This paper begins by addressing the following question: Given the importance of the Platonism of the school of Plotinus to Augustine’s development, why didn’t he adopt apophatic theology in his early writings? That question leads to a consideration of the role of apophasis in the theology of the Roman Platonist school and in its framing of pagan monotheism. Attention then turns to the Cassiciacum treatises and their representation of interior contemplation. There we find the record of Augustine’s discovery of (...) transcendence within the interior self. But Augustine understands transcendence after his own fashion, incorporating it into his newly recovered Catholicism without entirely obscuring the outlines of Platonic transcendentalism. Thus in these early treatises the outlines of Augustine’s mature understanding of Christian contemplation can be seen already to emerge. (shrink)

The term “pagan monotheism” was coined to describe monotheistic tendencies in Greco-Roman religion. Its usefulness has been strongly disputed on various grounds: for introducing a cognitive perspective on ancient religion, which was basically ritualistic; for implicitly taking Christianity as the norm by which to measure classical religion; and for confusing scholarly categories by classifying phenomena as monotheistic that are much better described as henotheistic. This article suggests that these arguments have been attempts to create a supposedly objective and universal (...) scholarly vocabulary, while that new vocabulary would serve to obscure the history and ideological origin of the concepts it promoted. Arguing for a reflective, hermeneutical approach that incorporates an awareness of the origin and charged meanings of our concepts into scholarship, the author proposes methodological pluralism as a way out of these unfruitful terminological debates. Each concept sheds light on some aspects of reality while obscuring others. In particular, the often-criticized ambiguity and fuzziness of the term “pagan monotheism” may help us to formulate questions that otherwise would remain marginal in studies of ancient religion. (shrink)

Peter Adamson offers an accessible, humorous tour through a period of eight hundred years when some of the most influential of all schools of thought were formed: from the third century BC to the sixth century AD. He introduces us to Cynics and Skeptics, Epicureans and Stoics, emperors and slaves, and traces the development of Christian and Jewish philosophy and of ancient science. Chapters are devoted to such major figures as Epicurus, Lucretius, Cicero, Seneca, Plotinus, and Augustine. But in (...) keeping with the motto of the series, the story is told 'without any gaps, ' providing an in-depth look at less familiar topics that remains suitable for the general reader. For instance, there are chapters on the fascinating but relatively obscure Cyrenaic philosophical school, on pagan philosophical figures like Porphyry and Iamblichus, and extensive coverage of the Greek and Latin Christian Fathers who are at best peripheral in most surveys of ancient philosophy. A major theme of the book is in fact the competition between pagan and Christian philosophy in this period, and the Jewish tradition also appears in the shape of Philo of Alexandria. Ancient science is also considered, with chapters on ancient medicine and the interaction between philosophy and astronomy. Considerable attention is paid also to the wider historical context, for instance by looking at the ascetic movement in Christianity and how it drew on ideas from Hellenic philosophy. From the counter-cultural witticisms of Diogenes the Cynic to the subtle skepticism of Sextus Empiricus, from the irreverent atheism of the Epicureans to the ambitious metaphysical speculation of Neoplatonism, from the ethical teachings of Marcus Aurelius to the political philosophy of Augustine, the book gathers together all aspects of later ancient thought in an accessible and entertaining way. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 695 Salvation Outside the Church? Tracing the History of the Catholic Response. By FRANCIS A. SULLIVAN. New York/Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1992. Pp. i + 224. $12.95 (paper). The subtitle of the volume describes well its purpose and content. The author surveys in chronological order, beginning with the earliest ecclesiastical writers and ending with John Paul II, the various interpretations of the axiom extra ecclesiam nulla salus. What (...) prompted Sullivan to undertake a historical rather than systematic approach in his volume is the conviction that without taking into account the historical and cultural factors that conditioned the formulation of this axiom it is impossible to make sense of the shift from the exclusivism of the pre-Vatican II Church to the inclusiveness of Vatican II and post-Vatican II theology with regard to the salvation of those who are not members of,the Roman Catholic Church. The principle that guides Sullivan's attempt to disclose the meaning embodied in the manifold formulations of the axiom " there is no salvation outside the Church" is Pope John XXHI's distinction between " the substance of the ancient doctrine of the deposit of faith " and " the way in which it is presented," and the more recent emphasis of the Declaration Mysterium Ecclesiae (1973) on the historical condition affecting the expression of divine revelation. As a historical study, Salvation Outside the Church? is an excellent continuation of Louis Caperan's two-volume work Le probleme du salut des infideles, which is still unavailable in English. Obviously an over· view of almost two thousand years of theological discussion of this problem has to be highly selective if one is not to miss the forest for the trees, and Sullivan's choice of authors as well as of historical periods for discussion is judiciously made. If a complaint is to be made in this regard, it is that he has focused too much attention on magisterial documents, and Roman documents at that, and not enough on contemporary theology. True, he devotes a chapter to the theory of " anonymous Christians," espoused mainly by Karl Rahner (chapter 10), and defends it against criticisms by Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Hans Kiing, and Max Seckler. He is well aware that Rahner's theory has become the position of mainstream Catholic theology and cites authors who support it in one way or another (p. 181). However, a book that claims to present " the Catholic response " to the problem posed by the axiom extra ecclesiam nulla salus should, one would expect, have discussed in greater detail the various positions of contemporary Catholic theologians on this issue. It is to be fervently hoped that Sullivan will take up this task in his next book. 696 BOOK REVIEWS Sullivan's basic thesis is that the substance underlying the various negative formulations of the axiom extra ecclesiam nulla salus is the positive belief ithat " God has assigned to the church a necessary role in the accomplishment of his plan for the salvation of humanity " (p. 12). Such a thesis is, of course, neither new nor startling. Hans Kling had already said that much in his 1967 Die Kirche (English translation, p. 318). What is helpful in Sullivan's account is his explanation of both the intent of those who affirmed this axiom with its apparent exclusiveness and the limitations that prevented them from perceiving the universality of God's saving grace. With regard to intent, Sullivan shows con· vincingly that the patristic usage of the axiom is intended as a warning for those Christians who had separated themselves from the catholica either by schism or by heresy that they must remain within it in order to be saved, whereas ithe medieval usage is intended to warn pagans and Jews that they should accept the message of the Gospel now that it had been announced to them. With regard to limitations, Sullivan singles out two: the geographical and the psychological. On the one hand, there was before the discovery of America the conviction that the world was identical with Christian Europe. This belief led theologians to postulate that the Gospel had been spread throughout the world. On the other hand, their ignorance... (shrink)

