This volume aims to commemorate, criticize, scrutinize and assess the undoubted significance of the Russian Revolution both retrospectively and prospectively in three parts. Part I consists of a palimpsest of the different representations that the Russian Revolution underwent through its turbulent history, going back to its actors, agents, theorists and propagandists to consider whether it is at all possible to revisit the Russian Revolution as an event. With this problematic as a backbone, the chapters of this section scrutinize the ambivalences (...) of revolution in four distinctive phenomena that pertain to the revolution’s historicity. Part II concentrates on how the revolution was retold in the aftermath of its accomplishment not only by its sympathizers but also its opponents. These chapters not only bring to light the ways in which the revolution triggered critical theorists to pave new paths of radical thinking that were conceived as methods to overcome the revolution’s failures and impasses, but also how the Revolution was subverted in order to inspire reactionary politics and legitimize conservative theoretical undertakings. Even commemorating the Russian Revolution, then, still poses a threat to every well-established political order. In Part III, this volume interprets how the Russian Revolution can spur a rethinking of the idea of revolution. Acknowledging the suffocating burden that the notion of revolution as such entails, the final chapters of this book ultimately address the content and form of future revolution. It is therein, in such critical political thought and such radical form of action, where the Russian Revolution’s legacy ought to be sought and can still be found. (shrink)

The Russian Revolution is a historical milestone both politically and theoretically. Its supporters found in it the consummation of all history that preceded it and the springboard towards a new history absolved from all grievances. Its opponents saw in it a violent coup d’ etat leading to the destruction of a state, the beginning of the division of the world in two hostile camps and last but not least one of the paradigmatic examples of an almost unprecedented authoritarianism. This book (...) examines the discursive and practical battleground of the Russian Revolution, describes how it keeps living through the events, struggles, theories, and effects it prompted, and analyzes revolutionary ideas and processes in a more general vein. By taking the Russian Revolution as the prime example of revolutionary processes, the articles of this volume attempt to acknowledge the legacy of the Russian Revolution, come to terms with its failures and sketch the future of revolutionary thinking and practice in its aftermath. (shrink)

Similar to parasites, malignant cells exploit the host for energy, resources and protection, thereby impairing host health and fitness. Although cancer is widespread in the animal kingdom, its impact on life history traits and strategies have rarely been documented. Devil facial tumour disease, a transmissible cancer, afflicting Tasmanian devils, provides an ideal model system to monitor the impact of cancer on host life-history, and to elucidate the evolutionary arms-race between malignant cells and their hosts. Here we provide an overview of (...) parasite-induced host life history adaptations, then both phenotypic plasticity of LH responses and changes in allele frequencies that affect LH traits of Tasmanian devils in response to DFTD are discussed. We conclude that akin to parasites, cancer can directly and indirectly affect devil LH traits and trigger host evolutionary responses. Consequently, it is important to consider oncogenic processes as a selective force in wildlife. Exposure to transmissible cancer cells, i.e., Tasmanian devil facial tumour cells, can cause changes to life history traits either as the result of phenotypic plasticity in response to exposure during the lifetime of the individual or as the result of evolutionary change in LH traits due to selection over generations.Photo credits: Frédéric Thomas, Sarah Peck, Geordie Jennings. (shrink)

A collection of late 20th-century scholarship devoted to Thomas Jefferson as a politician, writer, philosopher, Christian and economist.

The Essays on the Active Powers of Man was Thomas Reid's last major work. It was conceived as part of one large work, intended as a final synoptic statement of his philosophy. The first and larger part was published three years earlier as Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man. These two works are united by Reid's basic philosophy of common sense, which sets out native principles by which the mind operates in both its intellectual and active aspects. The (...) Active Powers shows how these principles are involved in volition, action, and the ability to judge morally. Reid gives an original twist to a libertarian and realist tradition that was prominently represented in eighteenth-century British thought by such thinkers as Samuel Clarke and Richard Price. (shrink)

This article explores silence and the ethics of conscience through a study of the life and late letters of Sir Thomas More. More's silence is a paradigm case for the contest of conscience under conditions of tyranny, and it is one of the most influential in the formulation of principles of conscience and human rights in modern constitutional democracies. The article focuses on More's prosecution by King Henry VIII, and offers close analysis of the concept of conscience discussed in (...) his last letters. The approach is historical and philosophical, and puts More's case in dialogue with other classic and modern texts on the ethics of conscience. Emphasis is placed on More's principle of self-determination as essential to conscience. (shrink)

