bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Meeting the Costs of University Education in Northern France, c. 1240-c. 1340
Authors: Dunbabin Jean
Published: November 2023

Did medieval universities really encourage social mobility? Or did they simply reinforce social privilege, allowing those who could afford to take degrees to monopolize high positions in church and state and justify their possession by reference not only to birth but also to educational advantage? Whatever their view of the situation after about 1350, most historians who have considered it regard the thirteenth and early fourteenth century studia generalia as genuinely open to talent, offering a career ladder to those who might otherwise have been denied promotion. This view is not founded on statistics-too little is known about student populations (except those of Oxford and Cambridge) before the late fourteenth century to admit of even crude analysis. It is, rather, an impression based on evidence culled from many different kinds of sources, university and college legislation, particular careers, hints in royal and papal accounts, anecdotes in chronicles, and perhaps most cogently from the relative absence of evidence for participation in university study by members of the high aristocracy whose life stories are known. ‘It is clear that the universities of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were not aristocratic institutions’ is a conclusion reinforced by the apparently striking contrast between them and the late fifteenth-century universities in which those of noble birth were conspicuous.
Higher Education and the Emergence of the Professional Woman in Glasgow c. 1890-1914
Authors: Kendall Catherine M
Published: November 2023

The purpose of this paper is to show how the effort and achievement of gaining higher education broadened the range of professional opportunity for women. In late Victorian Britain women’s job opportunities increased as demand grew for clerks, shop assistants, nurses, and teachers, but middle-class women were restricted to occupations considered suitable for ladies. Higher education was a great outlet for these women since it channelled their energies into something worthwhile, and proved useful for future employment. Access to universities opened the way to professional training, not necessarily for paid work, but to the same standards attained by men. We will consider the campaign for women’s higher education and how it affected three of the first professions open to women.
Irish America
Authors: Byron Reginald
Published: November 2023

Few writers on the Irish in America have looked beyond the nineteenth-century ethnic enclaves of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, or Chicago, or have asked how the notion of an Irish-American ethnic identity in contemporary America can be reconciled with five, six, or seven generations of intermarriage and assimilation over the last century and a half. This study, based on interviews with 500 people of Irish ancestry in Albany, New York, aims to discover in what senses and in what degrees the present-day descendants of nineteenth-century Irish immigrants possess distinctive social practices and ways of seeing the world, and raises questions about the social conditions in which ideas of Irishness have been created and re-created.
Form, Forms, and Reform: Richard Kraut (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato
Authors: Mccabe Mary Margaret
Published: November 2023

Life in the golden age, suggests the Stranger in the Politicus, would be a miserable and trivial business if people just sat around gossiping with the animals, eating and drinking and doing no philosophy; but it would be a life of bliss if it were spent in enquiry and discussion. Bliss is doing philosophy: and it is to this activity that the Platonic dialogues draw us. So the best Companion to Plato is Plato himself—there is no substitute for the enquiry we do when we read the dialogues for ourselves.
Philosophy and Prophecy: A Discussion of Miriam Galston, Politics and Excellence: The Political Philosophy of Alfarabi
Authors: Frank Daniel H
Published: November 2023

IT is entirely appropriate that discussion of Alfarabi (d. 950) and his political philosophy should find a place in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy. Alfarabi was after all considered al-mu’allim ath-thani, the ‘second master’, second only to Aristotle. He wrote voluminously on logic and musical theory, and composed commentaries on Aristotle’s Organon (including Rhetoric and Poetics), Nicomachean Ethics, Physics, and Metaphysics, and on Plato’s Laws. But undoubtedly his most important and original works are his ethical-political treatises, the subject-matter of Galston’s book.
Incommensurable Values
Authors: Broome John
Published: November 2023

You might join the army or you might become a priest. Which would be better? Intuitively it seems this question may have no determinate answer; the values realized by these two careers seem to be so very different that they cannot be weighed against each other in a precise way. In some circumstances there will be a determinate answer to the question-for instance, if you do not believe in God and like guns. But, in more balanced circumstances, it will not be determinate which is the better option. This phenomenon of indeterminacy is often called the ‘incommensurabilit/ of values. It is often thought to be a central feature of ethical life.
Recognition and Reaction
Authors: Dancy Jonathan
Published: November 2023

In this paper I discuss one of the many themes of Jim Griffin’s recent Value Judgement. This is the claim that we will not be able to make progress in a certain area of moral theory unless we succeed in blurring the distinction between recognition and reaction. My own view, in brief, is that blurring this distinction would not be enough. What we need to do is to transcend it altogether. So I agree with Griffin that the distinction needs philosophical treatment, but think that the sort of treatment it needs is much more radical than the one that he seems to think appropriate.
.Impartiality, Predictability, and Indirect Consequentialism
Authors: Hooker Brad
Published: November 2023

