Resumo: Este artigo é uma homenagem à trajetória de André Itaparica na pesquisa Nietzsche brasileira. Feita de um ponto de vista sobretudo pessoal, esta homenagem não poderia deixar de mencionar algumas das virtudes que se sobressaem em seu trabalho e que no meu entendimento conferem exemplaridade às suas contribuições para os estudos Nietzsche no Brasil. Entre essas virtudes destaco por fim a gentileza, que curiosamente não costuma figurar no catálogo das virtudes intelectuais. O trabalho de André Itaparica é um convite (...) para que essa negligência seja revista.: This paper pays tribute to André Itaparica’s career in the Brazilian Nietzsche research. Written mostly from a personal point of view, this homage couldn’t fail to mention the many virtues embodied by his scholarly work, which in my view place it in an outstanding position in the Brazilian Nietzsche studies. Among his many virtues I finally emphasize courtesy, which remains largely unnoticed as an intellectual virtue. Itaparica’s work invites us, I submit, to compensate this undeserved neglect. (shrink)

Nietzsche, Kant, and the Problem of Metaphysics is the first of three volumes meant to address Nietzsche's relation to Kant and Kantian philosophy. This volume addresses how Nietzsche rejects, adopts, and reformulates Kantian epistemology and metaphysics. In what follows I go through the book chapter by chapter, providing a brief summary before a brief commentary.In their helpful introduction, Brusotti and Siemens do an impressive job of elucidating the young Nietzsche's acquaintances with Kant. This section is a "must-read." They then (...) lay the groundwork for Nietzsche's later criticisms of Kant and provide an instructive outline of the volume's contributions. There is one lacuna, however. The title of the volume... (shrink)

'Updating Bertrand Russell for the 21st century... a cerebrally enjoyable survey, written with great clarity and touches of wit... The non-western section throws up some fascinating revelations' Sunday Times The story of philosophy is an epic tale: an exploration of the ideas, views and teachings of some of the most creative minds known to humanity. But since the long-popular classic Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, first published in 1945, there has been no comprehensive and entertaining, single-volume (...) history of this great intellectual journey. With his characteristic clarity and elegance A. C. Grayling takes the reader from the world-views and moralities before the age of the Buddha, Confucius and Socrates, through Christianity's dominance of the European mind to the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and on to Mill, Nietzsche, Sartre, and philosophy today. And, since the story of philosophy is incomplete without mention of the great philosophical traditions of India, China and the Persian-Arabic world, he gives a comparative survey of them too. Intelligible for students and eye-opening for philosophy readers, he covers epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, logic, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, political philosophy and the history of debates in these areas of enquiry, through the ideas of the celebrated philosophers as well as less well-known influential thinkers. He also asks what we have learnt from this body of thought, and what progress is still to be made. The first authoritative and accessible single-volume history of philosophy for decades, remarkable for its range and clarity, this is a landmark work. (shrink)

This book aims at remedying the deficiency which the author sees in the fact that not a single critical study of Heidegger's treatment of the history of philosophy has appeared in English. Magnus finds the basic theme of Heidegger's later works to lie in this treatment. He is concerned that "no sustained efforts have hitherto been made to come to grips with the methodological questions which Heidegger's hermeneutic occasions," and considers Heidegger's treatment of Nietzsche in order to make (...) such an effort. His ultimate motive in so doing is to present his conclusion that "to interpret the great philosophers from Heidegger's point of vantage... is ruinous to the history of philosophy as a discipline and is foreign to Heidegger's own thinking as well." The book is divided into two parts, the first clarifying Nietzsche's presentation of eternal recurrence; the second critically considering Heidegger's methodological approach in general and his conclusions vis-à-vis Nietzsche. The study will show a "partial and inadequate reading of Plato and Descartes" on Heidegger's part; the inadequacy of Heidegger's bald imputation of a "correspondence" epistemology reigning supreme throughout Western philosophy; and the textual evidence cited by Heidegger in his study of Nietzsche to be inadequate to his purposes. Chapter One of Part I points out the questionable nature of the material in Nietzsche's Nachlass; also, that much of the material consists of notes which Nietzsche abandoned or rejected as unfit for inclusion into the published works to which they refer. Nowhere in the published works or those designated for publication is the doctrine of eternal recurrence posited explicitly in "empirical-cosmological" terms. Magnus points out that Nietzsche scholars are unanimous in failing to draw the crucial methodological distinction between his published and unpublished works. To make this distinction is to come to recognize that the significance of eternal recurrence for Nietzsche is its existential imperative and not its empirical verification, which he mulled over as a "corroborative" hypothesis in his notes ; and which was attempted to confirm a doctrine which he had already embraced for other reasons. To understand this primary attraction to the doctrine one must consider Nietzsche's methodological challenging of the law of contradiction, his temperamental abhorrence of systematic, i.e. analytic philosophy. This latter methodology properly obtains in the empirical "proof" which was presented above as of derivative importance. To get at the existential significance of the doctrine, one might properly consider it "within the context of its opposition to three interpenetrating realities as Nietzsche understood them: Metaphysics, Christianity, and nihilism." This is the concern of the remainder of Chapter Three. Eternal recurrence emerges as the doctrine of becoming, and is seen to be "a critique [sic] and alternative to metaphysics." Part II illustrates how Heidegger reworked his understanding of Western philosophy from the period of Being and Time, when metaphysics was seen to begin with Aristotle and to have had its "decisive" phases with Descartes and Kant, to the subsequent consideration of its having begun with Plato and having had its "decisive" culmination with Nietzsche. Magnus argues that the contention that for Plato truth devolved from alétheia to orthotes is highly questionable; that the "humanistic" truth criterion of Western metaphysics pervades Heidegger's own Being and Time; and that the claim by Heidegger that Western philosophers have traditionally presupposed a subject/object correspondence conception of truth is patently false. He concludes that "[Heidegger's] interpretation is subordinated to a thesis which superimposes its meaning upon the history of philosophy." It remains the task of the concluding two chapters to elucidate how this "metahistory" of philosophy distorts Nietzsche's critique and alternative to metaphysics into the very embodiment of metaphysics. This project points out the disparity in the understanding of "nihilism" between the two thinkers; likewise, their variant understandings of the crucial notion of "revenge"; and, finally, Nietzsche's thoroughgoing rejection of Being as a precisely metaphysical notion. Magnus shows that the contexts from which Heidegger draws the quotations for his Nietzschean meditations themselves refute his distorted interpretation of Nietzsche's doctrine. A more careful consideration might not sacrifice thinking broadly in order to think deeply. Heidegger's metahistorical methodology Heideggerizes every philosopher to which he turns; hence, the Heideggerian virtue is "to comprehend and express not what another thinker thought/said, but what he did not think/say, could not think/say, and why he could not think/say it". To consider Nietzsche in terms of what he said regarding eternal recurrence rather in terms of the fundamentally contradictory words which Heidegger attributes to him, is to see the doctrine as the ultimate affirmation of becoming--and to see Heidegger as the last metaphysician. The serious alternative to metaphysics rests with Nietzsche.--R. J. G. (shrink)

This paper is devoted to a comparison between Ernst Mach's and Friedrich Nietzsche's anti-metaphysical approach to scientific and philosophical concepts. By making reference to Mach’s early essay on the conservation of energy (Die Geschichte und die Wurzel des Satzes von der Erhaltung der Arbeit, 1872), I argue that Nietzsche shares with him the idea that the concepts we adopt are only useful fictions developed during the history of humankind and its culture. This idea is fundamental for the development of (...) modern science, since Mach’s epistemology contributed to give up the mechanistic (Newtonian) view of physics. (shrink)

Pre-Socratic -- Socrates (469-399 B.C.) -- Plato (429-347 B.C.) -- Existentialism -- Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) -- The ship of Theseus -- Francis Bacon (1561-1626) -- The cow in the field -- David Hume (1711-1776) -- Hedonism -- Prisoner's dilemma -- St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) -- Hard determinism -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) -- The trolley problem -- Realism -- Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) -- Dualism -- Utilitarianism -- John Locke (1632-1704) -- Empiricism versus Rationalism -- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) -- René (...) Descartes (1596-1650) -- A-Theory -- The liar paradox -- Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) -- Philosophy of language -- Metaphysics -- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) -- Free will -- Philosophy of humor -- The Enlightenment -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) -- The Sorites paradox -- Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) -- Aesthetics -- Philosoph of culture -- Epistemology -- Twin Earth -- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) -- Karl Marx (1818-1883) -- Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) -- Voltaire (1694-1778) -- Relativism -- Eastern philosophy -- Avicenna (980-1037) -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) -- Phenomenology -- Nominalism -- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) -- Ethics -- Philosophy of science -- Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) -- Philosopy of religion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.1 (2001) 158-159 [Access article in PDF] Christopher Janaway, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. 592. Cloth, $59.95. Schopenhauer's import as a original thinker has often been downplayed or underestimated by contemporary commentators and his philosophy is often examined only in light of his influence upon Nietzsche. This collection of thirteen essays assembled (...) by Christopher Janaway does much to overcome scholarly neglect of Schopenhauer by illustrating the original aspects of his thought as well as the widespread influence his philosophy has had. One gains from this book not only a solid introduction to Schopenhauer's major ideas but an appreciation of the significant contributions he made to the philosophical milieu of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.In the first essay, Gunter Zöller examines how Schopenhauer's unique notion of selfhood fits into his overall "dual aspect" theory of the world as both will and representation. He also discusses Schopenhauer's conception of the self within the context of his claims regarding the negation of the will. The following article, by David Hamlyn, is also broad in scope and provides a comprehensive examination of Schopenhauer's epistemology in The World as Will and Representation. He looks at the various notions of knowledge that are employed in Schopenhauer's system and how they are determined by the different classes of objects of knowledge that Schopenhauer distinguishes. In the third essay F. C. White turns to Schopenhauer's earlier work, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle ofSufficient Reason. White runs through Schopenhauer's arguments regarding each of the four classes of objects which comprise the world as representation in the Fourfold Root. He reinforces the point made by Schopenhauer himself, that this is a text that can not be overlooked if one is to gain a sufficient understanding of his primary work. The Fourfold Root, like the rest of Schopenhauer's philosophy, is deeply engaged with the philosophy of Kant. This is the topic of the next article by Paul Guyer. Guyer gives a detailed summary and evaluation of Schopenhauer's appropriation and critique of Kant's theoretical philosophy. According to Guyer, Schopenhauer and Kant employ quite different methodologies, Kant's being thoroughly transcendental and Schopenhauer's more phenomenological. Also, Schopenhauer's phenomenological approach to epistemological questions often skews his interpretation and evaluation of Kant's transcendental arguments. [End Page 158]Christopher Janaway, in the first of his two contributions, turns the focus to Schopenhauer's famous metaphysical doctrine of the will. He provides a particularly illuminating discussion of Schopenhauer's conception of will as the "thing-in-itself." The thing-in-itself is also the subject of the next article by Noira Nichols. Despite his reputation for not significantly altering his major positions, Nichols argues that there is a distinct difference between Schopenhauer's earlier, more Kantian, conception of the thing-in-itself with his later, more mystical, conception. She attributes these conceptual shifts to the increasing influence of Eastern philosophy upon Schopenhauer's thinking. Schopenhauer's broad analysis of the concept of will includes complex aesthetic and moral theories which are addressed in the contributions by Cheryl Foster and David Cartwright. In her contribution, Cheryl Foster examines Schopenhauer's aesthetics by focusing on his views regarding the relationship of art and science, art and the limitations of the intellect, and the nature of artistic genius. Turning to Schopenhauer's moral theory, David Cartwright explicates Schopenhauer's "narrower" sense of morality as discussed in his often overlooked On the Basis of Morality, rather than focusing on the "higher metaphysical-ethical standpoint" exemplifed in the World as Will and Representation. Cartwright also attempts to demonstrate "... how Schopenhauer has contributed and could contribute to contemporary moral thought" (253).The next group of articles address the issue of Schopenhauer's pessimism. Dale Jacquette looks at Schopenhauer's understanding of the meaning of death in light of his pessimistic metaphysic. Included in Jacquette's study is an explanation of Schopenhauer's views on suicide and asceticism. Covering similar territory, Christopher Janaway... (shrink)

