this paper was written to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Bounds of Sense by Peter Strawson, in 1966. My own engagement with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason began a few months later, with a course in the spring semester of 1967 taught by Robert Nozick. The Critique had not been regularly taught at Harvard since the retirement of C. I. Lewis a dozen years before, and Nozick, then a twenty-eight-year-old assistant professor, started the course disarmingly (...) by telling us that he was offering the course because he had never read the Critique before and thought that teaching it would be a good way to learn it. Whether he was putting us on, I will never know, but it was... (shrink)

Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness. BY PAUL GUYER. (Cambridge UP, 2000. Pp. xii + 440. Price £12.95 or $19.95.) At the beginning of his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant claims that an ordinary view of morality would have it that moral experience is essentially the experience of obligation. There are clearly occasions, he notes, when our own and others’ interests would be greatly damaged were we to do what is morally required, and when no gain in (...) satisfaction, happiness, well-being or flourishing can be imagined a consequence of the act, yet we understand that we are obliged anyway, unconditionally. We also reserve our highest approval for agents who do what is required just because it is required, who act ‘from duty alone’. (shrink)

This important collection of more than twenty original essays by prominent Kant scholars covers the multiple aspects of Kant’s teaching in relation to his published works. With the Academy edition’s continuing publication of Kant’s lectures, the role of his lecturing activity has been drawing more and more deserved attention. Several of Kant’s lectures on metaphysics, logic, ethics, anthropology, theology, and pedagogy have been translated into English, and important studies have appeared in many languages. But why study the lectures? When they (...) are read in light of Kant’s published writings, the lectures offer a new perspective of Kant’s philosophical development, clarify points in the published texts, consider topics there unexamined, and depict the intellectual background in richer detail. And the lectures are often more accessible to readers than the published works. This book discusses all areas of Kant's lecturing activity. Some essays even analyze in detail the content of Kant's courses and the role of textbooks written by key authors such as Baumgarten, helping us understand Kant’s thought in its intellectual and historical contexts. Contributors: Huaping Lu-Adler; Henny Blomme ; Robert Clewis; Alix Cohen; Corey Dyck; Faustino Fabbianelli; Norbert Fischer; Courtney Fugate; Paul Guyer; Robert Louden; Antonio Moretto; Steve Naragon; Christian Onof; Stephen Palmquist; Riccardo Pozzo; Frederick Rauscher; Dennis Schulting; Oliver Sensen; Susan Shell; Werner Stark; John Zammito; Günter Zöller. (shrink)

The prevailing interpretation of Kant’s _First Critique _in Anglo-American philosophy views his theory of a priori knowledge as basically a theory about the possibility of empirical knowledge, or the a priori conditions for that possibility. Instead, Robert Greenberg argues that Kant is more fundamentally concerned with the possibility of a priori knowledge—the very possibility of the possibility of empirical knowledge in the first place. Greenberg advances four central theses: the _Critique_ is primarily concerned about the possibility, or relation to (...) objects, of a priori_,_ not empirical knowledge, and Kant’s theory of that possibility is defensible; Kant’s transcendental ontology must be distinct from the conditions of the possibility of a priori knowledge; the functions of judgment, in Kant’s discussion of the Table of Judgments, should be seen according to his transcendental logic as having content, not as being just logical forms of judgment making; Kant’s distinction between and connection of ordering relations and reference relations have to be kept in mind to avoid misunderstanding the _Critique_. At every step of the way Greenberg contrasts his view with the major interpretations of Kant by commentators like Henry Allison, Jonathan Bennett, Paul Guyer, and Peter Strawson. Not only does this new approach to Kant present a strong challenge to these dominant interpretations, but by being more true to Kant’s own intent it holds promise for making better sense out of what have been seen as the _First Critique_’s discordant themes. (shrink)

In this article, I want to argue that scepticism for Kant must be seen in ancient and not just modern terms, and that if we take this into account we will need to take a different view of Kant's response to Hume from the one that is standardly presented in the literature. This standard view has been put forward recently by Paul Guyer, and it is therefore his view that I want to look at in some detail, and to (...) try to correct. (shrink)