James Griffin’s Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement, and Moral Importance was a model of sophisticated and reasonable consequentialism. His more recent Value Judgement: Improving Our Ethical Beliefs includes a rejection of consequentialism. So Griffin is an apostate. What makes apostates so threatening and interesting is that they know well—from the inside, as it were what they are rejecting. In this chapter I examine the charge prosecuted by the later Griffin against indirect consequentialism. The question I will be asking is whether anything recognizable as indirect consequentialism can survive Griffin’s charge.
The Improvisatory Drama of Decision-Making
Authors: Rorty Amélie Oksenberg
Published: November 2023

It is no news that the movement from decision to action and from action to outcome are contingent and accident-prone. But we tend to set aside the fact that-for good or ill-intentions and decisions are themselves affected by tangential and accidental contingencies. I want to explore the dynamics of the process of shared or collective decision-making in which participants find themselves improvising dramatic roles and advancing positions that often do not represent their primary aims or views. But, despite the powerful role of chance and accident in decision-making, despite its apparent arbitrariness, there is an Aesopian moral, a surprising set of norms that can, in principle, govern the process.
A Reply To Van Eck
Authors: Rowe Christopher
Published: November 2023

The real substance, and importance, of Job van Eck’ contribution to the present debate, in my view, lies in his analysis of Phaedo 102 A 10-103 c 2, and his account of how that passage--which l shall refer to from now on as Passage B-illustrates the meaning of 99 E 2-6. Inhisoriginal paper .Skopein en logois’., building on previous work by H. N. Castaneda,2 he argued persuasively against an interpretation of the later passage of the sort I myself have favoured, in terms of the distinction between essence and accident. He also showed elegantly how the (or a) . Form-hypothesis. is used to provide ‘a logical analysis of a relational fact ... and an adequate one indeed., how this mode of analysis can be said to operate lv Aoyois, and how it differs from looking at things .in concrete..
Taking Stock Of The Central Books
Authors: Wedin Michael V
Published: November 2023

The past two decades or so have produced an impressive literature on the central books of Aristotle’ Metaphysics-Z, H, and attention, book Z has been the principal beneficiary. It is no exaggeration to say that our understanding of that once refractory text enjoys a detail and sophistication barely imaginable quarter of a century ago. This is not to be confused with agreement. On the contrary, there is hardly a text that provokes more wrangling than Metaphysics Z. But the disagreements have been acutely drawn and serve to sharpen and constrain interpretation. Such developments have begotten the need for a fresh and comprehensive commentary on Z, and the other central books, in addition to providing favourable conditions in which to produce it. So it is hardly surprising that the latest addition to the Clarendon Aristotle Series was eagerly awaited.3 In a number of respects, David Bostock’ Aristotle: Metaphysics, Books Zand His to be commended. For the most part, its translation is readable and philosophically reliable. Its commentary on the text is sophisticated and intricate, typically offering two or three ways to read a given passage. There is no doubt that this material will prove stimulating to serious scholars
Potted Platonism
Authors: Sheppard Anne
Published: November 2023

Even inOxford the study of ancient philosophy is no longer limited to Plato and Aristotle, and the recent development of the Clarendon Later Ancient Philosophers series bears witness to the continuing expansion of interest not only in Hellenistic philosophy but also in philosophy under the Roman Empire. The .blurb. for the series says that it is .designed to encourage philosophers and students of philosophy to explore the fertile terrain of later ancient philosophy.. Such explorers will quickly discover that some of the texts they are dealing with provide evidence for the thought of their time but are not in themselves powerfully argued or highly original. The Handbook of Platonism, better known under its Greek title of Didaskalikos, is such a work. Our knowledge of Middle Platonism depends on handbooks and doxographies and on the writings of philosophically educated authors such as Plutarch and Philo of Alexandria. No philosophical works of stature comparable to those of Plato, Aristotle, or Plotinus survive. This does not mean that Middle Platonism lacks philosophical interest, but understanding the material available requires the skills of the classical scholar and the historian of ideas as much as those of the philosopher. John Dillon is excellently equipped to present such material to a wider audience, and the success of his enterprise may be gauged by the fact that while I was working on this review Alcinous went into paperback. Dillon’ earlier work The Middle Platonists included.
Heraclitus’ Criticism of Ionian Philosophy
Authors: Graham Daniel W
Published: November 2023

In the ancient tradition of interpretation, Heraclitus is known for five doctrines which are of importance for an overall interpretation: (I) Fire is the άρχή or original material cause of the world; (2) there are periodic episodes of world conflagration (ε κπύρωσις) when the cosmos is consumed, to be regenerated later; (3) everything is in flux;-’ (4) the opposites are identical;’ and (in consequence of (3) and (4) ), (5) Heraclitus violates the Law of Non-Contradiction. The period of modern interpretation begins with a concerted attack on the attribution to Heraclitus of each of these doctrines.” John Burnet’ argued against (2), (4), and (5); Karl Reinhardt argued
Aristotle on Fair Exchange
Authors: Judson Lindsay
Published: November 2023

