AT the time Strauss published Natural Right and History the state of the question of natural right was a mixture of oblivion and fitful restoration. Natural right had disappeared from the center of discussion in political philosophy for well over a century. No philosopher of the first rank had written a treatise on, or advocated the necessity of, natural right since the time of German idealism or perhaps since Rousseau. Kant more than any other had emptied "natural right" of meaning--by (...) asserting that the moral law must be a law of reason and not a law of nature. Naturrecht in the subtitle of Hegel's great treatise on right did not mean right derived from human nature or from nature as a norm or standard: right was to be sought in the conjunction of the rational and the historical. By the middle of the last century there arose a virtually unanimous agreement between the conservative right and the radical left: the question of right had to be decided on the plane of "history" and not by reference to "nature." The attack on natural right in its explicit form had begun with the critique of modern natural right by the great conservatives of "the historical school." It was completed by Nietzsche and Heidegger who traced the "nihilism" of the age to the continuing power of the belief in trans-historical or "eternal" truths, e.g., to the belief in natural right. (shrink)

Richard Kennington , a professor for many years at Pennsylvania State University and the Catholic University of America, was renowned for his insight in reading and teaching early modern philosophy. Although he published articles and spoke widely, never before have his writings been collected in a book. On Modern Origins deftly shows how modern thinkers assessed the errors of the classical tradition and established in its place a philosophy that fuses a new meaning of nature and of theory (...) with humanitarian goals. This volume is an essential source for scholars seeking to understand the contemporary significance of the dawning of the modern era. (shrink)

A second reason for this neglect is the form in which Descartes was led or compelled to present his soul doctrine in the Meditations. In some complex manner the Meditations is both a medieval, scholastic-Aristotelian writing, as well as the acknowledged founding writing of modern philosophy. It is traditional as "first philosophy" or speculative metaphysics of substance, and as Christian apologetics concerned with the salvation of the infidel. In accordance with both, the soul is a separate, immaterial substance with an (...) immortal destiny unprejudiced by the fate of the body. On the other hand, the Meditations is novel or modern as quest for indubitable "foundations" of the edifice of the sciences. The goal of the edifice of science is however stated only in the non-apologetic or more secular writings: the "mastery and ownership of nature," or "the enjoyment of the fruits of the earth in this life without pain," or such a wisdom as depends on knowing that "the mind depends acutely on the temperament, and the disposition of the organs of the body...". It is tempting to distinguish two Cartesian soul doctrines, the separate and immortal soul of the apologetic Meditations, and a secular soul articulated mainly outside the Meditations and especially in the Passions of the Soul, where Descartes speaks "as a physicist," addresses "the whole nature of man", never mentions any doctrine of substance, and remains utterly unperplexed about the interaction of mind and body. While such a gross distinction proves to be not without a certain homely truth, it leads us away from the Meditations, the classic document of the discovery of the modern soul doctrine. (shrink)

1. [on Republic 508b] The good, as presented here, is discontinuous with the account at 505a–d, where it is the telos of all the soul pursues and does, and perhaps by implication at 505d, seeks to possess and enjoy. The good, as telos at 505a–d, is more general than that which eros seeks to be one’s own sempiternally at Symposium 206a, where the context is human, and the good is, in some sense, possessable. Thus the good as telos at 505a–d, (...) while essentially related to soul, is not limited to the soul as eros: the implication appears to be that there are other relations of the soul to the good than through eros. (shrink)

Pérez-Ramos' study of Baconian science in the New Organon departs sharply from recent interpretation. The single thesis that pervades this book is that the "over-arching ideal guiding Bacon's science" is "maker's knowledge." For Bacon "to know, in brief, means to make". This assertion is itself not made by Bacon, nor does it follow from his statement that "human knowledge and human power meet in one," for power has other forms than making alone. A philosopher who publishes his praise of Machiavelli's (...) realism, and who extends the range of application of his scientia to political knowledge does not restrict the scope of power to "making." Within limits that effectively make Bacon a "philosopher of technology" in a later sense, Pérez-Ramos has given us an original and valuable inquiry. He seeks to give full weight to the Baconian aim to "stake all on the victory of art over nature." This intention has the promise of bringing into a unity the end and the means of Baconian philosophy, the mastery of nature goal and the scientia which is its instrument, a unity not hitherto achieved by Baconian interpreters. (shrink)