This essay critically examines the view recently set forth by Paul Guyer that Kant's theories of artistic beauty and artistic creativity exclusively coincide with this theory of natural beauty. I note that very great works of art, although they may indeed be beautiful, also tend to be sublime. To acknowledge the sense of awe which attends those great works of art which are also beautiful, I argue that Kant's theory of sublimity must also be included within an accurate interpretation (...) of Kant's account of artistic beauty, and maintain that Guyer's exclusive reference to Kant's theory of natural beauty will not suffice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:138 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:1 JANUARY 1990 Paul Guyer. Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Pp. xiii + 482. Cloth, $59.5 o. Paper, $x9.95. For several years now, Paul Guyer has been publishing articles on what he sees as numerous different strategies pursued by Kant in his attempt to deduce the objective validity of pure categories. In this very (...) long, extremely detailed book, he has brought together the results of much of that work, added to it extensively, and defended at length a comprehensive and highly controversial view of the Deduction. The book has five major parts: on Kant's early views, on the deduction from 178187, on the "principles of empirical knowledge" (most of which is devoted to an elaborate reconstruction of the Analogies argument), on the Refutation of Idealism, and on transcendential idealism in general. More broadly Guyer's central thesis has two parts. In the first he tries to show that the more well-known versions of the Deduction are disappointing failures. According to Guyer, Kant variously tried to deduce the objective validity of pure concepts from the assumption that we do possess a priori knowledge of objects, from the assumption of empirical knowledge of objects, for which a priori conditions must be found, from a claim about a priori knowledge of unity of the self, and from the a priori conditions of empirical self-knowledge. The first three attempts are said to fail, all for somewhat different reasons, but all in a way linked to an implausible (and, to a skeptic, question-begging) premise about "necessary connection" in experience. Moreover, given this premise, these strategies all involve a commitment to very strong views about experience (e.g., it is necessary that any possible manifold of experience be subject to the categories) and to an accompanying claim about the mindimposed unity of experience, considered by many the "dark side" of Kant's enterprise. It is the last strategy that for Guyer represents the most philosophically interesting tactic and that constitutes the second major claim he makes. In this version, Kant is trying to show that "time determination," whether of objects represented in consciousness, or of representations themselves, empirically apperceived, can be shown to presuppose the objective validity of, at least, the Analogies. Guyer claims that this last strategy, while it represents the "original" idea of a Deduction entertained by Kant in the first half of the Silent Decade, only emerges in the Cr/t/que in the Analogies and Refutation of Idealism, and is only fully explored by Kant after the Critique's publication. It involves only a "conditional" argument for the categories ("if there is to be experience there must be objectively valid categories"); the categories are thus valid for whatever in a manifold can be an object of a cognitive claim, and are not "necessarily" imposed on a manifold per se. Guyer's attack on what he regards as the standard reading of the Deduction is far too detailed to address point by point. I can merely note three difficulties with his approach. First, he attributes to Kant a premise that goes far beyond the "standard" beginning contrast between the "arbitrary representations of states of the self as such" and the "rule-governed representation of an object." According to Guyer, all commentators (somewhat surprisingly) have failed to see the following: that when Kant makes this contrast, and appeals to the object as "that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united" (B x37), he really means that the "object" is that in virtue of BOOK REVIEWS 139 which the representations of a manifold are necessarilyunited 0og). This attributes to Kant the very strange view that empirical judgments are necessary truths of some sort, and even though Kant often explicitly denies this (even once in the course of the Deduction, at B142, cited but dismissed by Guyer), Guyer claims that only by such a claim can Kant hope to deduce the objective validity of pure categories. In almost all cases of textual evidence cited by Guyer, however, it is possible and often much more natural to read Kant as claiming that... (shrink)

Unlike most collections of essays by various writers, Essays in Kant's Aesthetics is unified by considerations not restricted merely to the subject denoted by the title of the book. Cohen and Guyer's Preface and Introduction make it clear that the essays have been chosen with some care and with an eye to certain thematic structures established by the editors. In consonance with this, the book falls into four parts. The first part, "Pleasure, Beauty, and Judgment," contains essays by (...) class='Hi'>Guyer, R. Meerbote, R. E. Aquila, and A. Savile, all on Kant's theory of aesthetic judgment. The second, "Art and Genius," contains essays by D. W. Crawford, T. Gould, and I. Stadler, on the implications of Kant's notion of artistic genius. The third part, "Beauty, Freedom, and Morality," with essays by Cohen and D. Henrich, explores the connection of the beautiful and the good in Kant. Part four, "Beauty and the World," containing essays by S. Cavell and J. E. Sobel, treats of ontological themes suggested by Kant's aesthetics. (shrink)

