This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Styles of Reading and Conceptions of Philosophy The Dialogue Form and Periodization A Maieutic Response to the Question of Periodization Bibliography.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Form and Argument in Late Plato ed. by Christopher Gill and Mary Margaret McCabeFrancisco J. GonzalezChristopher Gill and Mary Margaret McCabe, editors. Form and Argument in Late Plato. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. xi + 345. Cloth, $65.00.This collection has the commendable aim of challenging the view that in Plato’s “late” works the dialogue form is a mere formality adding little to the argumentative content, a (...) view still widespread among “analytic” scholars. The qualification is necessary because this view has already been seriously challenged by “nonanalytic” interpreters. It is therefore surprising that the editors chose contributors who almost all “share the analytic’ approach which is prominent in Anglo-American scholarship on Plato,” despite their admission that this approach has focused more on arguments than on the dialogue form (2, 299–300). Why seek to reinvent the wheel without the help of those who have already invented it? As a result, while the volume certainly makes an important contribution to our understanding of the form of this group of dialogues, it is much more successful in providing helpful and illuminating readings of their argumentative content: the detailed and rigorous analyses of McCabe, Malcolm Schofield (both on the Parmenides), and Gail Fine (on the Theaetetus) deserve special mention. The aim of the present review, which could not even begin to do justice to what the volume provides in the latter area, is therefore limited to documenting its mixed success in addressing some fundamental questions about form that have already occupied nonanalytic scholars (perhaps too exclusively):1) Does the main speaker speak for Plato?Given the great variety of main speakers in the “late” dialogues (Socrates, Parmenides, the Eleatic Stranger, Timaeus, the Athenian Stranger), each with a distinct personality and a distinct method, no attempt to understand the form of these dialogues should avoid this question. Gill raises it (293–95) and Schofield provides the most explicit response in denying that any interlocutor in a Platonic dialogue “can be assumed to be merely a spokesman for Plato’s own views” (51). More importantly, the essays by Dorothea Frede (on the Philebus) and Catherine Osborne (on the Timaeus), probably the most valuable in the volume, show what results can be achieved without this assumption. On the other hand, Michael Frede (on the Sophist) and Christopher Rowe (on the Politicus; see 158 and cf. 172 n.48) simply assume without argument that the Eleatic Stranger = Plato. All other contributors make the “spokesman” assumption, either implicitly or explicitly (see Christopher Bobonich’s reading of the Laws, 254–55).2) What is the significance of the dramatic context, especially dramatic chronology and characterization?As often noted, the Parmenides is set in Socrates’ youth and is in this sense the earliest [End Page 311] dialogue, while the series Theaetetus-Sophist-Politicus is set immediately before Socrates’ trial and condemnation. McCabe and Schofield are silent about the first fact. M. Frede briefly discusses the second (146–47), but adds little to what has already been said by others. As for the characterization of specific interlocutors, this volume overall has surprisingly little to offer. The essays of D. Frede and Osborne, however, are exemplary in this area.3) Why did Plato choose to write these works as dialogues rather than as treatises?Bobonich, D. Frede, and Osborne succeed in demonstrating the significance and even necessity of the dialogue form, an extraordinary achievement given the dialogues they discuss. Osborne in particular brilliantly shows how the dialogue form undercuts the common tendency to read the Timaeus as a treatise on natural science. Other contributors are less successful in answering this question central to the volume’s task. Schofield takes himself to be reading the Parmenides as a dialogue (51) because he, unlike Vlastos, interprets the Third Man Argument (second version) in the wider context of other arguments in the dialogue, including those of the second half. But “reading arguments in context” is demanded by any philosophical text and has nothing per se to do with the dialogue form. Fine reads the first part of the Theaetetus as the dialectical elaboration and refutation of an opponent’s view (109), but this could just as well be... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aristotle on the Etruscan Robbers:A Core Text of "Aristotelian Dualism"Abraham P. Bos (bio)1. A Non-Platonic Dualism in Aristotle's Lost WorksThe Soul of a Mortal on Earth is not "At Home," says Aristotle in his dialogue Eudemus. The story about the mantic dream of the expatriate Eudemus and his expectation that he "will return home"1 is well known. It makes clear that, in Aristotle's view, the death of the (...) human individual should be interpreted as the soul's "return to its homeland."2 This is strongly suggested by "the revelation of Silenus" which Plutarch (first century CE) passes down in a literal quotation from the Eudemus.3 It contains the theme of human life on earth as a punishment (timôria). The motif of human life as a punishment is central to two texts by Iamblichus (250-325 CE) and Augustine (354-430 CE), which are usually connected with Aristotle's Protrepticus.4 I want to examine these texts in more detail here. My intention in the following exposition is to propose a non-Platonistic explanation of these texts. In my opinion they have wrongly been read as testimonies of a "Platonistic" phase in Aristotle. The existence of such a phase in Aristotle's development has never been proved. Besides, the interpretation of these texts suffered from the fact that [End Page 289] Aristotle's De anima had also been explained in an unhistorical way since Alexander of Aphrodisias in the third century CE.2. Revising the Modern View of AristotleWe have to make a different assessment of Aristotle's contribution to the discussion on the soul compared with what was current until recently. For after W. Jaeger5 and F. Nuyens6, modern scholars became inclined to leave Aristotle's dialogues out of consideration, because they regarded them as "Platonizing." But a fundamental correction is necessary on this point.7 Jaeger led modern Aristotle studies in a wrong direction by assuming a sharp distinction between Aristotle's lost dialogue Eudemus and his surviving treatise De anima. Although nowadays Jaeger's theory for many scholars is something of a dead horse, nevertheless a real alternative has not been proposed. We still have to get rid of the consequences of the Jaegerian paradigm and develop a unitary interpretation of Aristotle's entire oeuvre. Even more consistently than O. Gigon has already done,8 we should assume that Aristotle's lost works and his surviving biological writings and De anima did not propose two (or more) different psychological theories but one and the same. Because this one Aristotelian psychology was a non-Platonistic but nevertheless dualistic psychology, we have much more reason than could be recognized in the past to assume Aristotelian influence on this discussion.On one essential issue Aristotle disagreed with his teacher Plato: the soul,9 more particularly the indissoluble bond of the soul with a body. Aristotle radically and [End Page 290] consistently argued for the distinction between nous and psychè.10 For Aristotle the nous-in-act is always wholly incorporeal. But he considered it characteristic of the soul that it cannot carry out its functions "without body."11However, the crucial question is: what body does Aristotle mean when he says that the soul cannot perform its specific activities "without body"? Jaeger and Nuyens were wholly convinced that Aristotle was referring to the visible, external body of a human being, animal, or plant. Hence they saw a yawning gap between Aristotle's views in De anima and his position in the dialogue the Eudemus. In the Eudemus Aristotle had clearly argued that the soul can perform its own functions very well, indeed better, without the galling and oppressive visible body.12 But in De anima II 1, in his famous definition of "the soul," Aristotle says that the soul is inextricably bound up with a "sôma physikon organikon."13 Jaeger and Nuyens, following an almost unanimous tradition since Alexander of Aphrodisias in the third century CE, interpreted this sentence in the sense that the soul is the formal principle or entelechy of an "organic body" or a "natural body equipped with organs," i.e., the visible body... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:How Old Are Modern Rights? On the Lockean Roots of Contemporary Human Rights DiscourseS. Adam SeagraveArguing for the proper placement of John Locke’s natural rights theory within intellectual history is a particularly high-stakes enterprise for historians of political thought and political theorists alike. This is due in large part to the fact that, as Brian Tierney notes in his recent study, it is “widely agreed that Locke’s work (...) was an important influence in the formation of modern liberal ideas, including ideas concerning rights.”1 Our understanding of Locke thus contributes to our reflective self-understanding as “modern liberals” (of one stripe or another) to an extent perhaps unequaled by any other thinker so far removed from our own time.As a result of the rare promise of studying Locke’s natural rights theory, there has been no shortage of scholarly attempts to determine its place in intellectual history on the basis of Locke’s own writings and their relation both to preceding and subsequent traditions and modes of thought. Although John Dunn had argued in his influential study that Locke’s political thought was too thoroughly steeped in theology to remain relevant in the contemporary context, this thesis has since been persuasively challenged (albeit in very different ways) by Simmons, Zuckert and Waldron, among others.2 Each of these scholars has contributed to an emerging agreement [End Page 305] that the thread of Locke’s natural rights theory may indeed be carried all the way up to current political and moral debates in some form or another. The precise length of this thread as it extends in the other historical direction has, however, remained a point of heated controversy. The scholarly literature on this issue may be broadly described in terms of a spectrum determined by two opposing emphases in understanding the relation of Locke’s natural rights theory to its medieval predecessors: a continuity emphasis and a discontinuity emphasis.On the discontinuity end of the spectrum stand those such as Michel Villey, Leo Strauss, C. B. Macpherson and, more recently, Michael Zuckert who argue for the existence of some sort of “Copernican moment” separating medieval natural rights theories from their modern counterparts.3 Whether this moment is identified with William of Ockham in the fourteenth century or Hobbes in the seventeenth century, these scholars tend to emphasize the distinctively “modern” character of Lockean natural rights theory and its significant departures from medieval modes of thought. According to many of the advocates of discontinuity, Lockean natural rights are not only “modern” in their political applications but also in their more profound meaning as foundations for morality, and particularly in their newly conceived relation to the concept of natural law.4The continuity end of the spectrum is, perhaps, more variegated, including scholars such as Tuck, Tierney, Tully, Oakley, Nederman, Coleman, and Swanson, among others.5 Despite their many important differences, [End Page 306] these scholars each focus upon the similarities between various elements or strains of medieval thought and modern natural rights theories rather than the differences between them. Insofar as the scholars on this end of the spectrum explicitly consider Locke’s natural rights theory, they tend to emphasize Locke’s intellectual debt to various preceding traditions and thinkers rather than his innovations upon them. Building explicitly upon the work of Tuck, Tierney and Tully, Janet Coleman finds “some extraordinarily Lockean moments” in the medieval thinkers John of Paris and Godefroid of Fontaines, and argues that Locke ought to be understood as contributing to this medieval tradition of thought rather than departing from it.6 Scott Swanson, in turn, builds upon Coleman’s scholarship in carefully connecting medieval understandings of the rights of subsistence and the principle of extreme necessity to Locke’s natural rights theory. Swanson initially goes even further than Coleman in asserting that “all of Locke’s celebrated doctrine is here [in John of Paris’s writings] offered in a nutshell” before concluding on the more moderate note, echoed by Cary Nederman, that Locke’s “application of natural rights of subsistence to politics” may indeed have been something “new under the sun.”7Brian Tierney, who has long been a prominent... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Augustine's Intellectual Conversion: The Journey from Platonism to ChristianityTravis E. AblesBrian Dobell. Augustine's Intellectual Conversion: The Journey from Platonism to Christianity. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xvii + 250. Cloth, $82.00.The question of Augustine's Platonism is famously vexed. Since Peter Brown, the standard reading holds that Augustine did not move beyond the Neoplatonism of his early dialogues until he studied the writings of the apostle Paul (...) in the mid-390s CE, after which his distinctive theology begins to emerge. In this book, Brian Dobell's basic claim is that, whatever the validity of the "volitional conversion" of book 8, Augustine is not truly converted to orthodox Christianity until he discards the Photinian (adoptionist) Christology he admits to in Confessions [hereafter conf.] 7.19.25, and discards the Platonic ascent as a means to contemplative union with God, both of which take place with the reading of Paul. But the book is equally motivated by a concern to defend the historicity of conf.; Dobell claims it is perfectly reliable, once we understand the latter half of book 7 not as a few months in 386, but as a compressed narrative spanning Augustine's entire development until his true conversion to Christianity around 395. [End Page 137]Dobell develops this argument by isolating Augustine's twofold way of salvation in the writings of the late 380s. First is the "way of authority," in which Augustine's putative Photinian Christology portrays Christ as a kind of "poor man's Plato, sent to provide a path to salvation for the uneducated masses" (96). The human Jesus is "assumed" by God and is as "a man of outstanding wisdom" (73) but is not the incarnate Son. Dobell analyzes the homo assumptus/susceptus language of the early writings, arguing that Augustine does not truly hold an orthodox Christology until 396, concordant with the development of his theology of operative grace. The second, much longer section of the book concerns the "way of reason," the intellectualist path of salvation expressed in Augustine's early obsession with the liberal disciplines. Dobell dissects the Platonic ascents of conf. 7, adducing verbal and conceptual parallels from texts ca. 387–390 (De immortalitate animae, De ordine, De libero arbitrio, De vera religione) showing how Augustine's métaphysique des degrés d'être, a concept Dobell borrows from Olivier Du Roy, provides both a means of articulating these ascents and an answer to the problem of evil. But by De doctrina christiana, Augustine has decisively rejected the Platonic ascent and the liberal disciplines, and it simply remains for his Christology to come in line for the "intellectual conversion" to be complete.Dobell's book is a significant addition to the current debate. His knowledge of the first decade or so of Augustine's literary output is impressive, and his familiarity with the secondary literature is considerable, though not encyclopedic—he misses the work of J. Patout Burns, which complicates the Pauline thesis through consideration of the anti-Donatist literature. Dobell offers magisterial and invaluable discussions of famously fraught topics such as Augustine's indecisiveness about the preexistence of the soul, or the volitional solution to the problem of evil. There are some problems with Dobell's argument, though. While his main thesis that conf. 7.9.13ff. is a kind of précis of almost a decade of intellectual development deserves serious consideration, and is an elegant solution to debates about the historicity of Augustine's narrative in conf., the supporting arguments Dobell employs are less persuasive. A major portion of his book revolves around the contention that Augustine's early, heretical Photinian Christology extends much longer than modern scholarship has realized, that Augustine rectifies this Christology in conjunction with a Pauline soteriology of grace, and that all of this has to happen before Augustine's conversion is complete. If we suspend the question of normativity inherent in deciding Augustine's "orthodoxy" (particularly prior to Chalcedon), Dobell still does not succeed in showing that the early "pedagogical" homo assumptus Christology is, in fact, adoptionist; indeed, his evidence is often rather weak (for a tacit admission, see 73). On the flip... (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to elucidate certain difficulties in the text of the Eryxias and to make the author's position as a thinker clearer than it has hitherto been. The Eryxias is a work which has suffered severely from excessive partisanship. While German and Dutch scholars of the eighteenth century appear to have valued it highly—a great deal too highly—as a work of enlightened ethical purpose, the scholarship of the nineteenth century was almost unanimous in condemning it (...) as an inept imitation of Plato's early writings. It soon became apparent, however, that it was not a mere imitation. The economist Hagen recognized in it traces of Stoic doctrine and proceeded somewhat hastily to the conclusion that the author was ‘a Stoic … who expressed the sentiments of his school in the form of a Platonic dialogue.’ Otto Schrohl of Göttingen, whose thesis is the most considerable work on the subject, is less emphatic in claiming the author as a Stoic, but nevertheless traces most of his ideas to Stoic and Cynic origins. This view is modified but retained in its essentials by Professor Souilhé in the Budé edition of Plato. While stressing the importance of the Platonic element, he agrees that the author's point of view has been influenced by Stoic and Cynic teaching, the influence of Cynicism being in his opinion predominant. (shrink)

This essay offers an assessment of some of the fundamental features and contributions of John Russon’s scholarship on the dialogues of Plato. It focusses on the interpretive method he refers to as “reading as agents of nemesis” and on Russon’s unique emphasis on experience as the ground of philosophical activity in the Platonic corpus. I close by raising two issues that I see as fundamental questions that Russon’s work on Plato leaves unanswered—the difference in ontology, and thus method, (...) between ancient and modern philosophers and the frequently relied upon chronological ordering of Plato’s dialogues. (shrink)

My dissertation has two main parts. In the first half, I draw out an underlying presupposition of Descartes' philosophy: what I term "atomism of thought." Descartes employs a radical procedure of doubt in order to show that the first principle of his philosophy, the cogito, is an unshakeable foundation of knowledge. In the dialogue that follows his dissemination of the Meditations, Descartes reveals that a whole set of concepts and rational principles innate in our minds are never doubted. These fundamental (...) units of thought are indivisible, distinct, and isolated, and enable the possibility of any rational demonstration. Atoms of thought are perfectly individuated because God has created them as such. Likewise, our minds have been fashioned such that we necessarily have a clear and distinct perception every time we alight upon these simple notions. In the second part of the dissertation, I take up critiques of Descartes' view given by Nietzsche and Heidegger. In the chapter on Nietzsche, I attempt to fill a lacuna in scholarship about Nietzsche's commentary on Descartes. More specifically, I argue that once the foundation of God is displaced, the basis for accepting atomism of thought dissolves. In the final chapter, I analyze Heidegger's critique of Cartesian atomism. I first look at Heidegger's critique of classical truth as correspondence from Being and Time, and show how it is relevant to a critique of atomism. Then I show how the early Heidegger's holistic philosophical framework can provide an alternative that avoids the pitfalls of atomism. While I limit the scope of my analysis to Descartes' particular formulation, atomism of thought was an influential doctrine throughout modern philosophy. This aspect of Cartesianism has persisted and continues to be a significant theoretical underpinning of many contemporary views. It is my contention that Nietzsche and Heidegger have important contributions to make to this area of thought, and the relative neglect of their work in recent scholarship is a detrimental oversight. (shrink)

