certain contradictory items of information are in circulation, but does not allow these to be related back to the political circumstances that are determining them. The journalistic preoccupation with rumour thus leads to the media becoming blinded to the political significance implicit in such information exchanges. As a consequence, the narrative content of this type (...) of information, whether or not it resembles that which is carried by certain forms of rumour, may effectively escape the central focus of the media treatment, which could open up a more political perception of these same exchanges. If, by limiting itself to doing no more than relay ‘rumours’, the press thus avoids taking part in the political game which conditions this information, it nevertheless fails to bring out the flavour of this game and to deconstruct the focal effect sought after. The ‘rumours’ of journalism are a political resource for the participants associated with them who are involved in a much broader political process which cannot be reduced to the simple dimension of rumour. (shrink)

This paper examines the concept of esse iudicatum in Peter Auriol. For Auriol, esse iudicatum is a property that objects acquire when they are correlated with an act of iudicium. Iudicium is the production of an object in the mind, and so esse iudicatum is the property of being produced as such an object. I will show that Auriol’s theory is at the confluence of two distinct streams of thought. It emerges, first, from a long philosophical tradition running from Aristotle (...) to Thomas Aquinas through Averroes. Indeed, the notion of iudicium is derived from that of κρίσις, which refers to an active mode of cognition, and Auriol himself refers to Averroes when he develops his theory of iudicium. In addition, Auriol combines this material with Christian theological sources – more precisely, with discussions about the production of the divine Word, which is understood as a “saying”, dicere, of which iu-dicium is an echo. (shrink)

In the famous Appendix to paragraphs 11 and 20 of his 5th Logical Investigation, Husserl criticizes the concept of ‘immanent object’ defended by Brentano and his pupils. Husserl holds that intentional objects, even non-existent ones, are ‘transcendent’. Yet long before Husserl’s criticism, Brentano and his pupils, in their theories of intentionality, besides immanent objects also took into account transcendent ones, in a similar way to Husserl, since such transcendent objects were not necessarily objects that exist. The ‘immanent object’ (immanenter Gegenstand) (...) was also called ‘presented-thing as presented’ (Vorgestelltes als Vorgestelltes), whereas the ‘transcendent object’ was called ‘object tout court’ (Gegenstand schlechtweg) or ‘presented-thing tout court’ (Vorgestelltes schlechtweg). Even if it is in Marty that one finds the clearest distinction between these two kinds of objects, other pupils of Brentano, and Brentano himself, made similar distinctions. Despite its importance, this point has been neglected in the Brentanian literature. In the first part of this article, I present the way in which immanent and transcendent objects have been distinguished in the School of Brentano. In the second part of the article, I present some problems linked to the distinction of two objects for every mental act, an immanent and a transcendent one; these problems could explain the abandonment of the notion of ‘immanent object’ by many philosophers of the Brentanian tradition. I conclude with some remarks on the distinction between content and object in the School of Brentano. (shrink)

This paper aims to present and evaluate the (unduly neglected) account of the essence of colours developed by the early phenomenologist Adolf Reinach. Reinach claims that colours, as regards their nature or essence, are physical entities. He is opposed to the idea that colours are “subjective” or “psychic”. It might be the case that the colours we see in the world do not exist but are mere appearances. However, their non-existence would not entail any change in their essence: that is, (...) they would not be psychic, but would just be non-existent physical entities. In Reinach’s view, we can be “ontic-neutral essentialists” about colours: we can remain neutral as to the existence of colours but still make claims about their essence. In the first part of the paper, I present Reinach’s take on the essence of colours. In the second part, I address his existential neutrality about colours; in particular, I argue that Reinach’s ontic-neutral essentialism brings to the fore a seldom noted but crucial distinction to be made in the discussion of colours, that between empirical and metaphysical non-realism about colours. (shrink)

This paper discusses the thesis defended by Edith Stein that certain acts can be attributed to the State. According to Stein, the State is a social structure characterized by sovereignty. As such, it is responsible for the production, interpretation, and application of law. These tasks require the performance of acts, most of which are what Stein calls “social acts” like enactments and orders. For Stein, the acts in question are made by the organs of the State, but in the name (...) of the State, and are thus attributed to the State via a relation of representation. In the first section, the paper presents Stein’s thesis that the sovereignty of the State entails a series of legal prerogatives, which in turn result in various social acts being ascribed to the State through its representatives. In the second section, the paper critically discusses Stein’s views, notably her theory of representation, and her account of the nature of the State, while emphasizing its most interesting aspects, namely, its fine-grained analyses of the various acts that are attributed to the State. (shrink)

