This essay explores the treatment of the relation between nature (phusis) and norm or convention (nomos) in Democritus and in certain Platonic dialogues. In his physical theory Democritus draws a sharp contrast between the real nature of things and their representation via human conventions, but in his political and ethical theory he maintains that moral conventions are grounded in the reality of human nature. Plato builds on that insight in the account of the nature of morality in the myth in (...) the Protagoras. That provides material for a defense of morality against the attacks by Callicles in the Gorgias and Thrasymachus and Glaucon in the Republic, all of whom seek to use the nature-convention contrast to devalue morality. (shrink)

This volume, which is part of the Clarendon Aristotle Series, offers a clear and faithful new translation of Books II to IV of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, accompanied by an analytical commentary focusing on philosophical issues. In Books II to IV, Aristotle gives his account of virtue of character in general and of the principal virtues individually, topics of central interest both to his ethical theory and to modern ethical theorists. Consequently major themes of the commentary are connections on the one (...) hand with other relevant Aristotelian texts and on the other with modern writings, both text-related and thematic. -/- Since the main aim of the volume is to make Aristotle's thought as accessible as possible to readers who do not know Greek, considerable care is taken to elucidate both his technical vocabulary and significant features of his Greek idiom. C. C. W. Taylor also provides systematic comparisons with other translations into English and other languages, and frequent references to other commentaries, ancient, medieval, and modern. These features make the work useful to other scholars in the field as well as to students of philosophy, both undergraduate and graduate. -/- In view of the widespread contemporary interest in the topic of virtue, the volume should appeal to students of ethics (even those hitherto unacquainted with ancient thought) and to any reader who is concerned to see how fundamental questions of life and conduct were approached in a culture significantly different from our own. (shrink)

Lazare Carnot was the unique example in the history of science of someone who inadvertently owed the scientific recognition he eventually achieved to earlier political prominence. He and his son Sadi produced work that derived from their training as engineers and went largely unnoticed by physicists for a generation or more, even though their respective work introduced concepts that proved fundamental when taken up later by other hands. There was, moreover, a filial as well as substantive relation between the work (...) of father and son. Sadi applied to the functioning of heat engines the analysis that his father had developed in his study of the operation of ordinary machines. Specifically, Sadi's idea of a reversible process originated in the use his father made of geometric motions in the analysis of machines in general. (shrink)

Davidson poses the problem via three propositions p1-P3, Each persuasive but apparently inconsistent. His solution, That the three are consistent, Merely re-Phrases the problem. We should rather reject p2; if an agent judges that it would be better to do "x" than to do "y", Then he wants to do "x" more than he wants to do "y". Plato accepts p2 because he thinks all agents predominantly self-Interested, And hare because he thinks that evaluative judgments imply desires; both are criticized. (...) An alternative to p2, Consistent with p1 and p3, Makes a subtler connection between judgment, Desire and behaviour. (shrink)

A course of lectures delivered at Cambridge in the summer of 1953. They include pieces by Moore, Broad, and Ryle. Körner's "Some Types of Philosophical Thinking" and Ryle's "The Theory of Meaning" are especially stimulating; the book as a whole presents an absorbing picture of contemporary British philosophy.--A. C. P.

Volume 1 of the Routledge History of Philosophy covers one of the most remarkable periods in human thought. The essays present the fundamental approaches and thinkers of Greek philosophy in chronological order.

It is shown that the usual procedures of obtaining the macroscopic Maxwell equations from the microscopic Maxwell-Lorentz equations by performing averages contain an arbitrary choice of gauge. By a suitable different choice of the gauge the so-obtained Maxwell equations can be cast back to the form of the starting Maxwell-Lorentz equations. Therefore one cannot consider the Maxwell equations to be obtainable from the Maxwell-Lorentz equations by simply performing averages. The implication of this result is that besides the electromagnetic fields produced (...) by the moving electric charges, as given by the Maxwell-Lorentz equations, there may be some other agents that cannot be identified as some kind of motion of the electric charges and that participate in the production of the electromagnetic fields. (shrink)

It is shown that the Maxwell-Lorentz equations can be deduced from the law of Biot-Savart by simply performing some theoretical experimentations.