Commentators on the main part of NE 5. 5 (u32b21-u33b28) rarely seem happy with it. Some frankly despair of making sense of one of its central claims, while others avoid this only by the importation of ideas not to be found in the text.
The Stoic-Platonist Debate on kathekonta
Authors: Sedley David
Published: November 2023

My aim in this chapter is to uncover a debate about the teaching of practical ethics which, unless I am altogether mistaken, must have been conducted early in the third century BC, between the last generation of the early Platonic Academy and the first generation of the new Stoic school.The focal concept will be that of kathekonta-the ‘duties’, ‘obligations’, or ‘proper functions’ which generation after generation of Stoics so laboriously classified and analysed. A kathekon is the proper thing to do, either exceptionlessly or in certain defined circumstances. In its developed form, the doctrine of kathekonta set out to cover every kind of social, political, economic, and familial relation. Codes of conduct were prescribed for the interaction of relative with relative, young with old, rulers with subjects, buyers with sellers, citizens with foreigners. And every significant area of choice was addressed.
Xenophanes’ Ouranian God in the Fourth Century
Authors: Palmer John A
Published: November 2023

Aristotle’s dismissal of Xenophanes in the Metaphysics may give the impression that he had a rather low estimation of him. It will be useful to qualify this impression somewhat before proceeding to the substance of the view he attributes to Xenophanes. One needs to consider both the implications of Aristotle’s general dismissal of the Eleatics from his present enquiry and the specific criticisms he directs against the character of Xenophanes’ views. Aristotle’s expressed purpose in considering his predecessors’ views in Meta-physics A is to support his contention that the four kinds of cause or principle he has specified in the Physics are the only kinds.
Plutarch on Koinoʣ ΛΟΓΟʣ: Towards an Architecture of De Stoicorum Repugnantiis
Authors: Boys-Stones George
Published: November 2023

Everyone who reads Plutarch’s De Stoicorum repugnantiis must be struck by the tremendous lack of formal structure which seems to have characterized its composition: at first sight it looks, as one writer put it, like a ‘polemical rag-bag’ and, so far at least as its structure goes, not much more. There have, of course, been more concerted attempts to describe, analyse, and explain the structure of De Stoicorum repugnantiis, and there is one observation which is common to almost all those, who have commented on the matter, and that is that there are groups of arguments which display some obvious thematic unity. Indeed, there are some fairly extended groups of thematically linked arguments which run through several of the chapters of the work (according to the division that we standardly use).2 For example, chapters 31-7 are obviously characterized by an interest in the Stoic theory of providence, and this grouping might easily be extended to cover 31-40, as a discussion of Stoic theology more generally.
Hume on Personal Identity
Authors: Penelhum Terence
Published: November 2023

I wANT in this paper to examine the arguments which Hume uses in the famous Sixth Section of Part IV of Book I of the Treatise, not primarily as a work of scholarship, but in order to assess how good they are and to try to learn something from them when they are mistaken as well as when they are right. Hume’s discussion of personal identity is the best there is; no one can feel the same about the problem after reading it as he did before; and like so much that Hume says, it is incisive, penetrating, and most unsatisfying. It also has an additional, topical, interest: it gives us, I think, an excellent example of how complex and far-reaching the consequences of a mistake in linguistic or conceptual investigation can be.
Hume, Identity and Selfhood
Authors: Penelhum Terence
Published: November 2023

HUME was not given to philosophical retractions; but he did express open dissatisfaction with his views on personal identity. It is therefore a great source of scholarly frustration that he did not make it very clear what he thought was wrong with them. Many have tried to decide what it was. I incline to the view that a recent contribution to this debate by Donald Ainslie comes close to the truth on this matter, although the vagueness of Hume’s text in the Appendix to the Treatise makes it impossible to be certain.1 Even if this view is right, however, I doubt that it indicates a clear aware ness on Hume’s part of what is really wrong with his philosophy of mind on this issue, or that it helps us solve any of the puzzles I have been concerned with in Chapters 2 to 5. But in arguing this, I can at least take the opportunity of delving a little deeper into some of them.
Hume and the Freedom of the Will
Authors: Penelhum Terence
Published: November 2023

Hume.’s views on freedom have been very influential; but they have not been discussed by Hume scholars as much as his views on other major themes. This is no doubt in part because, at least until very recently, there has not been disagreement about where he stands. The problem of free will is of course immensely complex and frustratingly hard to articulate, and this essay is not offered as a serious contribution to its solution. I shall only try to comment on some of Hume’s arguments concerning it, on the connections these arguments have with other parts of his system, and on the apparent implications these arguments and these connections have for the wider problem.1
Butler and Hume
Authors: Penelhum Terence
Published: November 2023

