Proponents of the “negative program” in experimental philosophy have argued that judgements in philosophical cases, also known as case judgements, are unreliable and that the method of cases should be either strongly constrained or even abandoned. Here we put one of the main proponent’s account of why philosophical cases may cause the unreliability of case judgements to the test. We conducted our test with thought experiments from physics, which exhibit the exact same supposedly “disturbing characteristics” of philosophical cases.

In Disturbed Consciousness, philosophers and other scholars examine various psychopathologies in light of specific philosophical theories of consciousness. The contributing authors—some of them discussing or defending their own theoretical work—consider not only how a theory of consciousness can account for a specific psychopathological condition but also how the characteristics of a psychopathology might challenge such a theory. Thus one essay defends the higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness against the charge that it cannot account for somatoparaphrenia (a delusion in which (...) one denies ownership of a limb). Another essay argues that various attempts to explain away such anomalies within subjective theories of consciousness fail. Other essays consider such topics as the application of a model of unified consciousness to cases of brain bisection and dissociative identity disorder; prefrontal and parietal underconnectivity in autism and other psychopathologies; self-deception and the self-model theory of subjectivity; schizophrenia and the vehicle theory of consciousness; and a shift in emphasis away from an internal (or brainbound) approach to psychopathology to an interactive one. Each essay offers a distinctive perspective from the intersection of philosophy, consciousness research, and psychiatry. (shrink)

In Disturbed Consciousness, philosophers and other scholars examine various psychopathologies in light of specific philosophical theories of consciousness. The contributing authors—some of them discussing or defending their own theoretical work—consider not only how a theory of consciousness can account for a specific psychopathological condition but also how the characteristics of a psychopathology might challenge such a theory. Thus one essay defends the higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness against the charge that it cannot account for somatoparaphrenia (a delusion in which (...) one denies ownership of a limb). Another essay argues that various attempts to explain away such anomalies within subjective theories of consciousness fail. -/- Other essays consider such topics as the application of a model of unified consciousness to cases of brain bisection and dissociative identity disorder; prefrontal and parietal underconnectivity in autism and other psychopathologies; self-deception and the self-model theory of subjectivity; schizophrenia and the vehicle theory of consciousness; and a shift in emphasis away from an internal (or brainbound) approach to psychopathology to an interactive one. Each essay offers a distinctive perspective from the intersection of philosophy, consciousness research, and psychiatry. -/- Contributors Alexandre Billon, Andrew Brook, Paula Droege, Rocco J. Gennaro, Philip Gerrans, William Hirstein, Jakob Hohwy, Uriah Kriegel, Timothy Lane, Thomas Metzinger, Erik Myin, Inez Myin-Germeys, Myrto Mylopoulos, Gerard O’Brien, Jon Opie, J. Kevin O’Regan, Iuliia Pliushch, Robert Van Gulick . (shrink)

In a process of emancipatory collective education proposed by the Urban Boundaries Project, this paper discusses the importance of the educational process not as cloistered but as critical tool to the current hegemonic system, and thus its roots in our situationality, as well as in our relations of survival. The concept of love as a political category will be argued from the modes of production of the urban human beings and its relations among the productive forces, the relations of production, (...) and the conscious bodies. Disturbing choices made in the dialogical exercise, from a victimization posture to a free collective subject rooted in or identified with a particular form of life, supports this argument. (shrink)

Synchronization of biological neurons is not only a hot topic, but also a difficult issue in the field of bioelectrical physiology. Numerous reported synchronization algorithms are designed on the basis of neural model, but they have deficiencies like relatively complex and poor robustness and are difficult to be realized. Morris-Lecar neuron is considered, and linear active disturbance rejection control is designed. Only one control input signal is utilized to synchronize membrane potentials of biological neurons. Meanwhile, in order to verify the (...) robustness of synchronization, sinusoidal signal and parameter perturbations are introduced in numerical simulations. LADRC can still achieve satisfactory synchronization. Both theoretical and numerical simulation results show that LADRC is capable of estimating and cancelling disturbances and uncertainties. Neither accurate neural models nor concrete disturbance signal models are indispensable. A more practical and effective thought is provided to address the synchronization between neurons. (shrink)

