The covering-law model of historical explanation works only for explanation of particulars by particulars, or narrative questions and person and action questions. Wisdom suggests three other explanatory theories that may be integral to historical explanation. What are called Challengeable-cover laws, Function-type laws, and Theoretical-type explanations are introduced and their ranges with respect to covering laws described. The first type are non-trivial generalizations the historian forms where existing covering laws are irrelevant or insufficient, for isolated aspects of their subject matter. (...) Function-type explanatory laws are systemic and answer questions basic in the social sciences where they point beyond particulars to general functions of systems. Theory-type explanations, like Mary Douglas' explanation of taboos, involve theoretical entities or unobservables and operate analogously to theoretical explanations in the natural sciences. Historians often condense generalizations into concepts and treat them as particulars. History thus becomes generality-impregnated narrative. (shrink)

© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Scots Philosophical Association and the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] Olson's Moral Error Theory: History, Critique, Defence has four aims. First, the book aims to provide a historical background to the development of moral error theory prior to its appearance in Mackie's article, ‘A Refutation of Morals.’ Secondly, it provides a critical look at four different versions of the queerness argument. (...) Olson contends that only one of them, the argument from irreducible normativity, succeeds. Thirdly, the book defends both moral error theory and its epistemic analogue against recent criticisms. Finally, it articulates and defends an approach to moral thought and language that Olson calls moral conservationism. In brief, moral conservationism is the view that one can continue to believe false moral claims because it is useful... (shrink)

Conflicting Systems in the History of Philosophy. Hegel's logic consists, as is well known, in a chain of categories, connected by a relation of dialectic, which proceeded from the featureless Being, Nothing, and Becoming through more important ones such as Substance, Cause, and Reciprocity to the highest category of all, the Absolute Idea. Now Hegel also pointed to an interesting correlation between the categories of his logic and the dominant concepts of those philosophies that preceded his own: that is to (...) say, the logical order of categories given by him corresponded to the temporal order of the history of philosophy. Such connexion was not, however, to be regarded as an accident but as a necessary truth: for the Absolute manifested itself temporally in the form of the history of philosophy. Seeing that this contention probably contains some psychological truth and is probably assumed in Marxian interpretations of Hegel, it may be of some interest to see how far it can be substantiated. (shrink)

A common line of thought in contemporary metaethics is that certain facts about the evolutionary history of humans make moral realism implausible. Two of the most developed evolutionary cases against realism are found in the works of Richard Joyce and Sharon Street. In what follows, I argue that a form of moral realism that I call proper-function moral realism can meet Joyce and Street's challenges. I begin by sketching the basics of proper-function moral realism. I then present what I take (...) to be the essence of Street's and Joyce's objections, and I show how proper-function realism answers them. (shrink)

In letter 37 to Johannes Bouwmeester, Spinoza identifies a historiola mentis à la Bacon as an important tool for distinguishing more easily between adequate and inadequate ideas. This paper contends that Spinoza's advice is to take into account Baconian-style ‘Civil History’ as providing instructive material for contemplating the variety, complexity, and persistency of human passionate behaviour. Specifically, it argues that Baconian civil history forms an integral part of Spinoza's reflections on provisional morality. Although for Spinoza, philosophical beatitude ultimately demands understanding (...) affects through their first causes – the intuitive perception of things sub specie aeternitatis – in the realm of everyday Spinoza allows for a different, more pragmatic approach to morality. This paper argues at this stage that a philosophical understanding of the mind and its affections is not needed. Spinoza, following Bacon, holds that conduct of practical affairs is particularly improved when those so engage.. (shrink)

Perfect for readers eager to acquire a basic familiarity with the history of philosophy but intimidated by the task, A Passion for Wisdom is a lively, accessible, and highly enjoyable tour of the world's great ideas.

Nichols examines the major writings of Alexandre Kojève, and clarifies the character and brings to light the importance of his political philosophy. This is an essential assessment of Kojève which considers the works that preceded his turn to Hegel, seeks to articulate the character of his Hegelianism, and reflects in detail on the two different meanings that the end of history had in two different periods of his thought.

A groundbreaking, revisionist account of the importance of the history of philosophy to intellectual change - scientific, philosophical and religious - in seventeenth-century England.

Contributors consider the limits of our knowledge of a world of unlimited knowability by examining philosophical thought from the Classical Greeks to the present.

A mixture of facts and philosophy. Jean-Paul Sartre, William Blake, lao Tzu, Groucho Marx, Albert Einstein - hold forth on poetry religion, quantum physics.

