"We must turn to the Euthydemus if we are to understand both Plato's earlier and his more mature work. Thomas Chance's book is an indispensible tool for penetrating to the sources of Plato's thinking on the nature of philosophy. This is the most impressive treatment of the dialogue so far available to scholars, and the interpretations offered will surely be the starting point for all future discussions."--G. B. Kerferd, Emeritus, University of Manchester "A sensitive and well-informed study of an (...) important and much neglected dialogue."--R. E. Allen, Northwestern University "A sensitive and well-informed study of an important and much neglected dialogue."--R. E. Allen "Chance's book [will be] an indispensable tool for penetrating to the sources of Plato's thinking.... The interpretations offered will surely be the starting point for all future discussions."--George Kerferd. (shrink)

Thomas V. Morris discusses life, death, religion, the nature of faith and more. This captivating book is ideal both for thoughtful unbelievers who consider Christianity unreasonable, and Christians wanting to know how to share their faith with sceptics. Writing in an engaging, conversational style, Morris takes an intriguing new look at the big questions that keep coming up -- questions about life, death, God, religion, the nature of faith, the formation of an adequate worldview, and the meaning of life. (...) Morris explores these kinds of questions in an earnest yet thoroughly entertaining and easily readable way, relating numerous personal anecdotes, incorporating intriguing material from the films of Woody Allen and the journals of Tolstoy, and using the writings of the seventeenth-century genius Blaise Pascal as a central guide. (shrink)

The Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid first published Essays on Active Powers of Man in 1788 while he was Professor of Philosophy at King's College, Aberdeen. The work contains a set of essays on active power, the will, principles of action, the liberty of moral agents, and morals. Reid was a key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment and one of the founders of the 'common sense' school of philosophy. In Active Powers Reid gives his fullest exploration of sensus communis as (...) the basis of all philosophical inquiry. He uses common sense realism to argue for the existence of a stable external world, the existence of other minds, and to offer a powerful challenge to versions of the Theory of Ideas advocated by Hume and Locke . This is a key work of the Scottish Enlightenment that made important contributions to fundamental debates about the basis of philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

Spanning thirty years of intensive research, this book proves what many scholars could not explain: that today’s Western world must be considered the product of both Greek and Indian thought—Western and Eastern philosophies. Thomas McEvilley explores how trade, imperialism, and migration currents allowed cultural philosophies to intermingle freely throughout India, Egypt, Greece, and the ancient Near East. This groundbreaking reference will stir relentless debate among philosophers, art historians, and students.

Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics By HofweberThomasOxford University Press, 2016. xvi + 366 pp. £50.00.