Until recently, experimental philosophy has been associated with the questionnaire-based study of intuitions; however, experimental philosophers now adapt a wide range of empirical methods for new philosophical purposes. New methods include paradigms for behavioural experiments from across the social sciences as well as computational methods from the digital humanities that can process large bodies of text and evidence. This book offers an accessible overview of these exciting innovations. The volume brings together established and emerging research leaders from several areas (...) of experimental philosophy to explore how new empirical methods can contribute to philosophical debates. Each chapter presents one or several methods new to experimental philosophy, demonstrating their application in a key area of philosophy and discussing their strengths and limitations. Methods covered include eye tracking, virtual reality technology, neuroimaging, statistical learning, and experimental economics as well as corpus linguistics, visualisation techniques and data and text mining. The volume explores their use in moral philosophy and moral psychology, epistemology, philosophy of science, metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and the history of ideas. Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy is essential reading for undergraduates, graduate students and researchers working in experimental philosophy. (shrink)

TWENTIETH-CENTURY ETHICS. AFTER NIETZSCHE -/- Preface This book tells the story of twentieth-century ethics or, in more detail, it reconstructs the history of a discussion on the foundations of ethics which had a start with Nietzsche and Sidgwick, the leading proponents of late-nineteenth-century moral scepticism. During the first half of the century, the prevailing trends tended to exclude the possibility of normative ethics. On the Continent, the trend was to transform ethics into a philosophy of existence whose self-appointed (...) task was that of describing the human condition as consisting of choices, as unavoidable as arbitrary, without any attempt at providing criteria for making such choices. In the Anglo-Saxon countries, the heir of ethics was a philosophy of morality, that is, an analysis of the language of morality that intended to clarify valuations without trying to justify them. 1958 was the year of the normative turn that led to the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy, a turn followed by decades of controversies between distinct kinds of normative ethics: utilitarian, Kantian, virtue ethics. While the controversy was raging, a quiet revolution took place, that of applied ethics which surprisingly dissolved the controversy's very subject matter by providing methods for making convergence possible on intermediate principles even when no agreement was available about first principles. The normative turn and the revolution of applied ethics have led us, at the turn of the century, to a goal that was quite far from the starting point. Instead of scepticism and relativism that was the fashion at the beginning of the century, at the beginning of the third millennium impartial and universal moral arguments seem to hold the spot being supported, if not by a final rational foundation, at least by reasonableness, the most precious legacy of the Enlightenment. -/- ● TABLE OF CONTENTS -/- ● I Anglo-Saxon philosophy: naturalism 1. Dewey beyond evolutionism and utilitarianism 2. Dewey and anti-essentialist moral epistemology 3. Dewey and naturalist moral ontology 4. Dewey and normative ethics of conduct and function 5. Perry and semantic naturalism -/- ● II Anglo-Saxon philosophy: ideal utilitarianism and neo-intuitionism 1. Moore's critique of utilitarian empiricism 2. Moore on the naturalistic fallacy 3. Moore on the nature of intrinsic value 4. Moore on ideal utilitarianism 5. Prichard on the priority of the right over the good 6. Ross's coherentist moral epistemology 7. Ross's moral ontology: realism, pluralism, and non-naturalism 8. Ross's normative ethics of prima facie duties -/- The chapter reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore's early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. It stresses the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. It argues that PE is more a patchwork of somewhat diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. -/- ●III Anglo-Saxon philosophy: non-cognitivism 1. The Scandinavian School, the Vienna circle and proto-emotivism 2. Wittgenstein and the ineffability of ethics 3. Russell's and Ayer's radical emotivism 4. Stevenson and moderate emotivism 5. Stevenson and the pragmatics of moral language 6. Stevenson and the methods for solving ethical disagreement 7. Hare and prescriptivism The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of 'good', its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with 'emotive' meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell's ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson's theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. A section reconstructs the discussion from the Forties about Hume's law, mentioning Karl Popper's argument and Richard Hare's early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- ●IV Anglo-Saxon philosophy: critics of non-cognitivism 1. Neo-naturalism and its objections to the naturalistic fallacy argument 2. Objections to Hume's law 3. Clarence Lewis and the pragmatic contradiction 4. Toulmin and the good reasons approach 5. Baier and moral reasons 5. Baier, social moralities and the absolute morality 6. Baier and the moral point of view 7. Baier and the contents of absolute ethics -/- ● V Continental philosophy: the philosophy of values 1. Max Weber and the polytheism of values 2. Phenomenology against psychologism and rationalism 3. Reinach and the theory of social acts 4. Scheler and the material ethics of values 5. Hartmann and the ontology of values 6. Plessner, Gehlen and the Philosophische Anthropologie -/- The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl's project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the apriori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy conducted in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach's theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that sketches the ideas 'discovered' later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section discusses Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of 'values' – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler, who claimed to be Husserl's legitimate heirs. -/- ● VI Continental philosophy: the critics of the philosophy of values 1. Freud, the Superego and Civilization 2. Heidegger on original ethos against ethics 3. Sartre and de Beauvoir on authenticity and ambiguity 4. Adorno and Horkheimer on emancipation and immoralism -/- ●VII Post-liberal theologians and religious thinkers 1. Barth on the autonomy of faith from ethics 2. Developments of Reformed moral theology after Barth 3. Bonhoeffer on the concrete divine command and ethics of penultimate realities 4. Developments of Reformed and Catholic moral theology after world war II 5. Baeck and the transformation of liberal Judaism 6. Rosenzweig against liberal Judaism 7. Buber and religion as the vital lymph of morality 8. Heschel and Judaism as a science of actions -/- The chapter examines the main protagonists of Christian theology and Jewish religious thinking in the twentieth century. It stresses how the main dilemmas of contemporary philosophical ethics lie at the root of the various path of inquiry taken by these thinkers. -/- ● VIII Normative ethics: neo-Utilitarianism 1. The discussion on act and rule utilitarianism 2. Hare on two-tiered preference utilitarianism 3. Harsanyi, Gauthier and rational choice ethics 4. Parfit, utilitarianism and the idea of a person 5. Brandt and indirect conscience utilitarianism -/- The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick's and Moore's fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine refuted. Two examples give the reader a glimpse at this uproarious process. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This transformation results in preference utilitarianism combined with a 'Kantian' version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare's two-level preference utilitarianism, where act utilitarianism plays the function of the eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of an action-guiding practical device. -/- ● IX Normative ethics: neo-Aristotelianism and virtue ethics 1. Hannah Arendt, action and judgement 2. Hans-Georg Gadamer and phronesis 3. Alasdair MacIntyre on practices, virtues, and traditions 5. Stuart Hampshire on deliberation 6. Bernard Williams and moral complexity 7. Feminist ethics -/- Sect 1 reconstructs the post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named 'Rehabilitation of practical philosophy' is described. Heidegger's most brilliant disciples were the promoters of this Rehabilitation. Hans-Georg Gadamer is a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle's lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger's lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the significant role of the notion of phronesis. Sect 3 discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. It argues that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. The chapter gives a short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot's and Peter Geach's critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre's grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly inevitable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- ● X Normative ethics: Kantian and rights-based ethics 1. Dialogical constructivism 2. Apel, Habermas and discourse ethics 3. Gewirth and rights-based ethics 4. Nagel on agent-relative reasons 5. Donagan and persons as ends in themselves Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This current started with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. The chapter offers an examination of his argument in some detail, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas's elaboration on Apel's theory. -/- ● XI The applied ethics renaissance 1. Elisabeth Anscombe on the atom bomb 2. From medical ethics to bioethics 3. Rawls and public ethics 3. Nozick, Dworkin and further developments of public ethics 5. Sen and the revival of economic ethics -/- The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin's new casuistry. The chapter argues that Rawls's distinction between a "political" and a "metaphysical" approach to the theory of justice, one central part of ethical theory, is a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and the new casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter. The idea is that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls' view never will be close – on the essential criteria for judgment. -/- ● XII Fin-de-siècle metaethics 1. Deontic logics 2. Anti-realism 3. External realism 4. Internal realism 5. Kantian constructivism -/- The chapter illustrates the fresh start of meta-ethical discussion in the Eighties and Nineties and the resulting new alignments: metaphysical naturalism, internal realism, anti-realism, and constructivism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of PhilosophyPaul S. MiklowitzSusan Neiman. Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Pp. xii + 358. Cloth, $29.95.Contemporary philosophy in America tends to regard epistemological questions as the most fundamental of the discipline, but Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought sets itself against this assumption in an attempt to sketch (...) "an alternative history of philosophy." "It's possible to begin to worry about the difference between appearance and reality because... a dream is so vivid that you want to grasp one of its objects for a moment or two of sleepy half-consciousness," Neiman writes, but then "you wake up in your bed, slap your face if you have to... " (5). The problem of evil, in stark contrast to such skeptical speculations, is far more urgent and trenchant; it is "the place where philosophy begins, and threatens to stop" (ibid.). Moreover, the problem of evil, far from being merely a theological quandary, actually forms a link between metaphysics and epistemology by starkly posing questions about the intelligibility of the world: Why are things like that? wants the answer Because it's best that way. For the early modern period, these questions centered on the "theodicy" debates focused by the catastrophic Lisbon earthquake of 1755, while for us the holocaust threatens to explode all our hopes and expectations for the possibility of a world that is as it should be. Thus, Lisbon and Auschwitz frame for Neiman the historical topoi that ground discussion of the relation between natural and moral evils, the evolving philosophical understanding of which defines "who we have become in the three centuries that separate us from the early Enlightenment" (10).The problem of theodicy is introduced through the figure of Alfonso X, king of Castille in 1252, and "the first Enlightenment hero" (14), according to Neiman. Having studied astronomy under the guidance of learned Jews from Toledo, Alfonso scandalously remarked "If I had been of God's counsel at the Creation, many things would have been ordered better" (15). Serving as a paradigm of blasphemy for half a millennium, Alfonso's boast also expresses the inevitable dismay that must accompany the delighted wonder at natural order exploited by the argument from design: while Creation is surely miraculous in its manifestation of seemingly intelligent structure, it is just as surely astonishing that so much of that structure seems so wantonly destructive. Can this really be the best of all possible worlds if innocent lives are cut short by cruel diseases or natural disasters while vicious villains prosper into comfortable old age?! Alfonso's remark serves Neiman as a leitmotif around which she orders central figures in the canon of western philosophy into two camps: those who struggled to reconcile natural evil with God's goodness or with reason (Leibniz, Pope, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx), and those who skeptically condemned reason by appealing to "brute appearances" (Bayle, Voltaire, Hume, Sade and Schopenhauer). Because the very categories of natural and moral evil tend to break down as a result of the development of psychology as a "science of nature" (to the extent that human motives are regarded as natural processes subject to empirical explanation, they cease to manifest a unique ontology), Nietzsche and Freud fall outside the philosophical canon thus construed—although Neiman's discussion of these two thinkers is perhaps the most compelling of the book.No new interpretive ground is broken in the resulting exegesis of western philosophical history, but Neiman's treatment of each of these figures is intelligent and skillful. In discussing Kant, for example, a deep paradox at the center of his moral thought is brilliantly harnessed to the book's argument. Whereas theodicies from Leibniz onward had focused on attempts to show that Providence ultimately guaranteed a connection between virtue and happiness despite obvious evidence to the contrary, Kant took exactly the opposite tack. As Neiman puts it, "Solving the problem of evil is not only impossible but immoral. For knowing the connections between moral and natural evils would undermine the possibility of morality" (69). If we could be sure that good deeds... (shrink)