THERE is not much direct evidence of connections between Hume’s thought and that of Joseph Butler. We do know that Hume wanted to interest Butler in the Treatise of Human Nature at the time of its first publication, and took out material about miracles in order to assist in this.1 Although this attempt came to nothing, we also know that in 1742 Butler was recommending Hume’s Essays Moral and Political ‘everywhere’.2 There is no reason to doubt that Hume’s wish to gain Butler’s approbation was based in part on genuine respect; and he includes Butler’s name in the Introduction to the Treatise when listing those students of human nature whose work has pre ceded his own. The late Professor Mossner argued that Cleanthes in the Dialogues is intended to represent Butler,3 and it would certainly be unreasonable to doubt that Butler was much in his mind as that work was composed over the years.
Human Nature and Truth: Hume and Pascal
Authors: Penelhum Terence
Published: November 2023

IT may seem strange for anyone to combine in one title the names of two such radically opposite thinkers as Blaise Pascal and David Hume. This may seem to be a combination that takes us well beyond the limits of profitable comparison. But I shall suggest that when we juxtapose some of the fundamental aspects of their thought, the result is instructive in several ways. First, though least in real importance, I think it becomes possible to make some conjectures about direct influence from Pascal in the seventeenth century to Hume in the eighteenth. I say ‘conjectures’ for several reasons. One of them is that Hume is a master of non-citation when it suits him, and the overt references to Pascal that we find in his writings do not suggest direct influences. Second, since we are dealing here with two figures of the very highest genius, the one the greatest of all Christian apologists, and the other the most considerable of all the philosophical secularizers of modern times, it is instructive to find them offering totally opposed inferences and value judgements, indeed totally opposed life choices, on the basis of remarkably similar understandings of the inner workings of the human spirit.
Doing Philosophy Historically
Authors: Campbell Richard
Published: November 2023

Our question is: how is truth related positively to historicity? Our guiding suggestion is that such an investigation itself needs to be conducted in a historical manner, by working through the generation of our present ways of thinking about truth. To propose this way of investigating the topic of truth and historicity is, however, to be brought face-to-face with a recurring problem. For straight away the topic of our investigation seems to pose a dilemma for us at the level of method. On the one hand, if we are to take our own historicity seriously, it would seem that the investigation will have to be undertaken in a historical manner; in short, to be an inquiry into the history of the idea of truth and of the idea of historicity. Yet, on the other hand, the topic of the relation of truth to historicity seems, in itself, to be a philosophical issue which a historical survey could, at best, only illustrate. Thus philosophy and history, as two different kinds of inquiry, seem to exhibit just that same polar opposition as do the ideas of truth and historicity. Accordingly, it is not surprising that the enterprise of carrying out an inquiry which is at once historical and philosophical should seem impractical. This methodological stumbling-block warrants careful pondering.
Truth as Divine Norm
Authors: Campbell Richard
Published: November 2023

Given our increasing awareness of the historicity of human existence, it might appear strange and puzzling that there emerged in ancient Greece a kind of thinking which turned away from the contingencies of history to explore thoroughly ahistorical questions. That not all modern thinkers register a sense of wonder at this phenomenon is, however, understandable. We are not just external observers of that ahistorical way of thinking; in large measure we are direct heirs to it. Yet the complex tensions within our contemporary thought-world enable us to appreciate something of the newness and peculiarity of the philosophical tradition which then arose.
Timeless Truth
Authors: Campbell Richard
Published: November 2023

From the pre-Socratic philosophers only disjointed fragments have come down to us by way of quotations in later writers. From none after Parmenides has there survived such a sustained and profound statement focused on the theme of truth. Of course, Parmenides had his followers, most notably Zeno, who developed a systematic series of paradoxes designed to show that motion is impossible, and Melissus, who wrote a treatise On Being in defence of the Parmenidean account of what is. But they appear not to have maintained his central focus on truth.
Truth and Judgements
Authors: Campbell Richard
Published: November 2023

For most modem philosophers, truth is to be analysed in terms of the use of the predicate “true” as it is applied to judgements, propositions, or sentences. That is in sharp contrast to the conception of truth in the Platonic tradition, in which truth is assigned primarily to reality, and only derivatively to a propositional item, a logos. For this tradition, truth is ontological in significance and not merely logical.1 This conception was preserved by the Augustinian identification of supreme truth with God, a move which only makes sense if truth is being conceived ontologically. If we are to understand the modern restriction of truth to the propositional domain, we shall need to appreciate how its ontological aspect, witnessed by the Platonic/ Augustinian conception, came to be dropped.
Truth and the New Way of Ideas
Authors: Campbell Richard
Published: November 2023

