The Lysis is one of Plato's most engaging but also puzzling dialogues; it has often been regarded, in the modern period, as a philosophical failure. The full philosophical and literary exploration of the dialogue illustrates how it in fact provides a systematic and coherent, if incomplete, account of a special theory about, and special explanation of, human desire and action. Furthermore, it shows how that theory and explanation are fundamental to a whole range of other Platonic dialogues and indeed to (...) the understanding of the corpus as a whole. Part One offers an analysis of, or running commentary on, the dialogue. In Part Two Professors Penner and Rowe examine the philosophical and methodological implications of the argument uncovered by the analysis. The whole is rounded off by an epilogue of the relation between the Lysis and some other Platonic texts. (shrink)

In this stunning reappraisal of the celebrated case of Daniel Paul Schreber, Lothane takes the reader on a richly documented tour of all the ingredients that made Schreber's illness a unique psychiatric event. Building outward from a close examination of Schreber's troubled relationship to his two psychiatrists, Flechsig and Weber, Lothane elaborates the personal, familial, and cultural contexts of Schreber's illness. Incorporating extensive new archival and bibliographic research, and providing extensive accounts of the personalities and theories of Schreber's two psychiatrists, (...) Paul Flechsig and Guido Weber, Zvi Lothane offers a stunning reappraisal of the Schreber case that overturns virtually all previous opinion. Lothane examines both the man and his milieu in a way that allows the reader fresh access not only to the tragedy of Schreber's illness but also to his heroic, if doomed, attempts to come to terms with his condition through writing. In the process, he persuasively demonstrates that important issues of both psychiatric diagnosis and psychoanalytic interpretation have heretofore been compromised by a failure to pay sufficient attention to Schreber's interpersonal, cultural, and historical contexts. (shrink)

We argue that a conflict between two conceptions of “quantity of matter” employed in a corollary to proposition 6 of Book III of the Principia illustrates a deeper conflict between Newton’s view of the nature of extended bodies and the concept of mass appropriate for the theoretical framework of the Principia. We trace Newton’s failure to recognize the conflict to the fact that he allowed for the justification of natural philosophical claims by two types of a posteriori, empiricist methodologies. Newton's (...) thoughts on these methodologies demonstrate that his natural philosophy continued to develop after the publication of the first edition of Principia and that De Grav should be understood as an early, and not necessarily representative, text. (shrink)

Newton’s Regulae philosophandi—the rules for reasoning in natural philosophy—are maxims of causal reasoning and induction. This essay reviews their significance for Newton’s method of inquiry, as well as their application to particular propositions within the Principia. Two main claims emerge. First, the rules are not only interrelated, they defend various facets of the same core idea: that nature is simple and orderly by divine decree, and that, consequently, human beings can be justified in inferring universal causes from limited phenomena, if (...) only fallibly. Second, the rules make substantive ontological assumptions on which Newton’s argument in the Principia relies. (shrink)

Newton began his Principia with three Axiomata sive Leges Motus. We offer an interpretation of Newton’s dual label and investigate two tensions inherent in his account of laws. The first arises from the juxtaposition of Newton’s confidence in the certainty of his laws and his commitment to their variability and contingency. The second arises because Newton ascribes fundamental status both to the laws and to the bodies and forces they govern. We argue the first is resolvable, but the second is (...) not. However, the second tension shows that Newton conceives laws as formal causes of bodies and forces. This neo-Aristotelian conception goes missing in Kantian accounts of laws, as well as accounts that stress laws’ grounding in powers and capacities. (shrink)

Francisco Suárez Sometimes called the "Eminent Doctor" after Paul V’s designation of him as doctor eximius et pius, Francisco Suárez was the leading theological and philosophical light of Spain’s Golden Age, alongside such cultural icons as Miguel de Cervantes, Tomás Luis de Victoria, and El Greco. Although initially rejected on grounds of deficient health … Continue reading Suárez, Francisco →.

Volume 10, Issue 2, June 2019, Page 300-312.

ABSTRACTMost legal theorists and philosophers of law who work in the analytic tradition believe that intellectual progress in their fields necessarily means going ‘deeper’: coming up with more nuan...

