Addressed to historians of medieval and Byzantine thought, philosophers and theologians, Eriugena: East and West provides an in-depth study of how the great Irish scholar, John Scottus Eriugena, bridged the gap between Eastern, Greek-speaking Christianity and the Latin West. In these essays, selected from the Eighth International Colloquium of the Society for the Promotion of Eriugenian Studies, 12 scholars not only focus on one crucial exemplar of the history of Christian ecumenism, but also open a fruitful discussion about the contemporary (...) challenges that continue to divide Christian theology, East and West. (shrink)

How to imagine the imagination is a topic that draws philosophers the way flowers draw honeybees. From Plato and Aristotle to Wittgenstein and Sartre, philosophers have talked and written about this most elusive of topics--that is, until contemporary analytic philosophy of mind developed. Perhaps it is the vast range of the topic that has scared off our contemporaries, ranging as it does from mental images to daydreams. The guiding thread of this book is the distinction Colin McGinn draws between (...) perception and imagination. Clearly, seeing an object is similar in certain respects to forming a mental image of it, but it is also different. McGinn shows what the differences are, arguing that imagination is a sui generis mental faculty. He goes on to discuss the nature of dreaming and madness, contending that these are primarily imaginative phenomena. In the second half of the book McGinn focuses on what he calls cognitive (as opposed to sensory) imagination, and investigates the role of imagination in logical reasoning, belief formation, the understanding of negation and possibility, and the comprehension of meaning. His overall claim is that imagination pervades our mental life, obeys its own distinctive principles, and merits much more attention. (shrink)

The Oxford-educated philosopher serves up his trenchant survey of his academic discipline, offering his commentary on Descartes, Anselm Bertrand Russell, Sartre ...

In Truth by Analysis (2012), Colin McGinn aims to breathe new life into conceptual analysis. Sadly, he fails to defend conceptual analysis, either in principle or by example.

Since the appearance of a widely influential book, Self-Knowledge and Self-ldentity, Sydney Shoemaker has continued to work on a series of interrelated issues in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. This volume contains a collection of the most important essays he has published since then. The topics that he deals with here include, among others, the nature of personal and other forms of identity, the relation of time to change, the nature of properties and causality and the relation between the (...) two, dualism and immortality, and the nature of mental states. All the essays show the same care and precision in argument as the earlier book, but they also reveal a substantial shift in Professor Shoemaker's position to a form of materialism. In fact, a number of papers together constitute what is probably the most subtle and rigourous defence yet of a sophisticated functionalism in the account of the mind. (shrink)

Conscious experience is one of the most difficult and thorny problems in psychological science. Its study has been neglected for many years, either because it was thought to be too difficult, or because the relevant evidence was thought to be poor. Bernard Baars suggests a way to specify empirical constraints on a theory of consciousness by contrasting well-established conscious phenomena - such as stimulus representations known to be attended, perceptual, and informative - with closely comparable unconscious ones - such (...) as stimulus representations known to be preperceptual, unattended, or habituated. Adducing data to show that consciousness is associated with a kind of global workplace in the nervous system, and that several brain structures are known to behave in accordance with his theory, Baars helps to clarify many difficult problems. (shrink)

Analyses of the concept of prestige are as divergent as they are rare. In the realm of politics, uncertainty and confusion about the nature of prestige manifest themselves in the concoction and circulation of invalid arguments: arguments whose prima facie plausibility rests upon a lack of perspicuous thought about prestige. “The meaning of ‘prestige’ is in fact not unrelated to that lack of clear political thinking which is the menace of our times.” Sir Harold Nicolson's remark, made some three decades (...) ago, applies with at least equal force in our own day. (shrink)

