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Absolute Time: Rifts in Early Modern British Metaphysics

Emily Thomas

What is time? Traditionally, it has been answered that time is a product of the human mind, or the motion of celestial bodies. In the mid-seventeenth century, a new kind of answer emerged: time or ... More

What is time? Traditionally, it has been answered that time is a product of the human mind, or the motion of celestial bodies. In the mid-seventeenth century, a new kind of answer emerged: time or eternal duration is ‘absolute’, in the sense it is independent of human minds and material bodies. This study explores the development of absolute time or eternal duration during one of Britain’s richest and most creative metaphysical periods, from the 1640s to the 1730s. It features an interconnected set of main characters—Henry More, Walter Charleton, Isaac Barrow, Isaac Newton, John Locke, Samuel Clarke, and John Jackson—alongside a large and varied supporting cast, whose metaphysics are all read in their historical context and given a place in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century development of thought on time. In addition to interpreting the metaphysics of these characters, this study advances two general, developmental theses. First, the complexity of positions on time (and space) defended in early modern thought is hugely under-appreciated. Second, distinct kinds of absolutism emerged in British philosophy, helping us to understand why some absolutists considered time to be barely real, whilst others identified it with the most real being of all: God.Less

Abstraction and Infinity

Paolo Mancosu

The book provides an original investigation of historical and systematic aspects of the notions of abstraction and infinity and their interaction. The notion of abstraction in question is that ... More

The book provides an original investigation of historical and systematic aspects of the notions of abstraction and infinity and their interaction. The notion of abstraction in question is that related to the use of abstraction principles in neo-logicism. The most familiar abstraction principle in this context is Hume’s Principle. Hume’s Principle says that two concepts have the same number if and only if the objects falling under each one of them can be put in one–one correspondence. Chapter 1 shows that abstraction principles were quite widespread in the mathematical practice that preceded Frege’s discussion of them. The second chapter provides the first contextual analysis of Frege’s discussion of abstraction principles in section 64 of the Grundlagen; the second part investigates the foundational reflection on abstraction principles in the Peanosets not by using school and Russell. Chapter 3 discusses a novel approach to measuring the size of infinite sets known as the theory of numerosities. This theory assigns numerosities to infinite sets not by using one–one correspondence but by preserving the part–whole principle, namely the principle according to which if a set A is strictly included in a set B, then the numerosity of A is strictly smaller than the numerosity of B. Mancosu shows how this new development leads to deep mathematical, historical, and philosophical problems. Chapter 4 brings the previous strands together by offering some surprising novel perspectives on neo-logicism.Less

Accessing Kant: A relaxed introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason

Jay F. Rosenberg

This book introduces Immanuel Kant's masterwork, the Critique of Pure Reason, from a ‘relaxed’ problem-oriented perspective which treats Kant as an especially insightful practising philosopher, from ... More

This book introduces Immanuel Kant's masterwork, the Critique of Pure Reason, from a ‘relaxed’ problem-oriented perspective which treats Kant as an especially insightful practising philosopher, from whom we still have much to learn, intelligently and creatively responding to significant questions that transcend his work's historical setting. The book's main project is to command a clear view of how Kant understands various perennial problems, how he attempts to resolve them, and to what extent he succeeds. The constructive portions of the First Critique—the Aesthetic and Analytic—are explored in detail; the Paralogisms and Antinomies more briefly. At the same time the book is an introduction to the challenges of reading the text of Kant's work and, to that end, selectively adopts a more rigorous historical and exegetical stance.Less

Adam Smith: Systematic Philosopher and Public Thinker

Eric Schliesser

This book treats Adam Smith as a systematic philosopher. Smith was a giant of the Scottish Enlightenment with polymath interests. The book explores Smith’s economics and ethics in light of his other ... More

This book treats Adam Smith as a systematic philosopher. Smith was a giant of the Scottish Enlightenment with polymath interests. The book explores Smith’s economics and ethics in light of his other commitments on the nature of knowledge, the theory of emotions, the theory of mind, his account of language, the nature of causation, and his views on methodology. It places Smith’s ideas in the context of a host of other philosophers, especially David Hume, Rousseau, and Isaac Newton; it draws on the reception of Smith’s ideas by Sophie de Grouchy, Mary Wollstonecraft, and other philosophers and economists to sketch the elements of and the detailed connections within Smith’s system. The book traces out Smith’s system and puts it in the context of his highly developed views on the norms that govern responsible speech. In particular, the book articulates Smith’s concerns with the impact of his public policy recommendations, especially on the least powerful in society. In so doing, the book offers new interpretations of Smith’s views on the invisible hand, Wealth of Nations, his treatment of virtue, the nature of freedom, the individual’s relationship to society, his account of the passions, the moral roles of religion, and his treatment of the role of mathematics in economics. While the book offers a single argument, it is organized in modular fashion and includes a helpful index; readers with a more focused interest in Smith’s achievements can skip ahead to the section of interest.Less

African Philosophy: New and Traditional Perspectives

Lee M. Brown (ed.)

