David Balme's major critical edition of Aristotle's largest and perhaps least studied treatise is based on a collation of the 26 known extant manuscripts and a study of the early Latin translations. Begun in 1975, with his work towards the Loeb editio minor of books VII–X, this edition of all ten books, including a very full apparatus criticus, was largely complete by 1989 when Professor Balme died, but it needed extensive work to put it in publishable form. (...) This work has been carried out by Allan Gotthelf, Balme's friend and associate. Volume I of the edition contains the complete text of the Historia Animalium, the critical apparatus, and Balme's introduction to the manuscripts, expanded and updated with the assistance of Friederike Berger, and in consultation with the editors of forthcoming editions of the extant medieval translations. A substantial index to the text has been provided by Liliane Bodson in collaboration with Professor Gotthelf. (shrink)

Buena parte del nervio metafísico radica en el esfuerzo, en ocasiones ímprobo, de remontarse al plano de lo quoad se (lo que es «en sí») sin dejarse eclipsar por la seductora inmediatez de lo quoad nos (lo que es «para nosotros», anclados en nuestra propia perspectiva), aun cuando, como en el caso del conocimiento, el objeto tematizado nos toque tan de cerca. De hecho, no se logra abordar satisfactoriamente la realidad del conocimiento en su taleidad, si se parte, en exclusiva, (...) de un primado indiscutible en la línea de lo receptivo, puesto que en tal caso sólo cabe entender el proprium del conocimiento como mero mecanismo «ordenador», entregado sin residuos a la tarea de interconectar y desmadejar una serie de impresiones o datos de conciencia que ya siempre aparecen en él en calidad de «huellas», presumiblemente procedentes desde un «afuera» nouménico que resulta ignoto por principio. Por esto mismo, desde el tomismo, el estudio del conocimiento humano no se puede realizar a espaldas de la íntegra y fundamental constitución metafísica de la persona humana, en cuanto acto de ser esencializado humanamente y singularizado por una materia signada, cuyo fundamento último descansa en la participación ontológica por la que Dios, Ser y Entender subsistente, da el ser a las creaturas. (shrink)

Nothing has so plagued twentieth-century philosophers of science as the demarcation problem—the effort to determine what constitutes science and marks it off from other human pursuits. We have come to the end of the century with, to say the least, no consensus among philosophers on this issue. This has led some, such as Larry Laudan, to announce the abandonment of the demarcation project, urging philosophers to turn their attention elsewhere. One wonders, however, whether all the options have been explored. In (...) particular, has the problem been sufficiently investigated in light of its historical origins? This question takes on some urgency, not only with the failure of modern philosophy of science to develop a viable definition of science, but also in light of recent developments in Aristotle studies. After all, Aristotle was the first philosopher to attempt a systematic account of the nature of science and the details of this account have been a major focus of the scholarship of the past two decades, especially in the work of such scholars as Pierre Pellegrin, James Lennox, and David Balme, to mention only a very few. (shrink)

Aristotle's biological writings, largely ignored by generations of philosophically oriented scholars, have been receiving an increasing amount of attention of late. This is a good thing, because this recent work has confirmed what David Balme's publications have been suggesting since 1961: that there is much to be learned about central concepts and issues in Aristotle's metaphysics and theory of science from a careful, philosophically sensitive study of this 25% of the surviving corpus.

David Young invites his readers on a journey of adventure and discovery; a journey for the mind, and an adventure in the realm of ideas. By retracing the steps of men who developed the theory of biological evolution, we see how scientists came to recognize the nature and importance of natural selection. The journey begins in the seventeenth century, when even the most accomplished naturalists knew next to nothing of biology as we understand it today. Steadily increasing knowledge and (...) the quickening pace of research began to uncover much new evidence, and in the middle of the century Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace incorporated this evidence in a comprehensive theory of evolution. In the twentieth century biology has become steadily more specialized, so the book picks out some of the main developments that bring us to studies of evolution being carried out today. (shrink)

In The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, Yoram Hazony suggests that it is part of Rabbinic tradition that in the Akedah, Abraham never intended to sacrifice Isaac. In a recent paper, Sam Lebens argued that in making this claim, Hazony is misrepresenting Rabbinic tradition. In this paper, I show that Hazony can concede to Lebens’s argument and still have something interesting to say about the Akedah, namely, that it provides an opportunity to reflect on what might happen when a ‘Shepherd’ is (...) commanded by God to violate what they understand to be a principle of natural law. (shrink)

