Plotinus stands at a crossroads in ancient philosophy, between the more than 600 years of philosophy that came before him and the new Platonic tradition. He was the first and perhaps the greatest systematizer of Plato's thought, and all later students of Plato in the following centuries approached Plato through him. This Companion from a new generation of ancient philosophy scholars reflects the current state of research on Plotinus, with chapters on topics including mathematics, fate and determinism, happiness, the theory (...) of forms, categories of reality, matter and evil, and Plotinus' legacy. The volume offers an accessible overview of the thought of one of the pivotal figures in the history of philosophy, and reveals his importance as a thinker whose impact goes far beyond his importance as an interpreter of Plato. (shrink)

A book that pulls together the results of research by several scholars to provide a fresh look at the rich heritage of ideas that Wright contributed to the theory and practice of architecture, with special emphasis on the ordering of structuring of architectural experience. An attempt is made to convey an understanding of Wright's contributions through a direct analysis of his designs as they exist or existed in reality. The authors take a different look at Wright's work in a search (...) for clarity and understanding. (shrink)

Since the fundamental challenge that I laid at the doorstep of the pluralists was to defend, with nonderivative models, a strong notion of genic cause, it is fatal that Waters has failed to meet that challenge. Waters agrees with me that there is only a single cause operating in these models, but he argues for a notion of causal ‘parsing’ to sustain the viability of some form of pluralism. Waters and his colleagues have some very interesting and important ideas about (...) the sciences, involving pluralism and parsing or partitioning causes, but they are ideas in search of an example. He thinks he has found an example in the case of hierarchical and genic selection. I think he has not. (shrink)

This introduction to contemporary social and political theory examines the impact of new ideas such as feminist theory, poststructuralism, hermeneutics and critical theory. The innovations brought by these intellectual traditions of Europe and America are outlined and discussed. Rather than focus on individual thinkers, the authors take a "conceptual" approach by examining contemporary theories through themes such as "critique", "rationality", "power", "the subject", "the body", and "culture". Each chapter considers the evolution of a concept and examines the major debates and (...) transformations that have taken place in that area. (shrink)

We make character trait attributions to predict and explain others’ behaviour. How should we understand character trait attribution in context across the domains of philosophy, folk psychology, developmental psychology, and evolutionary psychology? For example, how does trait attribution relate to our ability to attribute mental states to others, to ‘mindread’? This thesis uses philosophical methods and empirical data to argue for character trait attribution as a practice dependent upon our ability to mindread, which develops as a product of natural selection (...) acting on culture instead of genes. This analysis carves out trait attribution’s distinct place within an emerging complex and mature scholarship on pluralistic social cognition. (shrink)

This is a collection of 13 essays which focus on a theme to which Crossett dedicated much of his highly interdisciplinary research. Six essays concern Hamartia in Greek works by Herodotus, Plato, Euripides, and others; two deal with the concept of error in the Christian theology of Boethius and Aquinas; and five examine Hamartia in 14th-19th-century English works by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Coleridge, and George Eliot.

The editors of the JRE solicited short essays on the COVID‐19 pandemic from a group of scholars of religious ethics that reflected on how the field might help them make sense of the complex religious, cultural, ethical, and political implications of the pandemic, and on how the pandemic might shape the future of religious ethics.

As a constructive alternative to the exclusionary binaries of Cartesian philosophy, Genevieve Lloyd and Moira Gatens turn to Spinoza. Spinoza's understanding of the body as "in relation" takes the focus of philosophical thought from the homogeneous subject to the heterogeneity of the social, and the focus of politics from individual rights to collective responsibility. The implications for feminism are radical; Spinoza enables a reconceptualization of the imaginary and the possibility of a sociability of inclusion.

Review Essay: A Review of Tom Nairn and Paul James, Global Matrix: Nationalism, Globalism and State-Terrorism ; Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Globalization or Empire? ; Patrick Hayden and Chamsy el-Ojeili, Confronting Globalization: Humanity, Justice and the Renewal of Politics.