Centering on the early Platonic dialogues, this paper delineates the importance of considering Plato’s Lysis’ as rightful inclusion to Jan Szaif’s proposal of “core group” of aporetic dialogue. This paper highlights a synoptic presentation of the development of Lysis’s reception by modern scholars of Plato (Platonic scholars) at the beginning of this discourse to establish a compelling argument for its aporetic nature. It then proceeds with a revisit to Szaif’s article Socrates and the Benefits of Puzzlement. The (...) first section, considering its importance, emphasizes the evident possibility of opening his list of ‘core group’ of aporetic dialogue to Lysis benefitting the said dialogue. This exposition concludes with the philosophical nature of friendship, even love, must neither begin in Plato’s Phaedrus and Symposium nor in Aristotle’s conception of friendship in Nicomachean Ethics. Alternatively, cognizant of the aporetic tradition followed and practiced by Plato, all studies on the said topics may begin with Lysis. (shrink)

_A fresh, new translation of Augustine’s inaugural work as a Christian convert_ The first four works written by St. Augustine of Hippo after his conversion to Christianity are dialogues that have influenced prominent thinkers from Boethius to Bernard Lonergan. Usually called the Cassiciacum dialogues, these four works are a “literary triumph,” combining Ciceronian and neo-Platonic philosophy, Roman comedy and Vergilian poetry, and early Christian theology. They are also, arguably, Augustine’s most charming works, exhibiting his whimsical levity (...) and ironic wryness. In this second, brief dialogue, Augustine and his mother, brother, son, and friends celebrate his thirty-second birthday by having a “feast of words” on the nature of happiness that includes a bittersweet metaphorical birthday cake. Using a process of reasoning that is philosophical as well as theological, Augustine and the group conclude that the truly happy life consists of “having God” through faith, hope, and charity. Michael Foley’s clear, precise and playful translations are accompanied by his brief, illuminating commentaries. (shrink)

Modern scholarship has often wondered whether Indian Buddhist idealism is primarily epistemic or metaphysical: does this idealism amount to a kind of transcendental scepticism according to which we cannot decide whether objects exist or not outside of consciousness because we can have no epistemic access whatsoever to these objects? Or is it rather ontologically committed, i.e., does it consist in denying the very existence of the external world? One could deem the question anachronistic and suspect that with such (...) an inquiry we project onto Ancient and Medieval India a distinction that remains profoundly alien to it, were it not for a few preserved texts where Indian authors themselves distinguish between two such kinds of idealism within the Buddhist philosophical tradition. As already pointed out by Dan Arnold, this is the case in the commentary by Manorathanandin on Dharmakīrti’s Pramāṇavārttika; but the difference between two varieties of Buddhist idealism is also alluded to in Hindu sources, both Mīmāṃsaka and Śaiva. The present article offers a new analysis of Manorathanandin’s short and somewhat ambiguous distinction, and it examines in this connection some important remarks found in the works of the Śaiva nondualists Utpaladeva (c. 925–975) and Abhinavagupta (c. 975–1025). It shows that according to these authors, in fact the epistemic version of the Buddhist argument in favour of idealism is already metaphysical insofar as it necessarily involves a denial of the existence of the external world, and it attempts to assess the faithfulness of this Śaiva interpretation to its Buddhist sources. (shrink)

Plato’s statements on art have met with countless commentators and almost as many different interpretations. In most cases, comments and hints that are scattered through various dialogues are taken out of context and played off against each other – depending on whether the intention is to portray Plato as a modern art lover or as an ageing political reactionary. In the face of the confusing range of contending opinions, there is an urgent need to examine and clarify the textual (...) basis in Plato. For this purpose, a meticulous analysis of Book 10 of the Politeia is initially carried out – the only part of the corpus of Plato’s works that is concerned with art in detail and exclusively. The results are surprisingly clear. The corrupting and dangerous aspect of art is not attributed to individual artists or a specific artistic orientation, nor to the style of the depiction, nor to the content that is narrated or presented; instead, it is ascribed to its essential nature as the μίμησις of a μίμησις. Since even the objects of sense perception are imitations of the archetypal Ideas, which are ultimately accessible only to rational cognition, the artist is an imitator of something imitated. He merely touches on the appearance of a reality that is in turn already a defective, mutable and ephemeral imitation of the only true, immutable and eternal archetypal Ideas. As the imitation of an imitation, art is insurmountably distant from truth and knowledge, ontologically and therefore also epistemologically worthless and useless – and also damaging, because it attempts to shackle us and domesticate us at a level three steps below truth. However, it not only holds us captive, but also corrupts us even further by appealing not to reason, but to the lower part of the soul with its desires and affections. It is because of this that it is corrupting and dangerous, initially for the individual character and individual spiritual welfare, and ultimately – through the individual – also for human society as a whole. Art thus creates precisely the situation which for the philosopher represents the fundamentally distorted condition from which he is attempting to liberate people. Art is constantly re-fastening the shackles that the philosopher releases. This is why art has to be excluded from Plato’s ideal state, with philosophy alone taking its place. The condemnation of all forms of art could not be expressed more clearly. Despite this, repeated efforts have been made to weaken the condemnation or even disprove its existence, either in order to save art from Plato or, conversely, to save Plato from condemning art. To achieve this, alleged contradictions between Books 10 and 3 of the Politeia have been pointed out ; a differentiation or alteration in Plato’s understanding of the concept of μίμησις has been postulated; and reference has been made to passages in Plato’s works in which, it is claimed, the philosopher concedes that art has direct access to the world of the Ideas or in which he speaks of the artist’s divine inspiration , as well as the numerous passages that discuss Beauty . Finally, it is claimed that Plato did not condemn all art, but only a certain contemporary trend in art , or more generally, only illusionistic art in contrast to an abstract form of art – namely Egyptian art . In the second part of the study, these lines of argumentation are discussed individually and in detail and their content is tested. In each case, the findings obtained initially in the analysis of Book 10 of the Politeia are confirmed. The present study does not offer any new hypotheses; instead, its goal is to use a detailed and differentiated examination of the relevant texts to clearly distinguish Plato’s view of art from later neo-Platonic views, as well as from obfuscations created by modern interpreters, in order to obtain a secure basis for future investigations of Plato’s view of art in particular, as well as of ancient aesthetics in general. The extensive review of the secondary literature also documents part of the history of twentieth-century scholarship. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 166-169 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Cross-Examining Socrates: A Defense of the Interlocutors in Plato's Early Dialogues Cross-Examining Socrates: A Defense of the Interlocutors in Plato's Early Dialogues, by John Beversluis; xii & 416 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, $69.95. This book is more than a cross-examination of Socrates: it is a carefully wrought indictment. Beversluis, unlike Socrates' historical adversaries Anytus and (...) Meletus, brings philosophically serious charges against Socrates by offering a rigorous defense of the interlocutors in Plato's early dialogues, the so-called Socratic dialogues. In so doing, he charts new territory in the vast area of recent analytic scholarship on Plato.According to traditional readings, Socrates deploys his elenchus to defeat his interlocutors, leaving them "either to retreat in anger or to submit to his power." Allegedly, Plato, guided by his Socratic intellectualism, draws them as distinctive, complex characters, though intellectually and thus ethically flawed. Beversluis argues against this standard view, providing sympathetic reassessment of Socrates' interlocutors. Although some previous scholars have defended some of the interlocutors, Beversluis widens the scope of the argument, leveling a scathing attack on Socratic intellectualism and its correlative method of moral education.He deals not only with Socrates' interlocutors and their logical defeats, but also with the idea of an interlocutor, and in so doing casts light on the philosophical dialogue as a genre. This emerges in the first and perhaps most original chapter, entitled "The Socratic Interlocutor," which may be of value to readers interested in philosophical writing or the philosophy of literature more generally. Here he illuminates Plato's use of the interlocutor, in part, by contrasting it with that of other philosophers who wrote in dialogue form, such as Augustine, Anselm, Hume, and Berkeley. The Socratic interlocutors are not, he says, "embodiments of error." Socrates, unlike the protagonists drawn by these other authors, does not subject them to his scrutiny in order to make them accept his beliefs, but rather to reject theirs. Beversluis claims that Plato's portrayal expresses his Socratic belief in the good life as one of bewilderment and uncertainty, a view, Beversluis rightly says, Plato will come to repudiate in his middle dialogues. Beversluis is clearly aware of the disparity between the [End Page 166] discomfort Socrates visits on his interlocutors and that which he is willing to endure himself.While many interpreters forgive Socrates' lapses of logic, Beversluis is unsparing. There is no reason, he thinks, to judge Socrates' arguments by any other criterion than their logical merits, and he therefore rejects the idea that Socrates' most fallacious arguments are valuable for psychological illumination. He also rejects Vlastos's view that only those of Socrates' arguments that are offered "seriously" should be criticized seriously. If they appear to be logical arguments, Beversluis contends, they must be assessed on their logical merits, not their rhetorical or therapeutic virtues. Some might find this approach rather arid until they see that Beversluis is warning the reader not to be dazzled by Socrates as the interlocutors are.It is widely believed that the aim of Socratic elenchus is to uncover the structure of a person's beliefs and to show that it is either internally inconsistent or at best unreflectively constructed. Beversluis's account, however, portrays Socrates as a Svengali who makes people assent to claims they would not otherwise accept. If this is right, Socrates is not actually elucidating the interlocutor's real beliefs. Beversluis challenges the notion of sincere assent, both as an interpretative guide to the early dialogues and as an epistemic concept. He points out that sincere belief is not simply an occurrent interior state accompanying, and indicated by, a verbal act of assent; rather, it emerges from the totality of a person's lived character, from the relation between word and act.Some readers will object to his axiom that a character in a literary work, and thus in a Platonic dialogue, has a life subject to scrutiny outside of the literary work. In his brief... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface This special issue provokes a conversation between decolonial and postcolonial feminisms by asking what they are, how they speak about each other, and how they can speak to each other. Read together, the articles engage and sometimes trouble the temporal and spatial distinctions drawn between decolonial and postcolonial approaches. Kiran Asher explores overlaps between decolonial and postcolonial thought by comparing the ideas of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Silvia (...) Rivera Cusicanqui on representation. Aimee Carrillo Rowe also stages a dialogue between these approaches when interrogating her family ’s Chican@ settler history. Tiara R. Na’puti and Judy Rohrer offer an account of how recent scholarship from Hawai‘i and Guåhan (Guam) has elaborated Indigenous epistemologies in settler contexts. Two articles excavate colonialism’s relationship to science: Jennifer Hamilton, Banu Subramaniam, and Angela Willey explore how two instances of population genetic research illustrate the racialized knowledge systems that undergirded colonialism, while Sandra Harding points out how the colonization of Latin America contributed to the edifice of Western science. In a related vein, Breny Mendoza centers the material role of Abya Yala (the preferred term for Latin America) in not just Spanish colonialism but British colonial expansionism and eventually the eclipsing of China. Patricia A. Schechter reflects on her trajectory as a scholar and teacher of US women’s history and the insights she has gained through 504Preface engaging decolonial scholarship. Amy Piedalue and Susmita Rishi argue for a more expansive understanding of postcolonial feminism’s reach as they review recently published titles in the field. Although Anna Tsing and Paulla Ebron’s review of feminist scholarship about the Anthropocene does not directly mention postcolonial or decolonial approaches, it nonetheless engages relevant scholarship on the environmental impact of settler modernization and capitalism. An art essay by Hyunji Kwon introduces the largely unrecognized paintings of former comfort woman Duk-kyung Kang (1929–1997) and focuses on the potential of Kang’s work to challenge Japanese colonial hierarchies. Our featured poets in this issue are Emily Zhang, Megan Kaminski, and Raina J. León. Both postcolonial and decolonial scholars have been committed to critiquing the material and epistemic legacies of colonialism. The distinctions that are frequently drawn between the two approaches, however, have been a source of disquiet to the editors of Feminist Studies, and they prompted our journal’s call for papers in 2016. A common temporal marking that concerned us was the eclipsing of postcolonialism, which was increasingly becoming viewed as passé, and a setting up of decolonial feminism as always already better in time. Decolonial approaches sometimes depicted postcolonial feminism as being only about the past, despite postcolonial feminism’s stated commitment to studying the continuing impact of colonial processes and its complex use of the prefix “post.” Our concern was, as well, with misrepresentations of postcolonial feminist priorities. The depiction of postcolonial feminism as deconstructive, abstract, elite theory confined to the ambit of modern colonial knowledge systems overlooked the important quandaries that postcolonial feminism raised about how to represent marginalized people ethically and, indeed, how to understand the very desire to represent the marginalized—whether or not we claim belonging to them. Postcolonial feminists warned against an easy embrace of alterity, noting that the desire for positioning oneself outside colonialism could naively ignore the power of colonial discourses to frame colonialism’s Other. Another set of hopes for this special issue was to dwell on the spatial markings of decolonial and postcolonial feminisms: decolonial feminism is often associated with Indigenous scholars and those from the Americas, and postcolonial feminism with scholars from South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. These regional emphases, although not always as tidy as sometimes depicted, have produced distinct intellectual Preface 505 priorities. We must heed decolonial feminism’s insistence on engaging with the genocidal history of settler colonialism, the current manifestations of the violent dispossession of land, and its constitution of gendered racial capitalism the world over. (FeministStudies will soon publish a special issue on Indigenous Feminisms). Yet, if postcolonial feminism is circumscribed geographically to only South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, we risk ignoring its powerful transcontinental mapping of imperial gender formations and its scrupulous attention to the ethics of representing... (shrink)

This paper demonstrates the ontological status of virtue as an instance of love within the cosmology of St Maximus the Confessor. It shows that we may posit the real existence of a ‘virtue’ in so far as we understand it to have its basis in, and to be an instance of love. Since God is love and the virtues are logoi, it becomes possible and beneficial to parallel the relationship between love and the virtues with Maximus’ exposition of the Logos (...) and the logoi. In particular, Cvetković ’s interpretation of the circle and radii analogy will be utilised (Cvetković, 2011 & 2013). It will be shown that when one practices a virtue, one is practicing and participating in love, and, by extension, partaking in God. Within the context of Maximus’ cosmology, this means that practicing virtue and love is the ultimate purpose of humanity in its journey to gather all creation to communion with God. This paper is primarily an exposition of primary sources from St Maximus, but discussion of the ontology of virtue is made with a view to bringing it into dialogue with modern theories of virtue ethics. This paper arises in part as a response to the August 2013 papers by Louth and Blowers on the need for increased scholarship on Maximus and virtue ethics. (shrink)

