Since late antiquity, a connection was made between Jews and the psychological state of despondency based, in part, on the link between melancholy and Saturn, and the further association of the Hebrew name of that planet, Shabbetai, and the Sabbath. The melancholic predisposition has had important anthropological, cosmological, and theological repercussions. In this essay, I focus on various perspectives on melancholia in thinkers as diverse as Kafka, Levinas, Blanchot, Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Bloch, Scholem, and Derrida. A common thread that links (...) these thinkers is the hopelessness of hope imparted by the messianic belief in a future that must be perpetually deferred. (shrink)

In this paper I undermine the Entailment Principle according to which if an entity is a truthmaker for a certain proposition and this proposition entails another, then the entity in question is a truthmaker for the latter proposition. I argue that the two most promising versions of the principle entail the popular but false Conjunction Thesis, namely that a truthmaker for a conjunction is a truthmaker for its conjuncts. One promising version of the principle understands entailment as strict implication but (...) restricts the field of application of the principle to purely contingent truths (i.e. those that contain no necessary proposition at any level of analysis). But a conjunction of purely contingent truths strictly implies its conjuncts. So this version of the principle is committed to the Conjunction Thesis. The same is true of the version of the principle where entailment is understood in the sense of systems T, R, and E of relevant logic, since in these systems conjunctions entail their conjuncts. I argue that the Conjunction Thesis is false because a truthmaker is that in virtue of what a certain proposition is true and it is false that, for example, what the proposition that Peter is a man is true in virtue of is the conjunctive fact that Peter is man and Saturn is a planet (or the facts that Peter is a man and that Saturn is a planet taken together). I also argue against other versions of the principle. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Destruction and Transcendence in W. G. SebaldMark R. McCullohIFor all the Saturnine pessimism of W. G. Sebald's application of Walter Benjamin's view of historical process (an attitude toward history expounded upon at length in an influential work by Susan Sontag), the author's sense of irony about the human predicament is irrepressible. 1 Human beings seem destined to remain prisoners of various paradoxes—they both create and destroy, they are capable (...) of acts of love as well as bitterness and hate, they make efforts to document and communicate, but at the same time they tend to forget and are given to suppressing the truth, they are driven by ideals, yet remain hobbled by imperfection. Art and music, passed on from generation to generation, seem to be the most common way that human beings transcend the strictures of their imperfections, inadequacies, and their finitude. And to the extent that art indeed survives over time, and continues to be perceived and appreciated by beholders, the aesthetic enterprise succeeds. However, ultimately, as the Book of Ecclesiastes and Shelley's "Ozymandias" remind us, all human endeavor is in vain, and, to assume the perspective of physical cosmology for a moment—and in this regard Benjamin's cosmic vision appears painfully accurate—our speck of earth, dwarfed by a vast universe the true immensity of which has been revealed by the Hubble Telescope, will one day be ground to dust and debris like the rings of Saturn, and our sun will exist only as a burned-out hulk. But such a future world, devoid of beholders, and devoid of creators and their artifacts, is not Sebald's primary subject, even though it clearly forms the teleological backdrop for his third novel, The Rings of Saturn (1995, English version 1998). Rather, Sebald pursues his art in spite of a terminal prospect that will ultimately confront our [End Page 395] planet and solar system. His primary subject, the effect of trauma on individual and collective experience, is instead closely linked with the passing of Europe as a tradition, as an idea—as an idiosyncratic and innovative, but inherently corrupt contributor to cultural history. In the course of his narratives he also addresses the redemptive role of art in memorializing the past and attempting to capture the passing present. In both respects he attends to the humane and the sublime as well as the tragic and the grotesque.Paraphrasing the art historian Svetlana Alpers, one early reviewer of Sebald's novel Austerlitz (2001) points out the self-contradictory nature of preserving the transient moment in art:Why create visual art at all when everything on earth must be represented in its inexorable transitoriness; why paint earthly scenes with such incredible care and precision as if they were permanent? 2The care and precision of the painter's craft (in this case, the Dutch still-life painter David Bailly) are devoted to the representation of a scene that is by its very nature transient and even tenuous—like the scenes of sublime beauty in Sebald's fiction, the artist's depiction "courts and admits" its own fragility. What Bailly does visually, Sebald attempts in words. Take, for instance, the following passage from Vertigo, Sebald's first novel, which was titled in German (with considerably more irony) Schwindel. Gefühle 3 :At a hairpin bend I looked out of the turning bus down into the depths below and could see the turquoise surfaces of the Ferstein and Smaranger lakes, which, even when I was a child, on our first excursions into the Tyrol, had seemed to me the essence of all conceivable beauty.(p. 176)The author has already prepared the reader for this moment of awe by remarking on the otherworldly "slow-motion quality" of the waterfalls descending from the mountain cliffs and on the boulders in their screes spreading downwards into the wooded hillsides, "screes which reached from the mountains down into the forests like pale fingers into dark hair..." (p. 176). Examined closely, the passage in question suggests both the enduring power of natural beauty and, especially with its precise reference to an automobile long since out of production and unfamiliar to... (shrink)