Cross-disciplinary studies carried out lately by Russian scholars discovered a causal relationship between the three variables: technological potential, cultural regulation quality, and social sustainability. The patterns called techno-humanitarian balance law, states that the higher production and war technologies' power, the more refined the behaviorregulation means that are required for self-preservation of the society. The article shows that the law has controlled social selection for all of human history and prehistory, discarding unbalanced social organisms, as far as they could not cope (...) with ecological and geopolitical crises, which had been caused by their own activities. It also shows how successive growth of instrumental opportunities in long-term retrospection has dramatically led to the consecutive perfection of cultural and psychological regulation mechanisms. Relevant calculations, comparative-anthropological evidence, and historical illustrations are provided. Regularities in mental processes are described that precede and accompany crisis-causing behavior, to certain extent regardless of population's historical and cultural peculiarities. (shrink)

When the ancient Greeks looked up into the heavens, they saw not just sun and moon, stars and planets, but a complete, coherent universe, a model of the Good that could serve as a guide to a better life. How this view of the world came to be, and how we lost it (or turned away from it) on the way to becoming modern, make for a fascinating story, told in a highly accessible manner by Remi Brague in this wide-ranging (...) cultural history. Before the Greeks, people thought human action was required to maintain the order of the universe and so conducted rituals and sacrifices to renew and restore it. But beginning with the Hellenic Age, the universe came to be seen as existing quite apart from human action and possessing, therefore, a kind of wisdom that humanity did not. Wearing his remarkable erudition lightly, Brague traces the many ways this universal wisdom has been interpreted over the centuries, from the time of ancient Egypt to the modern era. Socratic and Muslim philosophers, Christian theologians and Jewish Kabbalists all believed that questions about the workings of the world and the meaning of life were closely intertwined and that an understanding of cosmology was crucial to making sense of human ethics. Exploring the fate of this concept in the modern day, Brague shows how modernity stripped the universe of its sacred and philosophical wisdom, transforming it into an ethically indifferent entity that no longer serves as a model for human morality. Encyclopedic and yet intimate, The Wisdom of the World offers the best sort of history: broad, learned, and completely compelling. Brague opens a window onto systems of thought radically different from our own. (shrink)

Guiding readers through vision one of Collationes in Hexaëmeron, Benjamin Winter argues that Bonaventure's rejection of certain philosophical errors ought to be understood within the context of the virtuous person's journey to wisdom. Propositions such as the eternity of the world, the unicity of the intellect, and fated necessity are not variables in a zero-sum equation "balanced out" by truths of faith. Instead, Bonaventure sees these propositions as opportunities to reflect charitably on nature and grace, emphasizing that just as (...) knowledge is empty without love, understanding is insufficient without humility. (shrink)

James Madison wrote, 'Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob'. The contributors to this volume discuss and for the most part challenge this claim by considering conditions under which many minds can be wiser than one. With backgrounds in economics, cognitive science, political science, law and history, the authors consider information markets, the internet, jury debates, democratic deliberation and the use of diversity as mechanisms for improving collective decisions. At the same (...) time, they consider voter irrationality and paradoxes of aggregation as possibly undermining the wisdom of groups. Implicitly or explicitly, the volume also offers guidance and warnings to institutional designers. (shrink)

Rorty's profound and challenging critique of contemporary philosophy is in several ways somewhat unfair. Analytic philosophy can contribute towards 'wisdom' in a reasonable sense of the term, though not in Rorty's narrow sense; and his contrast between 'sophist' and 'sage', with the latter understood in Plato's way, is also too constricting. Also, some contemporary 'analytic' work in the 'history of philosophy', so called, is not invalidated by Rorty's strictures - especially his implied accusation that we shan't be interested in (...) the intellectual past if we can't look down on it. (shrink)

"Wisdom in the Open Air" traces the Norwegian roots of the strain of thinking called "deep ecology" - the search for the solutions to environmental problems by examining the fundamental tenets of our culture. Although Arne Naess coined the term in the 1970s, the insights of deep ecology actually reflect a whole tradition of thought that can be seen in the history of Norwegian culture, from ancient mountain myths to the radical ecoactivism of today. Beginning with an introduction to (...) Norway's emphasis on nature and the wild, Reed and Rothenberg explore the birth of the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s. What follows is a collection of writings by prominent Norwegian thinkers on humanity and nature, most never before published in English. From Peter Wessel Zapffe, a twentieth-century Kierkegaardian figure, the list goes on to include Arne Naess, activist/critic/artist Sigmund Kvaloy, wilderness educator Nils Faarlund, novelist Finn Alnaes, sociologist Johan Galtung, and social reformer Erik Dammann. Their points of view offer thoughts on the significance of modern life and what it means to be human in the face of deteriorating environmental global trends of the 20th century. "Wisdom in the Open Air" asks and answers a fundamental question concerning the ecomovement: what is the role of deep, often abstract, thinking in the attempt to avert a very real ecological crisis? (shrink)

