The works of the French essayist reflect his views of morality, society, and customs in the late sixteenth century.

As we have seen in the transition form Part I to Part II of this book, the inductive riskiness of doxastic methods applied in testimonial uptake or prescribed as exemplary of religious faith, helpfully operationalizes the broader social scientific, philosophical, moral, and theological interest that people may have with problems of religious luck. Accordingly, we will now speak less about luck, but more about the manner in which highly risky cognitive strategies are correlated with psychological studies of bias studies and (...) human cognitive ecology. Chapter Four is concerned with connections between psychological study of biases and heuristics, and the comparative study of fundamentalism. The first section looks at work by psychologists and philosophers on our bias blind spot. Later sections ask, ‘In what ways might biases and heuristics play a special role in aiding our understanding of, and response to, fundamentalist orientation?’. The judgments we make in ignorance of our own biases Montaigne calls our importunate presumptions, and he suggests a host of practical factors that make them appealing. Montaigne, as I discuss in the first section, associates many of our errors with one or another kind of presumption, often about our similarity or differences from others, or from God. Our obvious psychographic diversity, and the polemical ground dynamics involved in our ‘culture wars’ are compounded on the agential side by the invisibility of our biases to ourselves. A number of person and social biases are described that plausibly affect all of our beliefs in domains of controversial views, religious views included. The second section continues to study of how etiological symmetry (similar patterns of belief-uptake) gives rise to religious contrariety (diverse narratives and theologies) in testimonial faith traditions, and what the implications of this are for philosophy of religion, generally, and for an improved comparative study of fundamentalism, in particular. Utilizing the work of philosophers such as Rachel Fraser and psychologists such as Emily Pronin and her co-authors, I offer a four-step genealogical account for how etiological symmetry so easily gives rise to religious contrariety. This account begins with the narrative nature of testimony in the Abrahamic family of religions, and how narrative content confounds our “source monitoring.” My genealogy also introduces what I term biased-closure inferences (BCI) as one of the key enablers of religious exclusivism and absolutism. These are the seemingly ‘logical’ but actually very self-serving inferences people often make, inferences from their own belief being true, to any belief contrary to it being false. Those who claim unique truth, epistemic access, and/or virtue and religious value for the home religion are no exception to the broad pertinence of bias studies across domains of controversial view. The proximate causes of belief are all that we can study, and in these there may be significant etiological symmetries. Yet those groups themselves, especially to the extent that they are exclusivist, are tunnel-visioned on claims of doctrinal uniqueness: on content differences of a theological sort. Comparative philosophy is met with the puzzlement that symmetric or essentially similar doxastic strategies should give rise not just to cognitive diversity, but to what we can call polarized or polemical contrariety, contrariety of a kind where each view adamantly rejects all others. Arguably, the more that theologies offer explanations of a counter-inductive sort, or profess counter-inductive thinking as exemplary of faith, the better evidential ground there for inferring that bias involved in the acquisition or maintenance of beliefs. This provides more substance to the question of when censure, and etiological challenges to faith-based beliefs are philosophically well-motivated. (shrink)

Under the pretense of defending an obscure treatise by a Catalan theologian, Sebond, Montaigne attacks the philosophers who attempt rational explanations of the universe and argues for a skeptical Christianity based squarely on faith rather than reason. The result is the _Apology for Raymond Sebond_, a classic of Counter-Reformation thought and a masterpiece of Renaissance literature. This new translation by Roger Ariew and Marjorie Grene achieves both accuracy and fluency, conveying at once the nuances of Montaigne’s arguments and (...) his distinctive literary style. (shrink)

A superb achievement, one that successfully brings together in accessible form the work of two major writers of Renaissance France. This is now the default version of Montaigne in English. --Timothy Hampton, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley.

