Cet article est une comparaison de certaines affirmations ontologiques sur la nature de la matière première chez le platonicien de la Renaissance Marsilio Ficino et sur la nature de l’espace chez Frane Petrić, platonicien du XVIème siècle issu de la ville de Cres. J’y soutiens que les philosophies naturelles des deux platoniciens se ressemblent à deux égards, notamment en ce qui concerne le statut ontologique du substrat le plus fondamental du monde matériel. D’abord, Ficino comme Petrić soutiennent l’existence fondamentale de (...) la matière et de l’espace. Deuxièmement, les deux philosophes attribuent la « priorité ontologique » à la matière et à l’espace sur ce qui est considéré comme qualités éphémères du monde materiel. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Marsilio Ficino’s Critique of the Lucretian AlternativeJames G. SnyderIntroductionMarsilio Ficino is perhaps most widely remembered by historians of philosophy today as a fifteenth-century Platonist and Hermeticist who advocated the soul’s flight from the sordid world of matter and body. Ficino’s major contributions to philosophy include his Latin translations of Plato and Plotinus, as well as his voluminous and encyclopedic Platonic Theology, where he argues that the immortal soul occupies (...) a privileged midpoint between God and inchoate prime matter. It therefore comes as a surprise to learn that Ficino, for a time in his early twenties, was drawn to the Roman poet Lucretius, who believed that most people are plagued by the superstitions of religiously-minded fable mongers. During this time Ficino composed a short commentary on Lucretius’ didactic Epicurean poem, On the Nature of Things. In 1417 one of the last surviving manuscript copies of this poem was found in a German monastery by the humanist Poggio Bracciolini after several centuries of dormancy.1 Also, in an early treatise on pleasure, Ficino [End Page 165] argues that the Epicurean emphasis on pleasure as the removal of pain is superior to the crass and vulgar hedonism of Aristippus.2 In time, however, Ficino developed into the Platonist that historians of philosophy are more familiar with today. He turned his back on Lucretius, destroyed his commentary on him, and he became a rigid opponent of those philosophers who, as Plato describes them in his Sophist, “insist that only what offers tangible contact is, since they define being as the same as body.”3Despite the fact that Ficino ultimately rejected Lucretius, and in a letter to the poet Angelo Poliziano claimed to have “followed the divine Plato from my youth,” it appears that he was never able to successfully put the Epicurean poet completely out of his mind.4 The specter of Lucretius—that is, the specter of a potent and fully-articulated materialism and what it entails—casts a long shadow across the eighteen books of Ficino’s Platonic Theology. This work, which was printed in 1482 and remains his most extensive philosophical treatise, gives the impression that Ficino considered Lucretius a relevant and un-eliminated alternative to his own mature philosophical vision. The Lucretian alternative, as it will here be called, aspires to show that anything that exists is a composite of matter and void alone, and that there is no need to countenance the existence of some ghostly third constituent, such as soul, in order to explain adequately the phenomena of nature or consciousness.5 Ficino’s Platonic Theology argues for a profoundly different metaphysical picture of the nature of things. There Ficino wanted to demonstrate the essential immortality of the soul, and to further clarify the best way that it can, as he puts it, “cast off the bonds of our terrestrial chains” so that it may “fly unhindered to the ethereal abode.”6 However, in order for Ficino to accomplish this, he first had to show that the Lucretian alternative is not a living hypothesis, but a dead one. Refuting Lucretius, therefore, is central to the polemical aims and aspirations of this [End Page 166] work, and it is to this end that Ficino addresses several chapters to refuting the materialism of the “vulgar” and “impious” Epicurean poet and philosopher. The Lucretian alternative also explains in part why Ficino discusses, sometimes at great length, the nature of matter and body, especially in the early books of his Platonic Theology. The core argument that Ficino brings against the Lucretian alternative is that its materialist ontology is at best incomplete, and that something else—some ghostly incorporeal principle— is in fact necessary in order to adequately explain the nature of things.Both the Renaissance recovery of On the Nature of Things, and the subsequent role that it played in the advancement of early modern philosophy and science, are familiar to historians of philosophy today.7 Ficino’s fifteenth-century critique of Lucretius, however, is not. Nearly half a century ago Paul Oskar Kristeller noted that in the 1450s Ficino came under the influence of Lucretius, and he further speculated that “a trace... (shrink)

