Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals ranges wide over the field of Western philosophical thought. Throughout the work, Murdoch proposes and enacts a form of philosophical inquiry that she believes supports a moral philosophy based on the idea of the good. One of her attempts, partly inspired by Paul Tillich and J. N. Findlay, centers on her critique and appropriation of the structure of the so-called “ontological argument” in Anselm’s Proslogion. This study assesses Murdoch’s accomplishment and the tenability (...) of the kind of Platonism she proposes against Anselm’s argument about the good in both the Monologion and the Proslogion. My claim is that Anselm’s conception of the good simply does not permit the kind of interpretation that Murdoch puts on the “ontological argument.”. (shrink)

First published in 1914, this volume by F. B. Jevons was designed as a response to the simple question: What is philosophy? Consisting of five separate lectures, the work throws light on the themes of philosophy and science, materialism and idealism, scepticism, practical philosophy, and the notion of the whole and its parts. The aim of the study was not simply to provide an answer to the question in the title, but to bring out the meaning of the question itself (...) and to demonstrate the inherent utilitarian significance of philosophy to everyone. As Jevons notes in the preface, 'Philosophy is a concern of the average man and of practical life, and should not be the monopoly of the professed student.'. (shrink)

Die Grieckischen Culten und Mythen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Orientalischen Religionen. Von O. Gruppe. Erster Band: Einleitung. Leipzig: Teubner. 1887. 14 Mk.

Plato, in one of his dialogues, says: “ The feeling of wonder is the genuine mark of the philosopher; for philosophy has its origin in wonder.” What Plato here says may be accepted as true: the philosopher does wonder. But the philosopher is not the only man who wonders about things. It might perhaps be going too far to say that all men experience the feeling, for some men seem to plod on their weary round without curiosity enough to wonder (...) at anything, whilst others, being comfortable, are satisfied to take things for granted, and never think of wondering at them. (shrink)

Although this work begins with Franz Brentano’s critique of both the Humean "content" theory of awareness and the Cartesian "idea" view of consciousness, it is not precisely an historical presentation of Brentano’s study of intentionality. It is more properly a philosophic study of the ontological and epistemological problems raised by Brentano’s work and modern efforts to solve them. Aquila thus attempts to analyze and evaluate Chisholm’s attack on Brentano’s view of "intentional relations"; he presents and criticizes Meinong’s, Bergmann’s, and Russell’s (...) theories regarding the proper objects of judgment; he examines the difference between the contents and objects of mental acts, contrasting Husserl’s early conception of this distinction with his later, more Fregean view; finally he referees the debate between Wilfrid Sellars and Chisholm on the nature of intentionality, concerning whether or not it is a real "characteristic" or "property" of an entity. (shrink)

Professor Lucas has written what is perhaps the most trenchant, sophisticated, and comprehensive treatise on time and space to have appeared in a long while. The book is distinguished not only by its acute treatment of the mathematical and physical concepts constituting its subject but also by a meditative quality all too rare in philosophical works dealing with the unquestionably fundamental and complex themes of time and space. The book is a phenomenology or morphology of time and space in that (...) it is a foundational analysis of the philosophical, mathematical, physical, logical, and theological aspects of our understanding of these concepts. The work is organized into five general sections each of which is internally refined with a keen sense of what is essential to the particular context of discussion. The first section investigates "Time by Itself" through reference to such notions as instant and interval, the topology and direction of time, cyclic time, permanence and omni-temporality, and the mathematical ideas of denseness and continuity. (shrink)

The distinguished Dutch cultural historian, Johan Huizinga, once observed that the 17th was the most complex and least understood of the modern European centuries. Professor Loemker, one of America’s foremost Leibniz scholars has written a learned and searching study in the intellectual history of the "baroque" century in an effort to illuminate the background of Leibniz’ synthesis of order of freedom, his system of universal harmony. The cacophonous period within which Leibniz philosophized presented an overriding geistige Aufgabe and the very (...) essence of his thought can be interpreted as a response to that task. The peculiar burden or problematic of his age required the defining of those ideals and conditions which could lead to the foundation of an adequate and more comprehensive form of order. It is the author’s conviction that the systematic thinkers of the time accomplished this "on the basis of an enlarged version of Neoplatonism, particularly the Christian Neoplatonism of St. Augustine, though they differed greatly on details.". (shrink)

Professor Vendler’s book is a notable recent addition to the Cornell Contemporary Philosophy Series, and it attempts to develop a more adequate, but still distinctly rationalistic, Cartesian perspective on ideas, thought, and speech by using the techniques of generative linguistics and of analytical philosophy. Initially, he elucidates the relationship between speech and thought by demonstrating that the former is an expression of the latter. He then distinguishes between the subjective and objective dimensions of thought by concentrating particularly on the concepts (...) of belief and knowledge. These analyses are followed by an acute inquiry into the learning and understanding of speech by reference to the native and acquired elements of knowledge. His investigations culminate in an explicit rejection of all forms of empiricism and behaviorism in philosophical psychology, most particularly the influential view propounded by Ryle in Concept of Mind. Furthermore, Professor Vendler’s study extends some insights of J. L. Austin, and he finds Wittgenstein’s understanding of language and speech to be incorrect because our knowledge of what a word means is "a function of, and is to be explained in terms of, understanding certain incomplete propositions.". (shrink)