Synchronization of biological neurons is not only a hot topic, but also a difficult issue in the field of bioelectrical physiology. Numerous reported synchronization algorithms are designed on the basis of neural model, but they have deficiencies like relatively complex and poor robustness and are difficult to be realized. Morris-Lecar neuron is considered, and linear active disturbance rejection control is designed. Only one control input signal is utilized to synchronize membrane potentials of biological neurons. Meanwhile, in order to verify the (...) robustness of synchronization, sinusoidal signal and parameter perturbations are introduced in numerical simulations. LADRC can still achieve satisfactory synchronization. Both theoretical and numerical simulation results show that LADRC is capable of estimating and cancelling disturbances and uncertainties. Neither accurate neural models nor concrete disturbance signal models are indispensable. A more practical and effective thought is provided to address the synchronization between neurons. (shrink)

In contemporary philosophy of mind and psychiatry, schizophrenic thought insertion is often used as a validating or invalidating counterexample in various theories about how we experience ourselves. Recent work has taken cases of thought insertion to provide an invalidating counterexample to the Humean denial of self-experience, arguing that deficiencies of agency in thought insertion suggest that we normally experience ourselves as the agent of our thoughts. In this paper, I argue that appealing to a breakdown in the sense of agency (...) to explain thought insertion is problematic, and that rather than following the prevailing binary approach which holds that certain features of consciousness go missing while others remain wholly intact, a better explanation involves construing thought insertion as a disturbing or disrupting of the subjectivity (for-me-ness) of experience. The result is that experiencing ourselves as the subject of our thoughts is where future research should be directed, given the robust persistence of this form of self-experience across psychopathological and non-psychopathological cases alike. (shrink)

This paper treats a recalcitrant problem in Spinoza scholarship, namely, how to reconcile the conception of 'power' in his political writings with that found in his Ethics. Some have doubted the capacity of Spinoza's political philosophy to yield an adequate normative theory. If he is unable to provide a normative ground for political philosophy then perhaps this exposes a problem in Spinoza's philosophy taken as a whole. I argue that the considerable normative resources of his ethical and political philosophy, as (...) well their continuing relevance today, are best appreciated through attending to his notion of the exemplar. (shrink)

In December of last year, a few clowns appeared on the grand and spectacular stage of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. These clowns were the reincarnated ghosts from the Capital Red Guard West City, East City, and Haidian Districts Pickets. They viciously attacked Chairman Mao's revolutionary line, engaged in slander on the Central Cultural Revolution Group, called dear Comrade Jiang Qing names, and sabotaged the organizations under the proletarian dictatorship. They provoked violence, created chaos, searched and confiscated the possessions of (...) revolutionary organizations, and spread reactionary declarations. The crimes they committed are simply too numerous to mention. These clowns were none other than the "Capital Red Guards United Action Committee.". (shrink)

This paper contributes to the debate in the philosophy of psychiatry regarding the relation between thought insertion in schizophrenia and the sense of selfhood. Some scholars have suggested that thought insertion presents a case where the sense of selfhood is lacking. Other scholars have disputed this by proposing that a form of minimal selfhood is a necessary feature of consciousness that is still present in thought insertion, albeit in a disturbed manner. Herein, I argue that the notion of minimal selfhood (...) that is used by these scholars is ambiguous between two meanings. The first is an ontological notion concerning the first-person individuation of consciousness. The second is a phenomenological notion concerning how a conscious experience is experienced as being given to the first-person subject. I argue that the former ontological notion is indeed a necessary feature of conscious experience, but the latter phenomenological notion is only a contingent feature. Therefore, even if it is possible that thought insertion presents a case where the feeling of first-person givenness is lacking or disturbed, the first-person individuation of consciousness remains present and undisturbed. As well as further clarifying the connection between consciousness and selfhood, this philosophical analysis reveals the extent to which schizophrenia can and cannot be said to comprise a disorder of selfhood. (shrink)

