The central debate of natural theology among medieval Muslims and Jews concerned whether or not the world was eternal. Opinions divided sharply on this issue because the outcome bore directly on God's relationship with the world: eternity implies a deity bereft of will, while a world with a beginning leads to the contrasting picture of a deity possessed of will. In this exhaustive study of medieval Islamic and Jewish arguments for eternity, creation, and the existence of God, Herbert (...) class='Hi'>Davidson provides a systematic classification of the proofs, analyzes and explains them, and traces their sources in Greek philosophy. Throughout the study, Davidson tries to take into account every argument of a philosophical character, disregarding only those arguments that rest entirely on religious faith or which fall below a minimal level of plausibility. (shrink)

A study of problems, all revolving around the subject of intellect in the philosophies of Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, this book starts by reviewing discussions in Greek and early Arabic philosophy which served as the background for the three Arabic thinkers. Davidson examines the cosmologies and theories of human and active intellect in the three philosophers and covers such subjects as: the emanation of the supernal realm from the First Cause; the emanation of the lower world from the transcendent (...) active intellect; stages of human intellect; illumination of the human intellect by the transcendent active intellect; conjunction of the human intellect with the transcendent active intellect; prophecy; and human immortality. Davidson shows that medieval Jewish philosophers and the Latin Scholastics had differing perceptions of Averroes because they happened to use works belonging to different periods of his philosophic career. (shrink)

A study of problems, all revolving around the subject of intellect in the philosophies of Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, this book starts by reviewing discussions in Greek and early Arabic philosophy which served as the background for the three Arabic thinkers. Davidson examines the cosmologies and theories of human and active intellect in the three philosophers and covers such subjects as: the emanation of the supernal realm from the First Cause; the emanation of the lower world from the transcendent (...) active intellect; stages of human intellect; illumination of the human intellect by the transcendent active intellect; conjunction of the human intellect with the transcendent active intellect; prophecy; and human immortality. Davidson shows that medieval Jewish philosophers and the Latin Scholastics had differing perceptions of Averroes because they happened to use works belonging to different periods of his philosophic career. (shrink)

The chapters in this volume focus on the philosophical aspects of Maimonides' work: the religious obligation to study philosophy, Maimonides' knowledge of the philosophical literature, and certain fundamental issues where philosophy and religion intersect."--ECIP summary.

Alternative non‐B‐DNA conformations formed under physiological conditions by sequences called flipons include left‐handed Z‐DNA, three‐stranded triplexes, and four‐stranded i‐motifs and quadruplexes. These conformations accumulate and release energy to enable the local assembly of cellular machines in a context specific manner. In these transactions, nucleosomes store power, serving like rechargeable batteries, while flipons smooth energy flows from source to sink by acting as capacitors or resistors. Here, I review the known biological roles for flipons. I present recent and unequivocal findings showing (...) how innate immune responses are regulated by Z‐flipons that identify endogenous RNAs as self. Evidence is also presented supporting important roles for other flipon classes. In these examples, the dynamic exchange of energy between flipons and nucleosomes enables rapid switching of genetic programs without altering flipon sequence. The increased phenotypic diversity enabled by flipons drives their natural selection, with adaptations evolving faster than is possible by codon mutation alone. (shrink)

Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas frequently assimilate and recast ancient and established ideas and practices to suit and justify their own theology and goals. The final aim of this strategy is to promote their version of mature emotional bhakti, as devotional participation. Their depictions of mature divine interactions are often mapped by way of rasa theory, originating as ancient poetic and dramatic aesthetic theory. Although only explicitly used to map aspects of mature religious experience, this paper explores an often-neglected side of the tradition’s (...) pedagogy, namely its tacit appeal to rasa theory to explain practices meant primarily for ordinary practitioners. An example of this strategy appears in the sixteenth century Gauḍīya treatise, Ṣaṭ-sandarbha. The author, Jīva Gosvāmī, offers a reformulated account of a typical set of Pāñcarātra meditation rituals. However, although the rituals are necessarily performed in the imagination, he paradoxically warns that the generated mental images should not be considered imaginative. By correlating his explanations of these ritual visualisations with elements of his yet to be depicted rasa theory, a consistent and non-problematic role of ritual imagination can be revealed. Since Jīva offers nothing explicit to arrive at this conclusion, this paper infers how a prominent Gauḍīya seems to be reformulating even ordinary ritual by way of rasa theory. This analysis acts as an individual example of a broader strategy in Gauḍīya texts. (shrink)

