Philosophers of action and perception have reached a consensus: the term ‘intentionality’ has significantly different senses in their respective fields. But Anscombe argues that these distinct senses are analogically united in such a way that one cannot understand the concept if one focuses exclusively on its use in one’s preferred philosophical sub-discipline. She highlights three salient points of analogy: (i) intentional objects are given by expressions that employ a “description under which;” (ii) intentional descriptions are typically vague and indeterminate; and (...) (iii) intentional descriptions may be false. I explore these three features as they apply to both perception and action and defend Anscombe’s view that the analogical concept of intentionality is a grammatical concept. That is, there are two distinctive linguistic/social practices that involve, respectively, a special sense of the question ‘Why?’ and a special sense of the question ‘What?’ To competently ask and answer the questions that constitute these practices not only reflects, but also conveys a grammatical understanding of intentionality’s basic, formal structure. (shrink)

I argue that the most common interpretation of experiential transparency’s significance is laden with substantive and ultimately extraneous metaphysical commitments. I divest this inflated interpretation of its unwarranted encumbrances and consolidate the precipitate into a position I call core transparency. Core Transparency is a thesis about experience’s presentational character. The objects of perceptual experience are there, present to us, in a way that the objects of most beliefs and judgments are not. According to core transparency, it is in the disclosure (...) of that which is central to experience’s presentational character, an intrinsic and irreducibly phenomenal aspect of experience I call phenomenal presence, that transparency’s significance principally consists. Phenomenal presence is uniquely positioned to illuminate the relationship between perceptual experience’s most important features: its intentionality and its phenomenality. The position I defend comprises two main claims. (1) The representational features of experience, understood in isolation from experiential phenomenality, neither constitute nor explain phenomenal presence. Consequently, the representational features of experience neither determine completely nor explain exhaustively experiential phenomenality. (2) Phenomenal presence is not representational, but is nevertheless the minimal realization of experiential intentionality. (shrink)

Aristotle outlines two methods in De Anima that one can employ when one investigates the soul. The first focuses on the exercises of a living organism’s vital capacities and the proper objects upon which these activities are directed. The second focuses on a living organism’s nature, its internal principle of movement and rest, and the single end for the sake of which this principle is exercised. I argue that these two methods yield importantly different, and prima facie incompatible, views about (...) what souls are. According to the first, the soul is a set of independently specifiable capacities that are related to one another in a manner that effects a unity of soul over and above the multiplicity. According to the second, the soul is a single, unitary nature that has a living organism’s form as its end. I bring the differences between these two conceptions of soul into relief and then attempt to reconcile the opposing views in a way privileges the conception according to which the soul is a unitary nature. In doing so, I discuss the following interrelated topics: (a) what makes a capacity a part of soul, (b) the relationship between the parts of soul within a given organism, (c) how a soul can be a unity while comprising various parts, (d) whether it is possible to give an adequate definition of life or soul, (e) what unity obtains among the various ways life is said that would allow for a proper, scientific investigation of life, and (f) the principle that grounds the hierarchy of souls—the nutritive, the perceptual, and the rational. (shrink)

My topic is the fundamental Aristotelian division between the animate and the inanimate. In particular, I discuss the transformation that occurs when an inanimate body comes to be ensouled. When nutriment is transformed into flesh it is first changed into blood. I argue that blood is unique in being, at one and the same time, both animate and inanimate; it is inanimate nutriment in actuality (or in activity) and animate flesh in potentiality (or in capacity). I provide a detailed exposition (...) of these manners of being (covering individual substances, artifacts, and mixtures), apply these insights to the case of blood, and then argue that blood's curious status is central to understanding hylomorphism in living organisms. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 60, Issue 1, pp 88 - 126 The dominant interpretation of Metaphysics Θ.8 commits Aristotle to the claim that the heavenly bodies’ eternal movements are not the exercises of capacities. Against this, I argue that these movements are the result of necessarily exercised capacities. I clarify what it is for a heavenly body to possess a nature and argue that a body’s nature cannot be a final cause unless the natural body possesses capacities that are exercised for (...) the sake of its nature qua form. This discussion yields a better understanding of what capacities are, what explanatory work capacities do, and what it is to possess a nature. (shrink)

