In al-Sirr al-Maktūm, a magisterial work on astral magic, the twelfth century Persian philosopher-theologian Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī formulated one of the most sophisticated theories of talismanic action at a distance ever produced in the Islamic world. Al-Rāzī deployed Avicennan psychology to explain how a practitioner’s soul might connect with the celestial spheres, the principles of sublunary change, and ‘blend’ their forces into a talismanic metal idol; then, performing a ritual mimetic of his intended effect, could direct these forces to bring (...) about his objective, from a distance, altering sublunary phenomena in accordance with his will. In constructing this theory, Rāzī drew on the psychologizing Avicennan accounts of thaumaturgy and veridical dreams, foregrounding what was common to both: the internal sense known as the wahm. (shrink)

Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart was born in Yorkshire in 1907 to second generation Jewish immigrants. Having won a scholarship to Oxford University, he went on to become the most famous legal philosopher of the twentieth century. From 1932-40 H.L.A Hart practised as a barrister in London. He was pronounced physically unfit for military service in 1940, and was recruited by MI5, where he worked until 1945. During his time at the Bar he had continued to study philosophy and at M15 (...) his interest was further stimulated by his philosopher colleagues in M16, Stuart Hampshire and Gilbert Ryle. After the war, Hart returned to Oxford to take up a philosophy fellowship, later to become Professor of Jurisprudence. H.L.A Hart single-handedly reinvented the philosophy of law and influenced the nation's thinking in the 1960s on abortion, the legalization of homosexuality, and on capital punishment. Hart's approach to legal philosophy was at once disarmingly simple and breathtakingly ambitious, combining as it did the insights of Austin and Bentham and the new linguistic philosophy of J.L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. He sought to elucidate a concept of law which would be of relevance to all forms of law, wherever or whenever they arose: his bestselling book, The Concept of Law, has sold tens of thousands of copies worldwide. In 1941, he married Jenifer Williams (a high-ranking civil servant, later an Oxford academic) with whom he had four children. Their relationship was an enduring if unconventional one. In the early 1950s, Jenifer was rumoured to be having a long-standing affair with Isaiah Berlin, one of Hart's closest friends. She was also, falsely, accused by the Sunday Times of having been a Russian spy, an allegation which was all the more scandalous given Hart's position at MI5 during the War. Nicola Lacey draws on Hart's previously unpublished diaries and letters to reveal a complex inner life. Outwardly successful, Hart was in fact tormented by doubts about his intellectual abilities, his sexual identity and his capacity to form close relationships. Her biography also sheds fascinating light on the origins of his ideas, and assesses his overall contribution. Above all, it chronicles of a life which had a depth ands impact far greater than many of Hart's readers have realized. (shrink)

To generations of lawyers, H. L. A. Hart is known as the twentieth century's greatest legal philosopher. Whilst his scholarship revolutionized the study of law, as a social commentator he gave intellectual impetus to the liberalizing of society in the 1960s. But behind his public success, Hart struggled with demons. His Jewish background, ambivalent sexuality, and unconventional marriage all fuelled his psychological complexity; allegations of espionage, though immediately quashed, nearly destroyed him. Nicola Lacey s biography explores the forces that shaped (...) an extraordinary life. (shrink)

Shortlisted for the 2005 British Academy Book prize, Nicola Lacey's entrancing biography recounts the life of H.L.A. Hart, the pre-eminent legal philosopher of the twentieth century. Following Hart's life from modest origins as the son of Jewish tailor parents in Yorkshire to worldwide fame as the most influential English-speaking legal theorist of the post-War era, the book traces his successive metamorphoses; from Yorkshire schoolboy to Oxford scholar, from government intelligence officer to Professor of Jurisprudence, from awkward batchelor to family figurehead. (...) In the tradition of Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein, Nicola Lacey paints an absorbing picture of intellectual and psychological development, of a mind struggling to cope with intellectual self-doubt, uncertain sexuality, a difficult marriage and an anti-semitic society. In depicting the evolution of Hart's life and mind, Lacey provides a vivid recreation of both the intellectual and social climate of Oxford in the post-War era. (shrink)