In this chapter, Ricardo Silvestre and Alan Herbert offer a reconstruction of the Gītā’s concept of God with a focus on the relationship between God and the world. They try to explain the claim that the Gītā is panentheistic. This is done with the help of some key notions of contemporary metaphysics (such as ontological dependence and fundamentality) along with the Indic notion of prakṛti, considered as a metaphysical primitive denoting the intimate relationship that exists between matter and (...) conscious living beings on the one hand, and God on the other. (shrink)

This book analyses the concepts of God in Vaisnavism, which is commonly referred to as one of the great Hindu monotheistic traditions. Addressing the question of what attributes God possesses according to particular textual sources and traditions in Vaisnavism, the book analyses Vaisnava traditions and texts in order to locate them within a global philosophical framework. The book is divided into two sections. The first one, God in Vaisnava Texts, deals with concepts of God found in the canonical Vaisnava texts: (...) the Bhavagad Gita, the Bhagavata Purana, the Pancaratras, and the Mahabharata. The second section, God in Vaisnava Traditions, addresses concepts of God found in several Vaisnava traditions and their respective key theologians. As well as the Alvars, five traditional Vaisnava schools- the Sri Vaisnava tradition, the Madhva tradition, the Nimbarka tradition, the Pustimarga tradition, and the Caitanya Vaisnava tradition- and two contemporary ones Ramakrishna's and Swami Bhaktivedanta's are considered. The book combines normative, critical and descriptive elements. Some chapters are philosophical in nature, others are more descriptive, unpacking a specific Vaiṣṇava concept of God for future philosophical analysis and critique. Written by experts who break new ground in presenting and representing a diversity of Vaiṣṇava texts and tradition, the book presents approaches that reflect the amount of philosophical and historical deliberation on the specific issues and divine attributes considered. This book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of philosophy of religion and Indian philosophy, cross-cultural and comparative philosophy, analytic philosophy of religion, Hindu studies, theology and religious studies. (shrink)

Moses Maimonides, scholar, physician, and philosopher, was the most influential Jewish thinker of the Middle Ages. In this magisterial new biography, the work of many years, Herbert Davidson provides an exhaustive guide to Maimonides' life and works. After considering Maimonides' upbringing and education, Davidson expounds all of his voluminous writings in exhaustive detail, with separate chapters on rabbinic, philosophical, and medical texts. This long-awaited volume is destined to become the standard work on this towering figure of Western (...) intellectual history. (shrink)

Là où on peut dater les commentaires d'Averroès sur Aristote, le Commentaire Moyen d'une œuvre donnée peut être considéré comme antérieur au Commentaire Long. En accompagnement de sa belle édition du Commentaire Moyen d'Averroès sur leDe anima, A. Ivry a soutenu que dans ce cas-ci les choses sont inversées et que le Commentaire Moyen duDe animaest “une version abrégée et révisée” du Commentaire Long de la même œuvre. Ivry développe sa thèse avec le plus de détails dansArabic Sciences and Philosophy, (...) 5. Là, il soutient que deux passages dans le Commentaire Moyen duDe animase rapportent nominalement au Commentaire Long, qu'un troisième passage fait allusion au Commentaire Long, et que dans d'autres passages le Commentaire Moyen et le Commentaire Long utilisent une phraséologie semblable et qu'on peut considérer que le premier a été la version abrégée du second. Le présent article répond à cette thèse de la manière suivante: les deux passages dans le Commentaire Moyen qui semblent selon d'lvry se rapporter explicitement au Commentaire Long peuvent vraisemblablement être compris comme des references a l'intérieur du Commentaire Moyen lui-même. Le passage qu'il comprend comme faisant allusion au Commentaire Long ne fait pas réellement allusion à cette œuvre, mais constitue une référence non-equivoque à une section ultérieure du Commentaire Moyen. II n'y a rien qui justifie le fait de regarder les passages dans le Commentaire Moyen cités par Ivry et utilisent une phraséologie semblable à celle du Commentaire Long comme des emprunts faits à ce dernier. Au cours de son argumentation, Ivry mentionne la position d'Averroes sur la nature de l'intellect materiel de l'homme, question qui a donne a Averroes le plus de peine dans ses commentaires sur le De anima d'Aristote et qui, depuis lors, a le plus intrigue ceux qui etudient Averroes. Le présent article souligne que sur le sujet de l'intellect materiel de l'homme, ni le Commentaire Moyen, ni le Commentaire Long sur leDe animan'empruntent I'un a l'autre, car les conceptions de l'intellect matériel qu'ils embrassent sont différentes et incompatibles. (shrink)

