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Abstract: There is a dilemma in Aristotle’s works that threatens to undermine key assumptions in his ethics and metaphysics. The dilemma concerns what I call “cross-sense comparisons”: comparisons in which the predicate is homonymous and applies to the comparanda in different senses.1 Aristotle states in the Physics, Categories, and Politics that cross-sense comparisons are impossible. Indeed, we would not try to compare the sharpness of pencils with the sharpness of our minds, because ‘sharp’ applies to pencils and minds in different senses.Aristotle’s rejection of cross-sense comparisons becomes problematic, however, when we recognize that several of his statements, including, in fact, some important ones, employ ... Read More PubDate: 2024-07-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In keeping with their professed Socratic heritage, the Stoics posited a kind of knowledge that is necessary for living a happy human life. A central innovation of their system was to posit an epistemic state that is superior to opinion (doxa) yet insufficient for understanding (epistêmê) and that affords us a way to acquire the latter. This “in between” state is katalêpsis, which the Stoics defined as assent to a kataleptic impression, and the special status of katalêpsis is supposed to derive from the nature of the kataleptic impression.1A central question concerning Stoic epistemology is whether it restricts kataleptic impressions to certain perceptual impressions or whether it countenances nonperceptual ... Read More PubDate: 2024-07-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Many early modern philosophers are notoriously hostile to Aristotelian metaphysics and especially the notion of power. Leibniz is an important exception, arguing that powers, along with substantial forms, are critical also to the new scientific world-picture.His position has received increased attention as part of a renewed interest in the philosophical history of powers. This interest is largely motivated and shaped by the reemergence of powers within contemporary metaphysics.1 In line with current discussions, scholars often assume that by ‘power’ past thinkers mean a dispositional property—a property whose essence consists in a directedness toward some manifestation.2 The central issue then becomes whether ... Read More PubDate: 2024-07-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Kant viewed Hume as a skeptical empiricist. Kant portrayed skeptics first and foremost as wary of our pretensions to engage in metaphysics, an alleged science in which we attempt to extend our knowledge a priori—that is, in advance of experience. He portrayed empiricists as committed to a view of the mind on which our concepts, and all substantive knowledge in which they figure, derive from experience. In viewing Hume as a skeptical empiricist, then, Kant portrayed him as challenging our pretensions to metaphysics in a particular way—namely, by challenging the status of concepts that Kant took to be pure concepts, or categories. Pure concepts originate in the understanding prior to experience, and for that reason ... Read More PubDate: 2024-07-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In the wake of the US Civil War, Republican leaders of South Carolina devised a plan to racially integrate their state university. Secretary of State Henry E. Hayne, one of the state’s many Black elected officials, took a first important step by registering for the medical program in 1873. The expected backlash was immediate: all three members of the medical faculty resigned upon Hayne’s first appearance on campus.1 Nonetheless, other politicians soon followed his example and enrolled for professional degrees, six young men transferred from the newly formed Howard University, and a steady influx of students would eventually lead the university to become majority Black.2 Governor Franklin J. Moses announced a second ... Read More PubDate: 2024-07-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In 1880s Britain, Constance Naden published several dozen philosophical texts, many defending “hylo-idealism,” a theory aiming to unify materialism with idealism. There is a large body of scholarship on Naden’s poetry, but her prose philosophy is neglected. Moreover, while some discussions of her hylo-idealism enter into metaphysics, none take her metaphysics as a focus.1 This paper offers the first sustained study of Naden’s metaphysical system. On this new reading of Naden’s hylo-idealism, her materialism is carefully qualified; and her idealism is distinctively Kantian, her construal of the external cosmos as unknowable placing her within the Victorian school of metaphysical agnosticism.One way this paper seeks ... Read More PubDate: 2024-07-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Aristotle on Sexual Difference is the latest addition to a growing literature on Aristotle’s views on women and other female animals. Like much of that literature, it surveys both his biological views and his political and ethical commitments. The writing is lucid, and the book is well organized. As described in the introduction, the book defends two overarching theses. First, Deslauriers claims that, unlike some of his predecessors who either saw women as an unalloyed evil (Hesiod, Empedocles, and Plato, among others) or thought of sexual difference as ideally eliminated (Plato again), Aristotle believes that females are valuable, albeit inferior. Second, she finds a biological basis for Aristotle’s description of ... Read More PubDate: 2024-07-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Brian C. Ribeiro’s Sextus, Montaigne, Hume: Pyrrhonizers is a charming and quirky investigation of his three titular skeptics. It is perhaps best understood as a skeptical investigation of skepticism. By that I mean that, like a good Pyrrhonist, Ribeiro explains how things appear to him without claiming to lay down a doctrine or dogma. His topic is how and why skepticism still matters (7). And he suggests that those who are moved by skeptical arguments can learn intellectual modesty from them and thereby achieve a degree of philosophical “calmness of soul” (141).Ribeiro approaches his three figures by taking the cogency of their skeptical arguments for granted. There is little investigation of why these ... Read More PubDate: 2024-07-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In this monumental