At the heart of Mizrahi’s project lies a sociological narrative concerning the recent history of philosophers’ negative attitudes towards scientism. Critics (e.g. de Ridder (2019), Wilson (2019) and Bryant (2020)), have detected various empirical inadequacies in Mizrahi’s methodology for discussing these attitudes. Bryant (2020) points out one of the main pertinent methodological deficiencies here, namely that the mere appearance of the word ‘scientism’ in a text does not suffice in determining whether the author feels threatened by it. Not all (...) philosophers use the term in ‘inherently negative’ (29) or pejorative ways. In this paper, I not only corroborate Bryant’s critical claim, but argue that Mizrahi’s response to this part of Bryant’s objection is inadequate. (shrink)

Upon delving into Chinese philosophy I have come to realize that Chinese philosophy is indeed rich and comprehensive, even though Chinese philosophy and the history of Chinese philosophy are different from the history of Western philosophy. Although Western society and Chinese society follow common laws, each has its own distinctive characteristics. Similarly, while Western philosophy and Chinese philosophy likewise follow common laws, each has its own distinctive characteristics. The scope of the (...) history of Chinese philosophy cannot be determined by that of Western philosophy, nor can the scope of Western philosophy be determined by that of Chinese philosophy. The most outstanding periods of Western philosophy have been the ancient and modern periods. The most outstanding period of Chinese philosophy was that of the Spring and Autumn era through the early Qing period. This was due to the differences between the two societies. In the West, both the slave system and the bourgeois revolution were much more highly developed than they were in China. China had a brilliant feudal culture and subsequently China's brilliant feudal philosophy simply had a different style from that of Western philosophy. I remember that Comrade Hou Wailu came to the following conclusion: that the style of the Western philosopher was that of a wise man [zheren], while the style of the Chinese philosopher was that of a worthy man [xianren], My impressions are similar. Western philosophers usually discussed the problems of cognition and knowledge, while Chinese philosophers usually talked and wrote about questions of politics and ethics. What they have had in common is the fact that both have discussed only the general or universal laws of nature, society, and human thought. This Marxist definition of philosophy has held true both in the East and in the West. It is said that Ridannov defined the history of philosophy as being the history of the beginnings and development of materialism. Not having his works at hand, I cannot substantiate this. But I feel that such a definition is rather narrow. The history of philosophy should discuss the history of the development of man's knowledge of nature, society, and human thought, including both the history of the rise and development of materialism and the history of the rise and development of idealism. Only by interweaving the two can we arrive at a full history of philosophy. I do not know whether or not such an understanding on my part is correct. In any case, I have to write in accordance with my own understanding; otherwise I could not write at all. (shrink)

"The picture of Hume clinging timidly to a raft of custom and artifice, because, poor skeptic, he has no alternative, is wrong," writes John Stewart. "Hume was confident that by experience and reflection philosophers can achieve true principles." In this revisionary work Stewart surveys all of David Hume's major writings to reveal him as a liberal moral and political philosopher. Against the background of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century history and thought, Hume emerges as a proponent not of conservatism but of reform. (...) Stewart first presents the dilemma over morals in the modern natural-law school, then examines the new approach to moral and political philosophy adopted by Hume's precursors Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, and Butler. Illuminating Hume's explanation of the standards and rules that should govern private and public life, the author challenges interpretations of Hume's philosophy as conservative by demonstrating that he did not dismiss reason as a key factor determining right and wrong in moral and political contexts. Stewart goes on to show that Hume viewed private property, the market, contracts, and the rule of law as essential to genuine civilized society, and explores Hume's criticism of contemporary British beliefs concerning government, religion, commerce, international relations, and social structure. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

From a phenomenological perspective of game-space and horizon, this paper tries to make a deconstructive reading of Hegel's "two galleries", namely, "the gallery of opinions" and "the gallery of knowledge", which are mentioned in the introduction of Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy. The reading shows that the Game-space or the ab-gruendiger Grund of the Hegelian concept of philosophical history lies in an originally differencing space that is keeping in absence, which is called by Edmund Husserl (...) and Jacques Derrida "the gallery of Dresden". (shrink)