Although Leibniz characterised himself in the “New Essays” as a “Platonic” as opposed to a “Democritean” philosopher, his intellectual relationship with the most famous of the Renaissance Neoplatonists, Marsilio Ficino, has received little attention. Here we review what can be thus far established regarding Leibniz’s acquaintance with portions of Ficino’s Opera omnia of 1576. We compare Ficino’s disenchantment with the atomistic materialism of Lucretius, which he had favoured in his youth, and his turn to Platonism for inspiration, with Leibniz’s own (...) reported disenchantment with Gassendi’s Epicurean atomism and his invention of a vitalistic monadology that, despite Leibniz’s reservations regarding Ficinian magic, resembles Ficinian nature philosophy in number of striking respects. (shrink)

Accountability is of universal interest to the business ethics community, but the emphasis to date has been primarily at the level of the industry, organization, or key individuals. This paper unites concepts from relational and felt accountability and team dynamics to provide an initial explanatory framework that emphasizes the importance of social interactions to team accountability. We develop a measure of team accountability using participants in the USA and Europe and then use it to study a cohort of 65 teams (...) of Irish business students over three months as they complete a complex simulation. Our hypotheses test the origins of team accountability and its effects on subsequent team performance and attitudinal states. Results indicate that initial team accountability is strongly related to team trust, commitment, efficacy, and identifying with the team emotionally. In established teams, accountability increases effort and willingness to continue to collaborate but did not significantly improve task performance in this investigation. (shrink)

The Renaissance was a period of great intellectual change and innovation as philosophers rediscovered the philosophy of classical antiquity and passed it on to the modern age. Renaissance philosophy is distinct both from the medieval scholasticism, based on revelation and authority, and from philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who transformed it into new philosophical systems. Despite the importance of the Renaissance to the development of philosophy over time, it has remained largely understudied by historians of philosophy and professional (...) philosophers. This anthology aims to correct this by providing scholars and students of philosophy with representative translations of the most important philosophers of the Renaissance. Its purpose is to help readers appreciate philosophy in the Renaissance and its importance in the history of philosophy. The anthology includes translations from philosophers from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, and it ranges from works on moral and political philosophy, to metaphysics, epistemology, and natural philosophy, thereby providing historians and students of philosophy with a sense for the nature, breadth, and complexity of philosophy in the Renaissance. Each translation is accompanied by an introduction by a historian of Renaissance philosophy, as well as select secondary sources, in order to encourage further study. (shrink)

In this short essay, we sketch a theory of faith that features resilience in the face of challenges to relying on those in whom you have faith. We argue that it handles a variety of both religious and secular faith-data, e.g., the value of faith in relationships of mutual faith and faithfulness, how the Christian and Hebrew scriptures portray pístis and ʾĕmûnāh, and the character of faith as it is often expressed in popular secular venues.

Is evil evidence against the existence of God? Even if God and evil are compatible, it remains hotly contested whether evil renders belief in God unreasonable. The Evidential Argument from Evil presents five classic statements on this issue by eminent philosophers and theologians and places them in dialogue with eleven original essays reflecting new thinking by these and other scholars. The volume focuses on two versions of the argument. The first affirms that there is no reason for God to permit (...) either certain specific horrors or the variety and profusion of undeserved suffering. The second asserts that pleasure and pain, given their biological role, are better explained by hypotheses other than theism. -/- Contributors include William P. Alston, Paul Draper, Richard M. Gale, Daniel Howard-Snyder, Alvin Plantinga, William L. Rowe, Bruce Russell, Eleonore Stump, Richard G. Swinburne, Peter van Inwagen, and Stephen John Wykstra. (shrink)