work, Frank Griffel provides a wide-ranging and methodologically diverse investigation into the nature and formation of philosophy in the Eastern Islamic world in the twelfth century. Griffel explores institutionally, biographically, and textually how philosophy continued to be practiced in the century following the death of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), a time previously associated with the decline of philosophy in the Islamic world. The astonishing breadth of content is organized with great clarity into three principal sections: (1) “Post-classical philosophy in its Islamic context,” itself divided into three chapters covering the historical context, the meanings and conceptual frameworks of ... Read More PubDate: 2024-07-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In recent years, there has been a noticeable uptick in studies exploring medieval conceptions of personhood. One line of approach taken by scholars of medieval philosophy has been to investigate the emergence of the idea of subjectivity in medieval philosophical and theological texts and to work from there toward a broader picture of medieval accounts of personhood. Alain de Libera’s as-of-yet incomplete series of books under the title Archéologie du sujet (the first volume appeared in 2007 for Vrin) exemplifies this approach. Others, such as Dominik Perler in Eine Person sein: Philosophische Debatten im Spätmittelalter (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2020), take their starting point from some uncontroversial ... Read More PubDate: 2024-07-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: What type of language should philosophers use' Granted that such things as clarity and communicative efficacy are desiderata of a good language in which to philosophize, are they best achieved by inventing a specialized language or by sticking to the common language we already possess' It might seem that using familiar terms would be among the nonnegotiable starting points in philosophical theorizing. After all, how else are we to ensure that our theories make and maintain contact with the subjects that prompted us to philosophize in the first place' On reflection, however, perhaps our common language is so beset with defects—imprecision, the encoding of various prejudices, an inability to express certain types of ... Read More PubDate: 2024-07-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Stewart Duncan’s Materialism from Hobbes to Locke presents a tightly focused study of the seventeenth-century English debate over materialism in the philosophy of mind, from Hobbes’s uncompromising rejection of incorporeal substance as a contradiction in terms through to Locke’s cautious calibrations around the metaphysics of mind and body. Along the way, Duncan considers Hobbes’s exchange with Descartes and examines the contributions of a handful of mid- and late seventeenth-century figures, including those of the Cambridge Platonists Henry More and Ralph Cudworth writing in scandalized reaction to Hobbes, and that of the more bohemian figure Margaret Cavendish, with her own panpsychist variation of materialism. ... Read More PubDate: 2024-07-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: This monograph offers a bold and original interpretation of Kant’s theory of reflective judgment, focusing on judgments of taste (hereafter “aesthetic judgments”) and the special problem that Kant takes such judgments to raise. In Makkai’s preferred terms, the problem is that aesthetic judgments are normative—they demand universal agreement—but also subjective (14). How are such judgments possible' Though the problem may seem clear enough, Makkai suggests that a closer look is in order; indeed, her “main focus is on working out a proper understanding of the problem” (15). Makkai undertakes this task over the course of five relatively short chapters, introducing several interpretive theses that come together to ... Read More PubDate: 2024-07-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: This is the last book Rudolf Makkreel published before passing away in October 2021. No wonder, then, that it makes some strong points, one of which is truly fundamental: the time has come to recognize the expediency of reading Kant along with Dilthey for a better understanding of the workings of human comprehension. Makkreel maintains that Kant endorsed “a more inclusive idea of philosophizing according to a world-concept (Weltbegriff ),” for Kant had realized that, because reason cannot simply extrapolate from the ways in which the understanding proceeds to a determinate lawful order, it is necessary to tame the speculative projections of reason by our own powers of orientation and judgment. Hence, Makreel ... Read More PubDate: 2024-07-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Fremstedal’s impressive synthesis of the anthropological, ethical, and religious dimensions of Kierkegaard’s thought draws on the fruits of his earlier work, Kierkegaard and Kant on Radical Evil and the Highest Good (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). In each of the two volumes, Fremstedal argues for key points of agreement between Kant and Kierkegaard, and he proposes a precise and differentiated account of the way in which the anthropological assumptions of each thinker (a) undergird and shape their respective ethics and (b) pave the way for a religiosity that not only builds on but actively fortifies moral agency. The result, Fremstedal claims, is a rendering of Kierkegaard as by no means averse to the demands ... Read More PubDate: 2024-07-15T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Simon Truwant has written a very well-researched study of Cassirer’s and Heidegger’s 1929 encounter in Davos. Because of its historical setting at the origin of the analytic-continental divide, this book is of interest to everyone working in contemporary philosophy. As there is already a considerable mass of secondary literature on this topic, Truwant acknowledges he needs to show that his book sheds new light on it. He does so by stressing his choice to focus exclusively on the philosophical arguments that were at stake in the Cassirer-Heidegger encounter rather than considering its reception and so adding to other scholars’ “non-philosophical assessments” (6). Truwant argues that the “Cassirer-Heidegger dispute” ... Read More PubDate: 2024-07-15T00:00:00-05:00
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