The book begins with the problem of the relationship between systematic philosophy and the history of philosophy. Why does philosophy attach so much importance to history? Consideration of this question is an essential part of metaphysics, and it has important consequences for the methodology of both history and philosophy. An analysis of the problem that begins the book leads to many other fundamental questions concerning the nature of philosophy. In treating these (...) issues the author discusses positions taken on them by Russell, Rorty, Heidegger, Gadamer, Levinas, Ricoeur, Derrida, and others of our century. He also draws inspiration from Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. (shrink)

Kyiv-Mohyla Seminar on the History of Philosophy was established by the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy’s Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies (in co-operation with Ukrainian Philosophical Foundation) in 2003. In this yearly seminar, the Department’s members as well as the historians of philosophy from other academic institutions regularly take part. Since 2003, 16 meetings of the seminar took place. They were focused on such topics as “Historiography of Philosophy in Ukraine: Current State and Perspectives” (2003), “Actual Problems (...) of the Source Studies in the Historiography of Philosophy” (2004), “The Problem of Text Interpretation in the Historiography of Philosophy” (2005), “Dmytro Chyzhevskyi as a Historian of Philosophy” (2006), “Historiography of Philosophy in Ukraine: Current State and Perspectives” (2007), “The Problem of Method in the Historiography of Philosophy” (2007), “Oleksii Losiev: Personality and Heritage (to the 115 th Anniversary of His Birth)” (2008), “Methodology of the Historiography of Philosophy: Actual Strategies” (2008), “Wilhelm Windelband as a Philosopher and Historian of Philosophy (to the 160 th Anniversary of His Birth)” (2008), “Hegel’s Heritage in the Mirror of Interpretations” (2009), “The Studies on the History of Philosophy: New Generation” (2010, 2011), “Kant’s Criticism from the perspective of Wolf’s dogmatism” (2012), “The Reception of Indian Philosophy in Ukraine: 1840s–1930s” (2013), “Did Kant Answer the Question on What a Man Is?” (2016). The proceedings of the early three meetings were published in a special volume (Tkachuk, 2006). The current issue of “NaUKMA Research Papers in Philosophy and Religious Studies” contains the proceedings of the sixteenth meeting of Kyiv-Mohyla Seminar on the History of Philosophy, which took place at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy on February 1, 2017. The main speaker was Dr. Taras Lyuty, while the co-speakers included Dr. Mykhailo Minakov and Dr. Vakhtang Kebuladze. The meeting was conducted by Prof. Vadym Menzhulin. The audio recording of the meeting was deciphered by a PhD-student Taras Fostiak. (shrink)

Philosophy of history is the conceptual and technical study of the relation which exists between philosophy and history. This paper tries to analyze and examine the nature of philosophy of history, its methodology and ideal development. In this I have tried to set the limits of knowledge to know the special account of Hegel’s idealistic view about philosophy of history. In this paper I have also used the philosophical methodology and (...) philosophy inquiry, quest and hypothesis to discuss the Hegel’s idealistic concept of philosophy of history. It also examines and demonstrates the views of other idealist philosophers like, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. It also shows the how history of mathematics is a complementary of idealism as most of philosophers who were idealists are also great mathematicians. In this paper we are investigation the epistemological approach, logical and metaphysical approach to study the nature of history, meaning of history and structure of history. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche's EducatorDaniel SchumanChristopher Janaway, Editor. Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche's Educator. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. 293. Cloth, $65.00.Considering how many English language studies of Nietzsche's thought exist, it is quite remarkable that more has not been written on the question of the influence that Arthur Schopenhauer, his self-described "educator," had on his philosophy. The essays in this important (...) volume go a long way toward filling this vacancy in Nietzsche (and Schopenhauer) scholarship. Christopher Janaway has assembled an impressive group of articles that, taken together, effectively reveal the complexity and depth of Nietzsche's Schopenhauerian inheritance. This collection is both focused and comprehensive. These essays deal with almost all of the major points of agreement and contention between these two philosophers without exaggerating the influence of Schopenhauer on Nietzsche.In his introduction and contributing essay, Janaway highlights some of the general ways in which Schopenhauer exerted an influence on Nietzsche throughout his philosophical development. Janaway argues that despite Nietzsche's steadfast rejection of Schopenhauer's metaphysics there are important ways in which he remained indebted to his mentor even in his later works. For instance, though Schopenhauer embraces the mystical ideal of freeing the intellect from the will, it is his view that in the phenomenal realm the intellect is essentially an instrument of the will. According to Janaway, this claim that the intellect must be "rooted in a living, striving entity" had a profound [End Page 133] influence on Nietzsche's later thought, especially on his 'perspectivism' (35). The second essay in this volume, contributed by Maudemarie Clark, makes the similar claim that Nietzsche's ideas regarding truth and knowledge are grounded in the naturalistic conception of intellect he inherited from Schopenhauer. Clark claims Schopenhauer's philosophy, once divested of its more extreme metaphysical aspects, can be understood as a form of empiricism in which all knowing is "rooted in affect" (74). This is an idea that Clark also takes to be at the heart of Nietzsche's perspectivism.Other essays deal with two issues that were of primary importance to both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche: aesthetics and morality. Ivan Soll compares their respective aesthetic theories and argues that their views regarding the significance of art are not as dissimilar as Nietzsche himself claimed. They both see art "through the lens of life" and as a way of responding to the suffering that characterizes human existence. However, whereas Schopenhauer sees art as a means of denying the will to life, Nietzsche sees it as means of affirming life in the face of suffering. Like Soll, David Cartwright argues that Nietzsche embraces Schopenhauer's stance on the pervasiveness of suffering in human life. From this standpoint he examines both Nietzsche's criticisms and appropriation of certain elements of Schopenhauer's moral philosophy. Cartwright cleverly argues that Nietzsche's scathing critique of Schopenhauer's asceticism and morality of Mitleid actuallyrelies upon Schopenhauer's methodology and incorporates elements of his pessimism.Pessimism is dealt with in more detail in the essays by Kathleen Higgins and David Berman. Higgins claims that Schopenhauer's and Nietzsche's basic conceptions of will are actually quite similar. Both philosophers understand and interpret life in fundamentally voluntaristic terms. However, the two philosophers part ways when it comes to how will is characterized. Schopenhauer's pessimism and Nietzsche's relative optimism, Higgins claims, spring more from a difference in the temperament of the two thinkers, rather than a difference in their conceptions of will. In his essay, David Berman reinforces Higgins' view that Schopenhauer and Nietzsche share the same basic understanding of will even though their evaluations of it differ. However, Berman claims that Nietzsche came to see Schopenhauer as a closet epistemological optimist whose purported pessimism was "being used to protect and insulate him from the world's pain" (190). It is Berman's view that Nietzsche's self-proclaimed recognition of Schopenhauer's pessimism as a kind of "self-deceived" optimism actually cleared the way for Nietzsche to develop his philosophy of power and life affirmation. Whereas Schopenhauer retreats into the false comfort of resignation and denial, Nietzsche's... (shrink)

This paper addresses the self-overcoming of historical consciousness in Nietzsche’s “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” and contemporaneous texts. I argue that Nietzsche’s particular historical awareness, which conditions his treatment of historiography [Historie], is indebted to the lineage of German Idealism it also overtly contests. That contestation reaches its apex in Nietzsche’s valorization of appearance and the redirection of poietic power, which enables him to affirm an art of history rather than a science thereof, indeed, an (...) art aligned with justice. (shrink)

The article analyzes the socio-cultural and theoretical origins of the Russian philosophy of history. These origins determined the development of the philosophy of history as a special feld of philosophical knowledge. This process took place in the second half of the 19th century, a significant factor of which was the split within the cultural and spiritual unity of Russian society on the wave of Alexander II’s reforms associated with the abolition of serfdom. In this period the (...) subject-matter of the philosophy of history was defned. In the author’s opinion, the subject-matter of the philosophy of history includes: 1) the historical process in its universal human dimensions and in “past – present – future” movement, 2) the life of society in historically concrete forms of the organization of human community, 3) historical epistemology. The article shows why the philosophy of history, formed in this research feld, was established in the public consciousness and intellectual context as historiosophy, i.e. knowledge of spiritual senses, the beginning and end of history. This philosophical-historical paradigm excluded the oppositions, on the one hand, between philosophical knowledge and historical science and, on the other hand, between the philosophy of the history and social philosophy. As the main ideas of the Russian philosophy of history during that period, the author considers the idea of the integrity of historical existence as an “organic life” and the idea of the variability of the historical process, interpreted as the constant inclination of history to “permanent improvisation”. The author pays special attention to the development of the concepts of “transitional form” and “chaos,” which provide the acceleration of the progressive movement of history and the possibility of an active and responsible participation of an individual and masses in it. The attention to this problem introduced the spiritual and moral component into the ontological basis of the historical process as well as the concept of necessity and chance, freedom and violence, revolution and evolution into the conceptual apparatus of philosophical and historical knowledge. As a result, simultaneously with the metaphysical principles, the principles of concrete historical and axiological analysis were integrated into the methodology of the philosophy of history. This approach to the analysis of the historical process has preserved its heuristic potential to the present day. (shrink)