According to many accounts of faith—where faith is thought of as something psychological, e.g., an attitude, state, or trait—one cannot have faith without belief of the relevant propositions. According to other accounts of faith, one can have faith without belief of the relevant propositions. Call the first sort of account doxasticism since it insists that faith requires belief; call the second nondoxasticism since it allows faith without belief. The New Testament may seem to favor doxasticism over nondoxasticism. For it may (...) seem that, according to the NT authors, one can have faith in God, as providential, or faith that Jesus is the Messiah, or be a person of Christian faith, and the like only if one believes the relevant propositions. In this essay, I propose to assess this tension, as it pertains to the Gospel of Mark. The upshot of my assessment is that, while it may well appear that, according to Mark, one can have faith only if one believes the relevant propositions, appearances are deceiving. Mark said no such thing. Rather, what Mark said—by way of story—about faith fits nondoxasticism at least as well as doxasticism, arguably better. More importantly, the account of faith that emerges from Mark is that faith consists in resilience in the face of challenges to living in light of the overall positive stance to the object of faith, where that stance consists in certain conative, cognitive, and behavioral-dispositional elements. (shrink)

Research has uncovered consistent gender differences in attitudes toward gay men, with women expressing less prejudice than men (Herek, 2003). Attitudes toward lesbians generally show a similar pattern, but to a weaker extent. The present work demonstrated that motivation to respond without prejudice importantly contributes to these divergent attitudes. Study 1 revealed that women evince higher internal motivation to respond without prejudice (IMS, Plant & Devine, 1998) than do men and that this difference partially mediates the relationship between gender and (...) attitudes toward gay men. The second study replicated this finding and demonstrated that IMS mediates the relationship between gender and attitudes toward lesbians. Study 2 further revealed that gender-role variables contribute to the observed gender differences in motivation to respond without prejudice. These findings provide new insights into the nature of sexual prejudice and for the first time point to possible antecedents of variation in motivation to respond without prejudice. (shrink)

The volume gathers a selection of nineteen contributions from an international conference on the seventeenth-century philosopher G. W. Leibniz held at Rice University in Houston, Texas. It focuses on the writings by the young Leibniz on a variety of subjects such as mathematics, physics, metaphysics, logic, theology and politics. It also contains a subsection with contributions on the much-debated question of the impact of Baruch de Spinoza's philosophy on Leibniz. The objective of the volume is partly to consider the early (...) texts as philosophical statements in their own right, partly to contribute to the understanding of the evolution and genesis of Leibniz's philosophy by tracing the tenets of his mature philosophy back to their origin. (shrink)

Judgment aggregation problems are language dependent in that they may be framed in different yet equivalent ways. We formalize this dependence via the notion of translation invariance, adopted from the philosophy of science, and we argue for the normative desirability of translation invariance. We characterize the class of translation invariant aggregation functions in the canonical judgment aggregation model, which requires collective judgments to be complete. Since there are reasonable translation invariant aggregation functions, our result can be viewed as a possibility (...) theorem. At the same time, we show that translation invariance does have certain normatively undesirable consequences (e.g. failure of anonymity). We present a way of circumventing them by moving to a more general model of judgment aggregation, one that allows for incomplete collective judgments. (shrink)

The Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (FCA), whose leaders govern well over half of the 80 million Anglicans worldwide, have put forward ‘a contemporary rule,’ called The Jerusalem Declaration, to guide the Anglican realignment movement. The FCA and its affiliates, e.g. the newly-formed Anglican Church in North America, require assent to the Declaration. To date, there has been little serious appraisal of the Declaration and the status accorded to it. I aim to correct that omission. Unlike ap-praisals in the social media, (...) however, mine grants the FCA’s conservative stand on same-sex unions and homosexual practice. Nevertheless, I argue, the Declaration mischaracterizes the traditional Christian teaching on marriage, binds Anglicans to falsehoods and dubieties in the Thirty-Nine Articles, and adds to the gospel. Two things follow. First, no one—especially no Anglican who identifies herself as con-servative, traditional, orthodox, evangelical, Anglo-catholic or simply concerned with the truth—should assent to the Jerusalem Declaration. Second, since the FCA and its affiliates know that these defects ex-ist in the Declaration, they should fess up to these shortcomings and retract the Declaration’s status as ‘a contemporary rule’ and they should stop requiring assent to it. Anything less constitutes intellectual dis-honesty of a most egregious sort. (shrink)

