bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Reading Seneca
Authors: Inwood Brad
Published: November 2023

Brad Inwood presents a selection of his most influential essays on the philosophy of Seneca, the Roman Stoic thinker, statesman, and tragedian of the first century AD. Including two brand-new pieces, and a helpful introduction to orient the reader, this volume will be an essential guide for anyone seeking to understand Seneca’s fertile, wide-ranging thought and its impact on subsequent generations. In each of these essays Seneca is considered as a philosopher, but with as much account as possible taken of his life, his education, his intellectual and literary background, his career, and his self-presentation as an author. Seneca emerges as a discerning and well-read Stoic, with a strong inclination to think for himself in the context of an intellectual climate teeming with influences from other schools. Seneca’s intellectual engagement with Platonism, Aristotelianism, and even with Epicureanism involved a wide range of substantial philosophical interests and concerns. His philosophy was indeed shaped by the fact that he was a Roman, but he was a true philosopher shaped by his culture rather than a Roman writer trying his hand at philosophical themes. The highly rhetorical character of his writing must be accounted for when reading his works, and when one does so the underlying philosophical themes stand out more clearly. While it is hard to generalize about an overall intellectual agenda or systematic philosophical method, key themes and strategies are evident. Inwood shows how Seneca’s philosophical ingenium worked itself out in a fundamentally particularistic way as he pursued those aspects of Stoicism that engaged him most forcefully over his career.
Seneca and Psychological Dualism
Authors: Inwood Brad
Published: November 2023

Seneca’s ‘philosophy of mind’ presents us with many puzzles, but in this it is no more than a faithful mirror of his philosophy as a whole. In this essay I am interested in how his views on the structure and operations of the human soul relate to those of so- called orthodox Stoics, and how one goes about assessing such an issue. That Seneca is not a slavish or unimaginative representative of Chrysippean Stoicism seems clear from the most casual reading of his work and the most cursory glance through the abundant secondary literature. But it is not clear just how his views on the soul differ from those of the early Stoics. Seneca is sometimes described by the (traditionally pejorative) term ‘eclectic’. But as Pierluigi Donnie and others have shown, we can no longer take for granted the usefulness of that simple description in the study of later ancient philosophy; indeed, it is not clear that we can readily agree about its meaning.
Zoos Revisited
Authors: Jamieson Dale
Published: November 2023

The possibility of perpetual reinvention is deeply embedded in the American psyche. Waiters can become movie stars, gangsters can be transformed into respectable businessmen, and corrupt White House officials can return as fundamentalist preachers. One California governor, who signed the most liberal abortion law in the nation, became a fiercely born-again anti-abortionist; another former California governor, one of the leading political fund-raisers of his generation, ran for president on a platform that denounced political fund-raising as the root of all evil. Despite its attractions, reinvention is not always successful. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s the the title character emerges from a shady past to assume the life of a Long Island gentleman. Yet despite the trappings of wealth and power, his new identity is fragile. In the end he succumbs to his past.
The Compositionality Papers
Authors: Fodor Jerry , Lepore Ernest
Published: November 2023

Ernie Lepore and Jerry Fodor have published a series of original and controversial essays on issues relating to compositionality in language and mind; they have now revised them all for publication together in this volume. Compositionality is the following aspect of a system of representation: the complex symbols in the system inherit their syntactic and semantic properties from the primitive symbols of the system. Fodor and Lepore argue that compositionality determines what view we must take of the nature of concepts. Anyone trying to figure out how language and mind work must take account of this challenging work by two leading figures in the field.
Why Compositionality Won’t Go Away: Reflections on Horwich ’s ‘Deflationary’ Theory
Authors: Fodor Jerry , Lepore Ernest
Published: November 2023

COMPOSITIONALITY is the idea that the meanings of complex expressions (or concepts) are constructed from the meanings of the less complex expressions (or concepts) that are their constituents. Over the last few years, we have just about convinced ourselves that compositionality is the sovereign test for theories of lexical meaning. So hard is this test to pass, we think, that it filters out practically all of the theories of lexical meaning that are current in either philosophy or cognitive science. Among the casualties are, for example, the theory that lexical meanings are statistical structures (like stereotypes); the theory that the meaning of a word is its use; the theory that knowing the meaning of (at least some) words requires having a recognitional capacity for (at least some) of the things that it applies to; and the theory that knowing the meaning of a word requires knowing criteria for applying it.
Reflective Judgement and the Application of Logic to Nature: Kant ‘s Deduction of the Principle of Purposiveness as an Answer to Hume
Authors: Allison Henry E
Published: November 2023