Is the history of philosophy primarily a contribution to PHILOSOPHY or primarily a contribution to HISTORY? This paper is primarily contribution to history (specifically the history of New Zealand) but although the history of philosophy has been big in New Zealand, most NZ philosophers with a historical bent are primarily interested in the history of philosophy as a contribution to philosophy. My essay focuses on two questions: 1) How did (...) New Zealand philosophy get to be so good? And why, given that is so good (a point I am at pains to establish), has it apparently had so slight a cultural impact within New Zealand itself? Did we get the wrong Anderson – the uninspiring William, who was Professor at Auckland, rather than his talented younger brother John, who had such a huge cultural influence as Professor of Philosophy at Sydney? Perhaps but that can only be part of the story since we managed to attract even bigger stars, (notably Karl Popper) as well as breeding bigger talents of our own (Prior, Baier, Bennett, Mulgan, Hursthouse, Waldron and many more). Do we export our best talent? Sometimes – but the stars that stay and the stars who arrive don’t seem to have much impact in New Zealand itself however brightly they shine in the international philosophical firmament. Is it too esoteric? Perhaps, but esoteric philosophy can still have a cultural impact, witness, Moore, Popper and the younger Anderson. Is it, like many of New Zealand’s cultural products (from romance novels to movies), primarily intended for an international audience? That’s a large part of the answer but only a part. Another part of the answer is that philosophy HAS had a cultural impact but that impact is not readily apparent. For NZ philosophers have been less keen to push their ideological barrows and more keen to produce critical thinkers, and critical thinkers don’t all think alike. The logician George Hughes was apparently a life-changing teacher not because he had a nostrum but because he taught people to think. As one of his students said ‘the only ism you believe in is the syllogism’. On the whole the history of New Zealand Philosphy is a ‘From Log Cabin to White House’ tale, ‘From colonial obscurity through struggle and adversity to philosophical excellence’. But there are shadows in the picture. Some departments have nearly come to grief through bureaucratic and political misadventures, and it is hard to resist the suspicion that there is often an element of hostility to philosophers on the part of both university bureaucrats and fellow-academics. I speculate as to why this is the case (we are too argumentative and don’t confine our argumentative tendencies to the cloister) but conclude with some upbeat reflections. on the future of New Zealand Philosophy. (shrink)

The transcripts of the three Kyoto School roundtable discussions of the theme of 'The standpoint of world history and Japan' may now be judged to form the key source text of responsible Pacific War revisionism. Published in the pages of Chuo Koron, the influential magazine of enlightened elite Japanese opinion during the twelve months after Pearl Harbor, these subversive discussions involved four of the finest minds of the second generation of the Kyoto School of philosophy. Tainted by (...) controversy and shrouded in conspiratorial mystery, these transcripts were never republished in Japan after the war, and they have never been translated into English except in selective and often highly biased form. David Williams has now produced the first objective, balanced and close interpretative reading of these three discussions in their entirety since 1943. This version of the wartime Kyoto School transcripts is neither a translation nor a paraphrase but a fuller rendering in reader-friendly English that is convincingly faithful to the spirit of the original texts. The result is a masterpiece of interpretation and inter-cultural understanding between the Confucian East and the liberal West. Seventy years after Tojo came to power, these documents of the Japanese resistance to his wartime government and policies exercise a unique claim on students of Japanese history and thought today because of their unrivalled revelatory potential within the vast literature on the Pacific War. The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance may therefore stand as the most trenchant analysis of the political, philosophic and legal foundations of the place of the Pacific War in modern Japanese history yet to appear in any language. (shrink)

Notes and Discussions Philodoxy: Mere Opinion and Question of History the "Philosophy as... rigorous science-- the dream is over." Edmund Husserl 1. MERE OPINION From the beginning philosophy has not only had a love affair with wisdom but also a special claim on truth and a concomitant contempt for mere opinion. Parmenides left a poem in which he contrasted the "way of truth," which was the path taken by Plato and his followers, with the (...) "way of opinion," which was paved with falsehood and deceit.' Arcesilaus defended opinion in the sense that he refused to concede certain truth to any ideas2 On such grounds Cicero concluded that the wise man should hold no opinions.s In the self-constituting canon of philosophy "opinion" has always been a pejorative term, designating an inferior sort of knowledge based not on demon- stration but on belief and associated in particular with the much-maligned Sophists, who languished under a "dark shadow" for centu- ries.4 As Macrobius wrote: "Opinion is born of failure of memory," meaning the preexistent form of knowledge -- ideas -- which was Platonic recollection;5 and for Aquinas, "opinion is knowledge of those things about which we do not have certain knowledge. ''6 In general, questions of "opinion" or "prejudice" have seldom been posed by 'Jonathan Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers , 156. See also T. Sprute, Der Begriff der doxa in der platonische.. (shrink)