Focusing on the sixteenth-century Oriya Lakshmi Purana by Balaram Das, this essay shows how distinctly “modern” values are being explored and elaborated in this religious poem. Das’s narrative develops the notion of a self-critical individuality that is distinct from—rather than merely embedded in—the dominant social structure and its patriarchal and caste-based value system. The LP provides a feminist and anticaste critique of patriarchal behavior and defends the value of the work done by women and others who are socially (...) marginalized. This literary-critical analysis is a contribution to contemporary scholarship on “alternative” or “precolonial” modernities, especially in the Indian context. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy by John DeweyCharles A. HobbsJohn Dewey. Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012, 351 pp., index.John Dewey’s latest publication marks a watershed moment for scholarship in American philosophy, and, in addition to Dewey himself, we have editor Phillip Deen to thank for discovering it (among the Dewey papers in Special Collections at Morris Library (...) of Southern Illinois University) and editing it. We see Dewey late in life (early 1940s) engaged mainly in a critique of the modern, ancient, and (fragmentarily) medieval philosophical periods, which Dewey argues, are eras not nearly as distinct as traditional understanding admits. In the Introduction, Deen helpfully explains how we are now bequeathed incomplete but in most [End Page 122] cases quite robust chapter drafts that amount to another substantial work by Dewey. While published by Southern Illinois University Press, this volume is not itself part of The Collected Works of John Dewey. Still, the careful editing (of what are actually a number of manuscripts) is comparable in its excellence. There is also a well-done Index.The scope is twofold: retrospective and prospective. Chapters one through seven trace the development of so-called modern philosophy along with its central epistemological problem, with the aim being to demonstrate how thoroughly “unmodern” such philosophy has been. Then, chapters eight through fourteen constitute a genuinely modern approach that naturalistically and functionally undercuts the epistemic problem of subject/object and points to a revolution in the process of knowing.We turn to the retrospective, beginning in the first chapter with the acknowledgement that Dewey comes to philosophy itself as a kind of anthropologist, something we note as consistent with the influence of Franz Boas on Dewey (with whom Dewey was a colleague and intellectual ally at Columbia for about thirty-five years). This is further underscored by a lengthy quotation of anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski on the meaning of culture (p. 290). The ongoing history of philosophy is itself a cultural activity. Indeed, citing James, Dewey declares that “The sickliest way in which a student of philosophy can approach his subject-matter is that of a search for ultimate impersonal revelation of truth.” (p. 16) Rather, let the philosopher have the pragmatic attitude of openness “... to truth from whatever source it comes” (ibid).With that, Dewey once again turns to the Greeks, who initiated “The Discovery of Rational Discourse” (Ch. III) as underscored by the Socratic means of cooperative discourse, with the dialogues—not lectures—being evidence of the Athenian philosophical revolution in turning “from discussing nature and giving an account of it to the examination of the nature and procedure of discussion and report” (p. 38). Yet this project, despite its initial promise, failed for lack of a genuine logic of experimentation or inquiry. Then philosophy focused on going beyond the natural, beginning with the medieval “Search for Salvation” (Ch. IV, a significantly less developed and unified chapter draft). “Modern” philosophers then rightly replaced grand cosmic schemes with a focus on human nature (Ch. V), but they went too far with their introspective methods, gradually resulting in the same consequence supernaturalism had produced: a dualism of mind and nature, as if human nature is somehow not a part of nature. As we recall from Human Nature and Conduct (1922), human nature is not independent of but rather interdependent (or, using Dewey’s later term, transactional) with the rest of nature. The key is to avoid hypostatizing mind and better to talk of culture as nature. [End Page 123]With the Renaissance onward, humans have been “Wandering between Two Worlds” (Ch. VI), and endless arguments between “rationalists” and “empiricists” overlook what these camps share, namely a psychology assuming a fundamental split between subjective/objective and assumptions about certainty as founded upon various first principles or substances. The result is the stagnation of philosophy while science flourishes. Dewey cites Bertrand Russell as an example of continued insistence on such a priori principles (p. 106).We find ourselves in an epoch split between scientism and moral and religious fundamentalism, the result of a lingering tenacious investment in bad elements from ancient and medieval... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Philosophy and Religion in Plato's Dialogues by Andrea NightingaleMarina Berzins McCoyAndrea Nightingale. Philosophy and Religion in Plato's Dialogues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 308. Hardback, $39.99.Andrea Nightingale has written a scholarly work that will prove indispensable to restoring the centrality of religion and theology to Platonic philosophy. She demonstrates that Plato uses the language of Greek religion to inform his metaphysics and his very conception of (...) philosophy. She deftly interweaves classical scholarship with close readings of a wide range of texts in order to build her claims. She gives especially good treatments of Eleusinian mysteries and Orphic ritual. She also explores the way in which the epiphanic nature of the encounter with the Forms has a transforming influence on the philosopher's soul.In the introduction, Nightingale presents an overview of key "divinity markers" (8–23) present in the dialogues—occurrences in which the Forms are described as godlike, references to Eleusinian and Orphic mysteries, poetic narratives of epiphanic encounters, and references to the sacred spectacle. She also assesses why these references are so often overlooked in contemporary scholarship, noting many contemporary scholars' unfamiliarity with the specific nature of Greek religion, and a general movement toward secularism in philosophy. She acknowledges some notable exceptions (e.g. Mark McPherran's work), but she might have given attention to others as well. Specifically, Jill Gordon's Plato's Erotic World: From Cosmic Origins to Human Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) characterizes Platonic philosophy in terms of both striving for and alienation from the divine, and Ross Romero's Without the Least Tremor: The Sacrifice of Socrates in Plato's Phaedo (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009) on religious sacrifice in the Phaedo is another example. Still, Nightingale is accurate in her assessment of the field's tendency to ignore religious language or to assimilate it too quickly to later monotheistic traditions. Her book convincingly argues that religious language can serve a philosophical purpose in suggesting how union with Beauty and the Good is experienced. The book as a whole provides precious information about many connections between Greek religion and culture that add depth and richness to particular Platonic passages.Chapter 1 sketches out a theory of the Forms and argues that as a group they are treated as "divine." The Phaedo connects the Forms to concepts of eternality, unchangingness, and intelligibility (50). Human beings can connect with the Forms through contemplation (51). Similarly, the Republic describes the Forms as divine and the soul that contemplates them as undergoing a kind of divinization. The Form of the Good is the highest divinity, and its pursuit is an encounter with the divine. Nightingale notes that this does not mean that the Good can be grasped completely. But insofar as we can contemplate the Forms, Plato thinks that we can come to know the Good and become more like it.In chapter 2, Nightingale turns to the topic of human longing, focusing on the Symposium. We humans, Plato believes, have two different but related kinds of longing for immortality. While human beings long for a divine kind of immortality that is ultimately unreachable, they can have a partial kind of immortality through desiring the Good and giving birth to "children" of the soul. The vision of the Beautiful can be a kind of divine epiphany that leads to wonder. Nightingale delves more deeply into the concept of epiphany through texts such as the Homeric Hymn to Dionysius and Herodotus, as well as sanctuary inscriptions. Epiphanies validate the Greek religious system. Similarly, Plato's metaphysics is validated [End Page 149] by a philosophical vision of the Forms. Nightingale's detailed account of Eleusinian mysteries brings together a wide range of source material with which many philosophers will be unfamiliar, and which is especially valuable for scholars seeking to interpret Platonic passages that allude to the mysteries. Nightingale also offers an engaging interpretation of Alcibiades as one who has encountered the divine in Socrates yet failed to understand it, and so has "profaned" the mysteries in the context of human relationship (107–13).Chapter 3 examines Socrates's accounts of the soul and immortality in the Phaedo. Whereas those... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Notes and Fragments THE FUTURE PRESENT TENSE by Justin Leiber Perhaps the simplest, most general, and oldest claim about fiction is that it should instruct and entertain. A logical positivist might draw a sharp line between the factual content of a discourse and the pleasurable emotional release available to the auditor. Aristotle straddles this distinction in seeing (dramatic) fiction as imitation of, principally, human action, an imitation which is, (...) Aristotle assures us in Poetics, both naturally pleasurable to perform or to observe performed. The distinction is straddled because for something to be an imitation of something else it must convey some body of rough fact about that thing; and granted various conventions of form and good form, the more accurate, compact, and revealing the imitation, the more the entertainment. Indeed, Aristotle also insists that drama is more universal than history, for the poet depicts what is necessary and probable in human action, while history depicts what is actual, though perhaps improbable, and the historian may not illume what is necessary, representative, exemplary, or prophetic in the mass of supposed actualities. There is a puzzle here in Aristotle's attitude. All humans by nature desire to know is the resolute thesis of the Metaphysics and he suggests there and elsewhere that this desire is a noble one and one whose fulfillment is an important form and ingredient of happiness. In Poetics it is quite clear that both the poet and the audience must have some of the sort of stuff that Aristotle considers fully genuine knowledge, explanatory knowledge, knowledge of universals, for otherwise they could not produce or understand the work as successful (or unsuccessful) imitation of the probable, 203 204Philosophy and Literature necessary, exemplary, etc., in human action. So in entertaining the work inevitably instructs. Aristotle does say that Homer gives in hexameters an imitation of human action, while Empedocles gives in hexameters physical philosophy. But what if Empedocles were providing us psychology? The example could be made more telling if we consider a twentieth-century psychoanalytic Empedocles who tracks or elucidates some generalizations of psychology through giving imagined, or partly imaged, case histories — how would such a work be psychology as opposed to fiction? Imitation (mimesis) wouldn't do thejob, for Aristotle mentions Socratic Dialogue as a form of it. To move to contemporary instances, what may we suppose is the difference between Plato's Republic and Robert Heinlein's Space Cadet? l In Space Cadet, we find some hundred years hence a modernized version of the Platonic Republic, with an elite outgrowth of the United Nations, the "Space Patrol," playing the role of the philosopher kings to the whole earth. Heinlein presents Plato's three-component theory of human psychology and of the meritocratic, tripartite, hierarchic structure of the most real, or healthy, state, and he argues and illustrates the basic Platonic thesis. Ethics is as much an objective science as mathematics, immorality is a form of ignorance (no one knowingly does wrong), and the general solution to the problem of statescraft is the creation of an educational system that will winnow, at level after level, and further educate an intellectual/ethical elite who will monopolize ultimate weaponry and political power, who will use the "divine lie" tojustify their authority, and who will act out of ethical knowledge, not for individual gain. Heinlein gives his account of these matters from the point of view of a Mathew Dobson, a Patrol candidate, who resembles a Candide who finds himself within a reasonable facsimile of the Just State, if not the Best of All Possible Worlds. One concedes that Plato provides us a substantially original, more detailed and coherently worked out set of speculations and theories, while Heinlein provides us a perhaps banal version of these ideas in a sentimental (perhaps fascistic) vision. Similarly, one eagerly concedes that Plato's Republic has played a potent role in European Civilization and the sweep of human thought, while Space Cadet has not. But, plainly, the distinction between a work of philosophy, or of physics, and a (dramatic) fiction or science fiction, cannot be this. One can have unoriginal, false, or impotent works of physics, psychology, or philosophy. So one cannot argue on... (shrink)

This paper demonstrates the ontological status of virtue as an instance of love within the cosmology of St. Maximus the Confessor. It shows that we may posit the real existence of a “virtue” in so far as we understand it to have its basis in, and to be an instance of love. Since God is love and the virtues are logoi, it becomes possible and beneficial to parallel the relationship between love and the virtues with Maximus’ exposition of the Logos (...) and the logoi. In particular, Vladimir Cvetković’s interpretation of the circle and radii analogy will be utilized. It will be shown that when one practices a virtue, one is practicing and participating in love, and, by extension, partaking in God. Within the context of Maximus’ cosmology, this means that practicing virtue and love is the ultimate purpose of humanity in its journey to gather all creation to communion with God. This paper is primarily an exposition of primary sources from St. Maximus, but discussion of the ontology of virtue is made with a view to bringing it into dialogue with modern theories of virtue ethics. This paper arises in part as a response to the August 2013 papers by Andrew Louth and Paul M. Blowers on the need for increased scholarship on Maximus and virtue ethics. (shrink)

Are there Buddhist conceptions of the unconscious? If so, are they more Freudian, Jungian, or something else? If not, can Buddhist conceptions be reconciled with the Freudian, Jungian, or other models? These are some of the questions that have motivated modern scholarship to approach ālayavijñāna, the storehouse consciousness, formulated in Yogācāra Buddhism as a subliminal reservoir of tendencies, habits, and future possibilities. -/- Tao Jiang argues convincingly that such questions are inherently problematic because they frame their interpretations of (...) the Buddhist notion largely in terms of responses to modern psychology. He proposes that, if we are to understand ālayavijñāna properly and compare it with the unconscious responsibly, we need to change the way the questions are posed so that ālayavijñāna and the unconscious can first be understood within their own contexts and then recontextualized within a dialogical setting. In so doing, certain paradigmatic assumptions embedded in the original frameworks of Buddhist and modern psychological theories are exposed. Jiang brings together Xuan Zang’s ālayavijñāna and Freud’s and Jung’s unconscious to focus on what the differences are in the thematic concerns of the three theories, why such differences exist in terms of their objectives, and how their methods of theorization contribute to these differences. -/- Contexts and Dialogue puts forth a fascinating, erudite, and carefully argued presentation of the subliminal mind. It proposes a new paradigm in comparative philosophy that examines the what, why, and how in navigating the similarities and differences of philosophical systems through contextualization and recontextualization. (shrink)

The term ’risk’ is used in a wide range of situations, but there is no real consensus of what it means. ‘Risk ‘is often stipulatively defined as “a probability for the occurrence of a negative event” or something similar. This formulation is however not very informative, and it fails to capture many of our intuitions about the concept or risk. One way of trying to find a common definition of a term within a group is to use a Socratic Dialogue (...) (SD). This method is fairly new, and it is rather different from the original Socratic dialogues (at least if we are to judge from how they are described by Plato). The best explanation for the name ought to be that it is inspired by the original Socratic dialogues. The SD in its modern form was originally developed as a tool for enabling laymen to perform rather advanced concept analyses under the supervision of a professional philosopher. The formal goal of the method is to find a common way of perceiving of a particular term, or at least to find out exactly how the members of the group differ in their understandings of the term, and why. The largest gain from the process has in practice turned out to be a higher awareness among the participants of different ways of understanding the term, and the ideas and intuitions behind it. This has turned out to be very useful in educational settings, but the method has also been used with great success both in research, and in e.g. business, public administration and nongovernmental organisations. In the present case, a Socratic dialogue on the concept of risk was performed within the framework of a Ph D-course about risk and uncertainty at the Swedish University of Agriculture in Alnarp, Sweden. The participants on the course where all quite familiar with practical issues relating to risks. Both from the course work, and from their own research. (shrink)

In this broad historical and critical overview based on a lifetime of scholarship, James Alfred Martin, Jr., examines the development of the concepts of beauty and holiness as employed in theories of aesthetics and of religion. The injunction in the Book of Psalms to "worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness" addressed a tradition that has comprehended holiness primarily in terms of ethical righteousness--a conception that has strongly influenced Western understandings of religion. As the author points out, however, (...) the Greek forbears of Western thought, as well as many Eastern traditions, were and are more broadly concerned with the pursuit of beauty, truth, and goodness as ideals of human excellence, that is, with the "holiness of beauty." In this work Martin describes a philosophical stance that should prove to be most productive for the dialogue between aesthetics and religion. Beginning with the treatment of beauty and holiness in Hebrew, Greek, and classical Christian thought, the author traces the emergence of modern theories of aesthetics and religion in the Enlightenment. He then outlines the role of aesthetics in the theories of religion proposed by Otto, Eliade, van der Leeuw, and Tillich, in the cultural anthropology of Geertz, and in the thought of Santayana, Dewey, Whitehead, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. In a global context Martin explores the relation of aesthetic theory to religious thought in the traditions of India, China, and Japan and concludes with reflections on the viability of modern aesthetic and religious theory in the light of contemporary cultural and methodological pluralism. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

This book presents another attempt at reconciling the various passages in Plato concerning what is perhaps his central metaphysical problem: the relationship of the Forms to things. The focus of the book is a new interpretation of the arguments of the Parmenides. To prepare the reader for this interpretation, Bigger offers his own analysis of dialogues from the early period and the middle period to show the ontological bifurcation of the Platonic position in its various expressions. His reading of (...) the Parmenides passages is based upon a threefold distinction of Ideas, and is supported with texts from the Theaetetus, the Sophist, and the Timaeus. Bigger disagrees with several contemporary interpretations of these arguments, and offers answers to the positions of R. J. Butler, G. Ryle, and G. Vlastos. His reading of the dialogues is interesting and usually very perceptive. He is not primarily interested in presenting another work in Platonic scholarship. Rather, borrowing a theme from Stanley Rosen who thinks that a problem in Plato is not solved by scholarship but by thinking it through on the basis of experience, Bigger in the last two chapters of the book presents his own solution to the problem of participation. This part of the book constitutes a complicated essay in technical metaphysics which embraces themes both from the dialogues of Plato and from A. N. Whitehead. Both as a reading of the Platonic dialogues and as a treatise on metaphysical theory, this is a valuable and stimulating book.--M. M. H. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Focusing on The Experience:Exploring Alternative Paths for ResearchEleanor Stubley, Anneli Arho, Päivi Järviö, and Tuomas MaliWriting and speaking are essential means of understanding, studying, and sharing music in the Western art music tradition. As a group of researchers, our story begins with the gap that seemingly exists between theoretical definitions or accounts of music and our experience of it as music makers—that is to say as composers, performers, conductors, (...) and teachers. Poignantly sensitive to the ways in which our musical experience and knowledge is embodied, we found ourselves one day four years ago sitting around an electrically-charged dinner table where ideas, questions, and the joy of having found someone like-minded seemed to be the main entrée. Since then, we have been working as a group, [End Page 39] experimenting with different ways of collaborating, using writing as a means of exploring and sharing our experiences across long distances. At first, the goal was simply to find a common ground, a platform for developing an extended dialogue that would draw on our unique backgrounds and divergent ways of our thinking. But, in the absence of a common language, both linguistic and theoretical, there were problems. We had, for example, to come to understand what each of us meant by the word experience and the role it could play as the ground of research, not as a series of defining moments or events but as the largely invisible flow of human life. We also had to deal with the inter-wovenness of mind and body, individual, and culture, not to mention our individual musical sensitivity and artistry. Confronted by these larger issues, our differences soon became the means to explore gaps or openings that could be entered to reveal the continuous becoming of music and language, the places where they intersect and diverge, and our own being in relationship to both.The papers presented in this symposium were the outgrowth of our dialogue during the summer of 2004. Each of us worked independently, yet each of us was also aware of the direction, the themes, and the ways of the others. The result is kaleidoscopic, each author starting from a different place, but seemingly working from the same palette of colors.Eleanor Stubley writes as a philosopher and conductor. Her work here is part of a larger on-going study that examines the way in which the body fills both language and our experience of music, with a particular focus on the way in which an interest in the body renews our understanding of music, language, and thought. Through a series of inter-connecting meditations inspired by the letter A, she challenges the practice of grounding research and practice in definitions of music as "organized sound." Her writing makes visible the habitual of a variety of educational practices, asking us to think anew about instructional technologies such as the alphabet, scale, and taxonomies of musical form, and to find in what we have traditionally thought of as practices of the mind, the omnipresence of the body. It also offers a new perspective on the hand, not as a tool or muscle to be trained as a skill, but as the very ground from which to develop an aesthetics of music that combines and recognizes the multiple ways in which we know and encounter music, through sight, sound, movement, and touch.Anneli Arho writes as a composer, educator, and philosopher/researcher. She explores the power of working from within the factical situation of a musician making music, focusing in particular on the embodiedness of music, questions of meaningfulness, and the ways in which phenomenological reflection on her own musical experiences has allowed her to move beyond traditional research discourses. Her writing asks us as educators to re-think curricular definitions of [End Page 40] composition, not simply as a collection of skills to be acquired or languages to be learned, but rather as embodied ways of living in and through sound. Using notation as an example, she argues that composing generates its own practical and existential questions distinct from those of listener, performer, and researcher, and which can never be totally shared with others... (shrink)

