“All Things Are Possible” is a 1920 English translation of the 1905 work by the Ukrainian/Russian existentialist philosopher Shestov. It draws on the aphoristic style of Nietzsche and deals with as diverse issues as science, rationalism and religion. This edition also includes an interesting foreword by D. H. Lawrence. Highly recommended for those with an interest in philosophy, and particularly existentialism. Contents include: “Lev Shestov”, “Note”, “Foreword”, “Zu Fragmentarish Ist Welt Und Leben”, and “Nur Für Schwindelfreie”. Many vintage books (...) such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie Jahrgang: 60 Heft: 1 Seiten: 44-57.

One of the most common judgments of normative life takes the following form: With respect to some things that matter, one item is better than the other, with respect to other things that matter, the other item is better, but all things considered – that is, taking into account all the things that matter – the one item is better than the other. In this paper, I explore how all-things-considered judgments are possible, assuming that they (...) are. In particular, I examine the question of how the different considerations relevant to an all-things-considered judgment come together in a way that gives each relevant consideration its proper due. I propose an answer which provides a unified account of all-things-considered judgments and highlights a deep connection between value and reason. My suggestion is that ‘all things considered’ is, in effect, a placeholder for a more comprehensive, sometimes nameless, value that includes the things considered as parts, and that this more comprehensive value determines how the things considered normatively relate. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:How Things Are: An Introduction to Buddhist Metaphysics by Mark SideritsRick Repetti (bio)How Things Are: An Introduction to Buddhist Metaphysics. By Mark Siderits. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. vi + 204. Paperback $29.95, ISBN 978-0-19-760691-9.How Things Are: An Introduction to Buddhist Metaphysics, by Mark Siderits, presents ten chapters on Buddhist metaphysics that will appeal to readers from any number of backgrounds, e.g. Western (...) philosophers concerned with analytic metaphysics, but also philosophers of mind, epistemologists, phenomenologists, philosophers of meditation, comparative philosophers, non-Buddhist Indian philosophers, and Buddhist philosophers. The book includes an introductory chapter and chapters on the self, the person, fundamental ontology, causation, Buddhist nominalism, time, the external world, the internal world, and anti-realism. This book is a must-read for anyone who wishes to have a robust understanding of Buddhist metaphysics. If nothing else, the reader will appreciate the richness, complexity, and analytic rigor of Buddhist metaphysics that parallels its Western counterparts.This book is an "introduction" to "Buddhist" metaphysics, but much more, as each chapter comprehensively assesses the dialectical progression of arguments, theories, objections, rebuttals, and refinements throughout the history within and between the various schools and traditions of Buddhist metaphysics and their non-Buddhist interlocutors in Indian philosophy, and their analogues in Western philosophy. That comprehensiveness is an obvious feature, but possibly also a bug, as "Introduction to Buddhist Metaphysics" is an understatement. For readers to fully follow any "introduction," they must be able to do so on the basis of the information provided. This is largely but not entirely the case here, for, as someone fairly well-versed in Western and Indian philosophy, I think readers of How Things Are would only be able to fully follow its many abstract, complex, eloquent arguments and assertions if they were already quite well-versed in the history of both. I found it occasionally difficult to follow Siderits' reasoning, despite knowing what he means by certain unexplained terms he relies on, such as "qualia-philes," "cognitively impenetrable," and "the refrigerator illusion."The introductory chapter begins by noting that, contextually, older philosophical systems, e.g. Sāṃkhya and Nyāya, were extant when Buddhism [End Page 1] arose in India, systems which agree that liberation is about disidentifying consciousness with matter, while Buddhism is about disidentifying with anything. Siderits here sketches the eightfold path and its meditative core, noting that "the careful observation of mental states cultivated in some types of meditational practice is said to provide empirical evidence in support of key philosophical theses" (p. 11). As keen as Siderits is elsewhere to uncover problems, however, this description glosses over the fact that Buddhist meditative instructions are formulated precisely to "confirm" the "key philosophical theses" of momentariness, impersonality, and causal interdependence, in which case practitioners are looking for these things in ways that generate their perception; thus the claim that meditative experiences count as "empirical evidence of key Buddhist ideological theses" is circular (Struhl 2022).Siderits then sketches the three main stages in Buddhist development, namely, the early sūtras (the Indian Nikāyas and the Chinese Āgamas), the subsequent philosophical analyses of these (the Abhidharma), and the later developments (the Mahāyāna: both Yogācāra and Mādhyamaka), and what they all agree on: the unreality of the self, momentariness, mereological nihilism, and non-substantialism. Siderits brilliantly explains arguments for and against each, and maps out four general stances: two dualist realisms (Vaibhāṣika and Sautrāntika), one external world anti-realism (Yogācāra), and one global anti-realism (Mādhyamaka). He then explains Vaibhāṣika's direct realism (we perceive external, mind-independent objects directly, akin to naïve realism) and eternalism (each moment exists in all three times: past, present, future). He goes on to explain Sautrāntika's representationalism (we are aware only of mental representations of perceptual objects, akin to sense data) and presentism (only the present moment exists). Siderits here notes that representationalism leads to idealism (as it did in the modern West), and that Yogācāra espouses non-duality between representation and reality--a non-duality that entails local anti-realism about the physical... (shrink)

A great many philosophers and theologians have recently maintained that we ought to adopt the following interpretation of the Christian Church’s proclamation that Jesus Christ is perfectly human and perfectly divine:(1) The one person Jesus Christ has every essential property of the kind humanity and every essential property of the kind divinity,where F is an essential property of a kind k just in case there is no possible world in which something belongs to k yet lacks F. I argue that (...) these writers need to do much more work if they are to convince us that their view is rationally preferable to rival interpretations of traditional Christology. To be specific, they must try to persuade us that (1) plays an indispensable rôle in our best available explanation of how Christ’s life, death, and resurrection atone for our sins. (shrink)

A great many philosophers and theologians have recently maintained that we ought to adopt the following interpretation of the Christian Church’s proclamation that Jesus Christ is perfectly human and perfectly divine:(1) The one person Jesus Christ has every essential property of the kind humanity and every essential property of the kind divinity,where F is an essential property of a kind k just in case there is no possible world in which something belongs to k yet lacks F. I argue that (...) these writers need to do much more work if they are to convince us that their view is rationally preferable to rival interpretations of traditional Christology. To be specific, they must try to persuade us that (1) plays an indispensable rôle in our best available explanation of how Christ’s life, death, and resurrection atone for our sins. (shrink)

The space of possible worlds is vast. Some of these possible worlds are materialist worlds, some may be worlds bottoming out in 0s and 1s, or other strange things we cannot even dream of… and some are idealist worlds. From among all of the worlds subjectively indistinguishable from our own, the idealist ones have uniquely compelling virtues. Idealism gives us a world that is just as it appears; a world that’s fit to literally enter our minds when we perceive (...) it. If the world is an idealist world, we live in a perceptual Eden. We did not fall from Eden. Rather, we deluded ourselves into believing that we couldn’t possibly live in Eden when we committed to materialism. Reflecting on these big-picture issues gives us reason to question this commitment and embrace a radically new account of reality and our relation to it. (shrink)