I. Introduction, notes, and appendix -- II. A facsimile of the first edition, 1642, reduced in size.

Die MISCELLANEA MEDIAEVALIA präsentieren seit ihrer Gründung durch Paul Wilpert im Jahre 1962 Arbeiten des Thomas-Instituts der Universität zu Köln. Das Kernstück der Publikationsreihe bilden die Akten der im zweijährigen Rhythmus stattfindenden Kölner Mediaevistentagungen, die vor über 50 Jahren von Josef Koch, dem Gründungsdirektor des Instituts, ins Leben gerufen wurden. Der interdisziplinäre Charakter dieser Kongresse prägt auch die Tagungsakten: Die MISCELLANEA MEDIAEVALIA versammeln Beiträge aus allen mediävistischen Disziplinen - die mittelalterliche Geschichte, die Philosophie, die Theologie sowie die Kunst- und (...) Literaturwissenschaften sind Teile einer Gesamtbetrachtung des Mittelalters. (shrink)

Thomas Hibbs is the Dean of the Honors College at Baylor University.

"The complete list of the works of Thomas S. Szasz": pages 237-253.

Contemporary Philosophy in Focus offers a series of introductory volumes to many of the dominant philosophical thinkers of the current age. Thomas Kuhn, the author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is probably the best-known and most influential historian and philosopher of science of the last 25 years, and has become something of a cultural icon. His concepts of paradigm, paradigm change and incommensurability have changed the way we think about science. This volume offers an introduction to Kuhn's life (...) and work and then considers the implications of Kuhn's work for philosophy, cognitive psychology, social studies of science and feminism. The volume is more than a retrospective on Kuhn, exploring future developments of cognitive and information services along Kuhnian lines. Outside of philosophy the volume will be of particular interest to professionals and students in cognitive science, history of science, science studies and cultural studies. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas produced a voluminous body of work on moral theory, and much of that work is on virtue, particularly the status and value of the virtues as principles of virtuous acts, and the way in which a moral life can be organized around them schematically. Thomas Osborne presents Aquinas's account of virtue in its historical, philosophical and theological contexts, to show the reader what Aquinas himself wished to teach about virtue. His discussion makes the complexities of Aquinas's (...) moral thought accessible to readers despite the differences between Thomas's texts themselves, and the distance between our background assumptions and his. The book will be valuable for scholars and students in ethics, medieval philosophy, and theology. (shrink)

Author: Thomas Sören Hoffmann. Translated by Pedro Sepúlveda Zambrano.

'Moge onze keuze het signaal zijn voor de oproep aan mensen om de ketenen te verbreken, waaronder de monnikachtige onwetendheid en het bijgeloof, die hen ertoe hadden overreed zichzelf vast te binden, en om de zegeningen en veiligheid van het zelfbestuur te aanvaarden.'.

Thomas Reid is now recognized as one of the towering figures of the Enlightenment. Best known for his published writings on epistemology and moral theory, he was also an accomplished mathematician and natural philosopher, as an earlier volume of his manuscripts edited by Paul Wood for the Edinburgh Reid Edition, Thomas Reid on the Animate Creation, has shown. The Correspondence of Thomas Reid collects all of the known letters to and from Reid in a fully annotated form. (...) Letters already published by Sir William Hamilton and others have been reedited, and roughly half of the letters included appear in print for the first time. Writing in 1802, Reid's disciple and biographer Dugald Stewart doubted that Reid's correspondence &"would be generally interesting.&" This collection proves otherwise, for the letters illuminate virtually every aspect of Reid's life and career and, in some instances, provide us with invaluable evidence about activities otherwise undocumented in his manuscripts or published works. Through his correspondence we can trace Reid's relations with contemporaries such as David Hume and his colleagues at both King's College, Aberdeen, and the University of Glasgow, as well as his engagement with the most controversial philosophical, scientific, and political issues of his day. If anything, the letters assembled here serve as the starting point for understanding Reid and his place in the Enlightenment. (shrink)

This book contains the text of Thomas Kuhn's unfinished book, The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development, which Kuhn himself described as "a return to the central claims of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and the problems that it raised but did not resolve." The Plurality of Worlds is preceded by two related texts that Kuhn publicly delivered but never published in English: his paper "Scientific Knowledge as a Historical Product" and his Shearman Memorial Lectures, "The (...) Presence of Past Science." The book opens with an introduction by the editor that describes the origins and structure of The Plurality of Worlds, and sheds light on its central philosophical problems. Kuhn's aims in his last writings are bold. He sets out to develop an empirically grounded theory of meaning that would allow him to make sense of both the possibility of historical understanding and the inevitability of incommensurability between past and present science. Moreover, he intends to show that incommensurability is fully compatible with a robust notion of a real world that science investigates, with the rationality of scientific belief change, and with the idea that scientific development is progressive. This is a must-read follow-up to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most important books of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Explore Thomas Paine's political and philosophical ideology in this collection of his most famous works.