After a very brief introduction, Davidson begins with an informed and detailed account of the views of Aristotle and his major commentators, whose writings had enormous influence on the development of the medieval traditions. Davidson's account is supplemented with a critical exposition of the relevant teachings from the Plotiniana Arabica, from al-Kindi, and from a treatise on the soul attributed to Porphyry in the Arabic tradition. Impressive as all this is, it is simply stage setting for Davidson's (...) detailed accounts of the doctrines and arguments of al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes. (shrink)

The Law of Inertia plays a key role in the scheme of constructive axioms for the General Theory of Relativity. A new formulation of this law which avoids the circularity problems inherent in previous formulations is presented. The empirical status of this law and the manner in which it provides a non-conventional foundation for the Law of Motion and the definition of physical forces is established. First, quite general path structures are discussed which are not defined at the outset in (...) terms of geodesic paths and which require for their description only the local differential topological structure. Secondly, a number of theorems are presented which serve as purely local differential topological criteria for singling out from among the general path structures the geodesic ones that represent the inertial structure of spacetime. (shrink)

The claim that distant simultaneity with respect to an inertial observer is conventional arose in the context of a space-and-time rather than a spacetime ontology. Reformulating this problem in terms of a spacetime ontology merely trivializes it. In the context of flat space, flat time, and a linear inertial structure (a purely space-and-time formalism), we prove that the hyperplanes of space for a given inertial observer are determined by a purely spatial criterion that depends for its validity only on the (...) two-way light principle, which is universally regarded as empirically verified. All (empirically determined) “spacetime” entities, such as the conformal structure or light surface equation, are used in a purely mathematical manner that is independent of and hence isneutral with respect to the ontological status that is ascribed to them. In this regard, our criterion is significantly stronger than thespacetime criterion recently advanced by D. Malament, which appeals explicitly to the conformal orthogonality of spacetime vectors and to the invariance of the conformal-orthogonal structure of spacetime under the causal automorphisms of spacetime. Once the hyperplanes of space for a given inertial observer have been determined by our empirical and purely spatial criterion, the following holds: there exists one and only one $\vec \varepsilon $ -synchronization procedure, namely the standard procedure proposed by Einstein, such that the planes of common time are thesame as the nonconventional hyperplanes of space for the inertial observer. It follows that our criterion provides an empirical even if indirect method for determining that the one-way speed of light is the same as the average two-way speed of light. In addition, two inertial observers that are not at rest with respect to each other necessarily havedifferent hyperplanes of space, and consequently their respective spatial views cannot be encompassed in a single three-dimensional space. Hence, our purely spatial criterion provides an empirical motivation for adopting the more comprehensive spacetime ontology. (shrink)

The book contains the first systematic study of the ontology and metaphysics of Gustav Bergmann, tracing their development from early (1940s) criticisms of Carnap’s semantical theories in Introduction to Semantics, to their culmination in his 1992 _New Foundations of Ontology_. This involves a detailed study of the implicit metaphysical doctrines in Carnap’s important, but long neglected, 1942 book and their connection to his influential views on reference, truth and modality, (including, contrary to current opinion, Carnap’s initiating the development of predicate (...) modal logic) that culminated in _Meaning and Necessity_. In dealing with various fundamental issues in ontology and metaphysics, the book discusses relevant views of major philosophers, such as Russell, Moore, Bradley, Wittgenstein, Meinong, Brentano, Husserl, Broad, McTaggart, and Quine, and of contemporary and recent figures, including D. M. Armstrong, D. Lewis, S. Kripke, J. Searle, W. Sellars, D. Davidson, J. J. C. Smart, and H. Feigl. Building on the critical studies of Bergmann, Carnap and such other philosophers, the author argues for a form of Logical Realism derived from important, but long misunderstood and ignored, aspects of Russell’s theories of descriptions, reference and truth. (shrink)

The text- and argument-focused histories of philosophy that we have are mainly interested in teasing out the details of the positions taken on philosophical issues by individual philosophers. But this is a long way from having a historical explanation of the larger-scale trajectory of philosophical development. An empirical history of philosophy, however, examines the institutionalized places and venues for philosophical work that provide a rich, shared structure for the promotion of particular sorts of work. Mid-twentieth-century philosophers of science such as (...) Herbert Feigl and Philipp Frank knew what they were doing—they were creating the space to promote certain sorts of work in venues such as the Institute for the Unity of Science and the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science and, ultimately, in publication venues such as Daedalus and the Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science. Here the engine of progress is the institution-building activity of committed philosophers making a space within the institutional structures of philosophy for their own projects and other projects aligned with them and transmitting these as live philosophical projects to the next generation. (shrink)

This chapter examines the ways in which Rorty interprets Freud in order to bolster some of his views about the nature of the self. In the process, it identifies certain tensions between (a) the kind of “holism of the mental,” which Rorty largely derives from the work of Donald Davidson, and (b) some of the claims Freud and other psychoanalysts make about the identity and mental life of human beings.

