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Abstract: in the ninth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that the virtuous person “wishes to live and to be preserved,” and rightly so, because “existing is something good to the good person [ἀγαθὸν τῷ σπουδαίῳ τὸ εἶναι]” (EN IX.4, 1166a19). Elsewhere in the same book, he notes that “living is choiceworthy [αἱρετὸν τὸ ζῆν], and for the good person most of all [μάλιστα], since being is good and pleasant for him” (EN IX.9, 1170b3–5). These two claims are broadly in agreement, but there is a subtle difference between them.1 Whereas the first suggests that living is good to the good person exclusively, the second implies that life might be worth choosing, albeit to a lesser degree than for the good person, even ... Read More PubDate: 2022-07-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: does the world contain colors, sounds, odors, and so on—that is, sensible qualities—or are they mere appearances that depend on our perception' In the early modern era, Galileo famously argued that reality is made up strictly of physical particles, and that sensible qualities exist only insofar as they are perceived; colors, for example, are mere appearances due to the impact of particles on our eyes, sounds are appearances deriving from the effect of air vibrations on our ears, and so on. Scholars generally see this view as opposed to that of Aristotelian-scholastic thinkers. There is broad agreement that Aristotle was a realist about sensible qualities and that medieval authors followed his realism: colors ... Read More PubDate: 2022-07-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: in a satirical letter to The Tatler in 1709, Mary Astell (1666–1731) is depicted as “Madonella,” the founder of “a College for young Damsels; where, instead of Scissors, Needles, and Samplers; Pens, Compasses, Quadrants, Books, Manuscripts, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, are to take up the whole of their Time.”1 The object of the satirist’s ridicule is Astell’s “serious proposal to the ladies” that they undertake in their formative years a religious retreat—to throw off the shackles of custom and, through a rigorous program of education and reflection on the Christian religion, learn how to exercise command over themselves in accordance with the “dignity of their natures” (SPL 57, 111). Permeating Astell’s metaphysical ... Read More PubDate: 2022-07-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: despite its centrality for his moral theory and psychology, Kant’s notion of “desire” (Begierde) has been understood in two different ways, and it is not obvious how those hang together. “Feeling-based” accounts stress the connection between Kantian1 desires and feelings. Such an account is endorsed by Wood, who says that “to desire an object (or state of affairs) is to have a representation of it accompanied by a feeling of pleasure. (Aversion is a representation accompanied by a feeling of displeasure.)”2 A slightly different version is defended by Grenberg, who argues that “insofar as the representation of a feeling includes representation of the pleasure (or potential pleasure) to be taken in the existence of a ... Read More PubDate: 2022-07-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: one distinctive feature of J. S. Mill’s liberalism is that he is at least as worried about threats to liberty that do not involve exercises of state power as those that do. Individuals and groups—“society”—can coerce without involving the police or legal system. But Mill’s recognition of this possibility poses a challenge for him, namely demarcating when society’s response to individuals’ exercise of their liberty constitutes coercion. Whenever people have choices to make, other people will have opinions about how well they have chosen, and sometimes those opinions will be critical. Even in a society where everyone had imbibed the lessons of On Liberty, people would still be amused, dismayed, or horrified by some ... Read More PubDate: 2022-07-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: this essay concerns the writings of Alfred Sohn-Rethel, an obscure figure on the margins of Frankfurt School critical theory.1 Though an associate of Adorno, Benjamin, Kracauer, and Bloch, Sohn-Rethel was never officially a member of Horkheimer’s “Institute for Social Research.”2 Nor does he today enjoy the renown of some of its official members.3 However, his writings provide the clearest instance of a project important to critical theory and Western Marxism more generally: the project of reconciling Marx’s historical materialism with classical German philosophy, in particular the transcendental idealism of Kant’s first critique.4 My aim in this essay is therefore to reconstruct Sohn-Rethel’s version of this ... Read More PubDate: 2022-07-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The Questions on Aristotle’s Metaphysics is Duns Scotus’s most important philosophical work. While Scotus’s obscurity is proverbial, that work adds additional layers of impenetrability, so much so that its fifteenth-century editor spoke of a chaos metaphysicum. In the last twenty-five years, scholars have brought a lot of clarity to this chaos, which is partly due to the difficulty of Scotus’s thought and writing style, and partly to the complicated textual tradition of this work. A further contribution to greater readability of the Metaphysics commentary is being made by a research team under the direction of Olivier Boulnois, which is undertaking its French translation, enriched by valuable introductory material. ... Read More PubDate: 2022-07-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Robin Douglass and Johan Olsthoorn’s edited critical guide grew from a European Hobbes Society meeting themed on Hobbes’s On the Citizen (De Cive). Hobbes intended On the Citizen to be the final treatise of his tripartite Elements of Philosophy. Sociopolitical forces demanded that he publish On the Citizen first, and he only later completed the trilogy with two preceding volumes: On the Body (De Corpore) and On Man (De Homine). Despite On the Citizen’s significance, it is often overlooked in scholarly work and in classroom instruction favoring Hobbes’s better-known Leviathan. Douglass and Olsthoorn augment the intellectual landscape by providing an engaging collection of articles that make an important and needed ... Read More PubDate: 2022-07-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The