Sooner or later, a discussion of wisdom and philosophy brings to mind Socrates as somehow both wise and ignorant. It is not implausible to say that for Socrates the greatness of philosophy is its capacity to free the individual from fate or circumstance and thereby to destroy the two great fears of mankind with which tragedy was unable to deal: the fear of death and the fear of the loss of love or honor.

In this article I endeavour to clarify the meaning of ‘responsibility’, which in the last decades has become a cornerstone of the ethical and political debate. To this end, I carry out an etymological enquiry into this notion with respect to antique and modern European languages. The thesis I argue is that language evidences a unique capacity to cherish, nurture, and foresee with a touch of wisdom an inexhaustible repertoire of existential meanings, which take the stage in human endeavours. (...) As a result, this enquiry helps to understand the original relational and future-oriented significance of ‘responsibility’. Additionally, the analysis steers clear of incorrect or incomplete interpretations, as well as of those willing to deal with the complex and multifaced meaning of ‘responsibility’ in a purely logical-analytical way, which results in moving to the background, if not disregarding altogether, its historical and linguistic stratifications, which are in fact relevant to the full comprehension of this notion. (shrink)

Alongside the tradition in Western thought which glories in logic, metaphysics, and science , a more variegated tradition of thought is to be found--that of rhetoric and of "wisdom"--whose focus is on the workings of human society and on language as its bond and instrument of change. Wisdom Speaking is the attempt to read Vico within this tradition and to see what it became in his hands. ;From implacable foes to cautious allies, science and wisdom have a (...) history of conflict and accommodation. Chapter One, "Pedagogy and Culture," intercepts this history in Vico, shows its ancient roots, and argues that a concern for its issues unifies his pedagogical and cultural theories. This argument is unfolded in the remaining chapters, which treat successively of rhetoric, pedagogy, and culture, each proceeding from a major Vichian text. ;In Chapter Two, "Philosophy and Rhetoric," the tradition of rhetoric and its manifold involvements with philosophy is first laid out, in order to look closely at Vico's own Institutions oratoriae. From its analysis the classical cast of Vico's mind is discovered, as is his steadfast concern to see rhetoric, both in its substantive and linguistic aspects, as the logic of social discourse. Plain from the beginning is Vico's appreciation for metaphor as a necessity of communication and for ingenuity as the faculty of seeing connections and thus making and remaking social structures. ;These themes are deepened in Chapter Three, "Ingenuity and Public Life," where Vico's school writings, centering in the De studiorum ratione, are made to show the nature of civil life and the sagacity needed to manage it. With the presentation of the sage as jurisconsult, as "knower of human and divine institutions," the transformation of pedagogy into a theory of culture begins. ;Chapter Four, "Wisdom and Eloquence," draws all the leads together, using the final New Science and its prior formulations to show how Vico, with philological discoveries in the Homeric poems and early Roman Law, fashioned a theory of the "poetic" beginnings of language, mind, and society; of their gradual maturation; and of the tension between their youth and maturity, thereby turning a formal understanding of culture into a functional, and preparing the way for modern social theory. (shrink)

"As a recently established field of Jewish thought, Jewish political philosophy has made increasingly frequent appearances in recently edited histories of Jewish philosophy. Following the pioneering efforts of Leo Strauss, Ralph Lerner and Daniel Elazar, among others, Jewish political philosophy gained its proper place alongside ethics and metaphysics in the study of the history of Jewish philosophy. This volume is another manifestation of this welcomed development. Consisting of selected papers published in English over the last thirty years, Wisdom's Little (...) Sister concentrates on the Medieval and Renaissance periods, from Sa'adiah Gaon in the tenth century to Spinoza in the seventeenth century. These were the formative periods in the development of Jewish political philosophy, when Jewish scholars, versed in the canonical Jewish sources (biblical and rabbinic), encountered Greek political philosophy as transmitted by Muslim philosophers such as Alfarabi, Ibn Bajja and Averroes. In combining Greek, Jewish and Muslim thought, these scholars are the originators of what we now know as Jewish political philosophy."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