Objectivity can be effectively described as striving for detachment -a capacity to achieve some distance from one's own spontaneous perceptions and convictions, to experimentally adopt perspectives that do not come naturally. Novick's treatment of objectivity satisfies the requirements of objectivity, while on a rhetorical level he rejects the notion as unrealistic. Detachment enables an intellectual, specifically an historian, to operate with self-reflexivity and simultaneously socializes him or her. The ultimate power in a community of detached intellectuals striving for objectivity is (...) a powerful argument. Under Novick's notion of objectivity, the conflict for historians between scholarly integrity and political alliance is unresolvable. Removing neutrality from the definition of objectivity resolves this conflict, enabling historians to strive for detachment and fairness, not disengagement from life. Postmodern disclaimers, such as Novick's on the futility of objectivity, fail, through being overly dismissive, to help us establish criteria for evaluating individual historical accounts. Having objectivity as a goal enables us to establish those criteria. (shrink)

The conventional readings of Hegel’s theory of property show that property plays an important role in developing human individuality. In this paper, I repudiate the conventional readings and offer a new interpretation of Hegel’s theory of property. I aim to show that Hegel’s theory of property provides a vantage point for us to rethink the relationship between persons and the society in general and the nature of property in particular. Situated in the whole picture of Hegel’s social theory of freedom, (...) I demonstrate that Hegel sees property as a social institution that plays a crucial role in shaping human individuality as well as sociability. (shrink)

Are we responsible for our misdeeds in dreams? The obvious answer would seem to be ‘No’. Dreams catch us with our defences down: just those critical and discriminative abilities which are distinctive of our waking lives as responsible moral agents seem out of play when we dream; el sueño de la razón produce monstruos . Moreover, if we are responsible for our dreamt misdeeds, then parity of reasoning demands that we be praised for dreaming noble dreams. But that (...) is absurd. Moral credit should not come that easily, and so neither should moral blame. (shrink)

“The human being embodies a tension between a nature which has since been lost and an unreachable Divine Creator,” writes Rudolf Borchardt in his book The Passionate Gardener. And he continues: “The garden stands at precisely the center of this tension and displaces itself, in accord with its fluctuations in the epoch and the individual, toward one or the other: toward nature or creativity. This is the deepest reason for which the human being dreams that our origins lie in a (...) garden, and that the garden is the place in which we achieve enlightenment; this is why we hope to find redemption in a garden, and why we look for solace there.”2What Borchardt articulates so well is that a garden is not just an enactment of a.. (shrink)

Plotinus, following certain Platonic cues, maintains that ‘we’ and ‘the true human being’ correspond to the rational part of the embodied human soul. This view is counterintuitive because it is natural to see ourselves and our humanity as including parts of the human organism additional to reason. In this paper, I propose that Plotinus’ view that we are our rational part is best understood as expressing a teleological claim. Since our proper end is an activity of the rational part of (...) soul, it is appropriate to identify our nature with that part of the organism alone. (shrink)

Whatever its grammatical status, the verb “to discern” has an implicit transitive element. That is to say, we always discern about something or between two options. What is the right course of action in this situation and in these circumstances? In our paper, we want to look at responses to this question from the perspective of the theology of liberation. As the name implies, this is first and foremost a theology, a way of seeking to understand and articulate the faith (...) of the believing Christian community. But it is also necessarily political, because it seeks to contribute to the liberation of those who are not free – the poor, the oppressed, those to whom injustice is done, both negatively, by decrying the presence of unfreedom and positively by working for social transformation. It is thus a public theology, a manifestation of the ongoing power of religion to inform and motivate its adherents to engage in attempts to transform the world not only in terms of a post mortem future but here and now. (shrink)

Athlete after athlete in this book found discipline, hope, and inspiration on the playing field, rising above their circumstances. Filled with first-hand accounts from stars who exemplify the idea of enduring at all costs, Rising Above will serve as a must-read source of inspiration for kids and sports fans of all ages.

