Richard Kilvington was an obscure fourteenth-century philosopher whose Sophismata deal with a series of logic-linguistic conundrums of a sort which featured extensively in philosophical discussions of this period. Originally published in 1990, this was the first ever translation or edition of his work. As well as an introduction to Kilvington's work, the editors provide a detailed commentary. This edition will prove of considerable interest to historians of medieval philosophy who will realise from the evidence presented here that Kilvington deserves to (...) be studied just as seriously as Duns Scotus or William of Ockham. (shrink)

Some of the series' finest lectures have been lost for many years, unavailable to the public in any form -- until now.

The Truth That Never Hurts brings together for the first time more than two decades of literary criticism & political thought about gender, race, sexuality, power & social change. As one of the first writers in the United States to claim Black feminism for Black women in the early seventies, this authors works has been ground breaking in defining a Black women's literary tradition; in examining the sexual politics of the lives of Black & other women of color; in representing (...) the lives of Black lesbians & gay men; & in making connections between race, class, sexuality, & gender. Her essay "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," is often cited as a major catalyst in opening the field of Black women's literature. This essay also presented the first serious discussion of Black lesbian writing. Essays about racism in the women's movement, Black & Jewish relations, & homophobia in the Black community have ignited dialogue about topics that few other writers address. The collection also brings together topical political commentaries that examine the 1968 Chicago convention demonstrations; attacks on the NEA; the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas Senate hearings; & police brutality against Rodney King & Abner Louima. It also includes a never before published personal essay on racial violence, the day-to-day life of Kitchen Table Press, & the bonds between Black women that make it possible to survive. This authors writing offers a rare combination of intellectual challenge & an accessible personal voice. her commitment to telling the truth about difficult, even volatile issues, makes a unique contribution to American literature & social thought. (shrink)

The Metaphysics of Theism presents an explanation and evaluation of Aquinas's natural theology, the paradigm of which is the first book of the Summa contra gentiles. Natural theology provides the traditional and still central means of integrating philosophy with (some of) theology. What makes this enterprise natural theology is its forgoing of appeals to revelation as evidence for the truth of propositions. What makes it natural theology is its agenda to investigate, by means of analysis and argument, not only the (...) existence and nature of God but also the relation of everything else—especially human nature and behaviour—to God, considered as reality's first principle. Natural theology still offers the best route by which philosophers can, as philosophers, approach theological propositions. The one presented in this book undertakes to show that there must be a necessary being that constitutes the ultimate explanation of the universe. (shrink)

Depth Calls to Depth: Jungian Psychology and Spiritual Direction in Dialogue draws on the author's dual background as a certified Jungian analyst and psychologist as well as a spiritual director with a master's degree in theology. Over the last several decades, spiritual direction has moved beyond its monastic origins to become a major force in contemporary spirituality. Its emphasis on direct spiritual experience offers a natural parallel to Jung's model of psychospiritual healing. This book describes how Jungian dreamwork can enhance (...) the practice of spiritual direction. There is much interest in Jung's thought in spiritual circles but little informed understanding of the details of his model and its application to work with individuals. In an effort to meet this need, chapters alternate between descriptions of Jung's approach, augmented by extensive case material and accounts of spiritual direction sessions. In this way, the book combines a comprehensive summary of Jung's main ideas and methodologies with vignettes that illustrate their practical application. Larger issues regarding the relationship between psychology and spirituality are discussed as well as Jung's complicated relationship with the Christian tradition. The author's background in Ignatian spirituality and the work of mystics like Meister Eckhart allow him to demonstrate how these approaches can bridge gaps between the Christian and Jungian models of spiritual growth. Parallels to 12-Step spirituality also are explored. (shrink)

1. Thoroughgoing TeleologyAquinas concludes his introductory chapter by announcing that his first task in Book III, a task to which he devotes sixty-two chapters, is to investigate “God himself in so far as he is the end of all things” (1.1867b). That compressed description of a very big topic is likely to arouse some misgivings. Why should we think that absolutely all things do have ends or goals? Even if we’re given good reasons to think that they do, why should (...) we think that all those ends or goals converge in a single end for all things? And even if we should be convinced of that, why should we think that that single universal end must be identified (somehow) as God himself? (shrink)

1. The Aims of the BookThis book is the third in a series of three volumes. In 1997 and 1999, Oxford’s Clarendon Press published my books The Metaphysics of Theism and The Metaphysics of Creation, which are related, respectively, to Books I and II of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa contra gentiles (SCG) as this book is to Book III.1.

