This article contains a case study of some innovative early fourteenth-century conceptions of the temporal structure of substantial change. An important tenet of thirteenth-century scholastic hylomorphism is that substantial change is an instantaneous process. In contrast, three early fourteenth-century Aristotelian commentators, first Walter Burley and then John Buridan and Albert of Saxony, progressively develop a view on which substantial change is linked to temporal duration. This process culminated, in Buridan and Albert of Saxony, with the explicit recognition of the temporally (...) extended nature of some (if not most) instances of substantial change. This article sheds light on this neglected episode in the history of late medieval hylomorphism taking as its point of departure these commentators’ discussions of the issue of minima naturalia, i.e., the issue of the lowest possible limit of any division of substantial forms coming about through the potentially infinite division of the matter they inform. In short: is there a piece of matter so small that no substantial form can possibly inhere in it? (shrink)

The essence of the theory of minima naturalia is the contention that a physical body is not infinitely divisible qua that specific body. A drop of water cannot be divided again and again and still maintain its “wateriness”. There are several statements in Aristotle's Physics which suggest such an interpretation, and the theory of minima naturalia is commonly considered to have originated in the thirteenth century as an interpretation of these statements. The present paper is a (...) preliminary presentation of the role of Ibn Rushd in the evolution of the theory, hitherto neglected. His theory developed not only as an elaboration on the “suitable” statements of Aristotle, but mainly as an attempt to solve the difficulties raised by Aristotle's thesis that body and motion are continuous, infinitely divisible entities and are associated qua such. According to Ibn Rushd's interpretation, body and motion are associated not qua being continuous but qua having indivisible minimal parts. It seems that Epicurus' and Ibn Rushd's theories of minima developed as responses to Physics VI and offer modifications of classical atomism and of classical Aristotelianism , which to a certain extent reduce the gap between these two systems. (shrink)

This essay proposes to discuss the manner in which Jan Baptista van Helmont helped to transform the Neoplatonic notions of vital spirit and of ferment by giving these notions an unambiguously chemical interpretation, thereby influencing the eventual naturalization of these ideas in the work of late seventeenth century chymists. This chemical interpretation of vital spirit and ferment forms part of Helmont’s hybrid ontology, which fuses a corpuscular conception of minima naturalia with a non-corporeal conception of semina rerum. For (...) Helmont, chemical alterations involve the minima as physical units but also depend upon ferments that are contained in the semina, which function as formative spiritual agents. Helmont’s nuanced ontology ultimately contributes to the development of modern corpuscularian theory by explaining many chemical reactions in fundamentally corpuscular terms, as the addition and subtraction of particles. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.2 (2003) 273-274 [Access article in PDF] Christoph Lüthy, John E. Murdoch, and William R. Newman, editors. Late Medieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Matter Theories. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Pp. viii + 610. Cloth, $186.00. The nineteen papers of this weighty (handsomely produced, but expensive) volume are mostly devoted to the views of one thinker or group of persons on "corpuscularism" (see 17ff.), in (...) either physics or mathematics, with few synthetic or diachronic studies. Only a quarter of the volume is devoted to the medieval period: Danielle Jacquart on minima in the Salerno school of medicine (twelfth century); the late George Molland on Roger Bacon's and Grosseteste's "corpuscular tendencies"; Charles Lohr on Ramon Lull; John Murdoch on minima naturalia in the medieval and Renaissance periods; and the greater part of William Newman's study of corpuscularian conceptions in "Aristotelian alchemy" from Geber to Sennert. The early-modern part includes studies on mostly expected figures: Francesco Patrici, Giordano Bruno, the Northumberland circle, Francis Bacon, David Gorlaeus (a little-known Dutch theology student; 1591-1612, sic), Daniel Sennert, Honoré Fabri, Galileo, Gassendi, Charleton, Boyle, Locke, and Homberg. Alan Gabbey more generally distinguishes different patterns of explanations in mechanical philosophy.As far as I can judge, the authors are knowledgeable and competent, and the studies make important contributions. But just because this is a high-quality volume produced with the ambition of making a step toward rewriting the history of a major chapter in the history of science, its two significant and principled deficiencies must be pointed out.The volume follows the intention of "show[ing] the debt of early-modern matter theory to previous traditions and thereby [explaining] its bewildering heterogeneity" (back cover). Now, the study of the corpuscular traditions in the pre-modern period is certainly an important desideratum (although this volume again attends chiefly to the early modern corpuscularians). But the motivation and perspective here announced—the medieval period [End Page 273] is to be studied because early modern science is indebted to it—are astoundingly Whiggish. Worse: the study of the entire Arabic-Islamic tradition is dismissed, on the grounds that "Islamic atomism does not seem to have been of any influence upon Christian fourteenth-century atomism" (8): this is not only Whiggism, but also frank and explicit euro- and Christian-centrism, which in the beginning of the twenty-first century is simply stunning. The method amusingly consists in affirming the consequent: presupposing that "Islamic atomism" did not influence the West and early-modern science, no scholar was asked to examine whether or not this was indeed the case, with the congenial result that the volume seemingly confirms the initial presupposition. Q.E.D. Similarly and no less regrettably, the fact that (ps.-) Geber's Summa Perfectionis is not, as Lasswitz had thought, the translation of an Arabic work is here used as grounds on which to dismiss altogether his claim concerning the importance of the Arabic input (13, but see also 293). This way, incomprehension between civilizations is reinforced instead of being reduced, and I believe we did not need September 11 to know this.The thusly dismissed Mu'tazilite school of Islamic theology had important repercussions in Judaism, so that referring to it as "Islamic atomism" is misleading (see notably Hagai Ben-Shammai, "Studies in Karaite Atomism," Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 6 [1985]: 243-93). The volume's forty-page cumulative bibliography, for which the editors are to be congratulated, reflects the volume's parochial viewpoint: H. A. Wolfson's important The Philosophy of the Kalam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), with some 150 pages on atomism, is not included; nor is the (English version of the) landmark study by the late S. Pines, Studies in Islamic Atomism (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1997; the original 1936 German version is mentioned). Wolfson's study, incidentally, shows that the editors' presupposition (8) that the Kalâm tradition could have influenced the West only via the Latin translation of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed is unwarranted, for Isaac... (shrink)

