Heidegger uses the term "Americanism" to refer to a certain technological-political trend which involves the inability to think the essence of technology. This would also involve the oblivion of the question of Being. His fear of both Americanism and Communism is what led him to support the National Socialist movement. Both the critics and followers of Heidegger gloss over his criticism of Americanism. Yet Heidegger's writings on this subject remain important for us. First, because Americanism would refer to what we (...) now call Globalization, and second, because it addresses the very possibility of philosophical thinking. This paper tries to push Heidegger's criticism to the very extreme in order to discover where its logic begins to strain, and thereby to generate new inights concerning the relationship between technology and thinking. (shrink)

For Hölderlin and Adorno, the power to transcend one’s being-in-nature in order to capture nature in an image, is both the most dangerous and the most beautiful aspect of the human being. Hölderlin develops a model of reconciliation of man with nature where the transcendental power, as soon as it achieves a vision of nature, violates true nature by virtue of its finitude and so must pay for this “hybris” through self-sacrifice. Adorno appropriates this model for the work of art. (...) Nature can never be captured directly, but only indirectly, by the attempt and failure to capture it directly. This is the role of the work of art. A good work of art is one which criticizes its own appearing quality. It recognizes its own hybris and “explodes” its appearance. In the afterglow of this explosion, true nature “expresses itself.” Hölderlin limits this sacrificial model to Greek humanity. Modern humanity does not follow this negative dialectical model of reconciliation with nature. It conditions nature through its movement away from its source. The Modern poem also becomes a type of movement, a pathway involving an alternation of representations or tones. Each poetic “path” creates truth in the process of its own movement. There is no longer any true nature to reconcile with, but nature is transformed by the particular path chosen and followed. In this way, each work of art creates its own destiny. Adorno misses this aspect of Hölderlin. Whereas Adorno needed the sacrificial dynamic to provide a place for philosophical reflection at a safe distance from the work of art, Hölderlin’s Modern dynamic places any philosophical reflection within the material destiny of any individual work. It is Walter Benjamin who recognizes this Modern dynamic and his disagreements with Adorno are reflected in the difference between their interpretations of Hölderlin. What I hope to show most strikingly in this dissertation is the manner in which the work of art is a material thing, a direction, a process and a destiny, and how any engagement with the work operates along its destiny. (shrink)

Human development is meant to be transformational in that it aims to improve people's lives by enhancing their capabilities. But who does it target: people as they are or the people they will become? This paper argues that the human development approach relies on an understanding of personal identity as dynamic rather than as static collections of preferences, and that this distinguishes human development from conventional approaches to development. Nevertheless, this dynamic understanding of personal identity is presently poorly conceptualized and (...) this has implications for development practice. We identify a danger of paternalism and propose institutionalizing two procedural principles as side constraints on development policies and projects: the principle of free prior informed consent and the principle of democratic development. -/- . (shrink)

We propose a multi-step evaluation schema designed to help procurement agencies and others to examine the ethical dimensions of autonomous systems to be applied in the security sector, including autonomous weapons systems.

(In German.) The book addresses Rawls's post-1985 political liberalism. His justification of political liberalism -- as reflected in his arguments from overlapping consensus -- faces the problem that liberal content can be justified as reciprocally acceptable only if the addressees of such a justification already endorse points of view that suitably support liberal ideas. Rawls responds to this legitimacy-theoretical problem by restricting public justification's scope to include reasonable people only, while implicitly defining reasonableness as a substantive liberal virtue. But this (...) virtue-ethical grounding of political liberalism is itself unreasonable. The phenomenon of disharmony of practical reason gives the reasonable reasons to take it that political legitimacy does not obtain if and where moral-political principles are acceptable from their point of view only. (shrink)

A brief introduction to Thomas Reid's philosophy on language.

Prime Matter Pluralism (PMP) states that while the prime matter of all terrestrial bodies is the same, there is a unique prime matter for each celestial body. Prime matters are distinct in virtue of being in potentiality to different forms. Steven Baldner argues that although Thomas Aquinas endorsed PMP in Summa theologiae I, he ultimately rejected it in his De caelo commentary and De substantiis separatis. Besides exegetical evidence for this claim, Baldner presents a philosophical objection to PMP: according (...) to PMP, distinct prime matters are restricted in their respective potentialities; such restriction requires form, however; therefore, prime matter is not pure potentiality. Since prime matter is pure potentiality, PMP is false. Pace Baldner, I argue that Aquinas endorses PMP as heartily in the later works as in STh I. Moreover, he resisted substantially the same objection to PMP as Baldner’s several times. In particular, Aquinas repeatedly rejected the claim that the restriction of prime matter’s potentiality requires form. In that case, when Aquinas calls prime matter “pure potentiality,” he means that it is formless of itself, not that it is in potentiality to any form whatsoever. (shrink)

