I provide a mereological analysis of Zeno of Sidon’s objection that in Euclid’s Elements we need to supplement the principle that there are no common segments of straight lines and circumferences. The objection is based on the claim that such a principle is presupposed in the proof that the diameter cuts the circle in half. Against Zeno, Posidonius attempts to prove against Zeno the bisection of the circle without resorting to Zeno’s principle. I show that (...) Posidonius’ proof is flawed as it fails to account for the case in which one of the two circumferences cut by the diameter is a proper part of the other. When such a case is considered, then either the bisection of the circle is false or it presupposes Zeno’s principle, as claimed by Zeno. (shrink)

The study of post-Aristotelian philosophy is constantly confused by the perplexing way in which the names of philosophers recur. Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, is sufficiently well known not be confused with either Zeno the Eleatic or the later Stoic, Zeno of Tarsus, a disciple of Chrysippus; but when we come to less distinguished names the opportunity of error is greater. If two philosophers of the same name are prominent members of different schools, there ought to be (...) no obscurity, but in an age of eclecticism one school will sometimes adopt doctrines from another, and so make classification difficult. (shrink)

Philodemus of Gadara was a poet and Epicurean philosopher who, after leaving Gadara, studied in Athens under Zeno of Sidon before moving to Italy. Once in Italy, he lived in the area around the Bay of Naples, where he belonged to a circle of Epicureans that included Siro as well as the Roman poets Vergil, L. Varius Rufus, Quintilius Varus, and Plotius Tucca. His epigrams were preserved as part of the Greek Anthology, while his prose works were discovered (...) at the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, carbonized by the first pyroclastic surge of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E. He wrote on a wide range of topics, including epistemology, ethics, theology, aesthetics, logic and science, and the history of philosophy, but not physics. In his works, he presents himself as an entirely orthodox Epicurean. He does so by explicating the teachings of earlier Epicureans (especially those of Epicurus, Metrodorus, Hermarchus, and Polyaenus), defending the positions of his teacher Zeno of Sidon, arguing against fellow Epicureans whom he perceives to have strayed from orthodoxy, and advancing Epicurean positions against other schools like the Academics, Peripatetics, Stoics, Cynics, and Cyrenaics. (shrink)

