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In the ongoing project of recovering and (re)integrating early modern European women philosophers, scholars have been re-examining not only who counts as a philosopher, but what kinds of works are properly understood as philosophical. Madeleine de Scudéry is best remembered as a novelist, but some scholars have argued that her dialogues are richly philosophical. Here, I examine an early and overlooked text from Scudéry – Illustrious Women – which is a collection of speeches of historical women who find themselves in dire circumstances. I argue that Illustrious Women offers a sophisticated critique of patriarchal power: Scudéry exposes the conflict between epistemic and practical agency under conditions of gendered oppression and illustrates specific manifestations of this harm concerning control, autonomy, and consent. In so doing, particularly through the genre of oratory, Scudéry’s Illustrious Women is both a work of seventeenth-century feminist resistance and a subversive educational tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Indian realists argue for the unique claim that universals are perceptible. The possibility of allowing perceptual access to universals puts pressure on the Nyāya theory of perception. The Nyāya philosophers introduced the notion of nirvikalpaka pratyakṣa (non-conceptual perception) to accommodate the perceptibility of universals. Since there is no direct introspective evidence for non-conceptual perception, it is difficult, if not impossible, to specify the content of nirvikalpaka pratyakṣa or non-conceptual perception. This paper addresses this concern by turning to Ned Block's work in contemporary philosophy of perception. Using Block's arguments, I propose that we have an independent empirical route to specify the content of a non-conceptual perception which is not subject to the ‘myth of the given’ objection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often remarked that Iris Murdoch’s thought deeply influenced the landscape of twentieth-century moral philosophy. It is certainly true that she inspired a generation of Anglo-American philosophers who sought to critique the moral philosophy of their day. However, these philosophers drew almost exclusively from her early philosophical thought, most notably The Sovereignty of Good. When it came to Murdoch’s second book, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (MGM), moral philosophers and scholars alike found it hard to place within contemporary moral philosophy.Our aim in this paper is to offer a reading of MGM that is resolute in its commitment to do justice to the book’s resistance against domestication within standard moral philosophy, while taking Murdoch at her word when she writes that her “whole argument can be read as moral philosophy” (MGM, 740). This commitment allows us to read MGM as an integrated unity. More importantly, it allows us to reassess Murdoch’s place in twentieth-century philosophy and to propose MGM as one of the works seeking to transform it. Our hope is that our reading will interest any philosopher who feels that something essential is missing in current typical practices in the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The standard interpretation of Avicenna's correspondence theory of truth posits that propositions either correspond to what exists extramentally or otherwise their truthmaker is mental existence. An influential post-Avicennian philosopher, Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī (d. 1274) points to the insufficiency of the above division of propositions and their respective truthmakers. He mentions the possibility of conceiving false propositions, such as ‘One is not half of two’ and postulates the necessity of the existence of another truthmaking domain for their true counterparts which he calls nafs al-amr. It is where objective and timeless entities, such as mathematical propositions, are located. While some claim that Ṭūsī's identification of this domain with the first Separate Intellect is a testimony to his Avicennian convictions, Ṭūsī's solution is a conspicuous departure from Avicenna that not only helps him remedy the insufficiency of Avicenna's theory of truth but is consistent with his critique of Avicenna's theory of God’s knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of recent papers or monographs have examined Susan Stebbing's criticisms of Arthur Eddington's scientific-philosophical writing. These papers focus on Stebbing's critique of Eddington's attempt to infer philosophical conclusions from developments in modern physics, his view that there is a discrepancy between the world of science and the world of common sense (best encapsulated by his famous ‘two tables’ metaphor), and his use of ‘inexact language’ to try and convey modern scientific insights to his readers. On November 10th 1938, Eddington presented a paper at the Moral Sciences Club in Cambridge entitled “Prof. Stebbing's ‘Philosophy and the Physicists'”. Eddington did not go on to publish this paper and it is not discussed in relevant scholarship. However, the details of Eddington’s talk are outlined in the minutes of that meeting. I argue that these minutes provide new insights into both the Stebbing-Eddington debate and developments in Eddington's late philosophical views. A full transcription of the minutes is included as an Appendix to this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Julian's Letter to Themistius is one of our most valuable sources for understanding Julian's political thought. More specifically, it is perhaps our most valuable source for investigating the extent to which Julian's approach to governance was or was not influenced by his philosophical commitments. Here I focus on this question and argue that, understood in its proper intellectual context, the Letter provides us with good reason for thinking that Julian's political philosophy (and the programme that he implemented as emperor) was