This paper examines the differences between moralist, realist, and pragmatist approaches to political legitimacy by articulating their largely implicit views of judgment. Three claims are advanced. First, the salient opposition among approaches to legitimacy is not between “moralism” and “realism.” Recent realist proposals for rethinking legitimacy share with moralist views a distinctive form, called “normativism”: a quest for knowledge of principles that solve the question of legitimacy. This assumes that judging legitimacy is a matter of applying such principles to a (...) case at hand. Second, neither Rawls nor Habermas is a normativist about political legitimacy. The principles of legitimacy they proffer claim to express rather than adjudicate the legitimacy of a liberal-democratic regime, and thus cannot solve the question of legitimacy at a fundamental level. But perhaps we should question the normativist aspiration to theoretically resolving the problem to begin with. My third claim is that a “pragmatist” approach enables us to rethink political legitimacy more deeply by shifting focus from the articulation of principles to the activity of judging. Implicit in Rawls’s and Habermas’s theories I then find clues towards an alternative account of judgment, in which the question of legitimacy calls not for theoretical resolution but for ongoing practical engagement. (shrink)

The concept of practical knowledge is central to G.E.M. Anscombe's argument in Intention, yet its meaning is little understood. There are several reasons for this, including a lack of attention to Anscombe's ancient and medieval sources for the concept, and an emphasis on the more straightforward concept of knowledge "without observation" in the interpretation of Anscombe's position. This paper remedies the situation, first by appealing to the writings of Thomas Aquinas to develop an account of practical knowledge as a (...) distinctive form of thought that "aims at production" of things that lie within an agent's power; and then by showing how this Thomistic understanding of practical cognition seems to have been Anscombe's, too. Having done this, I question whether the thesis that agential knowledge is practical knowledge entails that an agent always has non-observational knowledge of what she is intentionally doing. I answer "Not": Anscombe's claims to the contrary rest on a misleading assimilation of human beings' finite agency to that of an infinite agent like God. (shrink)

Some attention has also been devoted to a particular kind of judgment or a particular form of the intellect’s second operation, sometimes named separatio by Thomas. Important editions of questions 5 and 6 of Thomas’s commentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius in 1948 and 1955 and the groundbreaking study by L. B. Geiger in 1947, all have set the stage for further emphasis on this distinctive type of intellectual operation when it comes to one’s discovery of being, (...) or better, of that notion of being that can serve as subject of a science of being as being rather than a science of being as material or as quantified. While this new development has remained largely unnoticed in certain regions of Thomistic scholarship for a number of years, it has been pursued in depth by other writers. At the same time, investigation of the same nicely dovetails with the renewed emphasis on existence and on judgment as the process required to discover being as existing to which we have referred above. For as will be seen below, at least one passage in Thomas’s commentary reinforces the contention that one must pass beyond simple apprehension to the mind’s second operation or to judgment if one is to grasp being explicitly as existing. This particular point, however, is not our primary concern here. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that internalistic foundationalist theories of the justification of memory belief are inadequate. Taking a discussion of John Pollock as a starting point, I argue against any theory that requires a memory belief to be based on a phenomenal state in order to be justified. I then consider another version of internalistic foundationalism and claim that it, too, is open to important objections. Finally, I note that both varieties of foundationalism fail to account for the (...) epistemic status of our justified nonoccurrent beliefs, and hence are drastically incomplete. (shrink)

Moral and political forms of constructivism accord to people strong, “constitutive” forms of discursive standing and so build on, or express, a commitment to discursive respect. The paper explores dimensions of discursive respect, i.e., depth, scope, and purchase; it addresses tenuous interdependencies between them; on this basis, it identifies limitations of the idea of discursive respect and of constructivism. The task of locating discursive respect in the normative space defined by its three dimensions is partly, and importantly, an ethical task (...) that is beyond constructivism. Interdependencies between these dimensions call into question the possibility of a plausible and coherent form of discursive respect that is deep, inclusive in scope, and rich in purchase. This does not mean that we should reject discursive respect, or constructivism, for that matter. But it suggests that the task of reconciling the dimensions of discursive respect may not allow for widely shareable results. This task needs to be addressed on non-constructivist grounds. Accordingly, we have reasons to concede that constitutive forms of discursive standing are less fundamental in the order of justification than weaker, “derivative” forms, and this is so especially if we take constitutive standing to mark an important good. (shrink)

Political philosophy has seen vibrant debate over the connection, if any, between liberalism and pluralism. Some philosophers, following Isaiah Berlin, reckon a close connection between the two concepts. Others--most notably John Gray--believe that liberalism and pluralism are incompatible. In this essay, I argue that the puzzle can be solved by distinguishing the responsibilities of liberal states to their peoples from the responsibilities of liberal states to other states. There is an entailment from pluralism to liberalism, and it in turn (...) implies that while liberal states must tolerate "illiberal" lifestyles within their borders, liberal states must not tolerate illiberal states. The fact of liberal intolerance, however, does not justify unreasonably aggressive intervention by liberal states, nor does it mean that illiberal states deserve to be punished. (shrink)