The central thesis of this paper is that Epicurus held that swerves of the constituent atoms of agents' minds cause the agents' volitions from the bottom up. "De Rerum Natura" 2.216-93 is examined at length, and Lucretius is found to be making the following claims: both atoms and macroscopic bodies sometimes swerve as they fall, but so minimally that they are undetectable. Swerves are oblique deviations, not right-angled turns. Swerves must be posited to account both for cosmogonic collisions quite generally (...) and for every "free volition," including those of animals. All volitions are fresh starts of macroscopic motion, caused by that "something in our chests" which later philosophers would call 'the faculty of will.' Since nothing can come to be from nothing, volitions must be caused from the bottom up by swerves, fresh starts in the mind's atoms motions caused by the atoms' inherent swerviness. This is what Lucretius is saying, and what Epicurus had to say in order to defend both libertarianism and atomism. Modern scholars are wrong, then, in rejecting the interpretation of Guissani and Bailey, which was crudely stated, but substantively correct. The rival interpretations of Furley, Fowler, and Englert do not do justice to Epicurus' libertarianism, and that of Sedley does not do justice to his atomism, which entails universal bottom-up causation. Epicurus did not himself draw much attention to his positive doctrine of the swerve, preferring to emphasize the untenability of the deterministic alternative. The notoriety of the doctrine in Cicero's day is due primarily to Chrysippus, who insisted that swerves cannot occur, since they would be 'uncaused' motions, and secondarily to Carneades and Zeno of Sidon. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Storia dei filosofi: La stoà da Zenone a Panezio (PHerc. 1018), Edizione, traduzione e commentoDiskin ClayDorandi, Tiziano, ed. Filodemo Storia dei filosofi: La stoà da Zenone a Panezio (PHerc. 1018), Edizione, traduzione e commento. Leiden, New York, and Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1994. xvi 1 189 pp. Cloth, Gld. 110.00, $63 (U.S.) (Philosophia Antiqua, 60)The title of this edition of Philodemus is Storia dei filosofi. It translates a (...) more perplexing and tantalizing title in Greek. This is not preserved in the subscription to the Herculaneum papyrus edited here (PHerc. 1018). In the Catologo dei Papiri Ercolanesi (Bibliopolis: Naples 1979) the title of this treatise is given as [Filodümoy | Perç t©n ½p̄ Zünvnoq Stvik©n kaç ađrª | sevn ápŒntvn | q ]t [¼ ]x [oi..... ] | Sy [ntŒjevq t©n filos¿fvn | b¼bloq ]. This is approximately the title Agosto Traversa gave the work in his edition, Index Stoicorum Herculanensis (Genoa 1952). The reader will appreciate how ambitious Traversa’s supplements are. The inspiration for his title comes from the title Domenico Comparetti gave its companion work, PHerc. 1021 (1164), Filodümoy S′ntajiq [End Page 146] filos¿fvn. Comparetti’s inspiration was the notice in Diogenes Laertius, who cites the tenth book of Philodemus’ ï t©n filos¿fvn s′ntajiq (10.3). This second history of a philosophical school has long been known under the title that S. Mekler chose for it at the beginning of this century, Academicorum Philosophorum Index Herculanensis (Berlin 1902). The fact is that the word s′ntajiq occurs in neither of Philodemus’ companion treatises on the history of the Academic and Stoic philosophers.In both treatises and in PHerc. 1021 especially, Philodemus is generous with dates. He writes the nearly parallel histories of these schools from their foundation by Plato and Zeno of Citium down to his own day. Philodemus dates are not certain. Ca. 110–40 b.c.e. are the dates commonly given. Only a few lines are missing from the protected innermost midollo of PHerc. 1021, and the text of the last columns makes it clear that Philodemus has taken his history of the Academy down to his own day, not that of his master in Athens, Zeno of Sidon. He speaks of Menekrates of Mytilene (a student of Antiochus of Ascalon) as resident in Sicily “until recently” (24, 8–11) and of students of Antiochus who are “our acquaintances” (35, 5–8). The last words of the papyrus are: “[of the sects and successions beginning with Eucleides and those beginning with Plato, and the other sects and successions that came after these a collection....” The word which comes closest to giving us a title for these histories of Philodemus is syna [gvgü (col. 36, 19). If these two treatises belong to the work entitled “The Ordering of the Philosophers” it is plain that Philodemus’ inspiration is Apollodoros of Athens’ vast Xronikî s′ntajiq, which Philodemus made great use of in his Academicorum Historia and which he uses sparingly in his Stoicorum Historia. (He is named as Apollodoros “the man of letters”—¸ grammatik¿q —at the end of Philodemus’ Stoicorum Historia, col. 69. 4–5.)In lack of a title in the subscription to PHerc. 1018, Dorandi’s Storia dei filosofi is as good description as any. Philodemus is interested in the succession, lives, and characters of the Stoics whose history he writes—not their philosophy. A review of Dorandi’s Stoicorum Historia should offer a brief review of the companion edition of Philodemus’ history of the Academic philosophers that preceded it, for it seems clear from the end of PHerc. 