The role of Alfred Kinsey, America's most influential sexologist, in the cultural revolution of sex and gender during the past fifty years remains as unquestionable as it has been controversial. This admiring biography argues that Kinsey also qualifies as an authentic great man of science in the tradition of Darwin. Kinsey's expert authority was recently challenged by James Jones, who claimed in his 1997 biography that Kinsey's terrible personal secrets—homosexuality and masochism—plagued his life and ruined his science. Jonathan Gathorne‐Hardy sets (...) out to repair Kinsey's reputation by defending him against this “Kenneth Starr school of biography” . The author seeks to rescue Kinsey's achievement from the stigmatizing charge that it was flawed because it subordinated science to subjectivity.Gathorne‐Hardy emphasizes Kinsey's methodological creativity and his interviewing genius. During his early career, when he worked on gall wasps, Kinsey's science developed as a practice of scrupulous collection, observation, and documentation. Even in graduate school, he was dubbed “get a million Kinsey,” and his belief in sheer quantity—as well as quantification—was just as apparent when he turned his attention to human sexuality. In 1938 Kinsey taught a course on marriage at Indiana University, where he spent his entire working life. Limited to married or engaged students and faculty, the course covered reproductive physiology, contraception, and a host of other sexual topics in explicit detail. Kinsey also used the course to gather data about his students' sex lives. The thousands of sexual histories collected at the Institute for Sex Research in later years—7,985 by Kinsey alone—attest to his scientific commitment to behavior as the only legitimate basis for a science of sex.The behavioral unit of analysis chosen by Kinsey was the orgasm—or “outlet,” as Kinsey called it. Because it was countable, the theory went, it was objective. Kinsey's ethic of measurement resulted in interviews involving at least 350 standard questions, whose answers were recorded in a custom code designed to fit on a single sheet of paper divided into 287 squares. Among the ironies of Kinsey's method was the fact that his sex histories measured linguistic rather than sexual behavior. What Kinsey actually compiled was a huge cache of stories, not direct observations of sexual behavior. Kinsey, who gathered more sexual stories than any other person alive, systematically aimed to eradicate all quirks and complexities in order to produce a statistical portrait of population‐wide behavior. Meanings might be historically important, but numbers, not narratives, would yield truth. The easy use of “human males” and “human females” in the titles of Kinsey's famous reports suggests how universal his scientific claims were—and also how devoid of temporal and cultural particularity.The resulting conception of human sexual nature is probably best represented in Kinsey's six‐point scale, where behavioral possibilities ranged from exclusively homosexual at one pole to exclusively heterosexual at the other. Diversity emerged as the premier fact about sexual behavior. While this placed men and women uncomfortably close to their primate cousins on an evolutionary map, making human sexual exceptionalism objectively unsustainable, it also produced a reformist sensibility that rooted its demand for toleration in the powerful evidence of natural facts. It is difficult to overstate how shocking Kinsey's picture of polymorphous sexuality was in a culture devoted to either/or binaries and prone to harsh judgments about deviation from norms. Kinsey's contribution was to point out the gap between ideology and behavior . That lots of people did lots of things at odds with professed sexual morality was, for some, a welcome relief and call to revolution. For others, it was a reason to hate Kinsey and blame him for changes in the realm of gender and sexuality already well under way by midcentury.No biographies can save scientific heroes from the fatal charge that their methods and findings were bound up in their lives, or they would not be biographies worth reading. This attests to the stubborn endurance of the psychoanalytic paradigm. Kinsey despised Freud for passing off philosophy as science. Yet because of the conventions of post‐Freudian biography, Gathorne‐Hardy must explore exactly those dimensions of Kinsey's life and character that Freud embraced but that Kinsey himself would never have admitted into the precincts of science. His childhood illnesses and struggles with an overbearing father, his rage against religion, fondness for music, charismatic yet autocratic style, and his own anguished sexuality are keys to puzzling out not only a life in science, but a life.Gathorne‐Hardy can hardly ignore evidence that Kinsey's own sexual appetites were diverse—“bisexual” is this author's preferred designation—or that his enterprise in sex research involved experimentation: the mostly married male members of Kinsey's team were expected to engage in sexual activities with one another and one another's wives. Kinsey's wife Clara was a confidant and supporter from the start. Their loving marriage was also an open marriage. Mac was a participant‐observer in the world of sex research. She had a series of affairs with Kinsey's colleagues and even changed the bedsheets during energetic sessions of sexual cinematography that took place in the attic of their home. Yet the Kinseys also shielded their children from their own unorthodox sexual practices.This biography concludes by suggesting that Kinsey died tragically in 1957, convinced that his enemies had the upper hand. Kinsey was wrong. The diversity he championed has become a theoretical staple in the human and life sciences as well as a practical goal in social policies related to gender, race, and sexuality. However unfinished it may be, it is difficult to imagine Kinsey's revolution being reversed in either science or society. (shrink)

How does our conception of possibility contribute to our understanding of self and world? In what sense does the possible differ from the merely probable, and what would it mean to treat possibility as part of the real? This book is an opportunity to see Kierkegaard as contributing to a distinctive phenomenology, ontology, and psychology of possibility that addresses the question of our existential relationship to the possible. The term 'possibility' (Mulighed) and its variants occur with curious frequency across Kierkegaard's (...) writings. Key to Kierkegaard's understanding of the self, possibility is linked to a number of core concepts in his works: from imagination, anxiety, despair, and 'the moment' to the idea in The Sickness Unto Death that “God is that all things are possible”. Responding to what he sees as a Hegelian and Aristotelian misunderstanding of possibility, Kierkegaard offers a novel reading of the possible that, in turn, directly influences 20th-century philosophers such as Heidegger, Deleuze, and Derrida. Kierkegaard gives a rich account of how anxiety and despair, as lived experiences of possibility, not only show us the contingency and fragility of the systems and identities we presently inhabit but also reveal a more fundamental contingency that demands a new way of relating to the possible. For Kierkegaard, hope, faith, and love are attitudes in which meaning is forged by embracing contingency. In a time of political, social, and environmental uncertainty Kierkegaard's work on radical possibility seems more relevant than ever. (shrink)