Peter Adamson offers an accessible, humorous tour through a period of eight hundred years when some of the most influential of all schools of thought were formed. He introduces us to Cynics and Skeptics, Epicureans and Stoics, emperors and slaves, and traces the development of early Christian philosophy and of ancient science. A major theme of the book is in fact the competition between pagan and Christian philosophy in this period, and the Jewish tradition appears in the shape (...) of Philo of Alexandria. Ancient science is also considered, with chapters on ancient medicine and the interaction between philosophy and astronomy. Considerable attention is paid also to the wider historical context, for instance by looking at the ascetic movement in Christianity and how it drew on ideas from Hellenic philosophy. From the counter-cultural witticisms of Diogenes the Cynic to the subtle skepticism of Sextus Empiricus, from the irreverent atheism of the Epicureans to the ambitious metaphysical speculation of Neoplatonism, from the ethical teachings of Marcus Aurelius to the political philosophy of Augustine, the book gathers together all aspects of later ancient thought in an accessible and entertaining way. (shrink)

The term “pagan monotheism” was coined to describe monotheistic tendencies in Greco-Roman religion. Its usefulness has been strongly disputed on various grounds: for introducing a cognitive perspective on ancient religion, which was basically ritualistic; for implicitly taking Christianity as the norm by which to measure classical religion; and for confusing scholarly categories by classifying phenomena as monotheistic that are much better described as henotheistic. This article suggests that these arguments have been attempts to create a supposedly objective and universal (...) scholarly vocabulary, while that new vocabulary would serve to obscure the history and ideological origin of the concepts it promoted. Arguing for a reflective, hermeneutical approach that incorporates an awareness of the origin and charged meanings of our concepts into scholarship, the author proposes methodological pluralism as a way out of these unfruitful terminological debates. Each concept sheds light on some aspects of reality while obscuring others. In particular, the often-criticized ambiguity and fuzziness of the term “pagan monotheism” may help us to formulate questions that otherwise would remain marginal in studies of ancient religion. (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories (...) and On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

