This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

A complete translation of Aristotle's classic that is both faithful and readable, along with an introduction that provides the modern reader with a means of understanding this seminal work and its impact on our culture. In this volume, Joe Sachs (translator of Aristotle's _Physics, Metaphysics,_ and the _Nicomachean Ethics _)also supplements his excellent translation with well-chosen notes and glossary of important terms. Focus Philosophical Library translations are close to and are non-interpretative of the original text, with the notes (...) and a glossary intending to provide the reader with some sense of the terms and the concepts as they were understood by Aristotle’s immediate audience. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

While the ethical use of deception has been discussed in literature, the ethics and acceptability of nursing deception has yet to be studied. The current study examined nurses’ and nursing students’ ratings of the ethics and acceptability of nursing deception. We predicted that nurses and nursing students would rate a truthful vignette as more ethical than a deceptive vignette. We also predicted that participants would rate nursing deception as unethical and unacceptable. A mixed design was used to examine ethics scores (...) as a within-subjects factor and order as a between-groups design factor. A total of 131 nurses and nursing students were recruited from university nursing programs and hospitals in Texas. Participants were provided with a truthful vignette and deceptive vignette and used the Multidimensional Ethics Scale-Revised 1 to rate each vignette. Participants also completed the Lies in Nursing Ethics Questionnaire. The truthful nursing vignette was rated as more ethical than the deceptive vignette. Results indicated that most participants rated nursing deception as unethical, unacceptable, and a violation of the ANA ethical code. Some participants deemed that nursing deception may be acceptable within some cases. Age and years of experience were not related to the perceived ethics and acceptability of nursing deception. Nurses and nursing students believe that using deception with patients is unethical and unacceptable. However, some participants believed that deception may be warranted within some cases. These findings may reflect nurses’ placing the patient at the core of their values and viewing honesty as important for the nurse-patient relationship. Further implications and directions are discussed. (shrink)

Methods Young healthy heterosexual couples underwent sleep-lab-based polysomnography of two sleeping arrangements: individual sleep and co-sleep. Individual and dyadic sleep parameters (i.e., synchronization of sleep stages) were collected. The latter were assessed using cross-recurrence quantification analysis. Additionally, subjective sleep quality, relationship characteristics, and chronotype were monitored. Data were analyzed comparing co-sleep vs. individual sleep. Interaction effects of the sleeping arrangement with gender, chronotype, or relationship characteristics were moreover tested. Results As compared to sleeping individually, co-sleeping was associated with about 10% (...) more REM sleep, less fragmented REM sleep (p = 0.008), longer undisturbed REM fragments (p = 0.0006), and more limb movements (p = 0.007). None of the other sleep stages was significantly altered. Social support interacted with sleeping arrangement in a way that individuals with suboptimal social support showed the biggest impact of the sleeping arrangement on REM sleep. Sleep architectures were more synchronized between partners during co-sleep (p = 0.005) even if wake phases were excluded (p = 0.022). Moreover, sleep architectures are significantly coupled across a lag of ± 5min. Depth of relationship represented an additional significant main effect regarding synchronization, reflecting a positive association between the two. Neither REM sleep nor synchronization was influenced by gender, chronotype, or other relationship characteristics. Conclusion Depending on the sleeping arrangement, couple's sleep architecture and synchronization show alterations that are modified by relationship characteristics. We discuss that these alterations could be part of a self-enhancing feedback loop of REM sleep and sociality and a mechanism through which sociality prevents mental illness. (shrink)

The option of being ‘spiritual but not religious’ deserves much more philosophical attention. That is the aim here, taking the work of Robert Solomon as a starting point, with focus on the particular issues around viewing life as gift. This requires analysis of ‘existential gratitude’ to show that there can be gratitude for things without gratitude to someone for providing things, and also closer attention to the role that metaphor plays in cognition. I consider two main concerns with gift (...) and gratitude thinking, that the nonreligious justification is too instrumentalist in its approach and that viewing life as gift, whether in a religious or nonreligious way, is simply too optimistic. (shrink)