Kant, as any student of the Critique of Pure Reason will know, is a transcendental idealist. It is of course a commonplace of Kant-interpretation that transcendental idealism is basic to Kant's theory of knowledge. But Paul Guyer, in Kant and the Claims of Knowledge, proposes a revisionist thesis on this score. The thesis can be expressed in five parts: that idealism is a very implausible and indefensible aspect of Kant's epistemology; that Kant's official version of transcendental epistemology entails idealism; (...) that there is nevertheless a certain weaker transcendental theory--a "transcendental theory of experience"--which can be interpretatively elicited from Kant's published and unpublished works; that the transcendental theory of experience is essentially realistic and not idealistic; and that the transcendental theory of experience represents the essence of Kant's epistemology. (shrink)

Robert Greenberg offers an intricate, highly original reading of Kant’s first Critique on what constitutes the possibility of a priori knowledge. One of the book’s main features, ambitious in scope, is the author’s extensive polemic against mainstream Anglophone approaches to Kant’s position on a priori knowledge. Many of them have, according to Greenberg, fundamentally misunderstood Kant’s theory of transcendental idealism. In particular, Greenberg sees Peter Strawson’s epochmaking classic, The Bounds of Sense—An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as (...) a leitfaden for other similarly misguided interpretations. Most Anglo-American accounts hold that for Kant’s critical project to have any viability at all it cannot be taken as an attempt to show the possibility of a priori knowledge as such, but rather to spell out the conditions for empirical knowledge. Greenberg gives examples: Strawson believes that Kant’s transcendental idealism is unsustainable because the central “principle of significance” perishes from its own internal contradictions. Likewise, Henry Allison’s interpretations replace the dualism of transcendental idealism by a monism built around the empirical object. Greenberg faults other “ Customary Interpretations of Kant’s Ontology”, those of Karl Ameriks, Richard Aquila, Paul Guyer, Patricia Kitcher, among others, on grounds of having misread Kant’s ontology vis à vis his transcendental epistemology. (shrink)

Neo-teleology is the two part thesis that, e.g., (i) we have hearts because of what hearts are for: Hearts are for blood circulation, not the production of a pulse, so hearts are there--animals have them--because their function is to circulate the blood, and (ii) that (i) is explained by natural selection: traits spread through populations because of their functions. This paper attacks this popular doctrine. The presence of a biological trait or structure is not explained by appeal to its function. (...) To suppose otherwise is to trivialize natural selection. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy, political philosophy, and philosophy of judgement have been and continue to be widely discussed among many scholars. The impact of his thinking is beyond doubt and his ideas continue to inspire and encourage an on-going dialogue among many people in our world today. Given the historical and philosophical significance of Kant’s moral, political, and aesthetic theory, and the connection he draws between these theories and the appropriate function and methodology of education, it is surprising that relatively (...) little has been written on Kant’s contribution to education theory. Recently, however, internationally recognized Kant scholars such as Paul Guyer, Manfred Kuehn, Richard Velkley, Robert Louden, Susan Shell, and others have begun to turn their attention to Kant’s writings on education and the role of education in cultivating moral character. _Kant and Education: Interpretations and Commentary_ has gathered these scholars together with the aim of filling this perceived void in Kant scholarship. All of the essays contained within this volume will examine either Kant’s ideas on education through an historical analysis of his texts; or the importance and relevance of his moral philosophy, political philosophy, and/or aesthetics in contemporary education theory. (shrink)

This edited collection sets forth a new understanding of aesthetic-moral judgment organised around three key concepts: pleasure, reflection, and accountability. The overarching theme is that art is not merely a representation or expression like any other, but that it promotes shared moral understanding and helps us engage in meaning-making. This volume offers an alternative to brain-centric and realist approaches to aesthetics. It features original essays from a number of leading philosophers of art, aesthetics, ethics, and perception, including Elizabeth Burns Coleman, (...) Garrett Cullity, Cynthia A. Freeland, Ivan Gaskell, Paul Guyer, Jane Kneller, Keith Lehrer, Mohan Matthen, Jennifer A. McMahon, Bence Nanay, Nancy Sherman, and Robert Sinnerbrink. Part I of the book analyses the elements of aesthetic experience— pleasure, preference, and imagination—with the individual conceived as part of a particular cultural context and network of other minds. The chapters in Part II explain how it is possible for cultural learning to impact these elements through consensus building, an impulse to objectivity, emotional expression, and reflection. Finally, the chapters in Part III converge on the role of dissonance, difference, and diversity in promoting cultural understanding and advancement. Social Aesthetics and Moral Judgment will appeal to philosophers of art and aesthetics, as well as to scholars in other disciplines interested in issues related to art and cultural exchange. (shrink)