This volume is the best available introduction to the achievement of Jacob Klein, which is still insufficiently recognized. Klein published his monumental study, which in English translation is called Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, in two parts in 1934 and 1936. The book lacked an introduction; it needed a concluding part; and its title was somewhat misleading. In its 1968 translation Klein added a note of explanation. "This study was originally written and published in Germany during rather (...) turbulent times. Were I writing it today, the vocabulary would be less 'scholarly,' and the change from the ancient to the modern way of thinking would be viewed in a larger perspective." The present collection of twenty-two items, all but four prepared for publication by Klein, contains almost all of his writings apart from his three books, arranged chronologically, and spanning five decades. The earliest, "The World of Physics and the 'Natural' World," was originally given as a lecture at Marburg in 1932, approximately contemporary to the writing of the first study. To that study it is a useful introduction; it can also plausibly serve as a compressed draft of a possible third section of that book, as the editors suggest. (shrink)

This study reconstructs the relationship between philosophy and politics in the way in which Heidegger's failure as a politician influenced the redevelopment of philosophy in the 1930s. The author also explains how Heidegger's failure influenced the content and direction of his later work.

Logic has pride of place in mathematics and its 20th century offshoot, computer science. Modern symbolic logic was developed, in part, as a way to provide a formal framework for mathematics: Frege, Peano, Whitehead and Russell, as well as Hilbert developed systems of logic to formalize mathematics. These systems were meant to serve either as themselves foundational, or at least as formal analogs of mathematical reasoning amenable to mathematical study, e.g., in Hilbert’s consistency program. Similar efforts continue, but have been (...) expanded by the development of sophisticated methods to study the properties of such systems using proof and model theory. In parallel with this evolution of logical formalisms as tools for articulating mathematical theories (broadly speaking), much progress has been made in the quest for a mechanization of logical inference and the investigation of its theoretical limits, culminating recently in the development of new foundational frameworks for mathematics with sophisticated computer-assisted proof systems. In addition, logical formalisms developed by logicians in mathematical and philosophical contexts have proved immensely useful in describing theories and systems of interest to computer scientists, and to some degree, vice versa. Three examples of the influence of logic in computer science are automated reasoning, computer verification, and type systems for programming languages. (shrink)

Studies the politics of Heidegger in terms of "thrownness" or "existential contingency". Attempts to think through Heidegger's philosophy in a manner that parallels his own dialogue with other key western thinkers.

The proof theory of many-valued systems has not been investigated to an extent comparable to the work done on axiomatizatbility of many-valued logics. Proof theory requires appropriate formalisms, such as sequent calculus, natural deduction, and tableaux for classical (and intuitionistic) logic. One particular method for systematically obtaining calculi for all finite-valued logics was invented independently by several researchers, with slight variations in design and presentation. The main aim of this report is to develop the proof theory of finite-valued first order (...) logics in a general way, and to present some of the more important results in this area. In Systems covered are the resolution calculus, sequent calculus, tableaux, and natural deduction. This report is actually a template, from which all results can be specialized to particular logics. (shrink)

Despite their differences in origin, the three influential schools of twentieth-century continental cultural criticism--the Frankfurt School, existentialism, and poststructuralism--have long been treated as an ensemble and with critical hesitancy. Examining these schools as responses to the apparent collapse of Western civilization in the twentieth-century and as formidable intellectual challenges to the cultural legacies of the Enlightenment, this book provides a productive base for criticism and broadens our understanding of their histories and reception.

The Curry-Howard isomorphism is a proof-theoretic result that establishes a connection between derivations in natural deduction and terms in typed lambda calculus. It is an important proof-theoretic result, but also underlies the development of type systems for programming languages. This fact suggests a potential importance of the result for a philosophy of code.

This classic, provocative introduction to classical metaphysical questions focuses on appreciating the problems, rather than attempting to proffer answers.

Textbook on Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and computability theory, based on the Open Logic Project. Covers recursive function theory, arithmetization of syntax, the first and second incompleteness theorem, models of arithmetic, second-order logic, and the lambda calculus.