Most properties have comparatives, which are relations. For instance, the property of width has the comparative relation denoted by `_ is wider than _'. Let us say a property is reducible to its comparative if any statement that refers to the property has the same meaning as another statement that refers to the comparative instead. Width is not reducible to its comparative. To be sure, many statements that refer to width are reducible: for instance, `The Mississippi is wide' means the (...) same as `The Mississippi is wider than most rivers'. But some statements that refer to width are not reducible: for instance, `Electrons have zero width' is not. A property is not reducible to its comparative if it has absolute degrees, and specifically an absolute zero. A property's comparative relation places things in an order from those that have the property least to those that have it most. If there is an absolute zero point somewhere in this ordering, the property is not reducible to its comparative. For width, there is an absolute zero at one end of the ordering, so width is not reducible. The property of goodness is reducible to its comparative, betterness. In particular, there is no absolute zero of goodness. Things are ordered by betterness – some things are better than others – but nothing is absolutely good or absolutely bad. This is an exaggeration. In certain applications, goodness does have absolute degrees of a sort, and an absolute zero. For instance, it makes sense to say an event is good, and another event bad. These are absolute degrees of a sort, but they are themselves reducible to betterness. To say an event is good simply means the event is better than what would otherwise have happened. The goodness of lives has a different sort of absolute zero. Lives are ordered by betterness; some lives are better than others. We can make sense of the question `Where in this ordering is the division between lives that are good and those that are bad?' The division between good and bad lives is again reducible to betterness. To say a person's life is good means it is better that the person should continue living, rather than that she should die. Or it may mean it is better that her life should be lived rather than that it should never have been lived at all. As it is often put: a good life is a life worth living. Derek Parfit appears to attach a different sense to the idea of a good life. He appears to mean a life that contains a preponderance of good things (such as pleasure) over bad things (such as pain). If a life contains no good things and no bad things, it has zero goodness in this sense. In this sense, absolute goodness and the absolute zero of goodness are not reducible to betterness. However, this is a naturalistic sense of goodness, and it is subject to the open-question objection. If a life contains no good things and no bad things, it is an open question whether it has zero goodness. It might, for instance, be a bad thing that this life should be lived. In discussing the evil of death, some philosophers seem to have been searching for an absolute goodness that is not reducible to betterness. Thomas Nagel speaks of an asymmetry between what is good about life and what is bad about death. But if a person's life is good, that only means it would be better that she should continue living than that she should die. And if a person's death would be bad, that only means it would be worse that she should die than that she should continue living. So there can be no asymmetry. (shrink)

This chapter considers how Liberal Naturalism interacts with the main problems and theories in the philosophy of perception. After briefly summarising the traditional philosophical problems of perception and outlining the standard philosophical theories of perceptual experience, it discusses whether a Liberal Naturalist outlook should incline one towards or away from any of these standard theories. Particular attention is paid to the work of John McDowell and Hilary Putnam, two of the most prominent Liberal Naturalists, whose work was also very (...) influential in the philosophy of perception. There is also a section focusing on colour, an especially important topic not only for debates about perceptual experience but also for debates concerning how our ‘manifest image’ of the natural world relates to our best theories in the physical sciences. (shrink)

Some of the most forceful objections to William Wollaston's moral theory come from his early critics, namely, Thomas Bott (1688-1754), Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), and John Clarke of Hull (1687-1734). These objections are little known, while the inferior objections of Hume, Bentham, and later prominent critics are familiar. This fact is regrettable. For instance, it impedes a robust understanding of eighteenth-century British ethics; also, it fosters a questionable view as to why Wollaston's theory, although at first well received, soon (...) faded in esteem among philosophers. This paper gives Wollaston's early critics some of the attention they deserve. It reconstructs some of their objections to Wollaston's philosophy, addresses replies to those objections, and shows that despite some minor flaws, the objections succeed. A fact that becomes clear is that Wollaston's philosophy had suffered devastating criticism years before Hume wrote anything against it. (shrink)

John Searle has charged R.M. Hare's prescriptivist analysis of the meaning of ‘good,’ ‘ought’ and the other evaluative words with committing what he calls the ‘speech act fallacy.’ This is a fallacy which Searle thinks is committed not only by Hare's analysis, but by any analysis which attributes to a word the function of indicating that a particular speech act is being performed, or that an utterance has a particular illocutionary force. ‘There is a condition of adequacy which any (...) analysis of the meaning of a word must meet,’ Searle writes, ‘and which the speech act analysis fails to meet. Any analysis of the meaning of a word must be consistent with the fact that the same word can mean the same thing in all the different kinds of sentences in which it can occur.' Hare maintains that the word ‘good’ is used to indicate the speech act of prescribing. He maintains that one of the principal functions of this word is to indicate that utterances of sentences containing it have prescriptive illocutionary force, and that an analysis of its meaning must make explicit and ineliminable reference to this force-indicating function. But ‘good’ regularly occurs in sentences utterances of which appear to have no prescriptive illocutionary force. (shrink)

