Al-Fbb al-f, is apparently the first person to maintain that existence, in one of its senses, is a second-order concept [mal th]. As he interprets Metaphysics d] has two meanings, second-order being as truth'' (including existence as well as propositional truth), and first-order being as divided into the categories.'' The paronymous form of the Arabic word mawjd] distinct from their essences: for al-Kindd of all things. Against this, al-Fburr thinks that Greek more appropriately expressed many such concepts, including being, by (...) particles rather than nouns or verbs; he takes Metaphysics r's title can mean both Book of Particles'' and Aristotle's Metaphysics.''. (shrink)

"Williams's masterful translation satisfies (at last!) a long-standing need. There are lots of good translations of Augustine's great work, but until now we have been forced to choose between those that strive to replicate in English something of the majesty and beauty of Augustine's Latin style and those that opt instead to convey the careful precision of his philosophical terminology and argumentation. Finally, Williams has succeeded in capturing both sides of Augustine's mind in a richly evocative, impeccably reliable, elegantly readable (...) presentation of one of the most impressive achievements in Western thought--Augustine's Confessions." --Scott MacDonald, Professor of Philosophy and Norma K. Regan Professor in Christian Studies, Cornell University. (shrink)

This book is a systematic study of Descartes' relation to Augustine. It offers a complete reevaluation of Descartes' thought and as such will be of major importance to all historians of medieval, neo-Platonic, or early modern philosophy. Stephen Menn demonstrates that Descartes uses Augustine's central ideas as a point of departure for a critique of medieval Aristotelian physics, which he replaces with a new, mechanistic anti-Aristotelian physics. Special features of the book include a reading of the Meditations, a comprehensive historical (...) and philosophical introduction to Augustine's thought, a detailed account of Plotinus, and a contextualization of Descartes' mature philosophical project which explores both the framework within which it evolved and the early writings, to show how the collapse of the early project drove Descartes to the writings of Augustine. (shrink)

This book is the first sustained modern investigation of Plato’s theology. A central thesis of the book is that Plato _had _a theology—not just a mythology for the ideal city, not just the theory of forms or the theory of cosmic souls, but also, irreducible to any of these, an account of God as _Nous _, the source of rational order both to souls and the world of bodies. The understanding of God as Reason, and of the world as governed (...) directly or indirectly by Reason, is worked out in the dialogues of Plato’s last period, the _Statesman, Philebus, Timaeus, _and _Laws. _These dialogues offer a strategy for explaining the physical world that goes beyond anything in the middle dialogues, and gives the best starting point for understanding the cosmologies and theologies of Aristotle, the Stoics, and later ancient thinkers. Menn focuses on the _Timaeus _as Plato’s most sustained effort to provide what _Anaxagoras had failed to deliver: an explanation of the world through Reason, showing that things are as they are because it is best, or because it best serves the order of the world as a whole. Anaxagoras was disappointed because he explained things through their material constituents, without explaining why the constituents are ordered as they are; but the theory of forms has the same defect, since it_ _cannot explain why different parts of the universe participate in different forms according to a particular order. The _Timaeus _and other late dialogues attempt to supply the missing explanation of the ordering of the physical world. These dialogues do not retreat from the middle dialogue theory of forms, nor do they escape into an esoteric theory of numbers; but they add to the middle dialogues an analysis of the principles necessary to account for the existence and partial intelligibility of the sensible world—not only forms and a material substance but also _Nous _and souls. Although the demiurge of the _Timaeus _ _is represented as a cause both to souls and bodies, most scholars have been reluctant to identify the demiurge as a being separate from and superior to souls, because they think that both the meaning of the Greek word _nous _and Plato’s own statements require that _Nous _is_ _either a kind of soul or something inseparable from souls. Reexamining the linguistic evidence and the Platonic texts, Menn argues that _nous _can mean something separate from souls, namely the virtue of rationality or intelligence that souls participate in. Menn argues that Anaxagoras’ _Nous _should be construed as such a virtue; then he examines what status this virtue has in the context of the Platonic theory of forms, and how it_ _is a cause both to souls and to bodies. Soul plays a crucial role in mediating the causality of _Nous _and introducing rational order into the world of bodies, but neither soul in general nor the world-soul in particular can be identified with _Nous. _ Menn stresses the pre-Socratic context for the cosmology and theology of Plato’s late dialogues; he argues for the importance of Diogenes of Appolonia in particular, and he reconstructs a possible new fragment of Diogenes from the _Timaeus _and from the Hippocratic treatise _On Breaths. _In the _Timaeus _and other late dialogues Plato attempts to do better than his predecessors by standards implicit in Socrates’ critique of Anaxagoras in the _Phaedo, _but what Plato offers remains consciously provisional. Aristotle argues that the _Timaeus _remains liable to some of the same criticisms that Socrates had leveled against Anaxagoras, and Aristotle’s own cosmology and theology take up Plato’s challenge to carry out Anaxagoras’ promise of an explanation of the world through _Nous, _and attempt to improve on the _Timaeus _as_ _Plato had improved on Anaxagoras. In this way the _Timaeus _serves as an essential starting point, not only_ _for those later ancient philosophers who took it as an authoritative statement on the world and on God but also for those who took it as a challenge to do better. (shrink)