This book features a collection of essays that seek to provide accurate and well-developed characterizations of the epistemological and metaphysical concerns that shaped the conceptual languages and ... More

This book features a collection of essays that seek to provide accurate and well-developed characterizations of the epistemological and metaphysical concerns that shaped the conceptual languages and philosophical thought of sub-Saharan Africa. A common theme between the essays is that a word shared by different cultures can have different extensions while being taken to have the same sense. It is argued that the ability to appreciate or understand the conceptual languages of others is influenced by the extent to which this content is viewed from the perspectives of the native users of the language. Among the topics covered by the essays are conceptions of the person, truth, destiny, personal identity, and metaphysics.Less

After Certainty: A History of Our Epistemic Ideals and Illusions

Robert Pasnau

No part of philosophy is as disconnected from its history as is epistemology. After Certainty offers a reconstruction of that history as the story of an epistemic ideal first formulated by Plato and ... More

No part of philosophy is as disconnected from its history as is epistemology. After Certainty offers a reconstruction of that history as the story of an epistemic ideal first formulated by Plato and Aristotle, later developed throughout the Middle Ages, and then dramatically reformulated in the seventeenth century. In watching these debates unfold over the centuries, we come to understand why epistemology has traditionally been embedded within a much wider sphere of concerns about human nature and the reality of the world we live in. We also come to see why epistemology has become today a much narrower and specialized field, concerned with the conditions under which it is true to say, in English, that someone knows something. Looking back to earlier days, this study makes its way through the various and changing ideals of inquiry that have been pursued over the centuries, from the expectations of certainty and explanatory depth to the rising concern over evidence and precision, as famously manifested in the new science. At both the sensory and the intellectual levels, the initial expectation of infallibility is seen to give way to mere subjective indubitability, and in the end it is unclear whether anything remains of the epistemic ideals that philosophy has long pursued. All we may ultimately be left with is hope.Less

After Gödel: Platonism and Rationalism in Mathematics and Logic

Richard Tieszen

This book contains an analysis, development, and defense of a number of central ideas in Kurt Gödel's writings on the philosophy and foundations of mathematics and logic, with reference to his three ... More

This book contains an analysis, development, and defense of a number of central ideas in Kurt Gödel's writings on the philosophy and foundations of mathematics and logic, with reference to his three philosophical heroes, Plato, Leibniz, and Husserl, and to his engagement with Kant. Close readings of Gödel's texts on foundations are supplemented with materials from the Gödel Nachlass and from Hao Wang's discussions with Gödel. Gödel's views on the philosophical significance of his technical results on completeness, incompleteness, undecidability, consistency proofs, speed‐up theorems, and independence proofs are discussed throughout the book. A detailed analysis of his critique of Hilbert and Carnap, and of his subsequent turn to Husserl's transcendental philosophy in 1959, is provided. On this basis, a new type of platonic rationalism that requires rational intuition, called ‘constituted platonism’, is developed and defended. It is shown how constituted platonism addresses the problem of the objectivity of mathematics and of the knowledge of abstract mathematical objects. The implications of the position for the claim that human minds (‘monads’) are machines are considered in some detail. Issues about pragmatic holism and rationalism are discussed in a final chapter.Less

Agency and Autonomy in Kant's Moral Theory: Selected Essays

Andrews Reath

This book contains chapters on various features of Kant's moral psychology and moral theory, with particular emphasis on a conception of rational agency autonomy. The opening chapters explore ... More

This book contains chapters on various features of Kant's moral psychology and moral theory, with particular emphasis on a conception of rational agency autonomy. The opening chapters explore different elements of Kant's views about motivation, including an account of respect for morality as the distinctive moral motive and a view of the principle of happiness as a representation of the shared structure of non-moral choice. These chapters stress the unity of Kant's moral psychology by arguing that moral and non-moral considerations motivate in essentially the same way. Several of the chapters develop an original approach to Kant's conception of autonomy that emphasizes the political metaphors found throughout Kant's writings on ethics. They argue that autonomy is best interpreted not as a psychological capacity, but as a kind of sovereignty: in claiming that moral agents have autonomy, Kant regards them as a kind of sovereign legislator with the power to give moral law through their willing. The final chapters explore some of the implications of this conception of autonomy elsewhere in Kant's moral thought, arguing that his Formula of Universal Law uses this conception of autonomy to generate substantive moral principles and exploring the connection between Kantian self-legislation and duties to oneself.Less