Our minds have physical effects. This happens, for instance, when we move our bodies when we act. How is this possible? Thomas Kroedel defends an account of mental causation in terms of difference-making: if our minds had been different, the physical world would have been different; therefore, the mind causes events in the physical world. His account not only explains how the mind has physical effects at all, but solves the exclusion problem - the problem of how those effects (...) can have both mental and physical causes. It is also unprecedented in scope, because it is available to dualists about the mind as well as physicalists, drawing on traditional views of causation as well as on the latest developments in the field of causal modelling. It will be of interest to a range of readers in philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. This book is also available as Open Access. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:MACINTYRE'S POSTMODERN THOMISM: REFLECTIONS ON THREE RIVAL VERSIONS OF MORAL ENQUIRY THOMAS s. HIBBS Boston College Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts IN A RECENT issue of The Thomist, J. A. DiNoia, O.P., argues that certain themes in post-modern thought provide an occasion for the recovery of neglected features of the Catholic tradition.1 DiNoia focuses on three motifs : first, a " broader conception of rationality," with an emphasis on the (...) " role of tradition and authority," second, attention to the " role of texts and narrative in shaping thought and culture," and, third, the " importance of community in fostering personal identity." These themes have been prominent in the writings of Alasdair Macintyre. In his latest publication, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, he brings the Augustinian-Thomistic tradition into conversation with its principal rivals, encyclopaedia and genealogy.2 The dialogical character of the work, the text of his Gifford Lectures, affords Macintyre the opportunity to sharpen and develop his views of rationality, of the connection between particularism and universalism, and of the Christian contribution to moral inquiry. What emerges from the series of dialectical encounters is a constructive, postmodern Thomism, one which is not susceptible to the genealogical critique of encyclopaedia and which circumvents the self-destructive tendencies of genealogy. 1 " American Catholic Theology at Century's End: Postconciliar, Postmodern, and Post-Thomistic," The Thomist 54 (1990), pp. 499-518. 2 The seminal text for each of the three rival versions was published in the 1860's: for encyclopaedia, The Ninth Edition of Encyclopaedia Brittanica, for genealogy, Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, and for tradition or Thomism, Aeterni Patris. 277 278 THOMAS S. HIBBS According to Macintyre, the terms of the debate over rationality between genealogy and encyclopedia have obscured apprehension of the Thomistic alternative. As they see it, " Either reason is thus impersonal, universal, and disinterested or it is the unwitting representative of particular interests, masking their drive to power by its false pretensions to neutrality and disinterestedness." But the mutually exclusive way of putting the question conceals a third possibility, the possibility that reason can only move towards being genuinely universal and impersonal insofar as it is neither neutral nor disinterested, that membership in a particular type of moral community, one from which fundamental dissent has to be excluded, is a condition for genuinely rational inquiry.3 The passage introduces the salient features of Macintyre's view of the relationship between particularism and universalism.4 Macintyre develops his view not only in confrontation with genealogy and encyclopaedia, but also out of the Thomistic tradition. In a chapter entitled, "Too Many Thomisms? ", Macintyre describes the history of the revival of Thomism after Aeterni Patris.5 Macintyre criticizes early neo-Thomism for reading Aquinas as a systematic thinker, whose project was fundamentally epistemological. By beginning with ·epistemology, neoThomism distorted Aquinas's texts, cast the terms of the debate between Aquinas and modernity in the distinctively modern language of epistemic justification, and predictably reenacted the futile history of modern philosophy.6 Macintyre observes that there are simply "too many ways to begin." But even early on a Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), pp. 59-60. Henceforth referred to as TRV. 4 Many critics have misunderstood Maclntyre's insistence on the particularist means to universality. For a careful and sympathetic discussion of this question, see John Doody, " Macintyre and Habermas on Practical Reason,'' American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, LXV (1991), pp. 143-58. s TRV, pp. 58-81. 6 See the quite different understanding of this history in Gerald McCool's From Unity to Pluralism: The Internal Evolution of Thomism (New York: Fordham University Press, 1989) and "Why St. Thomas Stays Alive,'' International Philosophical Quarterly 30 (1990), pp. 275-288. THREE RIVAL VERSIONS OF MORAL ENQUIRY 279 there was an acknowledgement by Kleutgen, among others, of the disparity between pre- and post-Cartesian philosophy. Still, early neo-Thomism failed to see that the break came not with Descartes but with Scotus. Hence, the decidedly unThomistic influence of Scotus upon Suarez-whose authority was crucial in the rehabilitation of Aquinas-was unconsciously incorporated into neo-Thomism.7 The result of early neo-Thomism was an unhappy assimilation... (shrink)

These lucid studies of Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, and Rorty analyze majorcontributions to recent critical theory and forge a distinct position in the current philosophicaldebate.Thomas McCarthy is John Schaffer Professor in the Humanities ...

