A new translation of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, with an introduction that sets the work in its philosophical and historical contexts.

This is an examination of Aristotle's notion of an "accidental being" -- something intermediate between a substance and a property. An accidental being (sometimes called "accidental compound" or "kooky object") is an ephemeral object, typically the compound of a substance and a property, that exists for only as long as its components are united. I set out the role that accidental beings play in Aristotle's solutions to several philosophical problems. I also investigate the similarity between these beings and the individual (...) non-substances of Aristotle's Categories. Finally, I propose that accidental beings can be assimilated into a more contemporary conceptual scheme as events -- the states or conditions that substances are in or undergo. (shrink)

A two-volume set. Print edition available in cloth only. Awarded the Nicholas Hoare/Renaud-Bray Canadian Philosophical Association Book Prize, 2001 From the Preface: _Hegel's Ladder_ aspires to be... a ‘literal commentary’ on _Die Phänomenologie des Geistes_.... It was the conscious goal of my thirty-year struggle with Hegel to write an explanatory commentary on this book; and with its completion I regard my own ‘working’ career as concluded.... The prevailing habit of commentators... is founded on the general consensus of opinion that whatever (...) else it may be, Hegel’s _Phenomenology_ is not the logical ‘Science’ that he believed it was. This is the received view that I want to overthrow. But if I am right, then an acceptably continuous chain of argument, paragraph by paragraph, ought to be discoverable in the text. (shrink)

Drawing on various historical documents, the article uses process tracing methods and analytic narratives to establish a relationship between historical contractual practices and state formation in nineteenth-century East Africa. I trace the process through which local political leaders historically sought to secure monopolistic deals over trade with foreign entrepreneurs through incomplete contracts for tangible economic goods and intangible political goods or services. By showcasing agents’ bargaining strategies in contractual agreements, the article sheds light on notions of sovereignty and independence articulated (...) through public contracting in Africa’s political development. Historical understandings of notions of independence and sovereignty by procurement practitioners in East Africa provide seeds for thought in controversial debates about government outsourcing today. Is outsourced sovereignty always threatening? Can we outsource sovereignty and remain independent? These are perhaps the most important conceptual queries that make East Africa’s historical contractual experience pertinent today as new public-private partnerships for development, including government outsourcing, increasingly call for the use of private means to solve public problems in the developing countries. (shrink)

Jonathan Dancy charges that Hutcheson's distinction between justifying reasons and motivating reasons is unimportant: it is simply between moral reasons and other good reasons. I argue that the distinction is between propositions with different presuppositions and different functions. One identifies qualities of objects that we desire; the other identifies qualities that we approve. I situate Hutcheson in the current debate about the nature of practical reasons. I argue that he avoids problems posed for factivists and for Humeans. On Hutcheson's view, (...) motivating and justifying reasons at times refer to the same qualities, which makes it possible for one to serve the function of the other. (shrink)

Louis Frédéric Ancillon was a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and Belles Lettres whose imagined dialogue between Berkeley and Hume was read to the Academy in 1796 and published in 1799. It is important as an indicator of the reception of Hume and Berkeley in francophone philosophical circles in late eighteenth-century Prussia. Our introduction is followed by an English translation with notes.

Peirceana provides a forum for the best current work on Peirce worldwide. Besides monographs, the series will publish thematically unified anthologies and edited volumes with a defined topical focus and untranslated English selections of Peirce's writings.

Explanation of terms in Mīmāṃsā, an orthodox school in Hindu philosophy.

ABSTRACT:Daniel Callahan died on July 16, 2019, just short of his 89th birthday. In the years since, we have seen the overturning of abortion rights, a concern central to his scholarship and musings about the place of religion in American civic life. Callahan’s journey from lay Catholic journalist and commentator at Commonweal to a co-founder of the Hastings Center, during his decade of doubt, is especially relevant today as America revisits established precedent governing a woman’s right to choose. His life-long (...) struggle with faith and the secularization of bioethics is a story worth telling, as it may foster dialogue across a divide between religious and laical thinkers that has fractured our political discourse. We recall Callahan’s misgivings about the marginalization of religious perspectives in public life; he sought not the denial of complexity nor of difference in views, but rather the importance of free and honest debate around deeply held beliefs, contextualized in the realities of the contemporary world. Callahan’s ambivalence about his faith remains a part of the fabric of American life, a story that Callahan chronicled to our collective benefit for over a half-century. (shrink)

IN 1983 THE STUTTGART PUBLISHING FIRM OF PHILIPP RECLAM brought out a slim volume containing an introduction and seven essays by Robert Spaemann, then Professor of Philosophy at the University of Munich. Entitled Philosophische Essays, it presents and illustrates Spaemann’s philosophical project: to understand the phenomenon of modernity, to criticize the deficiencies of modern thought, and to preserve what is good in modernity by rehabilitating the teleological understanding of nature that modernity largely rejected. A second edition in 1994 included three (...) more essays. As little of Spaemann’s work has yet appeared in English, the aim of this paper is modest: to present as clearly and accurately as possible his position in the Philosophische Essays. (shrink)

Hindu culture and political ethics in the character of Krishana, Hindu deity as decribed in Bhāgavatapurāṇa and Mahābhārata ; a study.

The difficulty of the task that the authors of this book have posed themselves is due in the first instance to the fact that this period has been very little studied in the history of philosophy. In applying the term "early Russian philosophy" to the set of ideas, images, and conceptions of a philosophical order contained in the cultural texts of the tenth through the seventeenth centuries, M.N. Gromov and N.S. Kozlov see it not simply as a specific stage in (...) the development of Russian philosophy but as a "very particular phenomenon that is qualitatively unique and requires special study" . Thus the authors declare their own position in the far from finished debate about the specificity of Russian philosophy and the distinctive features of its historical development. They rely not only on the vast treasury of early Russian texts that have come down to us but also on the scholarship of historians of literature, language, painting, architecture, folklore, and other areas of culture. Of course, the book also gives careful consideration to the few studies that have been devoted to the historical-philosophical analysis of early Russian culture, from the works of the Archimandrite Gavriil to the most recent works by Soviet and foreign authors published in decades just past. (shrink)

Classical commentary on Brahmasūtra of Bādarāyaṇa, aphoristic work on Vedanta.