American Philosophy before Pragmatism

Russell B. Goodman

This study of five American thinkers—Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau—considers their work in relation to the philosophers and other ... More

This study of five American thinkers—Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau—considers their work in relation to the philosophers and other thinkers they found important: to the deism of John Toland and Matthew Tindal, the moral sense theories of Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and David Hume, the political and religious philosophy of John Locke, the romanticism of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant. The book considers Edwards’s condemnation and Franklin’s acceptance of deism, argues that Jefferson was an Epicurean in his metaphysical views and a Christian, Stoic, and Epicurean in his moral outlook, traces Emerson’s debts to writers from Madame de Staël to William Ellery Channing, and considers Thoreau’s orientation to the universe through sitting and walking. The morality of American slavery is a major theme in the book, introduced not to excuse or condemn, but to study how five formidably intelligent people thought about the question when it was—as it no longer is for us—open. Edwards, Franklin, and Jefferson owned slaves, though Franklin and Jefferson played important roles in disturbing the uneasy American moral equilibrium that included slavery, even as they approved an American constitution that incorporated it. Emerson and Thoreau were prominent public opponents of slavery in the 1840s and 1850s. The book contains an interlude on the concept of a republic and concludes with an epilogue documenting some continuities in American philosophy, particularly between Emerson’s Philosophy and pragmatism.Less

Animals: A History

Peter Adamson and G. Fay Edwards (eds)

It is commonly assumed that serious philosophical reflection on animals goes back only a few hundred years, to the Utilitarians or to the rise of Darwinism. This volume shows that, to the contrary, ... More

It is commonly assumed that serious philosophical reflection on animals goes back only a few hundred years, to the Utilitarians or to the rise of Darwinism. This volume shows that, to the contrary, animals have been a subject of controversy and reflection in all periods of the history of philosophy. We trace the story from Greek and Indian antiquity through the Islamic and Latin medieval traditions, to Renaissance and early modern thought, ending with contemporary ideas about animals. Two main questions that arise throughout the volume are: What capacities can be ascribed to animals, and How should we treat them? Notoriously ungenerous attitudes toward animals, for instance in Aristotle and Descartes, are shown to have been more nuanced than often supposed, while remarkable defenses of benevolence toward animals are unearthed in late antiquity, India, the Islamic world, and Kant. The book also includes philosophical exploration of such topics as cannibalism, animal instinct, and the scientific testing of animals. A series of interdisciplinary reflections sheds further light on human attitudes toward animals, looking at their depiction in visual artworks from China, Africa, and Europe, as well as the rich tradition of animal fables beginning with Aesop.Less

Anscombe's Intention: A Guide

John Schwenkler

This book provides a careful, critical, and appropriately contextualized presentation of the main lines of argument in G.E.M. Anscombe’s seminal book, Intention, at a level appropriate to the ... More

This book provides a careful, critical, and appropriately contextualized presentation of the main lines of argument in G.E.M. Anscombe’s seminal book, Intention, at a level appropriate to the advanced undergraduate but also capable of benefiting specialists in action theory, ethics, and the history of analytic philosophy. It begins by situating Anscombe’s project in relation to the controversy she initiated over the decision by the University of Oxford to award an honorary degree to Harry Truman, and the connection she saw between her Oxford colleagues’ willingness to excuse Truman’s murderous actions and the situation of moral philosophy at the time. It also documents many of the ways Anscombe drew on the thought of Aristotle, Aquinas, and Wittgenstein, as well as the points at which her argument engages with the work of then-contemporary authors, especially R.M. Hare and Gilbert Ryle. Against this background, the primary focus of the book is on presenting Anscombe’s arguments and assessing the plausibility and philosophical power of the position she develops. Topics that receive especially close attention include: Anscombe’s argument that the primary role of the concept of intention is in the description of what happens in the world, and not of an agent’s state of mind; her account of action as a teleological unity; the relation between rationalizing explanation and causal explanation; the difference between practical and theoretical reasoning; and the possibility of non-observational self-knowledge of what one intentionally does.Less

Anton Wilhelm Amo's Philosophical Dissertations on Mind and Body

Anton Wilhelm Amo (c. 1703–after 1752) is the first modern African philosopher to study and teach in a European university and write in the European philosophical tradition. This book provides an ... More