An essential companion to the most relevant works of Michel de Montaigne Essays: The Philosophy Classic delivers a carefully curated collection of thought-provoking works by sixteenth-century thinker Michel De Montaigne. Exploring topics as diverse as politics, poetry, love, friendship and the purpose of philosophy, this latest entry in the celebrated Capstone Classics series is accessible and intuitively organized. Follow the thoughts of the person who created the essay genre in literature as he expresses his philosophy, interests, and learning. (...) Throughout, you’ll be guided by an expansive introduction by leading Montaigne scholar Philippe Desan and the comments of series editor Tom Butler-Bowdon, placing the work of Montaigne in its historical and philosophical context. You’ll also find: Celebrated and famous works by Montaigne, including noted classics like “That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die” Lesser-known works that have taken on increased importance in the unique context of the 21st-century A version of the popular Charles Cotton translation first published in 1685: a simple, faithful, and clear adaptation of the French original An invaluable resource for anyone interested in the insightful and illuminating work of one of the most enduring thinkers of the 16th-century, Essays: The Philosophy Classic is an essential addition to the libraries of philosophers, historians, and laypeople seeking an eye-opening and fascinating exploration of life itself. (shrink)

Robert Pippin has recently raised what he calls ‘the Montaigne problem’ for Nietzsche's philosophy: although Nietzsche advocates a ‘cheerful’ mode of philosophizing for which Montaigne is an exemplar, he signally fails to write with the obvious cheerfulness attained by Montaigne. We explore the moral psychological structure of the cheerfulness Nietzsche values, revealing unexpected complexity in his conception of the attitude. For him, the right kind of cheerfulness is radically non-naïve; it expresses the overcoming of justified revulsion (...) at calamitous aspects of life through a reflective, higher-order affirmative attitude. This complex notion of cheerfulness turns out to have roots in Montaigne himself, and it must be thought of as a kind of second nature cultivated through practice, as a kind of second nature. Understanding the meaning of cheerfulness thereby sheds light on the conception of philosophy as a way of life in both Nietzsche and Montaigne. (shrink)