Notes and Discussions Philodoxy: Mere Opinion and Question of History the "Philosophy as... rigorous science-- the dream is over." Edmund Husserl 1. MERE OPINION From the beginning philosophy has not only had a love affair with wisdom but also a special claim on truth and a concomitant contempt for mere opinion. Parmenides left a poem in which he contrasted the "way of truth," which was the path taken by Plato and his followers, with the (...) "way of opinion," which was paved with falsehood and deceit.' Arcesilaus defended opinion in the sense that he refused to concede certain truth to any ideas2 On such grounds Cicero concluded that the wise man should hold no opinions.s In the self-constituting canon of philosophy "opinion" has always been a pejorative term, designating an inferior sort of knowledge based not on demon- stration but on belief and associated in particular with the much-maligned Sophists, who languished under a "dark shadow" for centu- ries.4 As Macrobius wrote: "Opinion is born of failure of memory," meaning the preexistent form of knowledge -- ideas -- which was Platonic recollection;5 and for Aquinas, "opinion is knowledge of those things about which we do not have certain knowledge. ''6 In general, questions of "opinion" or "prejudice" have seldom been posed by 'Jonathan Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers, 156. See also T. Sprute, Der Begriff der doxa in der platonische... (shrink)

Looking at current scholarship and opinion in American philosophy, one can easily conclude that there has been much more work done on studying the history of pragmatist philosophy than there has been on what pragmatist philosophy can give to the study of history. Ever since the resurrection of interest in pragmatism in the late twentieth century, we have seen a range of publications offering new interpretations for the ideas of the classical pragmatists, as well (...) as important new applications for philosophical pragmatism and the moving to center stage of historically sidelined individuals and groups. What we have seen relatively little of, however, aside from a 2016 symposium in the European Journal of Pragmatism... Read More. (shrink)

This book covers ground which authors like Mircea Eliade have treated more adequately, if not as inclusively. The "cosmic cycles" of Mesopotamia and Indian thought are related to the historical cyclic theories of the moderns, Vico, Spengler. Toynbee, and Sorokin. Because of her mystical vision, Cairns fails to see clearly that modern cyclical ideas of history are based on an analogy of the present with the past and are animated by empirical observation. The information used is accumulated rather than (...) analysed, the ideas are opinions, the conclusion science-fiction.--A. R. (shrink)

This book starts with the classification of the main views of different thinkers after the study of the original materials, which covers all the thinkers’ thoughts and conceptions. A major objective of this book is to reveal the ideas of the philosophers. Key ideological opinions are stated with the former discussion of exact questions and further clarification of their philosophical meaning, which enables the readers to better understand the meaning and value of the philosophical thoughts. Since the logic and (...) class='Hi'>history are in accordance with each other, a frame of conception is formed then. Then, the author clearly explains the logical relationship in the frame mentioned before, as well as the formation of the key concepts and their relationship. (shrink)

Examines the history of speculative thought by focusing on such dominant personalities as Plato, Bacon, Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.

Shaftesbury's Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times was published in 1711. It ranges widely over ethics, aesthetics, religion, the arts (painting, literature, architecture, gardening), and ancient and modern history, and aims at nothing less than a new ideal of the gentleman. Together with Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Addison and Steele's Spectator, it is a text of fundamental importance for understanding the thought and culture of Enlightenment Europe. This volume presents a new edition of the text together with (...) an introduction, explanatory notes and a guide to further reading. (shrink)

First published in 1840, this two-volume treatise by Cambridge polymath William Whewell remains significant in the philosophy of science. The work was intended as the 'moral' to his three-volume History of the Inductive Sciences, which is also reissued in this series. Building on philosophical foundations laid by Immanuel Kant and Francis Bacon, Whewell opens with the aphorism 'Man is the Interpreter of Nature, Science the right interpretation'. Volume 2 contains the final sections of Part 1, addressing namely the (...) philosophy of biology and palaetiology. Part 2, 'Of Knowledge', includes a selective review of opinions on the nature of knowledge and the means of seeking it, beginning with Plato. Whewell's work upholds throughout his belief that the mind was active and not merely a passive receiver of knowledge from the world. A key text in Victorian epistemological debates, notably challenged by John Stuart Mill and his System of Logic, Whewell's treatise merits continued study and discussion in the present day. (shrink)

