The editor's introduction to the volume gives an overview of its main themes and provides a summary of each of the twenty-two chapters.

"The availability of a paperback version of Boyle's philosophical writings selected by M. A. Stewart will be a real service to teachers, students, and scholars with seventeenth-century interests. The editor has shown excellent judgment in bringing together many of the most important works and printing them, for the most part, in unabridged form. The texts have been edited responsibly with emphasis on readability.... Of special interest in connection with Locke and with the reception of Descarte's Corpuscularianism, to students of (...) the Scientific Revolution and of the history of mechanical philosophy, and to those interested in the relations among science, philosophy, and religion. In fact, given the imperfections in and unavailability of the eighteenth-century editions of Boyle’s works, this collection will benefit a wide variety of seventeenth-century scholars." --Gary Hatfield, University of Pennsylvania. (shrink)

Since our visual perception of physical things essentially involves our identifying objects by their colours, any theory of visual perception must contain some account of the colours of things. The central problem with colour has to do with relating our normal, everyday colour perceptions to what science, i.e. physics, teaches us about physical objects and their qualities. Although we perceive colours as categorical surface properties of things, colour perceptions are explained by introducing physical properties like reflectance profiles or dispositions to (...) cause certain experiences in normal human perceivers. Hence, it seems as if colours as they are experienced by us have no place in the physical world, because they are fundamentally different from the properties which we ascribe to physical objects in scientific accounts of colour perceptions. This special issue on perspectives on colour perception presents new suggestions to solve to this major problem. (shrink)

The Appreciation of Charles Peirce’s religious dimension has been slow to mature, due in part to the disparate nature of his prodigious output, but also due to a certain blindness of his interpreters. Michael Raposa, in his essay “Peirce and Modern Religious Thought” (1991), argues: “Some early interpreters of Peirce, like Hartshorne and Goudge, argued that his religious perspective was inconsistent with the basic thrust of his philosophy. Many later commentators have implicitly endorsed this argument by systematically ignoring the religious (...) dimension of his thought.” In contrast, Raposa suggests “that what Peirce had to say about religion is remarkably continuous with what he wrote about a variety of .. (shrink)

I am proud to introduce this special issue of Philosophy in the Contemporary World, which is devoted to the range of possibilities open to us in dialogue with ancient philosophers. Needless to say, there will always be reason to return to ancient philosophical texts and retrace their lines of argument, precisely because these works will never cease to challenge us and offer us insight. But there is a special reason for us to take up this task in the present. As (...) I write this introduction, in July 2006, public discourse in the United States is bitterly divided over a wide range of moral and political controversies: chief among these are the issues surrounding the military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, the various means employed by the U.S. government in investigating and imprisoning suspected terrorists; but also, there are deep divisions within the country over environmental issues, such as that of global warming, and ongoing debate over immigration policy, same-sex marriage, limits of free speech, and so on. While this list of controversies is typical enough, and while some conflict of opinion is surely a necessary part of any living democracy, the rancor in contemporary discourse has escalated to a point that would seem to call into question whether discourse has any role to play in public life besides bludgeoning one’s opponents. (shrink)

In the January 2020 issue of this journal, Rory Misiewicz penned an excellent review of Brandon Daniel-Hughes's book. His one complaint is that Daniel-Hughes appeals to my theory that the Ultimate is "entirely indeterminate and absolute nothingness that contextualizes all things." This he claims to be inconsistent with Peirce. I do not want to defend Daniel-Hughes's use of my idea, although I surely congratulate him. I do want to correct Misiewicz's understanding of it, however.My idea is that all thought is (...) determinate, at least in part, and is therefore consequent to its creation. I give long, convoluted, but utterly persuasive arguments that the existence of any determinate things is the... (shrink)