According to what I call the Traditional View, there is a fundamental semantic distinction between counting and measuring, which is reflected in two fundamentally different sorts of scales: discrete cardinality scales and dense measurement scales. Opposed to the Traditional View is a thesis known as the Universal Density of Measurement: there is no fundamental semantic distinction between counting and measuring, and all natural language scales are dense. This paper considers a new argument for the latter, based on a puzzle I (...) call the Fractional Cardinalities Puzzle: if answers to ‘how many’-questions always designate cardinalities, and if cardinalities are necessarily discrete, then how can e.g. ‘2.38’ be a correct answer to the question ‘How many ounces of water are in the beaker?’? If cardinality scales are dense, then the answer is obvious: ‘2.38’ designates a fractional cardinality, contra the Traditional View. However, I provide novel evidence showing that ‘many’ is not uniformly associated with the dimension of cardinality across contexts, and so ‘how many’-questions can ask about other kinds of measures, including e.g. volume. By combining independently motivated analyses of cardinal adjectives, measure phrases, complex fractions, and degrees, I develop a semantics intended to defend the Traditional View against purported counterexamples like this and others which have received a fair amount of recent philosophical attention. (shrink)

According to many accounts of faith—where faith is thought of as something psychological, e.g., an attitude, state, or trait—one cannot have faith without belief of the relevant propositions. According to other accounts of faith, one can have faith without belief of the relevant propositions. Call the first sort of account doxasticism since it insists that faith requires belief; call the second nondoxasticism since it allows faith without belief. The New Testament may seem to favor doxasticism over nondoxasticism. For it may (...) seem that, according to the NT authors, one can have faith in God, as providential, or faith that Jesus is the Messiah, or be a person of Christian faith, and the like only if one believes the relevant propositions. In this essay, I propose to assess this tension, as it pertains to the Gospel of Mark. The upshot of my assessment is that, while it may well appear that, according to Mark, one can have faith only if one believes the relevant propositions, appearances are deceiving. Mark said no such thing. Rather, what Mark said—by way of story—about faith fits nondoxasticism at least as well as doxasticism, arguably better. More importantly, the account of faith that emerges from Mark is that faith consists in resilience in the face of challenges to living in light of the overall positive stance to the object of faith, where that stance consists in certain conative, cognitive, and behavioral-dispositional elements. (shrink)

Aaron Snyder and Fred Dretske present an argument for the proposition that singular causal sequences, such as S caused b, need not be related to a general regularity, that an event of type S is always followed by an event of type b. Therefore, they assert that a claim of causal relation does not require a regular observation of effect following cause or cause preceeding effect. To reinforce their assertion, they present the following case: Box R contains a randomizing device; (...) once activated it proceeds, in a perfectly random manner, to one of its one hundred different terminal states. Each of the terminal states may be supposed to be equally probable so that the probability of the box ending in state number 17 is.01. One can think of the device as embodying certain quantum mechanical processes—e.g. the emission of an electron … toward a screen which has one hundred different areas suitably marked off as terminal sights. Attached to Box R is a loaded revolver which fires when the terminal state happens to be number 17. We take this device and place it next to a cat, point the revolver at the cat and activate the box. Things go badly for the cat; the improbable occurs and the cat is killed. The cat's master, if informed of our doings, would almost certainly insist that we had killed his cat… Though we designate our actions as the cause, and the cat's death as the result, there is no regular or uniform connection between actions of the first sort and results of the latter sort … We seem to have a situation which we are inclined to describe in a way which implies the presence of a causal connection between C and E and, yet, a situation in which it is clear that in identical circumstances something of type C will not even generally be followed by something of type E. (shrink)

Conservative educational critics (e.g., Allan Bloom, Mortimer Adler, and E. D. Hirsch, Jr.) have succeeded in flaming the debate on the reform of education in a manner that ignores the questions that should be asked about how our most fundamental cultural assumptions are contributing to the ecological crisis. In this paper, I examine the deep cultural assumptions embedded in their reform proposals that furtherexacerbate the crisis, giving special attention to their view of rational empowerment, the progressive nature of change, and (...) their anthropocentric view of the universe. I argue that their form of conservatism must be supplanted by the more biocentric conservatism of such thinkers as Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry, and Gary Snyder. (shrink)

