Covers the period from the beginning of Greek Philosophy to St. Augustine.

Surveys philosophy from the neo-Platonists to St. Anselm, showing how Greek philosophy took the form in which it was known to its cultural inheritors and how ...

Originally published in 1940, this book by famous Plotinus scholar Arthur Hilary Armstrong assesses how the philosopher's hierarchy of reality fits into the wider universal order, and how the historical and philosophical tradition gave rise to Plotinus' own philosophies. Armstrong also supplies a bibliography broken down by topic for those who wish to pursue any aspect of the text in greater depth. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Plotinus, Neoplatonism and (...) in the pagan roots of Christian philosophy. (shrink)

Covers the period from the beginning of Greek Philosophy to St. Augustine.

Philosophers and psychologists discuss new collaborative work in moral philosophy that draws on evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience. For much of the twentieth century, philosophy and science went their separate ways. In moral philosophy, fear of the so-called naturalistic fallacy kept moral philosophers from incorporating developments in biology and psychology. Since the 1990s, however, many philosophers have drawn on recent advances in cognitive psychology, brain science, and evolutionary psychology to inform their work. This collaborative trend is especially strong in (...) moral philosophy, and these volumes bring together some of the most innovative work by both philosophers and psychologists in this emerging interdisciplinary field. The contributors to volume 1 discuss recent work on the evolution of moral beliefs, attitudes, and emotions. Each chapter includes an essay, comments on the essay by other scholars, and a reply by the author of the original essay. Topics include a version of naturalism that avoids supposed fallacies, distinct neurocomputational systems for deontic reasoning, the evolutionary psychology of moral sentiments regarding incest, the sexual selection of moral virtues, the evolution of symbolic thought, and arguments both for and against innate morality. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate the value for both philosophy and psychology of collaborative efforts to understand the many complex aspects of morality. Contributors William Casebeer, Leda Cosmides, Oliver Curry, Michael Dietrich, Catherine Driscoll, Susan Dwyer, Owen Flanagan, Jerry Fodor, Gilbert Harman, Richard Joyce, Debra Lieberman, Ron Mallon, John Mikhail, Geoffrey Miller, Jesse Prinz, Peter Railton, Michael Ruse, Hagop Sarkissian, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Chandra Sekhar Sripada, Valerie Tiberius, John Tooby, Peter Tse, Kathleen Wallace, Arthur Wolf, David Wong. (shrink)

For much of the twentieth century, philosophy and science went their separate ways. In moral philosophy, fear of the so-called naturalistic fallacy kept moral philosophers from incorporating developments in biology and psychology. Since the 1990s, however, many philosophers have drawn on recent advances in cognitive psychology, brain science, and evolutionary psychology to inform their work. This collaborative trend is especially strong in moral philosophy, and these volumes bring together some of the most innovative work by both philosophers and psychologists in (...) this emerging interdisciplinary field. The contributors to volume 1 discuss recent work on the evolution of moral beliefs, attitudes, and emotions. Each chapter includes an essay, comments on the essay by other scholars, and a reply by the author of the original essay. Topics include a version of naturalism that avoids supposed fallacies, distinct neurocomputational systems for deontic reasoning, the evolutionary psychology of moral sentiments regarding incest, the sexual selection of moral virtues, the evolution of symbolic thought, and arguments both for and against innate morality. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate the value for both philosophy and psychology of collaborative efforts to understand the many complex aspects of morality. Contributors: William Casebeer, Leda Cosmides, Oliver Curry, Michael Dietrich, Catherine Driscoll, Susan Dwyer, Owen Flanagan, Jerry Fodor, Gilbert Harman, Richard Joyce, Debra Lieberman, Ron Mallon, John Mikhail, Geoffrey Miller, Jesse Prinz, Peter Railton, Michael Ruse, Hagop Sarkissian, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Chandra Sekhar Sripada, Valerie Tiberius, John Tooby, Peter Tse, Kathleen Wallace, Arthur Wolf, David Wong Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is Professor of Philosophy and Hardy Professor of Legal Studies at Dartmouth College. (shrink)

Henry Habberley Price, who published as H. H. Price, was born in 1899. From 1935 to 1959 he was Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University. Price was a major figure in his lifetime well-known especially for the “clarity and elegance of style”, which, according to Martha Kneale (1996: xix), make his works readable in spite of changing fashions in philosophy. Many people’s acquaintance nowadays with Price’s philosophical work derives from his being a target in Austin’s (1962) famous attack on (...) the sense-datum theory. This restricted acquaintance with his output is one reason that Price has been ignored in recent philosophy. -/- Mainstream philosophy neglected him after the Second World War, perhaps partly because, when articulating his ideas, he mainly engaged with philosophers of the past, such as Locke and Hume. His thought was, however, valued by fellow philosophers such as Broad, Moore, Ayer, and generations of his students at Oxford, including Sellars, Armstrong, and Anscombe. -/- Although Price is seen mainly as a philosopher of perception, only two of his six books are about perception and he had a major influence, also publishing many articles, on a variety of topics, including some we cannot focus on here, e.g., our evidence of other minds (1938; 1930b: 195) and psychical research (1940c; 1953b; 1972; 1995; an interest he claims to share with Neo-Platonists [1968a: 447]). We can only provide a sketch of his rich contributions. After briefly sketching his life (§1), we discuss his philosophy’s general features (§2), contributions to the studies of perception (§3), properties (§5.1), recognition (§5), belief (§6), religious belief (§6.8), his revival and serious study of Hume (§4), and some remarkable anticipations (§7). (shrink)