Henri J. Renard, S. J.: a sketch, by J. P. Jelinek.--The good as undefinable, by M. Childress.--Gottlieb Söhngen's sacramental doctrine on the mass, by J. F. Clarkson.--Christ's eucharistic action and history, by B. J. Cooke.--Objective reality of human ideas: Descartes and Suarez, by T. J. Cronin.--A medieval commentator on some Aristotelian educational themes, by J. W. Donohue.--God as sole cause of existence, by M. Holloway.--Knowledge, commitment, and the real, by R. O. Johann.--John Locke and sense realism, by H. R. Klocker.--The (...) being of nonbeing in Plato's Sophist, by Q. Lauer.--Ethics and verification, by R. McInerny.--Analogy and the fourth way, by J. J. O'Brien.--Love and being, by W. L. Rossner.--Complexity in human knowledge: its basis in form/matter composition, by E. L. Rousseau.--Toward a more dynamic understanding of substance and relation, by J. M. Somerville.--The origin of participant and of participated perfections in Proclus' Elements of theology, by L. Sweeney. (shrink)

_Finding Wisdom in East Asian Classics_ is an essential, all-access guide to the core texts of East Asian civilization and culture. Essays address frequently read, foundational texts in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, as well as early modern fictional classics and nonfiction works of the seventeenth century. Building strong links between these writings and the critical traditions of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism, this volume shows the vital role of the classics in the shaping of Asian history and in the (...) development of the humanities at large. Wm. Theodore de Bary focuses on texts that have survived for centuries, if not millennia, through avid questioning and contestation. Recognized as perennial reflections on life and society, these works represent diverse historical periods and cultures and include the _Analects of Confucius_, _Mencius_, _Laozi_, _Xunxi_, the _Lotus Sutra_, Tang poetry, the _Pillow Book_, _The Tale of Genji_, and the writings of Chikamatsu and Kaibara Ekken. Contributors explain the core and most commonly understood aspects of these works and how they operate within their traditions. They trace their reach and reinvention throughout history and their ongoing relevance in modern life. With fresh interpretations of familiar readings, these essays inspire renewed appreciation and examination. In the case of some classics open to multiple interpretations, de Bary chooses two complementary essays from different contributors. Expanding on debates concerning the challenges of teaching classics in the twenty-first century, several pieces speak to the value of Asia in the core curriculum. Indispensable for early scholarship on Asia and the evolution of global civilization, _Finding Wisdom in East Asian Classics_ helps one master the major texts of human thought. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes posited a social contract which legitimates sovereign authority. But what grounds, or could ground, such a contract? Through reflection on Oakeshott, and on Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, the paper argues for a so far unrecognised mode of human association: philic association. It briefly considers a possible expression of philic association in the history of English law, before making the case for programmes of mentoring as a policy both reflective and supportive of this mode. It ends by suggesting that the (...) existence of such a mode shows why Hobbes's social contract theory, however ingenious and influential it has proven to be, is neither sufficient nor necessary for its stated purpose. (shrink)

What is philosophy? Why does it matter? How have philosophy and its relation to religion and science changed from the ancient to the medieval and modern periods and beyond? What are the central philosophical ideas, from Socrates to Nietzsche? Reexamining Love of Wisdom addresses these questions. It offers a new perspective by organizing the material under the theme of philosophical desire and shows the timeless importance of philosophy understood as the love of wisdom. Flores provides an historical introduction (...) to philosophy suitable for college students that is a resource for more advanced students or scholars interested in the history and nature of philosophy. -- back cover. (shrink)

_Divine Love and Wisdom_ has been called the most profound work of the Enlightenment scientist and seer Emanuel Swedenborg. It demonstrates how God’s love, wisdom, and humanity are reflected in creation and in ourselves, and suggests that the act of Creation is not a mystery of the past, but a miracle ongoing in every instant of the present. Like a blueprint of things unseen, _Divine Love and Wisdom_ makes visible the hidden design of the universe, as well as the (...) qualities of its Architect. Its vivid depiction of the spiritual mechanism of the world has impressed thinkers such as William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry James Sr. This volume contains an introduction by Gregory R. Johnson that puts the work in the context of the history of philosophy. The New Century Edition of the Works of Emanuel Swedenborg is a modern-language, scholarly translation of Swedenborg’s theological works. The series’ easy-to-read style retains the dignity, variety, clarity, and gender-inclusive language of Swedenborg’s original Latin, bringing his thought to life. Introductions and annotations by eminent, international scholars place Swedenborg’s writings in their historical context and illuminate obscure references within the text, enabling readers to understand and trace Swedenborg’s influence as never before. (shrink)