Philosophy is textual - it is written and it is read - yet today much of philosophy regards itself as a kind of science, sometimes reducing itself to a species of intellectual bureaucracy. It is important to see these qualities as having their own aesthetic. Even realism is a genre. The aesthetic of the empirical and the bureaucratic, the aesthetic of the rhapsodic and of the clinical... in each of these the genres of philosophy are as creative (...) as they ever were. They are productive of worlds, not only worlds of thought, but 'real worlds' enabled by the technological and other changes that thought has envisaged. This book explores genres through the history of philosophy, providing new ways of thinking about philosophical writing. Exploring a wide range of both European and analytic philosophers and their works - including Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Wittgenstein, Derrida and Rorty - Genres of Philosophy explores the reading and writing of philosophers who themselves read and write, revealing the textual relation to the history of philosophy. While the focus of the book is in aesthetics, Ferrell reveals that the interest in philosophy's writing turns out to be a metaphysical question. The question becomes one of evaluating the ontological basis for writing - its subject and its means of expression - within a world of thought which is presently captivated by a particular aesthetic, that of the empiricist. Presenting fresh readings of classic texts in aesthetics, and offering an original approach to the question of philosophical writing, this unique analysis will prove of particular interest to readers in European philosophy, the history of philosophy, aesthetics, and literary studies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Towards a Realist Philosophy of History by Adam TimminsAviezer TuckerTIMMINS, Adam. Towards a Realist Philosophy of History. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2022. 192 pp. Cloth, $95.00The debate about scientific realism, whether science represents reality or just discovers measurements and correlations that are followed by theoretical stories about them, is at the center of the philosophy of science. One potent and frequently discussed antirealist (...) argument has been Larry Laudan’s “pessimistic induction”: Historically, all scientific theories, especially in physics, have been proven false. Hence, all contemporary scientific theories will be proven false and science cannot represent reality. This pessimistic induction relies on knowledge of the history of science, on historiographic realism. Luckily for the pessimistic induction, the history of historiography, the scientific representation of the human past, supports an optimistic induction: Since the revolutions associated with Ranke in historiography, Lyle in geological history, and Darwin in biological history, the historical sciences have made progress but have not [End Page 368] overhauled the founders’ representations of the past. We know more about the human past than Ranke did and much more about the biological past than Darwin did, but the modern historical sciences have not overturned their theories and conclusions. Though there are many new methodologies, historians still go to the archives to compare primary sources, and biologists still study fossils and assume natural selection.Though scientific antirealism assumes historiographic realism, it has received scant philosophic attention. Often it is perceived or presented as a naive “empiricist” concept of historiography that imagines historians “observe” history and then describe it in historiography. Radical antirealist theories of historiography that reduce it to fiction, myth, or manipulative ideology use this image of realism as naive empiricism to dialectically support its equally naive antirealist antithesis. Both ignore the evidential, mostly testimonial, justifications of historiography.Adam Timmins’s project is to articulate and justify a sophisticated historiographic realism that fits historiographic practices and premises. He argues that historiography is “successful in providing information and understanding about the historical past that is constrained by and reflects what actually happened in the past itself.”Timmins’s historiographic realism springs out of the philosophy of language rather than epistemology or philosophy of science. This distinguishes it from Murray Murphey’s historiographic realism, which argued that historiographic ontology is theoretical. Famously, Murphey compared George Washington to the electron as two well-corroborated but unobservable theoretical entities. Timmins retorts that Washington is a proper name and not a theoretical concept, and it is impossible to conduct experiments with Washingtons. Timmins inquires how the language historians use may be interpreted as referring to past events and how historiography can represent history. He does not devote much attention to how historians justify their statements about history to a degree that may warrant a realistic interpretation of historiography. Rather, Timmins assumes so. He proceeds through polemical dialogues with philosophers of historiography who took antirealist stances like Leon Goldstein, Frank Ankersmit, and Jouni Kuukkanen.Timmins’s realism is founded on the belief in a universally accepted core of historiographic facts. He does not inquire about the theoretical foundations of historiographic inferences that allow the emergence of such a consensus. Rather than consider historiographic epistemology, the critical methods of historiography, Timmins considers linguistic communities and entrenched uses of language. He confronts the problem of reference to the past in the absence of its perception by asserting that historiographic representations are of “mental files” that have names (for example, “the Renaissance,” “the Second World War”) and evolving core facts about those historical events (for example, Petrarch and Da Vinci in the Renaissance, the main battles in the war). Though the exact contents of these files may differ between historians, they still refer to the same events and have the same labels. Timmins suggests that experts gradually introduce fluid norms of reference on the basis of broadly accepted facts [End Page 369] whose references caused information chains that led to them. He suggests that complex or colligated concepts are in the mind but refer through mediation to some directly referenced events. For example, the First World War is a concept that through the mediation of facts like its main battles refers to real... (shrink)

Nietzsche's controversial will to power thesis is convincingly rehabilitated in this compelling book. Tsarina Doyle presents a fresh interpretation of his account of nature and value, which sees him defy the dominant conception of nature in the Enlightenment and overturn Hume's distinction between facts and values. Doyle argues that Nietzsche challenges Hume indirectly through critical engagement with Kant's idealism, and that in so doing and despite some wrong turns, he establishes the possibility of objective value in response to nihilism and (...) the causal efficacy of consciousness as a necessary condition of human autonomy. Her book will be important for scholars of Nietzsche's metaphysics, and of the history of philosophy and science more generally. (shrink)

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

This book defends the controversial view that Nietzsche is a metaphysician against a tendency to sever Nietzsche from metaphysical philosophy. It shows that for Nietzsche the questions, answers, methods, and subject matters of metaphysics are not only perfectly legitimate, but also crucial for understanding the world and our place within it.

_Wittgenstein and the Practice of Philosophy_ introduces Wittgenstein’s philosophy to senior undergraduates and graduate students. Its pedagogical premise is that the best way to understand Wittgenstein’s thought is to take seriously his methodological remarks. Its interpretive premise is that those methodological remarks are the natural result of Wittgenstein’s rejection of his early view of the ground of value, including semantic value or meaning, as something that must lie “outside the world.” This metaphysical view of meaning is replaced in his (...) transitional writings with a kind of conventionalism, according to which meaning is made possible by the existence of grammatical conventions that are implicit in our linguistic practices. The implicit nature of these conventions makes us vulnerable to a special kind of confusion that results from lacking a clear view of the norms that underlie our linguistic practices. This special confusion is characteristic of philosophical problems, and the task of philosophy is the therapeutic one of alleviating confusion by helping us to see our grammatical norms clearly. This development of this therapeutic view of philosophy is traced from Wittgenstein’s early _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_ through his transitional writings and lectures to his great masterwork, _Philosophical Investigations_, and his final reflections on knowledge and scepticism in _On Certainty_. Wittgenstein’s discussions of naming, family resemblances, rule-following and private language in _Philosophical Investigations_ are all examined as instances of this sort of method, as is his discussion of knowledge in _On Certainty_. The book concludes by considering some objections to the viability of Wittgenstein’s method and speculating on how it might be extended to a discussion of moral value to which Wittgenstein never explicitly returns. (shrink)

Introduction -/- 1 Précis -/- 2 Methodology: Introducing digital humanities to the history of philosophy 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Core constructs 2.3 Operationalizing the constructs 2.4 Querying the Nietzsche Source 2.5 Cleaning the data 2.6 Visualizations and preliminary analysis 2.6.1 Visualization of the whole corpus 2.6.2 Book visualizations 2.7 Summary -/- Nietzsche’s Socio-Moral Framework -/- 3 From instincts and drives to types 3.1 Introduction 3.2 The state of the art on drives, instincts, and types 3.2.1 Drives 3.2.2 Instincts (...) 3.2.3 Types 3.3 The semantic neighborhood of drive, instinct, and type 3.4 A theory of (the relations among) instincts, drives, and types 3.4.1 Drives are act-directed rather than outcome-directed dispositions 3.4.2 The reflexive turn in Nietzsche’s drive psychology 3.4.3 Triggers of drive-displacement 3.4.4 Instincts are innate drives 3.4.5 Types are constellations of instincts and other drives 3.4.6 To what extent are types, instincts, and drives fixed? 3.5 Summary -/- 4 From types to virtues 4.1 Introduction 4.2 The state of the art on virtues and values 4.2.1 Virtues 4.2.2 Values 4.3 The semantic neighborhood of virtue and value 4.4 On (the relations among) instincts, drives, types, values, virtues, and values 4.4.1 Virtues are well-calibrated drives 4.4.2 Nietzsche’s type-relative unity of virtue thesis 4.4.3 The type of the criminal 4.4.4 Nietzschean exemplarism and his ad hominem attacks 4.5 Summary -/- 5 Socializing Nietzschean virtues 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Higher-order types 5.2.1 Social character construction 5.2.2 Reflexive character construction 5.3 Eponymous trait terms and Nietzschean summoning 5.3.1 Eponymous trait terms 5.3.2 Nietzschean summoning 5.4 Summary -/- Nietzschean virtues -/- 6 Curiosity 6.1 Introduction 6.2 Curiosity in virtue epistemology 6.3 Curiosity and its affiliated emotions 6.4 Curiosity, perspectivism, and inquiry 6.5 Curiosity as a virtue 6.5.1 A preliminary characterization 6.5.2 Curiosity in the middle through late works 6.6 Summary -/- 7 Courage 7.1 Introduction 7.2 Intellectual courage in contemporary virtue epistemology 7.3 Courage as a virtue 7.3.1 A preliminary characterization 7.3.2 Courage in the middle through late works 7.4 Summary -/- 8 Pathos of distance 8.1 Introduction 8.2 Contempt and disgust in contemporary moral psychology 8.3 The semantic neighborhood of contempt, disgust, and the pathos of distance 8.4 Nietzsche on contempt 8.4.1 Spernere mundum 8.4.2 Spernere neminem 8.4.3 Spernere se ipsum 8.4.4 Spernere se sperni 8.4.5 Nietzsche aims to induce what he considers fitting contempt in receptive readers 8.5 Nietzsche on disgust 8.5.1 The use of disgust: detaching from an ideal 8.5.2 The danger of disgust 8.6 The pathos of distance 8.7 Prospects for a Nietzschean democratic ethos 8.8 Summary -/- 9 Sense of humor 9.1 Introduction 9.2 The semantic neighborhood of laughter, humor, and comedy 9.3 The Nietzschean sense of humor and its functions 9.3.1 From episodic laughter to the sense of humor 9.3.2 Affirmation and inquiry 9.3.3 Negation and inquiry 9.3.4 Affiliation with like-minded inquirers 9.4 Summary -/- 10 Solitude 10.1 Introduction 10.2 Solitude in virtue theory and Nietzsche scholarship 10.3 The semantic neighborhood of solitude 10.4 An account of Nietzschean solitude 10.5 Summary -/- Conclusion -/- 11 Conscience & integrity 11.1 Introduction 11.2 Conscience and integrity in contemporary moral psychology and Nietzsche scholarship 11.2.1 Conscience and integrity in contemporary moral psychology 11.2.2 Conscience and integrity in Nietzsche commentary 11.3 The semantic neighborhood of conscience and integrity 11.4 Distinguishing conscience, good conscience, bad conscience, and intellectual conscience 11.4.1 Conscience 11.4.2 Good conscience 11.4.3 Bad conscience 11.4.4 Intellectual conscience and integrity 11.5 Summary -/- 12 Prospectus 12.1 Future directions in moral psychology 12.2 Future directions in Nietzsche scholarship 12.3 Future directions in digital humanities and the history of philosophy . (shrink)

