Emphasis on autonomy of texts presupposes that there are perennial concepts. But researchers' expectations may turn history into mythology of ideas; researchers forget that an agent cannot be described as doing something he could not understand as a description, and that thinking may be inconsistent. They will never uncover voluntary oblique strategies and by treating ideas as units will confuse sentences with statements. On the other hand, a contextual approach to the meaning of texts dismisses ideas as unimportant effects. Neither (...) method shows how what was said was meant is crucial for understanding. There are no perennial problems; philosophers of different times do not speak directly to us. But history of ideas helps us recognize the contingency of many of our beliefs. (shrink)

To hold an environmental ethic is to hold that non-human beings and states of affairs in the natural world have intrinsic value. This seemingly straightforward claim has been the focus of much recent philosophical discussion of environmental issues. Its clarity is, however, illusory. The term ‘intrinsic value’ has a variety of senses and many arguments on environmental ethics suffer from a conflation of these different senses: specimen hunters for the fallacy of equivocation will find rich pickings in the area. This (...) paper is largely the work of the underlabourer. I distinguish different senses of the concept of intrinsic value, and, relatedly, of the claim that non-human beings in the natural world have intrinsic value; I exhibit the logical relations between these claims and examine the distinct motivations for holding them. The paper is not however merely an exercise in conceptual underlabouring. It also defends one substantive thesis: that while it is the case that natural entities have intrinsic value in the strongest sense of the term, i.e., in the sense of value that exists independently of human valuations, such value does not as such entail any obligations on the part of human beings. The defender of nature’s intrinsic value still needs to show that such value contributes to the well-being of human agents. (shrink)

Kant was centrally concerned with issues in the philosophy of natural science throughout his career. The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science presents his most mature reflections on these themes in the context of both his 'critical' philosophy, presented in the Critique of Pure Reason, and the natural science of his time. This volume presents a new translation, by Michael Friedman, which is especially clear and accurate. There are explanatory notes indicating some of the main connections between the argument of the (...) Metaphysical Foundations and the first Critique - as well as parallel connections to Newton's Principia. The volume is completed by an historical and philosophical introduction and a guide to further reading. (shrink)

This is the most important book on Hegel to have appeared in the past ten years. The author offers a completely new interpretation of Hegel's idealism that focuses on Hegel's appropriation and development of Kant's theoretical project. Hegel is presented neither as a pre-critical metaphysician nor as a social theorist, but as a critical philosopher whose disagreements with Kant, especially on the issue of intuitions, enrich the idealist arguments against empiricism, realism, and naturalism. In the face of the dismissal of (...) absolute idealism as either unintelligible or implausible, Pippin explains and defends an original account of the philosophical basis for Hegel's claims about the historical and social nature of self-consciousness and of knowledge itself. (shrink)

This book provides a comprehensive survey of Hegel's philosophical thought via a systematic exploration of over 100 key terms, from `absolute' to `will'. By exploring both the etymological background of such terms and Hegel's particular use of them, Michael Inwood clarifies for the modern reader much that has been regarded as difficult and obscure in Hegel's work.

A conception of an environmental ethic is set forth which involves postulating that nonconscious natural objects can have value in their own right, independently of human interests. Two kinds of objection are considered: those that deny the possibility of developing an ethic ofthe environment that accepts this postulate, and those.that deny the necessity of constructing such an ethic. Both types of objection are found wanting. The essay condudes with some tentative remarks regarding the notion of inherent value.

A 5,000-word conspectus of Hegel’s moral philosophy which considers the theoretical context of his moral philosophy (§1), his accounts of legal, personal, moral and social freedom (§2), the structure of Hegel’s analysis in his Philosophy of Justice (or »Rechtsphilosophie«) (§3), his account of role obligations as a central component of social freedom (§4), and his integrated account of individual autonomy and social reconciliation (§5).

This new collection of essays by leading feminist critics highlights the fresh perspectives that feminism can offer to the discussion of past philosophers. Rather than defining itself through opposition to a "male" philosophical tradition, feminist philosophy emerges not only as an exciting new contribution to the history of philosophy, but also as a source of cultural self-understanding in the present.

Louis G. Lombardi’s arguments in support of the claim that humans have greater inherent worth than other living things provide a clear account of how it is possible to conceive of the relation between humans and nonhumans in this way. Upon examining his arguments, however, it seems that he does not succeed in establishing any reason to believe that humans actually do have greater inherent worth than animals and plants.

The ambiguity of the word ‘nature’ is so remarkable that I need not remark upon it. Except perhaps to emphasise that this ambiguity — scarcely less apparent, as Aristotle long ago pointed out, in its Greek near-equivalent physis — is by no means a merely accidental product of etymological confusions or conflations: it faithfully reflects the hesitancies, the doubts and the uncertainties, with which men have confronted the world around them. For my special purposes, it is enough to say, I (...) shall be using the word ‘nature’ in one of its narrower senses — so as to include only that which, setting aside the supernatural, is human neither in itself nor in its origins. This is the sense in which neither Sir Christopher Wren nor St Paul's Cathedral forms part of ‘nature’ and it may be hard to decide whether an oddly shaped flint or a landscape where the trees are evenly spaced is or is not ‘natural’. The question I am raising, then, is what our attitudes have been, and ought to be, to nature in this narrow sense of the word, in which it excludes both the human and the artificial. And more narrowly still, I shall be devoting most of my attention to our attitudes towards that part of nature which it lies within man's power to modify and, in particular, towards what Karl Barth calls ‘the strange life of beasts and plants which lies around us’, a life we can by our actions destroy. (shrink)

The chapter examines aspects of Schopenhauer's central concept of will: the role of will in relation to action and to sexual drive, the argument that the individual has no freedom of will, the notion of the will or 'will to life' as the 'inner nature' of the individual, and the notion that the will is the thing in itself.

