Shows how the aesthetic views of Plotinus and later Neoplatonists have played a role in the history of Western art.

To date no investigation has sought to interpret key themes in Aristotle’s writings on metaphysics, e.g., substance, potentiality, actuality, proximate cause, etc., within the context of a temporal logic or logic of events. Essentially, what follows is a programmatic effort to interpret aspects of Aristotle’s insights in Book Lambda of the Metaphysics in terms of recent advances in the development of a temporal logic, while being attentive to the sense of the original text as far as possible. The significance of (...) such an enterprise lies in unearthing and clarifying conceptual interconnections in Aristotle’s metaphysical writings which would be difficult to fathom through other means. This project, however exploratory in its present form, seems feasible partly because of the fact that at numerous points in Aristotle’s thesis process metaphors from the study of biology are strikingly evident. Also, there is additional justification for the suggested analysis in that his work involves repeated references to the “lived” activity of one’s inquiring into the nature of things. Thus a view of Aristotle’s pronouncements which presupposes a logic of events, where events are analysed pragmatically, i.e., in terms of a language-user and the extension of whatever is claimed to have occurred, is not alien to the mode of expression with which he presents his views. (shrink)

In his celebrated article on the contrary-to-fact conditional Roderick Chisholm makes the following astute observation.

This work brings under the centrally unifying theme of 'rationality' some of the issues on values and personal responsibility he has addressed during his long ...

The socio-economic “pro-democracy” revolutions which are currently sweeping the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the name of glasnost and perestroika have virtually stunned all but the best informed in the Western World. The demand for reform throughout the so-called “Soviet block,” and the concomitant impatience with the progress of these changes in the economic and basic social fabric of these societies, have come to exhibit an urgency which few observers, if any, had been able to forecast a few short (...) years ago. The declarations by some members of the U.S. Congress that these changes are indicative of the fact that the cold war has been won by the West, and that we are now witnessing the precipitous collapse of Marxist ideology, together with the widespread sentiment that there is “no going back” to the repressive Leninist-inspired regimes of Stalin, Khruschev, and Brezhniev are all synergistic to the creation of a sentiment of optimism that indeed we have turned the corner in East-West relations. To a world which has lived under the long night of thermonuclear extinction for over four decades, the feeling accompanying the prospect of a possible end to the nightmare of Armageddon further enhances the euphoric sentiment. (shrink)

Western studies tend to view Byzantine philosophy either as a minor offshoot of western European thought, or a handy storehouse for documents and ideas until they are needed. A scholar of philosophy (Aristotle U. of Thessaloniki), Tatakis (1896-1996) finds the view limiting, pointing out that during the Roman period, few Greeks learned Latin but Romans were not considered educated without a founding in Greek, and that Byzantine Christianity has its own trajectory unconcerned with how it deviates from western orthodoxy.