What is science, and what is it not? Is falsifiability the key to drawing this line? How and why does science work? Should we worry whether science is talking about a "real" world? And should we stop thinking there is a single thing we can call "the scientific method"? With Deborah Mayo, Robert Rynasiewicz, and Drew Arrowood.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle, writing over two thousand years before Wall Street, called people who engaged in activities which did not contribute to society "parasites." In his latest work, renowned scholar Robert C. Solomon asserts that though capitalism may require capital, but it does not require, much less should it be defined by the parasites it inevitably attracts. Capitalism has succeeded not with brute strength or because it has made people rich, but because it has produced responsible citizens (...) and--however unevenly--prosperous communities. It cannot tolerate a conception of business that focuses solely on income and vulgarity while ignoring traditional virtues of responsibility, community, and integrity. Many feel that there is too much lip-service and not enough understanding of the importance of cooperation and integrity in corporate life. This book rejects the myths and metaphors of war-like competition that cloud business thinking and develops an "Aristotelean" theory of business. The author's approach emphasizes several core concepts: the corporation as community, the search for excellence, the importance of integrity and sound judgment, as well as a more cooperative and humane vision of business. Solomon stresses the virtues of honesty, trust, fairness, and compassion in the competitive business world, and confronts the problem of "moral mazes" and what he posits as its solution--moral courage. (shrink)

Comprehensie collection of historical and contemporary philosophies of technology, including Plato, Aristotle, St. Simon, Comte, Marx, Heidegger, Mumford, Foucault.

Develops a theory of culture based on a metaphysics that elaborates on the Platonic and Confucian traditions. In Metaphysics of Goodness, Robert Cummings Neville extends Alfred North Whitehead’s project of cultural studies, which was based on a new metaphysics that Whitehead developed in Adventures of Ideas. Neville’s focus is value or goodness in many modes. The metaphysics treated in this book derive from the Platonic and Confucian traditions, with significant modifications of Whitehead, Peirce, Dewey, Confucius, Xunzi, and Zhou Dunyi. (...) Part one develops a theory of form based on a metaphysics of harmony. Part two elaborates a theory of art based on a metaphysics of beauty. Part three sketches a theory of personhood based on a metaphysics of obligation. Part four discusses civilization in a systematic way based on a metaphysics of flourishing. Throughout the book, Neville elaborates a theory of interpretation that is inspired by Peirce, Dewey, and Xunzi but is not limited to their ideas. While the reasoning of the book is concise, it employs methodologies from many kinds of philosophy, art criticism, ethics, and cultural studies, and sees philosophy as needing to learn from all these disciplines. “Neville’s work is informed by a lifelong engagement with the most important philosophers in history, including Plato, Aristotle, Whitehead, and Dewey. Here, he offers an important argument that there is beauty not only in how people see the world, but also in the world itself.” — Kevin Schilbrack, Appalachian State University. (shrink)

Like the Copernican revolution which initiated the Modern project, there has been a thermodynamic revolution in the empirical sciences in the last two centuries. The aim of this paper is to show how we might draw from this revolution to make new and startling metaphysical and ethical claims concerning the nature and value of reality. To this end, this paper employs Aristotle’s account of the relation of the various philosophies and sciences to one another to show how we might (...) assert a new theory of being, moral value, and practical action from the primacy of entropic decay asserted in the contemporary mathematical sciences. This paper proceeds to show how, from what the contemporary sciences have concluded concerning the primacy of entropic decay within reality, unbecoming might be forwarded as a new account of the essence of existence: i.e., the first cause and motivating principle of reality’s formal, material, efficient, and final nature. The paper concludes by arguing that a new and surprising account of universal ethical value and normative duty can be deduced from such a metaphysics of decay. (shrink)

Since the times of Plato and Aristotle, the relation of poetry to philosophy has been controversial. For certain scholars, poetry should in no way be confused with philosophy. For others, poetry is at the heart of the possibility of thinking itself. In _Affirmation of Poetry_, Judith Balso defends the significance of poetry as a necessary practice for thinking. For Balso, if reading poetry properly has become an obscure task, poetry itself still carries with it a power of thinking: the (...) efforts of the poets must continue. In analyzing the affirmation of thought found within the work of such poets as Osip Mandelstam, Wallace Stevens, Alberto Caeiro, and Giacomo Leopardi, Balso reestablishes poetry’s place as a site of thought. (shrink)

I attribute to Aristotle a theory of sensible qualities that straddles the modern debate between reductive physicalist and primitivist theories of color. On the interpretation I defend, Aristotle identifies sensible qualities with the physical properties of sensibly qualified bodies in virtue of which they move and affect perceivers and sense media. Nevertheless, I argue, Aristotle thinks that the essential nature of these qualities is revealed in ordinary sense experience. From a modern perspective, the resulting picture of sensible (...) qualities as simultaneously causes and manifest features of sense experience appears naive. But as I hope to show, it is in fact the product of an explanatorily sophisticated scientific theory, one which Aristotle finds necessary to meet the complex demands that, for him, make sensible qualities an ontological problem. (shrink)