An encounter with a large object may induce feelings of fear, awe, attraction, and more. But it is not simply the physical dimensions of an object that account for our sense that something is "big." Big Culture is a study of large objects and images that works to identify the qualities and effects of bigness. In doing so, David Wittenberg offers a philosophical proposal for reconceptualizing the problem of magnitude. The book explores examples of bigness that are simultaneously familiar (...) and singular in the cultural landscape, such as skyscrapers, atomic bomb explosions, and cinematic special effects. From these examples, Wittenberg postulates a new aesthetics of magnitude that is better able to account for the special role that bigness plays in our everyday perception of objects and images. Big Culture argues that bigness is a more primal, a more absolute, and even a more violent or erotic encounter with the objective world than the scalar relativism that tends to characterize our lives. Ultimately, Wittenberg insists that bigness comes before scale, even before size itself. (shrink)

John Locke's _Second Treatise of Government_ is perhaps the key founding liberal text. _A Letter Concerning Toleration_, written in 1685, is a classic defense of religious freedom. Yet many of Locke's other writings--not least the Constitutions of Carolina, which he helped draft--are almost defiantly anti-liberal in outlook. This comprehensive collection brings together the main published works with the most important surviving evidence from among Locke’s papers relating to his political philosophy. David Wootton's wide-ranging and scholarly Introduction sets the writings (...) in the context of their time, examines Locke's developing ideas and unorthodox Christianity, and analyzes his main arguments. The result is the first fully rounded picture of Locke’s political thought in his own words. (shrink)

What is politics? How is politics different from other spheres of human life? What is behind the debasement of political life today? This book argues that the most illuminating answers to these questions have come from Hannah Arendt. Arendt held that Western philosophy has never had a 'pure concept of the political', and that political philosophers have been guided and misguided by the assumptions implicit in their metaphysical questions. Her project was 'to look at politics … with eyes unclouded by (...) philosophy', and to retrieve the non-theoretical understanding of politics implicit in ancient Greek literature and history. David Arndt's original and accessible study shows how Arendt reworked some of the basic concepts of political philosophy, which in turn led her to a re-interpretation of American political history and even to a profoundly original reading of the US Declaration of Independence. (shrink)

Philosophers and historians of science have tended to denigrate the status and usefulness of the practice of natural history. The development of biology in this century is seen as the replacement of an older, descriptive and speculative method with a quantitative, experimental and well-founded science. This account embodies a philosophical view about the nature of science, which deems certain kinds of evidence and certain ways of producing knowledge appropriate. Natural history is seen as inadequate, providing insufficient support for establishing theory. (...) ;I develop a case study which shows this account to be incorrect. The case study concerns the debate over the role of geographical isolation in speciation between 1905 and 1907. After some preliminary historical background to the debate, I present a detailed discussion of the arguments made by naturalist David Starr Jordan . The debate that ensued centered on the kinds of evidence one should use in doing science--fieldwork versus experiments. Thus, this case study offers excellent subject matter for understanding natural history. ;After examining the debate and its participants in some detail, we can see that at the heart of this debate is an epistemological issue over what virtues are central to science. In particular, while natural historians like Jordan were advocating an approach which emphasized the consilience of inductions--and hence a variety of kinds of evidence--a more experimentally oriented group of biologists were advocating the centrality of replication and hence argued that all non-experimental forms of evidence should be abandoned. Contrary to expectations, the naturalists had the better theory. (shrink)

Two recent monographs re-examine the central elements of the just war tradition and its contemporary applications. David Rodin’s War and Self-Defense analyzes, and rejects, the common doctrine that just war is an instance of national self-defense, in parallel with the right of individuals to protect themselves against violent attack. This derivation fails, and it cannot justify resort to war. In contrast, Oliver O’Donovan’s The Just War Revisited dismisses the notion that there are rules for just war and calls instead (...) for careful and deliberate practical reasoning in particular contexts. Indeed, there can be no just wars, only specific acts that pass the tests of theological, historical, and practical scrutiny. (shrink)

In this article, David Shemin, who is now in retirement, describes how in 1944 he ingested 66 g of 15N‐labeled glycine in order to determine the half‐life of hemoglobin and other blood proteins. The ramifications of the experiment led to the unravelling of the biosynthesis of porphyrins and the role of glycine and α‐aminolevulinic acid in heme, vitamin B12 and chlorophyll synthesis.