In his analysis of judgement in the two versions of the introduction to the Critique of Judgment Kant introduces the purposiveness of nature as a new transcendental principle pertaining to judgement in its reflective capacity; and in the second or published Introduction he provides it with a transcen-dental deduction. Although this principle has been the topic of considerable discussion in recent years, neither its role as a general condition of empirical knowledge nor the nature and force of its deduction have been adequately explored. Such an exploration is the concern of this chapter. I shall argue that this principle lies at the centre rather than the periphery of Kantian epistemology; and that, even though Kant does not present it as such, its deduction may be viewed as his definitive answer to Hume regarding the rational grounding of induction broadly construed. The discussion is divided into three parts. The first examines the principle of purposiveness, its source in reflective judgement, and its multifaceted epistemic function. The second analyses the deduction of this principle in section V of the published Introduction. The third evaluates the adequacy of this deduction as an answer to Hume.
Neo-Teleology
Authors: Cummins Robert
Published: November 2023

There are two subpopulations of functional explanation roaming the earth: teleological explanation, and functional analysis. The two are in competition. In this chapter, I hope to help select the latter, and nudge the former to a well-deserved extinction. Teleology is the idea that some things can and should be explained by appeal to their purpose or goal or function. It is, for example, the idea that one can explain why rocks fall and fire rises by appeal to the fact that the goal of matter is to go to its natural place, and that this is down for rocks and up for fire.
Demonstrative Science and the Science of Being Qua Being
Authors: Fraser Kyle
Published: November 2023

This paper defends the view that Aristotle’s ontological enquiry into being qua being, inaugurated in Metaphysics T,falls under the rubric of demonstrative science, as defined in the Posterior Analytics. Ontology aims—in principle—to derive necessary truths about beings in general, just as Aristotelian zoology, for instance, aims to derive necessary truths about animal being. This proposal runs contrary to the verdict defended, inter alias, by G. E. L. Owen and more recently T. Irwin, who hold that ontology is chiefly a development of the procedures of Aristotelian dialectic, as laid out in the Topics. On their view, ontology does not satisfy the condition of homogeneity, which is central to the Posterior Analytics’ conception of a science: viz. the condition that every demonstrative science must be defined in its scope by a single genus of entities, as zoology is defined by the genus of animals, or botany by the genus of plants. The heterogeneity of the categories of being—the fact that they cannot be subsumed under a common genus—is presumed to indicate a dialectical mode of enquiry, on the grounds that dialectic is conceived by Aristotle as the method appropriate for universal investigations, i.e. investigations that are not restricted to a special genus. Thus the structure of being as being is not to be established demonstratively, according to a closed axiomatic system, but is, in Aubenque’s words, ‘toujours a ⟨rechercher⟩’. The structure and methods of demonstrative science find no application in ontology: ‘aucune demarche du discours scientifique, tel qu’Aristote le decrit dans la premiere partie de son Organon, ne trouve d’application dans le cas de Pêtre’
Aristotle’S Definition of Soul And The Programme of the De Anima
Authors: Menn Stephen
Published: November 2023

Aristotle’s De anima is a very fashionable book. It is fashionable chiefly because Aristotle develops a doctrine of the soul, as the form or ‘first actuality’ of an organic natural body, which seems to offer a via media between materialism and dualism. On Aristotle’s account, an animal’s soul is something other than its body, indeed something of a different ontological type from the body, but the soul is not independent of the body, and no problem arises of how soul and body can be united into a substantial whole: ‘there is no need to investigate whether the soul and the body are one, any more than the wax and the shape, or in general the matter of each thing and that of which it is the matter; for while “one” and “being” are said in many ways, the primary [sense] is actuality’ (De anima 2. 1, 4121, 6–9). Many twentieth-century philosophers have been looking for just such a via media between materialism and dualism, at least for the case of the human mind; and much scholarly attention has gone into asking whether Aristotle’s view can be aligned with one of the modern alternatives, or whether it offers something preferable to any of the modern alternatives, or whether it is so bound up with a falsified Aristotelian science that it must regretfully be dismissed as no longer a live option.
Practical Reasoning*
Authors: Wright Crispin
Published: November 2023

Aristotle took practical reasoning to be reasoning that concludes in an action. But an action—at least a physical one—requires more than reasoning ability; it requires physical ability too. Intending to act is as close to acting as reasoning alone can get us, so we should take practical reasoning to be reasoning that concludes in an intention. Sections 1 and 2 of this paper argue that there is such a thing as genuine practical reasoning, concluding in an intention.
The Rationality of Evolutionary Psychology
Authors: Over David E
Published: November 2023

Recent work in cognitive psychology on the adaptive nature of reasoning is partly a reaction to earlier experimental results that were taken, by some philosophers and psychologists, to imply that human beings are extremely irrational. The reaction to this conclusion has been to ask how we could achieve such apparent success in the world if we are so irrational, and to predict that the standard of human reasoning and decision-making will be found to be much higher when people are tested on more realistic problems, for which there should often be some adaptive mental processes. This reaction is sometimes itself too extreme, leading to complacency about human rationality. Human genes may have been quite successful so far, but many millions of people have died because of irrationality.
Commitment and Change of View
Authors: Levi Isaac
Published: November 2023

Do intelligent agents change their minds and hearts? Or are their minds and hearts changed for them? I am thinking here of changes of mind and heart as changes in beliefs and values, goals and hopes. And the question I am asking is whether intelligent agents exercise any control over changes in their attitudes.