Ever since the proposal of Giovanni Reale, it has been useful to distinguish three “paradigms,” or models of “normal science,” in Thomas Kuhn’s sense, in the history of Platonic scholarship, each of which are relatively distinct from the others in their historical succession: the Neoplatonic model which persisted into modern times; the “Romantic” model which replaced it and whose foundations were formulated around 1800 by Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher, and which was until recently the guiding (...) model for history, philology and philosophy; and lastly the model that takes both the literary and indirect Platonic traditions, integrates them, uses them to supplement one another, and so in part preserves and in part modifies the second model by a perspectival “paradigm shift”. The new research program justified itself in view of the surplus of anomalies left by the old program, which had to leave certain central portions of the tradition unexplained or else forcefully reinterpret them. Meanwhile, the new program promised to progressively work off the explanatory deficit. The new program was also able to emerge as an alternative because the explanatory abilities of the old program had visibly declined into a state of stagnation and exhaustion. That program had not achieved the hoped-for explanatory goals: neither the extraction of the philosophical content of Platonic dialogues by an analysis of form, nor the evaluation of the relative chronology of the dialogues for the inner development of their philosophical thought. (shrink)

It has been a commonplace, embodied in philosophy curricula the world over, to think of Descartes' philosophy as he seems to present it: as a radical break with the past, as inaugurating a new philosophical problematic centred on epistemology and on a radical dualism of mind and body. In several ways, however, recent scholarship has undermined the simplicity of this picture. It has, for example, shown the considerable degree of literary artifice in Descartes' central works, and thereby brought (...) out the deceptive character of his self-presentation there. In particular, it has revealed the extent of his debts to the Neoplatonist tradition, particularly to Augustine, and of his engagement with the Scholastic commentators of his day. My aim in this paper is to push this interpretative tendency a step further, by bringing out Descartes' indebtedness to Plato. I begin by offering some reminders of the broadly Platonic nature of Cartesian dualism. I then argue that he provides clues sufficient for—and designed to encourage—reading the Meditations on First Philosophy in the light of distinctively Platonic doctrines, and in particular, as a rewriting of the Platonic allegory of the cave for modern times. It will further be argued that some puzzles about the Discourse on the Method can be resolved by recognizing that Descartes there presents himself as a Socratic enquirer after truth. I conclude by drawing attention to some practical benefits that flow from recognizing these linkages. (shrink)

Philosophers speak—or, rather, they respond to various forms of speaking that are handed to them. This book by one of our most distinguished philosophers focuses on the communicative aspect of philosophical thought. Peperzak’s central focus is “addressing”: what distinguishes speaking or writing from rumination is their being directed by someone to someone. To be involved in philosophy is to be part of a tradition through which thinkers propose their findings to others, who respond by offering their own appropriations to their (...) interlocutors.After a critical sketch of the conception of modern philosophy, Peperzak presents a succinct analysis of speaking, insisting on the radical distinction between speaking about and speaking to. He enlarges this analysis to history and tries to answer the question whether philosophy also implies a certain form of listening and responding to words of God. Since philosophical speech about persons can neither honor nor reveal their full truth, speaking and thinking about God is even more problematic. Meditation about the archaic Word cannot reach the Speaker unless it turns into prayer, or—as Descartes wrote—into a contemplation that makes the thinker “consider, admire, and adore the beauty of God’s immense light, as much as the eyesight of my blinded mind can tolerate.”“ Thinking is a work of genuine and original scholarship which responds to the tradition of philosophical thinking with a critique of its language, style, focus, and scope.”—Catriona Hanley, Loyola College, Maryland. (shrink)

This article examines the notion of the `scientist as a moral person' in the light of the early stages of the commodification of science and the transformation of research into a big enterprise, operating on the principle of the division of labour. These processes were set in train at the end of the 19th century. The article focuses on the concomitant changes in the public persona and the habitus of scientific entrepreneurs. I begin by showing the significance of the professional (...) networks that were built up and maintained to further a group's research ideas and the careers of its members, thus demonstrating one condition on which depended their practice of science and their ability to earn a living. This leads to a characterization of the changing styles of work, thought and life, and to a consideration of public perceptions and of the ways in which a new self-image of scholarship and science was fashioned. A critical discussion of the public role of these mandarin scientists follows in order to highlight the strains created by the commodification of science at a time of international tensions and conflicts, when shared beliefs in scholarly cosmopolitanism were subverted by appeals to science and scholarship to work in the service of one's own nation as its `courtiers'. Various considerations of peculiar analogies between national styles of research and the style of social organization are then noted. In the final section, the article queries the long-term impact of these developments on the ideal of the scientist as a `moral person'. Taking a cue from Max Weber and pursuing reflections by Zygmunt Bauman on `science moralized', I argue that the emergence of a type of `specialists without spirit' was an unintended but fatal consequence of the changes in research practices promoted by scientific entrepreneurs such as Du Bois-Reymond. I conclude that the temptation to sever the ties to a general ethos of civil virtues lay in the rationalization, specialization and potential de-humanization of the objectifying scientific outlook once advocated for its efficiency. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The New Cambridge Companion to Plotinus ed. by Lloyd P. Gerson and James WilberdingBrandon ZimmermanGERSON, Lloyd P. and James Wilberding, editors. The New Cambridge Companion to Plotinus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. xxiv + 471 pp. Cloth, $105.00; paper, $34.99The original 1996 Cambridge Companion to Plotinus had the advantage of being one of the few systematic studies of Plotinus available and was able to recruit some of the (...) pioneers in the field to epitomize their research. In recent times, scholarship on Neoplatonism has exploded with new commentaries on and translations of Plotinus's works as well as significant studies of his Platonic predecessors and successors. Given the difficulty of following, let alone mastering, the burgeoning scholarship on late antique philosophy, The New Cambridge Companion to Plotinus is a sample of the work of current, generally younger, scholars in the field, rather than a comprehensive study of Plotinus's sources, thought, and influence.Because they address philosophical questions from a comprehensive metaphysical framework, Plotinus's treatises are difficult to group systematically. The same is true of the contributions of this volume, which elude the editors' attempts to classify them into sections. The first three essays are on historical topics. Eric Perl presents examples of how Plotinus creatively reworks material from Plato and Aristotle. Sebastian Gertz explores Plotinus's knowledge of Gnosticism, outlines his criticism of it in II.9, and speculates on whether certain criticisms were meant to apply to Christianity as well. Marije Martijn summarizes the critical reception and development of Plotinus's ideas in later pagan Neoplatonism. Little connection is made between Plotinus and the preceding Platonic and Pythagorean revivals, and nothing more is said about his reception.The order of the remaining essays is generally the inverse of Porphyry's arrangement of the Enneads, insofar as they move from the first principle downward to conclude with humanity's place in the whole. In her interpretation of Plotinus's first principle, Gwenaëlle Aubry presents the power of the One as an intermediary between it and its effects. Unlike Perl, who depicts the One as pure activity, and Gatti, who in the 1996 volume said the One is self-creative freedom, Aubry denies both freedom and activity to the One. Mauro Bonazzi and Christian Tornau both cover Plotinus's account of the divine intellect that is identical with the Forms as a response to the challenge of skepticism. Bonazzi begins with the Middle Platonic debate over Plato's first principles, while Tornau works upward from how our participation in Intellect enables us to judge the truth of sense perceptions. Svelta Slaveva-Griffin tries to show how Number is a metaphysical principle for Plotinus, suggesting that there is participated One posterior to the transcendent One. Michael Griffin rediscovers Plotinus's important place in the late antique development of Aristotle's logic. Griffin summarizes his criticisms of Aristotle's categories as being inconsistent with Aristotle's own logical principles, and then presents Plotinus's own categories (really more like transcendentals) of intelligible being and then of sensibles. Similarly, D. M. Hutchinsin's summary of Plotinus on the composition of sensible bodies highlights [End Page 349] Plotinus's valid probing of the relation between the predicables and the categories, even if Plotinus himself would reduce bodies to heaps or bundles of qualities. Damian Caluori insightfully reconstructs Plotinus's account of body–soul relations and operations as a synthesis of Aristotelian principles, Galen's anatomical discoveries, and his own understanding of the soul as an active intelligible reality. Plotinus is far more concerned about the distinct nature of bodily reality than he is often given credit for. Transcending the narrow historical focus of this volume, Pauliina Remes meditates upon and praises Plotinus's contributions to the philosophical problem of self-knowledge. Riccardo Chiaradonna ably summarizes III.7 "On Eternity and Time," but with no comments on the significance of Plotinus's teachings. James Wilberding questions whether Nature, which is the aspect of the World-Soul at work in giving the cosmos its life and form, should be considered its own level of reality (hypostasis). Jan Opsomer summarizes Plotinus's idiosyncratic teaching that matter, despite ultimately originating from... (shrink)

A diverse group of scholars reflect on the scholarship of Robert M. Veatch, the breadth of which is unmatched in modern day bioethics. Essays were written by both philosophers and clinician-philosophers, by contemporaries and mentees. They span the breadth of Bob’s work and include analyses of his ideas about death, dying and organ transplantation, human experimentation and research ethics, disability, equality and justice, the doctor-patient relationship, the history of bioethics, as well as his pedagogical approach to teaching bioethics (...) to clinicians across the health care spectrum. Recognition of Bob’s influence in the modern field of bioethics and the challenges that persist are clearly identified. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Isaac Barrow on the Mathematization of Nature: Theological Voluntarism and the Rise of Geometrical OpticsAntoni MaletIntroductionIsaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy embodies a strong program of mathematization that departs both from the mechanical philosophy of Cartesian inspiration and from Boyle’s experimental philosophy. The roots of Newton’s mathematization of nature, this paper aims to demonstrate, are to be found in Isaac Barrow’s (1630–77) philosophy of the mathematical sciences.Barrow’s attitude (...) towards natural philosophy evolved from his earnest interest in medicine of around 1650, when a young Cambridge graduate, to natural philosophy (apparently under Henry More’s influence); from his thesis on the insufficiency of the Cartesian hypothesis to geometrical optics and the strong program of mathematization of natural philosophy of the middle 1660s; from Lucasian professor of Mathematics to Chaplain of his Majesty and eminent Restoration divine. Contemporary accounts of Barrow’s life suggest that he grew ever more skeptical about the worth of natural philosophy and mathematics. 1 In his last years he became a prolific [End Page 265] author of sermons and theological works. Published shortly after his death by John Tillotson (1630–94), later archbishop of Canterbury, they occupy over two thousand folio pages. Overloaded with involved philosophical arguments, Barrow’s sermons were apparently not very popular, but they were highly regarded by scholars and the Anglican hierarchy. 2 It is on certain of his sermons, as well as on the philosophical discussions contained in the Mathematical Lectures that our account of Barrow’s philosophy of the mathematical sciences will rest. 3 Barrow’s understanding of the mathematical sciences will allow us to discuss together three issues often analyzed independently: the theological background to English natural philosophy, the changing notion of mixed mathematical sciences during the seventeenth century, and finally the philosophical foundations of modern geometrical optics.It has long been recognized that significant relationships exist between theological voluntarism or intellectualism and views on natural philosophy. In particular Robert Boyle’s theological voluntarism is seen as grounding his experimentalist approach to natural philosophy. It is not quite so clear, however, how well theological voluntarism may relate to a strong program of mathematization such as the one embodied in Newton’s Principia Mathematica. In fact it has been suggested that the relationship is a negative one. This is derived from the necessary character of mathematical laws, which would put unwanted restrictions on God’s absolute dominion over nature, and also from the notion that theological intellectualism is conducive to a deductive, a priori science—the paradigm of which is of course geometry. However, Barrow’s theological voluntarism lead him to heighten the role of mathematics within natural philosophy.During the seventeenth century the so-called mixed or subalternate mathematical sciences changed profoundly. In the Enlightenment mixed mathematics—meaning above all rational mechanics—became one of the most prestigious and influential disciplines. The mixed mathematics of the Enlightenment, however, was markedly different from the Aristotelian [End Page 266] mixed mathematical sciences. The differences are noticeable both in the subject matter and in the substitution of mathematical infinitesimal analysis for geometrical synthesis, but also in the way of grounding mathematical theory on empirical evidence. Barrow’s Mathematical Lectures (delivered at Cambridge from 1664 to 1666) offer a fresh insight into the metamorphosis of these sciences just when Newton’s “mathematical principles” were in the making. Not the least interesting feature of Barrow’s discussion is that God’s omnipotence allows an evaluation of the truth of mathematical theories that do not apply to this world. Therefore, Barrow is led to introduce the distinction between the internal consistency, or mathematical truth, of a mathematical theory and its physical truth. This, in turn, leads him to the notion that theories need testing.Barrow on Matter and GodRecent literature has established significant correlations between theological voluntarism and empiricism, as well as between theological intellectualism and rationalism. As E. B. Davis writes, “the Christian doctrine of creation is a dialogue between God’s unconstrained will, which utterly transcends the bounds of human comprehension, and God’s orderly intellect, which serves as the model for the human mind.” Intellectualist theology considers God’s omniscience His... (shrink)