1021 that Philodemus’ history of the Academic philosophers came first. Dorandi published Filodemo · Storia dei filosofi: Platone e l’Academia (PHerc. 1021 e 164) as volume 12 of Marcello Gigante’s La Scuola di Epicuro (Bibliopolis: Naples, 1991). The format of both volumes is strikingly similar: both contain introductions to Philodemus as a historian, first of the Academy and then of the Stoa; both give a survey of Philodemus’ sources in writing his histories. In both volumes a description of the papyri edited precedes Dorandi’s scrupulous and exacting editions of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Sextus Empiricus: Against the Grammarians (Adversus Mathematicos I)George A. KennedyD[avid] L. Blank, trans. Sextus Empiricus: Against the Grammarians (Adversus Mathematicos I). With an introduction and commentary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. lvi + 436 pp. Cloth, $105. (Clarendon Later Ancient Philosophers).Sextus was a Greek physician whose "empirical" medical studies seem to have led him to an enthusiastic commitment to what he calls "Pyrrhonian" skepticism, though it perhaps has rather (...) little debt to Pyrrho, who lived in the fourth century B.C. When and where Sextus himself lived and worked is unknown: certainly during the time of the Roman Empire, probably in the second, possibly in the third century, maybe in Alexandria, or Rome, or elsewhere. His extensive writings are a major source for the skeptical tradition in ancient philosophy--a kind of anti-foundationalism that has some appeal in our own age--but their importance goes beyond that, since Sextus explicates in detail the dogmas and theories he seeks to counteract. Against the Grammarians, as Blank notes, is second only to the textbook attributed to Dionysius Thrax for information on the teaching of grammar and is important for knowledge of Epicureanism as well.Blank's introduction, translation (the Greek text is not included), and line-by-line commentary (the first ever published) is a work of great learning and, I would think, of great patience. The volume as a whole greatly facilitates understanding of Sextus, his sources, and the traditions to which he subscribed or which he resisted. Blank has adopted "expertise" as a translation for the somewhat troublesome word techne, and "expert" for technites. This seems a reasonable rendering of Sextus' usage. What he attacks is not grammar (or, in subsequent books, rhetoric and the other arts) as practiced in ordinary life, but the claims to expert, scientific knowledge on the part of doctrinaire teachers of the arts, as well as some physicians and philosophers.This leads us, however, to a general problem in Sextus' writings. At the beginning of Against the Grammarians (chapters 5-7) (and elsewhere) he claims to have discovered difficult problems in the claims of specialists in philosophy and the arts which lead him to suspension of judgment. He will attempt "without any spirit of competitiveness to select and put the effective arguments against the liberal studies." Implicitly, an equal amount might be said in their defense. In what follows, however, he repeatedly claims to have "demolished" dogmas, leading to what has been called "negative dogmatism," the dogmatic denial of dogma. Blank devotes a section of his introduction to this problem, concluding that Sextus' intent throughout is in fact "equipollence." That is probably what Sextus himself would claim. Assuming it is, Sextus must, however, be charged with the fault of expressing himself poorly, for he repeatedly exults at his conclusive refutations of the claims of others.Throughout the work Blank strives, often with considerable success, to provide a sympathetic explanation and logical justification for Sextus' arguments, [End Page 166] many of which may initially strike a reader as blatant sophistries. Sextus was no fool, but he had blind spots and obsessions--infinite regress being one--and he often fails to take into account lines of argument obvious to a modern reader. Blank's objectivity does not extend to blanket approval of all of Sextus' arguments; indeed, he criticizes and even rejects the validity of arguments on a number of occasions. His treatment can be described as generally even-handed, but giving his author the benefit of the doubt more often than I would be inclined to do.Blank's extended introduction considers what is known about Sextus' life and works; the history of attacks on the arts, which go back to the fifth century b.c.; evidence for empiricist attacks on grammar; Against the Grammarians in relation to the other writings of Sextus; and negative dogmatism; then a few concluding remarks on the translation. Both here and in the commentary he convincingly demonstrates that Sextus' primary source is a lost Epicurean treatise--something like the writings of Zeno of Sidon, the teacher of Philodemus, though Blank stops short of claiming Zeno as the source. This Epicurean work contained a detailed attack... (shrink)