Introduction -- What is ethics? -- Ethics and religion -- The history of ethics -- Ethical questions -- What is the good life? -- Why be good : the problem of justification -- Why be rational : the place of reason in ethics -- Which is right : ethical dilemmas -- Ethical concepts -- Universality -- Prudence and morals -- Happiness and the good -- Egoism and altruism -- Virtue and the virtues -- Facts and values -- Justice and equality (...) -- Rights and duties -- Ethical theories and approaches -- Teleology -- Utilitarianism -- Kant and deontology -- Social contract theory -- Ethical relativism -- Pluralism and history -- Feminist ethics -- Prologue : ethics and religion -- The Hebrew Bible -- The Ten commandments -- The New Testament -- The Qur'an -- Ancient Asia -- India : Hinduism and Buddhism -- Buddhism -- China : Confucianism and Taoism -- China : Taoism -- Plato -- Aristotle -- Epicurus -- Augustine -- Thomas Hobbes -- David Hume -- Immanuel Kant -- Mary Wollstonecraft -- John Stuart Mill -- Friedrich Nietzsche -- John Rawls. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophers have grown increasingly skeptical toward both morality and moral theory. Some argue that moral theory is a radically misguided enterprise that does not illuminate moral practice, while others simply deny the value of morality in human life. In this important new book, Louden responds to the arguments of both "anti-morality" and "anti-theory" skeptics. In Part One, he develops and defends an alternative conception of morality, which, he argues, captures more of the central features of both Aristotelian and Kantian (...) ethics than do other contemporary models, and enables the central importance of morality to be convincingly reaffirmed. In Louden's model, morality is primarily a matter of what one does to oneself, rather than what one does or does not do to others. This model eliminates the gulf that many anti-morality critics say exists between morality's demands and the personal point of view. Louden further argues that morality's primary focus should be on agents and their lives, rather than on right actions, and that it is always better to be morally better--i.e. it is impossible to be "too moral." Part Two presents Louden's alternative conception of moral theory. Here again he draws on the work of Aristotle and Kant, showing that their moral theories have far more in common than is usually thought, and that those features that they share can be the basis for a viable moral theory that is immune to the standard anti-theory objections. Louden reaffirms the necessity and importance of moral theory in human life, and shows that moral theories fulfill a variety of genuine and indispensable human needs. (shrink)

The guiding suggestion of this article is intimated in the title: “Platonism,” that set of “philosophical positions” supposedly present in the Platonic dialogues (pre-eminently the “theory of forms,” but also “Plato’s metaphysics,” his “epistemology,” his “moral theory,” his “political theory” etc.) are not so much discovered in the dialogues as they are invented out of a very specific (mis) reading of those dialogues. And the first great “misreader” was Aristotle, who, I argue, first made possible the set of assumptions (...) about philosophy and about philosophic writing that, in turn, made anything like “Platonism” possible. (shrink)