After resolving to become a Catholic Christian, Augustine spent a decade trying to clarify his understanding of 'contemplation,' the interior presence of God to the soul. That long struggle yielded his classic account in the Confessions. This study explores Augustine's developing understanding of contemplation, beginning with his earliest accounts written before his baptism and ending with the Confessions. Chapter One examines the pagan monotheism of the Roman Platonists and the role of contemplation in their theology. Augustine's pre-baptismal writings are (...) then considered in Chapter Two, tracking his fundamental break from pagan Platonism. Chapter Three then turns to Augustine's developing understanding of contemplation in these pre-baptismal texts. Chapter Four concentrates on Augustine's thought during the decade after his baptism in 387, a period that encompasses his monastic life in Thagaste, and his years first as a presbyter and then as a bishop in Hippo Regius. This chapter follows the arc of Augustine's thought through these years of transition and leads into the Confessions, giving a vantage point to survey its theology of contemplation. Chapter Five concentrates on the Confessions and sets its most famous account of contemplation, the vision at Ostia from Book IX, into a larger polemical context. Augustine's defence of his transcendental reading of scripture in Confessions XII is analysed and then used to illuminate the Ostian ascent narrative. The book concludes with observations on the importance of Augustine's theology of contemplation to the emergence of Christian monotheism in late antiquity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ICONOCLASM in the OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS Peter Goldman Westminster State College ofSalt Lake City Acentral problem for any monotheistic religion is distinguishing worship of the one true God from idolatry in all its forms. René Girard's pioneering interpretation ofthe Judeo-Christian scriptures clarifies this distinction by recourse to an ethical conception ofthe sacrificial: False religion or idolatry is essentially sacrificial, while the Judeo-Christian tradition opposes the sacrificial in (...) all its myriad forms. As Girard explains, the Passion narrative makes clear that the sacrificial or scapegoat victim, Christ, is innocent. The violence inflicted upon Christ is human, not divine. The Gospels thus reveal the violence that hides behind the sacred. Religious practices that further sacrificial violence are idolatrous, worshiping violence in the guise ofthe sacred.1 The ethical simplicity of the Girardian distinction between true faith and idolatry is complicated, however, by the issue of representation. According to the Old Testament, the one true God cannot be represented by images or figures of any kind, while idols typically take figurai form. From a biblical perspective, therefore, the question ofform is central to an understanding of idolatry. The Old Testament ban on images has never been investigated from a Girardian perspective. In this essay I apply Rene Girard's anthropological insights to the subject oficonoclasm in the Old and New Testaments. More specifically I address the second command-ment, the famous ban on "graven images," and the problem of representing God. From the per- ' For a fuller treatment ofGirard's interpretation ofChristianity in relation to the sacrificial, see his Things Hidden since the Foundation ofthe World 84Peter Goldman spective ofGirard's "fundamental anthropology" there are two basic issues in this regard. The first is the ethical function of the ban on images; how does the second commandment function ethically to preserve the human community in the Bible? Second, is the ban on images sacrificial as understood in Girardian terms? Or is it anti-sacrificial and therefore ethically progressive? The second commandment reads: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth : Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God" (KJV, Exod. 20.4-5). At first glance, this commandment might appear as an expression ofthe most primitive form ofreligious taboo. A specific cultural activity is arbitrarily forbidden under threat of punishment. The taboo on images, unlike the law against murder for example, has no obvious moral dimension. Images of any kind must be violently expelled —sacrificed, as it were—for no immediate reason. According to the second commandment, any attempt to represent God or his creation by images is a profane violation of his "jealous" nature; the second commandment therefore often finds expression in the violent destruction ofsocalled idolatrous images. Acts oficonoclasm directed againstthe images of foreign gods are quite common in the Old Testament. Nevertheless, I argue here thatthe second commandment is in practical terms ethically progressive and anti-sacrificial. It actually questions and underminesthe whole sacred-profane dichotomy. Indeed, the ban on images is ultimately a secularizing influence crucial for the development of modernity. I also address the Christian acceptance of divine images, which has often been understood as a reversal of the Judaic ban on figurai representations. In the interpretation of iconoclasm that I am proposing here, however, the image ofChrist on the cross can be seen as a logical development of the second commandment rather than its contradiction. I. The second commandment in context In the Old Testament, the giving of the second commandment is associated with the Exodus from Egypt and the Hebrew rejection of Egyptian religion and culture. In Herbert Schneidau's book Sacred Discontent, he argues persuasively that Hebrew monotheism is first of all a reaction against pagan polytheism. Schneidau writes, "The JudeoChristian tradition defines itselfas opposed to a pagan world which it sees Iconoclasm in the Old and New Testaments85 as essentialIy mythological"(12). Further, "TheHebrews habitually defined themselves negatively, by their differences from their neighbors" (51). Schneidau explains: We find... (shrink)

How on Earth can Humans be perfect? The striving for perfection has always occupied a central place in ancient Greek culture. This dynamics urged the Greeks on to surpass themselves in different fields, from sculpture and architecture over athletics to philosophy. In this volume, an international group of scholars examines how the ideal of perfection was conceived and pursued in Late Antiquity, both within philosophical circles and Christianity. Their studies yield a fascinating panorama of various attempts to bridge the unbridgeable (...) and assimilate our frail, imperfect human nature as far as possible to divine perfection. (shrink)

This study, unique of its kind, asks how slavery was viewed by the leading spokesmen of Greece and Rome. There was no movement for abolition in these societies, nor a vigorous debate, such as occurred in antebellum America, but this does not imply that slavery was accepted without question. Dr Garnsey draws on a wide range of sources, pagan, Jewish and Christian, over ten centuries, to challenge the common assumption of passive acquiescence in slavery, and the associated view that, (...) Aristotle apart, there was no systematic thought on slavery. The work contains both a typology of attitudes to slavery ranging from critiques to justifications, and paired case-studies of leading theorists of slavery, Aristotle and the Stoics, Philo and Paul, Ambrose and Augustine. A final chapter considers the use of slavery as a metaphor in the Church Fathers. (shrink)