This paper argues that ‘dirty hands’ (DH) scenarios, where an agent is forced to do wrong in order to do right, are conceptually coherent. The charge of incoherence is a widespread and common criticism made by deontologists and consequentialists alike. They argue that DH theorists erroneously assume the existence of real moral dilemmas and then compound this error by claiming that it is possible to engage in justified moral wrongdoing. However, such critics argue that there are only _prima facie_ moral (...) dilemmas and hence it is not only irrational and obtuse to argue for DH scenarios, but also undermines our search for sound moral judgments in very difficult situations. Given the gravity of these charges, surprisingly little has been written in defence of DH as a coherent and necessary part of our moral vocabulary. If there can be no successful defence of the possibility of DH, then all talk of such scenarios become futile. This paper responds to two influential and what initially appear to be strongly plausible arguments used by critics of DH. I call these the ‘Arguments from Deontic Logic’ and the ‘All-Things-Considered Argument’. I present three responses which seek to raise serious doubts about their efficacy. I then support the possibility of DH by exploring what we can learn about our moral reality from the moral emotion of ‘tragic remorse’. This approach endorses the role of emotions in determining moral knowledge. It also rejects the view that ethical theories ought to dismiss DH experiences as incoherent in favour of questionable theoretical a priori assumptions, which seek a reductionist account of our moral reality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Scholars of Bonaventure's thought labor under the difficulty that the Seraphic Doctor is more widely admired than read. Yet there is one advantage they may claim: the immense popularity down through the centuries of his magnum opus: the Itinerarium mentis in Deum, "The Journey of the Mind to God." The text is poetic, concise, and dense. It summarizes many points in Bonaventure's philosophy, theology, and spirituality – indeed, it (...) has sometimes been called a summa of his spiritual theology.In the present essay, I offer a proposal for reading the Itinerarium. I do so with two types of readers in mind. One is the Bonaventure scholar, for whom I make certain arguments concerning the logic of the text and its relationship to other works of Bonaventure. The other is the non-specialist who wishes to teach the Itinerarium as a significant part of the Christian theological patrimony. To the latter, I offer a schematic to understand the different elements of the text in their relationship to each other. This guided reading will, I hope, help the teacher to present the scientific power of Bonaventure's theology.I. Preliminary NoteMy preliminary claim is that the Itinerarium is best understood as divided into two trajectories: one involves the three stages of seeing God through the visible world, the soul, and what is above the soul; the other involves the three stages of seeing God in the visible world, the soul, and what is above the soul. This claim might be criticized by readers of the text. Bonaventure gives several possibilities for understanding the structure of the text in the first part of chapter 1, and does not state that one should be privileged above the others. However, as he goes on to explain each stage, the division that keeps reappearing is that of seeing God through and in the visible world, the soul, and what is above the soul. I therefore regard that division as the most significant. In what follows, I first examine certain antecedents to the Itinerarium's structural argument in earlier works of Bonaventure. I then outline the first trajectory, highlighting its similarities and differences with those earlier works, and then the second trajectory, highlighting its uniqueness and proposing a key by which it may be understood. I close with a brief statement of the significance of my reading in light of some recent scholarship.For reference, one may use the following chart, delineating the trajectories.Knowing God through Knowing God inwhat is below the soul chap. 1: the consideration of God through his vestiges in the universe chap. 2: the consideration of God in his vestiges in this visible worldthe soul chap. 3: the consideration of God through his image imprinted on our natural powers chap. 4: the consideration of God in his image reformed through the gifts of gracewhat is above the soul chap. 5: the consideration of the divine unity through its primary name which is Being chap. 6: the consideration of the most blessed Trinity in its name which is the GoodII. Antecedents to This Kind of Consideration of GodA) Knowing God through and inThe distinction between seeing God through and in is not unique to the Itinerarium. It occurs earlier, in the Commentary on the Sentences, in two places. Though the contexts and the language are slightly different, the content of the distinction is the same. To know God through creatures is "to be raised from the knowledge of the creature to the knowledge of God as by way of a intermediate ladder." To know God in creatures is rather to know "his presence and influence in the creature." Bonaventure says further that knowing God through creatures is characteristic of wayfarers, and is a knowledge that is.. (shrink)

Ancient Chinese thought inquired primarily into how the achievement of things is possible rather than into what a thing as a thing is. It held that man should participate in the achieving or generation of things in order to realize his self-achievement. A thing is understood as an event. Because all things and man are united as one, it is possible for man to enter into things by tasting and feeling rather than by relying on the (...) sense of sight. This may provide a possible new means of rescuing things from the numericalization and phenomenalization that sweep over the world today. /// 在中国传统思想世界中，对物首要的态度不是追问 "物之为物" 而是关注如 何 "成物"; 强调以自身参与到物的生成中去，成己以成物，遂使物成为 "事" 使 万物一体; 强调以 "味"、"感" 的方式进入物之中，发展出不同于 "看" 的通达事 物之方法论。进入事物之中而使事物退隐的可能性降低，为克服今日世界的数字化、 表象化提供了一种 "新" 的可能性。. (shrink)

Through an approach primarily inspired by the Aisthetik (Gernot Böhme) and the Neue Phänomenologie (Hermann Schmitz) I define the atmospheric perception as the first pathic impression and investigate the relationship between this kind of perception (possibly initially immersive, then reflective) and the expressive qualities of our lifeworld. Pathic aesthetics therefore ceases to be just a theory of works of art. It considers the perceiver as a being first of all emotionally and felt-bodily touched by atmospheric feelings widespread in her (lived) (...) space but these atmospheric feelings are also affordances, ontologically rooted in things and quasi-things of her lifeworld. By exploring how she unintentionally exposes herself to what happens in this lifeworld, man turns out to be not a “subject of something” but rather a “subject to something”: a human being who is “sovereign” to the extent she is free from the claim of rational autonomy imposed by the western Modernity. (shrink)

Adiaphora and permissive natural law both conceptually pointed towards an arena of liberty in which the individual remained free to take up particular courses of action. In the Reformation debates over the external regulation of Christian freedom for the maintenance of peace and order, these two concepts became freighted with political significance; but they also in turn shaped attitudes over when and where obedience was due in relation to the civic regulation of liberty. Tudor apologetics deployed both ideas in order (...) to defend the English Reformation, especially the claim of the royal supremacy to have due authority to regulate ecclesiastical affairs in indifferent matters, limiting Christian freedom and requiring obedience. By situating these debates within the context of the conceptual development of adiaphora and permissive natural law from their original philosophical roots through to the Reformation, this article establishes the genealogy of claims that defined such apologetics. After surveying the seemingly intractable dilemmas in the thought of Thomas Starkey and John Whitgift over why obedience to lay ecclesiastical supremacy was due, this article considers the radical return to the permissive natural law traditions of the medieval period in the Elizabethan conformist thought of Richard Hooker. In this return, Hooker supplanted divine permissions and scriptural principles as the guide for the proper regulation of indifferent matters with an appeal to the light of reason as the divine instrument through which binding human laws are made to govern society and limit freedom for the public good, even in the life of the national church. (shrink)

This article explores how Chinese Daoist thought can address the need of an ethics that can cope with “the Anthropocene.” It explores the similarities between Daoist thought and posthumanist theories which arose partially as a response to the challenges of the Anthropocene. And it examines how Daoist thought can radicalize posthumanist thinking by means of an ethics based on a genuinely flat ontology that treats all things, human and nonhuman, as equal.

Max Stirner’s The Unique and Its Property (1844) is the first ruthless critique of modern society. In All Things are Nothing to Me, Jacob Blumenfeld reconstructs the unique philosophy of Max Stirner (1806–1856), a figure that strongly influenced—for better or worse—Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emma Goldman as well as numerous anarchists, feminists, surrealists, illegalists, existentialists, fascists, libertarians, dadaists, situationists, insurrectionists and nihilists of the last two centuries. -/- Misunderstood, dismissed, and defamed, Stirner’s work is considered by some to be (...) the worst book ever written. It combines the worst elements of philosophy, politics, history, psychology, and morality, and ties it all together with simple tautologies, fancy rhetoric, and militant declarations. That is the glory of Max Stirner’s unique footprint in the history of philosophy. -/- Jacob Blumenfeld wanted to exhume this dead tome along with its dead philosopher, but discovered instead that, rather than deceased, their spirits are alive and quite well, floating in our presence. All Things are Nothing to Me is a forensic investigation into how Stirner has stayed alive throughout time. (shrink)