This provocative collection of essays written by the influential Greek scholar E. R. Dodds between 1929 and 1971. represents the wide range of his literary and philosophical interests. Insightful and learned, the essays combine profound scholarship with the lucid humanity of a teacher awareof the special value of Greek studies in the modern world.

I defend the suggestion that the rational probability in the Sleeping Beauty paradox is one third. The reasoning in its favour is familiar: for every heads-waking, there are two tails-wakings. To complete the defense, I rebut the reasoning which purports to justify the competing suggestion – that the correct probability is half – by undermining its premise, that no new information has been received.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:684 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:4 OCTOBER 1995 "Private I.anguage" and the pivotal paper in the Stoic section, "The Conjunctive Model," bring out a third feature of Brunschwig's method. Many of his essays take their start from a small text or a relatively local problem, one which does not primafacie bear significantly on large philosophical issues. Yet in a rigorously conceived philosophical system, the whole is often (...) reflected in the details; where possible Brunschwig elicits the larger significance. He shows how Epicurean physics provides a normative model for Epicurean psychology without falling into the reductionist error; the Epicurean does extrapolate from physical theory to human experience, but in so doing he does not forget that human beings are not just atomic; they are atomic compounds. Reductionism does not follow from materialism, for Epicurus or for us. Similarly in "The Conjunctive Model" Brunschwig connects, in a manner which is speculative but nevertheless compelling, a important Stoic thesis in logic (that a conjunction is false if even one of its conjuncts is false) with a comprehensive understanding of Stoic ethics and physics, thereby giving definite content to the Stoic claims about the coherence of their system. The other Stoic papers focus on ontology and logic, showing how central these are to Stoicism. The titles speak for themselves: "Remarks on the Stoic Theory of the Proper Noun," "Remarks on the Classification of Simple Propositions in Hellenistic Logics," "The Stoic Theory of the Supreme Genus and Platonic Ontology," and "Did Diogenes of Babylon Invent the Ontological Argument?" (the answer is 'no'). One essay ("On a Stoic Way of Not Being") disguises by its title a crucial contribution to the philosophy of mind. The papers on Scepticism include "The 6oov ~t~ x~ ~.6"f.t 9 Formula in Sextus Empiricus," a definitive treatment of a verbal formula crucial to understanding the precise character of his sceptical stance, and "Sextus Empiricus on the xptxfl0tov," the only paper in the volume which has previously appeared in English. The papers "Once Again on Eusebius on Aristocles on Timon on Pyrrho" and "The Title of Timon's lndalmoi: From Odysseus to Pyrrho" deal with early Pyrrhonism, for which the evidence is so thin that no firm conclusions can be drawn. Yet even here Brunschwig's care and skill are exemplary, and his argument that we should look to Timon rather than Pyrrho as the creator of Pyrrhonism is as convincing as anything could be in this area. This is a collection which specialists must read and even nonspecialists will value for its elegant combination of rigor, intellectual honesty, and philosophical insight. BRAD INWOOD University of Toronto Michael J. B. Allen. Nuptial Arithmetic: Marsilio Ficino's Commentary on the Fatal Number in Book VIII of Plato's Republic. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. PP. x + 291. Cloth, $5o.oo. Marsilio Ficino was born in 1433 and died in 1499 at the age of 66. He would have been pleased if he could have known that. For three years before in 1496 (or slightly earlier) he declared in his Commentary on the Fatal Number that 6 was the perfect number and BOOK R~VIEWS 685 that contemplations of the sextile relations of the planets might lead to the return of the golden age of Saturn "some day," This is the fifth volume of Michael Allen's seminal studies of Ficino's Platonic commentaries; if his notable additional articles on further Ficino commentaries were assembled, as they sometime must be, it would be his sixth--not that he takes the same pleasure in numbers as his subject Ficino did. But 6 is the key to Ficino's unraveling of Plato's "fatal number" in Republic 546. To end the suspense, Ficino's solution, aided by Aristotle, Politics V. 1316, is (4 + 3 + 5)3or (6 x 2)3 or 1728. But 1728 what? There is no clue. The book is itself a valuable contribution to the history of philosophy. Allen reviews the history of this topos up to Brumbaugh and Rees. Although Ficino's entry was known and discussed in the sixteenth century, it has been lost from sight since, and Alien restores it importantly to... (shrink)