Descartes, and the so-called rationalists after him, were seeking an intuitive apprehension of truth within reason itself, albeit a conception of reason which had been transformed by Christian doctrines. For them, as for their Greek and medieval predecessors, scientific knowledge was of the necessary and unchangeable. The principles of mathematics, accordingly, were taken as the very paradigms of truth, discoverable by pure reason, and providing the framework for a new mathematical physics. For this tradition, as the example of Leibniz was soon notably to show, the problem always was to find some way of preventing contingent truths about the world from collapsing into necessary truths of reason.
Truth in a Contingent World
Authors: Campbell Richard
Published: November 2023

LOCKE’S difficulties in establishing non-trivial necessary truths stemmed from his twin assumptions that everything which exists is particular and that all knowledge springs from sensation and reflection. Those assumptions, in turn, are grounded on his acceptance of the radical contingency of the world as a consequence of its creation by the divine will. Were those difficulties inevitable? Might it not be possible to combine an acceptance of the contingency of the world with the rationalist drive to render everything explicable to reason? Exploring this possibility became a major preoccupation of Gottfried Leibniz (1646 1716).
Following Nature: A Study in Stoic Ethics
Authors: Striker Gisela
Published: November 2023

The following rather lengthy piece is a revised version of the Nellie Wallace Lectures I gave at Oxford University in the spring of 1984. My aim in this series of six talks was to put together an outline of Stoic ethics that would permit an audience of non-specialists to see some of the connections between the notorious bits of Stoic doctrine with which—or so I assumed—most of us are familiar. For example, most philosophers or classicists will have heard that the Stoics believed the universe was governed by a divine reason, identified with nature; that they defended the view that virtue is the only good, and that the virtuous person would be free from all emotion. But I thought that it was not so clear, given our fragmentary sources, how these doctrines hang together, and so I tried to offer a more or less historical sketch of the development of Stoic ethics as one way in which the pieces of the puzzle could be put together. The first five sections can I think be read as a continuous account of Stoic theories about the goal of life and of morality; the last one deals with ‘freedom from emotion’, picking up what is perhaps the most striking feature of Stoicism.
On Avoiding the Void
Authors: Malcolm John
Published: November 2023

Several prominent scholars have maintained that a denial of empty space, or the void, is crucial to Parmenides’ rejection of plurality and locomotion. Plurality, for example, implies divisibility but there is no what is not (or void) to separate one supposed portion of what is from another. Hence what is is one. Locomotion, also, might well appear to need some (empty) room for manreuvre, but such is precluded by the proclaimed ‘fullness’ of what is. Recently, however, interpreters of Parmenides have not been convinced that an appeal to the non-existence of a void plays a role in his denial of locomotion and plurality. The void is in fact never explicitly mentioned in his poem. More importantly, to introduce the void weakens Parmenides’ position, for a plenum may be regarded as permitting both locomotion and plurality—a situation adopted by his successors Empedocles and Anaxagoras. Moreover, at B 8. 22 Parmenides asserts that there cannot be any distinctions within what is and this principle is strong enough to preclude any locomotion or plurality. This renders an appeal to the absence of the void unnecessary as well as insufficient.
Two Sorts of Naturalism
Authors: Mcdowell John
Published: November 2023

Philippa Foot has long urged the attractions of ethical naturalism. I applaud the negative part of her point, which is to reject various sorts of subjectivism and supernaturalist rationalism. But I doubt whether we can understand a positive naturalism in the right way without first rectifying a constriction that the concept of nature is liable to undergo in our thinking. Without such preliminaries, what we make of ethical naturalism will not be the radical and satisfying alternative to Mrs Foot’s targets that naturalism can be. Mrs Foot’s writings do not pay much attention to the concept of nature in its own right, and this leaves a risk that her naturalism may seem to belong to this less satisfying variety. I hope an attempt to explain this will be an appropriate token of friendship and admiration.
Aristotle’s Notion of Potentiality in Metaphysics Θ
Authors: Frede Michael
Published: November 2023

Aristotle thinks that we can not only make claims of the form ‘A is F’ or ‘A is an F’ in the sense that A is F actually or that A is an actual F. It also matters greatly to him that we can make claims of the form ‘A is F potentially’ or ‘A is a potential F’. For he thinks that the physical world is characterized by the fact that there are such truths about it which cannot be reduced to, or eliminated in favour of, claims to the effect that something actually is something or other. To put the matter differently, Aristotle thinks that there are truths of the form ‘A possibly is F’, in some special sense of ‘possibly’, which cannot be reduced to truths of the form ‘A is actually G’. And given that he assumes that an actual F is an actual being precisely in so far as it is an actual F, he correspondingly assumes that there are not only actual beings, for example, actual houses, actual human beings, actually healthy things, but that there are also some kinds of possible being, namely potential beings, for example, potential houses, potential human beings, potentially healthy things. These potential beings, for Aristotle, form a crucial part of the ontology of the sensible world.
The Priority of Actuality in Aristotle
Authors: Witt Charlotte
Published: November 2023