Montaigne est un philosophe et un philosophe difficile. Un philosophe ce n'est pas parce que les Essais ne suivent pas un ordre systématique, qu'ils ne relèvent pas de l'histoire de la philosophie. Un philosophe difficile. Pourquoi, en effet, les Essais ont-ils été souvent laissés dans les marges inexploitées de l'histoire de la philosophie? À cause d'une particularité, consciemment revendiquée, de leur auteur: pour comprendre Montaigne lui-même, sa propre situation philosophique nous impose de le comprendre immédiatement. Il était donc (...) urgent de s'appliquer à retrouver certains des contextes des Essais, en particulier l'arrière-fond scolastique, trop longtemps exclu des études montanistes. Mais aussi de leur appliquer un principe herméneutique, aussi simple qu'indiscutable en histoire de la philosophie : aller du plus clair au plus obscur, de ce qui est conceptuellement le mieux établi au plus problématique. En l'occurrence, aller du XVIIe siècle, singulièrement de Descartes, aux Essais : accéder au je de Montaigne à partir de l'ego cartésien et par différence avec lui ; plus encore, y accéder, avec et par-delà l'ego cartésien, à partir de l'ego transcendantal et de la réduction phénoménologique. Bref, lire conceptuellement et philosophiquement un philosophe. Le présent volume réunit donc des études d'approches différentes et complémentaires. Il vise d'abord à rapprocher Montaigne de ses lectures antiques - y compris celles dont on ne soupçonne pas ordinairement que Montaigne les a faites. Il entend ensuite confronter les Essais à la scolastique - le Dieu de Montaigne n'est peut-être pas si éloigné qu'on l'a cru du Dieu de certains Nominalistes, voire du Dieu cartésien, libre créateur des vérités éternelles. En résulte une détermination nouvelle du scepticisme de Montaigne, qui permet de mieux mesurer son irréductibilité à ses modèles antiques. Enfin, il s'interroge sur la pertinence actuelle de l'attitude philosophique de Montaigne, en le faisant dialoguer avec d'autres philosophes qui ne furent pas ses contemporains, mais qui sont les nôtres, et sans lesquels il n'est pas aujourd'hui de philosophie - singulièrement la phénoménologie. C'est en excédant les catégories dans lesquelles l'historiographie a voulu l'enfermer et les faux problèmes qu'elle ne cesse de lui poser, qu'un philosophe se révèle pleinement, Montaigne. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Montaigne on Witches and the Authority of Religion in the Public SphereBrian RibeiroThe pleasure in reading Michel de Montaigne, the French Counter-Reformer and fideistic skeptic, is due in no small part to the ways in which he so frequently defeats our expectations. The surprises occur at several levels, beginning with the very titles of his essays, which frequently have little to do with the topics he actually (...) discusses. Who, for example, would expect an essay titled "Of Three Good Women" (II.35) to praise the three women for their variously successful attempts at committing suicide—and little else? Or who would expect an essay with the innocent title "On Some Verses of Virgil" (II.5) to be richly confessional, as well as very explicitly sexual? Or, as one final example, who would expect an essay "Of Cripples" (II.11) to either (a) discuss the witch trials or (b) discuss cripples principally in terms of whether the lame make better sexual partners?The surprises are not confined to the formal features of Montaigne's text, but also appear in the views he articulates. We would not expect an early modern Frenchman to write so sympathetically and even admiringly about the cannibals of the New World (I.31). Nor would we expect an early modern French Catholic to write in opposition to the witch trials. Montaigne does both—with incredible finesse. But despite the attractively progressive attitude seemingly manifested in these two stances, Montaigne's overall view is in fact far more conservative and quietistic than we might expect, were we judging based only on these few cases. And so he surprises us yet again: We are surprised to find him opposing the witch trials, and we are surprised a second time to find that his opposition does not signal any deeper tendency toward progressive or politically liberal views. In short, there is good reason [End Page 235] to see Montaigne's general stance as firmly traditional. While he sometimes expresses apparently progressive views, he does so in a way that has no stable basis in his overall conceptual scheme, as I will argue. Of course, merely observing this tension in Montaigne's work is nothing new. Hugo Friedrich, writing in 1949, and discussing II.11, claimed that "Montaigne bravely takes a position against the delusion of the masses and against clerical fanaticism."1 But in the same passage (and elsewhere) Friedrich shows himself to be well-aware that this apparent radicalism is balanced by Montaigne's conservatism.2 That tension—in a nutshell—encapsulates the debate.3 However, "Of Cripples" presents this tension in its most perplexing form, making a detailed analysis of II.11 our best hope of making progress on the debate.4To support these claims I propose to offer a careful textual analysis of Montaigne's discussion of the witch trials in "Of Cripples."5 After considering several philosophical interpretations of his key Augustinian principle, I will argue that Montaigne's critique of the witch trials is primarily driven by problems internal to the religious perspective, and so does not represent an attempt to circumscribe the authority of religion in the public sphere more generally.6 Such a position, then, is both traditional and quietistic—another of Montaigne's surprises for his readers. If this is correct, then one of the principal texts used for promoting a "liberal" Montaigne—namely, II.11—can be be reappropriated by the defenders of a "quietistic" Montaigne. Nonetheless, even on my reading, there remain some incompletely resolved tensions. That, perhaps, is no less than we should expect from history's only self-proclaimed "accidental philosopher."7IMontaigne opens "Of Cripples" by discussing the Gregorian reform of the calendar, which had been adopted in France in 1582. Yet as odd as this opening is, it serves to quickly introduce a familiar theme in the Essays: Even so basic a matter as the calendar is subject to "[s] o much uncertainty"—just like everything else—that "we are every day in doubt" about how to "keep a record of past events" (F, pp. 784–85). These thoughts are then quickly transformed into a skeptical reflection on human reason itself... (shrink)