Contemporary debates on obedience and consent, such as those between Thomas Senor and A. John Simmons, suggest that either political obligation must exist as a concept or there must be natural duty of justice accessible to us through reason. Without one or the other, de facto political institutions would lack the requisite moral framework to engage in legitimate coercion. This essay suggests that both are unnecessary in order to provide a conceptual framework in which obedience to coercive political (...) institutions can be understood. By providing a novel reading of Hobbes’s Leviathan, this article argues that both political obligation and a natural duty to justice are unnecessary to ground the ability of political institutions to engage in legitimate coercion. This essay takes issue with common readings of Hobbes which assume consent is necessary to generate obedience on the part of citizens, and furthermore that political obligation is critical for the success of political institutions. While the failure of the traditional Hobbesian narrative of a consenting individual would seem to suggest the Leviathan is indefensible as a project, this paper argues that the right of war in the state of nature was more central for Hob- bes’s understanding of political institutions than obligation. Furthermore, Hobbes provides an adequate defense of political institutions even if his arguments about consent, obligation and punishment are only rhetorical. In this way Hobbesian law is best understood as a set of practical requirements to avoid war, and not as moral requirements that individuals are bound to comply with. Thus Hobbesian political institutions are not vulnerable to contemporary philosophical anarchist criticisms about political obligation and political institutions as such. To develop this reading, I focus primarily on the Leviathan, including interpretations by Skinner, Kateb, Flathman, and Oakeshott. Ultimately, this argument provides insight into contem- porary political institutions of the state, citizenship, criminality, and the law in a world where political obligation has not been adequately justified. (shrink)

The rich have two defining capabilities: independence from and command over others. These make being wealthy very pleasant indeed, but they are also toxic to democracy. First, I analyse the mechanisms by which the presence of very wealthy individuals undermines the two pillars of liberal democracy, equality of citizenship and legitimate social choice. Second, I make a radical proposal. If we value the preservation of democracy we must limit the amount of wealth any individual can have and still be a (...) citizen of our polity. (shrink)

This paper challenges Francis Hutcheson's and John Clarke of Hull's alleged demonstrations that William Wollaston's moral theory is inconsistent. It also present a form of the inconsistency objection that fares better than theirs, namely, that of Thomas Bott (1688-1754). Ultimately, the paper shows that Wollaston's moral standard is not what some have thought it to be; that consequently, his philosophy withstands the best-known efforts to expose it as inconsistent; and further, that one of the least-known British moralists is (...) more important than hitherto thought, in that he uncovers the inconsistency Clarke and Hutcheson try in vain to elicit. (shrink)

The paper compares the non-standard theistic notion of God as presented by John Bishop and Ken Perszyk in their so-called “euteleological” concept of God with idealistic, especially Hegelian and post-Hegelian, concepts of the divine. Both frameworks not only share striking similarities, based on their guiding intuitions, but also have remarkably parallel problems that have already been discussed in 19th-century speculative German theology in the aftermath of German Idealism. The article offers some proposals to strengthen the euteleological concept of God (...) metaphysically — based on some insights coming from post-Hegelian discussions. (shrink)

This article advances a critical analysis of John Rawls’s justification of liberal democratic nuclear deterrence in the post-Cold War era as found in The Law of Peoples. Rawls’s justification overlooked how nuclear-armed liberal democracies are ensnared in two intransigent ethical dilemmas: one in which the mandate to secure liberal constitutionalism requires both the preservation and violation of important constitutional provisions in domestic affairs, and the other in which this same mandate requires both the preservation and violation of the liberal (...) commitment to international legal arrangements and to the rule of law generally. On this view, the choice to violate constitutional provisions and international legal arrangements is evidence of nuclear despotism. Moreover, this choice does not imply that the ethical foreign policy dilemmas were resolved. Instead, it implies that the dilemmas force liberal democratic governments into implementing ethically paradoxical policy outcomes. (shrink)

This essay argues that gun control in America is a philosophical as well as a policy debate. This explains the depth of acrimony it causes. It also explains why the technocratic public health argument favored by the gun control movement has been so unsuccessful in persuading opponents and motivating supporters. My analysis also yields some positive advice for advocates of gun control: take the political philosophy of the gun rights movement seriously and take up the challenge of showing that a (...) society without guns is a better society, not merely a safer one. (shrink)

Over the course of a decade or so, Philip Kitcher has gradually come to embrace classical pragmatism, particularly John Dewey’s iteration of it, hailing it in his latest volume, Preludes to Pragmatism: Towards a Reconstruction of Philosophy, as “not only America’s most important contribution to philosophy, but also one of the most significant developments in the history of the subject, comparable in its potential for intellectual change to the celebrated turning points in the seventeenth century and in the wake (...) of Kant” (Kitcher 2012, xi). By Kitcher’s own account, this represents quite a turnabout, and so it is unsurprising that some have viewed Kitcher’s transformation warily. Philosophers are not immune to.. (shrink)