Commonsense metaphysics populates the world with an enormous variety of macroscopic objects, conceived as being capable of persisting through time and undergoing various changes in their properties and relations to one another. Many of these objects fall under J. L. Austin’s memorable description, “moderate-sized specimens of dry goods.” More broadly, they include, for instance, all of those old favourites of philosophers too idle to think of more interesting examples—tables, books, rocks, apples, cats, and statues. Some of them are natural objects, (...) such as rocks, apples, and cats. Some are artefacts, such as tables, books, and statues. Some are living things, such as apples and cats. Some are inanimate things, such as tables, books, rocks, and statues. To such a list we could add much larger natural objects, such as planets and stars, as well as much smaller ones barely visible to the naked eye, such as mites and pollen grains. Telescopes and microscopes enable us to extend the scale further in both directions, to include such things as galaxies and microbes. To call into question the existence of all or any of these things would appear to be an extravagance of the sort that only a philosopher could indulge. Until fairly recently in the history of philosophy, however, the only way in which their existence would have been called into question was in the context of the debate between realism and idealism. Idealism calls their existence into question by questioning the existence of an “external world” as such, proposing instead that only minds and their experiences exist. What is much more recent is the suggestion that, although there is an external world of entities existing in space and time, it is not in fact populated by most, or perhaps even by any, of the objects recognized by common sense. Instead, it is suggested, the world is populated by submicroscopic entities of a highly esoteric kind best understood by theoretical physicists—entities which may not even qualify as “objects” in anything like the familiar sense because, quite possibly, they should not be thought of as having precise spatiotemporal locations or as persisting over time and through processes of qualitative change. Let us call these putative entities ‘atoms’, without prejudice as to whether they conform to the descriptions currently favoured by physicists in speaking of what they call ‘atoms’. In other words, let us use ‘atom’ as a place-holder for whatever kind or kinds of entities an ideal or completed physics would postulate as the “ultimate” constituents, as opposed to infinitely descending levels of ever more fine-grained physical structure, but let us set aside dispute over these alternatives for the time being, if only because we have little idea as to how to settle it. (shrink)

Ancient Chinese thought inquired primarily into how the achievement of things is possible rather than into what a thing as a thing is. It held that man should participate in the achieving or generation of things in order to realize his self-achievement. A thing is understood as an event. Because all things and man are united as one, it is possible for man to enter into things by tasting and feeling rather than by relying on the (...) sense of sight. This may provide a possible new means of rescuing things from the numericalization and phenomenalization that sweep over the world today. (shrink)

In his account of his Düsseldorf conversations with G.E. Lessing shortly before the latter’s death in 1781, F.H. Jacobi records the Enlightenment poet and philosopher’s allusion to the Kabbalistic philosophy of Henry More, whom he cited in support of his shocking Spinozist creed of the hen kai pan. Origen’s first Christian philosophy hinges upon a conviction of universal divine goodness which cannot but share its riches with beings capable of participating in it by virtue of their own free will. From (...) this first Christian truth flow the infamous doctrines of the pre-existence of souls and, above all, the restitution of all things envisaged as a never-ending process of autonomous moral soul-making. Origen’s philosophy of divine goodness and human freedom appealed deeply to the Cambridge Platonists Ralph Cudworth and Henry More, who cited the Church Father in support of their metaphysics of God’s benignity and man’s free will. German rationalist G.W. Leibniz was also a close reader of Cudworth and More. Both his Theodicy and his Monadology—notably the notion of a best possible world created by a good God and inhabited by self-improving spiritual monads—are indebted to the Church Father’s Christian philosophy. G.E. Lessing, reviewing the controversial discussions about the apokatastasis in his day, staunchly defended Leibniz’s Origenist rationalism in several works devoted to his philosophical eschatology. Above all, he restated Origen’s notion of salvation as divine pedagogy in his celebrated Education of the Human Race. The present essay establishes the deeply Origenist character of the historic systems of these two seminal German rationalists, with their shared concern for God’s creative goodness and man’s free perfectibility. (shrink)

Robert Stalnaker is an actualist who holds that merely possible worlds are uninstantiated properties that might have been instantiated. Stalnaker also holds that there are no metaphysically impossible worlds: uninstantiated properties that couldn't have been instantiated. These views motivate Stalnaker's "two dimensional" account of the necessary a posteriori on which there is no single proposition that is both necessary and a posteriori. For a (metaphysically) necessary proposition is true in all (metaphysically) possible worlds. If there were necessary a posteriori propositions, (...) that would mean that there were propositions true in all possible worlds but which could only be known to be true by acquiring empirical evidence. Consider such a purported proposition P. The role of empirical evidence for establishing P's truth would have to be to rule out worlds in which P is false. If there were no such worlds to be ruled out, we would not require evidence for P. But by hypothesis, P is necessary and so true in all metaphysically possible worlds. And on Stalnaker's view, the metaphysically possible worlds are all the worlds there are. So there can be no proposition that is true in all possible worlds, but that we require evidence to know. In this way, the motivation for Stalnaker's two dimensional account of the necessary a posteriori rests on his denying that there are metaphysically impossible Worlds. I argue that given his view of what possible worlds are, Stalnaker has no principled reason for denying that there are metaphysically impossible worlds. If I am right, this undercuts Stalnaker's motivation for his two dimensional account of the necessary a posteriori. (shrink)

According to the Principle of Sufficient Reason every event is determined down to the smallest detail. This principle entails a global determinism which is connected with the claim of uniformity: All things are basically one and differ only by degrees. Accordingly, Leibniz tries to explain the traditional distinction of necessity and contingency by the difference between a definite demonstration and an open, never ending analysis, that is a quantitative difference between the finite and infinite. It is controversial whether contingency (...) can be saved by this conception in the face of the thesis: Every predicate which can be truly attributed to a subject is included in the complete notion of this individual substance. The difficulties of the Lucky Proof can only be avoided by supposing: The infinity of analysis cannot be based on the fact that the complete notion is a simple conjunction of innumerable predicates which are not conceptually connected to each other. Then every predicate could be deduced from it in a finite number of steps; therefore, it would have been demonstrated and would consequently be necessary. The infinity of analysis cannot be either based on the fact that it is infinitely complex to prove that the subject is not contradictory. Conceptions like this or a superessentialism are not adequate, because they fail to distinguish between necessary and contingent statements about an individual within a single possible world. The complete notion and, therefore, the analysis of a contingent truth comprises an infinitely complex content, because the predicates of an individual are connected by infinitely complex relations. This corresponds to the idea that the perceptions of an individual mirror the infinitely complex connections by which the world is determined. (shrink)

By means of a theoretical analysis from the point of view of phenomenology of the body, this essay tries to explain the views of Taizhou School on the body so as to apprehend the essence of Confucian thought, which is a philosophy that seeks to “establish oneself” and “cultivate oneself” rather than a “philosophy of consciousness.”.