Taking its cue from a passage in which the late pagan Neoplatonist Damascius criticizes his predecessor Proclus, this paper explores the way that ancient philosophers understood the soul’s access to its own tacit contents through the power of memory. Late ancient discussions of this issue respond to a range of passages in Plato and to Aristotle’s On Memory. After a survey of this material it is shown that for Damascius, but not Proclus, memory requires a distinction between the subject (...) and object of remembering. This means that there can be no memory involved in self-thought, such as occurs in intellect, but only in soul. In conclusion, the paper draws attention to a parallel discussion in Augustine, who, like Proclus, thinks that self-thinking can be understood as a function of memory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.2 (2002) 239-259 [Access article in PDF] Original Sin and the Problem of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe Peter Harrison It is not the philosophy received from Adam that teaches these things; it is that received from the serpent; for since Original Sin, the mind of man is quite pagan. It is this philosophy that, together with the errors of the (...) senses, made men adore the sun, and that today is still the universal cause of the disorder of men's minds and the corruption of men's hearts. Nicolas Malebranche 1In his Éloge du Pere Malebranche, delivered to the Parisian Academy of Sciences on 22 April 1716, Bernard Fontenelle recounted the story of Nicolas Malebranche's somewhat controversial conversion to Cartesianism. When friends and colleagues had taken him to task over his new-found commitment to the doctrines of Descartes, Malebranche responded with this question: "Did Adam have the perfect science?" It was agreed that this was the common view. Malebranche responded that he, too, aspired to the perfect science, and that his quest for this knowledge could not be satisfied by following the historical or critical pursuits of his colleagues, but by adopting the procedures set out by Descartes. 2 For Malebranche, the Cartesian method offered a means of overcoming the limitations of the fallen intellectual faculties of Adam's seventeenth-century descendents, and thus of restoring the fabled encyclopedic knowledge of the first man. [End Page 239]Aspirations to recover the science of Adam provided a common motivation for a number of early-modern philosophical projects. Earlier in the seventeenth century Francis Bacon had famously observed in his Novum Organum (1620) that the human dominion over nature which Adam had lost at the Fall could be restored in some measure by the sciences: "For man by the fall fell at the same time from this state of innocency and from his dominion over creation." The moral losses of the human race were to be restored in some measure by "religion and faith"; Adam's lost knowledge, and the dominion which it made possible, by "arts and sciences." 3 Bacon's vision of a reconstructed knowledge of nature during the period which he regarded (somewhat prematurely) as "the last times" clearly played an important role in legitimizing the goals and methods of the new natural philosophy. Indeed the program of the Royal Society of London from its inception in 1660 explicitly relied upon a Baconian rhetoric of the restoration of that human knowledge and dominion over nature which Adam had once enjoyed.While historians such as Charles Webster have alluded to the ways in which the myth of an original perfect philosophy motivated projects for the advancement of learning in a rather general way, little attention has been paid to the manner in which early-modern views of the nature of the original fall from knowledge directly informed the methods of the new sciences, determined the scope of their enquiry, and provided ammunition for use against traditional learning. 4 Moreover, most commentators, following Webster's lead, have restricted their attention to Francis Bacon, and to the Baconian aspirations of subsequent reformers of knowledge in seventeenth-century England. In this paper I shall suggest that the biblical narrative of the Fall played a far more direct role in the development of early modern knowledge—both in England and on the Continent—than has often been assumed, and that competing strategies for the advancement of knowledge in the seventeenth century were closely related to different assessments of the Fall and of its impact upon the human mind. While confirmation of this claim would require a more comprehensive study than space here permits, this paper will set out a number of preliminary considerations which establish the plausibility of such a thesis, showing how the biblical narrative of the Fall directly informed the epistemological projects of the seventeenth century, and prompted various rationalist and empiricist solutions. [End Page 240] The Mind of Adam There was an almost universal consensus in the sixteenth... (shrink)

It is a pleasure to be able to pay tribute to Adam Potkay’s interesting and impressive book on two of the most important figures in the eighteenth century. It brings together the philosophical and the literary, the “anatomist” and the “painter” of the passions and the moral life, integrating worlds that, however isolated they may have become in the twentieth century, were not seen as all that distinct in the eighteenth. Having said this, the most remarkable feature of Potkay’s book (...) is that it unites two figures usually thought to be opposed—the irascible, domineering, and deeply Christian Johnson and the dispassionate, moderate, and pagan Hume. (shrink)