Natural selection is commonly interpreted as the fundamental mechanism of evolution. Questions about how selection theory can claim to be the all-sufficient explanation of evolution often go unanswered by today's neo-Darwinists, perhaps for fear that any criticism of the evolutionary paradigm will encourage creationists and proponents of intelligent design.In Biological Emergences, Robert Reid argues that natural selection is not the cause of evolution. He writes that the causes of variations, which he refers to as natural experiments, are independent of (...) natural selection; indeed, he suggests, natural selection may get in the way of evolution. Reid proposes an alternative theory to explain how emergent novelties are generated and under what conditions they can overcome the resistance of natural selection. He suggests that what causes innovative variation causes evolution, and that these phenomena are environmental as well as organismal.After an extended critique of selectionism, Reid constructs an emergence theory of evolution, first examining the evidence in three causal arenas of emergent evolution: symbiosis/association, evolutionary physiology/behavior, and developmental evolution. Based on this evidence of causation, he proposes some working hypotheses, examining mechanisms and processes common to all three arenas, and arrives at a theoretical framework that accounts for generative mechanisms and emergent qualities. Without selectionism, Reid argues, evolutionary innovation can more easily be integrated into a general thesis. Finally, Reid proposes a biological synthesis of rapid emergent evolutionary phases and the prolonged, dynamically stable, non-evolutionary phases imposed by natural selection. (shrink)

Recent debates over adults' theory of mind use have been fueled by surprising failures of perspective-taking in communication, suggesting that perspective-taking may be relatively effortful. Yet adults routinely engage in effortful processes when needed. How, then, should speakers and listeners allocate their resources to achieve successful communication? We begin with the observation that the shared goal of communication induces a natural division of labor: The resources one agent chooses to allocate toward perspective-taking should depend on their expectations about the other's (...) allocation. We formalize this idea in a resource-rational model augmenting recent probabilistic weighting accounts with a mechanism for (costly) control over the degree of perspective-taking. In a series of simulations, we first derive an intermediate degree of perspective weighting as an optimal trade-off between expected costs and benefits of perspective-taking. We then present two behavioral experiments testing novel predictions of our model. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the presence or absence of occlusions in a director–matcher task. We found that speakers spontaneously modulated the informativeness of their descriptions to account for “known unknowns” in their partner's private view, reflecting a higher degree of speaker perspective-taking than previously acknowledged. In Experiment 2, we then compared the scripted utterances used by confederates in prior work with those produced in interactions with unscripted directors. We found that confederates were systematically less informative than listeners would initially expect given the presence of occlusions, but listeners used violations to adaptively make fewer errors over time. Taken together, our work suggests that people are not simply “mindblind”; they use contextually appropriate expectations to navigate the division of labor with their partner. We discuss how a resource-rational framework may provide a more deeply explanatory foundation for understanding flexible perspective-taking under processing constraints. (shrink)

Mesoscale modeling is often considered merely as a practical strategy used when information on lower-scale details is lacking, or when there is a need to make models cognitively or computationally tractable. Without dismissing the importance of practical constraints for modeling choices, we argue that mesoscale models should not just be considered as abbreviations or placeholders for more “complete” models. Because many systems exhibit different behaviors at various spatial and temporal scales, bottom-up approaches are almost always doomed to fail. Mesoscale models (...) capture aspects of multi-scale systems that cannot be parameterized by simple averaging of lower-scale details. To understand the behavior of multi-scale systems, it is essential to identify mesoscale parameters that “code for” lower-scale details in a way that relate phenomena intermediate between microscopic and macroscopic features. We illustrate this point using examples of modeling of multi-scale systems in materials science and biology, where identification of material parameters such as stiffness or strain is a central step. The examples illustrate important aspects of a so-called “middle-out” modeling strategy. Rather than attempting to model the system bottom-up, one starts at intermediate scales where systems exhibit behaviors distinct from those at the atomic and continuum scales. One then seeks to upscale and downscale to gain a more complete understanding of the multi-scale system. The cases highlight how parameterization of lower-scale details not only enables tractable modeling but is also central to understanding functional and organizational features of multi-scale systems. (shrink)

Author Robert Wright shows how Buddhist meditative practice can loosen the grip of anxiety, regret, and hatred, and deepen your appreciation of beauty and other people." -- Adapted from book jacket.