1. ReorientationAt the end of Book III’s first, introductory chapter, Aquinas divides his projected investigation of divine providence into three big topics, the first of which he characterizes as having to do with “God himself in so far as he is the end of all things,” God’s omega-aspect (1.1867b).197 Since III.64 is unmistakably the beginning of Aquinas’s investigation of the second big topic, God’s universal governance, it looks offhand as if he intends to devote chapters 2–63 to his treatment of (...) God as the universal goal.198 In the first two of those chapters Aquinas does carry out a general investigation of the nature of agents, actions, and ends that makes an altogether appropriate preamble to a consideration of his thesis that God is (somehow) the unique, universal, ultimate goal of the actions of created agents.199 However, as we’ve just seen, Aquinas’s chapters 4 through 15 constitute a treatise on badness. God is mentioned only briefly in the twelve chapters that make up the treatise, and it’s unclear how, if at all, Aquinas intends his analysis of badness to contribute to his consideration of God as goal.200 So, setting aside the uncertainly relevant treatise on badness, it seems right to say that Aquinas’s investigation of God’s omega-aspect occupies not III.2–63 but just III.2–3 and 16–63.201 Within that latter series of chapters, he devotes III.16–24 to God as the goal of created things generally, the topic of this chapter, and III.25–63 to God as the ultimate goal of human beings specifically. (shrink)

_William of Sherwood's Introduction to Logic _ was first published in 1966. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The _Introduction to Logic _ by William of Sherwood, of which this is the first English translation, is the oldest surviving treatise which contains a treatment of the most distinctive and interesting medieval contributions to logic and semantics. Sherwood was a master at Oxford (...) and Paris in the thirteenth century and the author of several logical treatises. Besides presenting material of interest in its own right, this volume is useful as an introduction to the study of those aspects of medieval philosophy that are most pertinent to the interests of contemporary philosophers. Professor Kretzmann has provided biographical, bibliographical, and philosophical backgrounds on Sherwood and an analytical table of contents. (shrink)

Die Sophisten waren und sind umstritten. In der Zeit des Perikles, der Hochblüte der griechischen Kultur, als Wanderlehrer in Griechenland tätig, bewirkten sie mit ihrer Lehrtätigkeit, welche die verschiedensten Wissensgebiete umfasste, einen grundlegenden Blickwandel: Ihre Befassung mit Erkenntnistheorie, Rhetorik und Politik lenkte den Blick vom Kosmos zurück auf den Menschen. Indem sie den Menschen in den Mittelpunkt ihres Denkens stellten, ja ihn sogar zum Maß aller Dinge erklärten, wendeten sie sich zugleich gegen die traditionelle Sittlichkeit, die in der Regel religiös (...) begründet war. So waren sie für die einen gefeierte Aufklärer, für die anderen jedoch Zerstörer der Tradition. Diese Ambivalenz in der Einschätzung ihres Wirkens ist bis heute geblieben. Was auch geblieben ist und von Moderne wie Postmoderne aufgenommen wurde, sind wesentliche Ansätze ihres Denkens: z. B. ihr erkenntnistheoretischer Relativismus, ihre Vertragstheorie und ihre Lehre vom Recht des Stärkeren. Weil ihr Denken so aktuell ist, untersucht der vorliegende Band nicht nur die antiken Sophisten, sondern vergleicht sie auch mit ihren modernen und postmodernen Wiedergängern wie bspw. Nietzsche, Butler und Foucault. Mit Beiträgen von Viktoria Bachmann, Thomas Buchheim, Bettina Fröhlich, Benjamin Hahn, Hendrik Hansen, Raul Heimann, Johannes Hoerlin, Vanessa Jansche, Christina Kast, Peter Kainz und Barbara Zehnpfennig. (shrink)