The _Nicomachean Ethics_ is one of Aristotle’s most widely read and influential works. Ideas central to ethics—that happiness is the end of human endeavor, that moral virtue is formed through action and habituation, and that good action requires prudence—found their most powerful proponent in the person medieval scholars simply called “the Philosopher.” Drawing on their intimate knowledge of Aristotle’s thought, Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins have produced here an English-language translation of the _Ethics_ that is (...) as remarkably faithful to the original as it is graceful in its rendering. Aristotle is well known for the precision with which he chooses his words, and in this elegant translation his work has found its ideal match. Bartlett and Collins provide copious notes and a glossary providing context and further explanation for students, as well as an introduction and a substantial interpretive essay that sketch central arguments of the work and the seminal place of Aristotle’s _Ethics_ in his political philosophy as a whole. The _Nicomachean Ethics_ has engaged the serious interest of readers across centuries and civilizations—of peoples ancient, medieval, and modern; pagan, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish—and this new edition will take its place as the standard English-language translation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Beautiful Soul:From Hegel to BeckettDrew Milne (bio)The "beautiful soul," lacking an actual existence, entangled in the contradiction between its pure self and the necessity of that self to externalize itself and change itself into an actual existence, and dwelling in the immediacy of this firmly held antithesis—an immediacy which alone is the middle term reconciling the antithesis, which has been intensified to its pure abstraction, and is pure (...) being or empty nothingness—this "beautiful soul," then, being conscious of this contradiction in its unreconciled immediacy, is disordered to the point of madness, wastes itself in yearning and pines away in consumption.—G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of SpiritThe figure of the beautiful soul marks out a limit of representation. Its persistence is that of a literary fiction which cannot be actualized, but whose imaginative lure is no less powerful for being so resistant to embodiment. The beautiful soul emerges in a shift from philosophical reflections on moral beauty into the romantic novel, but for Robert E. Norton, the history of the beautiful soul is brought to a close by Hegel [139]. Nevertheless, the way this figure stands between philosophy and literature, and between moral agency and the literary imagination, casts shadows over contemporary thought. Unreconciled immediacy, disordered by consciousness of its contradiction and proximity to pure abstraction, becomes the sign of modern art, perhaps most explicitly in the writings of Samuel Beckett. In The Broken Middle, Gillian Rose projects the beautiful soul out of Hegel and Goethe into a speculative account of modern thought's ethical equivocations. For Allen Speight, Hegel's recourse to the awkward literary and novelistic status of the beautiful soul reveals how "inescapable questions discernible in the products of modern literary artists are ones that concern the account we give of our freedom as modern agents" [135]. This essay seeks to unravel some of the contemporary relevance of the beautiful soul, exploring the instability of this figure as a mediation between philosophy and literature, in particular as a tension in the interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.The difficulties posed by the beautiful soul for interpreting Hegel can be gleaned from Terry Pinkard's impressively lucid survey German Philosophy, 1760-1860. Pinkard notes how Hegel's discussion of the beautiful soul in the Phenomenology of Spirit "makes oblique reference to Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel, Fichte, Fries, Novalis, perhaps Rousseau, and maybe even Hölderlin" [240n19] before ascribing centrality in Hegel's discussion to Jacobi's novel Waldemar. Oblique reference folds into a structure whose indeterminacy concerns both the freedom claimed by literary representations of the beautiful soul, and the inability of this freedom to amount to more than a confession of conceptual paralysis or impotence. The beautiful soul proves resistant to interpretation, a literary-philosophical compound that destabilizes conventions of referentiality. The beautiful soul threatens to dissolve philosophy from the perspective of an inward delicacy of moral feeling, claiming [End Page 63] [Begin Page 65] the authenticity of a subjectivity that will do no wrong and knows no other as an object on which to act. Philosophical interpretations are often too brusque with the reflexive irony through which the beautiful soul is represented, or insufficiently literal-minded to capture its content as form. In turn, the self-critical claims of literary representation often dissolve into an ironic indifference to determinate consequences.The beautiful soul, however, can hardly be said to have existed outside its representation in writing. It recurs in manifold guises more as an aspiration to be, or appear, morally sensitive but incapable of action. Donald Phillip Verene sketches its background in the Romantic movement but suggests that: "The beautiful soul is not difficult to understand, as Hegel sketches it in the several pages he devotes to it. We are familiar in ordinary experience with types of persons that approximate to the stance of the beautiful soul, that is, if we keep polite company and associate from time to time with delicate people" [100-01]. Anyone who has spent time with aesthetes or poets who claim a delicacy of moral insight without feeling the need of justification or labor to actualize their insights knows the ills this shape of... (shrink)

The editio princeps of the first Medieval introduction to philosophy that makes use of the full range of Aristotle's writings.

Drawing on Aristotle’s notion of “ultimate responsibility,” Robert Kane argues that to be exercising a free will an agent must have taken some character forming decisions for which there were no sufficient conditions or decisive reasons.¹ That is, an agent whose will is free not only had the ability to develop other dispositions, but could have exercised that ability without being irrational. To say it again, a person has a free will just in case her character is the (...) product of decisions that she could have rationally avoided making. That one’s character is the product of such decisions entails ultimate responsibility for its manifestations, engendering a free will. (shrink)

Nicomachean Ethics/NE, Book III, Chapters 1-5, provides Aristotle’s account of “Voluntary Movement.” It, thus, draws the Passion-Action distinction, only posited earlier in Categories, while also serving as the linchpin of NE’ discussion of Virtue, in explicitly connecting it to Right Reason. My explication of this text renders its terminology consistent with the Law of Excluded Middle and rebuts two criticisms of the Eudaimonistic Axiology on which it is based. These results are shown to be entailments of Aristotle’s doctrine (...) that Voluntary is (a) Relative. That categorization is then used to help treat a problematic case of Deliberation beyond his purview. (shrink)

In this reply to Paul Gaffney, I raise questions about his strong emphasis on winning as the foundation of athletic virtues such as teamwork. I connect this to his reading of Aristotle on the connection of virtue and happiness, and suggest an alternative reading that I believe is more true to Aristotle and to the experience of sport.