Group beneficial norms are common in human societies. The persistence of such norms is consistent with evolutionary game theory, but existing models do not provide a plausible explanation for why they are common. We show that when a model of imitation used to derive replicator dynamics in isolated populations is generalized to allow for population structure, group beneficial norms can spread rapidly under plausible conditions. We also show that this mechanism allows recombination of different group beneficial norms arising in..

Hegel's holistic metaphysics challenges much recent ontology with its atomistic and reductionist assumptions; Stern offers us an original reading of Hegel and contrasts him with his predecessor, Kant.

The first unquestionably big idea in the history of philosophy was the idea of form. The idea of course belonged to Plato, and was then domesticated at the hands of Aristotle, who paired form with matter as the two chief principles of his metaphysics and natural philosophy. In the medieval period, it was Aristotle’s conception of form and matter that generally dominated. This was true for both the Islamic and the Christian tradition, once the entire Aristotelian corpus became available. For (...) this reason, although there is much to say about the fate of Platonic Forms in medieval thought, the present chapter will focus on the Aristotelian tradition.1 Aristotelian commentators have been puzzled by form and matter for as long as there have been Aristotelian commentators. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that these are topics about which Aristotelians have never formed a very clear conception, and that their failure to do so was the principal reason why Aristotelianism ceased to be a flourishing research program from the seventeenth century onward. For those who aspire to a modern revival of Aristotelianism, the concepts of form and matter can easily take on the aspect of a kind of Holy Grail, such that if only we could get these ideas clearly in focus, we could see our way forward on any number of philosophical fronts, such as the union of mind and body, the coherence and endurance of substances, the nature of causality, and so on. The historical record, however, suggests that this hope is a snare and delusion, insofar as there has never been any such thing as the theory of form and matter. Although medieval philosophers of all kinds used this terminology incessantly, it had no more of a fixed meaning than does the ubiquitous contemporary philosophical talk of “properties.” Hence, the most a general survey of the topic can do is consider some of the more important areas of agreement and disagreement. (shrink)

This essay argues that aristotle's doctrine of nominal definition is his semantic theory for natural-Kind terms. It offers a new interpretation of that doctrine. On this interpretation nominal definitions are initial working theoretical accounts of natural kinds which serve as starting points for scientific inquiry. As such, Nominal definitions have existential import. They make an implicit reference to the most familiar actual instances of the kinds they define and they define the essences of those kinds by reference to those instances. (...) Nominal definitions are, Thus, Accounts of real essences as much as real definitions. They are initial incomplete accounts of such essences and it is as such that they explicate the meanings of (natural-Kind) terms. (shrink)

Complexity–nonlinear dynamics for my purposes in this essay–is rich with metaphysical and epistemological implications but is only recently receiving sustained philosophical analysis. I will explore some of the subtleties of causation and constraint in Rayleigh-Bénard convection as an example of a complex phenomenon, and extract some lessons for further philosophical reflection on top-down constraint and causation particularly with respect to causal foundationalism.

Exploring Certainty: Wittgenstein and Wide Fields of Thought considers how, where, and to what extent the thoughts and ideas found in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty can be applied to other areas of thought, including: ethics, aesthetics, religious belief, mathematics, cognitive science, and political theory. Robert Greenleaf Brice opens new avenues of thought for scholars and students of the Wittgensteinian tradition, while introducing original philosophies about human knowledge and cognition.