The recent trend among many philosophers of religion has been to interpret divine eternity as an everlasting temporality in which an omnitemporal God exists in and throughout the whole of time. This is in contrast to the classical account of divine eternity as atemporal, immutable existence. In this paper, Aquinas' use of Boethius's definition of eternity as “the whole, perfect, and simultaneous possession of endless life” is analyzed and explained in contradistinction to Aristotle's definition of time. This analysis is then (...) used to respond to Nicholas Wolterstroff's argument in "God Everlasting" that God's knowledge of temporal events infects God with temporality and mutability. The argument concludes by introducing an important distinction between absolute simultaneity and temporal simultaneity, which allows us to hold God is omniscient because he is absolutely simultaneous with all events but is not temporally simultaneous with any event. (shrink)

Thomas Reid distinguished between natural and artificial language and argued that natural language has a very specific sort of priority over artificial language. This paper critically interprets Reid's discussion, extracts a Reidian explanatory argument for the priority of natural language, and places Reid's thought in the broad tradition of Cartesian linguistics.

In the Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas states that the “aspect of pastness” involved in memory is a certain kind of cognitive object — i.e., an intention — apprehended by the “estimative power.” All told, however, Aquinas mentions this idea precisely once. In this article, I construct an account of the idea that pastness is an estimative intention by drawing upon texts in which I argue that Aquinas develops this idea, albeit without invoking the terminology of the estimative intention. I (...) conclude that, by identifying the aspect of pastness as an estimative intention, Aquinas neatly synthesizes the Aristotelian and Arabic traditions on memory. (shrink)

ExtractIn a democracy people are free to express their opinions and question those of others. This is an important personal freedom, and also essential to the very idea of government by discussion. But it has also been held to be instrumentally important because in open public debate true ideas will conquer false ones by their merit, and the people will see the truth for themselves. In other words, democracy has an epistemic function as a kind of truth machine. From this (...) it follows that in a democracy there should be no dogma: no knowledge protected from public challenge and debate. Yet this whole argument is founded on embarrassing misconceptions of the nature of truth and of the working of democracy.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.DEMOCRACY IS NOT A TRUTH MACHINEVolume 12, Issue 33Thomas WellsDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175612000309Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. DEMOCRACY IS NOT A TRUTH MACHINEVolume 12, Issue 33Thomas WellsDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175612000309Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. DEMOCRACY IS NOT A TRUTH MACHINEVolume 12, Issue 33Thomas WellsDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175612000309Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation. (shrink)

This paper is part of a symposium on Linda Zagzebski's EPISTEMIC AUTHORITY (OUP, 2012). It focuses on Zagzebski's argument that the transmission of information through a chain of testimony weakens its evidential value. This argument is shown to rest on an overly simplistic model of testimonial transmission that does not apply to religious traditions. The real problem with modeling religious traditions just as transmitters of information is that this assumes a conception of religious knowledge that is too "insular" with respect (...) to other things the believer knows, as well as aspects of religious faith that go beyond the mere acceptance of doctrines. (shrink)

Abstract This paper explores Reiner Schürmann’s account of perigrinal ontology from the perspective of Meister Eckhart. What is so extraordinary about his work is its retrieval of nuances in Plato’s philosophy of mind. Professor Schürmann’s approach to Philosophy focused on a philosopher’s philosophy of mind. For example, his course titles, such as Augustine’s Philosophy, were listed and taught in Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind. The advantage of his approach can best be seen in his study of the Medieval Philosopher Meister Eckhart. (...) In this work, Professor Schürmann totalizes the relationship between the will and the intellect and unites the different categories of Platonic philosophy under the concept of perigrinal ontology. Instead of treating epistemology or aesthetics in isolation, they are examined as they relate to ontology. In Plato’s epistemology, the highest form of knowing is different; at its highest point, knowledge is a seeing. Meister Eckhart and the other Neoplatonic philosophers continued the argument that Plato initiated. This is not an instance of Gnosticism in that the successors of Plato in the Christian tradition are not introducing new material but are extending Plato’s philosophy. At the center of the controversies about Meister Eckhart’s alleged departure from Christian doctrine is the oneness with God. Here, Professor Schürmann acts like a good editor. He painstakingly draws out pertinent distinctions to demonstrate Meister Eckhart’s adherence to tradition. It is interesting in this light to consider what Saint Thomas Aquinas has said on some of these same issues. One can see, too, that Meister Eckhart is a good deal closer to Saint Thomas than is generally thought. Saint Thomas's writings are full of references to Neoplatonic philosophers, but he also actively engages with their ideas. Though exploring this is beyond this paper's scope, Saint Thomas’s commentary of the Christian Neoplatonist Pseudo Dionysius primarily supports this point. We also need to recall that the period in which all this unfolded was a period in history marked by the democratization of religion. More importantly, Meister Eckhart’s time was informed by the democratization of theology. Meister Eckhart’s writings and personal commitment to that project are noteworthy in this context. His decision to teach women in religious orders advanced theology, a historical breakthrough. There are some notable debates that Professor Schürmann addressed in this work. Perhaps chief among these is the overly close connection between the writings of Meister Eckhart and that of the late Heidegger. It had been suggested that Martin Heidegger’s interest in Zen Buddhism was thought to include that of Meister Eckhart. Waiting upon Being and detachment or releasement were similar in these three schools of thought. Professor Schürmann viewed this as a form of syncretism, the mashing up of ideas that seem similar but have important distinctions. For Professor Schürmann, the absolute absence of the faculty of the will in Meister Eckhart’s work distinguished him from these other philosophies. It is striking that Professor Schürmann repeatedly cites texts where Meister Eckhart sees the highest form of knowledge as purely a feature of the intellect. He even goes so far as to note that the will is almost absent from Meister Eckhart’s philosophy of mind. -/- . (shrink)