How does the human animal who thinks and loves relate to criminal justice? This essay takes up the idea of a moral psychology of guilt promoted by Bernard Williams and Herbert Morris. Against modern liberal society’s ‘peculiar’ legal morality of voluntary responsibility, it pursues Morris’s ethical account of guilt as involving atonement and identification with others. Thinking of guilt in line with Morris, and linking it with the idea of moral psychology, takes the essay to Freud’s metapsychology in Civilization (...) and Its Discontents. Two conflicting routes to guilt are noted in Freud, one involving internalisation of external anger to suppress destructive instincts, the other loving identification with others in the process of self-formation. This second route is developed through the psychoanalytic thought of Hans Loewald and Jonathan Lear. Following Loewald, the moral psychology of self-formation makes loving identification with others the root of responsibility, guilt and atonement. Following Lear, the moral psychology of guilt developed on these lines renders psychoanalysis part of a broadly understood philosophical project following Aristotelian and Socratic principles. Underlying Morris’s account of guilt is the possibility of ‘prospective identification’, understood as the moral and psychological ground of guilt and reconciliation. This is the rational core of criminal justice, which maintains an uneasy relationship with law’s ‘peculiar’ morality. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell’s eminence of intellect and person has long been unassailable. Besides his distinction as mathematician and philosopher, and a vast output of books, articles, lectures and talks on most aspects of the human condition, there is his continuing concern for day-to-day political issues, his championing of individual freedom and his readiness to stand for a cause to the point of imprisonment. To have distilled the essence of his ninety-odd years into this little book is itself quite an achievement. Originally (...) published in 1962, it has been called a ‘pocket guide to greatness’ and forms a useful complement to the longer and slightly earlier study by Alan Wood’s The Passionate Sceptic. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell’s eminence of intellect and person has long been unassailable. Besides his distinction as mathematician and philosopher, and a vast output of books, articles, lectures and talks on most aspects of the human condition, there is his continuing concern for day-to-day political issues, his championing of individual freedom and his readiness to stand for a cause to the point of imprisonment. To have distilled the essence of his ninety-odd years into this little book is itself quite an achievement. Originally (...) published in 1962, it has been called a ‘pocket guide to greatness’ and forms a useful complement to the longer and slightly earlier study by Alan Wood’s _The Passionate Sceptic. _. (shrink)

The thesis explores and suggests a solution to a problem that I identify in John McDowell’s and Lynne Rudder Baker’s approaches to mental and intention-dependent (ID) causation in the physical world. I begin (chapter 1) with a brief discussion of McDowell’s non-reductive and anti-scientistic account of mind and world, which I believe offers, through its vision of the unbounded conceptual and the world as within the space of reasons, to liberate and renew philosophy. However, I find an inconsistency in McDowell’s (...) criticism of Davidson’s anomalous monism (chapter 2), stemming from a tension between McDowell’s naïve common sense view of mental causation and an understanding of ordinary physical causation which I think McDowell ought to embrace, which portrays it as both objective, in the sense of being recognition- independent, and as belonging within the space of reasons. The question of the relation between these two concepts of causation is an aspect of the more general question of the relation between the space of reasons and the realm of law. In chapter 3 I begin examining the possibility that Baker’s account of material and property constitution could form the basis of a bridge between the two spaces, and find it generally promising. However, I find that her defence of her version of non-reductive monism against Kim’s causal arguments also runs into problems, which I attribute to the fact that she holds a view of causation as secondary to causal explanation. 2 3 In chapter 4 I develop an account of what I call manifest physical causation – of objective causal relations in the world of Sellars’s manifest image. Based upon McDowell’s transcendental empiricism, which takes the existence of the ordinary perceived world as a condition of the possibility of our possession of conceptual capacities, I contend that it is this picture of reality, rather than that of fundamental physics, that should be the starting point of our theorizing. Causation in the manifest image, I argue, covers the behaviour of the familiar physical world as well as that of its well-understood extensions into the special sciences and engineering. Manifest physical causation, on my account, is productive, acts through mechanisms which are almost entirely mechanical, electromagnetic, and/ or chemical, and is causally closed. In my view, normative, semantic, contentful property-instances are not part of the manifest physical causal nexus. In my final chapter I suggest a modification of Baker’s constitution account, which I call Constituted Causation, whereby higher-level – mental and other ID – causal relations are constituted, in favourable circumstances, by lower-level ones. ID causal relations belong in their own causal nexus but are connected to the manifest physical world through constitution, a relation of unity without identity. Causation and constitution are, respectively, intra- and inter-level relations, and they are non-overlapping. The constituted network of rational and normative relations bears, I believe, striking parallels with McDowell’s view of reality. According to Baker’s view of constitution, the essential properties of constituted entities subsume those of their constituters; extending this to my account enables us to say that the real cause and explanation of someone’s action is that they consciously performed it 4 rather than that certain manifest causal processes occurred at the lower level. (shrink)