As a constructive alternative to the exclusionary binaries of Cartesian philosophy, Genevieve Lloyd and Moira Gatens turn to Spinoza. Spinoza's understanding of the body as “in relation” takes the focus of philosophical thought from the homogeneous subject to the heterogeneity of the social, and the focus of politics from individual rights to collective responsibility. The implications for feminism are radical; Spinoza enables a reconceptualization of the imaginary and the possibility of a sociability of inclusion.

Seven important essays on the study of ancient Egyptian religion. Contents: The cosmology of the pyramid texts (James P Allen); Textual criticism in the coffin texts (David P Silverman); State and religion in the New Kingdom (Jan Assmann); The natural philosophy of Akhenaten (James P Allen); Horus or the crocodiles: a juncture of religion and magic in late Dynastic Egypt (Robert K Ritner); Psychology and society in the ancient Egyptian cult of the dead (Alan B Lloyd); Death (...) and initiation in the funerary reliion of ancient Egypt. (shrink)

To william james, conscious life was a stream; to Edmund Husserl, a flow. These metaphors point to the marvelous continuity of experience as it weaves through the world of thought and things. We might similarly talk about the flow of the body, as I reach for my cup of coffee. A physiologist could decompose the action, isolating the contribution of each muscle and joint to the whole. This functional analysis would constitute one form of explanation of the movement. As (...) we replace "I grab the cup" with the physiologist's account, there is a shift in level of description and a turn toward underlying processes, but the physiologist has added nothing to nature. Explanation of this sort, functional reduction, is simply a .. (shrink)

In this paper I contrast two causal explanations of the outcome of a set of laboratory experiments in population ecology conducted by Thomas Park in the 1940s and 1950s. These experiments shed light on the problem of adducing evidence for the operation of competition (see Lloyd 1987 for a recent philosophical discussion) and are central to the group selection controversy because they form the empirical base for experimental studies of group selection conducted over the last 12 years (see Griesemer (...) and Wade 1988 for an analysis).The experiments investigated competition in laboratory populations of two flour beetle species, Tribolium confusum and Tribolium castaneum, but the results were more complex and interesting than expected; in addition to demonstrating competition in a laboratory system, they exhibited what Park called “competitive indeterminacy.” This phenomenon was of great interest to statisticians, who devised stochastic models to describe its demographic basis (e.g., M.S. Bartlett, P.H. Leslie, and J. Neyman; see Mertz 1972 for references). (shrink)

Context: Neurophenomenology lies at a rich intersection of neuroscience and lived human experience, as described by phenomenology. As a new discipline, it is open to many new questions, methods, and proposals. Problem: The best available scientific ontology for neurophenomenology is based in dynamical systems. However, dynamical systems afford myriad strategies for organizing and representing neurodynamics, just as phenomenology presents an array of aspects of experience to be captured. Here, the focus is on the pervasive experience of subjective time. There is (...) a need for concepts that describe synchronic (parallel) features of experience as well as diachronic (dynamic) structures of temporal objects. Method: The paper includes an illustrative discussion of the role of temporality in the construction of the awareness of objects, in the tradition of Husserl, James, and most of 20th century phenomenology. Temporality illuminates desiderata for the dynamical concepts needed for experiment and explanation in neurophenomenology. Results: The structure of music – rather than language – is proposed as a source for descriptive and explanatory concepts in a neurophenomenology that encompasses the pervasive experience of duration, stability, passing time, and change. Implications: The toolbox of cognitive musicology suddenly becomes available for dynamical systems approaches to the neurophenomenology of subjective time. The paper includes an illustrative empirical study of consonance and dissonance in application to an fMRI study of schizophrenia. Dissonance, in a sense strongly analogous to its acoustic musical meaning, characterizes schizophrenia at all times, while emerging in healthy brains only during distracting and demanding tasks. Constructivist content: Our experience of the present is a continuous and elaborate construction of the retention of the immediate past and anticipation of the immediate future. Musical concepts are almost entirely temporal and constructivist in this temporal sense – almost every element of music is constructed from relations to non-present musical/temporal contexts. Musicology may offer many new constructivist concepts and a way of thinking about the dynamical system that is the human brain. (shrink)