I take for granted that deliberating agents have as much control over what they say as what they do. But exercising control over one’s utterances and inscriptions is not exercising control over changes in one’s beliefs and values.
The Third Donkey: Origin Legends and Some Hidden Indo-European Themes
Authors: Watkins Calvert
Published: November 2023

In the final paragraph of the article ‘Culture History and Historical Linguistics’ (Watkins 1992) I argued briefly and allusively for reflexes of a common Indo-European origin legend in three early Indic, Hittite, and Greek texts relating similar mythological themes, including prodigious multiple birth and incest. This paper is an expansion of that suggestion. The texts are RV10. 86. 23ab ‘The daughter of Manu, Parśu by name, gave birth to twenty at once’; the Zalpa tale ‘The queen of KaneŜ gave birth to thirty sons in a single year’; and the fifty daughters of Danaus (‘Greek’) fleeing an incestuous marriage with their parallel cousins, the fifty sons of Aegyptus (‘Egyptian’), the subject of Aeschylus’ play The Suppliants.
Die Tmesis bei Homer und auf den mykenischen Linear B-Tafeln: ein chronologisches Paradox?
Authors: Hajnal Ivo
Published: November 2023

Vor knapp zwanzig Jahren hat Anna Morpurgo Davies in einem viel beachteten Überblicksartikel das Verhältnis von epischer und mykenischer Sprache beleuchtet. In diesem Zusammenhang brachte die Jubilarin auch ein viel diskutiertes Paradoxon zur Sprache: die Tatsache, dass das Epos Homers die ererbte Trennung von ‘Präverb’ und Verb (die so genannte ‘Tmesis’) ausgiebig bezeugt, die um mindestens 500 Jahre älteren Linear B-Tafeln jedoch keine Spur dieses Archaismus zeigen. Anna Morpurgo Davies gelangte dabei zu folgender Beurteilung: Es sei nicht zu leugnen, dass die Tmesis im Epos ein archaisches syntaktisches Feature sei. Folglich musse die Tmesis auf HÖrer des ersten Jahrtausends sprachfremd gewirkt haben.
A Luwian Dedication
Authors: Melchert H Craig
Published: November 2023

We owe to Anna Morpurgo Davies an entire series of ground-breaking analyses of various aspects of Luwian grammar, encompassing phonology, morphology, and syntax. Admiration for these accomplishments is heightened among those of us who know just how difficult it has been merely to collect for H(ieroglyphic) Luwian all the relevant data needed to draw valid generalizations, much less to offer convincing solutions to the many problems raised. Thanks to the magnificent recently published corpus of Iron Age inscriptions by David Hawkins (2000), we now have greatly enhanced opportunities to use the two forms of Luwian in complementary fashion to elucidate both. I hope that both our honorand and others will find the following a persuasive example of this technique.
On Vedic Suppletion: dāś and vidh
Authors: Ramón José Luis García
Published: November 2023

Vedic dāś ‘honour, worship, revere, offer’ has three constructions in common with synonymous vidh: (a)with dative of the recipient and instrumental of the offering, (b)with dative of the recipient and accusative of the offering, and (c)with accusative of the recipient and instrumental of the offering. Of these constructions (a)is by far the most frequently attested in both roots as against (b)and (c), the occurrences of which are extremely rare (§ §2–3). The overwhelming preponderance of construction (a)is exclusively restricted to both dāśand vidh, in sharp contrast with other verbs of offering and celebrating, which have types (b)and/or (c)4).
Why am I My Brother’s Keeper?
Authors: Regan Donald H
Published: November 2023

I want to cast doubt on a proposition which many people would regard as the first axiom of moral theory. Joseph Raz has stated the proposition thus: ‘Morality is ... concerned with the advancement of the well00ADbeing of individuals.’1 Actually, Raz includes a qualifier the full quote says that morality ‘is thought to be concerned with’ advancing the well being of individuals. But the whole tenor of his ensuing discussion suggests that Raz generally shares this view of what morality is about.
Socrates And Protagoras On Virtue
Authors: O’Brien Denis
Published: November 2023

When Socrates has shaken himself free from the spell of Protagoras’ oratory (328 D 4–7), he fires off three seemingly simple questions in quick succession (329 c 6–E 4). Each question is cast in the form of a choice between two distinct theses. In each case, the two theses are introduced by the same pair of disjunctive particles [ineq]
Cosmological Ethics In The Timaeus And Early Stoicism
Authors: Betegh Gabor
Published: November 2023

At the beginning of the concluding part of the Critique of Practical Reason, in the well-known and well-worn dictum about the starry sky above us and the moral law within us, Kant places the cosmic and the ethical perspectives next to each other. Yet, the starry sky and the moral law do not figure there as two components of an ethical theory. Quite the opposite, they represent two distinct, autonomous spheres of the world: that of physics and natural law on the one hand, and that of ethics and freedom on the other. Most modern philosophers respect this distinction between the cosmic perspective and the sphere of ethics.
Cut-Offs and their Neighbors
Authors: Varzi Achille C
Published: November 2023