The Pleadings Game is a normative formalization and computational model of civil pleading, founded in Roberty Alexy''s discourse theory of legal argumentation. The consequences of arguments and counterarguments are modelled using Geffner and Pearl''s nonmonotonic logic,conditional entailment. Discourse in focussed using the concepts of issue and relevance. Conflicts between arguments can be resolved by arguing about the validity and priority of rules, at any level. The computational model is fully implemented and has been tested using examples from Article Nine of (...) the Uniform Commercial Code. (shrink)

During the nineteenth century, positivists charged that since historical accounts did not uncover the laws involved in human behavior, they were devoid of significance and should be replaced by sociological studies. Theorists, including Droysen, responded that man has a dual nature. Man's biological self is the inalterable substance of his life, while his spiritual self enables him to create its form. The objects of this creation, social institutions, embody the ideas and ideals of a social order and are transformed when (...) these values change. Remnants of the past are always contained within the new order and thus history both records the past and is embraced by the present. Since man is responsible for his progress he must know the past in order to fully understand and to act in the present. Droysen called this understanding of history Verstehen. (shrink)

In this essay, I explore the writings of Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of the mindfulness-based stress reduction program, to discern in them a moral framework that provides a narrative arch of human decline and restoration through greater mindfulness. I argue that this moral narrative framework has striking similarities to what Slavoj Zizek describes as the “Holderlin paradigm” which characterizes the thinking of post-Hegelian thinkers such as Marx, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Heidegger, and Derrida. This narrative takes late modernity as both the nadir (...) of a process of historical decline in the West and the site of its potential restoration. In demonstrating the similarities between the two narratives, I seek to show how the “Buddhification,” as Braun calls it, of American spirituality is internally complex, and to offer some conceptual tools from the philosopher Jane Bennett to account for breakdowns that the scholarly study of the mindfulness meditation phenomenon produces in our broad analytical typologies. (shrink)

Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding has generally been read as primarily concerned with epistemology. In particular, it has been claimed that the Essay attempts to defeat epistemological skepticism, but fails in this enterprise because of the veiling character of Locke's ideas. By way of reexamination of the texts in question I show that epistemological skepticism is not the topic of the Essay, and that there is not sufficient reason to claim that Locke's account of knowledge leads to epistemological skepticism. I (...) argue, moreover, that the motivating topic of the Essay is moral skepticism, and I explain the central role of ch. 8, book 2 in Locke's argumentation for the claim that we may achieve a science of morality. I conclude with an account of some of practical consequences of a science of morality, as conceived by Locke. (shrink)

[1] From Thales to Plato.--[2] From Aristotle to Plotinus.

Is seeing a matter of nature? Does perspective show things as they really are? Can we read an image in the same way as a text? This book draws together essays that attempt to answer these questions but in a variety of ways and from the different theoretical positions offered by psychoanalysis, semiotics, poststructuralism and postmodernism. The anthology opens up a dialogue between seeing and the seen, text and image, theory and practice. By discussing a range of visual material, from (...) advertising and architecture to painting and photography, it crosses generic and disciplinary boundaries and suggests ways in which vision and visuality are related to questions of textuality, subjectivity, race, and gender. (shrink)

The reaction to Darwin's Origin of Species varied in many countries according to the roles played by national scientific institutions and traditions and the attitudes of religious and political groups. The contributors to this volume, including M. J. S. Hodge, David Hull, and Roberto Moreno, gathered in 1972 at an international conference on the comparative reception of Darwinism. Their essays look at early pro- and anti-Darwinism arguments, and three additional comparative essays and appendices add a larger perspective. For this paperback (...) edition, Thomas F. Glick has added a new preface commenting on recent research. (shrink)

Males are selectively afflicted with the neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders of childhood, a broad and virtually ubiquitous phenomenon that has not received proper attention in the biological study of sex differences. The previous literature has alluded to psychosocial differences, genetic factors and elements pertaining to male “complexity” and relative immaturity, but these are not deemed an adequate explanation for selective male affliction. The structure of sex differences in neurodevelopmental disorders is hypothesized to contain these elements: Males are more frequently afflicted, (...) females more severely; disorders arising in females are largely mediated by the genotype; in males, by a genotype by environment interaction; complications of pregnancy and delivery occur more frequently with male births; such complications are decisive and influence subsequent development. We hypothesize that there is something about the male fetus that evokes an inhospitable uterine environment. This “evocative principle” is hypothesized to relate to the relative antigenicity of the male fetus, which may induce a state of maternal immunoreactivity, leading either directly or indirectly to fetal damage. The immunoreactive theory thus constructed is borrowed from studies of sex ratios and is the only explanation consistent with negative parity effects in the occurrence of pregnancy complications and certain neurodevelopmental disorders. Although the theory is necessarily speculative, it is heuristic and hypotheses derived from it are proposed; some are confirmed in the existing literature and by the authors' research. (shrink)