The Moral Nexus develops and defends a new interpretation of morality—namely, as a set of requirements that connect agents normatively to other persons in a nexus of moral relations. According to this relational interpretation, moral demands are directed to other individuals, who have claims that the agent comply with these demands. Interpersonal morality, so conceived, is the domain of what we owe to each other, insofar as we are each persons with equal moral standing. The book offers an interpretative argument (...) for the relational approach. Specifically, it highlights neglected advantages of this way of understanding the moral domain; explores important theoretical and practical presuppositions of relational moral duties; and considers the normative implications of understanding morality in relational terms. The book features a novel defense of the relational approach to morality, which emphasizes the special significance that moral requirements have, both for agents who are deliberating about what to do and for those who stand to be affected by their actions. The book argues that relational moral requirements can be understood to link us to all individuals whose interests render them vulnerable to our agency, regardless of whether they stand in any prior relationship to us. It also offers fresh accounts of some of the moral phenomena that have seemed to resist treatment in relational terms, showing that the relational interpretation is a viable framework for understanding our specific moral obligations to other people. (shrink)

ARISTOTLE PRESENTS HIS DOCTRINE OF GOD as the first unmoved mover as the crown of his metaphysics, and thus of his entire theoretical philosophy. He obviously considers it an important achievement. Yet the doctrine has been peculiarly resistant to interpretation. It is difficult to know where to break in to Aristotle's theology: certainly not with his proof that the first mover must be unmoved. The proof has clearly been developed for the sake of the conclusion and not vice versa. How (...) did this conclusion occur to Aristotle, and why did he want it to be true? (shrink)

Late ancient Platonists and Aristotelians describe the method of reasoning to first principles as "analysis." This is a metaphor from geometrical practice. How far back were philosophers taking geometric analysis as a model for philosophy, and what work did they mean this model to do? After giving a logical description of analysis in geometry, and arguing that the standard (not entirely accurate) late ancient logical description of analysis was already familiar in the time of Plato and Aristotle, I argue that (...) Plato, in the second geometrical passage of the "Meno" (86e4-87b2), is taking analysis as a model for one kind of philosophical reasoning, and I explore the advantages and limits of this model for philosophical discovery, and in particular for how first principles can be discovered, without circularity, by argument. (shrink)

"Anton Wilhelm Amo is the first modern African philosopher to study and teach in a European university and write in the European philosophical tradition. We give an extensive historical and philosophical introduction to Amo's life and work, and provide Latin texts, with facing translations and explanatory notes, of Amo's two philosophical dissertations, On the Impassivity of the Human Mind and the Philosophical Disputation containing a Distinct Idea of those Things that Pertain either to the Mind or to our Living and (...) Organic Body, both published in 1734. The Impassivity is an extended argument that the mind cannot be acted on, that sensation is a being-acted-on by the sensed object, and therefore that sensation does not belong to the mind, and must belong instead to the body The Distinct Idea works out the implications for the mind's actions, and tries to show how the mind understands, wills, and effects things through the body by 'intentions' which direct motions in our body intentionally toward external things. Both dissertations try to show how far each type of human act belongs to the mind, how far to the body, and expose and resolve earlier philosophers' self-contradictions on these questions"--. (shrink)