In the face of environmental crises such as climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss—which all adversely impact on health—Gils-Schmidt and Salloch explore whether physicians can be justified in taking climate issues into account in clinical care.1 While their approach centres on the ‘climate-sensitive’ decisions, physicians can carry out on the micro-level of clinical decision-making, they encourage further discussions on how climate-related issues can be included across different levels of decision-making in healthcare. We propose a list of tasks and a model (...) to assist with navigating the range of factors and structural elements an environmentally sensitive ethics must address. Stephen Gardiner’s notion of a perfect moral storm is central to understanding these issues.2 Gardiner describes how a perfect moral storm occurs in the centre of three overlapping conditions for human action and policymaking in the face of climate change. This storm is driven by: (1) a lack of interest among current generations to meet global needs and accommodate the well-being of future generations, (2) a lack of ecological concerns for other parts of nature than humans and (3) weak ethical and political theories and institutions shaping policy decisions on issues with severe implications across borders and generations. Moreover, these conditions are embedded in the existing, complex world of ethically unjustified power imbalances and social injustice. The growing awareness of healthcare’s climate footprint has amplified and accelerated global, grassroots action to make healthcare more environmentally friendly. This includes incorporating environmental impacts into quality improvement methodologies, building communities of practice to explore how to make …. (shrink)

Aim To study the views of people in a largely Muslim country, Kuwait, of the acceptability of a life-ending action such as physician-assisted suicide (PAS). Method 330 Kuwaiti university students judged the acceptability of PAS in 36 scenarios composed of all combinations of four factors: the patient's age (35, 60 or 85 years); the level of incurability of the illness (completely incurable vs extremely difficult to cure); the type of suffering (extreme physical pain or complete dependence) and the extent to (...) which the patient requests a life-ending procedure, euthanasia or PAS (no request, some form of request, repeated requests). In all scenarios, the patients were women who were receiving the best possible care. The ratings were subjected to cluster analysis and analyses of variance. Results Five clusters were found. For 44%, PAS was always very unacceptable, no matter what the circumstances. For 23%, it was unacceptable, but less so if the patient was older or requested it repeatedly. For 16%, it was unacceptable if the patient was young but was acceptable if the patient was elderly. For 5%, it was unacceptable if the patient had extreme pain but was acceptable if completely dependent. For 11%, it was unacceptable if the patient did not request it but acceptable if she did. Conclusion The majority of the Kuwaiti university students opposed PAS either categorically or with a slight variation according to circumstances. Nonetheless, a minority approved of PAS in some cases, particularly when the patient was elderly. (shrink)

This original and lively book explores Greek ideas about health and disease and their influence on Greek thought. Fundamental issues such as causation and responsibility, purification and pollution, mind-body relations and gender differences, authority and the expert and who can challenge them, reality and appearances, good government, happiness, and good and evil themselves are deeply implicated. Using the evidence not just from Greek medical theory and practice but also from epic, lyric, tragedy, historiography, philosophy, and religion, G. E. R. Lloyd (...) offers the first comprehensive account of the influence of Greek thought about health and disease on the Greek imagination. (shrink)

The free-will defence holds that the value of significant free will is so great that God is justified in creating significantly free creatures even if there is a risk or certainty that these creatures will sin. A difficulty for the FWD, developed carefully by Quentin Smith, is that God is unable to do evil, and yet surely lacks no genuinely valuable kind of freedom. Smith argues that the kind of freedom that God has can be had by creatures, without a (...) risk of creatures doing evil. I shall show that Smith's argument fails – the case of God is disanalogous to the case of creatures precisely because creatures are creatures. (shrink)