First published in 1840, this two-volume treatise by Cambridge polymath William Whewell remains significant in the philosophy of science. The work was intended as the 'moral' to his three-volume History of the Inductive Sciences, which is also reissued in this series. Building on philosophical foundations laid by Immanuel Kant and Francis Bacon, Whewell opens with the aphorism 'Man is the Interpreter of Nature, Science the right interpretation'. Whewell's work upholds throughout his belief that the mind was active and (...) not merely a passive receiver of knowledge from the world. A key text in Victorian epistemological debates, notably challenged by John Stuart Mill and his System of Logic, Whewell's treatise merits continued study and discussion in the present day. Volume 1 investigates the philosophy underlying pure, classificatory and mechanical sciences. Volume 2 includes a selective review of opinions on the nature of knowledge and the means of seeking it, beginning with Plato. (shrink)

In an interesting essay published in this journal Jonathan Floyd has recently argued (Citation2009) that, contrary to widespread opinion, political philosophy is not too a‐historical, for historical facts cannot ground timeless political principles. In the following I would like to reply to his theses showing that the authors he criticises aim in fact to show that our historical situation gives us a decisive clue as to the tasks that philosophical theory has to address; that philosophical argumentation rests on (...) normative beliefs that we expect our audience to take for granted, and that these beliefs are historically embedded. Finally, although the historicity of normative beliefs has been often used to reject universalism, current scholarship includes important attempts to combine historicity and universalism. (shrink)

This volume brings together, for the first time, experts on Greek, Syriac, and Arabic traditions of doxography, in order to investigate and present shared contexts and questions, and to initiate future collaboration among the fields of classics, Arabic studies, and the history of philosophy.

Recognizing that probability (the Greek doxa) was understood in pre-modern theories as the polar opposite of certainty (episteme), the author of this study elaborates the forms which these polar opposites have taken in some twentieth century writers and then, in greater detail, in the writings of Thomas Aquinas. Profiting from subsequent more sophisticated theories of probability, he examines how Aquinas’s judgments about everything from God to gossip depend on schematizations of the polarity between the systematic and the non-systematic: revelation/reason, science/ (...) class='Hi'>opinion, saints/philosophers, Aristotle/others. Post-medieval developments have provided the means to discern within Thomas’s thought both a logical theory and a kind of relative frequency theory of probability. The former depends on Aristotle’s theory of demonstration, the latter on his theory of an orderly cosmos; but each as used by Thomas lead to convictions that are sometimes naive, sometimes amusing or even terrifying. (shrink)

Kant famously said he 'had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith ’ . But what exactly was his conception of Glaube, and how does it fit into his epistemology? In the first Critique it is not until the concluding Method section that he explicitly addresses these issues. In the Canon of Pure Reason he lists three questions that sum up ‘all interest of my reason’: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? (...) . Kant here put hope on the agenda of philosophy. In his essays on history he argued that we can hope for secular progress in the development of human culture; but in his moral and religious philosophy he was also concerned with eschatological hopes that we can perfect our characters in a life after death, and that the moral governor of the universe will ensure that happiness is eventually proportionate to virtue. About immortality and the existence of God, his constant refrain is that we can have only a practical kind of faith. (shrink)

This volume presents a colourful and entertaining overview of German intellectual history by a central figure in its development. Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), famous poet, journalist, and political exile, studied with Hegel and was personally acquainted with the leading figures of the most important generation of German writers and philosophers. In his groundbreaking History he discusses the history of religion, philosophy, and literature in Germany up to his time, seen through his own highly opinionated, politically aware, philosophically (...) astute, and always ironic perspective. This work, and other writings focussing especially on Heine's rethinking of Hegel's philosophy, are presented here in a new translation by Howard Pollack-Milgate. The volume also includes an introduction by Terry Pinkard which examines Heine both in relation to Hegel and Nietzsche and as a thinker in his own right. (shrink)

An opinionated history of neuroscience, which argues that--due to the brain's complexity--neuroscientific theories have only captured partial truths, and therefore "neurophilosophy" is unlikely to be achieved.