Individual objects have potentials: paper has the potential to burn, an acorn has the potential to turn into a tree, some people have the potential to run a mile in less than four minutes. Barbara Vetter provides a systematic investigation into the metaphysics of such potentials, and an account of metaphysical modality based on them. -/- In contemporary philosophy, potentials have been recognized mostly in the form of so-called dispositions: solubility, fragility, and so on. Vetter takes dispositions as her (...) starting point, but argues for and develops a more comprehensive conception of potentiality. She shows how, with this more comprehensive conception, an account of metaphysical modality can be given that meets three crucial requirements: Extensional correctness: providing the right truth-values for statements of possibility and necessity; formal adequacy: providing the right logic for metaphysical modality; and semantic utility: providing a semantics that links ordinary modal language to the metaphysics of modality. -/- The resulting view of modality is a version of dispositionalism about modality: it takes modality to be a matter of the dispositions of individual objects. This approach has a long philosophical tradition going back to Aristotle, but has been largely neglected in contemporary philosophy. In recent years, it has become a live option again due to the rise of anti-Humean, powers-based metaphysics. The aim of Potentiality is to develop the dispositionalist view in a way that takes account of contemporary developments in metaphysics, logic, and semantics. (shrink)

Cultural accounts of how people facilitate learning extend beyond the five types of teaching outlined by Kline's target article. Rather than focusing so exclusively on individual teaching, cultural accounts examine the mutually constituting efforts of individuals who are teaching, together with those who are learning. Further, cultural research emphasizes the community contexts of people's arrangements for learning and their teaching/learning interactions.

Dr. Garrett Johnson received a call from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice asking if he would be interested in filling prescriptions for pentobarbital. Suddenly he faced a controversial issue - providing a drug used for the lethal injection of convicted criminals. Apparently big pharma was discontinuing the manufacture and sale of drugs used for human executions - primarily due to mounting pressure from death penalty activists and shareholders, legal appeals by inmates, media reports of botched lethal injections, etc. Texas (...) saw the solution by using small local compounding pharmacies that were less visible to the public. Should Garrett fill this lucrative order knowing how the State would use the drugs? The case presents the ethical and strategic issues that Garrett faces - having just graduated and started his own compounding pharmacy - in making this decision. (shrink)

Are there any business decisions that do not have an ethical dimension? Who decides that a decision is unethical? What impact does ethics have in today’s business environment? The case focuses on the development of Hawaii’s first public-private venture capital fund by three very different entities: the State of Hawaii economic development corporation; a US mainland-based private equity investment firm; and a partnership of two serial entrepreneurs. The case uses a progressive disclosure format so students only read and analyze the (...) actions and ethical issues that occur at a specific point in time: creation of the venture capital fund; selection of startups to be included in the fund’s investment portfolio; and public reaction to decisions and actions by the fund. The case frames the issues confronted at each point as ethical dilemmas. Analysis includes answering questions and formulating recommendations or solutions to each dilemma. (shrink)

Critics of Scientific Creationism (SC) contend that it is fundamentalist religion rather than science. While SC is, indeed, religion, giving it this vague label is neither useful nor descriptive. By treating SC as a body of rhetoric, one may address the question, "What kind of religion is SC?" SC creates a distinct image of God as a Divine Engineer and uses this image, rather than science, to criticize evolution. Further, SC employs many devices commonly found in early apocalyptic literature. SC, (...) then, reveals a new symbolic universe based on its image of God. The most important contribution of SC lies in its presenting an apocalyptic religion. (shrink)

Trying to obtain a medical history from a patient, I listen to her story. She’s a difficult patient, as in noncompliant, narcotic-seeking chronic-pain-in-the-ass patient. There’s a Physician’s Field Guide to the Difficult Patient, a chapter for each type. If you stop to listen, to question the words used, you may never finish this medical..