profoundly influenced by the Platonist tradition. While Julian does distance himself both from the philosopher-king of the Republic and the lawgiver of the Laws, this should not be taken as a wholesale rejection of the possibility of an applied Platonist political philosophy. A standard Platonist doctrine by Julian's time distinguished between not two but three levels of political reform: the divine ideal of the Republic, the second-best state of the Laws, and a third state, arising from reform. A careful reading of the Letter provides support for the idea that Julian aimed at the latter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many later thinkers in the Islamic world pick up on, and further expand, the idea of intuition (ḥads) as they react to Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā). Focusing on figures from the twelfth–thirteenth century, in this paper we will focus especially on the following points of debate: (1) Avicenna's idea that intuition is distingiushed from normal (discursive) thought by lacking 'motion', (2) The question of how and why different individuals differ in the extent of their intuition, (3) The role of intuitive thought in grounding knowledge: is intuition needed every time a certain item of knowledge is grasped for the first time, and hence without a teacher; and further, is intuition needed as an ultimate justification for all non-intuitive knowledge? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophers have long tried to articulate the specific epistemic status of judgements that neither need nor admit of justification by drawing on the metaphor of 'the light of truth'. In contrast, in Brentano's account of intuitive judgement correctness is central: intuitive or immediately evident judgements are 'characterized as correct (right)'. The aim of my paper is to introduce and explore Brentano's correctness-based view. I will conclude by relating it to the work of his students Meinong, Stumpf, and Husserl, who gradually eroded Brentano's insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Sanskrit philosophy, the closest analogue of intuition is pratibhā. Here, I will focus on the theory of pratibhā offered by the Sanskrit grammarian Bhartṛhari (fifth century CE). On this account, states of pratibhā play two distinct psychological roles. First, they serve as sources of linguistic understanding. They are the states by means of which linguistically competent agents effortlessly understand the meaning of novel sentences. Second, states of pratibhā serve as sources of practical knowledge. On the basis of such states, both human and non-human agents unreflectively know which actions they should perform under which circumstances. Given these two roles of pratibhā, modern commentators have often claimed that states of pratibhā, as understood by Bhartṛhari, are intuitions. In this article, I will reconstruct Bhartṛhari's view and to explore its consequences, I will argue that, if Bhartṛhari's theory of pratibhā is right, then a form of human exceptionalism – which makes rationality a unique trait of human beings – becomes difficult to maintain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I discuss Gaston Bachelard's criticism of Henri Bergson's employment of intuition as the specific method of philosophy, and as a reliable means of acquiring knowledge. I locate Bachelard's criticism within the reception of Bergsonian intuition by rationalist philosophers who subscribed to the Third Republic's ethos. I argue that the reasons of Bachelard's rejection of Bergsonian intuition were not only epistemological, but also ethical and pedagogical. His view of knowledge as mediated, social, and historical, cannot be separated from his conceptions of society, education, and the human being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sufficiently grounding the origin of sense-perceptions in the mind is an issue that has concerned philosophers for a long time, and remains an issue even today. In eighteenth-century Germany prior to the publication of Kant's Critical philosophy, the two main competing theories to causally ground sense-perceptions were pre-established harmony and physical influx, the latter of which ultimately carried the day. A third option had been around in the seventeenth century: occasionalism. However, historians of philosophy believe this option to have entirely disappeared in the eighteenth century. I will show that this is not the case. In this paper, I focus on one influential German occasionalist: Gottfried Ploucquet (1716–90). Ploucquet not only criticizes Leibniz's theory of pre-established harmony for providing an ultimately ungrounded, subjective, and arbitrary account of the origin of sense-perceptions, but also presents his own daring alternative: a representationalist-occasionalist theory that locates the objective ground of sense-perceptions in the divine mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely believed that the ancient Greeks thought that Thales was the first philosopher, and that they therefore maintained that philosophy had a Greek origin. This paper challenges these assumptions, arguing that most ancient Greek thinkers who expressed views about the history and development of philosophy rejected both positions. I argue that not even Aristotle presented Thales as the first philosopher, and that doing so would have undermined his philosophical commitments and interests. Beyond Aristotle, the view that Thales was the first philosopher is attested almost nowhere in antiquity. In the classical, Hellenistic, and post-Hellenistic periods, we witness a marked tendency to locate the beginning of philosophy in a time going back further than Thales. Remarkably, ancient Greek thinkers most often traced the origins of philosophy to earlier non-Greek peoples. Contrary to the received view, then, I argue that (1) vanishingly few Greek writers pronounced Thales the first philosopher; and (2) most Greek thinkers did not even advocate a Greek origin