In his Physics commentary, Thomas Wylton reports and rejects an opinion about time that posits the existence of minimal times conceived of as indivisible parts of time. This opinion is in contrast with the view that time is continuous, the predominant view in the late Middle Ages. In this paper I first explain the notion of minimal time. I then focus on the relation between the existence of minimal times and the existence of minima naturalia in the extension (...) of natural bodies. In particular, I present the two ways in which the author of the opinion in question deduces the existence of minimal times from the existence of minima naturalia in the extension of natural bodies. I also briefly present the reaction of Wylton against this opinion. I finally explain how in this opinion the position of minimal times is relevant to the problem of the existence of time. The Appendix to the paper contains Wylton's report of the opinion about minimal times. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 30, Issue 1, pp 4 - 27 The _Animadversiones in Elementorum Philosophiae_ by a little known Flemish scholar G. Moranus, published in Brussels in 1655 was an early European response to Hobbes’s _De Corpore_. Although it is has been referred to by various Hobbes scholars, such as Noel Malcolm, Doug Jesseph, and Alexander Bird it has been little studied. Previous scholarship has tended to focus on the mathematical criticisms of André Tacquet which Moranus included in the form (...) of a letter in his volume. Moranus’s philosophical objections to Hobbes’s natural philosophy offer a fascinating picture of the critical reception of Hobbes’s work by a religious writer trained in the late Scholastic tradition. Moranus’s opening criticism clearly shows that he is unhappy with Hobbes’s exclusion of the divine and the immaterial from natural philosophy. He asks what authority Hobbes has for breaking with the common understanding of philosophy, as defined by Cicero ‘the knowledge of things human and divine’. He also offers natural philosophical and theological criticisms of Hobbes for overlooking the generation of things involved in the Creation. He also attacks the natural philosophical underpinning of Hobbes’s civil philosophy. In this paper I look at a number of philosophical topics which Moranus criticised in Hobbes’s work, including his mechanical psychology, his theory of imaginary space, his use of the concept of accidents, his blurring of the distinction between the human being and the animal, and his theories of motion. Moranus’s criticisms, which are a mixture of philosophical and theological objections, gives us some clear indications of what made Hobbes’ natural philosophy controversial amongst his contemporaries, and sheds new light on the early continental reception of Hobbes’s work. (shrink)

A reflection on everyday existence in the 'sphere of consumption of late Capitalism', this work is Adorno's literary and philosophical masterpiece.