The early Stoics: Zeno of Citium. Persaeus of Citium. Cleanthes of Assos. Chrysippus of Soli. Aratus of Soli. Antipater of Tarsus. Boëthus of Sidon.--Epicurus.--The school of Aristotle: the Peripatetics (Theophrastus).--The Sceptics.--Deification of kings and emperors.--Sarapis.--The historians: Polybius. Diodorus of Sicily.--Posidonius.--Popular religion.--Philo of Alexandria.--The Stoics of the Roman Empire: Musonius Rufus. Cornutus. Epictetus. Dio (Chrysostom) of Prusa. Marcus Aurelius.--Second-century Platonists: Plutarch. Maximus of Tyre. Numenius.--Second-century believers: Pausanias. Aelius Aristides.--Second-century scepticism (Lucian of Samosata).--The hermetic writings.--Gnosticism (Valentius).--Neoplatonism: Plotinus. Porphyry. Iamblichus. Christian (...) criticism.--The last word. (shrink)

This work shows first that the attribution of consciousness to certain advanced organisms consists in imagining being those things, and, second, that such an attribution is a necesary condition of locating oneself in the world. Thus the problems of subjectivity and other minds appear to be inseparably tied. The possibility of such a representation, and the manner of achieving it, are examined in detail.

This book is a major attempt to reconcile the empirical basis of linguistic science with the a priori nature of philosophical reasoning. Its purpose is to show how the methods and findings of linguistic science, especially of transformational grammar, can be used to cast light upon central problems of analytic philosophy. After dealing with recent objections to the use of linguistic techniques in philosophy, the author shows, with great force and clarity, how these techniques can be applied to such problems (...) as the analysis of singular terms, the concepts of fact, event, and causality, and the meaning of the word "good.". (shrink)

The notion of possible worlds — once an abstruse offspring of Leibnizian theology — seems to enjoy a new lease on life in the hands of contemporary modal logicians and semanticists. The phrase “possible world” crops up with increasing frequency, and, as it is the case with many philosophical catchwords, its very familarity creates a presumption of understanding. Yet, although some related problems, particularly the one concerning cross-world identification of individuals, have received some critical scrutiny, the very idea of possible (...) worlds has been borrowed from Leibniz, and its intelligibility taken for granted even without its theological roots.My misgivings about this notion are not due to a prejudice against the concept of the possible itself: far from “passing” away, it remains a fundamental and irreplaceable element of human thought. (shrink)

After a brief outline of the book, Criticism is offered on the following points. 1) whether or not the verb 'say' is a general performative? 2) can belief-Objects be represented adverbially? 3) does ziff succeed in refuting grice's theory of meaning? 4) ziff's omission of the illocutionary domain.

This work presents an operational and geometric approach to logic. It starts from the multilinear elective decomposition of binary logical functions in the original form introduced by George Boole. A justification on historical grounds is presented bridging Boole’s theory and the use of his arithmetical logical functions with the axioms of Boolean algebra using sets and quantum logic. It is shown that this algebraic polynomial formulation can be naturally extended to operators in finite vector spaces. Logical operators will appear as (...) commuting projection operators and the truth values, which take the binary values \, are the respective eigenvalues. In this view the solution of a logical proposition resulting from the operation on a combination of arguments will appear as a selection where the outcome can only be one of the eigenvalues. In this way propositional logic can be formalized in linear algebra by using elective developments which correspond here to combinations of tensored elementary projection operators. The original and principal motivation of this work is for applications in the new field of quantum information, differences are outlined with more traditional quantum logic approaches. (shrink)

Originally published in 1936, this book presents the ancient Greek text of the paraphrases and quotations of Zeno's philosophical arguments, together with a facing-page English translation and editorial commentary. Detailed notes are incorporated throughout and a bibliography is also included. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Zeno and ancient philosophy.

Zeno of Elea, despite being among the most important of the Pre-Socratic philosophers, is frequently overlooked by philosophers and scientists alike in modern times. Zeno of Elea’s arguments on have not only been an impetus for the most important scientific and mathematical theories in human history, his arguments still serve as a basis for modern problems and theoretical speculations. This is a study of his arguments on motion, the purpose they have served in the history of science, and (...) modern applications of Zeno of Elea’s arguments on motion. (shrink)

In this note we present the recent critical edition (with commentary and translation) of Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 1 published by the Fuentes Patrísticas collection at number 37. We present its distinctive features and its assets as a very useful tool for studies on Irenaeus and gnosticism. We hope, it will complement for interested scholars the previous edition of SCh 263-264.