The aim of this article is an attempt to diagnose the current condition of the philosophy of history, as well as to show its potential in explaining contemporary phenomena and constructing a rational image of the world. Two recent works by Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined and Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress) and the methodological work of Karl Raimund Popper provide a point of reference. And although (...) the works mentioned are not classed as historiosophical (even by Pinker himself), it is the author’s opinion that they fully deserve this title by showing that philosophical reflection on history is something that is sorely needed today, in an age of multiple contradictory diagnoses and radical prophecies. (shrink)

A British historian might be excused for looking slightly askance at any collection of recent books relating to the philosophy of history. This is because we have been told, several times over and by distinguished members of the profession, that such speculative and analytic activity has little, if anything, to do with the actual business of historiography. One of the most forthright warnings was delivered on the very first page of Professor G. R. Elton'sThe Practice of History(1967), (...) when we were advised that: ‘Every new number ofHistory and Theoryis liable to contain yet another article struggling to give history a philosophic base, and some of them are interesting. But they do not, I fear, advance the writing of history’. For Elton, therefore, there could be little point in granting his colleague in another discipline the right to assess the cognitive claims of historiography. The historian himself, and he alone, was qualified to determine, for all practical purposes, the aims and applications of historical method. It was left to the late Arnold Toynbee to diagnose (inToynbee on Toynbee, 1974) the dangers in this protectionist approach. He claimed that Elton was ‘trying deliberately to create a closed circuit of “professional” historians’ which was, in his opinion, ‘fatal to any form of study’. But of course Toynbee's own lack of standing within the historical profession could be put forward as a telling index of the dangers of transgressing the barriers between history and philosophy. (shrink)

This volume presents a colourful and entertaining overview of German intellectual history by a central figure in its development. Heinrich Heine, famous poet, journalist, and political exile, studied with Hegel and was personally acquainted with the leading figures of the most important generation of German writers and philosophers. In his groundbreaking History he discusses the history of religion, philosophy, and literature in Germany up to his time, seen through his own highly opinionated, politically aware, philosophically astute, (...) and always ironic perspective. This work, and other writings focussing especially on Heine's rethinking of Hegel's philosophy, are presented here in a new translation by Howard Pollack-Milgate. The volume also includes an introduction by Terry Pinkard which examines Heine both in relation to Hegel and Nietzsche and as a thinker in his own right. (shrink)

Since the revival of historicist philosophy of science in the 1960s many philosophers have acknowledged a debt to Duhem. But Duhem’s opinions are imperfectly understood and, as McMullin has shown in his (1970) and (1979), there are many strands in the current revival of historicism. We consider here Duhem’s views on the role of history in the appraisal of scientific theories. However, there is no single text offering Duhem’s views on the subject; rather, they are revealed during their (...) application to various historical and contemporary cases. Duhem’s most sustained examination of a contemporary case is his critique of Maxwell’s science and scientific methodology.Duhem’s critique of Maxwell is not a set of isolated or incidental dicta, but the expression of Duhem’s mature thought over the last quarter-century of his life, ranging from (at least) 1893 to his death in 1916. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to show clearly what the terms “object” and “objectivity” as used over the centuries of modern philosophy — from the time of Descartes down to the time of Wittgenstein and Husserl, i.e., from early modern Rationalism and Empiricism to late modern Phenomenology and Analytic philosophy — have obscured. Objectivity, far from being “the ability to consider or represent facts, information, etc., without being influenced by personal feelings or opinions; impartiality; detachment,” as the (...) OED would have it, is fundamentally the condition of occupying the position of the significate in a triadic relation the foreground element of which is a sign vehicle conveying that significate to or for some third. Simply put, an “object” is a significate, a fact that common usage has come to obscure by sedimenting the influence of modern philosophy's reversal of the meaning of the terms “subjective” and “objective,” where the former has come to signify “private opinion” in contrast to “the way things are.” But this sedimentation to the level of common usage of modern solipsistic epistemology is precisely a usage that semiotic analysis of the linguistic sign overcomes, showing that in the expression “object signified” the qualification “signified” is redundant, for an object is nothing other than something signified! Thus “significate,” a term that modern dictionary makers resist, says clearly what the term “object” says obscurely; and a great deal of mischief in philosophy over the centuries after Descartes has been the result of this distinctively modern obscurantism in philosophy. (shrink)