How does thinking affect doing? There is a widely held view that thinking about what you are doing, as you are doing it, hinders performance. Once you have acquired the ability to putt a golf ball, play an arpeggio on the piano, or parallel-park, reflecting on your actions leads to inaccuracies, blunders, and sometimes even utter paralysis--that's what is widely believed. But is it true? After exploring some of the contemporary and historical manifestations of the idea, Barbara Gail Montero (...) develops a theory of expertise which emphasizes the role of the conscious mind in expert action. She aims to dispel various myths about experts who proceed without any understanding of what guides their action, and she analyzes research in both philosophy and psychology that is taken to show that conscious control and explicit monitoring of one's movements impedes well practiced skills. Montero explores a wide range of real-life examples of optimal performance, in sports, the performing arts, healthcare, the military, and other fields, and draws from psychology, neuroscience, and literature to offer a refreshing and persuasive view of expertise, according to which expert action generally is and ought to be thoughtful, effortful, and reflective. (shrink)

Eleonore Stump argues in her article in this volume that Aquinas’s theory of knowledge is not classical foundationalism, as it has sometimes seemed to be, but, instead, a version of reliabilism. I'm convinced that her thesis is important and well-supported, and it has led me to begin a re-examination of one aspect of Aquinas’s theory of knowledge from the new viewpoint Stump’s work provides. I think the results tend to confirm her account while revealing further details of Aquinas’s reliabilism.My topic (...) is not reliabilism itself. Instead, I am focusing on Aquinas’s account of the reliability of the fundamental operations of the two human cognitive faculties, sense and intellect. Accounts of cognitive reliability have a place in most theories about the justification of belief, of course, and so they are found in more than one sort of epistemology; but reliabilism might be said to need them most. (shrink)

This is the first of a three-volume anthology intended as a companion to The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy. Volume 1 is concerned with the logic and the philosophy of language, and comprises fifteen important texts on questions of meaning and inference that formed the basis of Medieval philosophy. As far as is practicable, complete works or topically complete segments of larger works have been selected. The editors have provided a full introduction to the volume and detailed introductory headnotes (...) to each text; the volume is also indexed comprehensively. (shrink)

This book presents the most important problems of reference and considers their solution. It presupposes no technical knowledge, presents analyses from first principles, illustrates every stage with examples, and is written with verve and clarity. This is the ideal introduction to reference for students of linguistics and philosophy of language.

Dispositions are modal properties. The standard conception of dispositions holds that each disposition is individuated by its stimulus condition(s) and its manifestation(s), and that their modality is best captured by some conditional construction that relates stimulus to manifestation as antecedent to consequent. I propose an alternative conception of dispositions: each disposition is individuated by its manifestation alone, and its modality is closest to that of possibility — a fragile vase, for instance, is one that can break easily. The view is (...) expounded in some detail and defended against the major objections. (shrink)

Abilities are in many ways central to what being an agent means, and they are appealed to in philosophical accounts of a great many different phenomena. It is often assumed that abilities are some kind of dispositional property, but it is rarely made explicit exactly which dispositional properties are our abilities. Two recent debates provide two different answers to that question: the new dispositionalism in the debate about free will, and virtue reliabilism in epistemology. This paper argues that both answers (...) fail as general accounts of abilities, and discusses the ramifications of this result. (shrink)

It is a familiar point that many ordinary dispositions are multi-track, that is, not fully and adequately characterisable by a single conditional. In this paper, I argue that both the extent and the implications of this point have been severely underestimated. First, I provide new arguments to show that every disposition whose stimulus condition is a determinable quantity must be infinitely multi-track. Secondly, I argue that this result should incline us to move away from the standard assumption that dispositions are (...) in some way importantly linked to conditionals, as presupposed by the debate about various versions of the ‘conditional analysis’ of dispositions. I introduce an alternative conception of dispositionality, which is motivated by linguistic observations about dispositional adjectives and links dispositions to possibility instead of conditionals. I argue that, because of the multi-track nature of dispositions, the possibility-based conception of dispositions is to be preferred. (shrink)

Recent work in the philosophy of religion has broken through disciplinary boundaries and ventured into new areas of inquiry. Examining aspects of the rationality of faith or bringing philosophical techniques to bear on particular religious texts or doctrines, this collection deepens our understanding of the connections between faith and reason.