This article proposes an interpretation of the use of the lemma ὁ κανὼν τὴς ἀληϑείας – regula veritatis in Irenaeus’ Adversus haereses. It is commonly interpreted as a compendium of the main items of Christian faith or as indicating the wholeness of the faith. These interpretations focuse themselves in terms of the “contents” of faith. We propose to understand it in a more formal way, as a lemma that indicates the formal structure of Christian truth, the specific shape that keeps (...) the objects of faith joined together. (shrink)

The 86 verses of Dorotheus printed at the end of Koechly's Manetho, 33 of which had already been published by Salmasius in his exercitationes Plinianae or his diatribae de annis climactericis, were edited by Iriarte from a scrap of manuscript at Madrid, into which they had been copied, as we now know, from the first book of the astrological treatise of Hephaestion of Thebes, who took Dorotheus for his chief authority. To these 86 verses nearly 300 more, by far the (...) most of which are preserved in the second and third books, still unpublished, of Hephaestion's work, have now been added, in the catalogus codicum astrologorum Graecorum vol. vi pp. 67 and 91–113, by Mr W. Kroll, the best editor they could have found ; a scholar who combines critical talent, knowledge of Greek, and knowledge of astrology, more happily than any of his associates, and who has emended much of the very corrupt text with conspicuous ability and success. A good many additional corrections, chiefly grammatical and metrical, have been made by Mr Ludwich in the Rheinisches Museum for 1904, pp. 42–54. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:NEWMAN'S PSYCHOLOGICAL DISCOVERY: THE ILLATIVE SENSE (V. Continued) 15. The Universals. A long and vehement dispute once raged about the reality of universals. Are they only mental creations, forged by the human brain, without any reality outside them, or have they some independent existence apart from their mental reality? Anyhow, there was an apparent contradiction between die universal character of our ideas and the individual character of concrete things. (...) The Scholastics solved this problem by drawing clear distinctions. An idea is an abstraction; as soon as it becomes applicable to a number of objects or things in the same sense, it is a universal idea. The "direct universal" (universale directum seu metaphysicum) as such has no existence apart from our minds, because an existing thing is always bound up with concrete, determining, individualizing notes, and it is these very circumstances or accidents which are ignored by the mind as it strips the thing of its individual characteristics. When the mind reflects on this "direct universal," i.e., on the abstract essence of the thing, it sees that this is to be found in many more things and that it is identical in all those things, and in this way the "reflex or logical universal" is formed (universale reflexum seu logicum). This same essence or quiddity is not really different from the thing itself, but the mind makes abstraction of all accidents, and this foundation makes it possible to apply this idea in die same sense to all other beings of the same kind, whether they are actually existing or not. In other words the universal as a universal has only reality in the mind but it has a foundation or a ground in the thing itself. Newman was not so well acquainted with Scholasticism that he knew and mastered the solution of the problem. As a matter of fact he approached it from quite another angle. Hence when scholastically trained minds read some of his statements on universals, they may feel shocked. They sound very curious, they seem incon418 DR. ZENO, O.F.M. CAP.419 sistent with each other, they apparenüy imply a negation of the objective reality of universals. This makes it necessary to compare the texts and to explain his meaning. a. Newman Inconsistent. We should never lose sight of the fact that Newman had no intention at all to enter the province of philosophy in the restricted sense of the word. "I am only contemplating the mind as it moves in fact, by whatever hidden mechanism,"1 that is what could be put as a heading to every page of the Grammar of Assent. And when he virtually deals with metaphysics, he wants us to consider his statements as hypotheses, or as propositions stated only by the way, and in this department he always wishes "to speak under correction." This explains how he could refer to the universale metaphy sicum and the universale directum in a very correct way without realizing he was teaching Scholastic doctrine. As far as I know, it is Professor Walgrave who has first drawn attention to this fact,2 when he dealt with Newman's alleged conceptualism. Newman states that "even one act of cruelty, ingratitude, generosity or justice reveals to us at once intensive the immutable distinction between those qualities and their contraries; that is, in that particular instance and pro bac vice."3 The same holds for the opposites: right and wrong, true and false, just and unjust, beautiful and deformed.4 In one experience, therefore, he sees a thing as an immutable, absolute quiddity, which objectively and in the same sense belongs to all possible things of the same kind, although the mind does not yet explicidy confirm this universal applicability. The contemplated quality remains limited to the particular case; but in its absoluteness it is stripped of all individual, changeable and concrete characteristics. This is the metaphysical universal of the Scholastics. But Newman also mentions the logical universal when he says: "As we form our notion of whiteness from the actual sight of snow, a lily or a cloud, so, after experiencing the sentiment of approbation which arises in us on the sight of certain... (shrink)