In the mid twentieth century the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously asserted that games are indefinable; there are no common threads that link them all. "Nonsense," says the sensible Bernard Suits: "playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles." The short book Suits wrote demonstrating precisely that is as playful as it is insightful, as stimulating as it is delightful. Suits not only argues that games can be meaningfully defined; he also suggests that playing games is a (...) central part of the ideal of human existence, so games belong at the heart of any vision of Utopia. Originally published in 1978, The Grasshopper is now re-issued with a new introduction by Thomas Hurka and with additional material (much of it previously unpublished) by the author, in which he expands on the ideas put forward in The Grasshopper and answers some questions that have been raised by critics. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Theories of the influence of technology on modern Western society have failed to take into account the important role played by a widespread pattern of sociotechnical practice. The pattern in question involves the interplay of technology, rights, and numbers. This paper argues that in the context of an ever more potent technological arsenal and an ever increasing number of individuals who have access to its elements and believe themselves entitled to use them in maximalist ways, adherence to the traditional (...) notion of individual human rights is anachronistic and increasingly problematic for the quality of life in contemporary society. To combat this situation, I criticise the idea of human rights as timelessly valid and offer a contextualised account of these constructs, one able to take on board the implications of their maximalist exercise in a populous technological society. I conclude by illustrating the struggles being waged over the adaptation of human rights to techno‐demographic reality in two areas of contemporary Western society: urban planning and medicine. (shrink)

The task of giving some sort of interpretation of Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colour is an extraordinarily difficult one. The book is exceptionally fragmentary. Many of the remarks seem to raise questions that are then left completely unanswered, or to invite us to imagine various circumstances that are then left without any further comment. Although nearly all the remarks are related in one way or another to the problem of colour, the range of topics that Wittgenstein touches on is extremely wide, (...) and covers areas that are not normally mentioned in contemporary philosophical discussions of colour. For example, apart from the familiar ‘Why can't there be a transparent white?’ and ‘Why can't there be a reddish-green?’, he asks ‘Can a transparent piece of glass have the same colour as an opaque piece of paper?’, ‘Is white always the lightest colour?’, ‘Do I see blond hair in the black and white photograph of a blond youth?’, ‘Does it make sense to point to a colour in the iris of a Rembrandt eye and ask for the walls of my room to be painted the same colour?’, ‘Do the colour-blind have the same concept of colour-blindness as the normally sighted?’, ‘Can normal vision be described?’, and so on. (shrink)

The basic principles of scientific research from the great French physiologist whose contributions in the 19th century included the discovery of vasomotor nerves; nature of curare and other poisons in human body; more.

Frege takes the view that “like ethics, logic can also be called a normative science.” The parallel that he detects depends upon his commitment to the idea of objective constraints on thought and action, against which particular acts or particular pieces of reasoning can be judged. The point of the comparison is to get us to see that logic is not an empirical science, concerned with laws of thought in a psychological sense; rather, the laws of logic are ‘prescriptions for (...) making judgement’. Hookway also detects a parallel, but it prompts him to move in the opposite direction: the point of the parallel is to bring us to appreciate the role of human emotional responses in our ordinary cognitive assessments of the truth of propositions, the soundness of inferences, the relevance of doubts, the appropriateness of questions, and so on. He argues that appreciation of this point enables us to solve some central epistemological problems, in particular, the problem of epistemological scepticism. I argue that Hookway shows, at best, that without our emotional convictions, our ordinary practices could not get off the ground, but that this, on its own, does not amount to a satisfying reply to the sceptic. (shrink)

Part I. Phenomenology -- Phenomenology and the return to beginnings -- Delimitations: phenomenology and the end of metaphysics -- Part II. Sallis's Plato interpretation -- Being and logos: reading the Platonic dialogues -- Chorology: on beginning in Plato's Timaeus -- Platonic legacies -- Part III. Art/Sallis -- Stone -- Shades-of painting at the limit -- Topographies -- Part IV. Sallis and other thinkers -- The gathering of reason -- Spacings-of reason and imagination in texts of Kant, Fichte, Hegel -- Echoes: (...) after Heidegger -- Crossings: Nietzsche and the space of tragedy -- Part V. Sallis speaks directly -- Double truth -- Force of imagination: the sense of the elemental -- On translation -- The Sallis/Derrida dialogue -- Derrida's "Tense" and Sallis's The verge of philosophy. (shrink)