I agree with Priest: the Sorites is a very hard paradox, possibly harder than the Liar. For the Liar can be isolated, whereas the Sorites is everywhere and can take us anywhere. And I agree that the paradox is so hard because it systematically imposes upon us the existence of unbelievable or otherwise unacceptable cutoff points. No solution can avoid explaining why this happens. But I have two points of disagreement with Priest’s account of the matter. The first concerns the emphasis that he places on the working of natural language. And the second, more important problem concerns the line of explanation that Priest offers of the reason why we are stuck with cutoff pointshence his tentative solution to the paradox.
Gap Principles, Penumbral Consequence, and Infinitely Higher-Order Vagueness
Authors: Graff Delia
Published: November 2023

Philosophers disagree about whether vagueness requires us to admit truthvalue gaps, about whether there is a gap between the objects of which a given vague predicate is true and those of which it is false on an appropriately constructed Sorites series for the predicatea series involving small increments of change in a relevant respect between adjacent elements, but a large increment of change in that respect between the endpoints. There appears, however, to be widespread agreement that there is some sense in which vague predicates are happy which may be expressed neutrally by saying that on any appropriately constructed Sorites series for a given vague predicate there will be a gap between the objects of, which the predicate is definitely true and those of which it is d finitely false.
New Grounds for Naive ruth Theory
Authors: Yablo S
Published: November 2023

There is no denying Tarski’s result, but one can try to steer around it. The ways of steering around it correspond to a number of things that Tarski did not show; All of these strategies have been tried. But the last two have been tried the least. Field’s approach combines elements of both. He adds a non-classical connective —> while at the same time de-classicalizing the logic of the other connectives (by rejecting excluded middle).
A Completeness heorem for Unrestricted First-Order Languages
Authors: Rayo Agustin , Williamson Timothy
Published: November 2023

Here is an account of logical consequence inspired by Botzano and Tarski. Logical validity is a property of arguments. An argument is a pair of a set of interpreted sentences (the premises) and an interpreted sentence (the conclusion). Whether an argument is logically valid depends only on its logical form. The Logical form of an argument is fixed by the syntax of its constituent sentences, the meanings of their logical constituents, and the syntactic differences between their non-logical constituents, treated as variables. A constituent of a sentence is logical just if it is formal in meaning, in the sense roughly that its application is invariant under permutations of individuals.
While We Wait: Notes on the English Translation of The Second Sex
Authors: Moi Toril
Published: November 2023

That the English translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sexis bad has been well known ever since Margaret Simons published her ground-breaking essay ‘The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir: Guess What’s Missing from The Second Sex’in 1983. So why write another essay on the same topic twenty years later? The first and most obvious reason is that English-speaking readers still have to use the text so cogently criticized by Simons, namely H. M. Parshley’s ‘edition and translation’.
Prototype Categories in Phonology
Authors: Taylor John R
Published: November 2023

In this chapter I discuss a topic of crucial importance for the coherence of the thesis presented in this book, namely the possibility of attributing non-classical structure to phonological categories. I drew attention in Section 2.3 to the role of the structural analogy assumption in twentieth-century linguistic theory. According to this assumption, a linguist will expect the same kinds of structure to show up at diﬀerent levels of linguistic organization. Now, taking a rather broad view of the recent history of linguistics, it is probably true to say that it was in the study of phonology that the modern discipline ﬁrst came of age. There are many reasons why this should have been so. The sounds of a language can be observed in a way in which meanings and syntactic structures cannot; the number of phonological entities (e.g. phonemes and features) which need to be posited for any one language is small and manageable; moreover, in their study of sound systems linguists were able to draw on the ﬁndings of a well-established tradition of articulatory phonetics.
The Acquisition of Categories
Authors: Taylor John R
Published: November 2023

One of the stated aims of the Chomskyan paradigm is to account for the process of language acquisition; conversely, alleged facts of acquisition are continuously, even monotonously, invoked as evidence for the correctness of the paradigm. The form of the argument is familiar. An examination of syntactic, semantic, and phonological phenomena leads to the postulation of abstract entities which are not visible in the surface forms of a language. These postulated entities, and the rules which manipulate them, cannot therefore be learnt by any process of induction or generalization from mere exposure to the surface forms. This is the ‘logical problem’ of language acqui-sition, which, it is argued, can only be solved if the child is credited with a rich initial state of the language faculty. The child, that is, succeeds in acquiring a language because the scaﬀolding is genetically inherited. Acquisition is seen as the unfolding of the innate potential; only the arbitrary facts of the target language (the phonological shape of individual morphemes, for example) need to be learnt.
Language and National Identity in Asia: a Thematic Introduction
Authors: Simpson Andrew
Published: November 2023

