I wish, in this article to take the opportunity to present some of the preliminary results of my preparatory investigations towards a first edition of Richard FitzRalph's Commentary on the Sentences. FitzRalph later became famous (or infamous) because of his criticism of the incursions of the religious orders into what he regarded as the proper preserve of the secular clergy. Much of the attention of scholars has concentrated upon the figure of Armachanus contra omnes, and little has (...) been devoted to his university career. The work of G. Leff was rather negative regarding his originality as a lecturer; he depicted our 'Ybernicus' as a traditionalist, as someone who ignored or was unaware of new ideas. In fact, the truth is rather different: FitzRalph was an extremely successful and influential lecturer. A close reading of his Commentary on the Sentences shows him not only to be one most representative of the Oxford tradition of the late 1320s but also to be one of its foremost protagonists. For this reason, my concern here will be with his earlier 'scholastic' work and, in particular, with the philosophical themes which he developed in the course of the surviving records of his teaching as a lecturer in Oxford. (shrink)

Cet article propose une édition critique des questions 7-9 de la Lectura sur les Sentences (Oxford, 1332-1333) de Thomas Bradwardine, où sont abordés la grâce et le mérite avant la publication de son monumental De causa Dei en 1344. La plus longue des trois, la question 7, a également été attribuée à Richard FitzRalph. Après avoir examiné les arguments en faveur de l’attribution à Bradwardine, l’article démontre comment le futur archevêque de Cantorbéry commençait seulement à réagir aux tendances (...) pélagiennes dont il avait été témoin l’année précédente. (shrink)

Medieval discussions on rights. Bonaventure -- Godfrey of Fontaines -- Peter John Olivi -- Hervaeus Natalis -- William Ockham -- Richard Fitzralph -- Jean Gerson -- Antoninus of Florence -- The right of the individual. Right as power -- Right as dominion -- Right as a relation -- The species of dominion. The six-fold dominion -- Natural dominion -- Property rights. Justification of private property -- The rights of use (usus) and usufruct (usufructus) -- Ownership (proprietas) and possession (...) (possessio). (shrink)

This paper presents an original interpretation of the fourteenth-century debate over whether every volitio is a cognitio. This debate, I argue, was at its heart a debate about what constitutes the mark of occurrent mental states. Three participants in this debate – Adam Wodeham, Richard FitzRalph, and John of Ripa – articulated three distinct accounts of the mark of the mental. In doing so, they also developed several philosophical accounts of the intentionality of occurrent affective states.

Posner characterizes the current preoccupation with moral and constitutional theory as an evasion of the real need of American law, which is for a greater understanding of the social, economic, and political facts out of which great legal controversies arise, and advocates a rebuilding of the law on the basis of systematic empirical inquiry.

Early in the first volume of his Ideen zu einer reinen Phiinomeno logie und phiinomenologischen Philosophie, Edmund Husserl stated concisely the significance and scope of the problem with which this present study is concerned. When we reflect on how it is that consciousness, which is itself absolute in relation to the world, can yet take on the character of transcendence, how it can become mundanized, We see straightaway that it can do that only by means of a certain participation in (...) transcendence in the first, originary sense, which is manifestly the transcendence of material Nature. Only by means of the experiential relation to the animate organism does consciousness become really human and animal (tierischen), and only thereby does it achieve a place in the space and in the time of Nature. l Consciousness can become "worldly" only by being embodied within the world as part of it. In so far as the world is material Nature, consciousness must partake of the transcendence of material Nature. That is to say, its transcendence is manifestly an embodiment in a material, corporeal body. Consciousness, thus, takes on the characteristic of being "here and now" (ecceity) by means of experiential (or, more accurately, its intentive) relation to that corporeal being which embodies it. Accordingly, that there is a world for consciousness is a conse quence in the first instance of its embodiment by 2 that corporeal body which is for it its own animate organism. (shrink)

RICHARD RORTY has written one of the most important and challenging books to be published by an American philosopher in the past few decades. Some will find it a deeply disturbing book while others will find it liberating and exhilarating—both, as we shall see, may be right and wrong. Not since James and Dewey have we had such a devastating critique of professional philosophy. But unlike James and Dewey, who thought that once the sterility and artificiality of professional—and indeed (...) much of modern philosophy since Descartes—had been exposed, there was an important job for philosophers to do; Rorty leaves us in a much more ambiguous and unsettled state. I will examine Rorty’s book from a variety of perspectives, beginning with a general overview and then moving to more finely meshed descriptions. My aim is not only to illuminate the power and subtlety of Rorty’s analysis and to show its inner unity, but to locate basic issues that are left unresolved. (shrink)

Richard Cross provides the first full study of Duns Scotus's theory of cognition, examining his account of the processes involved in cognition, from sensation, through intuition and abstraction, to conceptual thought. Cross places Scotus's thought clearly within the context of 13th-century study on the mind, and of his intellectual forebears.

Richard B. Miller aims to stimulate new work in religious ethics through discussions of ethnography, ethnocentrism, relativism, and moral criticism; the ethics of empathy; the meaning of moral responsibility in relation to children and friends; civic virtue, loyalty, war, and alterity; the normative and psychological dimensions of memory; and religion and democratic life.