This article attempts to think of thinking as the essence of critical education. While contemporary education tends to stress the conveying of knowledge and skills needed to succeed in present-day information society, the present article turns to the work of Theodor W. Adorno to develop alternative thinking about education, thinking, and the political significance of education for thinking. Adorno touched upon educational questions throughout his writings, with growing interest in the last ten years of his life. Education, he argues following (...) Kant, must enable students to think for themselves and to break free of the authority of teachers, parents and other adults. Nevertheless, in his discussions of education Adorno says little about the nature of thinking, and the secondary literature on his educational theory addresses this question only cursorily. Important claims on the nature of thinking do appear elsewhere in Adorno's work. From his early writings up to Negative Dialectics, Adorno is preoccupied with thinking, sketching the outlines of critical-dialectical thought. Still, these reflections rarely touch upon educational questions, and the Adorno scholarship has yet to establish this link. Unlike studies which read Adorno's educational thought against the backdrop of the history of education and the German Bildung tradition, or in relation to art and aesthetics, the present article brings together Adorno's ideas on education and thinking in an attempt to contribute both to the Adorno scholarship and to the growing field of education for thinking. (shrink)

In our wakeful conscious lives, the experience of time and dynamic temporal phenomena—such as continuous motion and change—appears to be ubiquitous. How is it that temporality is woven into our conscious experience? Is it through perceptual experience presenting a series of instantaneous states of the world, which combine together—in a sense which would need to be specified—to give us experience of dynamic temporal phenomena? In this paper, I argue that this is not the case. -/- Several authors have recently proposed (...) dynamic snapshot models of temporal experience— such as Prosser and Arstila, building upon Le Poidevin— according to which perceptual experience has no temporal content of a non‐zero extent. I argue that there is an absence of motivation for such a view; I develop and defend the claim that perceptual experience minimally presents something of some non‐zero temporal extent as such. (shrink)

Parva naturalia ist eine Gruppe kleinerer Schriften, die folgende Einzeltitel umfasst: De sensu et sensato, De memoria et reminiscentia, De somno et vigilia, De insomniis, De divinatione per somnum, De longaevitate et brevitate vitae, De iuventute et senectute. Der Titel Parva naturalia geht auf den mittelalterlichen Philosophen und Aristoteliker Aegidius Romanus zurück. Die Parva naturalia vervollständigen das Projekt von De anima, indem sie die darin entwickelten Definitionen der Seele und ihrer Vermögen für die Erklärung eines weiten Spektrums (...) unterschiedlicher Leistungen und Verhaltensweisen des Lebendigen zur Anwendung bringen. (shrink)

Oxford Scholarly Classics brings together a number of great academic works from the archives of Oxford University Press. Reissued in a uniform series design, they will enable libraries, scholars, and students to gain fresh access to some of the finest scholarship of the last century.

Oxford Scholarly Classics brings together a number of great academic works from the archives of Oxford University Press. Reissued in a uniform series design, they will enable libraries, scholars, and students to gain fresh access to some of the finest scholarship of the last century.

_Minima Memoria_ attests to the impact of the works of Jean-François Lyotard, one of the most influential French philosophers of the twentieth century, and the continuing effects of these works across a wide array of fields: philosophy, literature, political theory, gender theory, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis. Particular attention is paid to Lyotard's repeated warnings regarding the way in which the complexity of events can be occluded in the very attempt to represent them. Indeed, through the contributors' careful and critical analysis, Lyotard's (...) complex intellectual trajectory—all the way up to the posthumously published works _The Confession of Augustine_ and _The Misery of Philosophy_—is traced in different and often conflicting manners, which bring out the different currents that traverse his writings and the sites of tension that such terms as "different," "affect," and "infancy" mark. What emerges is not a grand narrative that would organize Lyotard's life and work around one unifying idea, but multifaceted approaches that extend in new and unforeseen directions. (shrink)

Suppose that 〈xk〉k∈ℕ is a countable sequence of real numbers. Working in the usual subsystems for reverse mathematics, RCA0 suffices to prove the existence of a sequence of reals 〈uk〉k∈ℕ such that for each k, uk is the minimum of {x0, x1, …, xk}. However, if we wish to prove the existence of a sequence of integer indices of minima of initial segments of 〈xk〉k∈ℕ, the stronger subsystem WKL0 is required. Following the presentation of these reverse mathematics results, we (...) will derive computability theoretic corollaries and use them to illustrate a distinction between computable analysis and constructive analysis. (shrink)

Adorno und Horkheimer zufolge prägt die Kulturindustrie alle Facetten des gesellschaftlichen Lebens und reicht bis in die tiefsten Fasern der subjektiven Erfahrung des Individuums hinein. Entsprechend hielt Adorno im Vorwort der Minima Moralia fest: „Was einmal den Philosophen Leben hieß, ist zur Sphäre des Privaten und dann bloß noch des Konsums geworden, die als Anhang des materiellen Produktionsprozesses, ohne Autonomie und ohne eigene Substanz, mitgeschleift wird.“ Seit Adorno und Horkheimer diese prägende Wirkung der Kulturindustrie auf die subjektive Erfahrung erstmals (...) beschrieben haben, hat sie nicht an Durchsetzungskraft verloren. (shrink)