The disappearance of the technical notion ofspeciesin Montaignes’sEssaysis characteristic of the transformation that took place around the beginning of the trial of knowledge. The theory of the species is then replaced by a doctrine of the appearance as “fantasy”. The problem, which is epistemological, takes its source in the debate opposing Stoics, Neo-academicians and Pyrrhonists on the topic of the truth value of representation. The conclusive passages in theApologyenable us to grasp the neo-pyrrhonian problematic in all its complexity. In (...) it, Montaigne focuses on the difference between appearance and reality, or appearance and essence, by opposing — as Sextus did — the “nature”, in itself inaccessible, to the quality as we perceive it through our senses. The role of the senses in this process is described either as a qualification or alteration of the object, or as a “falsification” of it, which entails the classical sceptical problem of the difficulty to choose between one representation or another — and to discriminate between the qualities that are “normal” and those that are not. A comparison with Henri Estienne’s commentary to thePyrrhonianae Hypotyposesfinally sheds some light on Montaigne’s dependence toward Greek sources and Renaissance philology. (shrink)

Pagans and Philosophers explores how writers—philosophers and theologians, but also poets such as Dante, Chaucer, and Langland, and travelers such as Las Casas and Ricci—tackled the Problem of Paganism. Augustine and Boethius set its terms, while Peter Abelard and John of Salisbury were important early advocates of pagan wisdom and virtue. University theologians such as Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, and Bradwardine, and later thinkers such as Ficino, Valla, More, Bayle, and Leibniz, explored the difficulty in depth. Meanwhile, Albert the Great (...) inspired Boethius of Dacia and others to create a relativist conception of scientific knowledge that allowed Christian teachers to remain faithful Aristotelians. At the same time, early anthropologists such as John of Piano Carpini, John Mandeville, and Montaigne developed other sorts of relativism in response to the issue. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:What Happened to Civility: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne's Modern Project by Ann HartleVicente Raga RosalenyHARTLE, Ann. What Happened to Civility: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne's Modern Project. Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 2022. ix + 178 pp. Cloth, $100.00; paper, $30.00Why are we witnessing increasing social polarization in Western societies? What has happened to make our liberal democracies so ideologically charged? (...) Professor Ann Hartle's book tries to answer these and other questions in line with the concept of civility that, according to her thesis, Michel de Montaigne created in early modernity and that is about to disappear in our day. Not in vain is Montaigne the protagonist of this book, given that Professor Hartle is a world-renowned specialist on the author of the Essays, although in this case she is interested in the transformations that gave rise to modernity in order to understand our present day. She reads Montaigne for a better interpretation of some central problems of our time, such as the difficulty to speak freely that is experienced on university campuses and, in general, the increasing politicization of our civil societies.Thus, in the first place, Professor Hartle's work interrogates the origins of civility, the social bond created in modernity. To this end, she exposes what happened in the time of Montaigne, when societies, based on the classical and Christian tradition, were plunged into a general crisis. This is what the French essayist detected, and it led him to propose a new type of bond. For this, it is necessary to free oneself from tradition, which had legitimized the division between masters and slaves, the source of all conflicts.Montaigne's movement is philosophical in character: It consists of a split carried out in his Essays between the natural human being and the philosophical observer, which leads to a break with traditional moral standards, identified with Nature. The new human being, thus unfolded, can choose his own hierarchy of values and address the good he chooses with his own will (although this will be a will purified of particularisms, without excessive self-esteem). Such self-awareness, achieved by Montaigne as an accidental philosopher, is concretized in the predominance of the concept of judgment, in the ability to freely choose our possibilities (and not ends dictated by Nature).The new world thus created, Hartle explains, gave rise to the liberal order. It is true that Montaigne was not a theorist, but in his work it is possible to find the rupture of the traditional hierarchy between masters [End Page 351] and slaves, now considered as equals before the law, which is above all, and which is the fruit of reason. In this civil society, human beings no longer dominate each other, and each peacefully pursues his purposes. It is the state, as the embodiment of the law, that regulates everything, except the space of freedom gained with the emergence of the modern public sphere.In this context, the concept of authenticity makes sense, which, according to Professor Hartle, is the best reflection of the breakdown of the traditional order and the disappearance of its moral community. Now each individual pursues his purposes and is no longer to fulfill the ends of a universal human nature. That is why the bond of civility, in which the absolute autonomy of the subject is recognized, as well as his equality before the law, replaces the moral ties of the traditional community and its hierarchies. It is the French thinker who best exemplifies this transit, by showing himself openly in his Essays as a common subject who pursues his purposes and who relates to others as equals, no longer as someone superior, capable of disputing merit, and dominating others.However, this new society and its civil bonds are in crisis; civility fades, or that is Professor Hartle's pessimistic conclusion. Today we are witnessing an ideologization of previously depoliticized areas, such as the university, with the demand for the use of politically correct language and the fear of expressing oneself freely, especially when one's own opinions do not align with the current political trends. The failure... (shrink)