A unique and controversial study of Nietzsche's philosophy in relation to Kantian methodologies.

A growing literature in recent epistemology leverages the fact of persistent, systematic disagreement among philosophers to reach deeply skeptical conclusions, not just about philosophical propositions, but about the practice of philosophy itself. This article argues that a version of this argument is implicit in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, and that Nietzsche is best read as occupying a stance that would be called “conciliationist” today. The only sincere effort to date to attribute to Nietzsche a skeptical position on the (...) basis of disagreement, I argue, both overcommits him in some ways and undercommits him in others. Correctly assessing his target and scope and appreciating the conciliationist strain in Nietzsche’s thought improves our understanding of his philosophical project. (shrink)

This collection of essays, first published two decades ago, presents central feminist critiques and analyses of natural and social sciences and their philosophies. Unfortunately, in spite of the brilliant body of research and scholarship in these fields in subsequent decades, the insights of these essays remain as timely now as they were then: philosophy and the sciences still presume kinds of social innocence to which they are not entitled. The essays focus on Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Marx; (...) on the 'adversary method' model of philosophic reasoning; on principles of individuation on philosophical ontology and philosophy of language; on individualistic assumptions in psychology; functionalism in sociological and biological theory; evolutionary theory; the methodology of political science; and conceptions of objective inquiry in the sciences. In taking insights of both Liberal and Marxian women's movements into the purportedly most abstract and value-free areas of Western thought, these essays chart sexist and androcentric assumptions, claims and practices in the cognitive, technical cores of Western sciences and their philosophies. They begin to identify the distinctive aspects of women's experiences and locations in male-supremacist social structures which can provide resources needed for the creation of post-androcentric thinking in research, scholarship, and public policy. Such uses of feminist insights remain controversial today, and even among some feminists. These authors were all junior researchers and scholars two decades ago; today many are among the most distinguished senior scholars in their fields. Their work here provides a splendid opportunity for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in philosophy and the social sciences to explore some of the most intriguing and controversial challenges to disciplinary projects and to public policy today. (shrink)

Intellectual history, philosophy, and science’s own self-understanding undermine the claim that science entails or need even tend toward atheism. By definition a radically transcendent creator-God is inaccessible to empirical investigation. Denials of the possibility or actual occurrence of miracles depend not on science itself, but on naturalist assumptions that derive originally from a univocal metaphysics with its historical roots in medieval nominalism, which in turn have deeply influenced philosophy and science since the seventeenth century. The metaphysical postulate (...) of naturalism and its correlative empiricist epistemology constitute methodological self-limitations of science -- only an unjustified move from postulate to assertion permits ideological scientism and atheism. It is entirely possible that religious claims consistent with the empirical findings of the natural and social sciences might be true. Therefore, historians of religion not only need not assume that atheism i. (shrink)

Overshadowed by his critiques of traditional morality and Christianity, many of Nietzsche’s insightful philosophical analyses have often been neglected. Although Nietzsche as philosopher has, at long last, been recognized, his epistemological reflections are a fairly recent discovery in Anglo-American philosophy. This is curious because some of the earliest German interpreters of his thought had emphasized the link between his metaphysical views and his analyses of human knowledge. At the beginning of this century, Eisler and Rittelmeyer discussed the importance of (...) Erkenntnistheorie for a full understanding of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Despite their basic grasp of his philosophical intentions, they sometimes misunderstood or underplayed central points in his critical negations. With rare exceptions, the significance of what Nietzsche called an “internal phenomenology” has often been overlooked. Even when it is alluded to, the full meaning of this method of analysis is not brought out. My intention here is to show how the concept of causality is construed by Nietzsche and how his analysis of its origin is related to a phenomenology of human intentionality. The analysis of the derivation of the idea of causality that is presented by Nietzsche has an intrinsic interest and the issues concerning the formation of the concept and its validity are obviously still vital ones. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 407-436 [Access article in PDF] Dilthey's Epistemology of the Geisteswissenschaften: Between Lebensphilosophie and Wissenschaftstheorie James Reid A great part of my life's work has been devoted to formulating a universally valid science which should provide the human sciences with a firm foundation and a unified internal coherency.... I am neither an intuitionist, nor a historicist, nor a skeptic. Dilthey (...) to Husserl, 29 June 1911 To show life as it is, that is what we strive for. To describe life: that is our goal.... We want to make life visible in its unfathomable depths, and in its unfathomable nexus. Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften 19: 330 In the dedication of the first volume of the Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften to his friend and philosophical interlocutor Count Yorck, Dilthey famously named what would become his lifelong philosophical preoccupation a Kritik der historischen Vernunft, the overarching aim of which is to provide "an epistemological foundation for the human sciences" that would "determine the interconnections among the particular human sciences, the limits within which knowledge is possible in these sciences, and the relation of their truths to one another." 1 For Dilthey, the liberation of historical consciousness from the "grey cobweb of abstract essences" spun by traditional metaphysics constituted one of the [End Page 407] major intellectual achievements of the nineteenth century. 2 However, as important as the concrete historical investigations of Ranke, Droysen, and Mommsen undoubtedly are, the Historical School nevertheless failed in Dilthey's eyes to grasp the essence of historical consciousness—its scope, limits and objective validity: Its study and evaluation of historical phenomena remain unconnected with the analysis of facts of consciousness; consequently, it has no grounding in the only knowledge which is ultimately secure; it has in short no philosophical foundation. 3A critique of historical reason, grasped as an epistemological analysis of "the capacity of man to know himself and the society and history which he has produced," is needed in order to provide for the Geisteswissenschaften a foundation equivalent to the one furnished by Kant for mathematical natural science in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. 4The epistemological dimension of Dilthey's project took shape as the elaboration of a basic science (Grundwissenschaft) identified, in the Einleitung at least, with descriptive psychology. 5 In an effort to delimit the province of the Geisteswissenschaften, Dilthey came to distinguish between outer experience and its objects and various levels of inner experience. Although Dilthey's thought developed considerably in the years after 1900, most notably in the direction [End Page 408] of a refinement of the relation between inner and outer experience, the distinction between these two fundamental modes of givenness remained central to his conception of the structure and methodology of the human sciences. 6 In a number of manuscripts, some published in Dilthey's lifetime, others (by far the majority) published after his death by former students, Dilthey envisages a comprehensive theory of consciousness and its objectifications that would shed light on the origins and ultimate validity of our knowledge of the historical world.As several commentators have pointed out, however, the epistemological dimension of Dilthey's project fails to capture the entire breadth of his achievement. 7 Dilthey's interest in the objective validity of historical investigation was subservient to broader concerns about the nature of human existence and its historicity, what Dilthey often referred to simply as Leben. 8 Life as it is revealed in the human sciences is the medium in which self-consciousness and self-knowledge, scientific and practical activity originate, and remains the abiding concern of the human sciences. At the most fundamental level of epistemological reflection, we encounter life as it is lived in pre-scientific and pre-reflective experience (Erlebnis). 9 Life, Dilthey consistently maintained, is the "prius" of thought: Knowledge (Erkenntnis) cannot go behind life, of which it is a function. Life always remains the presupposition of knowledge, i.e., of the consciousness or knowledge (Wissen) contained in life. As a presupposition of knowledge (des Erkennens) itself, life is [End... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:_Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2502\REVIEWS.252 : 2006-02-27 11:52 Reviews  HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS C P Philosophy / Purdue U. West Lafayette,  ,  @. Scott Soames. Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Vol. : The Dawn of Analysis; Vol. : The Age of Meaning. Princeton: Princeton U. P., . Pp. xix, ; xxii, . . (hb), . (pb) for each volume. he last twenty years (...) have seen an explosion in books and papers on RusTsell ’s philosophy and its contemporary significance. There is good reason to think that this will continue as the contents of the Collected Papers are digested by Russell scholars and as more specialists contribute to the history of analytic philosophy more generally. Given all this good news, it is disconcerting to find a -page discussion of Russell, in a well-reviewed book by a first-rate philosopher, repeating many of the errors and misconceptions about Russell that scholars have worked so hard against. Soames’ discussion of Russell in the volumes under review is in fact so distressing that it alone compromises the book as a suitable introduction to the history of analytic philosophy. After briefly reviewing the outline of the two volumes, I discuss the errors concerning Russell, and conclude by drawing some lessons for Russell scholarship. Soames’ focus is on what he takes to be the most important and influential work of analytic philosophers, beginning with Moore’s Principia Ethica and ending in  with Kripke’s Naming and Necessity lectures. Kripke, in fact, marks the culmination of one of the two great achievements of analytic philos- _Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2502\REVIEWS.252 : 2006-02-27 11:52  Reviews ophy that Soames sees in this period: … the two most important achievements that have emerged from the analytic tradition in this period are (i) the recognition that philosophical speculation must be grounded in pre-philosophical thought, and (ii) the success achieved in understanding, and separating one from another, the fundamental methodological notions of logical consequence, logical truth, necessary truth, and apriori truth. (: xi) Moore is credited with the methodological innovation required by (i), as once we accept that what we think we know prior to philosophical reflection is a constraint on our epistemology, Moore’s response to scepticism, which Soames endorses, inevitably follows. But even Moore, and nearly every other figure that Soames discusses, is guilty of confusing necessity, analyticity and apriority. Soames endorses Kripke’s basic point that necessity is a metaphysical concept that can come apart from the epistemic notion of apriority and the semantic category of analytic propositions. Volume  repeats this charge several times, using it to undermine Moore’s views on ethics in Part One, Russell’s conception of analysis in Part Two, and logical positivism in Part Three. It is noteworthy that Soames takes Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic as representative of logical positivism, ignoring contemporary scholarship on the Vienna Circle just as much as he ignores Russell scholarship. Part Four reconstructs Wittgenstein’s views in the Tractatus and Volume  ends with a discussion of Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”. The second volume begins with a part on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. This paves the way for Soames’ discussion of ordinary language philosophy in Parts Two and Three, which Soames sees as closely tied to the later Wittgenstein. Ryle’s Concept of Mind, Strawson’s early views on truth, Hare’s theory of goodness as well as Malcolm’s paradigm-case argument and Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia are investigated in these chapters. Part Four presents Grice’s theory of conversational implicature as the final nail in the coffin of ordinary language philosophy. In Part Five, Soames returns to Quine, this time discussing the ambitious arguments of Word and Object and the more general project of naturalized epistemology. Part Six articulates Davidson’s program for constructing a theory of meaning for natural languages along the lines of a Tarskistyle theory of truth, and Volume  ends with an extended discussion of the promise and limitations of Kripke’s Naming and Necessity. The material on Russell is entirely confined to four chapters in Volume : Chapter : “Logical Form, Grammatical Form, and the Theory of Descriptions ”, Chapter : “Logic and Mathematics: The Logicist Reduction”, Chapter : “Logical Constructions and... (shrink)