It is often held that to have a conscious experience presupposes having some form of implicit self-awareness. The most dominant phenomenological view usually claims that we essentially perceive experiences as our own. This is the so called “mineness” character, or dimension of experience. According to this view, mineness is not only essential to conscious experience, it also grounds the idea that pre-reflective self-awareness constitutes a minimal self. In this paper, we show that there are reasons to doubt this constituting role (...) of mineness. We argue that there are alternative possibilities and that the necessity for an adequate theory of the self within psychopathology gives us good reasons to believe that we need a thicker notion of the pre-reflective self. To this end, we develop such a notion: the Pre-Reflective Situational Self. To do so, we will first show how alternative conceptions of pre-reflective self-awareness point to philosophical problems with the standard phenomenological view. We claim that this is mainly due to fact that within the phenomenological account the mineness aspect is implicitly playing several roles. Consequently, we argue that a thin interpretation of pre-reflective self-awareness—based on a thin notion of mineness—cannot do its needed job within, at least within psychopathology. This leads us to believe that a thicker conception of pre-reflective self is needed. We, therefore, develop the notion of the pre-reflective situational self by analyzing the dynamical nature of the relation between self-awareness and the world, specifically through our interactive inhabitation of the social world. (shrink)

_Debates in Nineteenth-Century European Philosophy _offers an engaging and in-depth introduction to the philosophical questions raised by this rich and far reaching period in the history of philosophy. Throughout thirty chapters, the volume surveys the intellectual contributions of European philosophy in the nineteenth century, but it also engages the on-going debates about how these contributions can and should be understood. As such, the volume provides both an overview of nineteenth-century European philosophy and an introduction to contemporary scholarship in this field. (...) __KEY DEBATES IN EUROPEAN NINETEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY__ Kristin Gjesdal Contributors Editor's Introduction I. Kantian Presuppositions 1. The Reception of the _Critique of Pure Reason_ in German Idealism by Rolf-Peter Horstmann 2. The Reception of the _Critique of Pure Reason_ in German Idealism: A Response to Rolf-Peter Horstmann by Paul Guyer II. Fichte 3. Fichte's Original Insight by Dieter Henrich 4. Fichte's Original Insight: Dieter Henrich's Pioneering Piece Half A Century Later by Günter Zöller III. Romanticism 5. Philosophical Foundations of Early Romanticism by Manfred Frank 6. Response to Manfred Frank, "Philosophical Foundations of Early Romanticism" by Michael N. Forster IV. Hegel 7. From Desire to Recognition: Hegel's Account of Human Sociality by Axel Honneth 8. On Honneth's Interpretation of Hegel's "Phenomenology of Self-Consciousness" by Robert B. Pippin V. Schelling 9. The Nature of Subjectivity: The Critical and Systematic Function of Schelling's Philosophy of Nature by Dieter Sturma 10. Nature as Unconditioned? The Critical and Systematic Function of Schelling's Early Works by Dalia Nassar VI. Schopenhauer 11. The Real Essence of Human Beings: Schopenhauer and the Unconscious Will by Christopher Janaway 12. Emancipation from the Will by David E. Wellbery VII. Comte 13. Auguste Comte and Modern Epistemology by Johan Heilbron 14. Why Was Comte an Epistemologist? by Robert C. Scharff VIII. Mill 15. Mill: The Principle of Liberty by John Rawls 16. John Rawls on Mill's Principle of Liberty by John Skorupski IX. Darwin 17. Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection and its Moral Purpose by Robert J. Richards 18. Response to Richards by Gabriel Finkelstein X. Kierkegaard 19. Kierkegaard's _On Authority and Revelation _ by Stanley Cavell 20. A Nice Arrangement of Epigrams: Stanley Cavell on Søren Kierkegaard by Stephen Mulhall XI. Marx 21. Marx's Metacritique of Hegel: Synthesis Through Social Labor by Jürgen Habermas 22. Epistemology and Self-Reflection in the Young Marx by Espen Hammer XII. Dilthey 23. Wilhelm Dilthey after 150 Years by Hans-Georg Gadamer 24. Gadamer on Dilthey by Frederick C. Beiser XIII. Nietzsche 25. Nietzsche's Minimalist Moral Psychology by Bernard Williams 26. Naturalism, Minimalism, and the Scope of Nietzsche's Philosophical Psychology by Paul Katsafanas XIV. Freud 27. Bad Faith and Falsehood by Jean-Paul Sartre 28. Freud by Sebastian Gardner XV. Twentieth-Century Developments 29. Analytic and Conversational Philosophy by Richard Rorty 30. Not Knowing What the Right Hand is Doing: Rorty's "Ambidextrous" Analytic Redescription of Nineteenth-Century Hegelian Philosophy by Paul Redding References for Republished Texts Accompanying Original Works. (shrink)