To which science, if any, does the intellect’s study belong? Though the student of nature studies every other vital capacity, most interpreters maintain that Aristotle excludes the intellect from natural science’s domain. I survey the three main reasons that lead to this interpretation: the intellect (i) is not realized physiologically in a proprietary organ, (ii) its naturalistic study would corrupt natural science’s boundaries and leave no room for other forms of inquiry, and (iii) it is not, as all other vital (...) capacities are, a principle of movement and rest. I show that the third consideration is the most significant and then defend the view that the student of nature can (and ought to) study the intellect despite its not being a principle of movement. I argue that all of an organism’s vital activities have one and only one nature as their principle, namely, the organism’s soul considered as a unitary whole. The student of nature must concern herself with whatever activities are involved in the coming to be, development, and full realization of these natural forms. (shrink)

I argue that an experience’s sensuous elements play an ineliminable role in our being intentionally directed upon an entity through perception. More specifically, I argue that whenever we appreciate a sensuous element in experience, we appreciate an intrinsic and irreducibly phenomenal aspect of experience that I call phenomenal presence – an aspect of experience that I show is central to its presentational character – and that the appreciation of phenomenal presence is necessary for perceptual intentionality. If an experience is to (...) possess intentionality, the experience itself must make an entity available as an object of perceptually-based singular beliefs and the experiencing subject, by virtue of undergoing the experience, must in some sense be able to appreciate that it has done so. Phenomenal presence is necessary for perceptual intentionality because it plays an ineliminable role in making an entity available to its subject in this way. (shrink)

According to Aristotle, the three main varieties of soul – nutritive, perceptual, and rational – are hierarchically ordered. I develop and defend an interpretation of the soul’s unity that centers on Aristotle’s attempt to explain this hierarchy’s organizing cause. Aristotle draws an analogy between this series of souls and the series of figures. I first elucidate the fundamental feature both series share: each series’ prior members are present in capacity in its posterior members. I do so by examining several other (...) cases – mathematical, biological, and physical – where Aristotle appeals to presence in capacity. I then argue that an organism’s living body is continuous by nature. That is, an organism’s soul is the principle, cause, and end of a single, articulate activity of living and each of an organism’s vital bodily movements are aspects or partial manifestations of this unitary, natural activity. This account of natural continuity is, I contend, the key to understanding what it is for one soul to be present in capacity in another. And this account of presence in capacity is, I contend, the key to understanding what it is for a soul that comprises parts to be a unity. (shrink)

To act and to refrain from actions comprises according to the logic of ethical consequentialism to be responsible in any case. This argument is particularly important in medical ethics: Setting actively limits to a life or permitting a long-term suffering of a patient is sometimes interpreted as equally important in the view of morals or ethics. The foundation of this argument is a one-sided theory of causation. The essay presented here tries to differentiate between the idea of causation in activities (...) and the ascription of consequences of non-interference in certain cases. In former times nature presented reasons for nonintervention: God was at work. But when the idea of God is deficient in evidence in certain Western societies a qualified idea of life could replace the former basis of naturallaw or natural theology. (shrink)

An overall view of the 50 year’s issues of the ›Zeitschrift für Evangelische Ethik‹ tries to get on the track of the main discussions by often prominent authors. In the fifties and sixties of the 20th century the periodical offered the rare case of intellectual and ethical alternatives to preceding theologies which were in an affinity to antidemocratic traditions. The tradition of the ›kingdom of God‹ was rehabilitated to overcome a theology of divine orders, but the interpretation oscillated. Perspectives of (...) universalization and the sense of democracy and human rights were developed. A simple proposition of divine commandments was overcome by differentiated models of ethical judgment. Fundamental assumptions, however, were pluralistic. For more than twenty years the periodical was ahead of continental practical philosophy which was revived in the last quarter of the century. (shrink)

Just is not only a procedure, but an evoluating set of criteria which point to certain fundamental human goods as survival and participation in social activities. The main challenge behind the appeal to justice is not an abstract obligation, but the general idea of the other, who can be known face-byface or mediated by social structures. There are spheres of obligations and its strength; and the realization of basic human principles, which should be universal, is correlated to culture.

To act and to refrain from actions comprises according to the logic of ethical consequentialism to be responsible in any case. This argument is particularly important in medical ethics: Setting actively limits to a life or permitting a long-term suffering of a patient is sometimes interpreted as equally important in the view of morals or ethics. The foundation of this argument is a one-sided theory of causation. The essay presented here tries to differentiate between the idea of causation in activities (...) and the ascription of consequences of non-interference in certain cases. In former times nature presented reasons for nonintervention: God was at work. But when the idea of God is deficient in evidence in certain Western societies a qualified idea of life could replace the former basis of naturallaw or natural theology. (shrink)