In a series of recent papers, Jonathan Schaffer presents a novel framework for understanding grounding. Metaphysical laws play a central role. In addition, Schaffer argues that, contrary to what many have thought, there is no special 'explanatory gap' between consciousness and the physical world. Instead, explanatory gaps are everywhere. I draw out and criticize the methodology for metaphysics implicit in Schaffer's presentation. In addition, I argue that even if we accept Schaffer's picture, there remains a residual explanatory gap between consciousness (...) and the physical. The residual gap does most of the same philosophical work as the original. Schaffer has introduced a troublesome metaphysical methodology that fails to follow through on its biggest promise: to deflate the explanatory gap. (shrink)

Currently fashionable among critics of enlightenment thought is the charge that Kant's ethics fails to provide an adequate account of character and its formation in moral and political life. G. Felicitas Munzel challenges this reading of Kant's thought, claiming not only that Kant has a very rich notion of moral character, but also that it is a conception of systematic importance for his thought, linking the formal moral with the critical, aesthetic, anthropological, and biological aspects of his philosophy. The first (...) book to focus on character formation in Kant's moral philosophy, it builds on important recent work on Kant's aesthetics and anthropology, and brings these to bear on moral issues. Munzel traces Kant's multifaceted definition of character through the broad range of his writings, and then explores the structure of character, its actual exercise in the world, and its cultivation. An outstanding work of original textual analysis and interpretation, _Kant's Conception of Moral Character_ is a major contribution to Kant studies and moral philosophy in general. (shrink)

The 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and its 2010 Nagoya Protocol brought about a breakthrough in global policy making. They combined a concern for the environment with a commitment to resolving longstanding human injustices regarding access to, and use of biological resources. In particular, the traditional knowledge of indigenous communities was no longer going to be exploited without fair benefit sharing. Yet, for 25 years after the adoption of the CBD, there were no major benefit sharing agreements that led (...) to significant funding streams for indigenous communities. This changed with the signing of the Rooibos Benefit Sharing Agreement in South Africa, described in this paper. As the authors report, the Rooibos Agreement is a superlative in two respects. It is the biggest benefit sharing agreement between industry and indigenous peoples to date. It is also the first industry-wide agreement to be formed in accordance with biodiversity legislation. This article is a co-production between traditional knowledge holders, the lawyer who represented their interests, the Co-Chair of the Nagoya Protocol negotiations, and an ethicist who analyzed the major challenges of this historic agreement. With no precedent in the benefit sharing world, the agreement stands as a concrete example of the ‘art of the possible.’ Although the rooibos case is unique in a number of aspects, the experience offers many transferable insights, including: patience; incrementalism; honesty; trust; genuine dialogue; strong legal support; a shared recognition that a fair, win-win deal is possible; government leadership; and unity amongst indigenous peoples. Such ingredients of success can apply well beyond southern Africa. (shrink)

According to the ‘conceivability argument’ [1] it’s conceivable that a conscious human being H may have a perfect physical duplicate H* who isn’t conscious, [2] whatever is conceivable is possible, therefore [3] H* may possibly exist. This paper argues that the conceivability argument can’t help in discussion of the ‘mind–body problem’ even if [2] is allowed to be true. This is not because [1] is false, but because we don’t and can’t know enough about the nature of the physical to (...) know whether or not [1] is true. This follows from ‘the silence of physics’—the fact that physics neither does nor can tell us about the intrinsic non-structural nature of the physical, and the consequences of this fact for any adequate account of the meaning of the word ‘physical’. (shrink)

In his target paper, John Welwood tells us that we have to beware of 'spiritual bypassing -- using spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep personal, emotional -- unfinished business--, to shore up a shaky sense of self, or to belittle basic needs, feelings, and develop-mental tasks, all in the name of enlightenment'. It's arguable that there is an equal danger of 'narrative bypassing' -- using the idea of one's life as a narrative to 'sidestep personal, emotional --unfinished business--, to shore (...) up a shaky sense of self -- all in the name of' a good life. (shrink)