of philosophy. Finally, I show that the view that philosophy originated with Thales (along with its misleading attribution to the Greeks in general) has roots in problematic, and in some cases manifestly racist, eighteenth-century historiography of philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Preface to the Philosophy of Right, Hegel draws a favourable comparison between his project and Plato's Republic, while making a critical comment about an example taken from Plato's Laws. In this paper we investigate what Hegel's assessment of Plato's two texts in political philosophy illuminates about his conception of ethical education and the extent to which his own method allows a philosopher to contribute to the process of making people good. We show that although Hegel agrees with Plato that one becomes good by becoming "a citizen in a state with good laws" (PR §153), he believes that philosophy must remain faithful to its limited role in determining what these are going to be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I provide the first in-depth discussion of Susan Stebbing's views concerning our experience of the passage of time – a key issue for many metaphysicians writing in the first half of the twentieth century. I focus on Stebbing's claims about the passage of time in Philosophy and the Physicists and her disagreement with Arthur Eddington over how best to account for that experience. I show that Stebbing's concern is that any attempt to provide a scientific account of the passage of time will face problems, since the events described by physics are necessarily measured against the passage of time. I then identify views elsewhere in her philosophical corpus that can help shed light on this claim. Ultimately, I argue, Stebbing's views on time should be construed as part of her wider commitment to 'realism'. To be a realist, for Stebbing, is to accept a set of propositions which are a pre-requisite for even beginning to analyse the world around us. For Stebbing, I argue, part of what it means to be a realist is to accept our experience of the passage of time as something fundamental that cannot itself be subject to analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I criticize the thesis that value-laden approaches in American philosophy of science were marginalized in the 1960s through the editorial policy at Philosophy of Science and funding practices at the National Science Foundation. I argue that there is no available evidence of any normative restriction on philosophy of science as a domain of inquiry which excluded research on the relation between science and society. Instead, I claim that the absence of any exemplary, professional philosopher who discussed the relation between science and society sufficed to narrow the focus of philosophers of science, given the institutional stabilization of the domain within professional philosophy from 1959 onwards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of what Stanley Cavell wrote following the publication of The Claim of Reason, was preoccupied with making sense of the sudden "outbreaks" of "moments and lines of romanticism" in the final part of that book. "As I was trying to follow the last part, part 4, of my book The Claim of Reason to a moment of conclusion, my progress kept being deflected by outbreaks of romantic texts" (IQO, ix). These romantics outbreaks compelled Cavell to ask himself, retrospectively: Why did I suddenly, inexplicably, let romanticism, of all things (!), intrude into my philosophically sober discussion of skepticism? Why did I let the end of my story be dictated by romanticism? It thus became imperative for Cavell to find out, as he makes clear in the opening pages of In Quest of the Ordinary, why he had postulated some decisive or fateful "interplay between skepticism and romanticism" (IQO, x), such that he could no longer avoid the task of "uncovering the connection with romanticism" (IQO, 6). In this paper, I offer a critical assessment of Cavell's attempt to uncover the connections between his account of skepticism and his unexpected and consequential reception of romanticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plato's Politicus argues for a striking normative claim about the law: the ideal expert ruler will not only change the laws of the city when he thinks it best, but will also contravene them. The Eleatic Stranger's argument for this conclusion reveals important features of Plato's views on expertise in general, and political expertise in particular. Laws should not be inviolable for an expert ruler because no craft lays down inviolable rules for its practitioners. There are no inviolable rules of action for experts because crafts are teleological: expert action aims only to produce some good. The expert ruler's political action recognizes no constraints besides the aim of best promoting the good condition of the whole city. Plato believes that the statesman will do markedly better at promoting this end when unconstrained by even the best laws, and there is evidence that he will harm individual citizens in order to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'We' is said in many ways. This paper investigates Kurt Stavenhagen's neglected account of different kinds of 'we', which is maintained to be one of the most sophisticated within classical phenomenology. The paper starts by elaborating on the phenomenological distinction between mass, society, and community by claiming that individuals partake in episodes of experiential sharing only within communities. Stavenhagen conceptualizes experiential sharing as a meshing of conscious experiences infused by a feeling of us-ness. The remainder of the paper focuses on Stavenhagen's distinction of various senses of us: when individual share preferences, have mutual respect, or emotionally evaluate the world according to a cultural tradition, they elicit a sense of us of different kind and, thus, form communities of different kind. Within