Aristotle's "Parva Naturalia" culminates in definitions of the stages of the life cycle, from the generation of a new living thing up to death. This book provides a detailed reading of the end of the "Parva Naturalia" and shows how it completes the investigation into life begun in the "De Anima".

The authors discuss some of the conceptual issues that must be considered in using and understanding psychiatric classification. DSM-IV is a practical and common sense nosology of psychiatric disorders that is intended to improve communication in clinical practice and in research studies. DSM-IV has no philosophic pretensions but does raise many philosphical questions. This paper describes the development of DSM-IV and the way in which it addresses a number of philosophic issues: nominalism vs. realism, epistemology in science, the mind/body dichotomy, (...) the definition of mental disorders, and dimensional vs. categorical classification. (shrink)

"The studies collected in this book are all concerned with aspects of the Platonic tradition, either in its own internal development in the Hellenistic age and the period of the Roman Empire, or with the influence of Platonism, in one or other of its forms, on other spiritual traditions, especially that of Christianity." [Book jacket].

A. H. Louie's More Than Life Itself is an exploratory journey in relational biology, a study of life in terms of the organization of entailment relations in living systems. This book represents a synergy of the mathematical theories of categories, lattices, and modelling, and the result is a synthetic biology that provides a characterization of life. Biology extends physics. Life is not a specialization of mechanism, but an expansive generalization of it. Organisms and machines share some common features, but organisms (...) are not machines. Life is defined by a relational closure that places it beyond the reach of physicochemical and mechanistic dogma, outside the reductionistic universe, and into the realm of impredicativity. Function dictates structure. Complexity brings forth living beings. (shrink)

Edited with New Translation by Richard McKirahan With a New Preface by Malcolm Schofield This book is a revised and expanded version of A.H. Coxon's full critical edition of the extant remains of Parmenides of Elea—the fifth-century B.C. philosopher by many considered "one of the greatest and most astonishing thinkers of all times." Coxon's presentation of the complete ancient evidence for Parmenides and his comprehensive examination of the fragments, unsurpassed to this day, have proven invaluable to our understanding of the (...) Eleatic since the book's first publication in 1986. This edition, edited by Richard McKirahan and with a new preface by Malcolm Schofield, is released on the 100th anniversary of Coxon's birth. This new edition for the first time includes English translations of the testimonia and of any Ancient Greek throughout the book, as well as an English/Greek glossary by Richard McKirahan, and revisions by the late author himself. The text consists of Coxon's collations of the relevant folios of manuscripts of Sextus Empiricus, Proclus and Simplicius and includes all extant fragments, a commentary, the testimonia, a complete list of sources, linguistic parallels from both earlier and later authors, and the fullest critical apparatus that has appeared since Diels’ _Poetarum Philosophorum Fragmenta _. The collection of testimonia includes the philosophical discussions of Parmenides by Plato, Aristotle and the Neoplatonists, most of which had been omitted by Diels. The introduction discusses the history of the text, the language and form of the poem, Parmenides’ use and understanding of the verb ‘to be’, his place in the history of earlier and later philosophy and the biographical tradition. In the commentary Coxon deals in detail with both the language and the subject matter of the poem and pays full attention to Parmenides’ account of the physical world. The appendix relates later Eleatic arguments to those of Parmenides. (shrink)

For the first time in print, well-known spiritual teacher A.H. Almaas presents the highest level and most profound teachings of the Diamond Approach on the true nature of reality and the path to enlightenment. For more than thirty years, A.H. Almaas has been developing and teaching the Diamond Approach, a spiritual path of self-realization and maturity based on an original synthesis of modern discoveries in the field of psychology and a new paradigm about spiritual nature. If we can say the (...) Diamond Approach has a goal it is to realize the truth at progressively deeper levels until one reaches the ultimate Truth, the Absolute, and to become integrated into that truth so that we are a living presence and embodiment of that truth. The teachings of this path have been unfolding over time, and Runaway Realization presents--for the first time in print--the highest level of teachings in the Diamond Approach in the most profound work by Almaas so far. In this book, Almaas offers a detailed look at the true nature of reality and the nature of enlightenment. He also talks about practice--what it is and what it isn't, and how practice relates to the process of realization. He looks at what it is to be a human being and what our role is in the totality of the universe. The material includes a discussion of the nature of space and time, as well as a view of more and more subtle levels of realization. (shrink)

The phenomenological calculus is a relational paradigm for complex systems, closely related in substance and spirit to Robert Rosen’s own approach. Its mathematical language is multilinear algebra. The epistemological exploration continues in this paper, with the expansion of the phenomenological calculus into the realm of anisotropy.

The democratic principle in its extreme form is the assertation that the mere fact of free birth is alone sufficient to constitute a claim to all offices. It is never the claim of a majority to rule, but it is the demand that every one, whether rich or poor, high- or low-born, shall be equally represented in the constitution. This is what Aristotle calls the principle of numerical equality.-from "Chapter VI: Democracy"One of the most renowned classical scholars of the turn (...) of the 20th century here offers a lucid and highly readable overview of a difficult and little understood aspect of Greek history: its public law, not just how it was structured but how it behaved in action. This 1896 book-perfect for university students, amateur historians, and readers of the history of the law-covers the full range of Greek legal development, from the origin of the city-state and the beginnings of the Greek monarchy to the social and political institutions of the far-flung Greek civilization to the rise of federalism and its long-term historical impact on the cultures that came after.British classical scholar A.H.J. GREENIDGE was a lecturer in ancient history at Brasenose College, Oxford. He is also the author of Roman Public and Private Law (1894), Legal Procedure in Cicero's Time (1901), and Roman Public Life (1901), among many other works of ancient history. (shrink)

On the basis of previous studies in relational biology and the phenomenological calculus, in my contribution I outline the mathematical foundations of biological perception generally, and visual perception specifically. In this approach, the premise is that objects in nature are not directly accessible, and that real manifestations are projections of these invariant objects. The morphology of observables is mathematically entailed by the duality of projections and projectors in a bilinear algebra that is the phenomenological calculus. The relationships between what is (...) not directly accessible (which can be defined as noumena) and phenomena may be explicated in terms of metabolism and repair, whence a geometric theory of the perceived, the visible in particular, may be formulated in the category-theoretic language of relational biology. (shrink)

I explicate the crucial role played by efficient cause in Robert Rosen’s characterization of life, by elaborating on the topic of Aristotelian causality, and exploring the many alternate descriptions of causal and inferential entailments. In particular, I discuss the concepts of functional entailment and immanent causation, and examine how they fit into Robert Rosen’s relational-biology universe of living, anticipatory, and complex systems.