Pensées is a difficult book. When originally published in 1670, eight years after Pascal’s death, it was simply a collection of “thoughts” or pensées found among his papers after his death. Modern editors have based their editions on two seventeenth-century copies that group many of the fragments into thematic groups that purport to reflect Pascal’s own organization. Even so, the Pensées is still a collection of fragments. The reader, particularly the first-time reader, needs a guide.It was well known among his friends that Pascal was working on an apology for Christianity. In Pascal: Reasoning and Belief, Michael Moriarty is attempting both to recover Pascal’s plan for this apology and to offer a philosophical ... Read More PubDate: 2022-07-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The past thirty years have seen substantive debate on the nature of Robert Boyle’s self-described “Mechanical” or “Corpuscularian” philosophy, its treatment of kinds and qualities, its relation to his experimental studies, its relation to other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century matter theories, and its role in the development of chemistry. Using several different strands from this literature, Marina Banchetti-Robino aims to show how Boyle addresses issues relevant to philosophy of chemistry today: the emergent nature of chemical properties (chapter 4), the mereology of fundamental chemical wholes (chapter 5), and the nonreducibility of chemistry to physics. The last issue frames the whole book, which she describes ... Read More PubDate: 2022-07-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Stephen H. Daniel’s monograph offers a novel interpretation of Berkeley’s philosophy of mind while situating Berkeley’s thought within the context of early eighteenth-century epistemology and metaphysics. The text is commendable for its attempt to shed light on Berkeley’s engagement with thinkers and traditions that tend to fall outside the canon of early modern philosophy (such as Stoicism, Ramism, and “noncanonical” thinkers like Jonathan Edwards, Anthony Collins, and Peter Browne) and its attempt to place Berkeley’s lesser-known works, such as De Motu and Siris, on a par with his best-known texts. Daniel’s approach to historical interpretation is strongly contextualist and fits well with recent attempts to read ... Read More PubDate: 2022-07-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: One of the interpretive principles Jay Garfield follows in this book is the “cover principle”: “If you are unsure about what Hume is doing, close the book and read the cover” (4). The principle did not help when I was unsure about what Garfield was doing. The book starts with too many and incompatible goals. Garfield claims that book 2 of Hume’s Treatise is foundational to the entire Treatise and that “by taking Book II as foundational, we come to a reading that reconciles Hume’s skepticism and his naturalism, and that the key to this reconciliation is his communitarianism” (3). But Garfield also insists that we should read the Treatise “as an early text in cognitive science” (6). He also maintains that Hume ... Read More PubDate: 2022-07-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Hume scholarship in the history of economic thought has advanced since Eugene Rotwein’s 1955 collection Writings on Economics: David Hume, later reprinted with a new introduction by Margaret Schabas (New York: Routledge, 2006). However, as Schabas and Carl Wennerlind correctly observe, “There is as yet no monograph in English devoted to a comprehensive study of Hume’s economics, let alone one that connects this body of thought to his philosophical tenets” (xiii). Hence the motivation for the two eminent historians of economic thought, both of whom have specialized in Hume for a long time, finally to put out an excellent and readable book on Hume’s economic thought.Chapter 1, a survey on Hume’s biography, claims ... Read More PubDate: 2022-07-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: According to conventional wisdom, Kant demolished the traditional idea of the soul in his Critique of Pure Reason. By denying the human mind any theoretical or intuitive knowledge of the soul as an immaterial substance and referring this idea to an illusory tendency of the mind, he efficiently tore down a longstanding metaphysical discipline called rational psychology. Katherina Kraus’s aim is to challenge this conventional reading. In her new book Kant on Self-Knowledge and Self-Formation, she claims that Kant’s true intention was to transform rather than demolish the idea of the immaterial soul. Her main argument, nourished by a close reading of the Critique of Pure Reason, is that despite this transformation ... Read More PubDate: 2022-07-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Samantha Matherne has written an excellent, timely introduction to the thought of Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), the brilliant polymath who was the last representative of the “Marburg school” of neo-Kantianism, and who is well-known for wrangling a wide range of cultural phenomena into a system of “symbolic forms.” Despite Cassirer’s recent rise in prominence in the English-speaking philosophical world, there is only one other single-volume survey of his thought in English, Edward Skidelsky’s Ernst Cassirer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). Matherne’s book has the merit of helping to shore up this scholarly gap, and of providing a clear and succinct presentation of the philosophical system that ... Read More PubDate: 2022-07-13T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Originally a student of Marburg Neo-Kantianism, Nicolai Hartmann (1882–1950) departed from this tradition to become one of the leading German philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century. He wrote on all the major fields of philosophy, including the philosophy of history, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics, although his central interest was ontology. He held teaching posts in Marburg, Cologne, Berlin, and Göttingen, and was president of the German Philosophical Association after the Second World War. Perhaps unique among his peers, he spearheaded the resurgence of ontology by developing a pluralistic, humanistic realism that attempted to do justice to both the sciences and the humanities.Over the last ... Read More PubDate: 2022-07-13T00:00:00-05:00
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