Ancient philosophers had always been fascinated by religion. From the first century BC onwards the traditionally hostile attitude of Greek and Roman philosophy was abandoned in favour of the view that religion was a source of philosophical knowledge. This book studies that change, not from the usual perspective of the history of religion, but as part of the wider tendency of Post-Hellenistic philosophy to open up to external, non-philosophical sources of knowledge and authority. It situates two key themes, ancient wisdom (...) and cosmic hierarchy, in the context of Post-Hellenistic philosophy and traces their reconfigurations in contemporary literature and in the polemic between Jews, Christians and pagans. Overall, Post-Hellenistic philosophy displayed a relatively high degree of unity in its ideas on religion, which should not be reduced to a preparation for Neoplatonism. (shrink)

Pagans and Philosophers explores how writers—philosophers and theologians, but also poets such as Dante, Chaucer, and Langland, and travelers such as Las Casas and Ricci—tackled the Problem of Paganism. Augustine and Boethius set its terms, while Peter Abelard and John of Salisbury were important early advocates of pagan wisdom and virtue. University theologians such as Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, and Bradwardine, and later thinkers such as Ficino, Valla, More, Bayle, and Leibniz, explored the difficulty in depth. Meanwhile, Albert the (...) Great inspired Boethius of Dacia and others to create a relativist conception of scientific knowledge that allowed Christian teachers to remain faithful Aristotelians. At the same time, early anthropologists such as John of Piano Carpini, John Mandeville, and Montaigne developed other sorts of relativism in response to the issue. (shrink)

As we know, the sacred books of the three religions are not characterized by a gender-friendly approach. In the very beginning of the Old Testament we find the tale of the Fall of Man, where the serpent tempts Eve, who in turn tempts Adam to commit the original sin: to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Eve’s guilt is taken for granted, and rarely discussed. The question of Eve’s guilt was first taken up in Augustine’s De Genesi ad (...) Litteram, and was then later further systematized in Peter Lombard’s Sentences. Isotta Nogarola was a pioneer in taking this discussion beyond university walls, to the intellectual Veronese circles. When Isotta Nogarola pleads for Eve’s case in her Dialogue on the Equal or Unequal Sin of Adam and Eve, she may not be the first to defend Eve, but she has the merit of being a woman who is pleading for a woman’s case. We examine the background of this discussion in Isotta, focusing especially on the scholastic antecedents to this debate. Although most of the quotations cited by Isotta are attributed to early Christian and pagan authors—sources that are typical of humanistic literature—we will demonstrate that many of them are in fact taken from scholastic sources discussing original sin, which are the true immediate sources of Isotta’s dialogue. (shrink)

We suggest that the emerging field of the conservation humanities can play a valuable role in biodiversity protection in Papua New Guinea (PNG), where most land remains under collective customary clan ownership. As a first step to mobilising this scholarly field in PNG and to support capacity development for PNG humanities academics, we conducted a landscape review of PNG humanities teaching and research relating to biodiversity conservation and customary land rights. We conducted a systematic literature review, a PNG teaching programme (...) review, and a series of online workshops between the authors (10 PNG-based, 7 UK-based). We found a small but notable amount of PNG research and teaching focused on biodiversity conservation or customary land rights. This included explicit discussion of these topics in 8 of 156 PNG-authored humanities texts published 2010-2020 and related teaching content in the curricula of several different humanities-based programmes. We discuss current barriers to PNG academic development. The growth of fully fledged in-country conservation humanities will require a joint collaborative effort by PNG researchers, who are best placed to carry out such work, and researchers from abroad who can access resources to support the process. (shrink)

Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart invites readers to embark on a new journey into a land of rationality that differs from the familiar territory of cognitive science and economics. Traditional views of rationality tend to see decision makers as possessing superhuman powers of reason, limitless knowledge, and all of eternity in which to ponder choices. To understand decisions in the real world, we need a different, more psychologically plausible notion of rationality, and this book provides it. It is about (...) fast and frugal heuristics--simple rules for making decisions when time is pressing and deep thought an unaffordable luxury. These heuristics can enable both living organisms and artificial systems to make smart choices, classifications, and predictions by employing bounded rationality. But when and how can such fast and frugal heuristics work? Can judgments based simply on one good reason be as accurate as those based on many reasons? Could less knowledge even lead to systematically better predictions than more knowledge? Simple Heuristics explores these questions, developing computational models of heuristics and testing them through experiments and analyses. It shows how fast and frugal heuristics can produce adaptive decisions in situations as varied as choosing a mate, dividing resources among offspring, predicting high school drop out rates, and playing the stock market. As an interdisciplinary work that is both useful and engaging, this book will appeal to a wide audience. It is ideal for researchers in cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive science, as well as in economics and artificial intelligence. It will also inspire anyone interested in simply making good decisions. (shrink)

In their article, “Supported Decision Making with People at the Margins of Autonomy,” Peterson, Karlawish, and Largent point to the fact that the concept of ‘supported decision-making’ has recently...