Many puzzles surround Aristotle’s distinction between potential and actual being (Met. Δ, 1017a35-bg). How are we to understand his typical illustrations of the distinction—a capacity and its exercise (like sight and seeing), and an undeveloped substance and a mature substance (like unripe and ripe corn)? How are the two kinds of examples like one another? And how do the two additional important examples of potential and actual being—matter and form, perishable and eternal substances-—Fit in? One of the most interesting and central puzzles, it seems to me, is what Aristotle means when he says that actual being is prior to potential being, and why he thinks it is so.
The Essence of a Human Being and the Individual Soul in Metaphysics
Z and H
Authors: Woods Michael
Published: November 2023

In this paper, I raise, at a fairly general level, some questions about the hylomorphic conception of the relation of the soul to the body; in particular, as it appears in Metaphysics Z and H. I was stimulated to approach the issues in this way by Bernard Williams’s article ‘Hylomorphism’ (1986). I do not attempt to respond to this article in detail, and I shall in fact be occupied with certain aspects only of Williams’s arguments. Williams argued that hylomorphism ‘earns its reputation as everybody’s moderate metaphysics of mind’ by wobbling between two options: on the first of these, it is in fact a version of materialism—a version that, in essentials, treats human beings as physical bodies in a certain state, though it preserves certain features of the ordinary conceptual scheme by allowing that, when Callias dies, something has gone out of existence.
Aristotle’s Conception of Metaphysics as a Science
Authors: Bolton Robert
Published: November 2023

At the beginning of his exposition of his own positive metaphysical doctrine in Metaphysics Г. 1, Aristotle announces that the subject is a science the ‘distinct science which investigates being qua being and the things which pertain to this in itself’ (1003321). This account of some features of some typical sciences, features which metaphysics may well seem to us to lack, is, of course, one which many philosophers would now wish to reject. The idea that a science requires and aims to find objectively fundamental brute principles which uniquely explain why all of the other truths of that science hold involves a realist conception of theoretical scientific truth and of explanation which some would now reject. Some would also question the idea that we need or even can possess a testing procedure which relies on a relatively theory-neutral body of empirical or other data which we can and should use to evaluate competing theories in a given science. However, these are not features of a genuine science to which Aristotle would obviously object.
Understanding The Theaetetus’
Authors: Brown Lesley
Published: November 2023

Plato’s Theaetetus remains a challenge. Acknowledged by all as a philosophical and literary masterpiece, it is packed with arguments of astonishing depth, subtlety, and originality. The claims of perception to be incorrigible, relativism in more than one guise, the idea of the unity of consciousness, the problem of the epistemological regress of reasons, the relation of thought to its objects-all these and more make a brilliant first (or early) appearance on the philosophical stage in the Theaetetus.
Aristotle’s Philosophy of the Sciences
Authors: Barnes Jonathan
Published: November 2023

The Posterior Analytics plays Cinderella in the Aristotelian pantomime. Two decades ago, she languished in the kitchen, uncounted and unrewarded, a scholarly Buttons or two her only beaux. Now it is all different: those ugly sisters, £7Vand Met., still have their studious suitors; but Cinderella has come out, and rival Prince Charming offer her glass slippers by the carriage-load. In short and dropping the frigid fantasy-the last twenty years have seen a renewed interest in the Posterior Analytics. Some of the interest has been primarily philological or historical; but much of it has had a philosophical drive-and the ideas of the Posterior Analytics are widely taken to be as estimable and as sophisticated and as modern as anything in Aristotle’s oeuvre. If most of this recent work has been tedious or tawdry (such is the way we live now), it is nevertheless not hubristic to claim that our present understanding of the Posterior Analytics matches that of the scholars of the Renascence.
When Worlds Collide
Authors: Lewis Eric
Published: November 2023

The collective writings of Furley contain so many passages at which one can only exclaim; “Why didn’t I think of that?” This is partially due to Furley’s rare ability to present the muddled clearly, the complex simply, the garbled elegantly. Moreover, the volume under review is partially intended for students, and so the above virtues are particularly manifest. Yet at the same time this book, and its still unwritten companion (which will venture into the still relatively uncharted waters of post-Aristotelian natural philosophy), offer a coherent picture of a continuous tradition of debate concerning the formation and structure of the universe.
The History of the Earth, Life, and Man: Whewell and Palaetiological Science
Authors: Hodge M J S
Published: November 2023