The soul is an explanatory principle of Aristotle’s natural science, accounting both for the fact that living things are alive as well as for the diverse natural attributes that belong to them by virtue of being alive. I argue that the explanatory role of the soul in Aristotle’s natural science must be understood in light of his view, stated in a controversial passage from Parts of Animals (645b14–20), that the soul of a living thing is a “complex activity” (...) of its organic body. This paper explores the role of this “complex activity” model of soul in Aristotle’s study of soul in De Anima. I argue, first, that the model has its origins in De Anima II.4, where Aristotle argues that living things do all they do by nature for the sake of a single, teleologically primary end. I argue further that Aristotle uses this model to account for the psychological attributes naturally present in living things, including their capacities for vital activities like nutrition, reproduction, and perception, and that this is the task to which Aristotle devotes the obscure final chapters of De Anima III. (shrink)

When we hear the term "Japanese philosophy" we think of Zen Buddhism or the Shinto scriptures. Yet one of the great 20th century interpreters of Western philosophy, Nishida Kitaro, lived and wrote in the Japanese islands all his life, laboring at an ultimate synthesis of oriental thought and Western hermeneutics. To be sure, Nishida's aim was to understand his own cultural influences in relation to the Western world. What distinguished him, however, was his passion for rendering oriental metaphysics understandable in (...) the language of Western philosophy, and his attempts to contrast the paradoxicality of Buddhist logic with the logical strategies of Aristotle, Kant, or Hegel. Featured in this book is an interpretation of Nishida's writings. Professor Carter focuses on the Japanese thinker's notion of "basho," a concept of nothingness as field, place or topos as borrowed from Plato's Tim'us. Expounding on the logical foundations and archaic elements in Nishida's work, and carefully explaining Nishida's critical approach to the questions of God, religion and morality, and pure existence, this discerning book offers students of Western philosophy and oriental thought alike a highly readable introduction to the teachings of a true world philosopher. (shrink)

Drawing on Aristotle’s notion of “ultimate responsibility,” Robert Kane argues that to be exercising a free will an agent must have taken some character forming decisions for which there were no sufficient conditions or decisive reasons. That is, an agent whose will is free not only had the ability to develop values and beliefs besides those that presently make up her motives, but could have exercised that ability without being irrational. An agent wills freely, on this view, by (...) beingultimately responsible for how she is currently disposed to act. Kane needs, then, to show how an agent could be responsible for decisions that her deliberations did not guarantee. He must also explain how a decision for which there is no decisive reason could yet be rational, assuming that the responsibility engendering decisions forming the basis of a free will would be rational. I shall argue here that Kane has achieved neither of these goals. (shrink)

Presenting the most comprehensive and lucid account of the topic currently available, Robert Audi's "Practical Reasoning and Ethical Decision" is essential reading for anyone interested in the role of reason in ethics or the nature of human action. The first part of the book is a detailed critical overview of the influential theories of practical reasoning found in Aristotle, Hume and Kant, whilst the second part examines practical reasoning in the light of important topics in moral psychology - (...) weakness of will, self-deception, rationalization and others. In the third part, Audi describes the role of moral principles in practical reasoning and clarifies the way practical reasoning underlies ethical decisions. He formulates a comprehensive set of concrete ethical principles, explains how they apply to reasoning about what to do, and shows how practical reasoning guides moral conduct. (shrink)

This essay argues that aristotle's doctrine of nominal definition is his semantic theory for natural-Kind terms. It offers a new interpretation of that doctrine. On this interpretation nominal definitions are initial working theoretical accounts of natural kinds which serve as starting points for scientific inquiry. As such, Nominal definitions have existential import. They make an implicit reference to the most familiar actual instances of the kinds they define and they define the essences of those kinds by reference to those (...) instances. Nominal definitions are, Thus, Accounts of real essences as much as real definitions. They are initial incomplete accounts of such essences and it is as such that they explicate the meanings of (natural-Kind) terms. (shrink)