New vaccines to prevent COVID-19 and malaria underscore the importance of scientific advances to promote public health globally. How is credit for such scientific discoveries attributed, and who benefits? The complex narrative of Amitav Ghosh’s _The Calcutta Chromosome_, both historical and speculative, demonstrates how medicine has come to value particular kinds of advances over others, prompting readers to question who controls access to resources and at what cost to global populations. In Ghosh’s imagined world, scientific discovery is evaluated and rewarded—and (...) ultimately deemed necessary—for its ability to serve communal, public health needs. (shrink)

Property, or property rights, remains one of the most central elements in moral, legal, and political thought. It figures centrally in the work of figures as various as Grotius, Locke, Hume, Smith, Hegel and Kant. This collection of essays brings fresh perspective on property theory, from both legal and political theoretical perspectives, and is essential reading for anyone interested in the nature of property. Edited by two of the world's leading theorists of property, James Penner and Michael Otsuka, this (...) volume brings together essays which consider, amongst other topics, property and public law, the importance of legal forms in property theory, whether use or exclusion are most essential to our understanding of property, distributive justice, Lockean and Grotian theories, the common ownership of the Earth, and Confucian ideas of property. (shrink)

For many species that reproduce sexually, how sex is expressed at different points across lifespan is highly contingent and dependent on various environmental factors. For example, in many species of fish, environmental cues can trigger a natural process of sex transition where a female transitions to male. For many species of turtle, incubation temperature influences the likelihood that turtle eggs will hatch males or females. What is the case for Homo sapiens? Is human sex expression influenced by contingent environmental factors (...) like we see in fish and turtles, with whom we share common ancestry and DNA? Our paper explores the current biological science of sex determination and how it applies to philosophical and theological accounts of the human person. We argue that while human sex determination is not susceptible to environmental cues to the same degree we see in other species, there is sufficient variability among the pathways of human sex development to complicate simplistic biological categories of male and female. (shrink)

This study is about the interaction of scientific expertise and local knowledge in the context of a contested issue: the quality and quantity of safe drinking water available to some residents in one Canadian community. The authors articulate the boundary work in which scientific and technological expertise and discourse are played out against local knowledge and water needs to prevent the construction of a water main extension that would provide a group of residents with the same water that others in (...) the community already access. The authors draw on an extensive database constructed during a three-year ethnographic study of one community; the data base includes the transcript of a public meeting, newspaper clippings, interviews, and communications between residents and town council. The authors show not only that scientists and residents differ in their assessment of water quality and quantity but also that there is a penchant for undercutting residents in their attempts to make themselves heard in the political process. (shrink)

This paper deals with decision makers who choose among information systems. It shows that the properties of Schur convexity and of quasi-convexity are equivalent, even when general preferences are considered. Since Schur convexity is closely related to having a willingness to accept information and since quasi-convexity is closely related to having a preference for early resolution of the uncertainty about which information system prevails, then it follows that the equivalence implies that decision makers prefer more information to less if, and (...) only if, they prefer early resolution of uncertainty to later resolution. (shrink)

All families are political, each in its own way. Nevertheless, the diversity of family politics has not negated, by and large, patriarchal influence on the Political Family. This Article introduces the Political Family as a key concept in a scholarly and activist movement in family law studies which I identify as Critical Family Law. In Part I a reminder is offered that “alternative families” have existed since the dawn of history. However, I argue that despite constant changes in the configuration (...) of the family, for the most part all family forms have adhered to patriarchy. Part II offers a brief overview of some of the central themes in contemporary critical study of family law. I show how dichotomies such as private/public and intervention/autonomy have lain at the basis of the definition of the family since antiquity, constantly shifting the very meaning of the family across time, cultures and legal traditions, but rarely challenging its patriarchal ideology. Such challenges necessitate a critical look at the language of rights and obligations within the family, in acknowledgment that this very discourse is already saturated with ideology and biased preconceptions. Under the umbrella of “Critical Family Law,” I explore the potential for promoting such a shift, discussing articles in this issue. In memory of Paula Ettelbrick, 1955-2011. (shrink)

Accounts of Hobbes’s ‘system’ of sciences oscillate between two extremes. On one extreme, the system is portrayed as wholly axiomtic-deductive, with statecraft being deduced in an unbroken chain from the principles of logic and first philosophy. On the other, it is portrayed as rife with conceptual cracks and fissures, with Hobbes’s statements about its deductive structure amounting to mere window-dressing. This paper argues that a middle way is found by conceiving of Hobbes’s _Elements of Philosophy_ on the model of a (...) mixed-mathematical science, not the model provided by Euclid’s _Elements of Geometry_. I suggest that Hobbes is a test case for understanding early-modern system-construction more generally, as inspired by the structure of the applied mathematical sciences. This approach has the additional virtue of bolstering, in a novel way, the thesis that the transformation of philosophy in the long seventeenth century was heavily indebted to mathematics, a thesis that has increasingly come under attack in recent years. (shrink)