Two things about Hilary Putnam have not changed throughout his career: some (including Putnam himself) have regarded him as a “realist” and some have seen him as a philosopherwho changed his positions (certainly with respect to realism) almost continually. Apparently, what realism meant to him in the 1960s, in the late seventies and eighties, and in the nineties, respectively, are quite different things. Putnam indicates this by changing prefixes: scientific, metaphysical, internal, pragmatic, commonsense, but always realism. Encouraged by Putnam’s (...) own attempts to distinguish his views from one time to another, his work is often regarded as split between an early period of “metaphysical realism” (his characterization) and a later and still continuing period of “internal realism”. Late Putnam is understood to be a view that insists on the primacy of our practices, while the early period is taken to be a view from outside these, a “God’s Eye view”. As Putnam himself stresses (1992b), this way of dividing his work obscures continuities, the most important of which is a continuing attempt to understand what is involved in judging practices of inquiry, like science, as being objectively correct. Thus Putnam’s early and his current work appear to have more in common than the division between “early” and “late” suggests. In fact, Putnam’s earlier writings owe much of their critical force to his adopting the pragmatic perspective of an open-minded participant in practices of empirical inquiry, a stance not explicitly articulated in these writings but rather taken simply as a matter of course.1 Thus insofaras Putnam’s early writings defend a form of representational realism, they can be regarded as attempts to articulate a realist position at work inside our ordinary practices of making empirical judgments. For this reason, we begin our review of Putnam’s realisms by extracting from the early writings a core of principles that carries over into his current work but underwent significantly different interpretations over time.. (shrink)

Arthur Hilary Armstrong, 1909-1997Max Beloff, 1913-1999Tom Burns, 1913-2000John Desmond Clark, 1916-2002Arthur Geoffrey Dickens, 1910-2001Edmund Boleslaw Fryde, 1923-1999Ernest Andre Gellner, 1925-1995Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich, 1909-2001Jean Gottmann, 1915-1994Oliver Robert Gurney, 1911-2001Nicholas Geoggrey Lempriere Hammond, 1907-2001^LFrancis Harry Hinsley, 1918-1998^LHenry David Jocelyn, 1933-2000^LHenry Loyn, 1922-2000^LHenry Mathison Pelling, 1920-1997^LMervyn Reddaway Popham, 1927-2000^LJames Cochran Stevenson Runciman, 1903-2000^LJohn Denis Sargan, 1924-1996^LRichard William Southern, 1912-2001^LThomas Bertram Lonsdale Webster 1905-1974^LElizabeth Mary Wilkinson, 1909 2001^LThomas Wilson, 1916-2001^LGeorge David Norman Worswick, 1916-2001^LFrances Amelia Yates, 1899-1981.

This volume consists of an intellectual autobiography by world-renowned philosopher Hilary Putnam, 26 critical or descriptive essays, 26 replies by Arthur C. Danto, and a bibliography listing all of Putnam's published writings.

First published in 1971, Professor Putnam's essay concerns itself with the ontological problem in the philosophy of logic and mathematics - that is, the issue of whether the abstract entities spoken of in logic and mathematics really exist. He also deals with the question of whether or not reference to these abstract entities is really indispensible in logic and whether it is necessary in physical science in general.

In this short text, a distinguished philosopher turns his attention to one of the oldest and most fundamental philosophical problems of all: How it is that we are able to sort and classify different things as being of the same natural class? Professor Armstrong carefully sets out six major theories—ancient, modern, and contemporary—and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of each. Recognizing that there are no final victories or defeats in metaphysics, Armstrong nonetheless defends a traditional account of universals (...) as the most satisfactory theory we have.This study is written for advanced students, but as Armstrong goes considerably beyond his earlier work on this topic, it will interest professional scholars as well. Carefully plotted and clearly written, Universals is both a paradigm of exposition and a case study on the value of careful analysis of fundamental issues in philosophy. (shrink)

Analytic particularism claims that judgments of moral wrongness are about particular acts rather than general principles. Metaphysical particularism claims that what makes true moral judgments true is not general principles but nonmoral properties of particular acts. Epistemological particularism claims that studying particular acts apart from general principles can justify beliefs in moral judgments. Methodological particularism claims that we will do better morally in everyday life if we look carefully at each particular decision as it arises and give up the search (...) for a complete moral theory. This paper raises problems for each of these versions of particularism. (shrink)

In this important study D. M. Armstrong offers a comprehensive system of analytical metaphysics that synthesises but also develops his thinking over the last twenty years. Armstrong's analysis, which acknowledges the 'logical atomism' of Russell and Wittgenstein, makes facts the fundamental constituents of the world, examining properties, relations, numbers, classes, possibility and necessity, dispositions, causes and laws. All these, it is argued, find their place and can be understood inside a scheme of states of affairs. This is a (...) comprehensive and rigorously this-worldly account of the most general features of reality, argued from a distinctive philosophical perspective, and it will appeal to a wide readership in analytical philosophy. (shrink)