The oral history of philosophy is in the process of establishing. The article argues that this discipline is fundamentally different from the oral history of philosophers because the oral history of philosophy has to produce besides the empirical data (interview texts) but also a theoretical reflection that is inherent in any form of philosophy. The core product of oral history is the living narrative of a witness, which is only a starting point for (...) the oral history of philosophy that has to work for philosophical generalizations. This article describes for the first time four possible types of reflection in the oral history of philosophy at the empirical level: (1) at the stage of developing the plan and purpose of the interview, when the historian of philosophy identifies the type of empirical data needed to achieve the primary purpose of his research; (2) between views of an interviewer and a respondent, when the interview appears as a common reflection between those two not just as an adjustable conversation; (3) at the reflection level of the respondent (if he or she is a philosopher) preceded the interview; (4) in the mind of the reader / viewer of the interview, who is able to actively rethink ideas expressed in the interview. Types 1-3 of reflection are central to the oral history of philosophy as a discipline (type 4 is not scientific and belongs to the field of public opinion). Consequently, the result of the empirical research of the oral history of philosophy is not only the empirical data itself but also the primary reflections that need to be developed at the next theoretical stage of research. At the same time, the oral history of philosophy can be both a source of data (that is a special interviewing methodology relevant to any type of the history of philosophy), and a relatively independent discipline, the history of philosophy study primarily based on interview material. (shrink)

Philosophy of history is the Cinderella of contemporary philosophy. Philosophers rarely believe that the issues dealt with by philosophers of history are matters of any great theoretical interest or urgency. In their view philosophy of history rarely goes beyond the question of how results that have already been achieved elsewhere can or should be applied to the domain of historical writing. Moreover, contemporary philosophers of history have done desperately little to dispel the low (...) opinion that their colleagues have of them. In this essay I argue that Arthur Danto is the exception confirming the rule, for Danto’s philosophy of representation may help us understand how texts relate to what they are about. The main shortcoming of philosophy of language undoubtedly is that it never bothered to investigate the philosophical mysteries of the text. The writing of history is a philosophical goldmine and we must praise Danto for having reminded us of this. (shrink)

For forty years, beginning with the publication of the first modern English translation of the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Stillman Drake was the most original and productive scholar of Galileo's scientific work of our age. During that time, he published sixteen books on Galileo, including translations of almost all the major writings, and Galileo at Work, the most comprehensive study of Galileo's life and works ever written. His collection Discoveries and Opinions on Galileohas remained in print since (...) its appearance in 1957 and has become the most widely read of all books on Galileo. In addition to his books, Drake published about 130 papers, of which nearly 100 are on Galileo and the rest on related aspects of the history and philosophy of science. This three-volume collection includes eighty of those papers. Drake's papers are an essential supplement to his translations and other books because it was in his papers that he wrote his most detailed technical studies of Galileo's scientific work. There is hardly a subject in Galileo's science that is not considered. Perhaps the most important is the series on mechanics and motion, in which Drake analysed Galileo's manuscript notes recording the experiments by which he discovered and confirmed the law of the acceleration of falling bodies. There are also papers on the notes in which Galileo recorded his discovery of Jupiter's satellites and on other aspects of Galileo's astronomy, including his defence of the Copernican theory. Other papers consider Galileo's life and scientific work in general, exploring what Drake calls the 'scientific personality' of Galileo along with his scientific method and philosophy of science. In addition to the papers on Galileo, there are a number of papers on medieval and early modern science, principally on mechanics, and on the philosophers A.B. Johnson and J.B. Stallo, both of whom influenced Drake's own philosophy of science. (shrink)

Honor has been an indispensable reference in the life of individuals and societies throughout the course of human history. As a basic concern of men and women, the phenomenon already appears in the earliest literary testimonies. The heroes of the Greek, Roman or German epic poems adapt their behavior to the demands of this particular deity, honor. Literature, at any time, in any culture, in any language, makes constant use of honor as an effective dramatic element. The recurrent presence (...) is certainly a reflection of the actual significance the phenomenon of honor had in everyone’s life. This essay clarifies why honor is given such importance; why it has been considered to be more valuable for the individual than his/her own life. To this end, the mention of public opinion is unavoidable. This phenomenon, in its social psychological conception, is the key that permits us to enlighten the labyrinth of honor. (shrink)

Contrary to the opinion that considers the study of the history of philosophy to be useless, or sees it prevalently as subservient to today’s philosophical problems, the author maintains that a formative, not purely informative, insight is to be gained by such a study, because it helps us understand that past theories are something “other” than our contemporary view of man and the world. The history of philosophy thus reveals itself as a valuable tool for (...) broadening and enriching our intellectual – and therefore human – experience, avoiding the risk of intellectual conformism. (shrink)