phenomenology, Stavenhagen should be credited with the merit of having unearthed the aggregative, we-generating force of preferences, of respect, and of (certain) emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1948, A.J. Ayer was attacked on the pages of The New Statesman and Nation magazine where it was claimed that his views were partly responsible for increasingly Fascist attitudes at Oxford. Ayer was charged with promoting a philosophy of values (or one lacking therein) that allowed Fascism to fill the moral vacuum. Ayer noted that he knew who had written the article (and the ones that followed) and that this person had done so for entirely contingent and non-philosophical reasons. This paper aims to examine the historical context by discussing the article and the events that followed it; to show that the specific charges against Ayer were rooted in deeper philosophical/practical issues, namely the nature and status of philosophy; and to demonstrate that logical empiricism, or rather logical positivism as a movement, was indeed especially sensitive to political issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is, in the Ramsey Archive at the Hillman Library of the University of Pittsburgh, a note, written in 1929, in Ramsey's hand and mostly in German, consisting of twenty paragraphs the contents of which deal, in large part, with the infinite and generality. In this article, I provide an English translation of that note, followed by a philosophical commentary. The purpose of the commentary is to bring out the connections and, most importantly, the differences between Wittgenstein's and Ramsey's thought on these topics in 1929. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I raise and analyze two rarely discussed stories about the development of idealism in early modernity. I seek to show that Arthur Collier reaches the conclusion that the mind-independent world is strictly impossible following through the implications of Malebranche's intellectualist considerations. One important component of divine rationality accepted by both is that God has to act in the simplest way possible, which, for Collier, shows that the existence of an imperceptible matter is extrinsically or metaphysically impossible. By contrast, I will argue, George Berkeley resisted the temptation to construe the simplicity principle in an intellectualistic manner, even though it would have offered him an easy route to prove the impossibility of matter. Rather, when he argues that it is indeed God who is creating our perceptions directly on the basis that any belief in mind-independent substances is totally unjustifiable and we cannot form a coherent notion of it, he can be seen as radicalizing Locke's voluntarism, according to which we have to appeal to the omnipotent God's arbitrary decisions with regard to various difficulties in philosophy. My proposal can also be read as an alternative to the well-known epistemological narrative about the emergence of idealism in the early modern period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I draw on Carl Stumpf's essay "Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie" (1891), and his precocious On the Psychological Origin of the Idea of Space (1873), to set out a charge he raises against Kant's form/matter distinction. The charge rests, I propose, on the supposition that colourless extension, or empty space, cannot be seen. I consider an objection that Stumpf raises against Kant's notorious 'subtraction' argument. Kant supposes that we can 'take away' from the representation of a body all that the understanding thinks in relation to it and extension would yet remain (Remainder), separate from all sensation (Separateness). Stumpf denies both claims but I suggest he needn't. I outline a way of defending Remainder without Separateness, extrapolating from some neglected descriptive phenomenology in Husserl's 1907 "Thing and Space" lectures: we see empty regions insofar as we see things through them. Finally, by appeal to so-called 'structural' features of visual experience, I detail a distinctive approach to making the subtraction argument intelligible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Change in the human past, studied by historians, includes changes in philosophy's past, which can be explained by causes, motives and reasons. In the case of philosophy, must explanatory antecedents of change always be philosophical? Should philosophers ever treat non-philosophical reasons as belonging to the history of philosophy? Saying 'never' is absolutely internalist, while 'sometimes' rejects this absolutely internalist rule. To show that 'sometimes' is the better answer, I examine two case histories from the early modern period: these cases, framed by a taxonomy of historical narrative, eliminate absolute internalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the theory of artefacts presented by the 15th-century thinker Paul of Venice, paying special attention to the views of authors often referred to as 'nominalists' (e.g. Ockham, Buridan, Albert of Saxony), against whom Paul is arguing. In contrast to the position of artefact-nominalists, according to whom there is no need to posit artificial forms to account for the production and existence of artefacts, Paul claims that our metaphysical explanations of the status of artefacts cannot do without such forms. After sketching the broader context of this discussion (the Aristotelian roots of the debate, artefact-realism vs. artefact-nominalism, kinds of artefacts), the paper presents the important themes of the Ockham-Burley controversy regarding artefacts, to which Paul of Venice is referring. After that, Paul's views are presented: first, regarding the status of shapes, then, regarding the status of artefacts. The paper reviews some of the arguments that Paul employs to defend artefact-realism against the objections put forward by artefact-nominalists. The conclusion is that despite its intricacy, Paul's theory fails to be entirely