Introduction -- Matter, form of cognition, form of sensibility, form of understanding, time and space -- Sensibility, imagination, understanding, pure a priori concepts of the understanding or categories, schemata, answering the question Quid Juris, answering the question Quid Facti, doubts about the latter -- Ideas of the understanding, ideas of reason, etc. -- Subject and predicate. the determinable and the determination -- Thing, possible, necessary, ground, consequence, etc. -- Identity, difference, opposition, reality, logical, and transcendental negation -- Magnitude, alteration, change, (...) etc. -- Truth, subjective, objective, logical, metaphysical -- On the I, materialism, idealism, dualism, etc. -- Short overview of the whole work -- My ontology -- On symbolic cognition and philosophical language. (shrink)

The aim of my article is to present the critique by Brentanians – more precisely, by Brentano himself and his students Stumpf and Marty – of the thesis that colours are properties that are relational to a perceiver. For Brentanians, colours are monadic physical properties. Brentanians, I will show, think that colours do not exhibit a relationality to perception when we experience them, and that the concepts of them do not contain any mark representing a relation to perception; this phenomenological (...) and logical non-relationality, they think, allows them to hold that colours are not relational by nature. Despite arguing that colours are monadic and physical, Brentanians also hold that colours do not exist in reality, and in their opinion these two theses are perfectly compatible. I will further show that although Brentanians (especially Marty) claim that colours are monadic, they nonetheless allow for a loose relationality of colours to perception which is, however, identical to that of any other physical property. I will conclude by discussing some interesting consequences of the Brentanian theory for contemporary debates about colours. (shrink)

This paper aims to address a problem faced by any philosopher who treats universals as intentional objects: in defending this thesis, aren't they committed to the view that each of us thinks an individuated universal, since each of us, when thinking of a universal, must have our own intentional object? This problem, which is mentioned by Brentano at the turn of the twentieth century, originated in the Middle Ages in debates initiated by Averroes about the nature of the intellect. It (...) shows up in the later Aquinas, due to his theory of the verbum, which might be interpreted as a sort of intentional object, but it is solved without too much difficulty. It is later found in Hervaeus Natalis, who does accept intentional objects; in contrast to Aquinas, it is not clear that Hervaeus has a good solution to the problem. After first presenting the problem, this paper then turns to its medieval origins by analyzing its occurrence in Aquinas's criticism of Averroes. It then explains why Hervaeus has more difficulties than Aquinas in solving the problem. It concludes with a systematic reflection on the various possible solutions to the problem. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Enlightenment and Its Antecedents Equal Rights and American Constitutional Law Liberty and Equality under the Constitution The Radical Critique and the Radical Dilemma Rawls Dworkin Equality of Capabilities Equality Unmodified or Spheres of Justice Is Equality a Value? References.

As a Swiss-born Austro-German philosopher who taught in Czernowitz and in Prague, Marty was not only a cosmopolitan thinker; he had also an exceptional knowledge of the history of philosophy and well-informed inclinations towards specific branches of the discipline. He was influenced by Aristotle, the Scholastics, and early modern philosophers (both rationalists and empiricists), and was unsympathetic towards Kant and German Idealism. Yet his main intellectual inspiration came from his master Franz Brentano, whose conception of philosophy as a science—especially his (...) fourth habilitation thesis—made a lasting impression on many of his students, most prominently on Marty and Stumpf. By way of presenting the contributions to this volume, we offer here a general outline of Marty’s life and works, of his Brentanian upbringing, and we sketch some of his central ideas in philosophy—more precisely on mind, language, and their ontology, with regards to the themes discussed in the contributions. (shrink)

This paper presents and evaluates the Brentanian theory of association of ideas. The topic of association usually brings to mind British Empiricism, which is often thought to have a monopoly on the matter. Brentano, however, adopts an original, alternative account of association. He argues that all cases of association can be placed under a single general law, that of “habit”. His explicit account of the topic is rather brief; however, his most faithful pupil, Anton Marty, thoroughly developed his master’s views. (...) Marty presents Brentano’s account of association in detail, and endeavours to defend it against rival theories, notably those which hold that the laws of “similarity”, or of what is called “redintegration”, are able to explain all cases of association. First, the paper presents the information found in Brentano himself on association of ideas. Then, it turns to Marty to analyze his developments of the Brentanian view. Finally, the paper evaluates Brentano and Marty’s account by tackling some objections that it may face. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to the study of the proximities between phenomenology and analytic philosophy. Starting with some remarks on Husserl’s theory of the Lebenswelt and the echoes it finds among analytic philosophers partisans of the common sense, the paper focuses on some specific constituents of the Lebenswelt, namely «secondary qualities». More precisely, the paper points out the parallels between the theories of secondary qualities of Husserl and of P. F. Strawson, a major defender of the common sense. Both (...) Strawson and Husserl attribute an «objectivity», in the sense of «intersubjectivity», to secondary qualities. Besides, both these authors consider that the perception of primary qualities requires the perception of secondary qualities. This leads Strawson and Husserl to ask to what extent physics itself may epistemologically depend on the perception of secondary qualities. (shrink)