This paper explores how the "environmental turn" for the last 25 years has been shaping remembrance of the destruction of Europe's Jewish populations. I argue that climate change is not just one more catastrophe to pass into the broad analogical field of the Holocaust. In fact, international Holocaust consciousness and understandings of what we now call the Anthropocene have long been intertwined and mutually constitutive. The paper starts in the 1990s with acclaimed writers Anne Michaels and W.G. Sebald, who sought (...) to recast the Holocaust's significance to modernity against a long backdrop of geologic time. Their memorial fiction, which grounds the history of the Holocaust in the eroding landscapes of Europe, reflects a growing and urgent global concern for the vulnerability of the environment and a sense of man's responsibility for preserving human and biological life. The paper then moves through more contemporary examples of the sublimation of Holocaust memory in discourse about global warming—evident in terms like "climate change denial" and calls to "bear witness" to mass extinction events. For better or worse, journalists and scholars who write about environmental activism frequently call on memory of World War II and genocide in order to redefine what constitutes "grievable life." Example authors include historian Timothy Snyder, who has predicted that climate change may lead to new genocidal wars over Lebensraum ; scientist James Lovelock, who has urged nation states to consider how to limit the coming influx of climate refugees; theorist Bruno Latour, who has argued, via Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt, that we must "name our enemies" in the new climate wars; and essayist Ari Brostoff who has attempted to think climate catastrophe through Walter Benjamin's meditations on the angel of history. The implicit question in all of their work is this: What histories and philosophical traditions can help us redefine humanity's entangled relationship to nature in order to take political responsibility for saving life on Earth? In other words, the Anthropocene requires "a usable past"—but what will that usable past be? (shrink)

Originally published in 1965. This is a textbook of modern deductive logic, designed for beginners but leading further into the heart of the subject than most other books of the kind. The fields covered are the Propositional Calculus, the more elementary parts of the Predicate Calculus, and Syllogistic Logic treated from a modern point of view. In each of the systems discussed the main emphases are on Decision Procedures and Axiomatisation, and the material is presented with as much formal rigour (...) as is compatible with clarity of exposition. The techniques used are not only described but given a theoretical justification. Proofs of Consistency, Completeness and Independence are set out in detail. The fundamental characteristics of the various systems studies, and their relations to each other are established by meta-logical proofs, which are used freely in all sections of the book. Exercises are appended to most of the chapters, and answers are provided. (shrink)

This book challenges the common assumption that the predominant focus of the history of science should be the achievements of Western scientists since the so-called Scientific Revolution. The conceptual frameworks within which the members of earlier societies and of modern indigenous groups worked admittedly pose severe problems for our understanding. But rather than dismiss them on the grounds that they are incommensurable with our own and to that extent unintelligible, we should see them as offering opportunities for us to revise (...) many of our own preconceptions. We should accept that the realities to be accounted for are multi-dimensional and that all such accounts are to some extent value-laden. In the process insights from current anthropology and the study of ancient Greece and China especially are brought to bear to suggest how the remit of the history of science can be expanded to achieve a cross-cultural perspective on the problems. (shrink)

On the moderate view, an objecting pharmacist may refuse to fill a prescription, provided that the pharmacist then refers the client to a non-objecting pharmacist who will fill the prescription in a timely manner (see, e.g., Cantor and Baum, 2004, or Brock, 2008). This view seeks to balance the interests of the pharmacist and the interests of the client. The complicity objection holds that the moderate view fails to balance these interests, because the referral itself makes the objecting pharmacist complicit (...) in the act she sought to stop or at least avoid (see, e.g., Brock, 2008, Card, 2007, Charo, 2005, Nelson 2005, Snyder, 2010, Wicclair, 2006). Some claim that this objection shows that an objecting pharmacist should not be required to refer the client to another pharmacist. But what are the limits of the complicity objection? For example, does the complicity objection imply that an objecting pharmacist should also refuse to return the prescription to the client? I argue that the complicity objection has this implication. This does not mean that pharmacists should confiscate prescriptions. My goal is just to examine the moral reach of the complicity objection to the moderate position. What we should do, once we recognize the reach of this objection, is a separate question that I do not take up here. (shrink)