In the wake of the non-ideal theory turn in political philosophy, few have paused to ask: Is non-ideal theory a form of ideology? And perhaps even fewer have paused to ask: Is the debate between ideal/non-ideal theorists itself a form of ideology? To the first question, I argue that non-ideal theory is ideological in virtue of the fact that it rules out more utopian ways of theorizing by methodological fiat, and in so doing, risks entrenching an unjust status quo. To (...) the second question, I argue that the debate between ideal/non-ideal theorists is itself a form of ideology, one which serves to reinforce the status quo by convincing political philosophers/theorists that the most pressing problems are problems about what we should think about what we are doing. But this is false. An upshot of my argument is that we ought to abandon the ideal/non-ideal theory debate and address the pressing problems of political philosophy head-on in pluralist fashion, oscillating back and forth between these two modes of theorizing without a decision procedure to tell us when we should take up one perspective or the other. (shrink)

Although Henry Lee is often recognized to be an important early critic of Locke's 'way of ideas', his Anti-Scepticism (1702) has hardly received the scholarly attention it deserves. This paper seeks to fill that lacuna. It argues that Lee's criticism of Locke's alleged representationalism was original, and that it was quite different from the more familiar kind of criticism that was launched against Locke's theory of ideas by such thinkers as John Sergeant and Thomas Reid. In addition, the (...) paper offers an interpretation of Lee’s claim that, pace Locke, attempts to prove the veridicality of our cognitive apparatus are fundamentally misguided. (shrink)

In this article I contrast 17th and 18th explanations of hysteria including those of Sydenham and Willis with those given by Plato and pre-modern medicine. I show that beginning in the second decade of the 17th century the locus of the disorder was transferred to the nervous system and it was no longer connected with the womb as in Hippocrates and Galen; hysteria became identified with hypochondria, and was a disease contracted by men as well as women. I discuss the (...) purely mechanical explanation of hysteria given by Robert Boyle who attributed its cause to corporeal ideas as well as overly sensitive disposition of the nervous system. I relate this the mechanical theory of the nervous system prominent in Descartes' writings on physiology. The paper closes with a discussion of the contrast between early modern explanations of hysteria and the nature of man with those of Freud in the early 20th century. (shrink)

This article conducts a philosophical analysis of the legitimacy of political power in Tanzania using John Locke’s political theory as a framework. It evolved from researcher’s observation and empirical studies that concerned political legitimacy in Tanzania. The lack of philosophical approach opened away for philosophical investigations and the necessity of involving philosophical views like that of the John Locke, in addressing of the shaking political legitimacy in Tanzania. The factors such as; allegations of corruption, restricted freedom of expression (...) and limited access to justice, stimulated the author into philosophical inquiring, in accordance to John Locke’s political philosophy on the theory of legitimacy of political power. The Article examines how Locke’s principles of consent, protection of individual rights, and limited government apply within Tanzania’s socio-political context. The study highlights significant challenges to political legitimacy, including allegations of electoral manipulation, constraints on political freedoms, and governance issues such as corruption and lack of transparency. Recommendations are proposed to enhance democratic governance and accountability in Tanzania, emphasizing the critical need to strengthen electoral integrity, protect fundamental rights such as freedom of expression and assembly, and bolster institutional frameworks for transparency and judicial independence. By applying Locke’s principles, this analysis aims to contribute insights into the dynamics of political authority in Tanzania and suggest pathways for fostering a more inclusive, accountable, and legitimate governance framework aligned with the aspirations of its citizens. (shrink)