Anton Wilhelm Amo (c. 1703–after 1752) is the first modern African philosopher to study and teach in a European university and write in the European philosophical tradition. This book provides an extensive historical and philosophical introduction to Amo’s life and work, and provides Latin texts, with facing translations and explanatory notes, of Amo’s two philosophical dissertations, On the Impassivity of the Human Mind and the Philosophical Disputation containing a Distinct Idea of those Things that Pertain either to the Mind or to our Living and Organic Body, both published in 1734. The Impassivity is an extended argument that the mind cannot be acted on, that sensation is a being-acted-on by the sensed object, and therefore that sensation does not belong to the mind, and must belong instead to the body. The Distinct Idea works out the implications for the mind’s actions, and tries to show how the mind understands, wills, and effects things through the body by ‘intentions’ which direct motions in our body intentionally toward external things. Both dissertations try to show how far each type of human act belongs to the mind, how far to the body, and expose and resolve earlier philosophers’ self-contradictions on these questions.Less

Anxiety: A Philosophical History

Bettina Bergo

This is a study of the unlikely “career” of anxiety in nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy. Anxiety is an affect, something more subtle, sometimes more persistent, than an emotion or a ... More

This is a study of the unlikely “career” of anxiety in nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy. Anxiety is an affect, something more subtle, sometimes more persistent, than an emotion or a passion. It lies at the intersection of embodiment and cognition, sensation and emotion. But anxiety also runs like a red thread through European thought, beginning from receptions of Kant’s transcendental project. Like a symptom of the quest to situate and give life to the philosophical subject, like a symptom of an interrogation that strove to take form in European intellectual culture, angst (from anxiety to anguish) passed through Schelling’s Romanticism into Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, until it was approached existentially by Kierkegaard. Nietzsche situates it in the long history of producing an animal able to promise. Its returns in the twentieth century allow us to grasp the connection between phenomenology’s exploration of passivity, followed by interpretations of the human reality in a world and open to a call that it can hardly assume. The study thus begins with Kant; it probes late idealism and Romanticism, the metaphysical vitalism that flickered with Schopenhauer, the aesthetics and religious senses of angst in Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. It turns to three avatars of anxiety in the evolving psychoanalysis before exploring the return to rationalism and formalism in twentieth-century phenomenology, followed again by efforts to resituate human beings in world and body as well as, significantly, before the anxiogenic “other.”Less

Aquinas’s Theory of Perception: An Analytic Reconstruction

Anthony J. Lisska

This book presents an analysis of the principal texts used by Thomas Aquinas in developing his theory of perception. Little work has been devoted principally to his theory of perception and less ... More

This book presents an analysis of the principal texts used by Thomas Aquinas in developing his theory of perception. Little work has been devoted principally to his theory of perception and less still to inner sense. The thesis of intentionality serves as the philosophical backdrop of this analysis, which incorporates the insights not only of Franz Brentano but also of Anthony Kenny and John Haldane. The principal emphasis is on the importance of inner sense, with special reference to the vis cogitativa. By means of this faculty of inner sense, Aquinas offers an account of a direct awareness of individuals of natural kinds. By using this awareness, he can make better sense out of the process of abstraction using the active intellect (intellectus agens). Were it not for the vis cogitativa, Aquinas would be unable to account for an awareness of the principal ontological category in his metaphysics.Less

The Architecture of Matter: Galileo to Kant

Thomas Holden

Examines the debate in early modern philosophy over the composition and internal architecture of matter, focussing on problems concerning the structure of continua, the metaphysics of parts and ... More

Examines the debate in early modern philosophy over the composition and internal architecture of matter, focussing on problems concerning the structure of continua, the metaphysics of parts and wholes, and the individuation of material beings. Are the parts of material bodies actual or potential entities? Is matter divisible to infinity? Do material bodies resolve to atoms? All the leading figures of the period address this cluster of issues, including Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, Newton, Hume, Boscovich, Reid, and Kant. Presents a historical and critical study of these discussions, and offers an overarching interpretation of the controversy. Locates the central problem in the tension between the early moderns’ actual parts ontology on the one hand, and the programme of the geometrization of nature on the other.Less

The Aristotelian Ethics: A Study of the Relationship between the Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle

Anthony Kenny

This book is an attempt to solve a long-standing problem of Aristotelian scholarship on the basis of historical and philosophical arguments and a statistical study of features of style. It presents a ... More

This book is an attempt to solve a long-standing problem of Aristotelian scholarship on the basis of historical and philosophical arguments and a statistical study of features of style. It presents a detailed study of the relationship between the Eudemian and Nichomachean Ethics of Aristotle. The book provides a synthesis of three disciplines: philosophy, classical studies, and statistics.Less