convincing and coherent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article claims that today's reading of Francis Bacon's Essayes as a solely literary text turns upon philosophers' having largely lost access to the renaissance culture which Bacon inherited, and the renaissance debates about the role of rhetoric in philosophy in which Bacon participated. The article has two parts. Building upon Ronald Cranes' seminal contribution on the place of the Essayes in Bacon's 'great instauration', Part 1 examines how the subjects of Bacon's Essayes need to be understood as Baconian contributions to 'morrall philosophye' and 'civile knowledge', rather than rhetorical or poetic exercises. In Part 2, contesting the interpretations of Crane, Fish, Ferrari and others, I will argue that the Essayes' striking rhetorical form needs to be conceptualized in light of Bacon's renaissance account of the 'duty and office' of rhetoric in any moral and civil philosophy that would look to actively cure mental afflictions and cultivate the virtuous or canny conduct it extols. Bacon's Essayes, in this light, are best understood as a legatee and transformation of the popular early modern genre of books of apothegms and maxims designed to guide conduct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including variety of Immanuel Kant's influence on different traditions, aspect of Kant's thought that has proved important for philosophers and British idealism, phenomenology and analytic philosophy.

Wittgenstein’s later works are full of questions about the timing and duration of mental phenomena. These questions are often awkward ones, and Wittgenstein seems to take their awkwardness to be philosophically revealing, but if we ask what it is that these questions reveal then different interpretations are possible. This paper suggests that there are at least six different ways in which the timing of mental phenomena can be awkward. By identifying these we can give sense to some of Wittgenstein’s more cryptic remarks, and doing this enables us to clarify some obscure elements in his picture of the mind, including the distinction between sensations and feelings, and his account of the rational status of those processes out of which rule-following is built. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a recent scholarly trend drawing similarities between Aristotle’s conceptions of ethics and demonstrative science. One such similarity has become widely and rightly recognized: for Aristotle both ethics and demonstrative science seek essential definitions of phenomena. The task of the paper is to show that German philosopher and classicist Hans-Georg Gadamer not only prefigured this interpretative trend, he also identified a problematic feature of Aristotle’s method so construed. The problematic feature is semantic. For Aristotle essential definitions must consist of univocal terms, but such univocity cannot be maintained if the definienda and definientes are concepts to be usefully employed in everyday ethical judgements. Gadamer therefore points out a problematic tension in Aristotle’s ethics. On the one hand, ethical inquiry should have practical application, but, on the other hand, the semantic assumptions underlying inquiry imply that it cannot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In La filosofia dell'arte, Giovanni Gentile assigned a prominent new role to the sentiments. This change struck some critics as a major departure from the earlier, classic accounts of actual idealism, in which Gentile argued that thought and language comprise the entirety of reality. Sentiments do not fit cleanly into a theory so narrowly concerned with thought and thinking. Their introduction, runs the objection, only compounds certain existing ambiguities in Gentile's conception of the relation between mind and world. This article describes and criticizes Gentile's attempts to integrate feeling into actual idealism. It is argued that the appearance of feeling in his mature theory does not undermine but instead clarifies his views on the relation between thought and the act of thinking. Yet it also shows the strain under which idealist language was being put by the late 1920s. Gentile's attempts to lay out a comprehensive and phenomenologically accurate account of how thinkers actually experience reality were never wholly successful. The difficulties he faced reflect the reasons why idealism as a whole declined so sharply over the first half of the twentieth century, prompting its supporters to abandon it in favour of less metaphysically demanding doctrines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The philosophers of the self-styled 'revolution in philosophy' that went on to become the contemporary analytic tradition started a rumour about the British Idealists that has persisted to this day. Finding neither the substance of the idealist case, nor the style of idealistic writing, congenial to their modern taste, these Edwardians hinted that their Victorian forbears had argued from emotion rather than reason. No single paper could address this accusation across the board, for the movement in its entirety, and so in this essay I focus on just one case, that of F. H. Bradley. Specifically, I identify the role he allows to feeling, emotion and what he terms 'satisfaction' in the determination of metaphysical and moral principles, and further ask whether the critics of idealism were right that there was something untoward in his approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers an analysis on the contents of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy (BJHP) in the last 25 years, with particular reference to the last five years. Topics covered include the methodology used to assess the contents to estimate what percentage of the total number of articles is devoted to the work of a particular philosopher, the ranking of the sixteen philosophers, such as Kant, Hume and Descartes, who continue to occupy the top sixteen places.