The dominant theory of cross-disciplinarity represents multidisciplinarity as ‘lower’ or ‘less interesting’ than interdisciplinarity. In this paper, it is argued that this unfavorable representation of multidisciplinarity is ungrounded because it is an effect of the theory being incomplete. It is also explained that the unfavorable, ungrounded representation of multidisciplinarity is problematic: when someone adopts the dominant theory of cross-disciplinarity, the unfavorable representation supports the development of a preference for interdisciplinarity over multidisciplinarity. However, being ungrounded, the support the representation provides for (...) a preference for interdisciplinarity, is invalid. The issue is even more pressing because research policy makers and funding bodies are among the adopters of the theory, which means that there is a risk of policies reflecting an unjustified preference for interdisciplinarity over multidisciplinarity. This paper presents an improved version of the dominant theory of cross-disciplinarity, obtained by completing the original version with the information it was missing. Because the improved version is more neutral regarding the value of different types of cross-disciplinarity, it is better suited for use by research policy makers and funding bodies. (shrink)

When Aristotle speaks of theologikê, he means not the study of a single God, but the study of gods and divine things in general. He never uses the phrase “the unmoved mover” to pick out just one being, and that phrase would not express the essence of the beings it applies to. To see what sort of religious interest there might be in such a being, and how the words “god” and “divine” enter into Aristotle's philosophy, it is best to (...) start with what he says about gods and divine things in moral and political contexts. Guided by his criticisms of Plato on the soul's self-motion, Aristotle sets out, in Physics VIII, to give a revised version of Plato's cosmotheological argument in Laws X. This article focuses on Aristotle's theology and his views about gods, the soul, the cosmos, heavens and heavenly bodies, and the first principle or first cause. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Xenophon and the Socratic Question The Main Differences Between SocratesX and SocratesP SocratesX and Enkrateia Reworking of Socratic Themes on the Basis of Enkrateia Akrasia Enkrateia and Autarkeia One Socrates and Many.

In the recent literature on explanation in biology, increasing attention is being paid to the connection between design explanation and mechanistic explanation, viz. the role of design principles and heuristics for mechanism discovery and mechanistic explanation. In this paper we extend the connection between design explanation and mechanism discovery by prizing apart two different types of design explanation and by elaborating novel heuristics that one specific type offers for mechanism discovery across species. We illustrate our claims in terms of two (...) lines of biological research on the biological advantages of organismal traits, one on the eye-size of giant squid, the other on foraging habits of specific bat species. We argue that this research illustrates useful heuristics for mechanism discovery across species, viz. reasoning strategies to infer likely mechanisms for a certain biological role based on assessments of the environmental conditions in which the role is performed efficiently and less or in-efficiently. We bring out the novel features of our analysis in terms of a comparison with mechanistic approaches to mechanism discovery, amongst which graph-theoretical ones, and by comparing the different types of design explanation and the discovery heuristics they support. (shrink)

In this paper we assess the explanatory role of idealizations in ‘design explanations’, a type of functional explanation used in biology. In design explanations, idealizations highlight which factors make a difference to phenomena to be explained: hypothetical, idealized, organisms are invoked to make salient which traits of extant organisms make a difference to organismal fitness. This result negates the view that idealizations serve only pragmatic benefits, and complements the view that idealizations highlight factors that do not make a difference. This (...) analysis in particular strengthens the perspective that idealizations are means to highlight difference making factors, and identifies a novel, more direct role for idealizations in doing so. It thus offers a novel argument why in some explanatory contexts idealizations are in-eliminable. (shrink)

J'examine le statut et la fonction des Catégories dans la philosophie d'Aristote.Le traité n'appartient ni à la philosophie première, ni même à la philosophie tout court, mais à la dialectique. Il ne s'agit pas d'une « discussion dialectique » de l'être, mais plutôt de dialectique en tant que tel : ce traité forme un ensemble avec les Topiques, qui a pour but d'aider le questionneur dans un débat dialectique à décider si le terme donné peut tomber sous la définition proposée (...) ou sous le genre proposé. Bien qu'il y ait un emploi philosophique des Catégories, tout comme de la dialectique en général, l'opposition prétendue entre la théorie de la substance des Catégories et celle de la Métaphysique est fondée sur une méconnaissance des buts différents des deux traités. I examine the status and function of the Categories in Aristotle's philosophy.The work does not belong to « first philosophy, » or indeed to philosophy at all, but to dialectic; not as a « dialectical discussion » of being, but in the strict sense that it is intended, together with the Topics, to help the dialectical disputant to decide whether a given term can fall under a proposed definition or a proposed genus. Although the Categories, like dialectic in general, has uses in philosophical argument, the supposed opposition between the accounts of substance in the Categories and in the Metaphysics depends on a misunderstanding of the different aims of the two works. (shrink)