The eminent philosopher and classical scholar Alexander Nehamas presents here a collection of his most important essays on Plato and Socrates. The papers are unified in theme by the idea that Plato's central philosophical concern in metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics was to distinguish the authentic from the fake, the original from its imitations. In approach, the collection displays Nehamas's characteristic combination of analytical rigor and sensitivity to the literary form and dramatic effect of Plato's work. Together, the papers represent Nehamas's (...) distinct and original contributions to scholarship on Plato and Socrates and serve as a comprehensive introduction to the thought of these two philosophers.In the book's opening section, Nehamas discusses Plato's representation of Socrates as a model of authentic human goodness, showing that Plato's Socrates is a more skeptical, troubling, and individualistic thinker than is usually supposed. The papers in the second section form a sustained defense of a new and important understanding of Plato's theory of the forms and the evolution of that theory in Plato's later writings. The third section examines Plato's contention that popular entertainment--by which he meant Greek epic and tragic poetry--misleads its audience into a debased life, an argument Nehamas relates to modern anxieties about television and other forms of popular culture. The collection also includes a discussion of Plato's use of the dialogue form in his representation of Socrates and carefully examines the combination of literary and philosophical elements in his work.Nehamas argues in the book that Plato's specific judgments of what is authentic are often flawed, but that his idea of authenticity as the mark of truth, beauty, and goodness is stronger than many modern scholars have assumed. In drawing together Nehamas's many influential ideas about Plato and Socrates, Virtues of Authenticity is a major contribution to the study of ancient Greek philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Contexts and Dialogue: Yogācāra Buddhism and Modern Psychology on the Subliminal Mind, and: SciousnessBenjamin J. ChickaContexts and Dialogue: Yogācāra Buddhism and Modern Psychology on the Subliminal Mind. By Tao Jiang. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006. xi + 198 pp.Sciousness. Edited by Jonathan Bricklin. Guilford, CT: Eirini Press, 2006. 229 pp.It has become popular to view Buddhist concepts as nothing more than self-help techniques. The tradition, (...) stripped of religious content, is now used to foster human growth. Given such interests, psychological comparisons have become prevalent and Buddha has been understood as the first to explore the ego. This is a review of two books—Jiang’s Contexts and Dialogue and Bricklin’s Sciousness—approaching such developments from different directions. In Contexts and Dialogue, Tao Jiang worries that jumping into comparison too hastily risks losing original meanings when words are made relative to whatever structure in which they are placed. The original contexts of Yogācāra Buddhism and modern psychology both need to be understood in order to reveal existing presuppositions about how the two can be brought together. Jonathan Bricklin’s Sciousness has more hope for comparative work because he believes he has found an untapped resource for comparison in the theory of sciousness developed by William James (1842–1910). Pragmatic philosophy has yet to be compared with Buddhist traditions in depth, even though both favor practical solutions to problems over merely theoretical pondering.Jiang is a specialist in comparative philosophy. His method is to deconstruct current comparisons between different systems by recovering the original meanings of their different terminologies in their original context and in relation to the particular problems each system was addressing. Comparison can then be reconstructed out of these original contexts so that genuine similarities and differences can emerge. Regarding Yogācāra thought, the systematic theory of mind /consciousness, ālayavijñāna (“storehouse consciousness”) is at its center. This “storehouse of consciousness” is a subliminal reservoir for memories and habits that has made a correlation with the psychological unconscious tempting (pp. 9–10). However, rather than ask whether ālayavijñāna can serve the needs of modern psychology, Jiang first explores what problem it was originally meant to address. He achieves this goal by examining the seventh-century Chinese Buddhist work Cheng Weishi Lun (Discourse on the Perfection of Consciousness-only) of the Buddhist monk pilgrim Xuanzang (Hsüan-tsang, ca. 600–664). Only when this journey is complete does Jiang compare [End Page 201] ālayavijñāna to the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud (1856 –1939) and Carl Jung (1875–1961). The result Jiang argues for is that notions of transcendence and immanence are emphasized differently in the three theories of consciousness offered by Xuanzang, Freud, and Jung.Yogācārins were dealing with deep meditative states in which consciousness is supposed to cease and with the problem of how meditators could arise from such meditative states without violating the doctrine of anātman (“no-self ”). What supports the meditator in these states if no enduring substantive self exists? How can there be identity and change without substantial reification? On the other hand, how can impermanent existence account for the seeming continuity of the world we experience?The answer given by Xuanzang is that an empirical self can be embraced while a metaphysical one is rejected. However, without such a metaphysical self, the question of “whose” arises (p. 27). Whose consciousness of continuous experience is being dealt with if not that of a metaphysical self? The radical solution offered is that ālayavijñāna contains subliminal seeds that produce continuity between successive dharma moments. This solution must be possible without violating the simultaneity of cause and effect. Thus, Xuanzang spoke of dharmas as actual and bījas, seeds of the potential for production, as only potential (p. 60). Perishing dharmas are maintained by the seeds to be manifested in the future and substantive entities are not introduced because seeds are only potential (p. 42). The result is that after deep meditative states when mental activities halt, the mind can emerge from the seeds of mental activity without needing antecedent actual mental activity.Xuanzang’s approach... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:New Essays on the RationalistsSteven NadlerRocco J. Gennaro and Charles Huenemann, editors. New Essays on the Rationalists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xvii + 391. Cloth, $60.00.Here is yet another collection of essays on early modern philosophy. The focus this time is on the Seventeenth century, in particular "the rationalists." What this apparently involves is, as the old-fashioned classification has it, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. But (...) there is no overall theme to the essays, nothing uniting them besides the fact that almost all are devoted to those three thinkers and the fact that the volume was inspired by a summer seminar run by Jonathan Bennett.What the editors mean by "the rationalists" (besides the extensional definition) is [End Page 437] thinkers "united in the belief that the intellect and human reason are powerful tools in our ability to know about the ultimate nature of mind and matter." What is supposed to separate "the rationalists" from "the empiricists" is "a belief in the power of human reason" (xv). This is a fairly weak claim; and I, for one, am skeptical that such categories are truly useful (or even valid—one would be hard-pressed to find a single issue on which Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz all agree and on which those who are usually called "empiricists" unanimously dissent). In the light of so much important and creative work done over the last twenty years in seventeenth-century philosophy, it would have been nice to see a volume devoted to "the rationalists" include at least one sophisticated discussion of the legitimacy and grounds of such a label.The essays in this book are divided into three categories: Matter and Substance; Freedom and Necessity; and Mind and Consciousness. The contributors are a broad mix of scholars: some established and accomplished, others new and up-and-coming. The quality of the work is consistently high. There is a lot of detailed and careful work here, both in the attention to the historical texts and in philosophical analyses. However, not all of the essays are of great scope or interest; in fact, most are not. There is a definite tendency toward the small-scale (but not brevity): a concern with micro-problems (for example, the chapter by Clarence Bonnen and Daniel Flage, "Distinctness," is devoted to the question of what the "distinctness" of an idea is for Descartes) and an emphasis on theses and arguments (such as Geoffrey Gorham's examination of the "similarity condition" for causation in Descartes, "Causation and Similarity in Descartes,"). If there is indeed an "analytical" way of doing history of philosophy, that school is well represented here.And then there are a couple of essays that stand out by transcending this narrowness of focus. The chapters by Catherine Wilson ("The Illusory Nature of Leibniz's System") and Don Garrett ("Teleology in Spinoza and Early Modern Rationalism") are, without question, the boldest and most interesting of the collection. Wilson argues that, in the light of Leibniz's changing and inconsistent views on substance, there really is no metaphysical "system" in his philosophy. Garrett, in what is, to my mind, the best essay in the book (although I think I disagree with him), defends an account of teleology in Spinoza's metaphysics, and then compares Spinoza's views on teleology with those of Aristotle, Descartes, and Leibniz; he concludes that Spinoza not only accepted teleological explanations of particular phenomena, but did so more strongly than anyone else in the modern period. Experts will, of course, disagree with the claims made by Wilson and Garrett; that is what this game is all about. But it is truly refreshing to see scholars such as these taking on large-scale issues.It is worth noting that there is also a nice, indirect dialogue between two of the essays: Charles Huenemann's interesting account of a consistent necessitarianism in Spinoza ("The Necessity of Finite Modes and Geometrical Containment in Spinoza's Metaphysics,") and Edwin Curley and Gregory Walski's argument (in "Spinoza's Necessitarianism Reconsidered,") that, when it comes to the finite modes, Spinoza is not a strong or absolute necessitarian. What is truly unfortunate about the collection, however... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.2 (2004) 116-120 [Access article in PDF] Art History in the Age of Bellori: Scholarship and Cultural Politics in Seventeenth-Century Rome, edited by Janis Bell and Thomas Willette. Cambridge: Cambridge Universtiy Press, 2002, 396 pp. Giovan Pietro Bellori is a name familiar to all who have studied seventeenth-century Italian art. His magisterial book, The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (...) (Le vite de' pittori, scultori, ed architetti moderni), published in Rome in 1672, continued in the grand tradition of artists' biographies established by Giorgio Vasari in the sixteenth century, while at the same time espousing a classical theory of artistic creation that has often been seen as the foundation of academic classicism, popular well into the nineteenth century. He is, in other words, an immensely significant figure, as a source of information on artists' lives, and, more importantly, as a cogent, early spokesperson for one of the dominant aesthetic modes of Western European culture.Given this importance, the relative dearth of publications dedicated toBellori, especially in the Anglo-American world, is surprising. PerhapsBellori's famously negative assessment of Caravaggio, or his complete avoidance of two of the most successful Italian artists of the seventeenth century, Pietro da Cortona and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, account for the scarcity ofscholarly treatments, or maybe his supposed insistence that all great art should be grounded in rules is to blame. The reasons are hard to pin down, but the volume of essays under consideration here goes some significant way towards rectifying the situation. Stemming from a 1996 conference organized by the Association for Textual Scholarship in Art History and held at the American Academy in Rome, the volume is divided into two roughly equal sections, one on "Bellori and the Republic of Letters in Seventeenth-Century Rome," and the other on "Bellori's Lives: History, Criticism, Theory." It comprises twelve essays, including a long and very useful introduction by Janis Bell, one of the editors of the book. The overall goal of the collection is to treat Bellori's activity as a whole, rather than focus single-mindedly on the Lives. After all, as Bell points out, the preponderance of Bellori's publishing was not dedicated to aesthetic theory, or even artists' biographies, but to antiquarian studies. In this, the present volume is very different from the other major new work on Bellori, a two-volume cataloguepublished in 2000 to accompany anexhibition held at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, L'idea del Bello: viaggio per Roma nel Seicento con Giovan Pietro Bellori. The exhibition did acknowledge Bellori's antiquarian interests, but was aimed principally at something else: making visible his aesthetic theory. Unfortunately, the authors of Art History in the Age of Belloriwere not able to take into account fully [End Page 116] the conclusions of this important study,although it should be noted that several authors are represented in both publications.The first group of essays in the book, six in number, treats a wide range of themes, with the intention of crafting a context, both literary and political, for understanding Bellori's achievement. Giovanna Perini's essay, the first of section one, describes Bellori's career trajectory, and, more significantly, how this path had an impact on his life as a scholar. Bellori did not come from the wealthiest stratum of society. On the contrary, he was of relatively modest means, which meant that he had to rely on employment income. One implication of being economically beholden to his employers was that his writing had to conform to their political agendas. The Vite, for instance, are famous for lionizing the French artist Nicolas Poussin, of obvious appeal to his Francophile patrons. Diego Velázquez, however, was not included in the Vite, perhaps because he was Spanish and would thus have appealed to the opposing political faction in Rome at the time, which was linked to Spain. At the same time, Perini convincingly argues that Bellori's own voice was not drowned out in the process... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A New Direction for Comparative Studies of Buddhists and Christians:Evidence from Nāgārjuna and John of the CrossAbraham Vélez de CeaIs Nāgārjuna's emptiness a means to point out the inadequacy of logic and concepts to express the nature of the Ultimate Reality? Similarly, are John of the Cross's concepts of nothingness and emptiness examples of the apophatic path to God? In sum, is emptiness in Nāgārjuna and John of the (...) Cross comparable to the Christian via negativa and the apophatic path to God?If you answered yes to any of these questions, I believe you might be interested in reading this article carefully. You are not alone; in fact most if not all previous discussions of Nāgārjuna and John of the Cross in the field of Buddhist-Christian studies have assumed an affirmative answer to the former questions. The comparisons of D.T. Suzuki, Thomas Merton, and the Kyoto school between the Christian God and Buddhist emptiness, as well as the comparisons of members of the Masao Abe–John Cobb group, have greatly contributed to this apophatic interpretation of emptiness. The enormous contributions of D. T. Suzuki, Thomas Merton, the Kyoto school, and the Abe-Cobb group to the field of Buddhist-Christian studies cannot be sufficiently praised and appreciated. However, the future of Buddhist-Christian studies and Buddhist-Christian dialogue requires a new comparative direction, a shift from comparative theory to comparative praxis, from doctrinal comparisons to more ethical and spiritually relevant comparisons.This new direction provides Buddhist-Christian studies with a more practical orientation necessary for the urgent needs of our planet as well as for the needs of a growing number of members of different religions with pluralist attitudes. By pluralist attitudes, I do not mean a relativistic standpoint, but rather an attitude of intellectual humbleness and dialogical openness toward other religions. That humble and dialogical openness seeks neither to proselytize nor to create a new religion. Rather, the objective is to build bridges of understanding and solidarity among religious communities and to be personally enriched by the contributions of all religions.In order to justify the need for this new and more practically oriented comparative [End Page 139] direction, it is imperative to review previous scholarship in the field of Buddhist-Christian studies. A comprehensive analysis of all past scholarship would be too ambitious a goal for the purpose of this article. Thus, in the first part of this article I limit myself to reviewing those questionable hermeneutical tendencies that I have identified in former Buddhist-Christian discussions of John of the Cross and Nāgārjuna. In the second part, I continue the justification of this new direction for Buddhist-Christian studies by providing a specific example, namely, a comparison of the instrumental ethical function of emptiness in Nāgārjuna and John of the Cross.Hermeneutical Tendencies in Previous Buddhist-Christian Studies of John of the Cross and NāgārjunaHermeneutical Tendencies in Comparisons of John of the Cross and BuddhismIn the case of John of the Cross, I have identified three questionable hermeneutical tendencies. The first one is to exaggerate the similarity between John of the Cross and Buddhism. Take, for example, what Thomas Merton—whose pioneering work on Buddhist-Christian dialogue deserves careful study—said in 1968: "Frankly, I would say that Zen is nothing but John of the Cross without the Christian vocabulary" (quoted in Nugent 1996: 53). This comparison suggests that the teachings of Zen and John of the Cross are virtually identical, neglecting important differences between them.Similarly, Christopher Nugent compares John's experience of one's own true self to the experience of Buddha-nature, and describes satori as a fusion of all and nothing, and the coincidence of opposites. For Nugent, John of the Cross is not only a Zen master, but also "more Taoist than dualist" (1996: 62–64). These comparisons of John of the Cross to Zen and Taoism concepts fail to bring justice to his ideas. John of the Cross cannot be categorized a nondualist because he maintains a clear distinction between God and creatures. Similarly, from an ethical... (shrink)

The leading scholars represented in _Politics, Philosophy, Writing_ examine six key Platonic dialogues and the most important of the epistles, moving from Plato's most public or political writings to his most philosophical. The collection is intended to demonstrate the unity of Plato's concerns, the literary quality of his writing, and the integral relation of form and content in his work. Taken together, these essays show the consistency of Plato's understanding of the political art, the art of writing, and the (...) philosophical life. Studies emphasizing the unity of Plato's lifework have given way in recent scholarship to specialized and overspecialized examinations of individual dialogues. While each of the contributors to _Politics, Philosophy, Writing_ studies one text, his or her work is oriented toward illuminating the whole of Plato's project. Each of the essays is an innovative contribution to scholarship on its topic; as a collection, they constitute a unique reading of Plato's political philosophy. Plato scholars have generally divided themselves into two camps: those who concentrate on the analytic or logical aspects of the dialogues, and those who concentrate on the literary-critical features. In one camp are the philologists and classicists, and in the other, the writers of inventive interpretive commentaries. By avoiding distinctions between Plato the poet and Plato the philosopher, _Politics, Philosophy, Writing_ allows a deeper exploration of the comprehensiveness of Plato's theoretical vision and illuminates the lasting challenge of his understanding of the human condition. (shrink)