What is Life? This is the question asked by Denis Noble in this very personal and at times deeply lyrical book. Noble is a renowned physiologist and systems biologist, and he argues that the genome is not life itself: to understand what life is, we must view it at a variety of different levels, all interacting with each other in a complex web. It is that emergent web, full of feedback between levels, from the gene to the wider (...) environment, that is life. (shrink)

The Modern Synthesis has dominated biology for 80 years. It was formulated in 1942, a decade before the major achievements of molecular biology, including the Double Helix and the Central Dogma. When first formulated in the 1950s these discoveries and concepts seemed initially to completely justify the central genetic assumptions of the Modern Synthesis. The Double Helix provided the basis for highly accurate DNA replication, while the Central Dogma was viewed as supporting the Weismann Barrier, so excluding the inheritance of (...) acquired characteristics. This article examines the language of the Modern Synthesis and reveals that it is based on four important misinterpretations of what molecular biology had shown, so forming the basis of the four Illusions: 1. Natural Selection; 2. The Weismann Barrier; 3. The Rejection of Darwin’s Gemmules; 4. The Central Dogma. A multi-level organisation view of biology avoids these illusions through the principle of biological relativity. Molecular biology does not therefore confirm the assumptions of the Modern Synthesis. (shrink)

What is Life? To answer this question, Denis Noble argues that we must look beyond the gene's eye view. For modern 'systems biology' considers life on a variety of levels, as an intricate web of feedback between gene, cell, organ, body, and environment. He shows how it is both a biologically rigorous and richly rewarding way of understanding life.

In this paper I offer an analysis of Plotinus’ argument for the existence of a quasi-psychic entity, the so-called ‘trace of soul’, that functions as an immanent cause of life for an organism’s body. I argue that Plotinus posits this entity primarily in order to account for the body’s possession of certain quasi-psychic states that are instrumental in his account of soul-body interaction. Since these quasi-psychic states imply that an organism’s body has vitality of its own , and Platonic souls (...) are no part or aspect of any body, Plotinus draws the conclusion that the soul must be a cause of the body’s life by imparting a quasi-psychic qualification to it. In so doing, Plotinus introduces elements of hylomorphism into Platonist psychology, and addresses a problem for the animation of the body that Platonic soul-body dualism may plausibly be thought to face. (shrink)

This paper seeks to highlight the importance of spatial cognition in Bergson’s Données immédiates by engaging with Robert Watt’s reconstruction of Bergson’s argument that every idea of number involves the idea of space. We focus on the second stage of Watt’s reconstruction, where Bergson argues that only space can provide the distinction required for our counting of otherwise identical items. Watt bases his reconstruction on a premise regarding the possibility that identical objects, in the absence of spatial distinction, might remain (...) identical across different “temporal locations”. Our paper raises the prospect that Bergson is committed to a stronger thesis, namely one implying that identical objects would necessarily remain indistinguishable without the intervention of space. The paper thus concludes by emphasizing the indispensability of space for knowledge according to Bergson. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that Plotinus denies deliberative forethought about the physical cosmos to the demiurge on the basis of certain basic and widely shared Platonic and Aristotelian assumptions about the character of divine thought. We then discuss how Plotinus can nonetheless maintain that the cosmos is «providentially» ordered.