This paper examines the account of ordinary language semantics developed by Franz Brentano and his pupil Anton Marty. Long before the interest in ordinary language in the analytic tradition, Brentanian philosophers were exploring our everyday use of words, as opposed to the scientific use of language. Brentano and Marty were especially interested in the semantics of (common) names in ordinary language. They claimed that these names are vague, and that this is due to the structure of the concepts that constitute (...) their meaning: concepts expressed by such names are themselves vague, based on typicality, and have more or less similar items within their extension. After presenting the views of Brentano and Marty, this paper compares them to later accounts of meaning and concepts, notably Wittgenstein’s theory of family resemblances and the prototype theory of concepts, and emphasizes the originality of the Brentanian position. (shrink)

In this work, the author formulates a critique of widely accepted mereological assumptions, presents a new conception of wholes as ‘Unities’, and demonstrates the advantages of this new conception in treating a variety of metaphysical puzzles (such as that of Tibbles the cat). More generally he suggests that conceiving wholes as Unities offers us a new way of understanding the world in non-reductive terms.

Some Austro-German philosophers considered thoughts to be mind-dependent entities, that is, psychic products. Yet these authors also attrib- uted “objectivity” to thoughts: distinct thinking subjects can have mental acts with “qualitatively” the same content. Moreover, thoughts, once built, can exist beyond the life of their inventor, “embodied” in “documents”. At the beginning of the 20th century, the notion of “psychic product” was at the centre of the debates on psychologism; a hundred years later, it is rather at the margins of (...) the history of philosophy. While Twardowski’s theory of products has been fre- quently studied, those of Stumpf and the late Husserl have been much less dis- cussed. A presentation of the Austro-German debates about psychic products is all the more important since these discussions might be of direct interest for contemporary philosophy of mind and epistemology. This paper examines the Austro-German notion of psychic products in Stumpf, Twardowski, and the later Husserl. (shrink)

This paper analyses the ontological status of the ‘intellected thing’ (res intellecta) in Hervaeus Natalis. For Hervaeus an intellected thing is not a thing in the outer world, but something radically different, namely an internal, mind-dependent entity, something having a peculiar mode of being, ‘esse obiective’. While Hervaeus often says that the act of intellection is directed upon real things, this does not mean that the act is directed upon things existing actually outside the mind. Hervaeus argues that the act (...) of intellection is directed upon things existing ‘aptitudinally’ outside the mind, not actually outside the mind. A thing existing aptitudinally outside the mind is a mind-dependent entity, something having esse obiective. In order to establish this point, I will explain how the property ‘being intellected’ (esse intellectum) should be interpreted in Hervaeus’ philosophy. This property is a peculiar type of relation, namely a relation of reason that gives a peculiar ontological status to its bearer. To neglect the distinction between actually outside and aptitudinally outside could falsely lead one to ascribe to Hervaeus a theory of intellection where the mental act is directed upon mind-independent entities. (shrink)

This paper addresses the issue of how to best account for the diversity of our (synchronic) mental activities. The discussion starts with Mark Textor’s mental monism. According to mental monism, our mental life is constituted by just one simple mental act, in which different sub-acts can be conceptually distinguished. Textor grounds this view in the work of the early Brentano and contrasts it with the theory of the later Brentano, who introduces a mental substance into his philosophy. According to Textor, (...) Brentano needs a substance because he is unable to explain how mental monism can account for the separability of our mental activities, e.g. the fact that I can stop hearing F while still seeing blue. Textor argues, however, that mental monism can solve this problem. I address two issues regarding Textor’s view. First, I challenge his interpretation of Brentano by arguing that the early Brentano imports ontological complexity into our mental life; I defend Brentano’s view against possible criticisms, and I address some objections to mental monism. Second, I oppose Textor’s narrative about the mental substance. I argue that Brentano needs a substance not to explain separability, but rather to individuate our mental acts. I still argue, however, that Brentano’s earlier view (understood in my sense) is better than the substance account for dividing the mind. (shrink)

Pobreza, igualdade e justiça social voltaram à linha da frente do léxico político, econômico e social contemporâneo, embora de formas diferentes e com intensidade variável. A embriaguez do liberalismo e o entusiasmo injustificado pela dinâmica do mercado tinham projetado um mundo em que o bem-estar e a felicidade pareciam estar ao alcance de todos e totalmente disponíveis. Mas o despertar que se seguiu à folia das finanças criativas nos entregou um cenário muito mais dramático e repleto de conflitos. Desse ponto (...) de vista, a filosofia política não pode se eximir da tarefa de analisar esses fenômenos e definir um sentido e uma direção para a agenda política em tempos complicados como os atuais. É necessário, portanto, refletir novamente sobre conceitos e perspectivas que talvez tenham sido descartados muito apressadamente. Neste artigo, pretendo examinar esses conceitos utilizando a relação controversa entre a filosofia kantiana e o contratualismo de John Rawls como um fio condutor. (shrink)