Uttered language does not necessarily reflect the planned communications of schizophrenia patients, nor do their delusions necessarily reflect basic failures of inferential reasoning. The role of inhibitory failure in the production of speech and the role of primary experiences of discrepancy between intention and action, and between experience–based expectations and perceived realities account for many of the clinical phenomena that have led to the conclusion that these patients have a ‘thought’ disorder, or a ‘disturbed’ mind. The alternatives and the evidence (...) are summarized in this paper. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:World Alienation in Feminist ThoughtThe Sublime Epistemology of Emphatic Anti-EssentialismBonnie Mann (bio)The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.Hannah ArendtWe are tied to place undetachably and without reprieve.Edward CaseyThe alliance between feminism and postmodernism1 in the American academy has brought about a revolution in feminist epistemology. The early feminist epistemology of unmasking, of sorting through appearances to get to the real underneath, has been discredited as "essentialist."2 (...) Feminist standpoint epistemology was an attempt to respond to this accusation by using social location as a "standpoint" from which at least local and situated knowledge could be articulated.3 More recently, many feminists have taken on the epistemology of the simulacrum. Here "the real" plays a part only as that which dissolves into the appearances themselves. Behind the appearances, if there were such a place, would be only an abyss of absence.With this revolution in feminist epistemology comes a wholesale displacement [End Page 45] of the feminist project. Others have argued that the feminist political project is displaced in the alliance with postmodernism.4 On my view, the epistemological and political displacements accompany and instantiate an even deeper level of dispossession. The ultimate price we pay for the feminist alliance with postmodernism may well be a material displacement, in which we are dispossessed of our ability to inquire into and articulate our relationship to the earth itself. We find this planet we inhabit, this physical place that sustains us moment by moment, to be effectively shut out of what now passes as "good" feminist inquiry.In 1958, Hannah Arendt wrote already of "the advent of a new and yet unknown age," marked by world-alienation, a "twofold flight from the earth into the universe and from the world into the self" (1958, 6). The "unknown age" has now been named. Postmodernity takes this flight one step further than Arendt foresaw, however, and even folds the universe and the self into discourse. World-alienation has taken the form of the self-enclosed universe of the text. Our sojourn in the world of signs is so paradigmatic of "the postmodern condition," that asking the question of our relationship to the physical planet we inhabit seems naive and nostalgic. Anything we might say about the earth, after all, is already in language, already bound up in discourse. To speak of an "earth" or "nature" that exceeds discourse is to find oneself locked, even so, within discourse. Having lost our belief in the referentiality of language, in the relation between words and things, we are stuck with signs that refer only to other signs.A capitulation to our very real physical and phenomenological experience of world-alienation finds here its theoretical form. We give in to placelessness. As Edward S. Casey writes, "To say 'I have no place to go' is to admit to a desperate circumstance. Yet we witness daily the disturbing spectacle of people with no place to go: refugees from natural catastrophes or strife-torn countries, the homeless on the streets of modern cities, not to mention 'stray' animals. In fearing that 'the earth is becoming uninhabitable'—a virtual universal lament—we are fearing that the earth will no longer provide adequate places in which to live. The incessant motion of postmodern life in late-capitalist societies at once echoes and exacerbates this fear" (Casey 1993, xiii). Intellectually, we find ourselves in equally desperate circumstances, trapped as we are inside a language that can refer only to itself. This self-enclosure becomes a kind [End Page 46] of no place, a world-alienated space without place,5 and feminist thinking is set adrift from the physical places that give feminist thinkers our moment by moment sustenance. In its alliance with postmodernism, feminism has capitulated to the placelessness that so marks our phenomenological experience at the turn of the millennium.6Yet we inhabit this planet. Faced with its destruction we are compelled to make sense of our relationship to it and to act to save it. A feminist philosophy that turns its back on the earth embraces, rather than contests, the world-alienation of which Arendt spoke. Yet our alienation... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:World Alienation in Feminist ThoughtThe Sublime Epistemology of Emphatic Anti-EssentialismBonnie Mann (bio)The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.Hannah ArendtWe are tied to place undetachably and without reprieve.Edward CaseyThe alliance between feminism and postmodernism1 in the American academy has brought about a revolution in feminist epistemology. The early feminist epistemology of unmasking, of sorting through appearances to get to the real underneath, has been discredited as "essentialist."2 (...) Feminist standpoint epistemology was an attempt to respond to this accusation by using social location as a "standpoint" from which at least local and situated knowledge could be articulated.3 More recently, many feminists have taken on the epistemology of the simulacrum. Here "the real" plays a part only as that which dissolves into the appearances themselves. Behind the appearances, if there were such a place, would be only an abyss of absence.With this revolution in feminist epistemology comes a wholesale displacement [End Page 45] of the feminist project. Others have argued that the feminist political project is displaced in the alliance with postmodernism.4 On my view, the epistemological and political displacements accompany and instantiate an even deeper level of dispossession. The ultimate price we pay for the feminist alliance with postmodernism may well be a material displacement, in which we are dispossessed of our ability to inquire into and articulate our relationship to the earth itself. We find this planet we inhabit, this physical place that sustains us moment by moment, to be effectively shut out of what now passes as "good" feminist inquiry.In 1958, Hannah Arendt wrote already of "the advent of a new and yet unknown age," marked by world-alienation, a "twofold flight from the earth into the universe and from the world into the self" (1958, 6). The "unknown age" has now been named. Postmodernity takes this flight one step further than Arendt foresaw, however, and even folds the universe and the self into discourse. World-alienation has taken the form of the self-enclosed universe of the text. Our sojourn in the world of signs is so paradigmatic of "the postmodern condition," that asking the question of our relationship to the physical planet we inhabit seems naive and nostalgic. Anything we might say about the earth, after all, is already in language, already bound up in discourse. To speak of an "earth" or "nature" that exceeds discourse is to find oneself locked, even so, within discourse. Having lost our belief in the referentiality of language, in the relation between words and things, we are stuck with signs that refer only to other signs.A capitulation to our very real physical and phenomenological experience of world-alienation finds here its theoretical form. We give in to placelessness. As Edward S. Casey writes, "To say 'I have no place to go' is to admit to a desperate circumstance. Yet we witness daily the disturbing spectacle of people with no place to go: refugees from natural catastrophes or strife-torn countries, the homeless on the streets of modern cities, not to mention 'stray' animals. In fearing that 'the earth is becoming uninhabitable'—a virtual universal lament—we are fearing that the earth will no longer provide adequate places in which to live. The incessant motion of postmodern life in late-capitalist societies at once echoes and exacerbates this fear" (Casey 1993, xiii). Intellectually, we find ourselves in equally desperate circumstances, trapped as we are inside a language that can refer only to itself. This self-enclosure becomes a kind [End Page 46] of no place, a world-alienated space without place,5 and feminist thinking is set adrift from the physical places that give feminist thinkers our moment by moment sustenance. In its alliance with postmodernism, feminism has capitulated to the placelessness that so marks our phenomenological experience at the turn of the millennium.6Yet we inhabit this planet. Faced with its destruction we are compelled to make sense of our relationship to it and to act to save it. A feminist philosophy that turns its back on the earth embraces, rather than contests, the world-alienation of which Arendt spoke. Yet our alienation... (shrink)