Despite the importance of Suárez’s defense of the freedom of the will at the threshold of early modern philosophy, his account has received scant recent attention. This paper aims partially to redress that neglect. Suárez’s position can be understood as a balancing act between desiring to attribute libertarian freedom to agents and desiring to maintain the will’s status as a rational appetite. Hence, he rejects an intellectualism that says that choices are necessitated by the intellect’s judgements (since he does not (...) think that the judgements themselves can be directly free), but affirms that only what is judged good can be chosen. (shrink)

The introduction considers the state of scholarship on empiricism as a philosophical and historical category, particularly as it pertains to experimental philosophy. It concludes that empiricism properly understood is a rich category encompassing epistemic, semantic, methodological, experimental, and moral elements. Its richness makes it a suitable lens through which to account for actual historical complexity. The introduction relates the category to the work of Sir Isaac Newton, who influenced all of empiricism’s elements.

Teaching Newtonian physics involves the replacement of students’ ideas about physical situations with precise concepts appropriate for mathematical applications. This paper focuses on the concepts of ‘matter’ and ‘mass’. We suggest that students, like some pre-Newtonian scientists we examine, use these terms in a way that conflicts with their Newtonian meaning. Specifically, ‘matter’ and ‘mass’ indicate to them the sorts of things that are tangible, bulky, and take up space. In Newtonian mechanics, however, the terms are defined by Newton’s Second (...) Law: ‘mass’ is simply a measure of the acceleration generated by an impressed force. We examine the relationship between these conceptions as it was discussed by Newton and his editor, Roger Cotes, when analyzing a series of pendulum experiments. We suggest that these experiments, as well as more sophisticated computer simulations, can be used in the classroom to sufficiently differentiate the colloquial and precise meaning of these terms. (shrink)

Isaac Newton is best known as a mathematician and physicist. He invented the calculus, discovered universal gravitation and made significant advances in theoretical and experimental optics. His master-work on gravitation, the Principia, is often hailed as the crowning achievement of the scientific revolution. His significance for philosophers, however, extends beyond the philosophical implications of his scientific discoveries. Newton was an able and subtle philosopher, working at a time when science was not yet recognized as an activity distinct from philosophy. He (...) engaged with the work of Rene Descartes and G.W. Leibniz, and showed sensitivity to the work of John Locke, Francis Bacon, Pierre Gassendi and Henry More, to name just a few. In his time, Newton was not perceived as a scientific outsider, but as an active and knowledgeable participant in philosophical debates.... (shrink)

Evolution, mathematics, and the evolution of mathematics -- Mathematics and the Greeks' view of the world -- Mathematics and the view of the world in early modern times -- Mathematics and the modern view of the world -- The mathematics of randomness -- The mathematics of human behavior -- computations and computers -- Is there really no doubt? -- The nature of research in mathematics -- Why is teaching and learning mathematics so hard?

By building upon Raz's analysis of the spectrum of voluntary obligations, the author produces a typology of agreements, and then assesses the extent to which these different kinds of agreements underpin the common law of contract. While recognizing that the law of contract purports to deal with a broad range of voluntarily undertaken obligations, the typology of agreements suggests that the present law is primarily suited to dealing only with bargains. This suggests that there are situations in which agreements should (...) be legally recognized, but which should not be dealt with by all of the conceptual tools of contract law, for these agreements and voluntary undertakings serve the interests of those undertaking them in significantly different ways than do bargains. (shrink)

I argue that Isaac Newton's De Gravitatione should not be considered an authoritative expression of his thought about the metaphysics of space and its relation to physical inquiry. I establish the following narrative: In De Gravitatione (circa 1668–84), Newton claimed he had direct experimental evidence for the work's central thesis: that space had "its own manner of existing" as an affection or emanative effect. In the 1710s, however, through the prodding of Roger Cotes and G. W. Leibniz, he came to (...) see that this evidence relied on assumptions that his own Principia rendered unjustifiable. Consequently, he (i) revised the conclusions he explicitly drew from the experimental evidence, (ii) rejected the idea that his spatial metaphysics was grounded in experimental evidence, and (iii) reassessed the epistemic status of key concepts in his metaphysics and natural philosophy. The narrative I explore shows not only that De Gravitatione did not constitute the metaphysical backdrop of the Principia as Newton ultimately understood it, but that it was the Principia itself that ultimately lead to the demise of key elements of De Gravitatione. I explore the implications of this narrative for Andrew Janiak's and Howards Stein's interpretations of Newton's metaphysics. (shrink)