Architecture and Deconstruction Case of Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi -/- Introduction Towards deconstruction in architecture Intensive relations between philosophical deconstruction and architecture, which were present in the late 1980s and early 1990s, belong to the past and therefore may be described from a greater than before distance. Within these relations three basic variations can be distinguished: the first one, in which philosophy of deconstruction deals with architectural terms but does not interfere with real architecture, the second one, in which (...) a collaboration between Jacques Derrida and a group of architects interested in his concepts is commenced, and the third one, in which completed or only designed objects or new concepts of deconstruction created by architects gain their supremacy over philosophy. The following book analyses these three possible ways, first of all with the reference to Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi. -/- Peter Eisenman -/- Misreading… and Other Errors -/- The issue of relations between Peter Eisenman’s work and philosophy of deconstruction may be referred to his activity more than ten years preceding his direct collaboration with Jacques Derrida (in 1985) and organisation of the exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture at Museum of Modern Art in New York (in 1988). As soon as at the stage of designing the first houses (House I-III, 1967-1970), which almost entirely inscribed in formalistic aesthetics of Modernism, the architect analysed the problem of architecture dependence on its assumptions. All his later designs may be treated as consequence of this initial interest in relations between practice and theory, and at the same time as an introduction to manipulations later on led at the level of metaphysics of architecture. Beginning with the issue of presence, considered in comments to House VI (1972), the number of ideas having their analogies in philosophy of deconstruction increased. The text entitled The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, The End of the End (1984), in which Eisenman criticised questions of representation in architecture, its delusive strive for truth and comparably unattainable attempts at ultimate definition of elementary rules, should be acclaimed the breaking point. This attitude was extended by numerous strategies disturbing architecture rules defined at metaphysical level in an essay Moving Arrows, Eros, and Other Errors: an Architecture of Absence (1986). The issue of Eisenman’s passage from formalism to deconstruction has already been much discussed in the literature (Rosalind Krauss, Thomas Patin among others), still it should be mentioned that the threads similar to Derrida’s concept included in Eisenman’s writing reveal untranslatability of architecture and philosophy. -/- Choral Works or Separate tricks -/- In 1985-1986 a series of seven disputes between Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman took place. The pretext for them were designs concerning Parc de la Villette in Paris. The situation of many months of collaboration between a notable philosopher of the second half of the 20th c. and an architect that already had a huge theoretical oeuvre, ended up with a publication of a large volume entitled Chora L Works and it became at the same time a vast study area for historians of contemporary architecture and philosophers. Derrida’s contribution to concept works were his considerations over the idea of chôra, the properties related to this concept were about to be reflected in shapes of the park. Therefore, Chora L Works became an example of the abilities of contemporary art, both in its capability of translation from philosophical ideas to artistic forms and its resistance to tradition of representing in architecture some phenomena and values originating outside this discipline. In the final period of their collaboration both interlocutors started to polemicise with each other more decidedly, what became a separate part of their thought exchange. The exchange of letters between Derrida and Eisenman at the turn of 1989 ended up the period of their direct contacts, nevertheless, at this time precisely a large group of experts in issues of deconstruction joined the discussion and extended the revealed in the former dispute problems into more than ten years of further considerations and publications. Except for a long text by Jeffrey Kipnis, who had participated in the meetings of the philosopher and the architect, there appeared also comments of researchers of artistic theories (K. Michael Hays, Thomas Patin), philosophers (Andrew Benjamin), and even experts in Greek literature (Maria Theodorou or Ann Bergren). Following these debates a contemporary reflection on architecture has saturated with indeed numerous concepts originating in philosophy of deconstruction. -/- Architecture which imitates mute philosophy -/- The series of Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman meetings, which took place in the period of 1985-1987, induced many authors to make comments. Some of them (Jeffrey Kipnis, Ann Bergren, Maria Theodorou) developed the subject of chôra which was introduced to the discussion by Derrida. The problem that was about to be solved was the question of tying up the concept of chôra with architecture, including Eisenman’s architecture and the series of meetings within frames of Chora L Works project. Kipnis on this occasion paid attention to chôra and its character of anachronia which infects any being created within chôra. In other words any event has its counterpart (analogon) in another, earlier event. He demonstrated the similarity of structure of many events and statements from the times of Derrida and Eisenman’s meetings to the almost identical behaviour of figures in Plato’s dialogue Timaeus. The loss of beginning present in this phenomenon was appropriate to both features of chôra and the effects of typical analyses of philosophy of deconstruction. Bergren’s analyses focused on accentuating gender of chôra, which, according to this author, had been neglected hitherto in discussions. She collated chôra descriptions with characteristics of women in myths, early Greek epic and philosophy and she arrived at a conclusion that chôra has features of a single woman and a married one at the same time. And yet Theodorou’s studies showed that in the Homeric epics chôra is not treated as an idea but is related with single things and events. The other part of the comments (represented by Andrew Benjamin and K. Michael Hays’ utterances) concerns Eisenman’s attitude to tradition which was treated as a variety of iteration understood philosophically. Benjamin commenced his considerations at the point of closeness between a definition of tradition and a concept of chôra understood as perpetuation (placement). A problematic issue was for him Eisenman’s complex relation to tradition based on its contest and affirmation at the same time. Overcoming the simple subordination to tradition – according to Benjamin – was based on awareness of the role of repetition in culture not known before. Hays made an attempt to explain the pleasure and torment of repetition with the support of Sigmund Freud and Roland Barthes’ concepts. According to Hays repetitions are attempts of a single being to a certain primal state perceived as free of any tension. In a similar way Rosalind Krauss explained a motif of a grate present in Modernistic art and also exceptionally frequent in Eisenman’s work. -/- Annex Architecture is still writing Balzac novels. Peter Eisenman and literature -/- Architecture’s approach to writing, script or literature, present within Peter Eisenman’s work, is an exceptional phenomenon, furthermore a complex one. The article considers four possible relations. The first one relates to Eisenman’s characteristics as a person extremely gifted with the ability to wordplay, which very ‘play’ reveals skills to create architectural images. In the second approach the attention has been paid to Eisenman’s interests – in the first period of his oeuvre – in linguistic works by Noam Chomsky and his transformational-generative grammar. The third kind of relations applied to overcoming the need for autonomy of architecture (and of modernist aesthetics at the same time) and renew interests in questions of meaning in architecture. The fourth sort of relations occurred when Eisenman started to create reflections of historic or literary narrations in architecture – ‘stone stories’ and architectural fictions of their kind. -/- Bernard Tschumi -/- From perversion to deconstruction In Bernard Tschumi’s writings from the 1970s and 1980s we can find a transposition of important threads of post-structuralist ideas deriving from Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida’s works. The analysis of the architect’s writings also shows roots in Phillippe Sollers, Michel Foucault and Denis Hollier’s works. The analysis of borrowed elements from the beginnings of Tschumi’s theoretical activity may be helpful in explaining the contents of his later writings motre inspired by philosophy of deconstruction. The set of his earliest views was inspired by Marxism, Neo Marxism and French Structuralism, mainly by the writings of Henri Levebre and Guy Debord. From the thought of Levebre Tschumi took interest for city as not only a question of urbanistics but also a political issue. From Debord’s concepts he borrowed a conviction about the role of situational violation for changes in the society structure. Some of these beliefs were preserved in his own concepts of architecture as an event. From this period derived also his will to change conservative elements of social structure not by means of political revolution but of theoretical and creative activity. Tschumi acknowledged that the effective way of the proceedings towards achieving his aims would be accepting the role of both a critical intellectualist and architecture expert who would not hide away his left-wing orientation. The speculations defined by the architect as ‘revolting analyses’ were about to characterise contradictions which tear the society apart, penetrate architecture and constitute the basis of culture. Spreading away of the conscience of false assumptions hidden away in various disciplines could have weakened cohesion of a conservative society and influence the will to change among the elites. This way the beginnings of political revolution were rooted in philosophy of architecture. In 1977 Tschumi published his text entitled The Pleasure of Architecture inspired by Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text, it also included some concepts derived from Georges Bataille and Jacques Derrida. First of all the author used Barthes’s concept which made an assumption that literary activity is pervaded by the spirit of resistance towards social rules, and Tschudi transferred this remark onto architecture. From the ideas of Bataille, acquainted via Holier’s work, he derived his belief that two concepts of space, a conceptual one (defined as Pyramid) and a sensual one (defined as Labirynth), not losing their distinct features, they join in the concept of experienced space which exceeds contradictions. The exceeding itself was defined as the basic rule of architecture and it was referred to situations in which architecture not only negates social needs, but also disavows its own tradition. Crossing the borders applies not only to political issues or permanent rules of the very discipline but also interfering with other fields (especially literature and film). The fact that architecture is associated with organising events turned Tschumi’s attention to questions of violence that result from upsetting architectural order of a given building by its users and the one hand, and on the other from forcing the users to specific acts imposed by this very order. The analysis of the concepts used by Tschumi in his early writings indicates that they are close to definitions that would occur in his reflection in the following years influenced by philosophy of deconstruction. -/- Approaching deconstruction Tschumi in his theories developed in the 1980s presumed that the current social world had undergone a deep process of decay, and the reaction against which ought to be based on ordering-up actions, and also preserving the main outline of disintegration of the whole and its elements in the state of conflict. The statements concerning the nature of the contemporary to Tschumi social relations were applied by him to the world of architecture, this led him to coming up with designing strategies that took into consideration the destabilised character of conditions in which works of architecture were created. New ways of conduct invented by Tschumi drew their inspiration from literature and research on literature, psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, structuralism and post structuralism, and eventually also deconstruction philosophy. The proposed methods were opposed by their author both to functionalism continuity trends and postmodern architecture. Tschumi’s proposals contradicted any forms of conservatism or traditionalism in political sphere as well as in reference to tendencies in architecture. They were not simple contradictions of social or architectural rules, they intrude them from the inside, weaken or escalate the already existing incongruities, they move the boundaries between the areas. Revolutionary illusions about the possibility of radical changes were replaced with strategies which completed, tainted or test former rules in the series of formal games of permutation and combination. Quite different from avant-garde formalism Tschumi’s games were not about maintaining the autonomy of a given area, but on the contrary – polluting it with other areas’ influences. Tschumi enjoyed demonstrating illusions of architecture concerning simple relations between form and function, or between form and meaning. Making use of Freud, Lacan and Foucault’s research he introduced a category of “madness” into architecture allowing an observation that the recognised norms are nothing but merely ones of many possible principles of behaviour, and their recognised status resulted from unjustified hindering innovativeness which is crucial for architecture. To reborn architecture’s capability of changing Tschumi also made use of Barthes’s discoveries concerning rules of narration and works by writers who applied in their writing knowledge on linguistics. Making a work’s author unclear by various mechanical transformations of its elements was however apparent only, and formal rigours imposed on the process of designing liberated possibilities difficult to obtain in more traditional creative action. Another mode of acting introduced by Tschumi was combining his work of elements deriving from outside architecture; joining space records with notation of motion and events accompanying architectural objects among others. These architectural and extra-architectural elements were not unified, on the contrary their heterogenous and conflictual character was stressed. This is how shock, anxiety and instability, typical for live in great metropolises, infiltrated architecture. Taking some ideas of deconstruction philosophy as a pattern Tschumi also took into critical consideration in his essays traditional in architecture oppositions between form and figuration, or theory and practice. By combining various inspirations he eventually worked out an idea of architectural event, which he understood as a series of actions contesting its own field, redefining its sources, principles and elements. An event, understood in this way, was not so much producing works as rather creating conditions of their production and at the same time designing the society different from a hierarchic one. -/- Park of deconstruction Among numerous philosophical strategies of deconstruction most frequently used was questioning the practice of strong opposition of two reasons. In many cases Bernard Tschumi’s writings just consider functioning of the conflict juxtaposition of the ideas of structure and ornament or theory and practice in history of architecture. Violation of traditional relations between terms of this kind, both old and modern, raised Jacques Derrida’s objections, when he was induced for the first time to co-operate with architects’ milieu. During this long lasting thought exchange the philosopher eventually acknowledged Bernard Tschumi’s arguments for reasoning the encroachment of architecture’s fundamental rules. Deconstruction applied in architecture was not a simple transposition or analogy of practices that had been applied by philosophy of deconstruction. We may even say that considering architectural terms became an important formula of deconstruction. Architecture understood in philosophical way became something beyond the practice and theory of its own discipline, a sort of metaphysics of both philosophy and architecture. The deliberate encroachment of simplicity of dividing architecture into theory and practice, for the first time became a clear aim for Tschumi in his drawings and texts entitled The Manhattan Transcripts. The contents of this series of works was a record of characteristic features of this New York district in such a way that not only objects were the subject of the record but also relations between objects, people and events. The record was about to take into consideration a conflict character of elements of this representation and at the same time to avoid applying to them the rule of mimetism. The record became a form of reflection over the very record by an increased control over the ways of representation. Architecture which was considered in the The Manhattan Transcripts was not directed to fulfill the needs of inhabitation or production, it was rather related with hitherto usually marginalised liminal situations: building ostentatiously big monuments, religious cult, war etc. Architecture operating in these relations focused also the attention on the included in it continuous tendency to overpass its own restrictions, the role of violence as its not recognised factor, or the meaning of excess and shock in its operation. Architecture moving from reason towards madness became even more visible in the design of Parisian Parc de la Villette, whose pavilions were defined as folies (in French it means both small park buildings and follies). The park was supposed to be on the one hand a reflection of traditional society disintegration while on the other it questioned basic rules of producing a work of architecture. The traditional rules of designing, based on ordering up, were replaced with the strategies of dysfunction and dissociation. In Tschumi’s opinion methods of this kind may be equivalent of what Derrida named différance. Instead of aiming at mergence, any diversity, plays or variations were strengthen. Tschumi’s texts, in which he explained his attitude, were completed by Derrida’s extent statement entitled Point de folie – Maintenant l’architecture. Derrida’s article is the most significant of all his statements on architecture as a form of thinking and activity. According to the philosopher, architecture should divide space (in French defined as espacement), what enables both thinking and action – it arranges the space of an event. Tschumi’s buildings, defined as folies, in an essential way destabilise any created order, and at the same time they refresh it. Derrida’s statement suggests that architecture may become both metaphor of an order merging a language or a society but also of inner forces which deconstruct and reconstruct it. Therefore architecture is at the same time a construction, a deconstruction and a reconstruction. Parc de la Villette stands out in this system with its attempt to step beyond the scheme of an easy repetition and its heading for chances of achieving more radical otherness. -/- Conclusion Destruction as construction. Paradoxes of deconstruction in architecture -/- Scepticism about persistence and common importance of fundamental values of human culture evinced in philosophers and writers’ works as early as in Greek antiquity, nevertheless it was not expressed so strongly as in the second half of the 20th century. Especially in Heidegger’s work Being and Time (although originated in 1927, still influential in all later philosophy) the following states were characterised: the state of losing the ground (Abgrund), of being out of sight (Unheimlichkeit) and of being out of dwelling (Un-zuhause-sein) – as the basis of self-confidence of conscious being there (Dasein). The entire criticism of philosophy of home and dwelling draws the inspiration from this early writing of the German philosopher, it combines crisis of basic terms of metaphysics with social conditions which are dictated by living in large metropolis. The crisis of both metaphysical foundation and home appears to be similar to the situation of weakening the relations between a man and his dwelling in extensively expanding cities. Whereas philosophy, as well as many disciplines of social sciences, have diagnosed for a long time the destabilisation of fundamental ideas of Western culture and crucial changes in the ways of dwelling, architecture itself occurred to be “the last fortress of metaphysics” (J. Derrida). Among contemporary architects, Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi were the ones who engaged most decidedly in the issues of critical analysis of architecture foundation and its social role. Both the architects noticed new formulas of contemporary social and individual existence, tremendously different from the entire history, and at the same time they affirmed lack of adequacy of architecture concepts to new situations. Both Eisenman and Tschumi used to describe the existing architecture as a tool for consolidation of highly integrated and hierarchised societies, and also as a discipline extremely uncoincidental with the current character of social life based on ideas of freedom and diversity. The means to transform architecture and make a factor of further social changes out of it, was a concept that accentuated revealing the inner contradictions of this discipline, and considering them in designing strategies. Eisenman’s activity, in regard of what has just been noticed, was focused on questioning the basic rules of traditionally comprehended architecture, especially the rule of purpose. The American architect noticed that the concept of architecture as fulfilment the need of location, hides away the fact that the location has to be constantly reconsidered, and hence it is overtaken by change (dislocation). Therefore new concept of architecture propounded architectural activity to translocate the concept of location – more than before – but also to change its status perpetually. Such comprehended architecture should claim, as its main purpose, the constant revision of this purpose and create itself anew permanently. Even Eisenman’s earliest designs of houses nos. I-IV broke with such values as the sense of safety, closeness and familiarity, and just on the contrary they accentuated senses of strangeness, homelessness and loss of confidence. The contradictions within architecture noticed by Tschumi referred to combination of intellectual and sensual values in architecture, when their non-appropriation was defeated by an additional condition, namely the way of experience based on pleasure of excess, marked by insanity. The features of folly were especially visible in his designs of gardens, where the order of planning was mixed with sensual experience introduced by particular elements (both the ones created by nature, and the buildings defined as folies). Parc de la Villette designed by the French architect in Paris put in question not only the common understanding of purpose in architecture but also the ideas of order and integrity, as its plan was based on the combination of independent layers with records of grids of points, various lines and planes. The architecture that collides inadequate elements with each other was supposed to be a kind of an event with no beginning and no end. The architecture treated as an event became a form of a space weakened articulation that maintains its diversity and lack of accordance of the elements building it up. The analyses of Eisenman and Tschumi’s theoretical writings indicate how much the aims of architecture have actually changed; instead of supporting social persistence, the architecture is rather intensifying contradictions, and instead of providing people with the sense of safety, it sublimes danger. From simple acts of defamiliarisation, increasing the distance to itself and enhancing the role of theory, through discomfort, anxiety, not feeling someone at home, weirdness, excess, shock and violence, architecture reached the edge of stability and uncertainty, only to make an attempt at penetrating what is impossible and unutterable, and recording what cannot become the subject of any records. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Historical Narratives and the Meaning of NationalismLloyd KramerThe vast, expanding literature on nationalism may well defy every generalization except a familiar, general theme of intellectual history: texts about nationalism have always drawn their perspectives and passions from the evolving political and cultural contexts in which their authors have lived. Modern accounts of nationalism show the unmistakable traces of political, military, and cultural conflicts in every decade of the (...) twentieth century—from the era of nationalist rivalries before World War I to the redefinitions of gender, literature, and history that have emerged in contemporary postmodernism, postcolonialism, and multiculturalism.This connection between the texts of nationalist scholarship and the modern contexts of politics and culture suggests why historical narratives of nationalism have become part of the history of nationalism itself. Nationalism’s scholarly interpreters cannot easily separate themselves from the objects of their analysis, and their interpretations are often as diverse and fragmented as the nations they describe. This essay enters the debate on nationalism, describes recurring themes in the historical literature, and replicates a key characteristic of the historiography by stressing that the complexity of nationalism and its interpreters resists every simplifying, comprehensive definition. Histories of nationalism provide a striking example of how the history of ideas never reaches a point of uncontested closure and never finally escapes the political and cultural contexts in which all historical narratives are produced.Like most analysts of nationalism, I assume that it is one of the decisive forces in modern history and that its significance demands careful, critical analysis. It also calls for always incomplete definitions, one of which can be drawn from the German historian Peter Alter. Nationalism is “both an ideology and a political movement which holds the nation and sovereign nation-state to be crucial indwelling values, and which manages to mobilize the political will of [End Page 525] a people or a large section of the population.”1 Nationalist ideas are thus a distinctive form of modern thought that shapes the political actions and cultural identities of individuals as well as groups. The meanings of nationalism and national identity typically depend on various dichotomies that define the nation in terms of its differences from other places or people—the dynamic process of identity formation that has received wide attention in contemporary cultural studies. My own view of the “oppositional” structures in nationalist thinking coincides with the concise description by Peter Sahlins: “National Identity is a socially constructed and continuous process of defining ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’.... National identities... do not depend on the existence of any objective linguistic or cultural differentiation but on the subjective experience of difference.”2 Sahlins thus assumes that something called national identity is “there,” but he also insists that national consciousness is a “constructed” identity. Nationalism, in short, does not express or reflect a natural, primordial reality.The assumption that nationalisms are historical rather than natural phenomena shapes most of the scholarly literature, so that the study of nationalism leads to historical analysis rather than to biology or physical geography. Although there have been countless historical studies of nationalism in different periods, cultures, and conflicts,3 my discussion will refer to a small number of narratives that have made especially significant theoretical claims about the nature of nationalism. There is of course no way to analyze such theories without exclusions and generalizations, which I shall provide by focusing mostly on works about Europe and dividing the patterns of historical analysis into the following broad categories: (1) the description of nationalism as a central component of modernization, reflecting and also shaping intellectual, cultural, economic, social, and political transitions from premodern to modern history; (2) the claim that nationalisms are modern religious movements, related to but also displacing earlier religions; (3) the argument that nationalism is a linguistic, literary construction that depends on new forms of communication, intellectuals, and narratives; (4) the description of nationalism as a discourse of gender and ethnicity that shapes individual identities and also expresses anxieties about sexuality, culture, and respectability; and (5) the argument that nationalisms can be divided into categories (good/bad, Western/Eastern, [End Page 526] political/cultural) and phases that represent sharp differences in the development of modern... (shrink)