"Marin's admiration (in both seventeenth-century senses) for the word made flesh, and hence the word made power, is what makes this book both fascinating and disturbing." -- Times Literary Supplement A wicked queen orders the palace cook to kill her grandchildren and serve them up for dinner -- "in a sauce Robert." But as any good cook knows, this sauce is properly served with game, not domestic animals. Does the ogress transgress? Perhaps, but the cook breaks the rules as well. (...) Deceiving his mistress, he rescues the children and instead serves goat and lamb. In this provocative volume, Louis Marin treats a subject to which some of the most exciting literary criticism has been devoted: the body as represented in text and image. From fairy tales to biblical narrative, from the divine body in the eucharist to the body of Louis XIV as described in his physicians' journals, Marin focuses on the peculiar relationship between verbal and oral functions--speaking and eating, boasting and gluttony, lying and cannibalism. Drawing on the methodologies of semiology, philosophy of language, and literary and art criticism, Marin explores works by Rabelais, La Fontaine, Perrault, and the Logic of Port-Royal. Throughout, he is concerned with the conceptualization of desire and pleasure, justice and force, natural violence and political power -- and questions their ideological as well as their symbolic bases. (shrink)

Despite the diagnostic relevance of thought insertion for disorders such as schizophrenia, the debates about its aetiology are far from resolved. This paper claims that in paying exclusive attention to the perceptual and cognitive impairments leading to delusional experiences in general, current deficit approaches overlook the role that affective disturbances might play in giving rise to cases of thought insertion. In the context of psychosis, affective impairments are often characterized as a consequence of the stress and anxiety caused by (...) delusional episodes. However, here I explore some of the conceptual and empirical reasons to think that affective problems might in fact play a crucial doxastic role in the aetiology of thought insertion. Finally, I conclude by proposing a way of integrating the main insights of my analysis with the current ‘two-factor’ deficit approach to thought insertion and I explore the potential adaptive role that some delusions might have within this framework. (shrink)

In Kafka’s unfinished story, The Burrow, an unidentified subterranean creature struggles while digging in a burrow, constantly engulfed in anxiety for potential intruders. His obsessive anxiety starts to be materialised in his hearing of a noise everywhere and at constant intensity. Incessantly speculating the cause of this noise, his dreadful imagination first finds it as a swarm of small fries, eventually growing into a single gigantic monster threatening his burrow, as if desiring an irresistible entity that goes beyond the idea (...) of the individual. Inspired by this story of a creature suffocating from his lonesome effort of nesting, this paper discusses how an individual sensation of dread could potentially transcend to an ability to imagine social totality, drawing on the philosophical readings of Kafka’s other character Odradek by Benjamin and Adorno. I further argue that this process is aesthetic, correlating Freud’s idea of the uncanny with Adorno’s theory of aesthetic experience which examine the negotiation between individuation and socialisation in an experience of desubjectification. By sketching out the anxious hearing in The Burrow in reference to the disturbing seeing of object-creature Odradek, I discuss the feeling of dread that marks the transformation of individual entities into a transcendent social/collective being. (shrink)

This volume examines modern scepticism in all main philosophical areas: epistemology, science, metaphysics, morals, and religion. It features sixteen essays that explore its importance for modern thought. The contributions present diverse, mutually enriching interpretations of key thinkers, from Montaigne to Nietzsche. -/- The book includes a look both at the relationship between Montaigne and Pascal and at Montaigne’s criticism of religious rationalism. It turns its attention to an investigation into the links between ancient scepticism and Bacon’s Doctrine of the Idols, (...) as well as into the ancient problem of the criterion in Cartesian philosophy. Next, three essays focus on more general topics, like modern sceptical disturbances, clandestine literature and irreligion. Two essays investigate the role of scepticism in Bayle’s moral thinking and his theory of religious toleration. Hume’s sceptical philosophy is the subject of two papers by distinguished scholars. In addition, many contributors address the presence of scepticism in Kant and in the German Idealism, such as the role of Schulze's scepticism in the works of the young Hegel. The book closes with a paper on Nietzsche and scepticism, and an essay on the role of Popkin’s and Schmitt’s works on modern scepticism. -/- This collection continues along a rich, fruitful path opened by Richard H. Popkin and pursued by many important scholars, like Gianni Paganini, John-Christian Laursen, and José Raimundo Maia Neto. It re-establishes that necessary dialogue between researchers of scepticism from all over the Americas, which began with Popkin, Oswaldo Porchat and Ezequiel de Olaso long ago. This insightful reflection on modern European scepticism will also serve as an important resource in the history of modern philosophy. (shrink)