Aristotle and the Eleatic One

Timothy Clarke

This book examines Aristotle’s response to Eleatic monism, the theory of Parmenides of Elea and his followers that reality is ‘one’. The book argues that Aristotle interprets the Eleatics as ... More

This book examines Aristotle’s response to Eleatic monism, the theory of Parmenides of Elea and his followers that reality is ‘one’. The book argues that Aristotle interprets the Eleatics as thoroughgoing monists, for whom the pluralistic, changing world of the senses is a mere illusion. Understood in this way, the Eleatic theory constitutes a radical challenge to the possibility of natural philosophy. Aristotle discusses the Eleatics in several works, including De Caelo, De Generatione et Corruptione, and the Metaphysics. But his most extensive treatment of their monism comes at the beginning of the Physics, where he criticizes them for overlooking the fact that ‘being is said in many ways’—in other words, that there are many ways of being. Through a careful analysis of this and other criticisms, the book explains how Aristotle’s engagement with the Eleatics prepares the ground for his own theory of the principles of nature. Aristotle is commonly thought to be an unreliable interpreter of his Presocratic predecessors; in contrast, this book argues that his critique can shed valuable light on the motivation of the Eleatic theory and its influence on the later philosophical tradition.Less

Aristotle on the Sources of the Ethical Life

Sylvia Berryman

This work challenges the common belief that Aristotle’s virtue ethics is founded on an appeal to human nature, an appeal that is thought to be intended to provide both substantive ethical advice and ... More

This work challenges the common belief that Aristotle’s virtue ethics is founded on an appeal to human nature, an appeal that is thought to be intended to provide both substantive ethical advice and justification for the demands of ethics. It is argued that it is not Aristotle’s intent, but the view is resisted that Aristotle was blind to questions of the source or justification of his ethical views. Aristotle’s views are interpreted as a ‘middle way’ between the metaphysical grounding offered by Platonists and the scepticism or subjectivist alternatives articulated by others. The commitments implicit in the nature of action figure prominently in this account: Aristotle reinterprets Socrates’ famous paradox that no one does evil willingly, taking it to mean that a commitment to pursuing the good is implicit in the very nature of action. This approach is compared to constructivism in contemporary ethics.Less

The Ascetic Ideal: Genealogies of Life-Denial in Religion, Morality, Art, Science, and Philosophy

Stephen Mulhall

This book develops a reading of Nietzsche’s concept of ‘the ascetic ideal’, through which he tracks the evolution, mutation, and expansion of the system of slave moral values that he associates ... More

This book develops a reading of Nietzsche’s concept of ‘the ascetic ideal’, through which he tracks the evolution, mutation, and expansion of the system of slave moral values that he associates primarily with Judaeo-Christian religious belief through diverse fields of Western European culture—not just religion and morality, but aesthetics, science, and philosophy. The work of Stanley Cavell and Michael Fried, and its impact in the philosophy of film and literature, is central here, as is J. M.Coetzee’s on the philosophy of autobiography; Martin Heidegger’s critique of science and technology is also addressed. In so doing it also offers an interpretation of his genealogical method that aims to rebut standard criticisms of its nature, and to emphasize its potential for enhancing philosophical understanding more generally. The focus throughout is on developments in those fields which occurred after the end of Nietzsche’s intellectual career, and in particular on influential modes of thought and practice that have a contemporary significance. However, the goal is not simply to argue that Nietzsche’s diagnosis and critique retain considerable merit. It is also to show that Nietzsche is himself significantly indebted to the ideals he criticizes; and that this opens up a possibility of synthesizing elements of his approach with those drawn from its target. Hence, the book also tracks various ways in which the object of Nietzsche’s criticism has further mutated (just as his genealogical method would suggest), and in doing so has generated ways of pursuing the values central to asceticism that avoid Nietzsche’s criticisms.Less

Aspects of Hobbes

Noel Malcolm

Presents a set of extended essays on a variety of aspects of the life and work of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). Some have previously been published as journal articles, etc., but ... More

Presents a set of extended essays on a variety of aspects of the life and work of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). Some have previously been published as journal articles, etc., but two-thirds of the material in this book is new. While each essay may be read independently of the others and in any order, there are two introductory essays (Chs. 1 and 2), which nonspecialists may prefer to read first. The topics covered include Hobbes's political philosophy, his theory of international relations, the development of his mechanistic world-view, his Biblical criticism, and the European reception of his thought.Less