Spinoza’s definition of ‘attribute’ (E1d4) has been described as ‘one of the most puzzling passages in the Ethics’ and ‘a longstanding worry’ for Spinoza interpreters. Its puzzling status stems from (a) its apparent ‘subjectivist’ character and (b) the dominant understanding of Spinoza’s notion of attribute as an ‘objectivist’ notion. The paper aspires to remove this puzzlement by proposing and defending a reading of E1d4 in which it is understood to have two senses. First, I defend the objectivist character of Spinoza’s notion of attribute, and explain why E1d4 is problematic within the framework of an objectivist interpretation of the Spinozistic attribute. Second, I propose a reading of E1d4 as having two senses and explain the cause of an apparent contradiction in E1d4. Finally, I devote the largest part of the paper to a defence of the Two-Sense Reading of E1d4. More specifically, I draw on four sources for this defence: (a) the structure of E1d1 and E1d3, (b) the content and form of E1p4 and its demonstration, (c) Spinoza’s doctrine of parallelism and (d) Descartes’ treatment of attribute and its influence on Spinoza. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Walter Burley (born c. 1275; died. c. 1344) claims throughout his career that the mind can make a statement (propositio) out of things. Since things include entities that exist outside of the mind, Burley appears to be claiming that the mind can form a statement out of things that exist outside of it. Most scholars of Burley offer a deflationary reading of this claim, arguing that it confuses two distinct but closely related philosophical issues: the nature of propositional content, on the one hand, and the role of facts in a compelling account of truth, on the other. But I argue that Burley means exactly what he says: that the mind can, quite literally, form statements out of things that exist outside of it. In Burley’s account, statements of this sort function as the propositional contents of our thoughts and written or uttered sentences. This account of propositional content is motivated by three more fundamental theses to which Burley is committed: referentialism, compositionality, and a claim about truth-conditionality I call intellectualism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Seventeenth-century philosopher Margaret Cavendish wrote not only several philosophical treatises, but also many fictional works. I argue for taking the latter as serious objects of study for historians of philosophy, and sketch a method for doing so. Cavendish's fiction is full of conflicting viewpoints, and many authors have argued that this demonstrates that she did not intend her literary works to serve serious philosophical purpose. But if we consider philosophers more central to the canon, such as Plato or Kierkegaard, who sometimes used literary forms to do serious philosophy, we see that these arguments are unfounded. Like those philosophers, Cavendish had several philosophical motivations for pursuing value-theoretic issues through the flexible formats of literary genres. This suggests that Cavendish's literary corpus may be fruitful and largely unexplored ground for the history of philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michael Dummett has claimed that the only way to establish communication between the analytic and Continental schools of philosophy is to go back to their point of divergence in Frege and the early Husserl. In this paper, I try to show that Dummett's claim is false. I examine in detail the discussions at the infamous 1958 Royaumont Colloquium on analytic philosophy. Many - including Dummett - believe that these discussions underscore the futility of attempting to bridge the gap between Continental and analytical philosophies in anything like their current shapes. I argue, however, that a close study of the Royaumont proceedings rather reveals how close some of the analytical speakers were to some of their Continental listeners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the crucial concepts in the philosophies of minds including sensation, recollection, and intellection in the works of philosophers Ibn Sînâ and Rene Descartes. It states that both believed in the incorporeality of the soul or mind of human being. Details on the concepts of Sînâ and Descartes on the faculty of imagination and its distinction with the power of intellect are also presented. It also shows the importance and the richness of the Islamic philosophy, and its contribution to the central issues in the western philosophy. The critical analysis of the two philosophers are also discussed.