This volume examines modern scepticism in all main philosophical areas: epistemology, science, metaphysics, morals, and religion. It features sixteen essays that explore its importance for modern thought. The contributions present diverse, mutually enriching interpretations of key thinkers, from Montaigne to Nietzsche. The book includes a look both at the relationship between Montaigne and Pascal and at Montaigne’s criticism of religious rationalism. It turns its attention to an investigation into the links between ancient scepticism and Bacon’s Doctrine of the Idols, as (...) well as into the ancient problem of the criterion in Cartesian philosophy. Next, three essays focus on more general topics, like modern sceptical disturbances, clandestine literature and irreligion. Two essays investigate the role of scepticism in Bayle’s moral thinking and his theory of religious toleration. Hume’s sceptical philosophy is the subject of two papers by distinguished scholars. In addition, many contributors address the presence of scepticism in Kant and in the German Idealism, such as the role of Schulze's scepticism in the works of the young Hegel. The book closes with a paper on Nietzsche and scepticism, and an essay on the role of Popkin’s and Schmitt’s works on modern scepticism. This collection continues along a rich, fruitful path opened by Richard H. Popkin and pursued by many important scholars, like Gianni Paganini, John-Christian Laursen, and José Raimundo Maia Neto. It re-establishes that necessary dialogue between researchers of scepticism from all over the Americas, which began with Popkin, Oswaldo Porchat and Ezequiel de Olaso long ago. This insightful reflection on modern European scepticism will also serve as an important resource in the history of modern philosophy. (shrink)

In the first chapter, Erskine provides an interesting and exhaustive analysis of the evidence for Zeno's Politeia. He rejects statements to the effect that Zeno wrote the Politeia in his early days when he was influenced by the Cynics as the invention of the Stoics of the first century B. C., who were embarrassed by its contents. Two of the stipulations in the Politeia, that there should be no coinage and no private property, he explains in terms of the economic (...) and political instability in fourth-century Greece. He argues that "the ideal society of Zeno's Politeia contained only the wise". There is no reason to suppose, however, that this society, however ideal, could ensure that every child would become wise. The most it could claim was that every child would become an adult who was making progress towards virtue. I can see no reason why the presence of those actively seeking virtue would disturb the homonoia of the ideal city. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Melancholy and the Therapeutic Language of Moral Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century ThoughtJeremy SchmidtThe concept of melancholy comprehended a wide range of characteristics and conditions in seventeenth-century European culture, from the brooding introspection of the genius and the scholar to a condition of delirious and delusory madness.1 Its central and most immediately identifiable characteristic, however, was the excessive and unreasonable nature of its symptomologically defining emotions of fear and sorrow. As (...) Robert Burton noted out in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), the melancholic condition was commonly taken to be "a kind of dotage without fever, having for his ordinary companions fear and sadness, without any apparent occasion."2 The presence of a pervasive and unreasonable sense of fear and sorrow invariably solicited the melancholic label. Indeed, melancholic emotions were the primary substance of melancholic dotage; the ravings of the melancholically mad and their frequent obsession with a single idea were often driven by an overwhelming feeling of fear and sorrow.3The concept of melancholy as a mental disorder involving these specific emotions had coalesced under the gaze of medical observation in ancient Greece, and the melancholic condition was thought by many medical theorists of classical [End Page 583] antiquity to be caused by a physiological surfeit of black bile, the Greek word for which was melancholia.4 Western medicine, profoundly influenced by the Greek medical tradition, continued to diagnose and treat melancholic disturbance as a physical distemper well into the nineteenth century. Yet the kind of mental anguish which early medical observers labeled melancholic bore a striking resemblance to forms of emotional disorder whose point of origin was thought to be the mind itself. Various traditions of classical moral philosophy sought to treat disorders of the mind that unchecked emotion could create primarily by directing, ordering, and correcting the thought of the sufferer. Where the melancholic condition displayed qualities of the emotions as these were represented and analyzed by moral philosophers it was viewed as susceptible to philosophical treatment and insight.5Early modern English writers, no less than classical writers, thought it appropriate to apply to cases of melancholy therapies derived from the philosophic endeavor to define and achieve peace of mind. Burton argued explicitly in The Anatomy of Melancholy for the rightful authority of the philosophical "physician of the soul" in the treatment of melancholy; and the conceptual similarity of melancholy to moral diseases of the soul which provided the basis for this authority is evidenced in the works of several seventeenth-century moralists, as well as in the writings of the influential seventeenth-century physician and natural philosopher Thomas Willis on melancholy and the passions. Willis noted that melancholic emotions were structured and caused by the judgments of the mind rather than by the force of physiological dysfunction alone. His recognition of the importance of the mental aspects of melancholy provided the basis for his prescription of moral therapies for the government of the mind in addition to therapies for the body. Moreover, his writing on the passion of grief displays the ability of moral philosophical language to represent melancholic-like states as problems of the moral life, to be engaged through rational meditation and control.The importance of moral philosophy in understanding and treating melancholy has been largely ignored in current scholarship in the history of psychiatry and madness, which has concentrated on early modern medical concepts of mental disorder that traced its origins to the body. The historian of psychiatry and "madness" Roy Porter has, for instance, referred to Willis's medical writings as evidence for the "thoroughgoing somatic grounding of disorders of thought, feeling and behavior" that he alleged to have dominated the era's medical [End Page 584] conceptualization and treatment of madness.6 While Michel Foucault insightfully noted that Willis's ostensibly chemical account of the nature of melancholy was in fact "a phenomenology of the melancholic experience," he dismissed out of hand the relevance of classical moral philosophical language to the early modern treatment of madness, asserting the complete absence of moral treatments of madness until the end of the eighteenth century.7 In analyzing Willis's writing he thus failed to note the broader moral philosophical... (shrink)