The article is devoted to a comparative analysis of the political views of the philosophers of Montaigne circle. The ideas put forward by Charron and La Boétie were important not only for the period of religious wars of the 16th century, but also for various aspects of the genesis of modern philosophy. If autocracy is unacceptable in principle for La Boétie, then Charron is a supporter of a monarchical state structure, although he condemns tyrannical rule. La Boétie justifies his (...) position with references to the need to protect political free­dom. Autocracy, he believes, is inseparable from arbitrariness, illegal and gross violation of the interests of the country’s residents. People can refuse freedom only voluntarily, from force of habit of obeying tyrannical power, once established by deception or violence. He considers it possible to end religious strife by a revival of the Church and a moral re­newal. La Boétie’s political ideal is a republic. Charron, by contrast, considers the king a true sovereign. But rulers often have both shortcomings and vices, sometimes giving rise to tyranny, expressed in disregard for the laws and traditions of the country. Charron, like La Boétie, sees the reason for the religious wars in the damage of morals. He also sees a compromise as the best solution; to withdraw compatriots from the state of civil con­frontation is possible peacefully. For Charron, as for La Boétie, social inequality, class hi­erarchy seems to be an invariable condition of social existence. For both, violence is an unacceptable form of implementing social improvements. Both see religion as an im­portant pillar of social life. In the coordinate system of the two thinkers of the Montaigne circle, religious considerations are not taken beyond the general contours of their political reflections. It is noteworthy that for the philosophical landscape of the late Renaissance, the problem of religious confrontation turns out to be closely associated with the question of the best form of social structure. Discussions about it continue in our time. (shrink)

Sixteen American college students spent a month in India with His Holiness the Seventeenth Karmapa. Together, they discussed topics ranging from food justice to gender identities to sustainable compassion. The Karmapa's teachings in this book are the product of those meetings. For those who wish to take up its challenge, this book can serve as a guide to being a friend to this planet and to all of us who share it. The Karmapa describes how to see the world as (...) a global community, in which people are linked by their shared concerns for humanity--and their wish to bring about real change. While acknowledging the magnitude of this undertaking, the Karmapa shows us how to go about it, using the inner resources we have already. (shrink)

The article concerns the meta-epistemological problem of the justification of a theory of knowledge and provides a reconstruction of the history of its formulations. In the first section, I analyse the connections between Sextus Empiricus' diallelus, Montaigne's rouet and Chisholm's problem of criterion; in the second section I focus on the link between thediallelus and the Cartesian circle; in the third section I reconstruct the origin of Fries' trilemma; finally, in the last section I draw some general (...) conclusions about the issue qua a general problem for a theory of knowledge. (shrink)

I try to show that Descartes criterion of truth is neither viciously circular nor does it, alternatively, commit him to an infinite hierarchy of criteria. As a result, he is able to resolve the age-old "problem of the criterion" as it was known both to the Greek sceptics and Montaigne. Beyssade's interpretation of Descartes' criterion, on the other hand, is inconsistent with its being a criterion at all and has disastrous consequences for the rest of Descartes' philosophy.