The limited aim here is to explain what John Dewey might say about the formulation of the grue example. Nelson Goodman’s problem of distinguishing good and bad inductive inferences is an important one, but the grue example misconstrues this complex problem for certain technical reasons, due to ambiguities that contemporary logical theory has not yet come to terms with. Goodman’s problem is a problem for the theory of induction and thus for logical theory in general. Behind the whole discussion (...) of these issues over the last several decades is a certain view of logic hammered out by Russell, Carnap, Tarski, Quine, and many others. Goodman’s nominalism hinges in essential ways on a certain view of formal logic with an extensional quantification theory at its core. This raises many issues, but the one issue most germane here is the conception of predicates ensconced in this view of logic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Spectres of False Divinity: Hume’s Moral AtheismJohn J. TilleyThomas Holden. Spectres of False Divinity: Hume’s Moral Atheism. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. xvi + 246. Cloth, $50.00.Thomas Holden argues that a key element of David Hume’s irreligious agenda is his case for moral atheism. According to Holden, Hume defends (conclusively, Hume believes) not merely weak moral atheism, according to which there is no morally praiseworthy (...) deity, but strong moral atheism, according to which there is no deity with any moral characteristics. The idea here is that if any being approximates the traditional notion of God as a first cause or designer, it cannot meet the preconditions for having moral attributes. Holden also discusses arguments that some might expect to be central to Hume’s case but which, according to Holden, are not. For instance, Holden maintains that Hume does not even endorse the evidential argument from evil, let alone use it to support moral atheism. Instead, Hume intends it as a parody of traditional natural theology. Holden closes with several points about the historical and philosophical import of Hume’s moral atheism.Right from the start, Holden faces challenges. How can he square his interpretation of Hume as a moral atheist with Hume’s repeated strictures against theological speculation? And how can he square his interpretation with the fact that Hume never explicitly advocates moral atheism?Holden skillfully meets these challenges. Regarding the first challenge, for example, he distinguishes “core natural theology,” which aims at knowledge of the deity’s distinctive, intrinsic properties, from “liminal natural theology,” which lacks such aims. This distinction, Holden contends, reconciles two elements of Hume’s philosophy that seem to conflict. The first is Hume’s rejection of theological speculation as beyond our cognitive capacities. The second is Hume’s frequent willingness to draw conclusions about divine attributes. Holden argues that although Hume’s strictures against theological speculation pertain to [End Page 297] core natural theology, they are not aimed at liminal natural theology—that is, at speculation about the deity’s non-distinctive or relational properties. Hume’s defense of moral atheism, Holden believes, falls within liminal natural theology.After addressing challenges to his reading of Hume, Holden discusses Hume’s arguments for strong moral atheism. These do not stand out in Hume’s writings (though many of their components do), but Holden finds them there. He does so not through overly imaginative reconstruction but through careful interpretation, with an eye on many texts.Hume’s first argument, the “argument from sentimentalism,” draws on Hume’s theory of the passions and his sentimentalist metaethics. Holden reconstructs it as follows. S1: The deity is not a natural object of any human passion. S2: Moral sentiments are a species of human passion. S3: If a being is not a natural object of the moral sentiments, then it cannot have moral attributes (either virtues or vices). Therefore, S4: The deity cannot have moral attributes. The first premise is the least familiar of the three, and Holden devotes considerable effort to clarifying it, examining Hume’s rationale for it, and addressing objections to it. He performs similar tasks regarding S2, S3, and the argument in general. For instance, he addresses at length three possible objections to the argument, his concern being that if they were sufficiently damaging (he argues that they are not), this might tell against interpreting Hume as advancing the argument.Hume’s second argument, the “argument from motivation,” goes roughly as follows. Although we know nothing about the deity’s distinctive intrinsic properties, we have good reason to think that most likely, the deity (like any unknown being picked out in advance) lacks a sentimental nature anything like ours. But without a sentimental nature akin to ours, a being’s behavior is not intelligible in human terms—for example, it cannot be said to reflect moral concern or such motives as malice and benevolence. And if a being’s behavior is not intelligible in human terms, that being is not morally assessable, which is to say that it lacks moral attributes. Thus, we should conclude that the deity most likely lacks such attributes. Holden... (shrink)

In the closing chapter of his recent bestseller The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker attributes what he dislikes in modern literature to the influence of poor empiricist psychology. The modernist ‘denial of human nature’ resulted, Pinker informs us sadly, in the replacement of ‘omniscient narration, structured plots, the orderly introduction of characters, and general readability’ by ‘a stream of consciousness, events presented out of order, baffling characters and causal sequences, subjective and disjointed narration, and difficult prose’ (p.410). And, worse still, ‘in (...) postmodernist literature, authors comment on what they are writing while they are writing it’ (p.411). Pinker doesn’t mention the intense pleasure which rather large numbers of readers find in the novels of Thomas Pynchon or Paul Auster, for example: but I suspect this would be ascribed to a disavowed hunger for status fostered by pretentious and unintelligible critics (compare pp.412-6). (shrink)

In telling the story of Thomas Willis and the collective investigations of body and brain in 17th-century England with tremendous energy and enthusiasm, journalist Carl Zimmer has written one of the best recent books of popular history of science. The full range of readers will be rewarded by Zimmer’s synthetic scholarship and his evident pleasure in the language of the primary texts. While he owes much to the work of Robert Frank and Robert Martensen in particular, Zimmer has negotiated (...) a vast secondary literature on the major figures of early modern natural philosophy. His decision not to discuss scholarly controversy directly, but rather ‘to give accounts of these people that were consistent with the current consensus’ (p.304) is understandable given the mass market at which he has successfully aimed: yet such a voice would bring a welcome freshness to specialists’ debates. (shrink)