In this paper I argue that, while there are real tensions between phenomenology and critique, it makes a significant difference what we understand phenomenology to be, and that on a good understanding there is room for a project that is genuinely both critical and phenomenological. I will focus on four areas of tension: the eidetic character of phenomenology as opposed to the concrete character of critique; the transcendental orientation of phenomenology as opposed to social and political orientation of critique; the (...) descriptive nature of phenomenology as opposed to the normative nature of critique; and the possibly “naïve” character of phenomenology with respect to the shaping of phenomena by social forces. In each case, I will not try to show that there is no space between phenomenology and critique; rather, I suggest that the tension between the two can be mitigated to allow for a critical phenomenology. (shrink)

This collection of essays, inspired by the author's experience teaching ethics to Marine and Navy chaplains during the Iraq War, examines the moral and psychological dilemmas posed by war. The first section deals directly with Dr Peter A. French's teaching experience and the specific challenges posed by teaching applied and theoretical ethics to men and women wrestling with the immediate and personal moral conflicts occasioned by the dissonance of their duties as military officers with their religious convictions. The following (...) chapters grew out of philosophical discussions with these chaplains regarding specific ethical issues surrounding the Iraq War, including the nature of moral evil, forgiveness, mercy, retributive punishment, honour, torture, responsibility and just war theory. This book represents a unique viewpoint on the philosophical problems of war, illuminating the devastating toll combat experiences take on both an individual's sense of identity and a society's professed moral code. (shrink)

V.1 Re-establishing an initial union among philosophy, science, and wisdom by recovering our understanding of philosophy, science : how philosophy, science, is, and always has been, chiefly a study of the one and the many -- v.2. An introduction to ragamuffin Thomism.

Jorge J. E. Gracia, was born in Cuba in 1942. At age 19, he escaped Cuba and arrived in the United States. In 2019, 58 years later, in a nation which, prior to his arrival in North America, had no major Latino cultural presence in higher education and philosophy, Gracia rose to hold the Samuel P. Capen Chair and State University of New York at Buffalo Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature. In this position, he became the leading figure (...) to institutionalize Latin American philosophy in the U.S. academy and an internationally-renowned scholar in medieval philosophy. Jorge J. E. Gracia died in the United States on July 13, 2021. In this paper the author shows that what properly explains the philosophical and adult-personal life of Gracia is the Thomistic principle of virtual quantity. He contends that the only way to understand Gracia’s personal and philosophical life is to grasp this life as one of an organizational psychologist pursuing perfect self-realization in action and understanding: someone chiefly interested in intellectually grasping precisely how organizational wholes (including his own psyche) become united and divided, and operate when so united and divided. (shrink)

In the past few decades, scholars have offered positive, normative, and most recently, interpretive theories of contract law. These theories have proceeded primarily from deontological and consequentialist premises. In A Theory of Contract Law: Empirical Understandings and Moral Psychology, Professor Peter A. Alces confronts the leading interpretive theories of contract and demonstrates their interpretive doctrinal failures. Professor Alces presents the leading canonical cases that inform the extant theories of Contract law in both their historical and transactional contexts and, argues (...) that moral psychology provides a better explanation for the contract doctrine than do alternative comprehensive interpretive approaches. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: What is a ‘Tolerant Society’? Respect and Appreciation of Difference Alternatives for Education Notes References.

In physics, the temporal dimension has units of infinitesimally brief duration. Given this, how is it possible to perceive things, such as motion, music, and vibrotactile stimulation, that involve extension across many units of time? To address this problem, it is proposed that there is what is termed an “information construct of happening” (ICOH), a simultaneous representation of recent, temporally differentiated perceptual information on the millisecond time scale. The main features of the ICOH are (i) time marking, semantic labeling of (...) all information in the ICOH with ordinal temporal information and distance from what is informationally identified as the present moment, (ii) vector informational features that specify kind, direction, and rate of change for every feature in a percept, and (iii) connectives, information relating vector informational features at adjacent temporal locations in the ICOH. The ICOH integrates products of perceptual processing with recent historical information in sensory memory on the subsecond time scale. Perceptual information about happening in informational sensory memory is encoded in semantic form that preserves connected semantic trails of vector and timing information. The basic properties of the ICOH must be supported by a general and widespread timing mechanism that generates ordinal and interval timing information and it is suggested that state‐dependent networks may suffice for that purpose. Happening, therefore, is perceived at a moment and is constituted by an information structure of connected recent historical information. (shrink)