Against majority opinion within his profession, Donald Bloxham argues that it is legitimate, often unavoidable, and frequently important for historians to make value judgements about the past. 'History and Morality' draws on a wide range of historical examples, and its author's insights as a practicing historian. Examining concepts like impartiality, neutrality, contextualisation, and the use and abuse of the idea of the past as a foreign country, Bloxham's book investigates how far tacit moral judgements infuse works of (...) class='Hi'>history, and how strange those histories would look if the judgements were removed. The author argues that rather than trying to eradicate all judgemental elements from their work, historians need to think more consistently about how, and with what justification, they make the judgements that they do. The importance of all this lies not just in the responsibilities that historians bear towards the past - responsibilities to take historical actors on those actors' own terms and to portray the impact of those actors' deeds - but also in the role of history as a source of identity, pride, and shame in the present. The account of moral thought in 'History and Morality' has ramifications far beyond the activities of vocational historians. (shrink)

Politics seem most alien to the demand for truth, for they engage the future which is, on principle, undeterminable, whereas truth conversely requires that the object be determined according to strict rules. Yet, political philosophy has never renounced the quest for a true understanding of human living_together, an understanding that makes becoming predictable, thus denying its contingency. However lofty, the ambition nonetheless elicited the most devastating political experience in history: totalitarianism. Such a disaster would seem to call for (...) cautious relativism, but letting oneself be ruled by the arbitrariness of opinions is just as irresponsible as obeying the necessity of a postulated "destiny."Such is the quandary whose challenge was taken up by Hannah Arendt. In so doing, Arendt does not dismiss the true from the sphere of action. She seeks to comprehend which uses of truth cancel political lucidity and which uses of truth conversely warrant political lucidity. What shapes Arendt's position is a battle waged on several fronts, pointing to three distinct goals which this article proposes to address successively: first, the ambition to rescue politics from any "true law of history" which would aim at governing them; secondly, the ambition to rescue politics from the political lies in charge of their rewriting; thirdly, the ambition to rescue politics from a value relativism which would be irresponsible or cynical. Rational truth, factual truth, and opinion are all successively implicated, even though one cannot simply dissociate them from one another. (shrink)

The precise relationship between Hobbes's political philosophy and his late history of the English Civil War remains something of a puzzle. Given his well known doubts about the epistemological status of history, Behemoth or the Long Parliament is often treated as little more than a procrustean effort at forcing complex historical events into the bed of abstract theory that he had developed earlier. On this view, even Noam Flinker, who offers one of the few studies devoted to (...) a close reading of Behemoth, argues that Hobbes intended the work to be self repudiating, and that the dialogue form and the apparent confusions of one of the participants were meant to point readers to �the less rhetorical logic of the Leviathan�. Others, more impressed by Hobbes�s pragmatic intentions than his methodological pretensions, note that a primary motive for his political arguments was a horror at first of the prospect and then of the reality of civil war. They thus emphasize the significance of Behemoth for Hobbes and his interpreters. Robert Kraynak, for example, argues that it �is a work of primary importance� in completing the �history of civilization which is the logical beginning point of Hobbes's thought�, and that a complete understanding of his political theory is impossible without his analysis of the way in which �doctrinal politics and disputative science� had created political chaos in England. This interpretation correctly emphasizes the role of ideas, as opposed to economic interests, in his explanation of civil conflict. It also rightly notes didactic continuities between Behemoth and his earlier work. However, I argue below that it overestimates the extent to which Hobbes treats the general idea of opinion as an eliminable product of �artificial� historical relations rather than as a permanent feature of human psychology and action. Thus, it discounts the extent to which his understanding of the relationship between opinion and civil war was a product of his philosophy rather than of a 'history of civilization'. (shrink)

A British historian might be excused for looking slightly askance at any collection of recent books relating to the philosophy of history. This is because we have been told, several times over and by distinguished members of the profession, that such speculative and analytic activity has little, if anything, to do with the actual business of historiography. One of the most forthright warnings was delivered on the very first page of Professor G. R. Elton's The Practice of (...) class='Hi'>History (1967), when we were advised that: ‘Every new number of History and Theory is liable to contain yet another article struggling to give history a philosophic base, and some of them are interesting. But they do not, I fear, advance the writing of history’. For Elton, therefore, there could be little point in granting his colleague in another discipline the right to assess the cognitive claims of historiography. The historian himself, and he alone, was qualified to determine, for all practical purposes, the aims and applications of historical method. It was left to the late Arnold Toynbee to diagnose (in Toynbee on Toynbee, 1974) the dangers in this protectionist approach. He claimed that Elton was ‘trying deliberately to create a closed circuit of “professional” historians’ which was, in his opinion, ‘fatal to any form of study’. But of course Toynbee's own lack of standing within the historical profession could be put forward as a telling index of the dangers of transgressing the barriers between history and philosophy. (shrink)