Tsvetan Todorov, in his book Us and Them. French Thinking on Human Diversity, asked the following question: “How does one, how should one relate to those who do not belong to the same community as we do?” This question has been posed somewhat differently by intellectuals of the Americas anxious to develop paradigms of identity that will contribute to the successful construction of a society whose aim is to integrate heterogeneous ethnic groups: “How does one, how should one relate (...) to those who are members of our new society but who live either on its margins or who are frequently considered as different?” The mixed-race (métissage) approach, applied to the Latin Americas situation, was in part a response to this question. Here the “us” did not designate metropolitan Europeans engaged in thinking about the “others,” that is to say non-Europeans, but Latin Americans thinking about relations among various dominant groups and the varying “others” within their own society, since the “others” were part of “us.” The meaning of “us” is equally problematic when applied to North America. “What happens when words like ‘community’ and ‘us’ cease to have the clear and immediate meaning that Todorov seems to ascribe to them?” Sherry Simon recently asked. Although offering a general critique of the monological conception of culture and identity – a critique based on Bakhtin's work on polyphony and dialogism, on James Snead's investigation of the hybrid nature of several texts belonging to the European canon (such as The Odyssey and The Divine Comedy), and on the studies of Angelo Ara and Claudio Magris in regard to the heterogeneity of Trieste – she nevertheless begins her essay on a personal note, describing life in the multicultural city of Montreal, where “many children come out of mixed or immigrant marriages, some going to French schools, some to English,” and who can not “define themselves as products of a single culture” (pp. 15-16). Although I agree with Sherry Simon that the “us” of culture is never a given (it should be mentioned that Todorov himself writes that we must “give up basing our thinking on such a distinction” [between us and them] p. 421), it is essential here to emphasize the special ambiguity of the conception of “us” in the ex-colonies of the New World, where the “collision of cultures” implied not only, on the one hand, a confrontation among Spanish, Portuguese, British, and French colonists, but also between the colonists and the African slaves as well as with the immigrants who arrived after independence. Todorov's conception of nationhood (p. 422) as “a more or less perfect (although never total) coincidence of a State and a culture” - which he toned down a bit by adding that a culture is often identified with a particular region, a group of countries, or even a stratum of the population (pp. 424-425) - is even less applicable to the new societies of America than it is to Europe. Not only are we talking about hybrid societies (and what society isn't, to some degree?), but of societies conceived as hybrid, either multicultural (Canada) or mixed-race (Latin America). If, as Ernest Renan insisted at the end of the XIXth century, the idea of the modern nation is based on a conscious disregard for our diverse ethnic origins, the concepts of identity of the societies of the New World have often been based on an explicit symbolization of their heterogeneity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Keeping Philosophy in Mind:Shadworth H. Hodgson's Articulation of the Boundaries of Philosophy and ScienceThomas W. StaleyIntroductionShadworth H. Hodgson's (1832–1912) contributions to Victorian intellectual discourse have faded from prominence over the past century. However, despite his current anonymity, Hodgson's case is important to an understanding of the historical split between philosophy and science in late nineteenth century Britain. In particular, his example illuminates the specific role played by developing concepts (...) of the mind in a period of deep transition in the British intellectual community. His virtual disappearance from the record, I contend, is indicative also of the disappearance of his form of philosophy as a vital social project. His ideas, rather than being rejected, were instead largely neglected—they became lost as philosophical discussion moved elsewhere, both conceptually and institutionally. However, in the inaugural volume of Mind in 1876, Hodgson's ideas initially found a prominent place in a central dialogue over the position of philosophy with respect to science. There, and throughout his career, Hodgson engaged in the defense of an intellectual tradition he regarded as under threat from psychological science. Both his particular formulation of an ongoing role for philosophy and his own uneasy position in the intellectual environment of late Victorian Britain shed significant light on an under-examined issue [End Page 289] of the period: the fraught relationship between philosophy and science as competing enterprises engaged in the study of the human mind."Philosophy" and "science" are easily construed as partnered intellectual complexes in modern Western society. However, closer scrutiny of the historical record shows that the two terms—whether as theoretical referents or actors' categories—have often reflected divergent priorities and that transitions from "philosophical" to "scientific" terms have been contentious. In examining the birth of natural science out of natural philosophy during the Enlightenment, the historian Andrew Cunningham has emphasized how the reordering of intellectual fields created new conflictive relationships between philosophy, science, and religion.1 He reminds us that the process of scientific secularization was but one of a set of constitutive shifts among these human activities, and that the earlier natural philosophy thus played by fundamentally different rules than its successor. A similar story can be told about the late nineteenth-century transition I am considering: in a nutshell, to borrow a phrase from Cunningham, men did not start doing mental science until they stopped doing moral philosophy. However, this time, philosophy already stood in competition with existing scientific institutions, sparking a more severe contest for authority. As mental science began to develop along the lines of the natural disciplines, Hodgson and others feared little would remain as a distinctive domain for philosophy as such, moral or otherwise. His efforts on the part of philosophy thus represent one front in an intellectual "turf war"—what recent scholars have called "boundary work," shoring up the institutional positions of different intellectual enterprises competing for authority in the world.2 Gieryn's formative analysis of boundary work was based on the contemporaneous example of John Tyndall's campaign to promote scientific over religious authority in Victorian Britain, but this was much more than a two-way struggle. The early career of Mind bears witness to a closely related, but less discussed, battle for influence between philosophy and science, in which the journal itself served as a critical "boundary object," a medium for enforcement of the distinctions between these two intellectual fields.3 [End Page 290]Thomas Dixon has recently surveyed the origins of this shift. Like Cunningham, Dixon emphasizes the constitutive differences in scope and orientation of the two intellectual enterprises, salient among them the secularization of the new human sciences.4 This process—begun tentatively by Thomas Brown and brought to fruition by Bain, Spencer, and Darwin—involved wholesale shifts in the scholarly linguistic complex, from a set of several mental categories rooted in Christian philosophical categories—affections, passions, sentiments, etc.—to a novel, explicitly "scientific," and singular grouping of emotions. While the older tradition dominant until mid-century had understood the broad range of mental phenomena as largely rational and voluntary, the new emotions were formulated as more circumscribed in purview, subconscious or autonomic in action... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West by E. CramNathan StormerViolent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West. By E. Cram. Oakland: University of California Press, 2022. 292 pp. Cloth $85.00, paper $34.95. ISBN: 0520379470.E. Cram’s Violent Inheritance is an exceptional work that presents a distinctive synthesis of queer, decolonial, and mixed-method scholarship. The goal of the book, (...) Cram states, is to both “reimagine the place of racialized sexualities in contemporary conversations about environment, energy, and systems of violence” and “anchor these questions in contested memories of the North American West” (5). The book does just that, drawing from many contemporary streams of thought in rhetoric as well as the environmental and energy humanities to fashion a new and subtle analytic of infrastructures of feeling, which is supported by a range of conceptual innovations. For readers of this journal, Cram’s choice to ground theory quite literally in the land will be, I suspect, highly rewarding for those with interests crossing a wide range of topics: queer studies, violence, affect, Indigenous thought, sexuality and modernity, memory studies, rhetoric and materialism, ecological thought, ambience, regionalism. The breadth of scholarly dialogues that Cram harmonizes is simply impressive, reflecting the many years and the care they have devoted to this project.The book is composed of five chapters including a conceptual first chapter followed by four separate yet reinforcing studies. These are framed by a tidy introduction that prepares the reader admirably for the synergistic work to follow and a conclusion that stresses the bonds between the chapters without compromising the particularity of each study. In that regard, Violent Inheritance is both a single work guided by several cross-cutting ideas and questions and an anthology of sorts that prompts a series of discrete, rich conversations. The careful writing is evident in every paragraph, often presenting the reader with elegant, thought-provoking formulations [End Page 199] of deep onto-epistemological problems that never feel weighted down by the complexity of dwelling on “onto-epistemic” matters.The introduction sets out the question of the book in engaging fashion. Cram asks, in the first sentence, “What does it mean to route ‘sexuality’ through modernity’s relationship to energy?” They use nineteenth-century eugenic physician John Harvey Kellogg’s Rocky Mountain climatic therapeutics to exemplify how “climate and the environment” became crucial to “the production of theories of sexuality” (3). Cram proposes energy to be “perhaps the dominant relationship between humans and the environment” and points to the ways that “racial and sexual value” have been assigned to a broad range of practices of “revitalization and exhaustion,” such that “racial and sexual vitality converge in extractivism” (3, 5, 4). In this way, the “bodily vitality” of the “normative sexual subject” demands privileged access to land and the energy that can be taken from it, be it affective or petrochemical. The emergence of sexual modernity, Cram thus contends, is inextricably tied to the regime of energy extraction. Through selected cases, Cram follows “nonlinear traces of this regime’s enduring materiality and sedimentation: the ecological, energetic, and affective inheritance that I call ‘land lines’” (6). The term “land lines” refers to how “political and economic actions tether, or forge connections, between domains of sexuality and land use,” and “names the aggregation of layers of cultural sediment or the violent inheritance of any given place.... As method, to trace land lines asks in earnest how places of memory and memorialization mediate these relationships” (6,7, emphasis original). The choice of the North American West follows from Cram having grown up there and the particular land lines that bind them to its violent inheritance, as well as the West’s stature as a colonial reservoir of myth and abundant energy.The separate chapters are saturated with meticulous detail, studied reflection, and constant insight that reward slow reading, making a synoptic view misleading. Nevertheless, chapter 1 travels through the 1893 journal of author Owen Wister (who helped create the myth of the West) to map a rhetoric of reinvigorated, masculinized settler sexuality by way of access to the West and the healing energy... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.2 (2004) 220-221 [Access article in PDF] Clyde Lee Miller. Reading Cusanus: Metaphor and Dialectic in a Conjectural Universe. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2003. Pp. viii + 276. Cloth, $64.95. In an age where the idea of postmodernity gains more and more ground, the period of postmodern thinking has turned into a major challenge to the human mind. Whereas the (...) project of modernity revokes itself through the contradictions it has generated, the need to find new perspectives makes us wonder what happened in the 15th century when the Renaissance paved the way to modernity and still contained seeds of alternative developments which for one reason or another did not get a chance to germinate. This is an invitation to concentrate on the work of Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) as one of the major Renaissance thinkers.Miller's book is an attempt to promote the understanding of Cusanus by a close reading of six of the major works of this author. In reading these works he focuses on Cusan thought both as this thought presents itself in these works, and as it appears against the background of traditional philosophy, especially when seen in the light of the Neoplatonic tradition.The works in question are the books On Learned Ignorance (De docta ignorantia) and On Conjectures (De coniecturis), aptly presented under the title: "Envisiong the Whole," and "Conjecturing Oneness and Otherness" respectively. The remaining four works concern the The Layman: About Mind (Idiota de mente) in which Cusanus develops his understanding of the mind and of intellectual authenticity; The Vision of God (De visione Dei), a treatise on mystical theology and an invitation to enter the divine mystery through a combination of prayer and reflection; On the Not Other (De non aliud), a highly speculative work on divine immanence and transcendence; and The Hunt for Wisdom (De venatione sapientiae) in which Cusanus gives an account of his philosophy by connecting it with the metaphor of a hunt in ten different fields. [End Page 220]Miller begins his book with an Introduction in which he outlines his approach to Cusanus, taking the cue from Plato's image of the divided line with its emphasis on the dialectical distinction between noesis (intellect) and dianoia (reason), and from the dialogue On the Hidden God (De Deo abscondito), a brief discussion between a Heathen and a Christian in which Cusanus connects the theme of learned ignorance with the act of adoration. The distinction between reason and intellect is important because the work of Cusanus is a continuous effort to cope with the meaning of distinctions and their impact on our ways of thinking. The reference to the dialogue is significant because this text clearly indicates that the quest for God is the central issue in the thought of Cusanus, and that the notion of ignorance is actually connected with the theoretical and practical meaning of God.In his discussion of the six works Miller follows the text of Cusanus which he presents in the form of argumentative summaries and complementary reflections. His presentation is lucid and to the point. In his reflections on the text and context of Cusan thought he gives valuable insights into the historical position of Cusanus and the manner in which Nicholas appropriated and transformed traditional ways of thinking. At the same time Miller keeps track of the reception of Cusanus by contemporary scholarship and the various interpretations it has to offer.The book ends with a "reprise" of the previous chapters which provides "an overall perspective on Nicholas' thought and its main themes and proposals" (241). The central elements of this perspective are "the metaphysics of the Infinite and the finite" (242) and the doctrine of perspectival relations as it has been developed in De coniecturis. What connects them with one another finds expression in the distinction (and transition) between explanatory and exploratory metaphors (252); that is, between metaphors such as "image-exemplar" and "unfolding-enfolding," which provide explanatory structures for the interpretation of reality, and metaphors such... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Fear and Loathing in Academe:Gonzo Scholarship and the War Against TourismDaniel StempelIWhen I retired in 1985 I chose as my mantra an academic version of a famous general's farewell to his troops: "Old scholars never die—they just fade away into the stacks." Now that I am an octogenarian, I have faded away into total invisibility, but, like Tithonus, I am not inaudible. I hope my voice will be (...) strident enough to disturb the utopian dreams of a new generation, although I doubt that it will wake them from their dogmatic slumbers. My decision to return to the wars of intellect was occasioned by a chance discovery as I haunted the periodical stacks. I noted the name of an old friend in the title of an article and was surprised to find him pilloried as both a "liberal white Protestant" and a "white supremacist," terms which do not, in my experience, necessarily go together.The article, "Pacific Scholarship, Literary Criticism, and Touristic Desire: The Specter of A. Grove Day," written by Paul Lyons, a member of the University of Hawai'i English department's Cultural Studies group, uses bell, book, and candle of the new postcolonial faith in a rite of exorcism to dispel the evil influences of commercial tourism.1 As every exorcist knows, the rite demands that a demon must be called by his name and Lyons has chosen to demonize a deceased member of the English department. Grove Day came to Hawaii in 1944 and retired in 1969. He served as chairman from 1948 to 1953 and taught the course in Literature of the Pacific until his retirement in 1969. He began as a freelance writer long before he decided to enter graduate school at [End Page 95] Stanford and continued to publish more than fifty books on Hawaii and the Pacific. In 1979 he received the State Award for Literature. He died in 1994 in a plunge from an upper floor of a retirement home. Paul Lyons, by his own admission, came to Hawaii in 1990 knowing nothing of its history and culture but soon became a self-appointed authority on Hawaii, its colonial past and present, and its postcolonial future, eagerly embracing the ideas disseminated by the Center for Hawaiian Studies at the university.His article begins with a pretentious elaboration of the method he plans to use to raze the Potemkin village of tourism. Invoking the authority of Hegel on appearance and reality in a passage he has found cited by Žižek, he follows Dean MacCannell, who has adapted Erving Goffman's distinction between dramatic front and back: the entertaining scene presented to the tourist public contrasts with the backstage machinery of the stagehands who put it all together to deceive gullible visitors.2 He combines this with a quotation he has found in a book by William V. Spanos, the founder and former editor of Boundary 2, taken from a journalist's view of the Vietnam War, complaining that they had all been "deeply backgrounded." These are enlisted in the service of MacCannell's quest for "authenticity" as the touchstone of all encounters with other cultures, including the tourist experience.Had Lyons, instead of accepting MacCannell's interpretation of Goffman's early work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), taken a closer look at this witty and ironic study of social behavior in a small community in the Shetland Islands, he would have found that Goffman makes no judgment on the comparative authenticity of either front or back. He utilizes what may be called the J. Alfred Prufrock theory of interaction between individuals and the groups in which they find themselves: "There will be time, there will be time / To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet...." MacCannell, in contrast, sees the tourist as a Tennysonian Ulysses in pursuit of a horizon of authenticity that recedes into infinity, "whose margin fades / Forever and forever as I move."Of course, the front/back and foreground/background binary oppositions and the insistence on authenticity are commonplaces rooted in the ubiquitous literary and philosophical tradition of "All the world's a stage" and require no... (shrink)