This second set of papers by John Rist is concerned with attempts by (mostly pagan) thinkers in Greco-Roman antiquity to understand the nature of morality against a background of wide-ranging debate about the relationship between soul and body and the necessity for a correct psychology and physiology if the 'good life for man' is to be revealed. Three papers are on Plato, whose elaborate mix of ethics, psychology and metaphysics sets the stage for most of the debate; one is on (...) Aristotle, five are on the Stoics and five on Plotinus. A further study deals with the general problem of the relationship between ethics, cosmology and biology, and the series concludes with the crisis among both pagans and Christians in late antiquity over whether man is naturally good enough to correct his own moral weakness. The set of difficulties recognised by Plato has now found a disturbing conclusion. (shrink)

Turning to the history of philosophical thought, I am surprised by the question what is knowledge? I am surprised because usually we do not reflect on our own knowledge; it appears to us as something obvious. And yet this question has disturbed people since the beginning philosophical thinlung. Moreover, at the time knowledge appeared as a subject full of aporiasintellectual difficulties and obvious contradictions of judgment. This led to the humiliating doubt that man could know anything about the world in (...) which he lived and, thus, exposed, so to speak, the painful nerve of the cognitive aspirations of human reason. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been notable interest in Islamic philosophy and theology from an analytic and not merely historical perspective. One important area of research that has garnered a great deal of research is the arguments for the existence of God. Recent work by Hannah Erlwein seeks to argue that this research has been in vain, for there are no arguments for the existence of God in classical Islamic thought. This paper analyzes Erlwein’s strategies in justifying this position, revealing (...) that her research ignores an enormous amount of evidence that runs contrary to her thesis, in addition to demonstrating many of the errors and shortcomings in her work. Most disturbingly, the book seeks to present the Islamic philosophical tradition as fideistic and unintellectual based on a series of contrived interpretations of rather clear texts. In response, this paper demonstrates the importance of independent inquiry in the Islamic tradition by looking at a wide range of different relevant texts. (shrink)