Studies of nationalism and the emergence and maintenance of nations regularly concur that language, and in particular the existence of broadly shared language, is very often a primary and critical component in the successful moulding of a population as a nation. As a symbolic marker and index of individual and group identity, language has the potential to function as an important boundary device, separating distinct sub-populations of from neighbouring others with different, possibly unintelligible language habits, and binding the former together with shared feelings of identity and group self-interest. Spread amongst a significantly wide population of speakers via the use of various mass media, a common language can assist in the construction of a geographically widespread, imagined community of speakers and the building of nation-like polities, providing linguistic links are also reinforced with other shared cultural properties. The promotion of a standardized, common language throughout a territory and its inhabitants also has the ability to even out socio-economic inequities present in a society and encourage the unification of a population through the provision of equal (or at least improved) opportunities for advancement and future prosperity. Following on from Barbour and Carmichael’s (2000) revealing, multi-authored study of Language and Nationalism in Europe, the present, similarly structured volume takes as its focus the theme of language as a force in the construction and maintenance of nations within Asia, and endeavours to probe and chart the linguistic tensions at play in the development of states in the Asian region.
North and South Korea
Authors: King Ross
Published: November 2023

Until the separate states of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (henceforth, North Korea or DPRK) and the Republic of Korea (henceforth, South Korea or ROK) were declared in 1948, Korea for hundreds of years was a rare case of a near-perfect fit between nation and language: it has for centuries been characterized by an extremely high degree of homogeneity, both linguistically and ethnically. Now, the Korean nation and its territory is divided into two distinct nation-states, each with quite different political and economic systems and conditions in operation, and characterized by very different conditions and experiences of everyday life. Since the end of the Second World War, the North, with a current, estimated population of 22 million, has largely isolated itself from the outside world and spawned a resolutely independent form of communist development that has yielded minimal economic success in recent years. The South, by way of contrast, has undergone significant modernization and growth in its open economy, established extensive contacts with other countries in Asia and the West, and with a population of 48 million now enjoys much prosperity as one of Asia’s major economic forces.
Tensed Quantifiers
Authors: Lewis David
Published: November 2023

Some of our idioms of quantification embed verbs, e.g ‘there is ‘, ‘there exists ‘. When they do, those verbs can be tensed, forming what I shall call tensed quantifiers. There are past-tensed quantifiers, e.g. ‘there was ‘, ‘there has been ‘, ‘there existed ‘. There are future-tensed quantifiers, e.g. ‘there will be ‘, ‘there is going to exist ‘. There are tensed quantifiers with compound tenses, ‘there had existed ‘, or ‘there will have been ‘. And sometimes, at least, the unmarked quantifier phrase ‘there is1 or ‘there exists1 acts as a present-tensed quantifier.
Non-symmetric Relations
Authors: Dorr Cian
Published: November 2023

Let us say that a relation r is symmetric iff, whenever x bears r to y, y bears r to x; otherwise, r is non-symmetric. In this paper I will argue for the thesis that, necessarily, there are no non-symmetric relations.
The Circle of Adequate Knowledge: Notes on Reason and Intuition in Spinoza
Authors: Malinowski-Charles Syliane
Published: November 2023

One of the fundamental characteristics of Spinoza’s theory of knowledge, and one of the most intriguing, is the quasi-automatic character of the progress of knowledge, which Spinoza puts forward in paragraph 85 of the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and illustrates by the image of the intellect forging its own tools of perfection in paragraphs 30-2. Lia Levy’s recent study of Spinoza’s notion of consciousness shows the complexity and richness of this problematic, which should be considered crucial for the understanding of Spinoza’s theory of knowledge.
The Relationship Between Books Zeta and Eta of Aristotle’s Metaphysics
Authors: Devereux Daniel
Published: November 2023

It is easy to understand why there is general agreement among scholars that books Zeta and Eta of Aristotle’s Metaphysics make up a unified treatise on the nature of substance.1 Aristotle begins book Eta (‘H’) with the announcement that ‘we must reckon up what has been said and, after drawing together the main points, complete the remainder of our enquiry’. He then gives a brief summary of topics discussed to this point, a summary which reads like a table of contents of book Zeta (‘Z’). And the rest of H seems to carry forward the investigation of substance which was launched at the beginning of Z. The two books thus present themselves as a unified, self-contained discussion.
What’s the good of agreeing? Homonoia in platonic politics
Authors: Kamtekar Rachana
Published: November 2023

ALL the citizens in the ideal city of Plato’s Republic, the rulers as well as the ruled, agree that their city’s rulers, the philosophers, should rule. This agreement is a feature of the city’s moderation: the city’s moderation is not only a condition in which ‘the desires of the base majority are ruled by the desires and wisdom of the superior minority’ (431 c 9-D 2) but also one in which the ruled, rather than being simply dominated by the rulers, believe that their rulers should rule over them.
The Virtues And ‘Becoming Like God’: Alcinous To Proclus
Authors: Baltzly Dirk
Published: November 2023

