I lay out and examine two sharply conflicting interpretations of Aristotle's claims about nous in the De Anima (DA). On the human separability approach, Aristotle is taken to have identified reasons for thinking that the intellect can, in some way, exist on its own. On the naturalist approach, the soul, including intellectual soul, is inseparable from the body of which it is the form. I discuss how proponents of each approach deal with the key texts from the DA, focusing on (...) four of the most important and interesting topics in this area. Two of these topics concern the activity of understanding (noêsis): first, what does Aristotle mean when he claims that the intellect cannot have a bodily organ and, secondly, what role does Aristotle think phantasmata (“images” or “representations”) play in understanding something? Two of the topics concern DA 3.5, one of the most difficult passages in Aristotle's corpus: first, what is the nature and role of the productive intellect (nous poiêtikos) introduced there and, secondly, what are this chapter's implications for the question of whether the intellect or intellectual soul can exist apart from the body? I conclude by identifying areas where further research is necessary. (shrink)

Pragmatic theories of truth need to pass the pragmatic test: they need to make a difference. Unfortunately, defenders of the pragmatic theory have rarely applied this test. I argue that a Deweyan pragmatic account of truth passes the test by identifying the political and epistemic dangers of certain types of social networks that create a durable consensus around false beliefs. To better understand Dewey’s account of truth I propose an excursion through Wittgenstein’s later views on knowledge and certainty.

This paper offers a new interpretation of Spinoza's doctrine of parallelism. It argues Spinoza reinterprets the ancient doctrine of metaphysical sympathy among ostensibly disconnected and distant beings in terms of fully intelligible relations of 1) identity between formal and objective reality, and in terms of 2) "real identity," grounded in Spinoza's substance-monism. Finally, the paper argues against the standard reading of mind-body pairs as "numerically identical".

Plato’s Socrates is famous for claiming that “I know one thing: That I know nothing”. There is one subject that Socrates repeatedly claims to have expertise in, however: ta erôtika. Socrates also refers to this expertise as his erôtikê technê, which may be translated as “erotic expertise”. In this dissertation, I investigate Socrates’ erotic expertise: what kind of expertise is it, what is it constituted by, where is it put into practice, and how is it practiced? I argue that the (...) purposes this expertise serve are, to a significant extent, educational in nature. After first having clarified the dissertation’s topic and aim, as well as my methodological approach, I present an initial account of erôs and Socrates’ erotic expertise. While discussing what constitutes Socrates’ erotic expertise, I account for two erotic educational methods: midwifery and matchmaking. I further argue that these methods tend to be accompanied by two psychological techniques, namely charming and shaming. I argue that these methods and techniques are systematically applied by Socrates when he puts his erotic expertise into practice. In the dissertation, three dialogues where Socrates practices his erotic expertise are scrutinized: Lysis, Charmides, and Alcibiades I. I focus on Socrates’ encounters with the eponymous youths of the dialogues, and each dialogue is devoted a chapter of its own. I show how these dialogues are erotically charged, and also how Socrates in these dialogues demonstrates his erotic expertise. I argue that Socrates’ expertise on erôs plays an essential role in his attempts to engage the three youths in the processes of self-cultivation, learning, and the very practice of philosophy. In the final chapter of the dissertation I turn to some questions that arise in light of my readings, and summarize the results of my investigation. (shrink)

The doctrine of the conceptual priority of the perfect (CPP) is the claim that the concept of the perfect is prior to that of the imperfect insofar as possessing the latter presupposes a grasp of the former, but not vice versa. The goals of this study are to provide an account and defense of the Cartesian argument for CPP, to determine the consequences of this priority for the relationship between our concepts of human and divine properties, and to explore its (...) implications for bottom-up accounts of theological concept formation. I argue that the predicates “perfect” or “infinite” in Descartes’ version of CPP are equivalent to “true” or “genuine” and thus function in the same way they would in geometrical examples where the perfection at issue is definitive of the kind and where imperfection constitutes falling short of the kind. I can thus be said to have the idea of a “perfect” circle (of that which is “infinitely” circular, as it were) merely by virtue of having the idea of a circle, yet I cannot apprehend something as imperfect or finite insofar as it resembles but fails to be a circle unless I already possess a concept of the kind in question—a true or perfect circle. CPP thus implies a qualitative distinction between the perfect and imperfect that, when applied to God and creation, is consistent with a theory of analogy. Unlike traditional ‘bottom-up’ theories of analogy, however, CPP entails a ‘top-down’ order of derivation in which concepts of creaturely perfections are derived (via a sort of ‘partial negation’) from concepts of divine ones. The ‘top-down’ order of derivation yields epistemological advantages over the traditional approach, which had always struggled to explain how we can derive analogical concepts of God from creatures. Further, CPP enables its proponents to address the classic anthropomorphism critiques leveled at practitioners of Perfect Being Theology. Though I acknowledge that CPP is not without its own weaknesses, I present a largely sympathetic account of the argument and its relevance for contemporary philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Both in Polish and international literature Duns Scotus’ ethical thought has had a number of conflicting interpretations. The article presents the main elements of Duns Scotus’ ethical thought. The quaestions it tries to answer are the following: a) is Scotus’ ethics voluntaristic; b) if so, what type of voluntarism can one attribute to Scotus. Finding Scotus’ ethics moderately voluntaristic I distinguish and characterize three types of voluntarism that could be attributed to Scotus: psychological voluntarism (Duns finds the will more perfect (...) than the intellect as its acts are more perfect); theological voluntarism (Duns takes the Commandments of the first table to be obligatory in a stronger way than the Commandments of the second table), causal voluntarism (the will is taken to be the primary cause of free action, non determined even by the most perfect good). (shrink)