Everson presents a comprehensive new study of Aristotle's account of perception and related mental capacities. Recent debate about Aristotle's theory of mind has focused on this account, which is Aristotle's most sustained and detailed attempt to describe and explain the behavior of living things. Everson places this account in the context of Aristotle's natural science as a whole, showing how Aristotle applies the explanatory tools he developed in other works to the study of perceptual cognition.

This volume deals with Epistemology. The period from the sixth century BC to the second and third centuries AD was one of the most fertile for the theory of knowledge, and the range of 'epistemic states' explored in the ancient texts is much wider than those to be found in contemporary discussions of epistemology or cognition. Greek philosophers approached these problems in a great variety of ways, from the extreme relativism of Protagoras to the scepticism of the Pyrrhonists, and the (...) contributors demonstrate both the familiarity and novelty of this range of views in their critical essays. (shrink)

This second Companion deals with the ancient theories of the psyche. The essays range over more than eight hundred years of psychological enquiry and provide critical analyses not only of the ancient discussions of the nature of the psyche and its states, but of such central topics as perception, subjectivity, the explanation of action, and what it is to be a person. In examining the wide variety of the different psychological theories offered by the ancient thinkers, from the increasingly complex (...) materialism of the Presocratics and Hellenistics to the dualism of Plato and Plotinus, the collection demonstrates that psychology had become a wide-ranging and sophisticated discipline long before Descartes. The essays will be of interest not only to ancient philosophers but also to all those studying psychology and its history. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: References.

This is an important book for the specialist in Aristotelian natural science and philosophy of mind. While its overall aims are more sweeping—to show how the account of perception is an application of the explanatory method of the Physics and to argue that Aristotle’s resulting method of explaining mental activity has substantive advantages over contemporary accounts in philosophy of mind —much of its most successful argument is a sustained and detailed attack on a position made famous by Myles Burnyeat. On (...) Burnyeat’s “spiritualist” reading of Aristotle, the sense organs perceive without undergoing any material alteration; the capacity for perception is a basic capacity of the matter that constitutes sense organs, and admits of no further material explanation. The “literalist,” by contrast, maintains that when a sense organ perceives something it is physically altered, so that it takes on a property of the sensible that affects it. Everson’s primary achievement is to supply a thorough and generally convincing defense of a literalist reading by explaining in detail the material workings of both the individual senses and the perceptual system as a whole, including the activities of phantasia. (shrink)

In his book What We Owe to Each Other, Thomas Scanlon proposes what he calls a ‘contractualist’ explanation of what he describes as ‘a central part of the territory called morality’, i.e. our duties to other rational creatures. If Scanlon is right, the fact that another creature is rational generates a particular kind of moral constraint on how we may act towards it: one should ‘treat rational creatures only in ways that would be allowed by principles that they could not (...) reasonably reject insofar as they too were seeking principles of mutual governance which other rational creatures could not reasonably reject’. This is then used to explain what makes actions right, at least within his central moral area. Such actions will be right because they are permitted by principles that cannot reasonably be rejected. In this essay, I question both whether Scanlon succeeds in identifying a proper part of the moral terrain as a subject for his account and also what, if any, is the contractualist content of that account. I argue that he equivocates between two distinct and incompatible conceptions of the justifiability of principles. According to the first, justifiability is a relation between principles and people, whilst according to the second, for a principle to be justifiable is for it to be justified. For his explanation of morality to have any contractualist force, justifiability needs to be understood as a relation, but for that explanation to have any plausibility, justifiability must be understood nonrelationally. Because of this, the account is unstable and fails to describe any part of the moral landscape. (shrink)

This fourth Companion to Ancient Thought is devoted to ancient ethics. The chapters range over the ethical theories of all the major philosophers and schools from the earliest times to the work of the Hellenistic philosophers. There is a substantial introduction which considers the question of what is distinctive about ancient ethics, and an extensive bibliography. This collection provides a sophisticated and accessible introduction to the moral theories of the ancient world.

This third Companion To Ancient Thought is devoted to ancient theories of language. The chapters range over more than eight hundred years of philosophical enquiry, and provide critical analyses of all the principal accounts of how it is that language can have meaning and how we can come to acquire linguistic understanding. The discussions move from the naturalism examined in Plato's Cratylus to the sophisticated theories of the Hellenistic schools and the work of St Augustine. The relations between thought about (...) language and metaphysics, philosophy of mind and the development of grammar are also explored. (shrink)

One issue of contention amongst scholars of the Republic is whether Thrasymachus initially espouses a conventionalist account of justice, according to which just actions are merely those which are lawful; required, or at least allowed, by the laws passed by the ruler of the state. A further question is then whether his initial conceptions of rulers and laws are positivist ones, such that to be a ruler or law of a state is simply determined by the state’s constitution. At 340c (...) Thrasymachus effectively rejects such positivism by placing a condition on being a ruler that one should be exercising the art of ruling and on being a law that it should work to the ruler’s interest. Some have maintained that this works to clarify his initial account and so shows that he was never a positivist about rulers and laws. In this paper I argue against such an understanding of Thrasymachus’ argument and explore the problems which beset the position he is, on my reading, forced into by Socrates’ objection to his opening claim that justice is what is in the interest of the stronger and the argument he first gives to support it. (shrink)