Recent work in virtue ethics owes much to the moral philosophy of Aristotle and that of the Hellenistic schools. It cannot be said to be similarly indebted to Platonic moral philosophy. Doubtless this is partly because Plato’s dialogue form does not 1end itself to the construction of a ‘Platonic virtue theory’ in quite the same way that Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics lends itself to the project of constructing an Aristotelian theory of virtue. But it is not just a matter of the form of Plato’s writings. Later Platonists such as Alcinous, Plotinus, Porphyry, and Proclus sought to extract what they took to be Plato’s eudaimonist moral philosophy from the dialogues and present it in formats not utterly dissimilar to that of Aristotle’s treatises. I do not propose to address the question of whether the expositions of these later Platonists misrepresent Plato’s moral philosophy-or, indeed, whether he had a moral philosophy to misrepresent. Instead, this paper addresses an objection that Platonic moral philosophy of this sort could not provide us with much valuable insight because the Platonist conception of the goal of living is not only implausible but also deeply ambiguous. Let us consider the charge levelled against the moral philosophy of Plato as it was developed by these Platonists.
Externalism in Mind and Epistemology
Authors: Brown Jessica
Published: November 2023

Prima facie, the debates between ‘internalism ‘ and ‘externalism ‘ in the philosophy of mind and epistemology are not obviously connected. In the philosophy of mind, the debate between those I will call ‘semantic internalists ‘ and those I will call ‘semantic externalists ‘ concerns thought content; in epistemology, the debate between those I will call ‘epistemic internalists ‘ and those I will call ‘epistemic externalists ‘ is best understood as concerning justification. However, despite the difference in their subject matters, it turns out that the two debates are connected. In particular, I argue that if, as is widely claimed, semantic externalism undermines the traditional idea that one has special access to one‘s thought contents, then it may undermine those forms of epistemic internalism which involve the idea that one has special access to one‘s justificatory status or the facts which determine justification.
Aporia and Searching in the Early Plato
Authors: Politis Vasilis
Published: November 2023

It is typical of Socrates in a number of dialogues traditionally considered early— Laches, Euthyphro, Charmides, Protagoras as well as Meno—to lead the interlocutor towards a state of aporia, a mental state of perplexity and being at a loss, about some ethical subject—courage, piety, temperance, virtue. The aim of this activity, as we know especially from the Apology, is to divest the interlocutor of the pretence of knowledge in a particular area and to bring him to a recognition of his ignorance.
Knowledge And True Belief In The Meno
Authors: Fine Gail
Published: November 2023

In Meno 97 A ff. Plato, for the first time, explains how, in his view, knowledge differs from true belief; he also notes some similarities between them. This is often thought to be the first passage in Western philosophy to say that knowledge is true belief plus something. Some commentators think it is also the first passage to say that knowledge is justified true belief: that is, that justification is what must be added to true belief so as to yield knowledge. However, both the view that the Menosays that knowledge is justified true belief, and the view that it says that knowledge is true belief plus something, have been challenged. Those who challenge these views disagree among themselves about what alternative view of knowledge the Meno articulates. Indeed, as we shall see, there is also dispute about whether it even discusses knowledge.
An Aristotelian Theory Of Predication?
Authors: Bostock David
Published: November 2023

In Section r I briefly assemble some reminders of what Aristotle has to say about predication in his logical works (and I shall confine my attention to these works only). To keep my discussion within reasonable bounds I have here had to be somewhat dogmatic on some issues which are still controversial, and I apologize for this. In Section 2 I outline a modern reconstruction of why Aristotle may have thought as he did, and sketch in modern terms the theory to which it gives rise. In Section 3 I ask whether there really is good reason to attribute this theory to Aristotle. In Section 4 I ask whether it has merit anyway as a philosophical account of predication, irrespective of whether we may call it Aristotle’s theory.
Aristotle On ‘Simultaneous Learning’ In Posterior Analytics1. 1 And Prior Analytics 2. 21
Authors: Labarge Scott
Published: November 2023

Two passages in Aristotle’s Analytics—Pr. An.2. 21, 67a5–30 and Post. An.1. 1, 71a17–30—confront Aristotle’s interpreters with a joint challenge. The context of the two passages is very different: the first appears in a chapter meant to explain what kinds of syllogistic errors we can and cannot make, while the second comes in a discussion of the Aristotelian principle that all teaching and all intellectual learning arise from pre-existing cognition.
Three Introductory Questions: Is Analytic Philosophical Theology an Oxymoron? Is Substance Dualism Incoherent? What’s in this Book, Anyway?
Authors: Zimmerman Dean
Published: November 2023

The essays within this book—all of which appear here for the first time1—are philosophical explorations of the nature of persons. Those comfortable using the word “analytic” to describe the kind of philosophy that now thrives in the philosophy departments of most Anglophone universities will say that we are all analytic philosophers. (Shortly, I shall have more to say about the problematic adjective “analytic”.) As a consequence, there is much within this book that is continuous with current philosophical debates about the nature of persons. On the other hand, the authors have theological concerns that do not arise for most contributors to the philosophical literature on persons.
Materialism and Christian Belief
Authors: Plantinga Alvin
Published: November 2023