Sitting at the nexus of unchanging constitutional rights, constantly evolving social norms, and tensions between federal and state justice systems, defamation law in the US is exceedingly complex. In this work, I focus on a single conceptual and practical problem amidst this network: the fact-opinion distinction. This distinction—developed largely as a result of US Supreme Court decisions _Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc._ and _Milkovich v. Lorraine Journal Co._—states that, while opinions are protected under the First Amendment so long as (...) they do not imply “provably false” information, facts, if false, may always be actionable in a lawsuit for defamation. Thus, the judicial decision of whether an allegedly defamatory statement is fact or opinion is influential in determining whether a claim may move forward. In spite of the significance of this distinction, legal precedent and academic literature shows that there are no generally agreed upon characteristics to organize statements into these two categories. Using the framework of Appraisal Analysis (Martin and White, The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English, Palgrave Macmillan, London 2005), I examine a corpus of previously adjudicated defamatory language to answer the question: _how does expression of stance differ between judicially-determined statements of opinion and fact in defamation cases?_ This analysis reveals that judicially-determined opinions express more markers of attitude and expanding engagement than their factual counterparts. Ultimately, I argue that this research may be directly applied to the analysis of allegedly defamatory language in the US, and, in being so applied, may play a role in adding robustness to existing analytical procedures regarding the distinction between fact and opinion in defamation law in the US. (shrink)

There have been several important breakthroughs in the fields of philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and neuroscience in recent centuries. Despite their complexities and varying opinions in each field, the majority of these breakthroughs tend to view human consciousness as a concrete reality influenced by physiological, social, and environmental factors. This raises the question of why such a dominant perspective did not prevail throughout the history of philosophy and why there were inclinations to deny it. (...) Additionally, why did great philosophers throughout history reject the notion of embodied knowledge, which is a revolutionary approach in both philosophy and neuroscience and holds significant implications across diverse fields, from educational sciences to artificial intelligence? In this paper, we explore the reasons behind these questions. Firstly, we trace the origins of this perspective back to ancient Greek philosophers, including figures like Anaxagoras, Plato, and Aristotle. Next, we examine the reasons for the continuation of this line of thought among modern philosophers, including prominent figures like Descartes and Kant. Lastly, we delve into the approaches and attitudes of pioneering philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who diverged from the mainstream and emphasized the significance of the body in knowledge and consciousness. Understanding the historical neglect of embodiment in philosophy is essential to fully grasp the complexities of human consciousness. By incorporating insights from both historical and contemporary perspectives, we can gain a deeper understanding of the embodied nature of knowledge and its far-reaching impact on various philosophical, scientific, and practical domains. (shrink)

RESUMEN Se aborda en particular su relectura de Aristóteles y Tomás de Aquino, junto con su análisis de algunas discusiones relevantes en las ciencias sociales. Según Macintyre, el abandono del aristotelismo y su esquema teleológico de la investigación filosófica y de la razón práctica ha generado confusión e incoherencia en las articulaciones conceptuales de la filosofía moral moderna y contemporánea. En opinión de este autor, en el concepto de tradición el presente es considerado una reapropiación del pasado, lo que brinda (...) coherencia a las argumentaciones. A los fines de este trabajo se opta por una aproximación a medio camino entre una metodología analítica y una historia conceptual basada en el reconocimiento de distintas discusiones de las cuales se nutren los conceptos macinteryanos. Finalmente, se valoran las contribuciones de Macintyre a la vez que se indican algunas limitaciones de su tesis. ABSTRACT The article specifically addresses Macintyre's rereading of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, as well as his analysis of certain relevant discussions in the social sciences. According to the author, abandoning Aristotelianism and its teleological scheme of philosophical research and practical reason has generated confusion and incoherence in the conceptual formulations of modern and contemporary moral philosophy. In Macintyre's view, the concept of tradition considers the present as a reappropriation of the past, thus bringing coherence to argumentation. For purposes of this paper, we have adopted an approach that is halfway between analytical methodology and conceptual history, based on the acknowledgment of different discussions that nurture Macintyre's concepts. Finally, the article assesses the philosopher's contributions, while also pointing out some of the limitations of his thesis. (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)