Published here for the first time in paperback is much of a final and long-anticipated work on philosophy of history by the renowned Oxford philosopher, historian, and archaeologist R. G. Collingwood. The original text of this uncompleted work was only recently discovered in the archives of Oxford University Press. Also found there were two conclusions written by Collingwood for lectures which were eventually revised and published as The Idea of Nature, but which have relevance to his philosophy of history as (...) well. These pieces are included in this volume, accompanied by further short writings by Collingwood on historical knowledge and inquiry, selected from previously unpublished manuscripts held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. All these writings, besides containing entirely new ideas, discuss further many of the issues which Collingwood is famous for having raised in The Idea of History and in his Autobiography.A lengthy editorial introduction sets these writings in their context, and discusses philosophical questions to which they give rise. The editors also consider why Collingwood left The Principles of History unfinished at his death, and what significance should be attached to the fact that it contains no reference to one of his best-known ideas: that of historical understanding as re-enactment. This volume will be a significant publication not just in Collingwood studies but in philosophy of history generally. (shrink)

EDITED BY SLAVENKO ŠLJUKIĆBOOK SYMPOSIUM ON KENNETH R. WESTPHAL’S HOW HUME AND KANT RECONSTRUCT NATURAL LAW.

Jonathan Dancy’s Practical Reality defends a strikingly nonpsychologistic account of motivating reasons for action. When we explain what people do by citing their reasons, we are trying to isolate the considerations that were actually effective in moving them to act. But it is crucial, Dancy contends, that these considerations be understood in a way that preserves their connection to the normative contexts in which the concept of a reason also has a place. The considerations that move agents to act are (...) considerations that agents take to cast a favorable light on the actions they perform, and it is at least sometimes the case that peoples’ motivating reasons are also good reasons for action, considerations that really do recommend or speak in favor of the action that was undertaken. If we make the plausible further assumption that these normative reasons are typically not psychological states of the agents to whom they apply, it follows that motivating reasons equally cannot be understood in essentially psychological terms. The reasons for which people act are rarely if ever psychological states to which they are subject, but facts or states of the world of the sort that are capable of counting in favor of actions, and that in successful cases render sensible or reasonable the very actions that agents in fact perform. (shrink)

R S Peters; Postscript 2, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 7, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 179–180, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1973.tb00480.x.

The "Supplement" transmitted as the second book of "On the Soul" by Alexander of Aphrodisias is a collection of short texts on a wide range of topics from psychology, including the general hylomorphic account of soul and its faculties, and the theory of vision; questions in ethics ; and issues relating to responsibility, chance and fate. One of the texts in the collection, "On Intellect", had a major influence on medieval Arabic and Western thought, greater than that of Alexander's "On (...) the Soul" itself. The treatises may all be by Alexander himself; certainly the majority of them are closely connected with his other works. Many of them, however, consist of collections of arguments on particular issues, collections which probably incorporate material from earlier in the history of the Peripatetic school. This translation is from a new edition of the Greek text based on a collation of all known manuscripts and comparison with medieval Arabic and Latin translations. (shrink)

Most writing on informed consent in Africa highlights different cultural and social attributes that influence informed consent practices, especially in research settings. This review presents a composite picture of informed consent in Nigeria using empirical studies and legal and regulatory prescriptions, as well as clinical experience. It shows that Nigeria, like most other nations in Africa, is a mixture of sociocultural entities, and, notwithstanding the multitude of factors affecting it, informed consent is evolving along a purely Western model.Empirical studies show (...) that 70–95% of Nigerian patients report giving consent for their surgical treatments. Regulatory prescriptions and adjudicated cases in Nigeria follow the Western model of informed consent. However, adversarial legal proceedings, for a multiplicity of reasons, do not play significant roles in enforcing good medical practice in Nigeria. Gender prejudices are evident, but not a norm. Individual autonomy is recognized even when decisions are made within the family. Consent practices are influenced by the level of education, extended family system, urbanization, religious practices, and health care financing options available. All limitations notwithstanding, consent discussions improved with increasing level of education of the patients, suggesting that improved physician's knowledge and increasing awareness and education of patients can override other influences.Nigerian medical schools should restructure their teaching of medical ethics to improve the knowledge and practices of physicians. More research is needed on the preferences of the Nigerian people regarding informed consent so as to adequately train physicians and positively influence physicians’ behaviors. (shrink)