Jacques Rancière has continually unsettled political discourse, particularly through his questioning of aesthetic "distributions of the sensible," which configure the limits of what can be seen and said. Widely recognized as a seminal work in Rancière's corpus, the translation of which is long overdue, _Mute Speech_ is an intellectual tour de force proposing a new framework for thinking about the history of art and literature. Rancière argues that our current notion of "literature" is a relatively recent creation, having first appeared (...) in the wake of the French Revolution and with the rise of Romanticism. In its rejection of the system of representational hierarchies that had constituted belles-letters, "literature" is founded upon a radical equivalence in which all things are possible expressions of the life of a people. With an analysis reaching back to Plato, Aristotle, the German Romantics, Vico, and Cervantes and concluding with brilliant readings of Flaubert, Mallarmé, and Proust, Rancière demonstrates the uncontrollable democratic impulse lying at the heart of literature's still-vital capacity for reinvention. (shrink)

Leibniz argues that God doesn't create everything possible because not all possible things are compossible, that is, compatible with each other. Much recent debate has focused on Leibniz's conception of compossibility. One important aspect of this debate, which has not been examined directly, is the distinction between possible worlds and possible creations: the notion of possible world is more robust than simply whatever God can create. Many commentators have relied on this distinction without a clear formulation of it. I (...) develop the distinction between possible worlds and possible creations by looking at how Leibniz characterizes what God is capable of creating. I argue that possible creations must be both logically consistent and determinate. Possible creations differ from possible worlds insofar as possible creations fail to be either maximal or harmonious. I conclude, therefore, that focusing on the notion of determinateness offers a new approach to answering the question why doesn't God create everything possible? (shrink)

Leibniz denies Spinoza’s claim that all possible things actually exist. He also denies necessitarianism, Spinoza’s claim that all truths are necessary truths. Both denials seem plausible. What is surprising, however, is Leibniz’s view that the first claim entails the second, i.e., that the existence of all possible things implies necessitarianism. Why think this? Couldn’t it be that, as a matter of contingent fact, all possible things actually exist? There seems to be no incoherency in claiming both that (...) all possible things actually exist and that fewer things could have existed. In this paper, I explain why Leibniz thought that such a position is indeed inconsistent. My thesis is that the Principle of Sufficient Reason plays a decisive role in his reasoning. Leibniz claims that the non-existence of a thing requires a sufficient reason. He also holds that if all possible things can coexist, such a reason cannot be given. Together these claims rule out a scenario in which all possible things actually exist, but only contingently so. (shrink)

In the Third of his celebrated Five Ways in Summa Theologiae Ia, q. 2, a. 3, St. Thomas Aquinas argues for the existence of God from contingency and necessity noting that the world contains possible beings which are able not to be since, being generated and corrupted, they at some time do not exist. He claims to show that there must be some necessary being since it is impossible that all things are possible beings. Scholars have long found this (...) part of the Third Way problematic, since it appears that Aquinas is committing a logical fallacy. He seems to be arguing that all members of a group have one common attribute since they each have their own particular instance of that attribute, as one might argue that since everybody has a birthday, i.e., one day on which each was born, therefore, there is one (and the same) day on which everyone was born. This paper will show that the accusation that Aquinas commits the alleged Birthday Fallacy would mean he was arguing for a temporal beginning for all material things, and so believed that such claim was philosophically demonstrable. Aquinas, however, argued against our ability to naturally know physical creation had a beginning in time; such knowledge requires God’s revelation of it. Instead Aquinas in the Third Way is allowing for the possibility that the physical universe could be temporally infinite, as Aristotle argued, but that this possibility would still support Aquinas’ contention that some necessary being must exist. (shrink)

By means of a theoretical analysis from the point of view of phenomenology of the body, this essay tries to explain the views of Taizhou School on the body so as to apprehend the essence of Confucian thought, which is a philosophy that seeks to “establish oneself” and “cultivate oneself” rather than a “philosophy of consciousness.”.

1. Quassim Cassam's subtle book, The Possibility of Knowledge, 1 contains many insights. My goal here is not to attempt to give a sense of all that this book has to offer – which I suspect would be foolhardy in the extreme – but rather to explore one particular central theme of this book that I find especially interesting – viz. the application of the ‘multi-level’ response to ‘how possible?’ questions that Cassam offers to the problem of radical scepticism.2. A (...) central contention of Cassam's book is that we should re-cast sceptical problems in terms of ‘how possible?’ questions. Although it is not a sceptical problem that Cassam examines himself , consider how this re-casting would work as regards the problem of free will. The relevant ‘how possible?’ question would be: " How is free will possible?" There are two features of ‘how possible?’ questions that are important for our purposes. The first is that they are by their nature challenging in that they imply that there is a standing obstacle to the possibility in question. In the case of , this obstacle is the familiar one concerning determinism. The second is that they do not presuppose that the target thing – in this case free will – is impossible; rather, they simply ask how such a thing could be possible.These two features of ‘how possible?’ questions impose constraints on what would constitute a satisfactory response to such a question. On the one hand, it would clearly be pointless to respond to such a question by simply insisting – on the basis of commonsense, say – that the target thing is possible, since the question was not suggesting …. (shrink)

In Kant’s idealism, all spatiotemporal objects depend on the human mind in a certain way. A central issue here is whether the existence of spatiotemporal things requires that these things are, at least at some point, objects of some actual experience or of a merely possible experience. In this essay, I argue (on textual and philosophical grounds) for the latter view: spatiotemporal things exist (or spatiotemporal events occur) if they are objects of a (suitably qualified) possible experience.

Especially over the past twenty years, a number of analytic philosophers have embraced the idea that the world itself is vague or indeterminate in one or more respects. The issue then arises as to whether it can be the case that the world itself is indeterminate in all respects. Using as a basis Chinese Madhyamaka Buddhist thought, I offer two reasons for the coherence and intelligibility of the thesis that all concrete things are themselves indeterminate with respect to the (...) ways they are. The first reason draws on a notion reminiscent of the picture of reality as an amorphous lump, while the second reason makes use of the relativity of conceptual perspectives and determinations. Assuming that the world is the mere totality of all concrete things, I show that there is a genuine metaphysical possibility of the world’s being indeterminate in all respects. (shrink)

This thesis explores whether the three standard value relations, “better than”, “worse than” and “equally as good”, exhaust the possibilities in which things can relate with respect to their value. Or more precisely, whether there are examples in which one of these relations is not instantiated. There are cases in which it is not obvious that one of these relations does obtain; these are referred to as “hard cases of comparison”. These hard cases of comparison become interesting, since if (...) it not the case that the standard three value relations obtains in these cases then the three standard relations do not exhaust the possibility of instantiated value relations. It is argued that for some of the hard cases of comparison, the standard relations determinately obtain. For some it is indeterminate, due to vagueness, which of the three relations obtains, but it is determinate that one of them obtains. Thereafter it is argued that the influential Collapsing Argument fails in ruling out other accounts of the hard cases of comparison. Since one cannot depend on the Collapsing Argument in order to conclude that all items are related by the standard three relations, the investigation continues. It is argued that none of the hard cases of comparison are cases of incomparability. Furthermore, none of them are cases of a fourth basic positive value relation such as “parity”. Consequently, for all the hard cases of comparison one of the standard value relations holds, although sometimes we do not know which one and sometimes it is indeterminate which one holds. This means that there is no reason to assume that one of the standard three value relations does not hold between items we are comparing. This is followed by a brief discussion about the normative consequences of this result. The thesis ends with four different appendices in which related topics are discussed. (shrink)