Focusing on four cases presented by Lloyd Wells, M.D., this paper addresses the relationship of clinical psychopathology to the philosophical concept of narrative identity. The paper begins with a review of the debate among historians, literary critics, and philosophers over the referential status of narrative identity, that is, whether the narrative self is a fictive structure unrelated to lived life or whether ordinary life is in fact lived narratively. Agreeing with those philosophers who argue for the reference of narrative (...) identity to actual life, the author analyzes the four cases from the perspective of narrative identity to determine what light this philosophical concept sheds on the various psychopathologies. Then, having used the philosophical concept to illuminate psychopathology, he reverses direction and questions what psychopathology has to offer philosophy and its notion of narrative identity. The author argues both that the philosophical concept of narrative identity contributes to our understanding of psychopathology and that psychopathology offers challenges to the philosophical notion of narrative identity. (shrink)

In the context of feminist and postmodern thought, traditional conceptions of masculinity and what it means to be a “Real Man” have been critiqued. In Genevieve Lloyd's The Man of Reason, this critique takes the form of exposing the effect that the distinctive masculinity of the “man of reason” has had on the history of philosophy. One major feature of the masculine-feminine dichotomy will emerge as a key notion for understanding the rest of the paper: the dichotomy of reason-feeling, (...) a parallel and a foundational aspect to the dichotomy of masculinity and femininity. In exploring the history of symbolic conceptions of masculinity in ancient Greece, the Renaissance, and the present, one finds that the oppression of women is integrally linked to the traditional tie between masculinity and reason. There have been many efforts in recent feminist philosophy to rewrite or redefine “Woman” in such a way as to alleviate the oppression of women. I argue that the effectiveness of rewriting Woman for this purpose is problematic, primarily because any rewriting of this type must occur in the current historical context of hierarchical dualisms, like Man-Woman, masculine-feminine, male-female. These binary oppositions arguably find their roots in Pythagorean philosophy and can be traced through the Renaissance to our current historical context. It is these dualisms that have traditionally valued the masculine side of the Man-Woman dichotomy more than the feminine. Further, it will be argued that the hierarchical dualism of Man and Woman is so pervasive that if we rewrite or redefine the inferior, deprivileged side of that dualism, we cannot correct its devalued status. Instead, we redefine that which is undervalued but retain its devalued status. This particular aspect of attempts to critique hierarchical dualisms like reason and feeling has been reflected in the writings of many feminists, male and female. This paper will show that in cases where women attempt to redefine the dichotomy by revaluing the traditionally feminine (like feelings and emotions) over the traditionally masculine (like reason) their work is often mistakenly criticized for being purely political; conversely, when men attempt to redefine the same dichotomy in an attempt to allow men to “get back in touch with their feelings,” to be nurturers, their work is described in terms of providing a better epistemology. The current literature on masculinity explores alternatives to rewriting or redefining Woman that try to avoid the problem of status remaining with redefinition. This alternative is rewriting or redefining Man. Through redefining Man, one may be able to reconceptualize the privileged side of the hierarchical dualism in such a way that it is no longer privileged. Deprivileging, as well as redefining Man, is argued by theorists of masculinity to be possible because while the devalued status of the inferior side of a hierarchical dualism tends to keep the same status when redefined, it may be possible to redefine the privileged side of the dualism in such a way that it loses its privileged status. Unfortunately, many of these attempts to rewrite or redefine masculinity have detrimental faults of their own. Finally, this paper will discuss more promising possibilities for new definitions of Man, as well as a vision for better interaction between the work of women and men in general. (shrink)