Philosophy and the scientific revolution / Daniel Garber -- Old history and introductory teaching in early modern philosophy : a response to Daniel Garber / Lisa Downing -- Meaning and metaphysics / Susan Neiman -- Evil and wonder in early modern philosophy : a response to Susan Neiman / Mark Larrimore -- The forgetting of gender / Nancy Tuana -- The forgetting of gender and the new histories of philosophy : a response to Nancy Tuana (...) / Eileen O’Neill -- The idea of early modern philosophy / Knud Haakonssen -- Response to Knud Haakonssen / Jeffrey Edwards -- Arguments over obligation : teaching time and place in moral philosophy / Ian Hunter -- Response to Ian Hunter / T.J. Hochstrasser -- Teaching the history of moral philosophy / J.B. Schneewind -- Historicism, moral judgment, and the good life : a response to J.B. Schneewind / Jennifer A. Herdt -- Integrating history of philosophy with history of science after Kant / Michael Friedman -- Response to Michael Friedman / Juliet Floyd -- Thought versus history : reflections on a French problem / Denis Kambouchner -- Response to Denis Kambouchner / Bé́atrice Longuenesse -- Teaching the history of philosophy in 19th-century Germany / Ulrich Johannes Schneider -- Response to Ulrich Johannes Schneider / Karl Ameriks -- Comment : philosophy in practice / Lorraine Daston -- A note from inside the teapot / Anthony Grafton -- Philosophy, history of philosophy, and L’histoire de l’esprit humain : a historiographical question and problem for philosophers / Jonathan Israel -- History and/or philosophy / Donald R. Kelly -- Historians look at the new histories of philosophy : roundtable discussion. (shrink)

The article problematizes the relatively recent tradition (initiated by O.M. Medushevskaya and picked up by a number of researchers) of a phenomenological interpretation of A. S. Lappo-Danilevskii’s historical and methodological work. The article aims to find out whether, and if so, in what sense (senses) it is possible to talk about the phenomenology of Lappo-Danilevskii. It shows the grounds on which this interpretation can, within certain limits, be accepted, and the moments of principal divergence between classical phenomenology and Lappo-Danilevskii’s (...) class='Hi'>methodology of history. The key point of these discrepancies is the phenomenological reduction, which is the essence of the phenomenological method, and, in the author’s opinion and contrary to the opinion of some researchers, is absent in the methodology of history of Lappo-Danilevskii. The theoretical positions that provoke the comparison of the views of Lappo-Danilevskii and Husserl are reduced to two main points: the problem of the psychological impenetrability of someone else’s Self and the understanding of the historical source as a construction of the historian. The article suggests that the “phenomenological motives” of Lappo-Danilevskii’s work are determined by the general philosophical and epistemological search of his time, perceived by Lappo-Danilevskii through the works of I. G. Droysen, Russian Neo-Kantianism and W. Dilthey, but hardly directly from Husserl’s philosophy, with which he could not be thoroughly familiar. The author suggests qualifying Lappo-Danilevskii’s methodological work as an original version of historical phenomenology, which was formed outside the direct influence of the classical phenomenology of Husserl. The article outlines the directions of further development of the problems laid down in Lappo-Danilevskii’s methodology of history, in particular, O. M. Medushevskaya’s “cognitive history,” A. L. Yurganov’s “historical phenomenology” and the sociological turn in the methodology of historical knowledge (turn from a subject to an actor) fixed by M. F. Rumyantseva. The latter, according to the author of the article, actualizes the key problem of the phenomenological tradition—that of intersubjectivity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.2 (2004) 232-233 [Access article in PDF] Giuseppina D'Oro. Collingwood and the Metaphysics of Experience. New York: Routledge, 2002. Pp. xi + 179. Cloth, $80.00. There is a resurgence of interest in Collingwood among philosophers and political theorists in the English-speaking world. One of the scholars leading this resurgence is Giuseppina D'Oro, whose fine monograph on Collingwood's metaphysics and epistemology appears (...) in the series "Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Philosophy." D'Oro's prose is lucid and tightly argued: her analyses of the problems that concerned Collingwood, as well as her reinterpretations and supporting arguments, are a thoughtful model of clarity.Collingwood is generally ignored except by philosophers of art and history; D'Oro aims to reassess Collingwood's important metaphysical and epistemological views and raise awareness of them. Arguing that, when not ignored, these aspects of Collingwood's philosophy often have been misinterpreted, D'Oro supplies a reconstruction and defense of Collingwood's conception of philosophical thought. Admirably and insightfully, she contextualizes his concerns within the past three centuries of philosophy and also within influential contemporary discussions (addressing, for example, relationships to Locke, Hume, Kant, Prichard, Russell, Ryle, Ayer, James, Rorty, and Quine). D'Oro demonstrates that Collingwood provides crucial contributions to both the history of philosophy and contemporary debates.For D'Oro, Collingwood's key text is his An Essay on Philosophical Method (1933), which is concerned with the proper subject matter, method, and task of philosophy. This work, [End Page 232] with its distinction between philosophical and empirical concepts, introduces into Collingwood's metaphysics the Kantian element that D'Oro emphasizes to support her original interpretation. Collingwood's metaphysics, like Kant's, is described as a "descriptive metaphysics" or "metaphysics of experience" (2-3) which was intended to reform, not jettison, metaphysics. Conceptual rather than ontological, Collingwood's metaphysics is an epistemological project that reveals not the "structure of reality," but the "structure of experience" (2). According to Collingwood, all knowledge is based on presuppositions and conditioned by them; thus, metaphysics cannot be a presuppositionless "study of pure being" (3) or things-in-themselves. Rather, Collingwood's Kantian metaphysics aims to uncover the absolute presuppositions behind various aspects of experience, presuppositions that ground or make possible diverse forms of knowledge and that structure different domains of inquiry. D'Oro here argues intriguingly against a view of much Collingwood scholarship: that for the later Collingwood of An Essay on Metaphysics (1940), metaphysics is the study of the historically relative presuppositions adopted by diverse people of different historical eras or epochs, i.e., metaphysics entails historical relativism. Instead, D'Oro contends, metaphysics for Collingwood is the second-order study of the absolute presuppositons that provide the conditions for the possibility of disciplinary knowledge. Furthermore, she argues, this metaphysical view is consistent with An Essay on Philosophical Method. Contra some commentators, there is no "early" and "late" Collingwood, and the notion that he ultimately experienced a "radical conversion" (79) to historical relativism is false.Collingwood's metaphysics of experience entails that domains of inquiry such as art, religion, natural science, and history are governed by distinct presuppositions or a priori principles and thus provide complementary, not competing, accounts of reality. Hence, history deals with actions and presupposes that their causes are freely chosen reasons or motives; natural science deals with events and presupposes that they are caused by empirical regularities in nature. These presuppositional distinctions are philosophical and conceptual rather than empirical, and different areas of knowledge may address the same empirical objects in different ways.This truncated summary hardly does justice to the rich totality of D'Oro's book, much of which provocatively works out the implications of her reinterpretation. Among other things, she defends Collingwood against metaphysical realism, neo-empiricism, and logical positivism; addresses his idiosyncratic "'rehabilitation' of the ontological proof" (67); argues against the common view that his philosophy of history promotes "re-enactment" as a methodological procedure for historical practice; and explores his non-dualist and non-physicalist resolution of the mind/body problem.Perhaps... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 13.2 (2005) 142-145 [Access article in PDF] The Doing of Philosophy in the Music Class: Some Practical Considerations. Response to Bennett Reimer Mary J. Reichling University of Louisiana at Lafayette How I respond to Bennett Reimer's challenge depends in part on how we define philosophy in this context. We might think of philosophy as a subject of study, that is, (...) philosophy in itself such as epistemology, metaphysics, and so on. Or we may conceive it as philosophy of music, better designated as aesthetics. Or we may consider philosophy as a verb in the sense of "doing" philosophy where our goal is to assist students in developing their thinking skills. It seems that Reimer is placing focus on the last, the doing of philosophy, not that these other views of philosophy are mutually exclusive; they are not.Yet even this distinction is not sufficient for discussion. I am reminded of a little book edited by Eunice Boardman, titled Dimensions of Musical Thinking and published by MENC in 1989. It is a real gem with many fine ideas. In particular it stresses the relationship of content-area knowledge to thinking, and that is what I want to do. Developing thinking skills does not take place in a vacuum: "Now I am going to think." It occurs with respect to a subject area. We have philosophy of science, philosophy of history, philosophy of art, and so on, and philosophy of music.Further, our thinking about music occurs in at least two different ways. I suggest that music possesses both instrumental and intrinsic value with respect to philosophical analysis, as well as instances where the two values are combined. In pondering these values we bring together several so-called philosophical 'methodologies': the search for meaning or understanding, analysis, criticism, [End Page 142] and synthesis. In the process we build arguments that are consistent, coherent, and correspond with the musical evidence.1And further, in our field, students, whether it be through course content itself or through performance classes, have the advantage of gaining both propositional knowledge, learning that, for example, the rhythmic value of eighth notes, and procedural knowledge or learning how, for example, performing eighth notes vocally or instrumentally.2Both of which challenge the students' thinking skills.It is also important to articulate several assumptions if we aspire to "doing" philosophy within the teaching of music. These include a belief that it is worthwhile to develop such thinking skills as I have outlined; that we are willing to take the time for dialogue within the music class or rehearsal hour; and that we as teachers are willing to be facilitators of questions rather than experts with answers.I shall attempt with a few examples to show how these thinking processes might be integrated into the music curriculum following Jerome Brunner's view that children can be taught anything if done so at their level of understanding.The first example relates to the instrumental value of music as it supports text or programmatic conceptions. Let us consider the text of a particular song such as "Blowing in the Wind" or the "Kookaburra" song, the subject of an opera such as Berg's Wozzeck, or the topic of war as exemplified in Britten's War Requiem or some of the protest songs. We ask students how the extra musical subjects are established musically, how the music communicates the ideas, why one musical setting is preferred or better than another, and so forth. In dialoging about these examples, students must first of all be perceptive listeners or participants, then analyze at their level of ability. For an elementary child such analysis might be as simple as pointing out the tempo, mood, rhythms, dynamics, or other expressive elements. Advanced students will have a more extensive musical background to draw upon. Through the analysis students come to a synthesis of these factors that leads to greater understanding of the meaning of the music as they approach questions of value and beauty. If the teacher... (shrink)