1. Goethe, the greatest poet of his age, has spent a great deal of effort in composing a treatise on color. He was in his fifties, and Napoleon was roaming about Germany. It was a time when, as he puts it, “a quiet, collected state of mind was out of the question”. Yet he persisted, inspired by the importance of the topic ), and goaded on by what he perceived to be glaring inadequacies in the prevailing theories offered by Newton (...) and his successors. (shrink)

A few weeks ago I received a copy of the PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES, containing a review of my book John Henry Newman, Our Way to Certitude, written by Fr. Boekraad. It was very unfavourable so that anybody reading it is sure to make up his mind never to buy the book.

The influence of St. Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises on Descartes’ work, including the Meditations, has been recognized and discussed by many historians. I just mention a few fairly recent and easily accessible instances. In The Metaphysics of Descartes, J. L. Beck suggests that the literary form of the Meditations is most likely due to the Ignatian meditations to which Descartes had been exposed during his training at the Jesuit college of LaFlèche. Arthur Thomson in ‘Ignace de Loyola et Descartes’ (...) traces some elements in Descartes’ method and psychology to Ignatian sources, mainly focusing on the Discourse. (shrink)

The Empire of Chance tells how quantitative ideas of chance transformed the natural and social sciences, as well as daily life over the last three centuries. A continuous narrative connects the earliest application of probability and statistics in gambling and insurance to the most recent forays into law, medicine, polling and baseball. Separate chapters explore the theoretical and methodological impact in biology, physics and psychology. Themes recur - determinism, inference, causality, free will, evidence, the shifting meaning of probability - but (...) in dramatically different disciplinary and historical contexts. In contrast to the literature on the mathematical development of probability and statistics, this book centres on how these technical innovations remade our conceptions of nature, mind and society. Written by an interdisciplinary team of historians and philosophers, this readable, lucid account keeps technical material to an absolute minimum. It is aimed not only at specialists in the history and philosophy of science, but also at the general reader and scholars in other disciplines. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Beyond Ratzinger's Republic:Communio's Postliberal TurnSam Zeno Conedera S.J. and Vincent L. Strand S.J.Is the political future of the West a postliberal one? For the past decade, numerous prominent thinkers in America and Europe have been debating this question. Matters that not long ago were merely of historical interest, such as Pope Gelasius I's understanding of the relation between sacral authority and royal power, Thomas Aquinas's thought on monarchy (...) and Robert Bellarmine's theory of the pope's indirect authority in temporal matters are now increasingly studied for their potential answers to contemporary political questions. This development, which would have been nearly unimaginable just a decade earlier, unsurprisingly has been led by Catholics. We say "unsurprisingly" in view of the long pre-modern tradition of Catholic political thought, as well as the Church's long struggle against liberalism during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of the current postliberal writers explicitly connect themselves to both of these aspects by using the term "integralist" to describe their position.1 [End Page 889]This "new integralism" represents a radical departure from the mainstream of Catholic political discourse of the last half century, which has largely sought rapprochement with Western liberalism. A group of writers, led by John Courtney Murray, George Weigel, Michael Novak, and Robert George, have held that the American constitutional order is rooted in the natural law tradition, and therefore is basically friendly to Catholic political thought. The Church's role in American life, they say, is upholding the natural law as a public moral philosophy, while embracing the non-establishment clause of the First Amendment as a matter of principle, in accordance with the teachings of the Second Vatican Council. This "Whig Thomism," which for decades represented the predominant outlook of conservative American Catholics, must now face the challenge of a different sort of Thomism