Any part of Whewell brings us to confront the whole. But Whewell as a whole is a daunting prospect. He was a very big man was Whewell, perhaps a great one; and they do not make them like that any more. Only by grafting Cassirer, the historical philosopher, on to Conant, the scientific educator, could we have in our day a comparable combination of intellectual stride and institutional clout, of polymathic savant and academic supremo. But no such reflections can help us as historians. Great man theories of history, let alone big man theories, are in no better repute than myths of giants who walked the earth, or at least the quadrangles, in distant days.
Deductivist Versus Inductivist Approaches in the Philosophy of Science as Illustrated by some Controversies Between Whewell and Mill
Authors: Buchdahl Gerd
Published: November 2023

The contrast between the two approaches listed in the title has over the years gained a certain prominence in discussions on the philosophy of science. With the knowledge of hindsight it will be of interest therefore to study its incidence during an earlier period, and in particular, in the writings of Whewell and Mill which may yield added significance for a later generation. For the moment I shall not attempt to define the two schools of thought delineated by these labels, partly because at this stage—being controversial—any account of necessary and sufficient criteria would be difficult to come by, and partly because it may be more fruitful in the present context to evaluate the differences by way of a study of the philosophical positions held by Whewell and Mill themselves. So for the moment we may use them simply as convenient reference labels. The situation is in any case complicated by the fact that, on the one side, despite Whewell’s apparently explicit attachment to deductivism, he also elaborated a nominally inductive type of methodology; whilst on the other side, Mill’s explicitly inductive approach did not prevent him from attributing considerable importance to deductive methods in the development of scientific theorizing, especially in the realm of physics.
Whewell’s Problematic Heritage
Authors: Wettersten John , Agassi Joseph
Published: November 2023

William Whewell is a very important writer whose contribution to the philosophy of science is enormous. Ignoring him presents a gap in our understanding of the history of the field. Yet he is ignored, and though he was famous and influential in both philosophical and scientific circles, he was maligned to the degree that he had to be rediscovered.
Wise Choices, Apt Feelings
Authors: Gibbard Allan
Published: November 2023

`Choices can be wise or foolish, and feelings can be apt or off the mark.' Since this is how we judge, it would be good to know what content these normative judgements carry. Gibbard offers an answer, and elaborates it. His theory explores what is at issue in narrowly moral questions, and in questions of rational thought and conduct in general. It helps to explain why normative thought and talk so pervade human life, and why our highly social species might have evolved to be gripped by these questions. Gibbard asks how, if his theory is right, we can interpret our normative puzzles, and thus proceed toward finding answers to them. What claims to objectivity could we make for these answers, if once we had them? Gibbard maintains that normative philosophical inquiry is a refinement of a central human activity: working out in discussion how to live, and how to feel about things in our lives and in the lives of others. Not available from OUP in the USA, Canada or the Phillippines.
Pragmatic Support
Authors: Gibbard Allan
Published: November 2023

With norms as with facts, we can tell stories of what makes a person a good judge. From time to time we have to ask whether a person is silly or sagacious, whether his judgment is worth heeding and why. In response to demands for coherence, we might elaborate our answers and systematize them. We might inch, then, toward a full fledged normative epistemology, a coherent story of what constitutes being a better or a worse normative judge.
Assessing Feelings
Authors: Gibbard Allan
Published: November 2023

In the last chapter I tried for an ecology of broadly moral sentiment. Now suppose I succeeded with it, beyond my fondest hopes: suppose I got the shapes of our broadly moral feelings just right.
Piety and the Unity of Virtue in Euthyphro 11e-14c
Authors: Warren Calef Scott
Published: November 2023

Constructivists such as Brickhouse and Smith and Mark McPherran find in Euthyphro  11 E-14 c positive Socratic teaching on piety. According to the implicit view they find contained in the passage, piety is the part of justice concerned with service to the gods (  πηρϵτℓk   θϵoís). We serve them by helping them to bring about some truly beneficial end which pleases them or which they desire. What exactly the gods’ ϵργoν is is usually held to be left unspecified in the Euthyphro —though some have identified it with ‘order and good in the universe’, ‘knowledge’, and ‘good human souls’ —and it is Euthyphro’s inability to state accurately the gods’ ϵργoν that accounts for Socrates’ sudden dissatisfaction with his interlocutor’s progress at 14B-C. Euthyphro wrongly brings up the knowledge of how to sacrifice and pray, which he alleges helps to preserve private houses and public affairs of state, and the discussion is diverted in the (to Socrates) unprofitable direction of orthodox religious practice.
Activity and Change in Aristotle
Authors: Heinaman Robert
Published: November 2023