This article proposes a novel interpretation of Montaigne’s and Bayle’s comments on Tacitus. My contention is that their Tacitism is a Foucauldian discourse on toleration. Toleration is an example of governmentality, a strategy to govern a population, not a genuine call for religious diversity. This novel reading applies to Michel de Montaigne’s Essays and Pierre Bayle’s Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet and his Historical and Critical Dictionary. Montaigne’s essay On the Useful and the Honourable, (...) he shows that there is a difference between his public and private persona. The author discusses ideas of toleration in a Tacitist style. This happens in his essay Something Lacking in Our Civil Administrations, where the author laments the death of Sebastian Castalio and, indirectly, he supports his commitment to religious pluralism. As I will show, Montaigne embraces a Gallican belief system, which is more conciliatory Bayle a century later, discusses the same issues. In his Various Thoughts, he makes a case for toleration as a tool to manage a population. Ultimately, it will be clear how this plea for toleration is not a product of the Enlightenment, but it is rather a discourse to achieve societal compliance. (shrink)

Politics and Modernity provides a critical review of the key interface of contemporary political theory and social theory about the questions of modernity and postmodernity. Review essays offer a broad-ranging assessment of the issues at stake in current debates. Among the works reviewed are those of William Connolly, Anthony Giddens, J[um]urgen Habermas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor and Roy Bhaskar. As well as reviewing the contemporary literature, the contributors assess the historical roots of current problems in the works of (...) Nietzsche and Max Weber. (shrink)

The Mahayana tradition in Buddhist philosophy is defined by its ethical orientation--the adoption of bodhicitta, the aspiration to attain awakening for the benefit of all sentient beings. And indeed, this tradition is known for its literature on ethics, which reflect the Madhyamaka tradition of philosophy, and emphasizes both the imperative to cultivate an attitude of universal care (karuna) grounded in the realization of emptiness, impermanence, independence, and the absence of any self in persons or other phenomena.This position is morally very (...) attractive, but raises an important problem: if all phenomena, including persons and actions, are only conventionally real, can moral injunctions or principles be binding, or does the conventional status of the reality we inhabit condemn us to an ethical relativism or nihilism? In Moonpaths, the Cowherds address an analogous problem in the domain of epistemology and argues that the Madhyamaka tradition has the resources to develop a robust account of truth and knowledge within the context of conventional reality. The essays explore a variety of ways in which to understand important Buddhist texts on ethics and Mahayana moral theory so as to make sense of the genuine force of morality. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to analyse the positions of Montaigne and Descartes in relation to the question of the animal. To do this, I begin by characterizing Derrida's position on the subject, who considers Montaigne and Descartes as two opposing positions on the subject. Then, I analyse the positions of Montaigne and Descartes by means of a commentary on texts by both authors, while I try to explain the Cartesian turn on the animal question with (...) respect to Montaigne. Finally, I argue that Derrida's approach, beyond emphasizing the problem of the animal from the point of view of the Western tradition, inherits the dispute between Montaigne and Descartes. He stressed not so much animal dignity as the peculiarity of man. Moreover, this peculiarity must be demonstrated in order to make self-government possible in a world which is not incomprehensible, but explicable by laws that seem to make human freedom impossible. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to analyse the positions of Montaigne and Descartes in relation to the question of the animal. To do this, I begin by characterizing Derrida's position on the subject, who considers Montaigne and Descartes as two opposing positions on the subject. Then, I analyse the positions of Montaigne and Descartes by means of a commentary on texts by both authors, while I try to explain the Cartesian turn on the animal question with (...) respect to Montaigne. Finally, I argue that Derrida's approach, beyond emphasizing the problem of the animal from the point of view of the Western tradition, inherits the dispute between Montaigne and Descartes. He stressed not so much animal dignity as the peculiarity of man. Moreover, this peculiarity must be demonstrated in order to make self-government possible in a world which is not incomprehensible, but explicable by laws that seem to make human freedom impossible. (shrink)