The purpose of this brief study is to ascertain Peter Lombard's understanding of what the Christian doctrine of creation means and his judgment about whether pagan philosophers were able to reach this doctrine through the light of natural reason. Lombard's views on creation set the foundation for thirteenth-century discussions of creation, since all the scholastic masters of Oxford and Paris commented on Lombard's 'Sentences' and thus recorded their agreement or disagreement with him. Lombard's views are of especial importance (...) for understanding Aquinas's teaching on creation, since Aquinas's first detailed discussion of creation takes place in his Sentences Commentary, bk II, d. 1, q. 1, in which he forcefully presents the essence of creation as demonstrable through philosophy, though knowable more perfectly through faith, and reinterprets the essential meaning of creation using Avicenna's metaphysics. My study thus complements the studies of Timothy Noone, Stephen Baldner, William Carroll, Mark Johnson, John F. Wippel, and Lawrence Dewan on how Aquinas's understanding of creation and of whether Plato and Aristotle taught the doctrine of creation differs from that of the immediate Latin scholastic tradition, though I will not be able to show here how Aquinas adapts some of Lombard's ideas and suggestions even as he moves quite far beyond them in metaphysical sophistication. Additionally, the medieval reception of Plato and Aristotle will be touched upon. (shrink)

It would be useful to have a category of extensive-form games whose isomorphisms specify equivalences between games. Since working with entire games is too large a project for a single paper, I begin here with preforms, where a “preform” is a rooted tree together with choices and information sets. In particular, this paper first defines the category \, whose objects are “functioned trees”, which are specially designed to be incorporated into preforms. I show that \ is isomorphic to the full (...) subcategory of \ whose objects are converging arborescences. Then the paper defines the category \, whose objects are “node-and-choice preforms”, each of which consists of a node set, a choice set, and an operator mapping node-choice pairs to nodes. I characterize the \ isomorphisms, define a forgetful functor from \ to \, and show that \ is equivalent to the full subcategory of \ whose objects are perfect-information preforms. The paper also shows that many game-theoretic entities can be derived from preforms, and that these entities are well-behaved with respect to \ morphisms and isomorphisms. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Theologian's Doubts:Natural Philosophy and the Skeptical Games of GhazālīLeor HaleviIn the history of skeptical thought, which normally leaps from the Pyrrhonists to the rediscovery of Sextus Empiricus in the sixteenth century, Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-Ghazālī (1058-1111) figures as a medieval curiosity. Skeptical enough to merit passing acknowledgment, he has proven too baffling to be treated fully alongside pagan, atheist, or materialist philosophers. As a theologian defending certain (...) Muslim dogmas, Ghazālī has not met what historians consider the mark of the true skeptic, a mind doubting the possibility of all systems of knowledge. But what is fascinating about him is that he brought into practical operation the tools of what I call "functional skepticism."1He denied the claims to truth of Aristotelian physics—whose basis he showed to rest on groundless belief—then turned and argued for the possibility of the Resurrection tooth and nail. The scholarly debate on The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahāfut al-falāsifa) has concentrated on the extent to which Ghazālī qua Ashcarite theologian was seduced into Aristotelian philosophy despite himself.2 In my view this debate has been misguided in the attempt to distill the [End Page 19] essence of Ghazālī from the book's eclectic theology; I will argue for a different view of Ghazālī on the basis of a close reading of key passages. In the unusual sections where Ghazālī applies Aristotelian language to a world not following the ordinary laws of physics, some have found Ghazālī slipping, unconsciously perhaps, into an Aristotelian frame of mind. I will show that, as a skeptical theologian with a dialogic imagination, he was rather deconstructing Aristotelian discourse while playing a Wittgensteinian sort of language game.Natural Philosopher or Speculative Theologian?The disagreement about the extent to which philosophy infected Ghazālī is ancient. Ghazālī might have studied philosophy only in order to refute it. He himself defended his philosophizing with the claim that one cannot deconstruct a system of thought until one has understood it so deeply as to elaborate upon its fundamental principles.3 His Maqāṣid al-falāsifa was in fact received, especially in trans-Pyrenean Europe, as a philosopher's genuine summary of the object of philosophy.4 The book strikes me as suspiciously creative in its representation of philosophical discourse, but it appears in any case as an expert and surprisingly unbiased treatment.5 Arabic readers knew that Ghazālī had also written a polemical treatise against philosophy, Tahāfut al-falāsifa, but they still wondered about his engagement with the ideas he challenged. Abū Bakr Ibn al-cArabī, for example, commented that Ghazālī had been unable to extricate himself from philosophy.6 Other philosophers pondered whether or not he had been a closeted member of their charmed circle and sought in his writings traces of esoteric philosophy.7Averroës's own sober sense of distance between philosophy and theology was partially a reaction to what he perceived as Ghazālī's dangerous and carefree mixture of the two sciences.8 He attacked Ghazālī's book in The Incoherence [End Page 20] of the Incoherence to restore philosophy's sense of purity, an aim he sought to accomplish by separating religious concerns from the philosopher's field of inquiry.9 Ironically, such a separation is precisely what Ghazālī might have wished to provoke by crisscrossing and blurring the line between religion and philosophy.The modern debate on chapter 17 of Tahāfut al-falāsifa has concentrated on defining Ghazālī as either a natural philosopher or an occasionalist theologian. In his defense of the possibility of miracles Ghazālī presented two theories of causation, one denying the logical basis of Aristotelian notions of natural causality, and the other more or less adopting these notions. Jointly, the two theories have seemed incompatible, and for this reason scholars have attempted to sort Ghazālī out of the apparent confusion. In 1978 L. E. Goodman argued persuasively that Ghazālī exploited rather than denied the philosophers' ideas of causality. In two articles Michael Marmura challenged Goodman, contending... (shrink)

There is a moral phenomenon of “Secondary Permissibility” in which an otherwise morally impermissible option is made morally permissible by the presence of another option. In this paper I explain how this phenomenon works and argue that understanding how it works suggests a new model for the structure of the ethics of harming.