The universal acceptance of atomism in physics and chemistry in the early 20th century went along with an altered view on the epistemic status of microphysical conjectures. Contrary to the prevalent understanding during the 19th century, on the new view unobservable objects could be ‘discovered’. It is argued in the present paper that this shift can be connected to the implicit integration of elements of meta-empirical theory assessment into the concept of theory confirmation.

This paper highlights the significance of sensory studies and psychophysical investigations of the relations between psychic and physical phenomena for our understanding of the development of the physics discipline, by examining aspects of research on sense perception, physiology, esthetics, and psychology in the work of Gustav Theodor Fechner, Hermann von Helmholtz, Wilhelm Wundt, and Ernst Mach between 1860 and 1871. It complements previous approaches oriented around research on vision, Fechner’s psychophysics, or the founding of experimental psychology, by charting Mach’s engagement (...) with psychophysical experiments in particular. Examining Mach’s study of the senses and esthetics, his changing attitudes toward the mechanical worldview and atomism, and his articulation of comparative understandings of sensual, geometrical, and physical spaces helps set Mach’s emerging epistemological views in the context of his teaching and research. Mach complemented an analytic strategy focused on parallel psychic and physical dimensions of sensation, with a synthetic comparative approach – building analogies between the retina, the individual, and social life, and moving between abstract and sensual spaces. An examination of the broadly based critique that Mach articulated in his 1871 lecture on the conservation of work shows how his historical approach helped Mach cast what he now saw as a narrowly limiting emphasis on mechanics as a phase yet to be overcome. (shrink)

Whereas his contemporaries were explicitly aware that the limits of memory called for scrupulous arrangement of one?s papers, Boyle?s papers remained chaotic throughout his life, necessitating a habitual recourse to memory. This invites consideration of Boyle?s views on the use of memory and notes, taking account of the precepts and options of his day. Like many other early modern virtuosi, Boyle made copious notes comprising both textual extracts and empirical information, but he did not maintain large commonplace books of the (...) kind recommended by Renaissance humanists; nor did he publicize an account of his note?taking methods, as John Locke did. However, through his early contacts with Samuel Hartlib, Boyle was exposed to the ways in which diverse information could be noted, stored and used. Furthermore, his practice exemplified the well?known dual function of notes as both prompting memory and relieving it. Boyle did not pause to write a sustained essay on these issues; nevertheless, scattered throughout his prefaces, advertisements, works, notebooks and manuscripts there are significant comments on his practice of making what he called ?loose notes?. Boyle was aware of the kinds of notes he kept and his reliance on both memory and notes as prompts to reflection and thought. (shrink)

Many of the errors that occur in children' subtraction are due to the use of incorrect strategies rather than to the incorrect recall of number facts. A production system is presented for performing written subtraction which is consistent with an earlier analysis of the nature of such a cognitive skill. Most of the incorrect strategies used by schoolchildren can be accounted for in a principled way by simple changes in the production system, such as the omission of individual rules or (...) the inclusion of rules appropriate to other arithmetical tasks. The production system model is evaluated against a corpus of over 1500 subtraction problems done by 10‐year olds and is shown to account for about two‐thirds of the (nonnumber fact) errors. It also provides an alternative, simpler interpretation of the subtraction errors analysed by Brown and Burton (1978). Some implications for teaching are discussed. (shrink)

..............................................................................................101 I. The Idea of a Noncombatant ........................................................104 II. The Moral Shield Protecting Noncombatants.............................106 A. Accommodation.......................................................................107 B. Guilty Past ...............................................................................107 C. Guilty Bystander Trying to Inflict Harm .................................109 D. Guilty Bystander Disposed to Inflict Harm .............................109 E. Guilty Bystander Exulting in Anticipated Evil ........................109 F. Fault Forfeits First Doctrine in Just Warfare ...........................110 III. Noncombatants as Wrongful Trespassers ...................................110 IV. The Noncombatant Status of Captured Soldiers ........................111 V. Guerrilla Combat ..........................................................................116 VI. Morally Innocent Unjust Combatants.........................................118 VII. Should Rights Reflect What (...) We Can Know? ............................121 VIII. Absolute and Moderate Construction of the Revised Right.. (shrink)

In the transition to Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity (SR), certain concepts that had previously been thought to be univocal or absolute properties of systems turn out not to be. For instance, mass bifurcates into (i) the relativistically invariant proper mass m0, and (ii) the mass relative to an inertial frame in which it is moving at a speed v = βc, its relative mass m, whose quantity is a factor γ = (1 – β2) -1/2 times the proper mass, (...) m = γm0. (shrink)

This volume contains more than twenty essays in the history of modern philosophy and history of religion by R.H. Popkin.