This article surveys some contemporary literature in analytic philosophy of religion bearing on the relationship between God and possible worlds. Most of these authors take “God” to denote an essentially omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being, who is the creator and sustainer of all that contingently exists. Since the 1960s, philosophers have employed the conceptual apparatus of worlds to discuss topics pertaining to God. Very roughly, the actual world is the way things are, whereas each possible world is a (...) way things might have been. Many philosophers believe that if God exists, he could not have failed to exist. In other words, God exists in all possible worlds; God is a necessary being. The first section of this article, God and Necessity, discusses several accounts of what this means, and of the relationship between God and worlds. Worlds are widely assumed to bear axiological properties: some are good, others are bad; some are better, others are worse. Some authors have judged that God could not exist in bad worlds. Whether this counts against theism is discussed under God and Bad Worlds (The Modal Problem of Evil). If all worlds bear axiological properties, and can be compared, it is natural to wonder whether the hierarchy has an upper bound. The literature concerning this topic is surveyed under Is there a Best Possible World?. It is widely assumed that if God exists, he chooses a world to make actual. The next three sections of this article consider this choice: God’s Choice if there is One Best Possible World, God’s Choice if there are Multiple Best Worlds, and God’s Choice if there are No Best Worlds. Some authors hold that certain pairs of worlds simply cannot be compared. The literature surrounding God’s choice between such pairs is discussed under God’s Choice and Incomparable Worlds. Some philosophers have recently argued that if theism is true, the actual world is a multiverse made up of many worthy universes. Their proposals are discussed under God and the Multiverse. Finally, this article surveys some literature that attempts to answer the following question, with respect to the value of worlds: What Difference Would—or Does—God’s Existence Make? Given space constraints, this article does not discuss arguments for God’s existence that invoke possible worlds, such as “ontological” arguments. Nor does it discuss arguments for atheism that appeal to evil, except insofar as theistic multiverse theories constitute responses. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 10.2 (2005) 175-194 [Access article in PDF] Measure for Measure The Reliance of Human Knowledge on the Things of the World Tim Adamson When all things were in disorder, God created in each thing in relation to itself, and in all things in relation to each other, all the measures and harmonies which they could possibly receive. —Plato, Timaeus (69b) Is my (...) body a thing, is it an idea? It is neither, being the measurant of the things. We will therefore have to recognize an ideality that is not alien to the flesh, that gives it its axes, its depth, its dimensions. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1968, 152) The search for truths differs from the search for truth criteria in more ways than those that are immediately obvious. —M. C. Dillon (1997, 9) The notion that all knowledge is a form of measurement can be traced back to the Socratic insight that knowledge requires the presence of some standard against which things are measured. We cannot account for our knowledge of things, Socrates argued, without appealing to some prior capacity we have for recognizing, comparing, or measuring things in terms of something else, for example, a concept or definition. In the modern era, Kant extended this insight to include perception as such, [End Page 175] arguing that even though our perceptual experience seems to be direct and immediate, upon reflection we know that some process of mediation must be at work which enables us to have a stable experience of objects. Faced with such insights, we are compelled to ask how such measuring is possible. If experience and knowledge rely on some capacity for measurement, what is measurement and what does it entail?The most common contemporary answer to this question can be found in notion that our experience and knowledge are "constructed" by distinctly human, that is, cultural factors. Having abandoned Kant's notion of a priori knowledge and its various Idealist offshoots, contemporary constructivism nonetheless maintains that cultural structures (although not fixed or permanent ones) serve as the basic principles upon which experience and knowledge are built. Such a view has some merit, insofar as it enables us to acknowledge the mediated character of our experience, while also avoiding the problematic claims of traditional idealism. But as appealing as this view is, it raises the question of the place and role of nature in our experience. From a constructivist point of view, although we may acknowledge that our experience and knowledge depend in crucial ways upon natural elements and events, it can often seem naive to discuss the role of such natural factors within experience—except, that is, as we admit that nature itself is "constructed" by culture, for example, language, conceptual systems, theoretical constructs, ideology, political power, institutional practices, and so forth. That is, although we no longer accord cultural factors an a priori or absolute status, we remain convinced that in fact cultural norms play the final, determining role in shaping our experience. In the end, we have come to believe, it is culture that measures and defines nature, not vice versa.My aim in this essay is to articulate an alternative view of the measurement involved in human experience and knowledge, one which helps us to overcome the privileging of culture over nature that still plagues contemporary thought. My account is inspired by Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of the body, particularly his notion that the human body serves as a "measurant of things." There are two key components of this claim. First, it describes the body's general capacity for measurement, and does not appeal to any specific measure or standard of measurement. As a measurant, the body is not any particular measure; rather, it is a thing that measures, an element of the natural world that brings measurement to the [End Page 176] things it encounters, thus bringing meaning into our experience. Second, the body's capacity to measure shows how our natural being as bodies is inherently meaningful, because measurement is, as we shall see... (shrink)