In libro suo cui titulus Discursus de metaphysica Leibnitius quaestionem movet, quomodo homo in mundum harmonia gaudentem praestabilita agere debeat eiusque bonitatem, quo melius se explicet, adiuvare. Responsio ab eo allata vero discrepantiam quandam prae se fert ad docendum valde utilem. Una ex parte enim Leibnitius docet dari ordinem naturalem a Providentia firme constitutum, altera ex parte tamen suae aetatis doctrinam profitetur, scil. mundum agentibus humanis, ut technologiae cultoribus, infinitas praebere possibilitates. Aliorum Leibnitii textuum perscrutatio necnon eorum cum Aristotele, S. (...) Thoma, I. Kant comparatio revelat, quam acriter Leibnitii in mente veneratio antiquae et a maioribus traditae rationis philosophiam naturalem colendi, quae est scientia pure speculativa, pugnat cum ipsius dedicatione ad modernam notionem naturae dominationis, quod propositum e contra est valde pragmaticum ac transformativum.In the Discourse on Metaphysics Leibniz addresses how human beings ought to intervene in a preharmonized world and contribute to the unfolding of its goodness. His view exhibits an instructive tension between belief in a providentially fixed natural order, on the one hand, and, on the other, a characteristically early modern belief in a world of infinite possibilities for human actors, that is, developers of technology. Other texts in Leibniz, as well as comparison with Aristotle, Aquinas, and Kant, helps to reveal the extent to which Leibniz is torn between venerating the ancient tradition of natural philosophy, a purely “contemplative” discipline, and embracing the modern project of mastery of nature, a pragmatic and transformative enterprise. (shrink)

THINK Currency. THINK Relevancy. THINK Critically. THINK Critically is a cutting-edge, self-reflective guide for improving critical thinking skills through careful analysis, reasoned inference, and thoughtful evaluation of contemporary culture and ideas. An engaging visual design developed with extensive student feedback and 15-page chapters makesTHINK Critically the textbook your students will actually read. It delivers the core concepts of critical thinking in a way they can easily understand. Additionally, engaging examples and masterful exercises help students learn to clarify ideas, analyze arguments, (...) and evaluate reasoning. (shrink)

Truth and Its Deformities is the 32nd volume in the Midwest Studies in Philosophy series. It contains major new contributions on a range of topics related to the general theme of the volume by some of the most important philosophers writing on truth in recent years.

Although generally philosophers have put a high valuation on reason, increasingly the role of emotions in motivating action is being recognized. The essays in this volume explore the emotions from a variety of perspectives, ranging from Aristotelian views of the passions to the new findings of cognitive science, and from such diverse starting points as medieval literature and psychological studies.

Through extensive textual analysis, this book concludes that the prevailing opinion about the nature of modern and contemporary philosophy is wrong. It maintains that almost all modern and contemporary philosophy is deconstructed, secularized, Augustinian theology, not philosophy. The work is divided into eight chapters, a guest Foreword by Herbert I. London notes, bibliography, and an index. Chapter 1 considers Cartesian thought, Hobbes, and Newton. Chapter 2 examines Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Chapter 3 investigates Lessing and Rousseau. Chapters 4 and 5 (...) treat Kant. Chapters 6 and 7 deal with Hegel. Chapter 8 concludes that a lack of philosophical and historical experience coupled with a widespread inability to read philosophical texts according to the intention of the author causes us to mistake secularized theology for philosophy and is a main cause for the decline of contemporary universities. (shrink)

A central aspect of the computational theory of vision developed by Marr and his coworkers is the use made of contingent regularities in the physical environment to explain how the visual system determines the shape and location of objects in the world on the basis of the spatial organization of the retinal image. Marr (1982) refers to these environmental regularities as “natural constraints” and “physical assumptions.” In this paper I am concerned with recent arguments concerning the implications of this feature (...) of Marr’s theory for understanding psychological explanation. Burge (1986) claims that Marr’s use of natural constraints shows the theory to be nonindividualistic, in the sense that the individuation of psychological states depends essentially on the objects and conditions of the world external to the subject. While it does capture an important aspect of Marr’s theory, Burge’s account is misleadingly incomplete. To see this it is useful to compare the issue of individualism with the question whether the theory is compatible with methodological solipsism as a research strategy. (shrink)