In _Tang Junyi: Confucian Philosophy and the Challenge of Modernity_, Thomas Fröhlich examines Tang Junyi’s philosophical oeuvre which stands as one of the most ambitious Chinese projects to come to terms with modernity in 20th century.

Thomas Erne entfaltet im Anschluss an Schleiermachers Ästhetik das Verhältnis von Kunst und Religion. Dabei nimmt er über Schleiermacher hinaus auch die moderne, autonome Kunst in Blick. Im Dialog mit exemplarischen Kunstwerken der Gegenwart fragt er nach Transzendenzerfahrungen in der Gegenwartskunst, in der die Kunstwerke selbst zu,,autonomen Sinndomänen" werden. Der Band dokumentiert die Schleiermacher-Lecture 2019 an der Theologischen Fakultät der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Im Rahmen dieser Reihe sollen ausgewählte Aspekte von Schleiermachers Werk mit Fragen und Problemkonstellationen der Gegenwart in (...) Beziehung gesetzt werden. (shrink)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty's _Phenomenology of Perception_ is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important contributions to philosophy of the twentieth century. In this volume, leading philosophers from Europe and North America examine the nature and extent of Merleau-Ponty's achievement and consider its importance to contemporary philosophy. The chapters, most of which were specially commissioned for this volume, cover the central aspects of Merleau-Ponty's influential work. These include: Merleau-Ponty’s debt to Husserl Merleau-Ponty’s conception of philosophy perception, action and the role (...) of the body consciousness and self-consciousness naturalism and language social rules and freedom. Contributors: David Smith, Sean Kelly, Komarine Romdenh-Romluc, Hubert Dreyfus, Mark Wrathall, Thomas Baldwin, Simon Glendinning, Naomi Eilan, Eran Dorfman, Francoise Dastur. (shrink)

‘Hybrid’ theories of personal good, defended by e.g. Parfit, Wolf, and Kagan, equate it, not with a subjective state such as pleasure on its own, nor with an objective state such as knowledge on its own, but with a whole that supposedly combines the two. These theories apply Moore's principle of organic unities, which says the value of a whole needn't equal the sum of the values its parts would have by themselves. This allows them, defenders say, to combine the (...) attractions of purely subjective and purely objective views. This common understanding of the theories is, however, mistaken. At the most fundamental level they don't combine a subjective and an objective element but two objective ones. Once this is understood, their attraction as hybrid theories diminishes: the value in their wholes may be just the sum of the values in their parts. (shrink)

Evolution and ethics. Prolegomena (1894).--Evolution and ethics (1893).--Science and morals (1886).--Capital, the mother of labour (1890).--Social diseases and worse remedies (1891): Preface. The struggle for existence in human society. Letters to the Times. Legal opinions. The articles of war of the Salvation Army.

I find myself in the odd position of trying to convince someone who had done as much as anyone to bring philosophy into the wider culture that he is wrong to urge now that its practice be consigned to the esoteric pursuits of “private ironists.” The problem, I still believe, is Richard Rorty’s all-or-nothing approach to philosophy : foundationalism or ironism; and this, I think, is encouraged by his selective reading of philosophy’s history. On that reading, modern philosophy “centered around (...) a discussion of truth” ; it was preoccupied with foundationalist claims of one sort or another. But that preoccupation was permanently discredited by Friedrich Nietzsche and his descendants, especially Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, leaving philosophy with nothing to do but pick the bones of its own carcass. What is missing from this story is precisely the line of thought—extending from the left Hegelians to Jürgen Habermas—I sought to develop in my paper. That line is defined by, among other things, the primacy of practical reason and the rerouting of philosophical inquiry in sociohistorical directions. One of its high points is American pragmatism, which, pace Rorty, does not lie along the Nietzsche—Heidegger—Derrida line. Thomas McCarthy is professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas and editor of the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. His work-in-progress concerns the relation of philosophy to social theory. (shrink)