Robert Stalnaker is an actualist who holds that merely possible worlds are uninstantiated properties that might have been instantiated. Stalnaker also holds that there are no metaphysically impossible worlds: uninstantiated properties that couldn't have been instantiated. These views motivate Stalnaker's "two dimensional" account of the necessary a posteriori on which there is no single proposition that is both necessary and a posteriori. For a (metaphysically) necessary proposition is true in all (metaphysically) possible worlds. If there were necessary a posteriori propositions, (...) that would mean that there were propositions true in all possible worlds but which could only be known to be true by acquiring empirical evidence. Consider such a purported proposition P. The role of empirical evidence for establishing P's truth would have to be to rule out worlds in which P is false. If there were no such worlds to be ruled out, we would not require evidence for P. But by hypothesis, P is necessary and so true in all metaphysically possible worlds. And on Stalnaker's view, the metaphysically possible worlds are all the worlds there are. So there can be no proposition that is true in all possible worlds, but that we require evidence to know. In this way, the motivation for Stalnaker's two dimensional account of the necessary a posteriori rests on his denying that there are metaphysically impossible Worlds. I argue that given his view of what possible worlds are, Stalnaker has no principled reason for denying that there are metaphysically impossible worlds. If I am right, this undercuts Stalnaker's motivation for his two dimensional account of the necessary a posteriori. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 10.2 (2005) 175-194 [Access article in PDF] Measure for Measure The Reliance of Human Knowledge on the Things of the World Tim Adamson When all things were in disorder, God created in each thing in relation to itself, and in all things in relation to each other, all the measures and harmonies which they could possibly receive. —Plato, Timaeus (69b) Is my (...) body a thing, is it an idea? It is neither, being the measurant of the things. We will therefore have to recognize an ideality that is not alien to the flesh, that gives it its axes, its depth, its dimensions. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1968, 152) The search for truths differs from the search for truth criteria in more ways than those that are immediately obvious. —M. C. Dillon (1997, 9) The notion that all knowledge is a form of measurement can be traced back to the Socratic insight that knowledge requires the presence of some standard against which things are measured. We cannot account for our knowledge of things, Socrates argued, without appealing to some prior capacity we have for recognizing, comparing, or measuring things in terms of something else, for example, a concept or definition. In the modern era, Kant extended this insight to include perception as such, [End Page 175] arguing that even though our perceptual experience seems to be direct and immediate, upon reflection we know that some process of mediation must be at work which enables us to have a stable experience of objects. Faced with such insights, we are compelled to ask how such measuring is possible. If experience and knowledge rely on some capacity for measurement, what is measurement and what does it entail?The most common contemporary answer to this question can be found in notion that our experience and knowledge are "constructed" by distinctly human, that is, cultural factors. Having abandoned Kant's notion of a priori knowledge and its various Idealist offshoots, contemporary constructivism nonetheless maintains that cultural structures (although not fixed or permanent ones) serve as the basic principles upon which experience and knowledge are built. Such a view has some merit, insofar as it enables us to acknowledge the mediated character of our experience, while also avoiding the problematic claims of traditional idealism. But as appealing as this view is, it raises the question of the place and role of nature in our experience. From a constructivist point of view, although we may acknowledge that our experience and knowledge depend in crucial ways upon natural elements and events, it can often seem naive to discuss the role of such natural factors within experience—except, that is, as we admit that nature itself is "constructed" by culture, for example, language, conceptual systems, theoretical constructs, ideology, political power, institutional practices, and so forth. That is, although we no longer accord cultural factors an a priori or absolute status, we remain convinced that in fact cultural norms play the final, determining role in shaping our experience. In the end, we have come to believe, it is culture that measures and defines nature, not vice versa.My aim in this essay is to articulate an alternative view of the measurement involved in human experience and knowledge, one which helps us to overcome the privileging of culture over nature that still plagues contemporary thought. My account is inspired by Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of the body, particularly his notion that the human body serves as a "measurant of things." There are two key components of this claim. First, it describes the body's general capacity for measurement, and does not appeal to any specific measure or standard of measurement. As a measurant, the body is not any particular measure; rather, it is a thing that measures, an element of the natural world that brings measurement to the [End Page 176] things it encounters, thus bringing meaning into our experience. Second, the body's capacity to measure shows how our natural being as bodies is inherently meaningful, because measurement is, as we shall see... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Possibility Of Puns: A Defense of DerridaGordon C. F. BearnHow is a pun possible?—J. Derrida 1Puns are not high on the philosophical horizon. 2 Wittgenstein, it is true, thought that the depth of grammatical jokes was the same as the depth of philosophy, but it is not unusual to smile politely at this remark, and move on. 3 Jokes, like puns, are philosophically puny. Or worse. The air (...) of crime clings to puns. In some contexts the use of a pun is enough to convict one of the fallacy of equivocation, and even where “simply” fun, we refuse to laugh. By groaning, we punish the punster. Apparently we take puns more seriously than we consistently insist.Puny or not, puns do exist, and any adequate account of linguistic communication should allow for the possibility of puns. Surprisingly enough, one natural way to account for this possibility brings us very close to a Derridean domain most philosophers of language make every effort to avoid. But with this result in hand, we may be better placed to understand the seriousness which by scoffing at puns we mask.Puns can be made, but more often they are found. We can find ourselves surprised, sometimes embarrassed, by puns we have inadvertently put into play while thinking about some other, more serious, linguistic business. These are the puns I want to consider: inadvertent puns. 4 How are they possible? It is easy to think that in ordinary cases of using a word, we intentionally or contextually invoke some one of that [End Page 330] word’s possible significances and put that significance into play in our sentence. Successful communication would then consist in successfully transmitting that significance—and only that significance—to the receiver of our communication. The possibility of inadvertent puns shows that more meanings of a word are in play than those we have intentionally put into play. The possibility of puns which are not only inadvertent but also inappropriately sexual shows, in addition, that more meanings of a word are in play than are contextually called for. Inadvertent puns draw our attention to the occasional powerlessness of either context or intention to narrow down the possible significances of our spoken or written words to one. What are we to make of these facts?At a minimum, the possibility of inadvertent puns shows that more meanings of our words can be in play than we normally suppose. We might want to say that only those meanings were in play which surfaced with the inadvertent pun itself. But is there any justification for drawing the line there? The only thing that makes the situation of the inadvertent pun different from the more usual one is that we noticed the intentionally and contextually surprising meanings. But the possibility of inadvertent puns is perfectly general, so the most straightforward account of the possibility of inadvertent puns is to say that all possible significances of a word are always in play whenever it is being used. The fact that we don’t normally notice this is no more remarkable than the fact that we don’t normally notice the size of people’s ears. Inadvertent puns draw our attention to what was there all along.Immediately smelling trouble, we might consider backpedalling: insisting that the only meanings invoked by an inadvertent pun were those intentionally invoked by the producer of the pun. But that would be to deny the existence of inadvertent puns altogether; it would be to insist that they were illusory, merely apparent, artifacts of the circumstances, not really real, at all. This is as unpalatable a suggestion as that according to which the spinach was only apparently good for playing spinach tennis, simply because the cook did not intend to produce projectiles. The cook’s intentions make these qualities of the spinach unintentional, but not unreal. So, pedalling forward once again: what are the consequences of saying that whenever we use a word all of its possible significances are in play?(a) We will have to reconceive our account of interpretation. When it is a question of providing an interpretation of a spoken or written text, this hermeneutical process... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Abailard and Non-Things MARTIN M. TWEEDALE On SEVERAL OCCASIONSin his logical writings Abailard extracts himself from embarrassing ontological implications of his analyses of language by resorting to the notion of a something that is not a thing. I shall note here two such occasions and then discuss Abailard's explanations of this procedure based on the grammatical distinction of personal and impersonal constructions. Since the texts on this latter (...) topic are especially confusing, a considerable portion of my effort will be spent on making sense of them as preparation for drawing some conclusions about Abailard's overall approach. My purpose here is to show how Abailard's grammatical analyses are fundamental to his defence of a number of metaphysical positions. I also want to suggest that Abailard's grammatical approach, especially on the question of dicta, contains insights of continuing interest. Not all of Abailard's non-things are particularly associated with analyses of language. For instance, there are the likenesses the mind supposedly constructs for itself in order to think of things that are not being perceived. These Abailard calls fictive things (res ficta), and he refuses to give them the status of real psychological entities. ~ The likenesses are compared to mirror images which Abailard is also willing to treat as non-things. However, I wish to restrict my discussion here to cases which arise from Abailard's analysis of the reference of certain words. One such instance occurs in his discussion of universals. The peculiar nonthing here is the "state" (status), which, Abailard maintains, is "the common cause by which the universal word is imposed"7 Abailard is very careful to dis1Glossae super Porphyrium, in Peter Abelards philosophische,.gchriIten, edited by Geyer (henceforth referred ~o as Geyer), Miinster i. W., 1919 (BGPM, vol. 21), pp. 20-21, ll. 23-32: Intellectus autem sicut nec corporeo indigens instrumento est, ita /nec/ necesse est eum subiectum corpus habere in quod mittatur, sed rei ~dmilitudine contentus est, quam sibi ipse animus conficit, in quam suae intelligentiae actionem dirigit. Unde turr,~ destructa vel remota sensus qui in earn agebat, perit, inteUectus autem permanet rei similitudine auimo retenta. Sigut autem sensus non est res sentita, in quam dirigitur, sic nec intellectus forma est rei quam concipit, sed intellectus actio quaedam est animae, unde intelligens dicitur, forma vero in quam dirigitur, res imaginaria quaedam est et ficta, quam sibi, quando vult et qualm vult, animus conficit.... 11.9-17: Quaero enim, utrum flla quadratura et ilia altitudo vera forma sit intellectus, qui ad similitudinem quantitatis turris ducatur et compositionis eius. Sed profecto vera quadratura et vera altitudo non nisi corporibus insunt, ficta etiam qualitate nec intellectus nec ulla vera essentia forrnari potest. Restat igitur, ut sicut ficta eat qualitas, ficta substantia sit ei subiecta. Fortasae autem et ea speculi imago, quae visui subiecta apparere videtur, nihil esse vere dici potest, quoniam scilicetin alba speguli superficie contrarii coloris qualitas saepe apparet. Ibid., pp. 19-20,II. 14-16- ~ad nunc ea quae breviter tetigimus, diligenter perquiramus, scilicet quae sit iIla communis causa, secundum quam universale nomen impositum est.... 11. 21-29. Singuli homines discreti ab invicem, gum in propriis differant tam essentiis quam formis, ut supra meminimus rei physicam inquirentes, in eo tamen conveniunt, quod homines aunt. Non dico in homine, gum res nulla sit homo uisi discreta, sed in esse hominem. Esse autem hominem non est homo nec res aliqua, si diligentius consideremus, [329] 330 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY tinguish three different questions frequently confused in discussions on universals. The first is "What is 'universal' predicated of?", and the answer is simply words --words not in the sense of mere marks or sounds, but of meaningful marks or sounds. Another is "How do we have an idea associated with universals?" Here the aforementioned likenesses enter as that by which the mind can have an idea applicable to many individuals. But there is also the question of what makes a certain word correctly applicable to many things. Abailard does not make the error of thinking that an idea in the mind or some operation of the mind could possibly be the cause, as some conceptualists seem to think. This would lead to the conclusion that... (shrink)