represented by the integralists.2While the engagement between Whig Thomists and integralists has received most of the attention from scholars and journalists alike, another postliberal option has emerged in recent years. Its source is a group of Catholic thinkers associated with the Communio theological movement. Their political vision, which has no single name or label, has a complex and subtle relationship with the thought of earlier Communio writers, most of whom shared the Whig Thomist desire for reconciliation with Western liberalism. [End Page 890] The appearance of a Communio postliberalism therefore represents a significant development within this intellectual tradition. The most important representative of the earlier Communio perspective on political questions is Joseph Ratzinger / Pope Benedict XVI, who has recently been lauded as the "most important Catholic thinker of the twentieth century" on matters at the intersection of theology and politics.3In an article titled "Ratzinger's Republic" that appeared in these pages in 2020, we identified a significant tension in his thought about the Church's contribution to political life.4 Exploring Ratzinger's writings on natural law, we demonstrated that two currents are present. In accord with his fundamental theological commitments about nature and grace and about faith and reason, Ratzinger often questioned the effectiveness of arguments from natural law. He claimed that, since reason is historically conditioned, and therefore in the current order marked by sin, reason needs grace and faith to function properly. Yet, on other occasions, Ratzinger strongly endorsed arguments from natural law, highlighting its role as the foundation of a just democratic political order. We traced this ambivalence about natural law back to a dilemma at the heart of Ratzinger's political thought. On the one hand, in accord with his thinking about the relations of nature and grace and faith and reason, Ratzinger argued that the state needs the Church to supply moral values that the state cannot furnish on its own. On the other hand, he believed it belongs to the very nature of the Church to be separate from the state, and he endorsed nonconfessional, religiously pluralistic states.5 In light of these two commitments, Ratzinger argued that the contribution Christians are to make to the state is to supply moral values that were discerned under the influence of grace and divine revelation but... (shrink)

Contemporary perspectives on delusions offer valuable neuropsychiatric, psychoanalytic, and philosophical explanations of the formation and persistence of delusional phenomena. However, two problems arise. Firstly, these different perspectives offer us an explanation “from the outside”. They pay little attention to the actual personal experiences, and implicitly assume their incomprehensibility. This implicates a questionable validity. Secondly, these perspectives fail to account for two complex phenomena that are inherent to certain delusions, namely double book-keeping and the primary delusional experience. The purpose of this (...) article is to address both problems, by offering an understanding “from the inside”. Our phenomenological approach is a form of “radical empathy”, and crosses the Jaspersian limits of understanding. It compares delusional experiences with variations of reality experience in everyday life, and makes use of the structure of imagination. Six factors influencing the experience of reality are discussed and illustrated by clinical and non-clinical examples. These factors are: continuity, materiality and resistance, multiplicity of sensations and perceptions, intensity, the sense of authorship, and the complex role of intersubjectivity. I suggest that experiences of hypo- and hyperreality are not restricted to pathology, but have their place in everyday life as well. Delusional phenomena can be better understood by investigating the interplay of these six factors. With this framework, the two complex phenomena consequently prove to be better understandable to us. Our approach remains within the phenomenal experience and might thereby contribute to the validity of psychopathology. (shrink)

If a speaker says something in a language and one of the listeners knows L but another does not, then, normally, A will understand what S said but B will not. What is it, exactly, that A , but not B , succeeds in doing in this case, and how to account for the difference? This is a fundamental problem, which the philosophy of language should be able to solve, yet, to my knowledge, has not done so to date.