The article explores the relationship between the positions of philosophers Immanuel Kant and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz about the representation of subjects and mind-dependent objects. It compares the positions of the two philosophers regarding the relationship between knowing subjects and known objects. Two important aspects of the relationship between their philosophies are discussed, including the fundamental divergence highlighted by amphiboly and the stark contrast between their philosophies about the status of knowing subjects.

The author reflects on the contrasting philosophies of Siger of Brabant and Thomas Aquinas on the concepts of divine power and separability of accidents. He cites that Siger believes that a primary cause cannot produce the effect of the secondary cause without the secondary cause while Thomas Aquinas believes that God operates in things in such a way however that things have their own operations. The author mentions Duns Scotus who believes in divine omnipotence which is understood as the ability on God's part to produce on his own any effect that he does with a secondary cause.

The author reflects on the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes and his concept of war. He cites that Hobbes does not specify the nature of the actors and distinguishes war as a state from the acts of war such as battles. He states that Hobbes' definition of war both inherits and distances himself from the Just War tradition. The author stresses that Hobbes' writings continue to offer relevant and useful theoretical tools to those who would wish to reflect on the moral and political conditions for achieving a lasting peace.

The article presents the author's view regarding philosopher Robert Desgabets adoption of the Cartesian philosophy. He says philosopher Emmanuel Faye describes Desgabets' work as original and striking metaphysical thought in which his philosophy is consistent and coherent with that of philosopher Nicolas Malebranche. He discusses some of Desgabets' unusual views about how thought is related to reality and possibility. The author further reveals that Desgabets' acceptance of the orthodox Cartesian view forced him to accept some surprising restrictions on what he could say about God's creative options.

The author reflects on the work of philosopher Immanuel Kant in which he accepted the rationalist Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) as philosophers Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff had done. He argues that Kant must have questioned the status of PSR by the time of his essay titled "Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Directions in Space" in 1768. The author stresses that Kant's essay is filled with difficulties and confusion due to the obscurity of the philosopher's comments and the fusion of arguments it contains.

The article discusses the investigation on the relationship of Rene Descartes' mind-body causation, mind-body union and the special mode of thinking. It examines Descartes' claims to which the author refers as the Special Cognition Doctrine, the No-Problem Doctrine and the Union -Dependence Doctrine. It also explicates the nature of body-to-mind causation in Descartes' philosophical system. It presents the subdivision of the paper into five subtopics to anatomize the philosophy of Descartes on the union of mind and body.

The article discusses John Locke's philosophy of mental operations. It mentions the author's admiration to Locke as a great philosopher especially to his solutions to a number of metaphysical problems but still recognizes one of philosopher's failure. It explores the proposal to examine the problems about Locke's accounts on three mental operations that individuals perform upon ideas to produce other ideas. It discusses how the author explicate the operations of compounding and abstraction. He states that Locke was invoked to explain the individuals' possession of complex ideas, abstract ideas and ideas of relation.

The article discusses Emmanuel Kant's general definition of the work of art wherein he introduced a distinction between two kinds of beauty, the free beauty and adherent beauty. It mentions Kant's argument that the judgments of taste about beauty are entirely independent from the concept of perfection, to which the author agreed for free beauty but not for adherent beauty. It also offers the author's explanation on the questions that arise on Kant's aesthetic theory through explicit discussion of free and adherent beauty, beauty and perfection, fine art and genius, and the possibility of judgments of free beauty about works of fine art.

The article discusses the detailed review of Immanuel Kant's theses on existence of God. It presents the distinction which Kant proposes between real and logical predicates in support of his theses. It also presents the arguments of the author that modalities are categorically non-real predicates as part of Kant's theses as well as the suggestions that two different but related positive theses about what is existence may be found in Kant's main texts. It also offers the explanation of the author for Kant's claim that existential propositions are synthetic.