Richard E. Aquila - Kant's Theory of A Priori Knowledge - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.2 267-268 Book Review Kant's Theory of A Priori Knowledge Robert Greenberg. Kant's Theory of A Priori Knowledge. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2001. Pp. ix + 278. Cloth, $45.00. This is one of the deepest and most carefully reasoned books on Kant I have read. It is a book for the scholar of the (...) first Critique, not the "educated layman," but it very much needs to be read by the former. Even for Kant scholars, it is not easy. Apart from demands imposed by the tightness of the reasoning, one may simply be uneasy with the fact that, as instanced in a relentless and detailed critique of the main species of the "customary" reading -- represented primarily by Allison and Guyer -- Greenberg is defending a radically new view of Kant's reasoning in the Critique. Typically, one either supposes Kant.. (shrink)

Rice, Robert James William Gleeson was born in Balaklava, a town in the mid-north of South Australia, on 24 December 1920. The son of John Joseph Gleeson and Margaret Mary O'Connell, he was the third born of six children - the elder brother of Thomas, John and Raphael (Ray), and the younger brother of Mary. The first-born child, also Mary, born in Balaklava on 6 May 1918, died one hour after birth. She was baptised during her short life.

The first five chapters of the second book of Aristotle's Politics contain a series of criticisms levelled against Plato's Republic. Despite the abundance of studies that have been done on Aristotle's Politics, these chapters have for the most part been neglected; there has been no book-length study of them this century. In this important new book, Robert Mayhew fills this unfortunate gap in Aristotelian scholarship, analyzing these chapters in order to discover what they tell us about Aristotle's political philosophy. (...) Mayhew demonstrates that in Politics II 1-5, Aristotle is presenting his views on an extremely fundamental issue: the unity of the city. Indeed, he states, almost all of Aristotle's criticisms of the Republic center on this important subject in one way or another. Only by understanding Aristotle's views on the proper unity of the city, Mayhew explains, can we adequately discover his views on the proper relationship between the individual and the city. Students and scholars of classical political philosophy will be greatly interested in this innovative book. (shrink)

In this accessible and comprehensive work, Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins cover the entire history of philosophy--ancient, medieval, and modern, from cultures both East and West--in its broader historical and cultural contexts. Major philosophers and movements are discussed along with less well-known but interesting figures. The authors examine the early Greek, Indic, and Chinese philosophers and the mythological traditions that preceded them, as well as the great religious philosophies, including Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, and Taoism. Easily understandable to students without (...) specialized knowledge of philosophy, A Short History of Philosophy demonstrates the relevance of philosophy to our times, illuminating the impact of the revolutions wrought by science, industry, colonialism, and sectarian warfare; the two world wars and the Holocaust; and the responses of philosophy in the schools of existentialism, postmodernism, feminism, and multiculturalism. In addition, the authors provide their own twists and interpretations of events, resulting in a broad view of the nature of philosophy as an intellectual discipline and its sometimes odd and dramatic consequences. (shrink)

We compare Gödel’s and Brouwer’s explorations of mysticism and its relation to mathematics.

Normative naturalism (NN), advocated by Larry Laudan, understands the principles of scientific method to be akin to scientific hypotheses which are then open to test like any principles of science. It uses a meta-inductive rule to test methodological principles against suitably presented episodes in the history of science. One strength of NN is that it provides the basis for a philosophical/historical research programme into the methodological strategies actually employed in the sciences. But for the philosopher interested in the grounds of (...) scientific rationality NN is not without it difficulties such as: it adopts a strongly empiricist account of meta-method which rules out realist principles of scientific method from the test procedures; it uses principles of test which are either not agreed upon, or stray from the meta-inductive rule; it reveals its limits in presupposing answers, rather than offering solutions, to problems of scientific rationality. (shrink)

Uses textual and archaeological evidence to argue that emerging Egyptian and Greek architectural technologies were crucial to the origins and development of Greek philosophy.

This book considers the relation between language and thought. Robert Wardy explores this huge topic by analyzing linguistic relativism with reference to a Chinese translation of Aristotle's Categories. He addresses some key questions, such as, do the basic structures of language shape the major thought patterns of its native speakers? Could philosophy be guided and constrained by the language in which it is done? And does Aristotle survive rendition into Chinese intact? Wardy's answers will fascinate philosophers, Sinologists, classicists, linguists (...) and anthropologists, and make a major contribution to the scholarly literature. (shrink)