Over the past years, the intersubjective dimension of psychotic disorders, including schizophrenia, has gained increasing phenomenological attention. Psychopathologists and philosophers have developed ideas on how the social aspects of psychotic symptoms and experiences could be understood, in particular in their relation to the ipseity disturbance model, namely the idea that schizophrenia is essentially a disorder of the minimal self. Although the exact characteristics of the ipseity disorder hypothesis can differ from author to author, emphasizing certain phenomenological aspects like temporality or (...) embodiment... (shrink)

Those who disturb the hornets’ nest better be thick skinned. Keeping that in mind, thus far I kept my silence in the face of the adverse reactions my essay “On What One Knows” has provoked in the literature. As to the merits of the various objections, moreover, I trusted the judgement of the philosophical community to sort them out, and either recognize their futility, or make the necessary adjustments in my arguments without the need to reject the conclusions.In the case (...) of Dunn and Suter, however, I decided to make an exception. The reason is that they indeed succeeded in pointing out certain difficulties in my position, which are not due to misunderstandings, conflicting linguistic intuitions, or other superficial sources. And, second, meeting their objections gives me the opportunity of proposing a significant refinement of my theory, the need for which I increasingly felt in the meanwhile myself. (shrink)

In this paper I give a Bayesian criterion for when an experiment is a test of the theory of the apparatus, rather than a test of the theory of the phenomena, and describe strategies used to ensure that tests of the theory of the phenomena are possible. I extend this framework to low dose electron microscopy which has a stochastic instrument theory and which provides an exception to a thesis by Robert Ackermann on the independence between theory and instrumentation.

Randomization is a generally accepted principle of sound experimental design and common practice among working scientists. But Bayesian statisticians reject it, most often because of decision theoretic argument against randomization. I trace it back to Abraham Wald's Theory of Inductive Behavior and argue that Bayesians should concur with Ronald Fisher 's criticism of Wald's analysis of randomization. The paper ends with a Bayesian argument in favor of randomization: randomization can lead to an increase in expected utility.

For more than 20 years now, the phenomenological approach to schizophrenia has developed a strong and influential hypothesis on the basic alterations of this disorder. Schizophrenia, it is claimed, is a disorder of subjectivity, and more specifically, a disorder of the minimal self. This ‘minimal self’ aims to describe the most basic or core self, which is considered to be foundational for every other kind of self. It is a form of minimal self-awareness that precedes every explicit or reflective self-awareness. (...) Based on this model, a semistructured interview has... (shrink)

Contemporary readers of Descartes can hardly fail to notice that the author uses the word pensée, or cogitatio, in a much broader sense than French speakers use pensée nowadays, or we use the closest English word, thought. He consistently maintains that feelings, sensations, as well as the products of one's fancy, are one and all modes of thought.Yet, clearly, according to the normal use of the word, sensations of light, of sound, of hunger, and so forth, are not regarded as (...) part of one's thinking, nor do we so regard the spontaneous flight of the imagination one might experience in daydreams or real dreams, or while thinking about unrelated matters. Some of these sensations, notably aches, pains, pangs of hunger, blinding light, and strong noise, are not only not counted among our thoughts, but they are apt to interfere with our thinking, and, in extreme cases, might stop it altogether. In a similar way, the lascivious play of St. Antony's imagination did not embellish his meditations on the holy mysteries; he had to overcome or ignore it to be able to pursue the train of his thought. (shrink)

The article presents the historical path of the exegesis of Is 53:8 from the pre-Nicene authors to the fourth-century Trinitarian controversy. It dwells particularly on the epistemological use of the verse in the Trinitarian sphere: it notes the argumentative structure coined around it by Irenaeus of Lyons against Valentinian speculations, and considers its subsequent history of effects on various fronts of the Trinitarian controversy.