These two volumes contain all of my articles published between 1956 and 1975 which might be of interest to readers in the English-speaking world. The first three essays in Vol. 1 deal with historical themes. In each case I as far as possible, meets con have attempted a rational reconstruction which, temporary standards of exactness. In The Problem of Universals Then and Now some ideas of W.V. Quine and N. Goodman are used to create a modern sketch of the (...) class='Hi'>history of the debate on universals beginning with Plato and ending with Hao Wang's System L. The second article concerns Kant's Philosophy of Science. By analyzing his position vis-a-vis I. Newton, Christian Wolff, and D. Hume, it is shown that for Kant the very notion of empirical knowledge was beset with a funda mental logical difficulty. In his metaphysics of experience Kant offered a solution differing from all prior as well as subsequent attempts aimed at the problem of establishing a scientific theory. The last of the three historical papers utilizes some concepts of modern logic to give a precise account of Wittgenstein's so-called Picture Theory of Meaning. E. Stenius' interpretation of this theory is taken as an intuitive starting point while an intensional variant of Tarski's concept of a relational system furnishes a technical instrument. The concepts of inodel world and of logical space, together with those of homomorphism and isomorphism be tween model worlds and between logical spaces, form the conceptual basis of the reconstruction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 13.2 (2005) 142-145 [Access article in PDF] The Doing of Philosophy in the Music Class: Some Practical Considerations. Response to Bennett Reimer Mary J. Reichling University of Louisiana at Lafayette How I respond to Bennett Reimer's challenge depends in part on how we define philosophy in this context. We might think of philosophy as a subject of study, that is, (...) philosophy in itself such as epistemology, metaphysics, and so on. Or we may conceive it as philosophy of music, better designated as aesthetics. Or we may consider philosophy as a verb in the sense of "doing" philosophy where our goal is to assist students in developing their thinking skills. It seems that Reimer is placing focus on the last, the doing of philosophy, not that these other views of philosophy are mutually exclusive; they are not.Yet even this distinction is not sufficient for discussion. I am reminded of a little book edited by Eunice Boardman, titled Dimensions of Musical Thinking and published by MENC in 1989. It is a real gem with many fine ideas. In particular it stresses the relationship of content-area knowledge to thinking, and that is what I want to do. Developing thinking skills does not take place in a vacuum: "Now I am going to think." It occurs with respect to a subject area. We have philosophy of science, philosophy of history, philosophy of art, and so on, and philosophy of music.Further, our thinking about music occurs in at least two different ways. I suggest that music possesses both instrumental and intrinsic value with respect to philosophical analysis, as well as instances where the two values are combined. In pondering these values we bring together several so-called philosophical 'methodologies': the search for meaning or understanding, analysis, criticism, [End Page 142] and synthesis. In the process we build arguments that are consistent, coherent, and correspond with the musical evidence.1And further, in our field, students, whether it be through course content itself or through performance classes, have the advantage of gaining both propositional knowledge, learning that, for example, the rhythmic value of eighth notes, and procedural knowledge or learning how, for example, performing eighth notes vocally or instrumentally.2Both of which challenge the students' thinking skills.It is also important to articulate several assumptions if we aspire to "doing" philosophy within the teaching of music. These include a belief that it is worthwhile to develop such thinking skills as I have outlined; that we are willing to take the time for dialogue within the music class or rehearsal hour; and that we as teachers are willing to be facilitators of questions rather than experts with answers.I shall attempt with a few examples to show how these thinking processes might be integrated into the music curriculum following Jerome Brunner's view that children can be taught anything if done so at their level of understanding.The first example relates to the instrumental value of music as it supports text or programmatic conceptions. Let us consider the text of a particular song such as "Blowing in the Wind" or the "Kookaburra" song, the subject of an opera such as Berg's Wozzeck, or the topic of war as exemplified in Britten's War Requiem or some of the protest songs. We ask students how the extra musical subjects are established musically, how the music communicates the ideas, why one musical setting is preferred or better than another, and so forth. In dialoging about these examples, students must first of all be perceptive listeners or participants, then analyze at their level of ability. For an elementary child such analysis might be as simple as pointing out the tempo, mood, rhythms, dynamics, or other expressive elements. Advanced students will have a more extensive musical background to draw upon. Through the analysis students come to a synthesis of these factors that leads to greater understanding of the meaning of the music as they approach questions of value and beauty. If the teacher... (shrink)

This collection contains such a wealth of topics that it deserves the attention of anyone seriously interested in what its title denotes, namely the philosophy of the history of philosophy. The content of the various essays, along with their translated titles, can be described as follows. "The New Aspects of the Philosophy of the History of Philosophy" claims to be, but is not, an introduction to the other essays; it abounds in obscurities and does (...) not even make the effort of integrating the various contributions into some common themes. "Meta-philosophy and History of Philosophy" is partly a methodological discussion of the connections among philosophy, metaphilosophy, and history of philosophy, and partly a discussion from a psychological-psychoanalytical and cultural anthropological point of view of questions like the following: whether anything like progress exists in the history of philosophy, what is the meaning of the whole philosophical history, and what are its prospects for the future. "Heidegger, Schelling, and German Idealism" discusses the relations between the history of philosophy and the philosophy of existence, using primarily Heidegger’s lectures on Schelling as a case study. "Hermeneutic Experience and Philosophical Historiography" is a discussion primarily of the theory of historical interpretation in Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode, and secondarily of some of its consequences for the study of the history of philosophy; it is highly informative, but one cannot fail to lament the fact that the author reports Gadamer’s critiques of historicism without any explicit indication that, besides Dilthey’s version, there exists Croce’s brand of historicism, which in my judgment is very similar to Gadamer’s hermeneutics as reported in this essay. "History of Art as History of Philosophy?" is a thoughtful and provocative brief discussion of the divergence between the histories of art and of philosophy; it also suggests that, nevertheless, data and facts from art-history can be used by the historian of philosophy for the reconstruction of the philosophical concepts of epochs and cultures whose available historical records abound in the field of art but are lacking in the area of philosophy. "The Hegelian Left and the History of Philosophy" is an analysis of some of the historiography of the 19th century Hegelian Left. "-Philosophy and the Theology of Secularization discusses the interconnections among philosophy, history of philosophy, the contemporary historical situation, and political philosophy, developing a Gentilean critique of the theology of secularization; it argues that Gentile’s critique refutes some presuppositions of this theology, namely, the idea of the progressive character of contemporary history and that of the irreversible process of secularization. "Philosophy of Religion and History of Philosophy," though terminologically and stylistically obscure, is a very stimulating justification of the thesis that an adequate philosophy of religion is to be grounded on a philosophy of history, which in turn is to be grounded on an all-encompassing history of philosophy; independently of the adequacy of this justification, the author makes a number of very suggestive comparisons between the history and historiography of philosophy and the history and historiography of the Church, such as the following: the analogy of the relationships between theology and Church history and between philosophy and philosophical history, the analogy between the "history of ideas" and ecumenical Church history, the analogy between the position of Hegel in philosophical history and that of Jesus in Church history, and the analogy between the visible/ invisible Church distinction in religious studies and the history/theory distinction in philosophical inquiry. "Beyond the Historical Disease" discusses to what extent philosophical hermeneutics solves Nietzsche’s problem that there is a conflict between historiographical awareness and the capacity to make history; it answers that, in spite of its insights, hermeneutics fails, and that the solution lies in the direction of certain suggestions found in Sartre’s Question of Méthode. "Interpretation and Translatability of Philosophical Texts" discusses certain problems in the theory of meaning from the point of view of analytical philosophy, and in relation to the meaning of philosophical passages. "Epistemology, Hermeneutics, and Analytical-Philosophical Historiography" is an interesting mixture of a critique of the view that contemporary analytical philosophy is ahistorical, a discussion of the similarities between Popper’s epistemology and Gadamer’s hermeneutics, and a study of the interplay between Popper’s epistemology and his interpretation of Plato in The Open Society and its Enemies. "Information Theory and Philosophy" studies the relation between science and the history of philosophy by comparing and contrasting certain philosophical ideas of Leibniz and Kant with recent results in information theory. A final essay deals with "The Myth of Faust in Kierkegaard."—M.A.F. (shrink)

Philosophers have almost always relegated the topic of revision to the sidelines of their discipline, if they have thought about it at all. This book contends that acts of revision are central and indispensable to the project of philosophizing and that philosophy should be construed essentially as a practice of rereading and rewriting. The book focuses chiefly on Heidegger's highly influential interpretation of Nietzsche, conducted in lectures during the 1930s and 1940s and published in 1961. The author closely analyzes (...) the rhetorical means by which Heidegger repositions Nietzsche's thinking within a broad history of metaphysics, even as Heidegger positions his own reinterpretation as that history's more 'proper' reading. In addition to being the first book-length published study of Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche, the book also examines the work of Hans-Robert Jauss, Harold Bloom, and other critics of revision. (shrink)