Philosophy challenges our assumptions—especially when it comes to us from another culture. In exploring Japanese philosophy, a dependable guide is essential. The present volume, written by a renowned authority on the subject, offers readers a historical survey of Japanese thought that is both comprehensive and comprehensible. Adhering to the Japanese philosophical tradition of highlighting engagement over detachment, Thomas Kasulis invites us to think with, as well as about, the Japanese masters by offering ample examples, innovative analogies, thought experiments, and (...) jargon-free explanations. He assumes little previous knowledge and addresses themes—aesthetics, ethics, the samurai code, politics, among others—not in a vacuum but within the conditions of Japan’s cultural and intellectual history. For readers new to Japanese studies, he provides a simplified guide to pronouncing Japanese and a separate discussion of the language and how its syntax, orthography, and linguistic layers can serve the philosophical purposes of a skilled writer and subtle thinker. For those familiar with the Japanese cultural tradition but less so with philosophy, Kasulis clarifies philosophical expressions and problems, Western as well as Japanese, as they arise. Half of the book’s chapters are devoted to seven major thinkers who collectively represent the full range of Japan’s historical epochs and philosophical traditions: Kūkai, Shinran, Dōgen, Ogyū Sorai, Motoori Norinaga, Nishida Kitarō, and Watsuji Tetsurō. Nuanced details and analyses enable an engaged understanding of Japanese Buddhism, Confucianism, Shintō, and modern academic philosophy. Other chapters supply social and cultural background, including brief discussions of nearly a hundred other philosophical writers. In his closing chapter Kasulis reflects on lessons from Japanese philosophy that enhance our understanding of philosophy itself. He reminds us that philosophy in its original sense means loving wisdom, not studying ideas. In that regard, a renewed appreciation of engaged knowing can play a critical role in the revitalization of philosophy in the West as well as the East. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 3, March 2020, Page 32-34.

Thomas C. Vinci argues that Kant's Deductions demonstrate Kant's idealist doctrines and have the structure of an inference to the best explanation for correlated domains. With the Deduction of the Categories the correlated domains are intellectual conditions and non-geometrical laws of the empirical world. With the Deduction of the Concepts of Space, the correlated domains are the geometry of pure objects of intuition and the geometry of empirical objects.

What is freedom? In this study, Thomas Dumm challenges the conventions that have governed discussions and debates concerning modern freedom by bringing the work of Michel Foucault into dialogue with contemporary liberal thought. While Foucault has been widely understood to have characterized the modern era as being opposed to the realization of freedom, Dumm shows how this characterization conflates Foucault’s genealogy of discipline with his overall view of the practices of being free. Dumm demonstrates how Foucault’s critical genealogy does (...) not shrink from understanding the ways in which modern subjects are constrained and shaped by forces greater than themselves, but how it instead works through these constraints to provide, not simply a vision of liberation, but a joyous wisdom concerned with showing us, in his words, that we “are much freer than we feel.” Both as an introduction to Foucault and as an intervention in liberal theory, Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom is bound to change how we think about the limits and possibilities of freedom in late modernity. (shrink)

In his opening speech, Timaeus (Timaeus27d5-29b1) argues that the cosmos must be the product of a craftsman looking to an eternal paradigm. Yet his premises seem at best to justify only that the world could have been made by such a craftsman. This paper seeks to clarify Timaeus’ justification for his stronger conclusion. It is argued that Timaeus sees a necessary role for craftsmanship as a cause that makes becoming like being.