The question of man is a question of philosophical anthropology. It raises a particular problem because man is both the subject and object of any knowledge of man. This question has ontological consequences, because man is the one being that can have knowledge of himself and can change himself and the laws of his existence. Such knowledge and change, however, are not innate to man but are creations that have both psychical and social-historical presuppositions and implications. The question of de (...) jure validity arises with the creation of politics and philosophy and can be made more precise in the question: How can the valid be effective and the effective be valid? Politics, as the lucid and reflective activity that interrogates itself about society's institutions and attempts to change them, is a creation of a new anthropological type: reflective and deliberative subjectivity. Today's `liberal oligarchies', falsely labelled `democratic', proclaim liberty and equality, but an analysis of the present heteronomous situation of a majority of the world's population and of the compromise nature of liberal oligarchic regimes shows how partial has been their realization. (shrink)

This is a 1988 philosophical introduction to Aristotle, and Professor Lear starts where Aristotle himself starts. The first sentence of the Metaphysics states that all human beings by their nature desire to know. But what is it for us to be animated by this desire in this world? What is it for a creature to have a nature; what is our human nature; what must the world be like to be intelligible; and what must we be like to understand it (...) systematically? Through a consideration of these questions Professor Lear introduces us to the essence of Aristotle's philosophy and guides us through the central Aristotelian texts - selected from the Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics, Politics and from the biological and logical works. The book is written in a direct, lucid style which engages the reader with the themes in an active, participatory manner. (shrink)

This book offers an introduction to the Sophists of fifth-century Athens and a new overall interpretation of their thought. Since Plato first animadverted on their activities, the Sophists have commonly been presented as little better than intellectual mountebanks - a picture which Professor Kerferd forcefully challenges here. Interpreting the evidence with care, he shows them to have been part of an exciting and historically crucial intellectual movement. At the centre of their teaching was a form of relativism, most famously expressed (...) by Protagoras as 'Man is the measure of all things', and which they developed in a wide range of views - on knowledge and argument, virtue, government, society, and the gods. On all these subjects the Sophists did far more than simply provoke Plato to thought. Their contributions were substantial and serious; they inaugurated the debate on many central philosophical questions and decisively shifted the focus of philosophical attention from the cosmos to man. (shrink)