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;The main part of the thesis concerns how things, in the sense of individuals, might have been. The topic is what limits there are on the counterfactual possibilities for individuals: in other words, what essential properties, if any, they have. ;In Chapters 3-6 three answers to this question that have been given in recent philosophical literature are examined. They are: that each thing has a unique individual essence (...) ; that there are features of the origin of an individual without which it could not possibly have existed ; and, finally, that there are sortal concepts that represent essential properties of the things that fall under them . ;All of these answers, and many of the arguments that have been given for them, are criticised. Sometimes the criticism takes the form of pointing to unpalatable consequences that result from the acceptance of the doctrine in question. Sometimes the criticism consists in pointing to difficulties or inadequacies in the arguments that have been presented in its favour. ;A preliminary chapter prepares the ground by setting out the conceptual framework, and the chief formal characteristics, of the essentialism discussed in the later chapters. Chapter 2 discusses the nature of necessary a posteriori truth, touching on questions in the philosophy of language and mind concerning the notion of de re thought. ;It is argued that essentialism about natural kinds raises problems of its own: some of these are discussed in Chapters 7 and 8. Here the main topic is the connection between semantic theory and natural kind essentialism. Concluding that the essentialism should be regarded as in an important sense independent of semantic theory, the chapters add to, and also criticise, the work of other writers who have reached the same verdict. Scepticism is also expressed about the independent plausibility of natural kind essentialism. ;Recent interest in essentialism owes its genesis chiefly to the work of Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam: these figures stand in the background throughout the discussion. Among the other writers whose work is discussed are Baruch Brody, Gareth Evans, Graeme Forbes, Colin McGinn, J. L. Mackie, D. H. Mellor, Nathan Salmon, and David Wiggins. (shrink)

The most commonly heard proposals for reducing possible worlds to language succumb to a simple cardinality argument: it can be shown that there are more possible worlds than there are linguistic entities provided by the proposal. In this paper, I show how the standard proposals can be generalized in a natural way so as to make better use of the resources available to them, and thereby circumvent the cardinality argument. Once it is seen just what the limitations are on these (...) more general proposals, it can be clearly seen where the real difficulty lies with any attempt to reduce possible worlds to language. Roughly, the difficulty is this: no actual language could have the descriptive resources needed to represent all the ways things might have been. I conclude by arguing that this same difficulty spells doom for any nominalist or conceptualist proposal for reducing possible worlds. (shrink)

This article explores some of the implications of understanding sin as failure of perception. The theological underpinning of the argument is the choice made in the Garden of Eden to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge rather than the fruit of the tree of life, or wisdom. This has led to distorted perception, in which all things are seen as having separate, independent existences rather than joined together by their common divine source and their deep interrelatedness in (...) the covenant made with God. The article discusses the fascination with the principle of respect for autonomy in the light of this theology. It also looks at perceptions of the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa. It finishes with a definition of repentance that makes right perception possible. (shrink)

This article addresses the following meta-ethical question: do moral values have a special position among other values? According to Robert Adams, moral values do have a special position and are of overriding importance. I argue that the "overridingness" thesis is inconsistent with Adams’s value theory that only God has value in himself and all other things are valuable to the extent that they resemble God. I consider some possible ways of integrating the overridingness thesis that are latent in Adams’s (...) work and argue that none succeeds. My main contribution is to propose a solution to the inconsistency in Adams’s theory. I argue that a theological account of beauty gives us reason to reject the overridingness thesis. Morality overrides some other concerns, but not all other concerns. (shrink)

Shestov's work can be summed up under six headings. Three are sharp contrasts, three are paradoxes. (1) First there is the contrast between Shestov the person, who was moderate, competent, and calm, and Shestov the thinker, who was extreme, incandescent, and impassioned. (2) Then there is the contrast between his critique of reason, his acceptance of irrationalism, and the means by which he attacks the former and defends the latter: namely, careful rational argument. Sometimes he argues like a lawyer (after (...) all, he had a law degree from Moscow University). (3) Shestov speaks repeatedly of the "horrors and atrocities of human existence." But his examples are always drawn from history or literature, never from his own life, although we know that he experienced much horror. (4) Nietzsche is the thinker whom he invokes most frequently, and most warmly. Yet, paradoxically, Shestov completely ignores most of Nietzsche's central themes. (5) Shestov's skeptical doubts are mostly directed at rationalism; he is not skeptical about the existence or benevolence of God. Yet he is explicitly skeptical about divine omniscience and implicitly skeptical about divine omnipotence in a metaphysical sense, though not in its ethical application. (6) Shestov has a deep faith that God can undo all the horrors of life, putting an end to all suffering. At the same time he knows that this will not, and cannot, happen, since the very idea of undoing the past, erasing its horrors, is conceptually incoherent. (shrink)

This paper argues that according to the influential version of legal moralism presented by Moore infidelity should all-things-considered be criminalized. This is interesting because criminalizing infidelity is bound to be highly controversial and because Moore’s legal moralism is a prime example of a self-consciously liberal legal moralism, which aims to yield legislative implications that are quite similar to liberalism, while maintaining that morality as such should be legally enforced. Moore tries to make his theory yield such implications, first by (...) claiming that the scope of our moral obligations is much more limited than legal moralists have traditionally claimed, and second by allowing for the possibility that the goodness of legally enforcing morality is often outweighed by the badness of limiting citizens’ morally valuable autonomy and spending scarce resources on enforcement. If Moore is successful in this, legal moralism is strengthened because it becomes immune to many of the most damaging liberal objections. By showing that despite making those moves Moore’s legal moralism is still committed to criminalizing infidelity, a manifestly illiberal implication for legislation, it is established that Moore is unsuccessful in creating a liberal legal moralism, and Moore’s failure in this regard raises questions about whether there can be such a thing as a liberal legal moralism. (shrink)

In Physical Theory Mr. Lenzen writes, “Thus the concept of thing is the concept of a class of aspects which are in the past, present, or future for several minds.” Again, in Mind and the World-Order, Mr. Lewis defines “thing” as “… a complex of properties or qualities, recognizable by some uniformity of appearance.” Without questioning the metaphysics implied in these two definitions of “thing” I shall accept them as quite compatible and as useful in defining the rôle of experience (...) in the construction of scientific objects. If in “Pragmatism and Metaphysics” Mr. Morris has not established proof of the existence of objects independent of any and all experience of them, he certainly has shown conclusively that the possibility of experiencing objects is independent of any and all observers. (shrink)