The eminent philosopher of science Carl G. Hempel, Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University and a Past President of the American Philosophical Association, has had a long and distinguished academic career in the course of which he has been professorial mentor to some of America's most distinguished philosophers. This volume gathers together twelve original papers by Hempel's students and associates into a volume intended to do homage to Hempel on the occasion of his 65th year in 1970. The papers (...) are grouped around the unifying topic of Hempel's own interests in logic and philosophy of science, the great majority dealing with issues on inductive logic and the theory of scientific explanatio- problems to which Hempel has devoted the bulk of his outstandingly fruitful efforts. With the approach of 'Peter' Hempel's 65th birthday, an editorial committee sprang into being by an uncannily spontaneous process to prepare to commemorate this event with an appropriate Festschrift. The editors were pleased to receive unfailingly prompt and efficient coopera tion on the part of all contributors. The responsibility of seeing the work through the press was assumed by Nicholas Rescher. The editors are grateful to all concerned for their collaboration. ALAN ROSS ANDERSON PAUL BENACERRAF ADOLF GRUNBAUM GERALD J. MASSEY NICHOLAS RESCHER RICHARD S. RUDNER TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE V PAUL OPPENHEIM: Reminiscences of Peter 1 w. v. QUINE: Natural Kinds 5 JAAKKO HINTIKKA: Inductive Independence and the Paradoxes of Confirmation 24 WESLEY c. (shrink)

Truth is an embattled concept; many different positions have been put forward. One widely influential contribution has been Donald Davidson's theory. Although it has been derived from Alred Tarski's formal account of truth it has been claimed to offer a pragmatical solution to the problem by e.g. Richard Rorty. This dialogue explores the attraction Davidson's theory offers to philosophers of realist as well as relativist persuasion. There seems to be a core position useful to any of those philosophical (...) schools: Truth occurs at the interface of two languages or two usages of a language. Some consequences of such a point of view are discursively explored. (shrink)

Consider statements like ``Machines will never be able to think'' or ``You cannot turn a cat into a dog''. Many people will find such propositions evident, but we have learned to be cautious. 100 years from now things might look very different; it seems unduly dogmatic to insist on todays opinions as unrevisable points of reference, disallowing future breakthroughs in computer science or biology. The scientific outlook presupposes and enhances a high degree of curiosity and it seems a good idea (...) to generally keep one's meanings flexible so as to master break-downs of everyday understanding induced by unforseen circumstances, science or technology. Such intuitions are at the heart of Quine's philosophy. According to him we find ourselves enmeshed within a web of belief that joins together past and present attitudes, cognitive procedures and evidential tests. The strands show various degrees of coherence and interconnectedness and there are no general rules on how to proceed in case something unexpected happens. Sometimes it is ignored, sometimes it is explained away and sometimes it induces more or less extensive changes in our predictive and behavioural patterns. This seems to be the lesson drawn from the Vienna Circle's battle against metaphysics. Philosophers like Putnam, Kripke and Davidson have, it is true, come up with accounts of meaning, necessity and reality that seriously challenge Quine's indeterminacy of translation and ontological relativity, re-introducing elements of a priori presuppositions and (quasi-)transcendental arguments into philosophical discourse. But - compared to Quine's unrelenting insistence on naturalistic first-level talk - those attempts have a free-floating, speculative touch. Quine refuses to engage in elaborate philosophical constructions designed to block the permanent drift of meaning. His is a truly radical position, admirably suggestive and provocative, to be challenged on its own ground. The untenability of a priori truth is suggested by profound experiences that cannot easily be refuted by arguments purporting to show how some more or less exotic sentences could, after all, be held immune from change.1 If the untenability thesis is to be shaken a more down to earth strategy seems to be called for. It would have to be shown that Quine's radical move entails consequences that are highly unattractive even according to its own standards. (shrink)