This careful and engaging introduction to Aristotle equips readers of ancient philosophy and classics with an intellectual map that will guide their further exploration within the terrains of Aristotelian philosophy and logic. The book does not seek to provide a verdict or to persuade the reader of the usefulness of Aristotle's ideas. Instead it offers a comprehensive introduction to key philosophical areas while situating the reader within the ongoing intellectual debates on Aristotle's significance and relevance. Crowley's book allows an overview (...) of Aristotle's contributions and includes discussions on the Organon, the epitome of his logical treatises, his works on biology, nature and causation, metaphysics, citizenship, ethics and eudaimonia. The book is a valuable tool for readers interested in becoming acquainted with the work of Aristotle but most importantly for those who are keen to understand his many interpretations. (shrink)

T.J. Reed's study has long established itself as the standard work in English on Thomas mann, and offers as comprehensive a view of Mann's fiction and thought as is available in any language. It is based on a coherent close reading of Mann's oeuvre, literary and political, and also on manuscripts and sources, and was part of the first phase of literary scholarship that opened up the resources of the Zurich Thomas Mann Archive. Further documents that have appeared since then (...) - Mann's diaries, notebooks, and other correspondences - have not fundamentally altered the individual interpretations or the overall picture the study offers, and in some respects have emphatically confirmed them. A further chapter added to this edition covers the new documentation, gives a vigorous account of the main curents in Mann scholarship and criticism over the last two decades suggesting how we should now see the writer, the man, and the political figure, and above all the complex relationship between the three. (shrink)

What are the different styles by which political theorists deal with intellectual problems? This question is important because if we do not answer it, we shall not know why methodological disagreements are so much more intense and heated than substantive disagreements. Nor shall we know why particular political theorists take the positions they do in methodological controversies. This paper argues that there are now five main styles by which political theorists deal with intellectual problems: the Classicist, the Mannerist, the Baroque, (...) the Romantic, and the Collectivist. Classicism solves the problem it poses, Mannerism presses it, the Baroque resolves it, Romanticism dissolves it, and Collectivism publicizes it. For each style, we give an account of its main features, give examples of how it has been applied to different problems in political theory, and then identify its strengths and weaknesses. (shrink)

Germany’s political and cultural past from ancient times through World War II has dimmed the legacy of its Enlightenment, which these days is far outshone by those of France and Scotland. In this book, Jim Reed clears the dust away from eighteenth-century Germany, bringing the likes of Kant, Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Gotthold Lessing into a coherent and focused beam that shines within European intellectual history and reasserts the important role of Germany’s Enlightenment. Reed looks closely at the arguments, achievements, (...) conflicts, and controversies of these major thinkers and how their development of a lucid and active liberal thinking matured in the late eighteenth century into an imaginative branching that ran through philosophy, theology, literature, historiography, science, and politics. He traces the various pathways of their thought and how one engendered another, from the principle of thinking for oneself to the development of a critical epistemology; from literature’s assessment of the past to the formulation of a poetic ideal of human development. Ultimately, Reed shows how the ideas of the German Enlightenment have proven their value in modern secular democracies and are still of great relevance—despite their frequent dismissal—to us in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

The theme of this volume is natural beauty, landscape and the arts. The first question for a philosopher to ask is what does philosophy have to say now particularly about natural beauty. I emphasize now, because, as is well known, historically philosophers, for example, Plato and the eighteenth-century British, and especially Scottish, philosophers, were interested in the topic of beauty. At the present day there has also been some revival of interest in this subject, but when it comes to what (...) philosophers past and present have had to say about beauty, I am doubtful how much relevance it has to the question of how we should think about natural beauty. We must be careful then in an inquiry into natural beauty not to begin by taking up some question within the traditional philosophy of beauty – such as for instance whether beauty is a real quality, or whether judgments of beauty are subjective or objective – for it is difficult to see what such metaphysical lucubrations could do for the question in hand, other than offering, what is not to be underestimated, an innocent form of academic pleasure.In any case, the modern world takes a short cut with the question of beauty: everyone, unless having a distinct reason for believing the contrary, such as a specific religious faith, unhesitatingly takes it for granted that an extreme subjectivism and relativism must hold sway. (shrink)

One of the many striking theses for which Virginia Held argues in How Terrorism Is Wrong is that terrorism is not necessarily morally wrong. In principle, she argues, terrorism can sometimes be permissible . Call this "the Non-necessity Thesis," or NNT. As so often in this deep and thought-provoking book, Held gives a powerful and illuminating argument to this thesis. The argument begins by asserting what we may call "the Violations Distribution Principle" : if we must have rights violations, then (...) a more equitable distribution of such violations is better than a less equitable . It then claims that this implies that "it is better to equalize rights violations in a transition to bring an end to rights violations than it is to subject a given group that has already suffered extensive rights violations to continued such violations" . But this in turn implies that where one group's rights are severely and systematically violated— say, by an oppression, in which their right to personal safety is systematically violated—and another group's rights are not so violated, then a transition which involves a sharing of proportionate rights violations between the oppressed and the non-oppressed is permissible, "if this and only this can be expected to lead to a situation in which rights are more adequately respected" . In those and only those circumstances, terrorism would be permissible, since it centrally violates the right to personal safety. Hence NNT. The idea, then, is that VDP implies that where there is a systematic imbalance in the distribution of severe rights violations between one group and another , and where only a transition which involves a sharing of proportionate rights violations between the oppressed and the non-oppressed can be expected to achieve a situation in which rights are more adequately respected , then terrorism aimed at the oppressors and in conformity with the Uniqueness condition is permissible. (shrink)

Costly signalling theory has become a common explanation for honest communication when interests conflict. In this paper, we provide an alternative explanation for partially honest communication that does not require significant signal costs. We show that this alternative is at least as plausible as traditional costly signalling, and we suggest a number of experiments that might be used to distinguish the two theories.

v. 1. Nicomachean ethics. Politics. The Athenian Constitution. Rhetoric. On Poetics.--v. 2. Logic.--v. 3. Physics. Metaphysics. On the soul. Short physical treaties.--v. 4. On the heavens. On generation and corruption. Meteorology. Biological treatises.

T. J. Smiley; XII.—Entailment and Deducibility, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 59, Issue 1, 1 June 1959, Pages 233–254, https://doi.org/10.1093.