Having visited Ireland regularly during the 1930s, Ludwig Wittgenstein resigned his Cambridge philosophy professorship in 1947 and moved there, living in a fishing village on the Atlantic coast and hotels in Dublin and the Wicklow Mountains. Although Wittgenstein spent some time out of the country, Ireland was effectively his base for three very productive years during which he worked on what would become one of his key books, the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein in Ireland represents the first sustained account (...) of Wittgenstein's time in Ireland, placing it in its historical context. Wall pays a good deal of attention to the representation of the Irish landscape in which the Austrian philosopher found himself able to work; a large part of his writings were produced in the bleak landscapes of Ireland and Norway. (shrink)

Methods available for the axiomatization of arbitrary finite-valued logics can be applied to obtain sound and complete intelim rules for all truth-functional connectives of classical logic including the Sheffer stroke and Peirce’s arrow. The restriction to a single conclusion in standard systems of natural deduction requires the introduction of additional rules to make the resulting systems complete; these rules are nevertheless still simple and correspond straightforwardly to the classical absurdity rule. Omitting these rules results in systems for intuitionistic versions of (...) the connectives in question. (shrink)

Written by a former student of Heidegger, this book examines the relationship between the philosophy and the politics of a celebrated teacher and the allure that Nazism held out for scholars committed to revolutionary nihilism.

This book gives a descriptive analysis of specific Madhyamika texts. It compares the ideology of Kumarajiva (a translator of the four Madhyamika treatises 400 A.D.) with the ideologies of the three Chinese contemporaries - HuiYuan, Seng-Jui and Seng-Chao. It envisages an intercultural transmission of religious and philosophical ideas from India to China.

Early in the first volume of his Ideen zu einer reinen Phiinomeno logie und phiinomenologischen Philosophie, Edmund Husserl stated concisely the significance and scope of the problem with which this present study is concerned. When we reflect on how it is that consciousness, which is itself absolute in relation to the world, can yet take on the character of transcendence, how it can become mundanized, We see straightaway that it can do that only by means of a certain participation in (...) transcendence in the first, originary sense, which is manifestly the transcendence of material Nature. Only by means of the experiential relation to the animate organism does consciousness become really human and animal (tierischen), and only thereby does it achieve a place in the space and in the time of Nature. l Consciousness can become "worldly" only by being embodied within the world as part of it. In so far as the world is material Nature, consciousness must partake of the transcendence of material Nature. That is to say, its transcendence is manifestly an embodiment in a material, corporeal body. Consciousness, thus, takes on the characteristic of being "here and now" (ecceity) by means of experiential (or, more accurately, its intentive) relation to that corporeal being which embodies it. Accordingly, that there is a world for consciousness is a conse quence in the first instance of its embodiment by 2 that corporeal body which is for it its own animate organism. (shrink)

Drawing on case studies from around the world - including Iran, Guatemala, USA and Mexico - this collection documents how transnational human rights discourses and legal institutions are materialised, imposed, resisted and transformed in a variety of contexts.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has developed a novel framework for assessing and communicating uncertainty in the findings published in their periodic assessment reports. But how should these uncertainty assessments inform decisions? We take a formal decision-making perspective to investigate how scientific input formulated in the IPCC’s novel framework might inform decisions in a principled way through a normative decision model.

The standard adaptationist explanation of the presence of a sensory mechanism in an organism—that it detects properties useful to the organism—cannot be given for color vision. This is because colors do not exist. After arguing for this latter claim, I consider, but reject, nonadaptationist explanations. I conclude by proposing an explanation of how color vision could have adaptive value even though it does not detect properties in the environment.

Part I The Imperative Mood 'Virtue, then, is a disposition governing our choices '. ARISTOTLE, Eth. Nic. 36 Prescriptive Language. ...

Should particularists about ethics claim that moral principles are never true? Or should they rather claim that any finite set of principles will not be sufficient to capture ethics? This paper explores and defends the possibility of embracing the second of these claims whilst rejecting the first, a position termed 'principled particularism'. The main argument that particularists present for their position-the argument that holds that any moral conclusion can be superseded by further considerations-is quite compatible with principled particularism; indeed, it (...) is compatible with the idea that every true moral conclusion can be shown to follow deductively from a finite set of premises. Whilst it is true that these premises must contain implicit ceteris paribus clauses, this does not render the arguments trivial. On the contrary, they can do important work in justifying moral conclusions. Finally the approach is briefly applied to the related field of jurisprudence. (shrink)

This book is the complete story of the creation of the universe, as it was understood by the ancient Egyptians. It is a collection of harmonic and radical 'Black Thoughts' and the pursuit of equality for all of this planet's inhabitants"--P. vii.