Continuing the dialogue: postcolonial feminist scholarship and Bourdieu — discourses of culture and points of connection Postcolonial feminist theories provide the analytic tools to address issues of structural inequities in groups that historically have been socially and economically disadvantaged. In this paper we question what value might be added to postcolonial feminist theories on culture by drawing on Bourdieu. Are there points of connection? Like postcolonial feminists, he puts forward a position that aims to unmask oppressive structures. We (...) argue that, while there are points of connection, there are also epistemologic and methodologic differences between postcolonial feminist perspectives and Bourdieu's work. Nonetheless, engagement with different theoretical perspectives carries the promise of new insights — new ways of ‘seeing’ and ‘understanding’ that might enhance a praxis‐oriented theoretical perspective in healthcare delivery. (shrink)

Ex interiore ipso exeas. Preface. This book reconstructs the history of a still open dialectics between several ethoi, that is, shared codes of unwritten rules, moral traditions, or self-aware attempts at reforming such codes, and ethical theories discussing the nature and justification of such codes and doctrines. Its main claim is that this history neither amounts to a triumphal march of reason dispelling the mist of myth and bigotry nor to some other one-way process heading to some pre-established goal, but (...) instead to a chain of controversies where the partners’ will to win unintentionally yields a wealth of insights on human existence that has still something to teach us. -/- 1. The Hellenic moral tradition. -/- Two different traditions of morality in vi-v century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. -/- 2. Plato and the Good. -/- Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates rejoinder to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 3. Aristotle and practical philosophy. -/- Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistency in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater families, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics, is illustrated. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexes, or ‘dispositions’. Prudence, or better, practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with boùleusis or deliberation is discussed, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 4. Cynics and Stoics: ethics as therapy. -/- The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place that was given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of the science of well-being aiming, more than pleasure understood as in the popular view, the reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Roman and Imperial Moralists. -/- The chapter is dedicated to the reconstruction of a particular kind of literature, whose specific features have long been under-stressed, namely the Roman and Imperial moral literature. Cicero is treated at some length, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is given pride of place, stressing the novelty of his approach to ethics as cognitive therapy, in this case just following an already existing new wave of interest after nineteenth-century oblivion justified by alleged lack of authentic ‘philosophical’ character. -/- 6. The Hebrew moral tradition. -/- A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torah (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Levitic is stressed as the turning point when the stress on mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, starts being combined with legal tradition yielding the change in the sensibility of the Second Temple time. -/- 7. Second Temple Judaism. -/- This chapter describes the Long March leading from the post-exile Zadokite restoration to the first-century aevi vulgaris. The first topic reconstructed is the Zadokite theology of the double retribution. The second is the alternative Enochic tradition consistently rejecting the central role of the Temple, the Priesthood and worship as atonement for sins and offering as an alternative God’s unlimited mercy and preaching mercy, not sacrifice as the way of behaving requested by God. Wisdom literature, the third subject discusses, is a kind of third way, on the one hand increasingly critical towards the double retribution and ruling theology’s optimism facing the world as it is and on the other mocking at the Enochic current as a band of dreamers and visionaries. The third way consists in disenchantment facing the word as it is combined with a refusal of vain and childish hope of prizes for the righteous, suggesting instead the leading idea of right deeds for righteousness’s sake. Rabbi Hillel, Rabbi Yeshua and Philo of Alexandria are described as the three leading figures at the culminating point of such process of emergence of a new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This starting point consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, whose meaning is, arguably, more consistent than a long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine made us believe. And Christian morality, vis-à-vis allegedly legalist ‘Ancient Testament’ teachings, is less of a novelty than most early Christian writers announced. -/- 8. Talmudic moral doctrines and proto-Christian paraenesis. -/- The first three sections examine the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirke Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deot, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexes and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was "the tool by which the world was built"; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous, but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The last two sections examine first the various Christian currents and then Gnostic para-Christian or non-Christian currents as well as Manicheism. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure, purest Judaism. The last section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manicheism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. -/- 9. Christianity as “philosophy”. -/- The chapter reconstructs the stormy story of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and several rhetorical topics from the Stoic and Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua himself had been influenced by cynical preachers, is a proof of the necessity to translate the original Christian message in a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 10. Ethics in the Arabic-Islamic Philosophy. -/- The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on the retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince, had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries, a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with the disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 11. Ethics in the Jewish philosophy. -/- The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place for the first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed too a few traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Tora and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirke Avot could be translated. -/- 12. The practical philosophy revival in Latin Europe. -/- A reconstruction is carried out of a fresh start of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium rescuing a Platonic and Augustinian legacy, with Anselm and Peter Abelard. In this phase remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions, gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of a full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. -/- 13. Scholastic practical philosophy: Thomas Aquinas. -/- Aquinas’s ethics is theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to the repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave pure nature incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too ambitious, and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Prima Secundae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas was able to solve the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from the knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethics, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of the death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not the Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is no way an ethical ‘absolutism’, as both the traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularists tend to believe, but rather an ethic of prudential judgment on the individual case. Exceptions to this approach – or better the result of logical fallacies – are provided by the thesis of the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of so-called intrinsically evil acts, a thesis that would simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences that Thomas did not live long enough to draw. -/- 14. Scholastic practical philosophy: John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. A reconstruction is carried out of the ethical doctrines by both most authoritative Franciscan doctors. Their continuity with Aquinas is vindicated against prejudice carried by centuries of polemics within the Catholic Church and tendentious disparaging of both as forerunners of execrable Reformation. Besides aspects of continuity, also the important novelties are illustrated, first John’s abandonment of Aquinas’s and Augustine’s eudemonism, asserting righteousness for righteousness’s sake, and then William’s explicit defence of the philosopher’s virtues, that is, natural morality, and his solution to the dilemma of God’s omnipotence and the universal validity of natural law extending to God himself. -/- 15. Aristotelianism interpreted by the Magistri Artium. -/- A reconstruction of the until recently forgotten ethical doctrines by the Parisian Magistri Artium, falsely depicted as ‘Averroists’ and either deprecated as heretics or mistaken for predecessors of modern secularism. In fact, they illustrate a view of ‘natural’ virtue as may be understood by human reason without the assistance by Revelation. -/- Etiamsi daremus Deum non esse. Intermediate considerations. Three considerations may be suggested by the story told in the book. The first one is that intellectual histories have been mounted in the past with the same state of mind as one may mount a war chariot. Such constructions are not very helpful as tools for understanding the past. Wars waged in the past have left the field obstructed by ruins not easy to remove even by those historians who have animated by an impartial academic motivation. They have been influenced too by consequences of past emphasis on some authors and damnatio capitis suffered by others, by stratifications left on sources by secondary literature and translations, by allotment of originally close sources to different literary genres, by the monopolization of religious texts by churches with full cooperation by secular scholars who still fear contamination. The second one is that aware or unaware ethnocentrism has carried various calamities to our comprehension of the past. Their last vestiges have surfaced again in the semi-scholarly discussion on the idea of Europe occasioned by the debate on a project of a European Constitution. Mention of Europe’s Christian roots has been the clumsiest move. Proclamations of such roots were so obvious in what they affirmed as they were totally off-path concerning what they omitted, namely that he modern European moral tradition included legacies from Middle-Eastern wisdom, Hellenic philosophy, Roman Imperial legal literature, and, besides, a Jewish legacy in turn incorporating other more ancient Middle-Eastern legacies and which has been partly conveyed by Christianity. And the Islamic-Arabic philosophy too, in so far it made the Nicomachean Ethics available to Latin Christian scholars, is one more of Europe’s roots. The third is that religious traditionalists and secularist fundamentalists have gone hand in hand for a couple of centuries in either extolling or deprecating the allegedly Modern idea of Ethics without God, first formulated by Hugo Grotius with the claim that natural law would still be valid ‘etiamsi daremus – quod sine summo scelere dari potest – Deum non esse’. The facts are, firstly, that this is not an irreligious claim and Grotius was just a pious and meek Christian and, secondly, that it is not a ‘modern’ claim but rather one more formulation of the claim that there is a natural morality, independent of divine revelation, a claim shared by Moshe ben Maimon, Aquinas and William of Ockham. -/- . (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ignorance, Knowledge, and Omniscience: At and Beyond the Limits of Faith and Reason after Shinran:Reflections on The Boundaries of Knowledge in Buddhism, Christianity, and Science, with Special Attention to Dennis HirotaAmos YongAlthough published in the series Religion, Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, Paul Numrich's edited volume is really about epistemology in religion and science, in particular about human knowing in Buddhist and Christian traditions shaped by the world of science on (...) the one hand, and how such knowing might also inform scientific knowledge on the other hand.1 The panoply of positions is presented by both Buddhist and Christian thinkers.From the Buddhist side, the following arguments are sketched:• that religion and science are complementary modes of knowing and that "understanding the true nature of the physical world" opens up "the way to enlightenment" (Trinh Xuan Thuan).2• that Buddhism is both continuous with (and hence deserving of serious consideration amidst) the epistemic discourses of modernity in many respects and yet also discontinuous with (and hence capable for critically interrogating) modernity's epistemology in other respects as well (David L. McMahan).3• that a Shin Buddhist approach to human knowledge—which in this chapter is brought into dialogue with Martin Heidegger's (1889-1976) notion of truth—opens up to a Kuhnian philosophy of science that emphasizes how paradigmatic shifts occur when new perspectives replace older frameworks (Dennis Hirota).4• that the questions raised by theoretical and quantum physics provide a scientific framework for discussing fundamental epistemological, ontological, and metaphysical questions that Buddhists and Christians might otherwise disagree about (Mark T. Unno).5From the Christian side, the following theses are explored: [End Page 201]• that boundary constraints confront not only working scientists but also Buddhists and Christians, and that these constraints can thus serve as a springboard for a science and religion "trilogue" (Paul O. Ingram).6• that the mystery of creative becoming (God, in traditional Christian terms) is the dynamic backdrop to the ongoing human quest for knowledge (Gordon D. Kaufman).7• that it is at the boundaries of knowledge that genuine creativity occurs (not only scientific creativity but also theological creativity emerges, i.e., the apophatic tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy or the theory of coincidentia oppositorum of Nicholas of Cusa [1401-1464]), and where, as a result of such creative approaches, distinct fields of inquiry open up and different domains of knowledge emerge (Antje Jackelén).8• that theological discourse is paradoxical precisely because such discourse marks the fluid boundaries demarcating sense and nonsense (Tom Christenson).9And, befitting a volume on the encounter between religion (i.e., Buddhism and Christianity) and science, there is a concluding chapter from a physicist on the limits of scientific knowledge that both is encouraged by the gains made by science (presuming a critical realist approach to science's modeling of reality) and yet also is honest about there being much more to learn on small and big questions (John R. Albright).10The foregoing summaries do not do justice to the complexity and sophistication of the chapters in the book. However, they provide a broader context for my interactions with Dennis Hirota's chapter on Shinran's (1173-1263) epistemology and its implications for both religious and scientific knowledge. As an evangelical Christian, I am particularly intrigued by the challenges confronting a Shin Buddhist approach to the sciences, even as I am hopeful that such a consideration will precipitate creative insights both for the Buddhist-Christian encounter and for the religion-science dialogue. I am all the more motivated since I have long been convinced that the religion-science dialogue has been dominated by generically religious approaches and that it is time for more particularistic or even confessional positions to be registered in the discussion.11 I am optimistic that the specificity of the Shin tradition will provide both complementary and contrasting perspectives to the contemporary Buddhist encounter with science that has so far been dominated by the broadly Tibetan approaches of His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (1935-) and those in his circle of dialogue partners,12 and that this will in turn open up new trajectories—even initiate new paradigms, as Hirota suggests—for the Buddhist... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Less Familiar Plato: From Phaedo to Philebus by Kevin CorriganKristian SheeleyCORRIGAN, Kevin. A Less Familiar Plato: From Phaedo to Philebus. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023. xi + 306 pp. Cloth, $110.00Corrigan makes a substantial contribution to the body of Plato scholarship that offers rigorous and textually supported corrections to [End Page 711] superficial (yet all too common) readings of Plato’s dialogues. The book covers a (...) range of core Platonic topics such as embodiment and selfhood, participation in the divine, the critique of artworks in the Republic, the form of the good, love, friendship, desire, and the relationship between mythos and logos. Corrigan devotes his primary attention to the so-called middle dialogues and the Philebus, but to varying degrees he engages with many more Platonic dialogues as well as other philosophers in the Platonic tradition.Chapter 1 combats common interpretations of the Phaedo claiming that Plato wholly denigrates the body and idealizes the state of disembodiment that can only be fully reached in death. Corrigan’s opponents claim that Plato’s negative comments about the body encourage an unhealthy attitude toward the body and the emotions. Corrigan responds by thoroughly showing how the passages about body–soul separation, when read in view of the dialogue as a whole, instead reveal a “model of positive embodiment” that is “full of conscientious protest, good hopes, thoughts, arguments, refutations, and friendship.” Next, Corrigan turns his focus to passages from both Plato and Aristotle that shed light on classic perplexities surrounding the key concept of participation. He argues that “participation” is not the best option for translating methexis or its related terms, and he suggests “having of” or “sharing” as alternative translations. If they are correctly understood, Plato’s discussions of the forms and their relationship to particulars are not vulnerable to criticisms concerning infinite regress or self-predication issues according to Corrigan’s analysis. Chapters 3 and 4 confront Plato’s well-known criticisms of artworks in the Republic and beyond. Here Corrigan makes a highly intriguing point about the role of what he calls “the intelligible painter” in Republic 6 and 7, through which Socrates both sketches and exemplifies “positive philosophical art” as an alternative to the traditional art he criticizes in books 2, 3, and 10. The intelligible painter uses the good as his “perfect and sufficient model” to cultivate himself and others through education, just as Socrates fashions the images of the sun-good, the cave, and other images for the sake of benefitting his interlocutors.In chapter 5 Corrigan draws inspiration from Plotinus’s nuanced understanding of the famous statement in the Republic that the form of the good is “beyond being.” According to the view Corrigan works out, the form of the good is the ground of all intelligibility, and so its relationship to everything that is intelligible can be understood, but it is not in itself intelligible. Chapter 6 takes a close look at the Philebus in light of the Republic’s discussions of the forms and dialectic, the One and the indefinite Dyad of the “unwritten doctrines,” and the work of Speusippus and Xenocrates. Corrigan then shows in chapter 7 how Plato reveals the wide variety of ways in which myths can be used, ranging from the misleading tales of unwise poets to Plato’s own use of stories to aid philosophical logos. Finally, chapters 8 and 9 focus on Plato’s dialogues concerning love and friendship: Symposium, Phaedrus, Lysis, and First Alcibiades, which Corrigan regards as authentic. Corrigan’s main [End Page 712] objective is to show that these dialogues collectively provide a “guide for the perplexed” in matters of love that, contrary to modern criticisms of Plato, is both sensitive and relevant to real, complex, and concrete relationships between humans.As mentioned above, Corrigan sometimes uses terminology and conceptual resources from authors throughout the various ancient and medieval Platonic traditions, including Aristotle and his inheritors. Corrigan’s interpretive method often aims to show that the dialogues harmonize with one another as well as with Plato’s “unwritten teachings,” and he argues that some Neoplatonic interpretations of Plato are correct. This interpretive approach might be seen as... (shrink)