Language is the third in a series of volumes edited by Stephen Everson devoted to the examination of a special topic in philosophy from its origins in the pre-Socratic thinkers through to Late Antiquity. In keeping with its predecessors, Epistemology and Psychology, this is a collection of essays whose audience is primarily Anglo-American philosophers of an analytic bent. “This new series of Companions is intended particularly for students of ancient thought who will be reading the texts in translation (...) but approaching them with the analytical skills of modern philosophy and with an eye to their contemporary as well as their historical significance”. This volume also features an up-to-date, thematically arranged bibliography, which, along with appendices of names and passages cited, will prove to be a useful resource to readers and scholars. The distinguished group of authors survey most of the major figures/schools. There is, however, next to nothing about the pre-Socratic thinkers and nothing on later Platonism. Perhaps the emphasis on contemporary analytic philosophy of language meshes less well with the distinctive views of these philosophical writers. (shrink)

I review this fine collection of articles on ancient ethics ranging from the Presocratics to Sextus Empiricus. Eight of the nine chapters are published here for the first time. Contributors include Charles H. Kahn on "Pre-Platonic Ethics," C. C. W. Taylor on "Platonic Ethics," Stephen Everson on "Aristotle on Nature and Value," John McDowell on "Some Issues in Aristotle's Moral Psychology," David Sedley on "The Inferential Foundations of Epicurean Ethics," T. H. Irwin on "Socratic Paradox and Stoic Theory," (...) Julia Annas on "Doing Without Objective Values: Ancient and Modern Strategies," and Susan Sauvé Meyer on "Moral Responsibility: Aristotle and After." There is also an introductory essay by the editor, Stephen Everson. I summarize and then critique each chapter in this rather lengthy review. (shrink)

A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes is a popular-science book on cosmology (the study of the origin and evolution of the universe) by British physicist Stephen Hawking. It was first published in 1988. Hawking wrote the book for readers who have no prior knowledge of the universe and people who are interested in learning.

A comprehensive reassessment of the concept of mimesis in the history of ancient Greek aesthetics and philosophy of art, with particular attention to Plato, Aristotle, Hellenistic philosophy, and neoplatonism. There is also a wide-ranging review of arguments pro and contra the idea of artistic mimesis from the Renaissance to modern literar theory. The book challenges standard accounts in numerous respects and builds a new dialectical model with which to make sense of the entire history of mimeticist thinking in aesthetics.

Aboutness has been studied from any number of angles. Brentano made it the defining feature of the mental. Phenomenologists try to pin down the aboutness-features of particular mental states. Materialists sometimes claim to have grounded aboutness in natural regularities. Attempts have even been made, in library science and information theory, to operationalize the notion. But it has played no real role in philosophical semantics. This is surprising; sentences have aboutness-properties if anything does. Aboutness is the first book to examine through (...) a philosophical lens the role of subject matter in meaning. A long-standing tradition sees meaning as truth-conditions, to be specified by listing the scenarios in which a sentence is true. Nothing is said about the principle of selection--about what in a scenario gets it onto the list. Subject matter is the missing link here. A sentence is true because of how matters stand where its subject matter is concerned. Stephen Yablo maintains that this is not just a feature of subject matter, but its essence. One indicates what a sentence is about by mapping out logical space according to its changing ways of being true or false. The notion of content that results--directed content--is brought to bear on a range of philosophical topics, including ontology, verisimilitude, knowledge, loose talk, assertive content, and philosophical methodology. Written by one of today's leading philosophers, Aboutness represents a major advance in semantics and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

Ao longo dos séculos as ferramentas de trabalho evoluíram constantemente e as ferramentas que se destinam à manipulação de informações não são diferentes. O surgimento da Informática e de recursos e conceitos que a impulsionaram, corno o computador pessoal, a interface gráfica e a multimídia, revolucionaram os processos tradicionais de criação e disponibilização de informações. O Folio Views é um exemplo de ferramenta de informação de última geração e está sendo utilizado pelo Projeto Integrado Urbanidade e Cidadania.

In Return to Reason, Stephen Toulmin argues that the potential for reason to improve our lives has been hampered by a serious imbalance in our pursuit of ...

Stephen Hetherington's prominent career within epistemology has been a series of distinctive, bold, varied and provocative arguments and ideas. Bringing together Hetherington's unique body of writing for the first time, this collection features previously published as well as new material that link his approaches to key issues including knowledge, justification, fallibility, scepticism and the Gettier Problem. Advancing our understanding of the systemic nature of Hetherington's thinking, Stephen Hetherington on Epistemology presents his distinctive perspective on some of philosophy's central (...) questions about knowledge - an inviting blend of forensic detail and 'big picture' proposals. (shrink)