One of the conundrums of Wittgenstein’s so-called ‘1914–1916 Notebooks’ concerns the role played by the visual instances of logical analysis. As a matter of fact, in discussing in that work the requirement that the logical analysis of meaningful sentences be complete, Wittgenstein often takes as examples statements about the colored parts of the subject's visual image (Gesichtsbild). In view of this, it might be thought that the requirement is not laid down in the Notebooks on logical grounds, but somehow on (...) psychological or psychophysical ones. In this paper I argue this is not so and that the requirement is exemplified rather than justified by the analysis of statements about the products of the subject’s visual imagination. I also argue that, on Wittgenstein’s syntactic notion of a complete logical analysis, our unanalyzed statements embody as they are the requirement that their sense be fully determinate; which is just what is meant by the idea that the analysis must be complete. (shrink)

Philosophers no longer argue whether Hume ever read Berkeley, yet some remain puzzled as to why so little of Berkeley appears in Hume's works. Professor Popkin has remarked that even “where Hume and Berkeley come closest to discussing the same subject or holding the same view, Hume neither uses Berkeley's terms nor refers to him.” An apparent exception to this generalization is Berkeley's doctrine ofminima sensibilia, for both philosophers use this term to denote indivisible sensible points, and both invoke such (...) points in order to show that sensible extension is not infinitely divisible. Yet it has been suggested that, although Berkeley and Hume employ the same terms, they nevertheless maintain different doctrines: Hume'sminimaare unextended, whereas Berkeley's are extended. (shrink)

Este artículo se propone como objetivo analizar detalladamente la definición mínima de democracia propuesta por Norberto Bobbio, sus elementos constitutivos, sus principales características así como sus límites conceptuales, sobre todo sus pretensiones de universalidad, univocidad y neutralidad, enfocándonos críticamente en estos tres últimos elementos en aras de tensionar la definición bobbiana de democracia. Se comenzará por analizar el rasgo procedimental de esta definición. A continuación se descompondrá detalladamente cada uno de los elementos que la caracterizan, haciendo énfasis en el supuesto (...) y prioridad de la libertad. Finalmente, se indicarán una serie de objeciones que obstaculizarían las pretensiones de universalidad, univocidad y neutralidad, tensionando con ello la intencionalidad teórica del filósofo italiano. Metodológicamente hablando, se tratará de un análisis descriptivo y sistemático, no prescriptivo ni tampoco axiológico. (shrink)

As a rational discourse philosophy can not be reduced to any cultural concern. Culture we call that civilization which became aware of its own mortality and henceforth cultivates the aesthetic pleasure of representing its ruined ideals. It is the responsibility of philosophy to think through to the end the project of modern philosophical aesthetics, thus accomplishing it. The description of the aesthetic condition shows that aisthesis does not have to provide the fake peace of consentment with the sensible but on (...) the contrary should question and discredit the aistheton that confronts us with a double bind experience. This experience stirs to life the 'minimal soul' in its pure affectibility, and at the same time threatens it with slavery and death. Therefore art has to consist in the achievement of a work, not in disguising nihilism but in carrying it out. Should philosophy accomplish a work of art? The activity of reflexivity in writing which caracterizes philosophy persists in interrogating its own singularity, thereby incessantly dispossessing itself. (shrink)

This book began with my edition of the anonymous treatise. A translation and notes seemed essential if the material of the treatise was to be understood. It then seemed that Chapter 5 of Heytesbury's Rules for Solving Sophismata, on which the treatise was based, should also be included. My translation of the Heytesbury treatise is based on a fifteenth-century edition, supplemented by readings from a few of the better manuscripts. (A critical edition from all the manuscripts, of which Chapter 5 (...) will be mine, is now in progress under the supervision of Paul Spade, but only a few insignificant changes in the translation should be necessitated by the completed edition. ) An examination of related materials seemed reasonable, and these included Heytesbury's commentator Gaetano, as well as a chapter from a treatise by Johannes Venator (in an edition in progress provided by Francesco del Punta). It seemed unnecessary to publish Gaetano's and Venator's related works in this volume, but all their departures from Heytesbury and the anonymous treatise are noted here. I have not examined other works in the tradition in any detail. I owe a great deal to my teacher, Norman Kretzmann, not only as regards the edition and translations, but also as regards the notes, study and introduction. The referees of the typescript (to me unknown) made unusually thorough criticisms and suggestions to which I have paid close attention. The book is far better for my having done so. (shrink)