Contemporary linguists interested in delineating differences between types of verb often look to Aristotle’s discussion of change (κíνησιS) and activity ( ν ργϵια) in Metaphysics Θ 6 as a source of important contrasts between two categories of verb and verb-phrase. Words falling into the category intended to match Aristotle’s class of activities have been variously labelled ‘activity’, ‘nonbounded’, ‘non-limited’, or ‘irresultative’ verbs; while verbs which are supposed to fall under the category corresponding to change have been called ‘accomplishment’, ‘performance’, ‘bounded’, or ‘terminative’ verbs. These linguistic differences have in turn been used by philosophers as the basis for drawing metaphysical distinctions between types of states of affairs and events. For example, Anthony Kenny writes: ‘Where “A is ϕing” implies “A has not ϕd” I shall call the verb a “performance-verb” and say that it stands for a performance; where “A is ϕing” implies rather “A has ϕd” I shall call the verb an “activity-verb” and say that it stands for an activity.’
Eros and the Wise: The Stoic Response to a Cultural Dilemma
Authors: Nussbaum Martha
Published: November 2023

An older man stands close to a younger man, who looks up (or as the case may be down) at him, often with fond affection. The older man beams beneficently at the young man’s beardless face, and with one hand he cups the younger man’s chin, in a gesture expressive of tender personal affection. His other hand, however, has other ideas: it fondles the young man’s genitals, which are usually exposed. The older man’s penis is often erect, the younger man’s almost never.’ The young man sometimes repels the groping hand, but often, too, contentedly allows it.
The Proofs of the ΠEPI IΔEΩN
Authors: Shields Christopher
Published: November 2023

THE author of the Πϵρì ìδϵ  ν reproduces five polemical arguments, each intended to unmake an Academic argument for the theory of Forms. When he recounted these critical appraisals in his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Alexander saw little need to scrutinize their authorship or assess their philosophical purport. By contrast, because she wishes to determine what the Πϵρì ìδϵ  ν teaches us about Plato, his theory of Forms, Aristotle, and his attacks on that theory, Professor Fine needs to say a great deal about these issues, including especially the ways in which questions of authorship and intended target interact to create serious obstacles to eventual philosophical appraisal. We know that the critical arguments of the Πϵρììδϵ  ν hit their mark only if we know their intended target; and we know their intended target for the most part only to the extent that it is explicitly stated by the argument’s author or reflected in the writings of a named adversary whose theory we can read for ourselves. Unfortunately, the portion of the Πϵρì ìδϵ  ν preserved by Alexander does little to characterize the theory under attack in any neutral way; nor does it ever mention Plato by name.
States of Affairs
Authors: Woods Michael
Published: November 2023

For a variety of semantical and metaphysical reasons, some better than others, philosophers have found it convenient to postulate extra-linguistic entities called states of affairs to serve as the descripta of sentences (closed formulae). In the somewhat vague terminology of these traditional theorists, each state of affairs is a logical complex having as ‘constituents’ the entities relevant for the truth of any sentence describing it. Some states of affairs obtain; such states of affairs are facts; and a sentence is true precisely in case it describes a fact.
The Enigmas of Derveni
Authors: Hussey Edward
Published: November 2023

More than thirty-five years have passed since the discovery at Derveni near Thessaloniki of the charred papyrus which is now known by the name of the place. Official publication of the text is still awaited. In 1982 unofficial action provided scholars with a provisional and still very incomplete text. Now, with the appearance of Studies  on  the  Derveni  Papyrus, edited by Andre Laks and Glenn W. Most [Studies], the amount of publicly available information is increased significantly. The officially designated editor of the papyrus, Kyriakos Tsantaanoglou, provides a text of the first seven columns, plus improved readings and supplements for some of the later ones. The editors give a provisional English translation, which has been checked by Tsantsanoglou against his latest readings (including unpublished ones). All in all, by no means a definitive publication of the text, but at least a welcome step forward, a stimulus, and a reasonably firm basis for further scholarship.
Memory Processes Underlying Humans’ Chronological Sense of the Past
Authors: Friedman William J
Published: November 2023

How do we remember the times of past events? What information in memory allows us to know when an event occurred? Usually, we take for granted that memory is infused with chronology. The term ·autobiographical memory’, used by some cognitive psychologists to describe memory for personal events, seems to imply a particular metaphor: that memory is like a narrative of one’s life, organized by chronology, much as the sequence of chapters and pages of a book might reflect the order in which the events of a life unfold. In this chapter I wil1 try to show that events are not chronologically organized in memory nor is there even a special system for assigning temporal codes to individual memories. Personal memories, instead, are individual episodes-islands in time. Only by recon structing when an event must have occurred or by assessing the vividness of a memory can we place it in time. And even this latter, intuitive sense of how long ago an event took place is distorted, with considerable compression of the subjective ages of events beyond the recent past.
Aware and Unaware Memory: Does Unaware Memory Underlie Aware Memory?
Authors: Mayes Andrew R
Published: November 2023

Most people think that provided one can explain how information is stored in the human brain there is no extra problem that must be solved to explain why we usually know that we are remembering. In this section, it will be argued that even if the processes of storage were understood, there is an extra problem requiring solution.