Contents I Introduction II Subalternation and Theology III Theology and Dogmatic Declarations IV The Mixed Principles of Theology V Virtual Revelation: The Unity of Theology VI Theology as a Natural Science VII Theology’s Certitude VIII Conclusion Notes Bibliography All the contents are fully attributable to the author, Doctor Victor Salas. Should you wish to get this text republished, get in touch with the author or the editorial committee of the Studia Poinsotiana. Insofar as possible, we will be happy to broker (...) your contact. (shrink)

There are two general routes that Augustine suggests in De Trinitate, XV, 14-16, 23-25, for a psychological account of the Father's intellectual generation of the Word. Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent, in their own ways, follow the first route; John Duns Scotus follows the second. Aquinas, Henry, and Scotus's psychological accounts entail different theological opinions. For example, Aquinas (but neither Henry nor Scotus) thinks that the Father needs the Word to know the divine essence. If we compare (...) the theological views entailed by their psychologies we find a trajectory from Aquinas, through Henry, and ending with Scotus. This theological trajectory falsifies a judgment that every Augustinian psychology of the divine persons amounts to a pre-Nicene functional Trinitarianism. This study makes clear how one's awareness of the theological views entailed by these psychologies enables one to assess more thoroughly psychological accounts of the identity and distinction of the divine persons. (shrink)

Amid the many figures who number among the Thomists writing during the early 20th century period of revival in scholastic thought in the Roman Catholic Church in the wake of the encyclical letter Aeterni Patris (1879) of Leo XIII, there is numbered the French convert, Jacques Maritain (1882–1973). Over the course of his long lifetime, Maritain authored works covering a host of philosophical and theological topics: epistemology, the philosophy of the sciences and natural philosophy, aesthetics, moral philosophy, political philosophy, metaphysics, (...) the philosophy of history, etc. The details concerning Maritain’s youth and conversion have been ably told by others and can be consulted by the interested reader. Detailed bibliographies of his works are available for those interested in engaging the full breadth of his writing. In this article, I will focus on the particular shape of Maritain’s Thomism and his place in the overall hermeneutics of the Thomistic tradition, in particular the debt that he owes to John Poinsot (1589–1644), to whom he refers as “John of St. Thomas,” in accord with the standard appellations within the Thomistic tradition in which he wrote. Following a general account of Maritain’s “style” of Thomism, I will provide a specific catalogue of some central themes in his thought that bear the clear impress of his engagement with the thought of John of St. Thomas. Without claiming to be exhaustive, this article intends to provide the reader with a sufficient appraisal of the main lines of influence exercised upon Maritain’s thought by the Baroque Commentator, without whose philosophical and theological works Maritain’s own labors would be unthinkable. (shrink)

Arguably the biggest challenge in analyzing English tense is to account for the double access interpretation, which arises when a present tensed verb is embedded under a past attitude—e.g., "John said that Mary is pregnant". Present-under-past does not always result in a felicitous utterance, however—cf. "John believed that Mary is pregnant". While such oddity has been noted, the contrast has never been explained. In fact, English grammars and manuals generally prohibit present-under-past. Work on double access, on the other (...) hand, has either disregarded the oddity (e.g., Abusch 1997: 39) or treated it as a reflex of a particular dialect (e.g., Kratzer 1998: 14). The goal of the paper is to argue—based on a corpus study—that a present-under-past sentence is grammatical, but modulated by two, interacting pragmatic phenomena: cessation and parentheticality. (shrink)

The article presents a basic perception regarding social contract theory which is considered to be one of the most well-known and influential theories in western political philosophy. By exploring the concepts of social contract theory suggested by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, an attempt is made to reveal various features and characteristics of the natural state. The article discusses the general description of the state of nature as well as the process of establishing a social contract as a (...) means of formation of civil society. (shrink)

The author of the monograph is a Candidate of Culturology, Associate Professor of Tyumen State University. The monograph tests approaches to the understanding of the essence of Hobbes’s and Locke’s ideas about miracles that are more flexible than a formational-evolutionist approach. The monograph presents the main characteristics of these ideas as Christian philosophical ones, shows their general Christian direction and the historiographic perspective of studying these ideas primarily in line with Christian philosophy. The monograph is intended for experts in the (...) history of philosophy, the history of ideas, theology, religious studies, historical anthropology, as well as for those interested in the problems of historical-philosophical knowledge. Автор монографии – кандидат культурологии, доцент Тюменского государственного университета. В монографии апробируются более гибкие подходы к пониманию сущности идей Гоббса и Локка о чудесах по сравнению с формационно-эволюционистским подходом. Представлены основные характеристики идей Гоббса и Локка о чудесах как христианских философских идей. Показана общехристианская направленность идей Гоббса и Локка о чудесах и историографическая перспективность изучения этих идей в первую очередь как христианских философских идей. Монография рассчитана на специалистов в области истории философии, истории идей, теологии, религиоведения, исторической антропологии, а также на всех, кто интересуется проблемами историко-философского знания. (shrink)

An overview of debates in ethical theory within Christian Scholasticism in the decades after Thomas Aquinas.