In this book, Professor David Starrett organizes within a single framework the major theoretical foundations of modern public sector economics. He presents a unified treatment of market failure that encompasses externalities, pure public goods, local public goods and natural monopolies. Professor Starrett then develops and assesses the efficacy of the various planning procedures - including representative voting, benefit cost analysis, incentive compatible design mechanisms and the free market. He devotes attention to both national and local issues, with the aim (...) of identifying those methods that are best suited to each arena separately. Special attention is paid to financial arrangements, techniques for eliciting necessary information that is not readily available, and identification of biases that will result from incorrect procedures. This study will be useful to graduate students and economists who are interested in public finance or welfare economics. (shrink)

This paper opens by distinguishing between the multiple concepts of system and the philosophical idea of system. It then goes on to discuss the differences between systems and other proximate ideas, such as whole, set, aggregate and structure. Subsequently, it proposes a definition of system, and then lays out three classifications of systems. When elaborating a general definition of system, the main challenge is finding a general criterion with which to characterize both technical systems built by men, and scientific systems (...) independent of human subjects. The criterion proposed in the text solves this difficulty. Lastly, from the tenets of Gustavo Bueno’s hyperrealist philosophy of categorial closure, I put forward the consideration of the sciences as systems. (shrink)

© British Society of Aesthetics 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comBefore even opening the pages of Bart Vandenabeele’s The Sublime in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy, it is an encouraging sight to behold. For, there are surprisingly few single-author monographs focused solely on Schopenhauer’s aesthetic philosophy, at least in the Anglophone literature—much less on Schopenhauer’s theory of the sublime in particular, as is rightfully boasted in the blurb (...) to Vandenabeele’s book. The paucity of such books is all the more surprising given, first, that Schopenhauer is often noted as having continuously exerted an influence upon artists and writers from the time of his own life up to the present day; and second, and more relevantly to Vandenabeele’s book, that few philosophers have held aesthetic experience, of nature as well as art, in any higher regard... (shrink)

MUCH RECENT SCHOLARSHIP HAS CALLED FOR THE INTEGRATION OF NATural law theory with biblical revelation, yet few writers have pursued such a project in detail. This essay presents the foundations of a constructive account of natural law grounded in an overlooked biblical text and in Reformed covenant theology, in conversation with contemporary biblical exegesis and recent Protestant and Roman Catholic literature on natural law. It explores the character of the Noahic covenant established with all creation (Gen. 8:20—9:17) and argues that (...) this covenant provides necessary theological foundation for understanding nature and common human moral obligations. This account of natural law provides a sound way to integrate natural law theory with the biblical narrative and to conceive of natural law as a universal God-given standard mediated through a fallen world. (shrink)

Aristotle argues that friendship is characterized by recognized, reciprocal goodwill. Friends are concerned about each other; ideally, they want the best for each other. As long as dialogue is possible, community exists, and friendship and goodwill are possible. Dialogue is a central, distinctive feature of Hans‐Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. It is rare in nineteenth‐century hermeneutics and it is all but absent in Martin Heidegger's philosophizing. Gadamer famously argues that dialogue can occur with texts and works of art, even though there (...) is a clear difference between these dialogues and dialogues with other people. In community, we share our interpretations in dialogue, moving us ever beyond our limited, individual understanding of God and creation and becoming ever more aligned with the Infinite. The true church is the community of freely associating believers working together in dialogue to come to an intuition of the Infinite. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 93 Heft: 2 Seiten: 603-609.

In this paper I propose to answer the age-old reductio against vegetarianism, which is usually presented in the form of a sarcastic question. Addressing the question takes on special significance in the light of arguments which seem to show that even nonsentient life is intrinsically valuable. Thus, I suggest that we rephrase the question in the following manner: When beings evolve into societies of moral agents are they entitled merely to assume that they retain their license to destroy other life (...) in order to sustain their own? I answer in the negative. I argue that such societies must continually earn that right by engaging in activity that makes up for and augments the values that they destroy. Unlike other biological beings, humans have complete control over what they eat, whether they eat, and whether they reproduce. Hence, the appeals to necessity that are ubiquitous in justifications of both vegetarian and non-vegetarian diets are inauthentic and must be accordingly forsaken. We will have to appeal instead to the value of particular human activities that are fueled by our consumption of other lives. (shrink)

A sequel to Weissman's Intuition and ideality (1987).

Professor Whitehead has provided a new translation of the five surviving forensic speeches of the Athenian lawyer-politician Hypereides. Hypereides' importance lies not only in his speeches, but also in his centrality in the political life of ancient Athens, as a contemporary of Demosthenes, and one of the canonical Ten Attic Orators. This book, which includes a general introduction and lavish historical and literary commentary, represents the first complete collection of Hypereides' works in any language.

Teachers White and Thompson allowed students to explore the primary-source readings from several philosophers in a 5th grade course called Apogee. The essay is written with a focus on Patience and other virtues.