According to materialism, human persons are material objects. They are not immaterial things, or objects, or substances; neither do they contain as parts immaterial selves or souls or entelechies. Their parts are material: flesh and bones and blood, molecules, atoms, electrons and quarks (if in fact there are such things). This view, of course, goes contrary to the vast bulk of the Christian tradition. This is not to say, pace Plato (or anyway Socrates), that the body is the prison house of the soul, or that our present attachment to the body is to be deplored, as if it were a temporary, makeshift arrangement (due to sin?) to be jettisoned in the next life.
Modes without Modalism
Authors: Leftow Brian
Published: November 2023

Such odd arithmetic demands explaining. Some explanations begin from the oneness of God, and try to explain just how one God can be three divine Persons. As Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas pursued this project, let us call it Latin Trinitarianism (LT). I now sketch a Latin view of the Trinity.
Approaches: Sublists
Authors: McMahon April , McMahon Robert
Published: November 2023

In the last chapter we considered Thomason’s typology of contact linguistics (2001). There is a paradox inherent in typologies of this kind, since the most extreme types of contact are not necessarily the most problematic for language classification. Although it might initially appear that contact-induced changes which affect all areas of the grammar, sometimes radically, might have most impact on our attempts to group languages into families, in fact many contact situations of this kind are particularly obvious, and therefore less likely to mislead us into proposing a relationship where there is none, or a closer relationship than was historically the case. On the other hand, contact involving only lexical borrowing, especially when that borrowing has been gradual but continual over a lengthy period of time, can be particularly difficult to trace, and to distinguish from the effects of equally gradual, differentiating change on a common ancestral system.
Correlations Between Genetic and Linguistic Data
Authors: McMahon April , McMahon Robert
Published: November 2023

An approach which can diagnose and use even unknown loans turns out to be of considerable relevance when we turn to another area of controversy, this time moving beyond linguistics per se to a set of observed though contentious interdisciplinary correlations. It is easy to see language families as abstractions, and perhaps our conventional representation of each language, reconstructed or attested, as a single node encourages that kind of thinking. But reconstructed languages in the past, like languages today, must have had speakers; so it follows that human histories, rather than simply linguistic histories, are necessarily involved. However, it is impossible to find out about those human histories through linguistic work alone: we have to take an interdisciplinary approach. One possibility, which is much in the scientific news at the moment, is the ‘new synthesis’; and its proponents argue that we can bring together evidence from linguistics, genetics, and archaeology, assess whether meaningful correlations exist between these disciplines, then use this cumulative evidence to provide clues to the histories of human populations. Moreover, work of this kind might help us understand the features of populations today, by revealing prehistoric affiliations and contacts.
Ramsey’s Legacies on Conditionals and Truth
Authors: Edgington Dorothy
Published: November 2023

Two ideas associated with Frank Ramsey have been very influential, and further developed in recent years, one about conditional judgements, the other about truth. The two ideas can appear to be in tension with each other, for the former has a consequence which it has seemed hard to square with the latter. Philosophical descendants of Ramsey on truth have found it hard to be philosophical descendants of Ramsey on conditionals.1 It is this tension which I want to discuss and try to defuse. A footnote in Ramsey’s ‘General Propositions and Causality’ (1929a) has had a great impact on thinking about indicative conditionals since the 1960s. The idea it propounds has come to be known as the Ramsey Test. Here it is: If two people are arguing ‘ If p will q?’ and are both in doubt as to p, they are adding p hypothetically to their stock of knowledge and arguing on that basis about q they are fixing their degrees of belief in q given p. ( p. 155)
Hume and Hutcheson: The Question of lnfluence
Authors: Norton David Fate
Published: November 2023

One important aspect of the continuing attempts to delineate David Hume’s philosophical character has been the effort to clarify the relationship of Hume’s views to those of his older contemporary Francis Hutcheson. Throughout the second half of the past century commentators routinely concluded that, at least early on, Hume was influenced or stimulated by the moral philosophy of Hutcheson. There is good evidence that prior to the publication of his first work, A Treatise of Human  Nature (1739–40), Hume was reasonably familiar with Hutcheson’s Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), and perhaps also with his Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections (1728).There have also appeared to be several significant similarities between Hutcheson’s views and those of Hume. These facts led Norman Kemp Smith to conclude that ‘it was under the direct influence of Francis Hutcheson that [Hume] was led to recognise that judgments of moral approval and disapproval, and indeed judgments of value of whatever type, are based not on rational insight or on evidence, but solely on feeling’. And, Kemp Smith, went on, what opened up ‘a new Scene of Thought’ for Hume was ‘the discovery that this [Hutchesonian] point of view could be carried over into the theoretical domain’ where he used it to solve problems raised by Locke and Berkeley. Kemp Smith modified his thesis, however, by observing that Hume drew consequences from Hutcheson’s philosophy that Hutcheson himself ‘had refused to draw’.
From Fleece To Fabric: Weaving Culture In Plato’S Statesman
Authors: Blondell Ruby
Published: November 2023

