Abstract This paper examines the role of joy and its three species, enjoyment , cheerfulness and good spirits , in Stoic ethics. Getting a complete picture of joy requires dealing with its various manifestations in detail. Since these species of joy are defined in terms of their intentional objects, examining them will also shed fresh light on the disputed question of how frequently the Stoic sage experiences joy: Seneca claims that the joy of the sage is constant, while Arius Didymus thinks that some sages experience no joy at all. I argue that Seneca’s view is closer to the truth, but that the sage’s joy will be constantly available, not constantly active. Attention to the differing causes of joy will help to illuminate why this is the case. My analysis will also contribute to the debate, initiated by Cooper, on whether emotional life of the sage is recognizably human.
Abstract Medieval thinkers debate how we retain and recall what we have previously learned, especially our intellectual knowledge about essences like treeness. Thomas Aquinas argues that intellect retains its abstracted forms or species “habitually” while not using them “actually.” But it has rarely been noticed that in his earliest major writing, the Sentences commentary, Aquinas had originally endorsed a different view, positing a separate mental faculty of intellective memory to retain abstracted forms. The goal of this study is to show that Aquinas takes a different position in this early work, compare it philosophically with his mature view, and identify the conceptual pressures that drive him into the mature view. As I will show, that Aquinas initially attempts to combine two historically venerable models of intellective memory: an Augustinian “storage” model and an Aristotelian “habituation” model. This approach fails under pressure, resulting in the alternative, rather cryptic, distinction between “habitual” and “actual” species that will characterize his mature view of intellective memory. In light of this historical development, we can demystify this distinction and explain exactly what a habitual species is.
Abstract This article reconstructs the central doctrine of the Ḥatäta Zär’a Yaʿǝqob by analyzing the faculty of ləbbuna , a term variously translated as ‘reason,’ ‘understanding,’ ‘conscience,’ or ‘heart.’ I first reconstruct the Ḥatäta’s core problem: perspective-relative justification in religious disagreement, against the seventeenth-century backdrop of interconfessional conflict in the Ethiopian highlands. I then offer a systematic account of ləbbuna as an anti-relativistic solution to this problem. I show how ləbbuna functions as a universal, divinely-endowed capacity for discerning the śərʿatä fəṭrät (the established order of creation), thereby providing an independent standard for judgement. I identify six defining features of ləbbuna : its independence from any haymanot or ‘creed’; its grounding in a metaphysical harmony between creation, the Creator and human minds; its divine origin; its ethical-epistemic unity; its immediacy and conditional infallibility; and its arduousness. I conclude by clarifying what is (and is not) at stake in describing Zär’a Yaʿǝqob as a rationalist.
Abstract Schopenhauer’s case for pessimism turns on a claim about desire. All desire, Schopenhauer suggests, consists in aversion rather than attraction: we are pushed away from states experienced as bad rather than pulled toward states experienced as good. Despite this claim’s importance, most commentators view it as an unsupported assertion. I argue that this consensus is mistaken: Schopenhauer does not leave his theory of desire without defense. This defense consists in a far-reaching reductive argument. Everyone grants that some desires are aversive: the hungry person seeks to eliminate their distressing hunger, the sexually frustrated person seeks to eliminate their distressing frustration, and the bored person seeks to eliminate their distressing boredom. In order to establish that all desires are aversive, Schopenhauer argues that their apparent diversity is an illusion: at bottom, there are only many different ways of expressing the same small set of aversive desires listed in the previous sentence.
I present and discuss an unknown early manuscript by David Hilbert, which bears witness both to now largely forgotten debates, as well as to the breadth of Hilbert's knowledge of nineteenth-century philosophy: in it, Hilbert surveys a variety of criticisms of, and ultimately subscribes to (a version of), Kant's philosophy of mathematics. I present a carefully documented conjecture concerning the time and context of composition, arguing that the manuscript is likely a draft of something like a term-paper written for a course taught by G & uuml;nther Thiele in the Sommersemester 1885. (It incidentally contains one of the earliest documented engagements with Frege.) I also highlight one instance where Hilbert takes up a position from this manuscript later, thus showing that engagement with the philosophy of his time shaped Hilbert's views on the nature and methodology of mathematics from the earliest stages of his career.
Scholars disagree about how to understand Aristotle's account of the vicious person. Some argue that he allows the vicious agent internal harmony and principled action; others maintain that vice entails disorder, conflict, and the absence of genuine commitment to a unified conception of the good. This debate turns on an apparent inconsistency in Aristotle's claims. In Nicomachean Ethics VII, he describes the intemperate person as regretless and motivationally consistent; in NE IX.4, he describes the base person as regretful and motivationally conflicted. I argue that there is no inconsistency because Aristotle is an experiential pluralist about vice: he allows that different vicious people can have different psychological experiences. An agent's psychological experience depends on how she evaluates her own character. This interpretation reveals that Aristotle denies that internal disunity and motivational conflict are essential to vice. In this, his position marks a sharp departure from that of Plato for whom conflict and disorder are essential to vice.
This article reconstructs the central doctrine of the Hatata Zar'a Ya'partial derivative qob by analyzing the faculty of l partial derivative bbuna, a term variously translated as 'reason,' 'understanding,' 'conscience,' or 'heart.' I first reconstruct the Hatata's core problem: perspective-relative justification in religious disagreement, against the seventeenth-century backdrop of interconfessional conflict in the Ethiopian highlands. I then offer a systematic account of l partial derivative bbuna as an anti-relativistic solution to this problem. I show how l partial derivative bbuna functions as a universal, divinely-endowed capacity for discerning the s partial derivative r'ata f partial derivative trat (the established order of creation), thereby providing an independent standard for judgement. I identify six defining features of l.bbuna: its independence from any haymanot or 'creed'; its grounding in a metaphysical harmony between creation, the Creator and human minds; its divine origin; its ethical-epistemic unity; its immediacy and conditional infallibility; and its arduousness. I conclude by clarifying what is (and is not) at stake in describing Zar'a Ya'partial derivative qob as a rationalist.