The oeuvre of Hegel, like that of many thinkers of the post-Kantian tradition in European philosophy, has been subject to a number of misreadings and misrepresentations by both specialists and nonspecialists alike that have until fairly recently rendered Hegel’s reception in the Anglo-American philosophical world extremely problematic. These often willful misrepresentations, variously referred to by scholars as the Hegel myths or legends, have given rise to a number of prejudices against Hegel’s philosophy primarily, although by no means exclusively, in the (...) English-speaking world. Among the caricatures that have enjoyed the widest currency are the following: that Hegel denied the law of contradiction; that his dialectical method of argumentation took the form of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad; that he saw the end of history in his own philosophical system; that he tried to prove a priori the number of planets; that he was a reactionary apologist for the Prussian state, or worse, a protofascist; finally, that he was a kind of pre-Kantian metaphysician or “cosmic rationalist” who believed like Schelling and some of the Romantics in a metaphysical world soul. (shrink)

The creation of the University of Berlin in 1810 was the result of interaction between the state and philosophy, two human expressions whose relationship, at least since Socrates' death and Aristotle's exile, has tended to be problematical. That university, which became an important model for North American institutions of higher learning, was from the outset a state university; it was designed and run by the state, as opposed to what was previously the rule: institutions dependent on the Church or princes. (...) The bind, of course, is that this idea of a modern university, defined by its independence with regard to ecclesiastical and private interests, must henceforth depend on the state to guarantee its independence. This dilemma is already apparent in the philosophical ideas at work in the University of Berlin's early evolution. (shrink)

Despite Platonism's unquestioned claim to being one of the most influential movements in the history of philosophy, for a long time the conventional wisdom was that Platonists of late antiquity, or Neoplatonists, were so focused on otherworldly metaphysics that they simply neglected any serious study of the sensible world, which after all is 'merely' an image of the intelligible world. Only recently has this conventional wisdom begun to be dispelled. In fact, it is precisely because these thinkers did see the (...) sensible world as an image of the intelligible world that they devoted so much time and energy to understanding its inner workings. Thus we find Neoplatonists writing on embryology, physiology, meteorology, and astronomy, among other subjects.Neoplatonism and the Philosophy of Nature collects essays by leading international scholars in the field which shed new light on how the Neoplatonists sought to understand and explain nature and natural phenomena. It is thematically divided into two parts, with the first part--The General Metaphysics of Nature--directed at the explication of central Neoplatonic metaphysical doctrines and their relation to the natural world, and the second part--Platonic Approaches to Individual Sciences--showing how these same doctrines play out in individual natural sciences such as elemental physics, geography, and biology. Together these essays show that a serious examination of Neoplatonic natural philosophy has far-reaching consequences for our general understanding of the metaphysics of Platonism as well as for our evaluation of their place in the history of science. (shrink)

To formulate a philosophy of time is not easy, even though it would seem to be the basic requirement for any philosophy which attempts to comprehend the world of nature or of history. The problem is briefly posed: Can the conceptual framework of philosophical thought do justice to the dynamic character of time?The purpose of this paper is not to provide a definitive answer to this question. Its aim is more limited. By discussing carefully the way in which Hegel's philosophy (...) related conceptual thought to time, it hopes to provide new perspectives on this vexing philosophical problem. (shrink)

Solomon discusses at least three passages in which, he believes, Hegel criticizes theories of truth. The first is in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Mind, and concerns "historical truth". Historical truth, Solomon writes, "is the usual paradigm for the correspondence theory; against it, Hegel argues that we know a "naked fact" only insofar as we know "the reasons behind it." In other words, we need criteria of coherence as well as correspondence". But what Hegel says in this passage is (...) this: historical statements or beliefs are "true," but they are not true in the philosophical sense. This is because they deal with "the sphere of particular existence, with a content in its contingent and arbitrary aspects, features that have no necessity." Even these "truths" share some of the features of philosophical truth. Often, for example, we cannot know them without seeking evidence, and even if we perceive some event, and hence do not need evidence for its occurrence, our knowledge is of no true value unless we also know the "reasons behind it." That is, Hegel is not saying that historical truths appear to be true in a piecemeal correspondence way, but in fact are true in the philosophical sense. Rather, although evidence and reasons are relevant to their truth, this still isn't sufficient to make them philosophically true. Hegel is here criticizing historical truths, and not just a theory of truth. Philosophical truth is not just a theory of truth, but a special sort of truth which historical truths lack. (shrink)