The Statesman is a lumpy dialogue, oddly constructed with digressions of various kinds, several disparate methodologies, and a long, strange myth in the middle of it all. This paper will focus on an interlinked set of themes which, I shall argue, supply it with a dynamic overarching unity. In seeking a definition of the ideal statesman, the dialogue begins with herding-which provides wool-and ends with weaving, the wool-working craft par excellence. These two poles in fabric production provide us with a pas sage from the solitary, marginal world of the herdsman, with his transient way of life and tangential relationship to culture, to the settled, complex world of civilization. In each case, a human be haviour characteristic of that world is projected onto the ruler, who is imagined first as a herdsman and then as a weaver. In between lies the cosmic myth, which describes the pre-cultural, pastoral age of Cronus, followed by the age of Zeus with its institution of techne,1 reinscribing the passage from nature to civilization as the principal cultural matrix in which the dialogue’s arguments are embedded.
What is aristotle’s "third man" argument against the forms?
Authors: Sharma Ravi
Published: November 2023

Among Aristotle’s criticisms of the Forms, the argument labelled ‘the Third Man’ is commonly viewed as one of the most significant. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most obscure. Although the argument is mentioned several times in the Metaphysics and dis cussed once in the Sophistical Refutations, it is not fully explained in either work. At best, Aristotle offers several clues as to its proper interpretation. Things seem better if one looks to the tradition of ancient commentary, since the Third Man is treated explicitly by Alexander in his detailed exposition of the anti-Platonic arguments of Meta physics A 9. Alexander’s treatment is not without ambiguities of its own; but apart from its comparative level of detail, it has recently held a special attraction for scholars. For it readily accommodates, even encourages, an interpretation whereby the Third Man turns on the ascription of a "self-predication" thesis to Plato. And since a number of scholars have become convinced that Plato fell victim to self-predication, they have been quick to accord Aristotle the honour of being the first to diagnose that confusion.
Belief about Nothing in Particular
Authors: Kroon Frederick
Published: November 2023

It is easy nowadays-so Nathan Salmon declares approvingly in Frege’s Puzzle-to get caught up in ‘direct-reference mania’, the widespread philosophical conviction that the semantic content of a proper name, demonstra tive, or other simple indexical is not descriptive but directly involves the particular that the term refers to. This Direct Reference program (DR) faces enormous problems, of course-problems that persuaded Russell long ago to reject the program for all but the most immediate of referring devices (his logically proper names) and to prefer a description-theoretic treatment for ordinary proper names. With the demise of description theories, however, the question of how to deal with these problems has once again begun to occupy center stage.
Moorean Absurdity: An Epistemological Analysis
Authors: Almeida Claudio De
Published: November 2023

In view of what the philosophical imagination has done with Moore’s paradox, there should be no doubt that Moorean Absurdity may be symptomatic of a number of philosophical ills (that is, the kind of flaw of intellectual or moral character that philosophers seek to understand). A main concern for those who have been influential in the debate about the problem is explaining why a Moore-absurd belief is a case of irrationality. Indeed, whatever else may truly be said about it, we will not have found a satisfactory account of Moorean Absurdity until we have an unobjectionable explanation of this peculiar form of doxastic irrationality.
The Aesthetic Value of Ideas
Authors: Schellekens Elisabeth
Published: November 2023

In conceptual art the idea of the concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is intuitive, it is involved with all types of mental processes. It is the objective of the artist who is concerned with conceptual art to make his work mentally interesting to the spectator, and therefore usually he would want it to become emotionally dry. There is no reason to suppose, however, that the conceptual artist is out to bore the viewer. It is only the expectation of an emotional kick, to which one conditioned to expressionist art is accustomed, that would deter the viewer from perceiving this art.
Kant After LeWitt: Towards an Aesthetics of Conceptual Art∗
Authors: Costello Diarmuid
Published: November 2023

Conceptual Art is generally portrayed as a rejection of aesthetic theory as an adequate basis for understanding artistic value or significance. In what follows I want to see whether one can understand Conceptual Art, contrary to this orthodox art-historical and philosophical narrative, in aesthetic terms— but without fundamentally distorting the nature of the work. Perhaps even more outlandishly, I want to examine whether Conceptual Art’s aesthetic dimension can be understood by extrapolating from Kant’s enigmatic account of what works of art do in the third Critique — namely, ‘express aesthetic ideas’.
Structure and Identity
Authors: Shapiro Stewart
Published: November 2023

The purpose of this paper is to further articulate my preferred version of mathematical structuralism in light of some criticisms of my Philosophy of Mathematics: Structure and Ontology (1997) and Michael Resnik’s Mathematics as a Science of Patterns (1997). Some of these criticisms are shortcomings in the original presentation, and so I take this opportunity to correct aspects of the view.