The Ontological and Epistemological Assumptions of Montaigne’s ScepticismMontaigne is widely regarded as one of the most significant sceptics of the 16th century. His most important work, Essays, had a great impact on the thinkers of the 16th and 17th centuries, in particular on the philosophy of Descartes. The article presents Montaigne’s critique of senses and reason as sources of human knowledge. The elements of his scepticism that went beyond the sceptic arguments of ancient thinkers has been emphasized. The (...) negative role of his ontological variabilism in knowing things has been underlined. As a result of the total criticism of the possibilities of human cognition made by the author of the Essays, attention has been paid to the non-sceptical type of the question posed by him: “What do I know?” “Que sais-je?”. The answer to this question led him to fideism in cognition. At the end of the article, an attempt has been made to indicate Montaigne’s main epistemological and metaphysical assumptions that contributed to the problem of cognition. It has also been highlighted in what way the understanding of reason, method, and, above all, self became for Descartes, unlike Montaigne, the foundation of certain knowledge. (shrink)

David Rosenthal’s anthology is a valuable collection of readings. There is no dross in this book: each article is both an excellent philosophical composition in its own right and a marked stage in the development of the relatively young discipline, the philosophy of mind. Of the five sections of the book the first two are introductory; one historical the other problematic. The first section contains statements on classical materialism by Descartes, Spinoza, and Hobbes. The Descartes selections include passages from his (...) correspondence with Newcastle and Henry Moore. These clarify his veiled attack on Montaigne’s attempt to mitigate the differences between man and beast in Part V of the Discourse. Along with excerpts from Part V and Meditation VI the letters leave a coherent impression of the way Descartes handles "materialism." In the second part we are given the familiar statement of the identity thesis by Smart along with two early articles by Shaffer and Cornman, which, at the time overlooked, are significant forecasts of problems that most identity theorists are only today recognizing as problems. For instance, Cornman’s suggestion that the first project for the identity theorist is to "develop further the concept of a category" has attracted close attention only in the last few years. (shrink)

RESUMO O texto propõe, inicialmente, uma aproximação entre as visões de Aristóteles e Montaigne sobre a virtude da coragem, com especial atenção ao problema da morte heroica. Então, são apresentados alguns pontos de diferenciação do filósofo francês em relação ao legado aristotélico para, enfim, mostrar que uma das restrições especificamente montaignianas sobre a legitimidade de um ato de coragem acarreta uma limitação à ação do próprio Estado, o que deve ser julgado um elemento essencial à formação do pensamento político (...) moderno. ABSTRACT At first, the article proposes an approximation between Aristotle's and Montaigne's views on the virtue of courage, with special attention to the problem of heroic death. Then, some distinguishing points of the French philosopher from the Aristotelian legacy are presented, in order to show, finally, that one of the specifically Montaignean restrictions on the legitimacy of an act of courage entails a limitation to the action of the State itself; which must be considered an essential element to the shaping of Modern political thought. (shrink)

The “somewhat vague, intuitive” notion from computability theory of an effective procedure (method) or algorithm can be fairly precisely defined even if it is not sufficiently formal and precise to belong to mathematics proper (in a narrow sense)—and even if (as many have asserted) for that reason the Church–Turing thesis is unprovable. It is proved logically that the class of effective procedures is not decidable, i.e., that no effective procedure is possible for ascertaining whether a given procedure is effective. This (...) undecidability result is proved directly from the notion itself of an effective procedure, without reliance on any (partly) mathematical lemma, conjecture, or thesis invoking recursiveness or Turing-computability. In fact, there is no reliance on anything very mathematical. The proof does not even appeal to a precise definition of ‘effective procedure’. Instead, it relies solely and entirely on a basic grasp of the intuitive notion of an effective procedure. Though the result that effectiveness is undecidable is not surprising, it is also not without significance. It has the consequence, for example, that the solution to a decision problem, if it is to be complete, must be accompanied by a separate argument that the proposed ascertainment procedure invariably terminates with the correct verdict. (shrink)