One of the most distinguished cultural and intellectual historians of our time, Frank Turner taught a landmark Yale University lecture course on European intellectual history that drew scores of students over many years. His lectures—lucid, accessible, beautifully written, and delivered with a notable lack of jargon—distilled modern European history from the Enlightenment to the dawn of the twentieth century and conveyed the turbulence of a rapidly changing era in European history through its ideas and leading figures. Richard A. Lofthouse, (...) one of Turner’s former students, has now edited the lectures into a single volume that outlines the thoughts of a great historian on the forging of modern European ideas. Moreover, it offers a fine example of how intellectual history should be taught: rooted firmly in historical and biographical evidence. (shrink)

Music is fundamental to human existence, a cultural universal among all humans for all times. It is embedded in our evolution, encoded in our DNA, which is to say, essential to our survival. Academics in a variety of disciplines have considered this idea to devise explanations that Richard Manning, a lifelong journalist, finds hollow, arcane, incomplete, ivory-towered, and just plain wrong. He approaches the question from a wholly different angle, using his own guitar and banjo as instruments of discovery. (...) In the process, he finds himself dancing in celebration of music rough and rowdy. American roots music is not a product of an elite leisure class, as some academics contend, but of explosive creativity among slaves, hillbillies, fieldhands, drunks, slackers, and hucksters. Yet these people-poor, working people-built the foundations of jazz, gospel, blues, bluegrass, rock 'n' roll, and country music, an unparalleled burst of invention. This is the counterfactual to the academics' story. This is what tells us music is essential, but by pulling this thread, Manning takes us down a long, strange path, following music to deeper understandings of racism, slavery, inequality, meditation, addiction, the science of our brains, and ultimately to an enticing glimpse of pure religion. Use this book to follow where his guitar leads. Ultimately it sings the American body, electric. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 1-2, Page 189-199, June 2022.

Much of the debate around requirements for the free, prior, and informed consent of indigenous peoples has focused on enabling indigenous communities to participate in various forms of democratic decision-making alongside the state and other actors. Against this backdrop, this article sets out to defend three claims. The first two of these claims are conceptual in nature: (i) Giving (collective) consent and participating in the making of (collective) decisions are distinct activities; (ii) Despite some scepticism, there is a coherent conception (...) of collective consent available to us, continuous with the notion of individual consent familiar from discussions in medical and sexual ethics. The third claim is normative: (iii) Participants in debates about free, prior, and informed consent must keep this distinction in view. That is because a group’s ability to give or withhold consent, and not only participate in making decisions, will play an important role in realising that collectives’ right to self-determination. (shrink)

What does it mean for ethics to say, as Wittgenstein did, that philosophy “leaves everything as it is”? -/- Though clearly absorbed with ethical questions throughout his life and work, Wittgenstein's remarks about the subject do not easily lend themselves to summation or theorizing. Although many moral philosophers cite the influence or inspiration of Wittgenstein, there is little agreement about precisely what it means to do ethics in the light of Wittgenstein. -/- Ethics after Wittgenstein brings together an international cohort (...) of leading scholars in the field to address this problem. The chapters advance a conception of philosophical ethics characterized by an attention to detail, meaning and importance which itself makes ethical demands on its practitioners. Working in conversation with literature and film, engaging deeply with anthropology and critical theory, and addressing contemporary problems from racialized sexual violence against women to the Islamic State, these contributors reclaim Wittgenstein's legacy as an indispensable resource for contemporary ethics. (shrink)

Volume 23, Issue 3, September 2020, Page 302-313.

Richard Popkin has assembled 63 leading scholars to forge a highly approachable chronological account of the development of Western philosophical traditions. From Plato to Wittgenstein and from Aquinas to Heidegger, this volume provides lively, in-depth, and up-to-date historical analysis of all the key figures, schools, and movements of Western philosophy. The Columbia History significantly broadens the scope of Western philosophy to reveal the influence of Middle Eastern and Asian thought, the vital contributions of Jewish and Islamic philosophers, and the (...) role of women within the tradition. Along with a wealth of new scholarship, recently discovered works in 17th- and 18th-century philosophy are considered, such as previously unpublished works by Locke that inspire a new assessment of the evolution of his ideas. Popkin also emphasizes schools and developments that have traditionally been overlooked. Sections on Aristotle and Plato are followed by a detailed presentation on Hellenic philosophy and its influence on the modern developments of materialism and scepticism. A chapter has been dedicated to Jewish and Moslem philosophical development during the Middle Ages, focusing on the critical role of figures such as Averroës and Moses Maimonides in introducing Christian thinkers to classical philosophy. Another chapter considers Renaissance philosophy and its seminal influence on the development of modern humanism and science. Turning to the modern era, contributors consider the importance of the Kaballah to Spinoza, Leibniz, and Newton and the influence of popular philosophers like Moses Mendelssohn upon the work of Kant. This volume gives equal attention to both sides of the current rift in philosophy between continental and analytic schools, charting the development of each right up to the end of the 20th century. Each chapter includes an introductory essay, and Popkin provides notes that draw connections among the separate articles. The rich bibliographic information and the indexes of names and terms make the volume a valuable resource. Combining a broad scope and penetrating analysis with a keen sense of what is relevant for the modern reader, _The Columbia History of Western Philosophy_ will prove an accessible introduction for students and an informative overview for general readers. (shrink)