Aquinas Saint Thomas. The Commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas on Aristotle's Treatise on the soul Aquinas Saint Thomas TI-IE COMMENTARY. OF * ST. THOMAS AQUINAS ON I. Front Cover.

INTRODUCTION Although the writings of Thomas Reid are very fertile and interesting, his life is biographically barren in comparison to such seventeenth - and ...

Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham disagree over how and whether virtues are specified by their objects. For Thomas, habits and acts are specified by their formal objects. For instance, the object of theft is something that belongs to someone else, and more particularly theft is distinct from robbery because theft is the open taking of another’s good, whereas robbery is open and violent. A habit such as a virtue or a vice shares or takes (...) the act’s object. For Scotus, although the same virtue or act cannot have objects which differ formally, different virtues and acts can have an object which is identical according to its formal ratio, in the way that the different theological virtues might even formally have God as their object. Ockham accepts Scotus’s view that charity and hope are two kinds of love, we will see how, unlike Scotus, he argues that these theological virtues differ on account of their immediate complex objects. The disagreement between these three figures raises important difficulties concerning what it even means to be a formal object. (shrink)

Abstract Freedom in the sense of free will is a multiway power to do any one of a number of things, leaving it up to us which one of a range of options by way of action we perform. What are the ethical implications of our possession of such a power? The paper examines the pre-Hobbesian scholastic view of writers such as Peter Lombard and Francisco Suárez: freedom as a multiway power is linked to the right to liberty understood as (...) a right to exercise that power, and to liberation as a desirable goal involving the perfection of that power. Freedom as a power, liberty as a right, and liberation as a desirable goal, are all linked within this scholastic view to a distinctive theory of law as constituting, in its primary form of natural law, the normative recognition of human freedom. Hobbes's denial of the very existence of freedom as a power led him to a radical revision both of the theory of law and of the relation of law to liberty. Law and liberty were no longer harmonious phenomena, but were left in essential conflict. One legacy of Hobbes is the attempt to base a theory of law and liberty not on freedom as a multiway power, but on rationality. Instead of an ethics of freedom, we have an ethics of reason as involving autonomy. The paper expresses some scepticism about the prospects for such an appeal to reason as a replacement for multiway freedom. (shrink)

This volume contains new translations of the essential philosophical writings of Thomas Aquinas, from the Summa Theologiae and The Principles of Nature. The included texts represent the breadth of Aquinas's thought, addressing: the fundamental principles of nature; causality; the existence of God; how God can be known; how language can be used to describe God; human nature (including the nature of the soul, free will, and epistemology); happiness; ethics; and natural law. The goal of these translations is twofold: to (...) allow Aquinas to speak for himself, but also to make his thought accessible to the contemporary reader without the burden of unnecessary adherence to convention. A thorough introduction to Aquinas and his ideas is included, as are a series of useful appendices connecting Aquinas's arguments to those of Anselm, Scotus, and others. (shrink)

The impassioned democratic voice of the Age of Revolution, Paine possessed a gift for stating complex ideas in concise language. This accessible collection of highlights from the social and political philosopher's best-known works includes lengthy selections from Common Sense , The American Crisis , The Rights of Man , and The Age of Reason.

Aquinas occupies an extremely important position in the western philosophical tradition. His work contains influential contributions in logic, metaphysics, theory of knowledge, ethics and philosophy of religion, and his commentaries on Aristotle played a major role in the incorporation of the philosophy of Aristotle into the understanding of Christian doctrine and into western culture at large. Yet many people find it difficult to begin the study of Aquinas's work, daunted by its volume and by its being worked out within in (...) the context of Catholic doctrine, which must now be obscure to most readers. This book can help rectify this. (shrink)

I suggest a unified account of conditional oughts and of contrastive reasons. The core of the account is an explanation of facts about conditional oughts in terms of facts about contrastive reasons, and a reduction of contrastive reasons to non-contrastive reasons. In rejecting contrastivism about reasons, the account is consistent with orthodoxy about reasons. Moreover, it extends a standard view of how oughts and reasons are related to one another, and it makes sense of important and explanatorily recalcitrant phenomena. To (...) the extent to which the account involves an explanation of facts about conditional oughts, it does not directly compete with semantic analyses of statements about conditional oughts. However, as I indicate in passing, the account coheres well with an important type of such analyses, while it is inconsistent with others. (shrink)