Kant's influence on the history of philosophy is vast and protean. The transcendental turn denotes one of its most important forms, defined by the notion that Kant's deepest insight should not be identified with any specific epistemological or metaphysical doctrine, but rather concerns the fundamental standpoint and terms of reference of philosophical enquiry. To take the transcendental turn is not to endorse any of Kant's specific teachings, but to accept that the Copernican revolution announced in the Preface of (...) the Critique of Pure Reason sets philosophy on a new footing and constitutes the proper starting point of philosophical reflection.In this volume a team of leading philosophers explore the concept of the transcendental as it developed through history, focusing on approaches to the transcendental project by Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Bernard Williams. By giving systematic shape to historical material, the volume provides a unique resource for systematic reflection on transcendental philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 407-436 [Access article in PDF] Dilthey's Epistemology of the Geisteswissenschaften: Between Lebensphilosophie and Wissenschaftstheorie James Reid A great part of my life's work has been devoted to formulating a universally valid science which should provide the human sciences with a firm foundation and a unified internal coherency.... I am neither an intuitionist, nor a historicist, nor a skeptic. Dilthey (...) to Husserl, 29 June 1911 To show life as it is, that is what we strive for. To describe life: that is our goal.... We want to make life visible in its unfathomable depths, and in its unfathomable nexus. Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften 19: 330 In the dedication of the first volume of the Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften to his friend and philosophical interlocutor Count Yorck, Dilthey famously named what would become his lifelong philosophical preoccupation a Kritik der historischen Vernunft, the overarching aim of which is to provide "an epistemological foundation for the human sciences" that would "determine the interconnections among the particular human sciences, the limits within which knowledge is possible in these sciences, and the relation of their truths to one another." 1 For Dilthey, the liberation of historical consciousness from the "grey cobweb of abstract essences" spun by traditional metaphysics constituted one of the [End Page 407] major intellectual achievements of the nineteenth century. 2 However, as important as the concrete historical investigations of Ranke, Droysen, and Mommsen undoubtedly are, the Historical School nevertheless failed in Dilthey's eyes to grasp the essence of historical consciousness—its scope, limits and objective validity: Its study and evaluation of historical phenomena remain unconnected with the analysis of facts of consciousness; consequently, it has no grounding in the only knowledge which is ultimately secure; it has in short no philosophical foundation. 3A critique of historical reason, grasped as an epistemological analysis of "the capacity of man to know himself and the society and history which he has produced," is needed in order to provide for the Geisteswissenschaften a foundation equivalent to the one furnished by Kant for mathematical natural science in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. 4The epistemological dimension of Dilthey's project took shape as the elaboration of a basic science (Grundwissenschaft) identified, in the Einleitung at least, with descriptive psychology. 5 In an effort to delimit the province of the Geisteswissenschaften, Dilthey came to distinguish between outer experience and its objects and various levels of inner experience. Although Dilthey's thought developed considerably in the years after 1900, most notably in the direction [End Page 408] of a refinement of the relation between inner and outer experience, the distinction between these two fundamental modes of givenness remained central to his conception of the structure and methodology of the human sciences. 6 In a number of manuscripts, some published in Dilthey's lifetime, others (by far the majority) published after his death by former students, Dilthey envisages a comprehensive theory of consciousness and its objectifications that would shed light on the origins and ultimate validity of our knowledge of the historical world.As several commentators have pointed out, however, the epistemological dimension of Dilthey's project fails to capture the entire breadth of his achievement. 7 Dilthey's interest in the objective validity of historical investigation was subservient to broader concerns about the nature of human existence and its historicity, what Dilthey often referred to simply as Leben. 8 Life as it is revealed in the human sciences is the medium in which self-consciousness and self-knowledge, scientific and practical activity originate, and remains the abiding concern of the human sciences. At the most fundamental level of epistemological reflection, we encounter life as it is lived in pre-scientific and pre-reflective experience (Erlebnis). 9 Life, Dilthey consistently maintained, is the "prius" of thought: Knowledge (Erkenntnis) cannot go behind life, of which it is a function. Life always remains the presupposition of knowledge, i.e., of the consciousness or knowledge (Wissen) contained in life. As a presupposition of knowledge (des Erkennens) itself, life is [End... (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article, invited for presentation to the North American Nietzsche Society at the 2020 Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, is a commentary on Mark Alfano's 2019 monograph, Nietzsche's Moral Psychology. It critically discusses Alfano's synoptic digital humanities approach and examines the efficacy of two aspects of his argument about Nietzsche's philosophy developed using this methodology: the connection between life and will to power, and the role of speech acts.

Philosophy as a discipline is typically characterized through the use of rigorous argument and analysis, and the clarification of the meaning of concepts. Philosophical problems are thus resolved, not through the appeal to empirical evidence, but by identifying inconsistent and confusing patterns of thought and reflection. This paper will clarify the nature of a philosophical methodology by explicating the relationship between the philosophy of sport and the core traditional areas of philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, axiology and logic.

This essay offers a meta-level analysis in the sociology and history of physics in the context of the "Arrow of Time" or so-called "Two Times" problem. In effect, it argues that the two topics are intertwined, and it is only by coming to grips with the sociological aspects, involving adherence to certain metaphysical, epistemological and methodological beliefs and practices, that real progress can be made in the physics.

Friedrich Nietzsche haunts the modern world. His elusive writings with their characteristic combination of trenchant analysis of the modern predicament and suggestive but ambiguous proposals for dealing with it have fascinated generations of artists, scholars, critics, philosophers, and ordinary readers. Maudemarie Clark's highly original study gives a lucid and penetrating analytical account of all the central topics of Nietzsche's epistemology and metaphysics, including his views on truth and language, his perspectivism, and his doctrines of the will-to-power and the eternal recurrence. (...) The Nietzsche who emerges from these pages is a subtle and sophisticated philosopher, whose highly articulated views are of continuing interest as contributions to a whole range of philosphical issues. This remarkable reading of Nietzsche will interest not only philosophers, but also readers in neighbouring disciplines such as literature and intellectual history. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:History of Philosophy and the Reflective Society by Riccardo PozzoRobert R. ClewisPOZZO, Riccardo. History of Philosophy and the Reflective Society. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2021. vi + 231 pp. Cloth, $94.99In a forward-looking proposal, Pozzo lays out his vision for a multidisciplinary history of philosophy "from a global perspective." This book is "a long position paper, an extended essay dedicated to twenty-first (...) century policies of philosophical research from a global perspective." The chosen format is a Denkschrift, that is, a memorandum in the sense of a document that experts lay out for their government to ponder. Perhaps, Pozzo suggests, the history of philosophy could even have an impact on economic authorities and policymakers. Indeed, the work seems driven by the laudable aim of promoting access and equality around the world. The author reveals a just concern for migrants in particular, since they bring [End Page 156] with them their intellectual traditions and philosophical texts, which can be translated and thereby foster intercultural dialogue.The book consists of an introduction (chapter 1) followed by nine chapters. It has a thirty-page references list as well as subject and name indexes. In part one, Pozzo argues for the need for new narratives in the history of philosophy (chapter 2), in order to establish its role in addressing migration (chapter 3). The second part concerns reflective society (chapter 4). It considers societal readiness (chapter 5) and cultural innovation (chapter 6). Part three explores the paradigm shift from a close reading of texts to a "distant" reading of corpora (chapter 7), a shift Pozzo endorses. It examines implications for the translation of languages (chapter 8) and the translation of studies (knowledge) and competencies (chapter 9). Chapter 10 concludes by briefly reflecting on the notions of the "fluidity" of peoples and their ideas, biodiversity (and food), and spiritual humanism based on dignity.Scholars in the history of philosophy "should be open to the idea of a pluriversum of a history of facts and places, whereby history of philosophy finds its grounding in spatial heterogeneity." Nowadays, when people migrate and transfer competencies at increasing velocity, the "history of philosophy can be usefully reinvented on the basis of its consideration of intercultural dialogue." Pozzo considers the World Digital Library to be "one of the most exciting examples of corpora that talk to each other"—an idea he uses not merely metaphorically. By "corpora" is meant not just the sum of separate books, but XML-accessible complete collections of traditions of texts, with corresponding dictionaries, thesauri, and reference works, which make it possible to analyze a number of original texts as well as transliterations into other alphabets or hanzi characters. The result would be a "data-driven" history of philosophy.Given that history of philosophy is a product of culture, it is influenced by migrating peoples, who bring philosophical ideas and religious traditions with them. Research on migration thus ought to also consider translations of texts and competencies from one to another context, be it linguistic, economic, political, or cultural. The humanities, and a reflective society more generally, might provide a partial basis for intercultural dialogue. The history of philosophy might even thereby improve the quality of life of citizens.Pozzo rightly emphasizes that we need multilingual philosophers and historians of philosophy. History of philosophy ought to also be based on robust lexical and historical considerations, and historians of philosophy should be trained in a number of the world's languages as well as face the challenge of dealing with multilingualism and with validating translations. Pozzo's proposed methodology, informed by computational techniques, relies on tools such as vocabularies, ontologies, concordances, frequencies, or the analysis of texts and corpora, which integrates quantitative and formal methods into the portfolio of the methods of history of philosophy and intellectual history. Since Pozzo has published [End Page 157] widely on Kant, it is fitting that he explores Kant on migration as well as the editorial contexts and translation projects concerning the philosopher's writings.As for aesthetics, Pozzo notes that the history of philosophy can reflect on migrants' cultural and artistic creations. Historians of philosophy should thus start observing and interpreting phenomena created by... (shrink)

This volume of fourteen essays commemorating the 350th anniversary of the publication of Descartes’s Meditations represents several current trends in Descartes scholarship. Among the essays there are close textual analyses, discussions of the scholastic Aristotelian influence on Descartes, and an emphasis on metaphysical topics rather than the epistemological ones that dominated the Anglo-American literature twenty years ago. The volume bears the mark of being a collection of conference papers in its breadth of topics and methodological styles, but it serves well (...) as a measure of the times for the history of philosophy, as I will explain below. (shrink)

This selection of papers that were presented (or nearly so!) to the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science during the seventies fairly re presents some of the most disturbing issues of scientific knowledge in these years. To the distant observer, it may seem that the defense of rational standards, objective reference, methodical self-correction, even the distin guishing of the foolish from the sensible and the truth-seeking from the ideological, has nearly collapsed. In fact, the defense may be seen (...) to have shifted; the knowledge business came under scrutiny decades ago and, indeed, from the time of Francis Bacon and even far earlier, the practicality of the discovery of knowledge was either hailed or lamented. So the defense may be founded on the premise that science may yet be liberating. In that case, the analysis of philosophical issues expands to embrace issues of social interest and social function, of instrumentality and arbitrary perspective, of biological constraints (upon knowledge as well as upon the species-wide behavior of human beings in other relationships too), of distortions due to explanatory metaphors and imposed categories, and of radical comparisons among the perspectives of different civilizations. Some of our contributors are frankly programmatic, showing how problems must be formulated afresh, how evasions must be identified and omissions rectified, but they do not reach their own completion. (shrink)