Conscious Agency is a major driver of evolution. Artificial Selection (i.e. Conscious Selection by human breeders) was the foil against which Charles Darwin defined Natural Selection. In later work, he extended Artificial Selection to other species. That ability for social (e.g. sexual) selection must have evolved. Jablonka and Ginsburg identify markers of conscious agency, such as Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL), and show that it must have existed at the time of the Cambrian Explosion. To their insights, my commentary argues that (...) the harnessing of stochasticity was also involved in the evolution of the faculty of choice in organisms. (shrink)

The extensive range and depth of the twenty commentaries on my target article confirms that something has gone deeply wrong in biology. A wide range of biologists has more than met my invitation for “others to pitch in and develop or counter my arguments.” The commentaries greatly develop those arguments. Also remarkably, none raise issues I would seriously disagree with. I will focus first on the more critical comments, summarise the other comments, and then point the way forward on what (...) I view as a necessary and long-overdue transition in the foundations of biology. (shrink)

In Ennead 3.6, Plotinus maintains that the soul is unaffectable. This thesis is widely taken to imply that his soul is exempt from change and free from emotional ‘affections’. Yet these claims are difficult to reconcile with evidence that Plotinian souls acquire dispositional states, such as virtues, and are subjects of emotional ‘affections’, such as anger. This paper offers an alternative account that aims to address these difficulties. In denying affections to soul, Plotinus is offering a distinction between the soul’s (...) self-actuated motions (or "activities") and the passive motions (or "affections") of bodies. But this distinction does not imply the soul’s changelessness, since Plotinus regards psychic motions that culminate in the soul’s acquisition of new dispositional states as changes. As for emotional ‘affections’, these (as activities) are merely homonymous with the affections denied to soul, and so do not violate the ban on the soul’s affectability. (shrink)

This article examines the issues that are at stake in the current resurgence of interest in the subject of habit. We focus on the role that habit has played in conceptions of the relations between body and society, and the respects in which such conceptions have been implicated in processes of governance. We argue that habit has typically constituted a point of leverage for regulatory practices that seek to effect some realignment of the relations between different components of personhood – (...) will, character, memory and instinct, for example – in order to bring about a specific end. In reviewing its functioning in this regard across a range of modern disciplines – philosophy, psychology, sociology – we explore the tensions between its use and interpretation in different lineages: in particular, the Cartesian–Kantian/ravaisson–bergson–deleuze lineages. The article then identifies how these questions are addressed across the contributions collected in this special issue. (shrink)

In this paper, we offer a criticism, inspired by Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations, of the enactivist account of perception and action. We start by setting up a non-descriptivist naturalism regarding the mind and continue by defining enactivism and exploring its more attractive theoretical features. We then proceed to analyse its proposal to understand normativity non-socially. We argue that such a thesis is ultimately committed to the problematic idea that normative practices can be understood as private and factual. Finally, we offer a (...) characterization of normativity as an essentially social phenomenon and apply our criticisms to other approaches that share commitments with enactivism. (shrink)

The distinction between personal level explanations and subpersonal ones has been subject to much debate in philosophy. We understand it as one between explanations that focus on an agent’s interaction with its environment, and explanations that focus on the physical or computational enabling conditions of such an interaction. The distinction, understood this way, is necessary for a complete account of any agent, rational or not, biological or artificial. In particular, we review some recent research in Artificial Life that pretends to (...) do completely without the distinction, while using agent-centred concepts all the way. It is argued that the rejection of agent level explanations in favour of mechanistic ones is due to an unmotivated need to choose among representationalism and eliminativism. The dilemma is a false one if the possibility of a radical form of externalism is considered. (shrink)

In this paper, we demonstrate (1) how harnessing stochasticity can be the basis of creative agency; (2) that such harnessing can resolve the apparent conflict between reductionist (micro-level) accounts of behaviour and behaviour as the outcome of rational and value-driven (macro-level) decisions; (3) how neurophysiological processes can instantiate such behaviour; (4) The processes involved depend on three features of living organisms: (a) they are necessarily open systems; (b) micro-level systems therefore nest within higher-level systems; (c) causal interactions must occur across (...) all the boundaries between the levels of organization. The higher levels constrain the dynamics of lower levels. The experimental evidence and theoretical arguments are shown to be consistent with previous research on the neuronal mechanisms of conscious choice, and with the interconnected multi-level processes by which organisms harness stochasticity, whether conscious or unconscious. (shrink)