For Nietzsche, we can regard our life as worth living only if we overcome the threat of nihilism. However, it is difficult to determine the nature of this threat since he characterizes the stance of nihilism in multiple, rather different and seemingly incompatible ways. This essay attempts to shed light on this issue by distinguishing three key forms of nihilism that figure centrally in Nietzsche's thinking and pose different challenges to life affirmation: 'ascetic' nihilism (embodied, for instance, by Christianity or Buddhism); value nihilism (the impression that life lacks value and meaning); and 'anthropaedic' nihilism (disgust with - specifically modern - humanity). I argue that Nietzsche perceives anthropaedic nihilism as the gravest danger and that he has no effective response to it. Thus, his key philosophical project of life-affirmation remains (at least to some extent) unsuccessful.
Throughout the Transcendental Aesthetic as well as elsewhere in the first Critique, Kant characterizes things in themselves in terms of abstraction: to consider things as they are in themselves is to consider them in abstraction from the conditions of our sensibility. Despite Kant's frequent appeal to the notion of abstraction, the view that our talk of 'things in themselves' should be understood in terms of abstraction ('the abstraction analysis') has not gained much traction among non-epistemological readers of transcendental idealism. In this paper, I give a systematic account of the notion of abstraction at work in Kant's characterizations of things in themselves, arguing that while abstraction is a logical procedure, some of Kant's background assumptions in the Transcendental Aesthetic warrant attributing some metaphysical import to the abstraction analysis. I also defend the abstraction analysis against the longstanding objection that it trivializes the non-spatiotemporality of things in themselves.
There is a relatively overlooked problem with Kant's claim that in inquiry we must treat nature as if it were actually infinite in extent: he also states that the concept of an actually infinite world is self-contradictory. This threatens to make the command to treat the world as infinite incoherent; the problem also affects his error theory for traditional metaphysics and his account of the sublime. After laying out this worry in greater detail than has been done so far, I consider and reject readings on which Kant either does not consider this case a violation of ought-implies-can or allows that in this case, following an incoherent demand is epistemically acceptable on consequentialist grounds. Then I turn to my preferred solution, which takes the relevant regulative principle to concern Kant's noumena (understood as intensionally distinct from things in themselves), whereas the contradiction is provoked only by representations of phenomena.
I compare a 1689 ballad by the Mexican Hieronymite nun Sor Juana In & eacute;s de la Cruz, "Let Us Pretend I am Happy," with David Hume's 1742 essay, "The Sceptic." I argue that each composition conveys several competing messages. At the surface layer, both compositions employ skeptical reasoning to argue against the usefulness of learning for attaining happiness. They also invite ironic readings on which learning is a primary source of joy - a point also emphasized by Sor Juana's defenses of women's right to study. Ultimately, I argue, both Sor Juana and Hume hold an intermediary position between the surface-layer pessimism and ironic optimism. They express this middle position using a literary device I call 'layered irony.' Comparing the two compositions reveals that layered irony is a fitting device for producing the middle position, for critiquing skepticism, and for increasing philosophy's efficacy in its traditional function as a kind of therapy.
While the skeptical undercurrents of early modern thought have received sustained scholarly attention, such work has tended to be inattentive to hermeneutical or exegetical skepticism. This is a form of skepticism that threatened to stop hermeneutical theorizing in its tracks and absorbed several central hermeneutical concepts in its orbit. Hermeneutical probability was one of them. In this paper, I aim to examine whether the doctrine of hermeneutical probability as it was originally formulated by Christian Thomasius is a surrogate of exegetical skepticism. I argue that not only is the examined view incompatible with skepticism, but that it can indeed articulate a promising response to it. Since general reflection on probability shaped the philosophical landscape of the Early German Enlightenment, the viability of the Thomasian view has much broader ramifications that extend beyond hermeneutics to historics, ethics, and physics.
In 1966, Dorothy Emmet published Rules, Roles and Relations, in which she argues that moral philosophy could stand to learn a lot by drawing on sociological research. In this paper. I will argue that Rules, Roles and Relations is deserving of much wider scholarly attention, especially in light of an explosion of scholarship focusing on contemporaries of Emmet such as Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Iris Murdoch (the 'Wartime Quartet'). Emmet, unlike the Quartet, has received a very minimal amount of scholarly attention. Yet, like the Quartet, Emmet rejects the fact-value distinction, endorses what can be characterized as an Aristotelian approach to ethics, and defends a form of moral cognitivism. What is more, her approach to these issues is novel (in drawing on sociological research) and thus enrichens our understanding of how certain philosophers in twentieth-century Britain sought to push back against dominant analytic approaches to moral theorizing.
This paper proposes a new way of understanding the thematic unity of the Timaeus. One of the major obstacles to appreciating the unity of the dialogue has been the apparent disconnect between the prologue, which prominently includes Critias' account of ancient Athens (20d-26d), and Timaeus' cosmological account. Past attempts to establish unity have worked on the assumption that the Timaeus as a whole is looking forward to the Critias and have sought to show that Critias' account is in some sense complementary to Timaeus' cosmological program. Building on recent work that calls the authenticity of the Critias into question, I argue that we can best appreciate the thematic unity of the dialogue by reading Timaeus' account as a critical response to Critias' account.