Human societies are extraordinarily cooperative compared to those of most other animals. In the vast majority of species, individuals live solitary lives, meeting to only to mate and, sometimes, raise their young. In social species, cooperation is limited to relatives and (maybe) small groups of reciprocators. After a brief period of maternal support, individuals acquire virtually all of the food that they eat. There is little division of labor, no trade, and no large scale conflict. Communication is limited to a (...) small repertoire of self-verifying signals. No one cares for the sick, or feeds the hungry or disabled. The strong take from the weak without fear of sanctions by third parties. Amend Hobbes to account for nepotism, and his picture of the state of nature is not so far off for most other animals. In contrast, people in even the simplest human societies regularly cooperate with many unrelated individuals. Human language allows low-cost honest communication of virtually unlimited complexity. The sick are cared for, and sharing leads to substantial flows of food from the middle aged to the young and old. Division of labor and trade are prominent features of every historically known human society, and archaeology indicates that they have a long history. Violent conflict among sizable groups is common. In every human society, social life is regulated by commonly held moral systems that specify the rights and duties of individuals enforced, albeit imperfectly, by third party sanctions. (shrink)

This article challenges the claim that Friedrich Nietzsche is a good reader of the French moralist, Chamfort, when it comes to Chamfort's politics. Chamfort is a meritocrat rather than the bitter egalitarian Nietzsche protrays him to be. Moreover, the moralist's meritocratic beliefs, his hopes for a new social order and the emergence of a new aristocracy resemble many of Nietzsche's own values. Had Nietzsche read Chamfort as a meritocrat, he could have found much to stimulate and clarify his own thoughts (...) about the aristocracy of the future. (shrink)

Theories about the dawn of "principality of existence" or "principality of quiddity" stand in the realm of "confusion of term and concept fallacy". It is true that asalat as a term appeared for the first time in Mirdamad's works such as Taqwim al-Iman to mention the problem of principality of existence, but we should notice that its meaning as a concept can be tracked in Suhrawadi's works. If by the term asalat we mean having real extension, as it is used (...) in Mulla Sadra's work, we can, without any doubt, claim that Suhrawardi is among the proponents of principality of quiddity. Proposing the distinction of existence and quiddity by al-Faraby and Avicenna, some philosophers regarded this distinction as a real one. But Suhrawardi, by presenting about nine arguments, claimed that existence remains as a mental predicate and does not have any real extension. He made use of his theory in the realm of the Necessary Being through Itself. Avicenna had claimed that the essence of God is His Existence but Suhrawardi denied this Avicennan Peripatetic principle. He said that existence has no real extension and so the essence of God cannot be existence. He claimed that here iniyyah means indivisible life. It seems that Mulla Sadra's arguments for demonstrating the principality of existence posed versus Suhrawardi's arguments for the mental nature of existence. (shrink)

"In this article, I will try to examine this doctrine from a historical point of view; this examination is, somehow, different from the critical studies on this doctrine. This doctrine should be discussed as an epistemological topic. Hence, to recognize the notion of intelligence, a glance on the history of development of this term will largely help us.''After a historical discussion from the ancient times to the present time, the author says:"``After the advent of Islam and the conquests, made by (...) Muslims, the scientific heritage of the predecessors became available for Muslim thinkers, and the works of Greek philosophers were translated into Arabic. Among the translated works, those of Aristotle were of special importance, so that the good translators of these works were paid openhandedly. This, perhaps, caused some translators to translate the works of the other philosophers and attribute them to Aristotle, in order to take more money. Among the books, which probably were attributed in this way to Aristotle, was a book translated as ``Athologia''". This book is, in fact, the translation of some part of Plotinus' Enneads. This apparently insignificant mistake left a very great effect on the thoughts of Muslim philosophers. As a result of general acceptance of Aristotle the earlier philosophers on the one hand and attribution of this book to him on the other hand, Plotinus' ideas entered the Islamic philosophy under Aristotle's name, and caused the Peripatetic philosophy of Muslim philosophers to appear in the guise of Neo-Platonism. After Introducing Ibn Sina's perspective as well as that of Mulla Sadra on the doctrine of unity of the intellect and intelligible, I will note some 7 fundamental flaws in Mulla Sadra's doctrine.". (shrink)