In this classic analysis, Leo Strauss pinpoints what is original and innovative in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.

This profound analysis of the nature of art is the culmination of a series of essays and polemics on issues of morality, social justice, and religion. Considering and rejecting the idea that art reveals and reinvents through beauty, Tolstoy perceives the question of the nature of art to be a religious one. Ultimately, he concludes, art must be a force for good, for the progress and improvement of mankind. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of (...) classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. (shrink)

Applied ontology is the attempt to put to use the rigorous tools of philosophical ontology in the development of category systems which can be of use in the formalization and systematization of knowledge of a given domain. In what follows we shall sketch some elements of the ontology of legal and socio-political institutions, paying attention especially to the normativity involved in such institutions. We shall see that there is more than one type of normativity, but that this fact that has (...) often been ignored in standard attempts by philosophers to build ontologies of legal and other socio-political entities. In order to provide a sound system of categories for legal and socio-political institutions and entities, however, the manifold of normativity needs to be addressed. The classical examples of normative statements have been moral propositions; they do not merely describe states of affairs; they tell us how states of affairs ought to be. The distinction between how things are and how they ought to be is the basis of the distinction between fact and value. Analytic philosophers for a long time shunned discussions of normativity and ethics. They considered ethical statements as pseudo-propositions, or as expressions of pro- or con-attitudes of no theoretical significance.1 Nowadays, in contrast, prominent analytic philosophers discuss normative problems and there are important books written by such philosophers on topics such as law and justice. Here we pay attention to three seminal thinkers in this development: H. L. A. Hart, John Rawls, and John R. Searle in concerning ourselves especially with the way in which they deal with the issue of normativity. Hart is, within the context of recent analytic philosophy, the most important philosopher of law, Rawls the most.. (shrink)

While it is no doubt a good pedagogical principle to stress the most convincing proof in the first learning of a philosophic thesis, yet a man with any pretence to philosophic effeciency should certainly have at his beck and call several proofs to do service in various situations. Mr. Brown indicates a few subsidiary proofs in connection with the subject of materialsm, a consideration of grave import in the philosophical world today.

This essay is basically exegetical in nature, and its purpose is fourfold. First, I argue against the prevailing view that the dao 道 of the Daodejing 道德經 is metaphysically either a non-being or something transcending all senses by showing that it is a nonempty transforming unsummed totality.1 Dao is still metaphysical, but only as something that defies our ability to experience it as a totality or as any of its aspectual totalities.Second, I argue that in the Daodejing Laozi 老子 adopts (...) the condition of naming that a sign becomes a name only if it can be used to describe what it signifies.2 Because none of the aspectual totalities of dao can be described, the naming condition is contravened, and thus dao and its... (shrink)

I explore the possibility and rationality of interpersonal mechanisms of doxastic self-control, that is, ways in which individuals can make use of other people in order to get themselves to stick to their beliefs. I look, in particular, at two ways in which people can make interpersonal epistemic commitments, and thereby willingly undertake accountability to others, in order to get themselves to maintain their beliefs in the face of anticipated “epistemic temptations”. The first way is through the avowal of belief, (...) and the second is through the establishment of collective belief. I argue that both of these forms of interpersonal epistemic commitment can function as effective tools for doxastic self-control, and, moreover, that the control they facilitate should not be dismissed as irrational from an epistemic perspective. (shrink)

[Philosophy of Nature of St. Thomas Aquinas:. Nature, the Universe, Man].

Selon une accusation lancée par Mendelssohn en 1785, Kant est souvent considéré comme le brise-tout (Alleszermalmer) de la métaphysique. Les textes permettent de montrer qu'une telle attitude était étrangère à Kant, et qu'il projetait en réalité une réforme et une renaissance de la métaphysique. A cet effet, il s'est servi d'une argumentation qui, outre ses aspects originaux, plonge aussi ses racines dans une stratégie que Baumgarten, puis son disciple Georg Friedrich Meier, avaient déjà déployée contre l'attitude antimétaphysique. Gemäss Mendelssohns Anklage (...) von 1785 wird Kant oft als ein Alleszermalmer, als der Zermalmer der Metaphysik, betrachtet. Die Texte belegen jedoch, dass Kant keine derartige Absicht hegte, und dass er in Wirklichkeit die Metaphysik einer Reform unterziehen wollte. Dazu bediente er sich einer Argumentation, die ausser ihren originellen Aspekten auch in einer Strategie wurzelt, die schon von Baumgarten und seinem Schüler Georg Friedrich Meier gegen die antimetaphysische Haltung durchgeführt wurde. (shrink)

This book explores the multiple meaning of the notion of otherness in Søren Kierkegaard’s thought. Leo Stan discusses in detail the threefold structure of human existence in Kierkegaard’s authorship as a whole, both pseudonymous and self-signed.

George Grote published the History of Greece between 1846 and 1856, thereby providing the first positive evaluation of democratic Athens in the early modern period and a novel interpret...

This paper provides an analysis of the paradoxical definition of art as the silence of the world, as presented in Maurice Blanchot’s The Space of Literature. The definition is analysed phenomenologically, by treating the world as the universal horizon of all experiences. The paper presents two possible interpretations of Blanchot’s statement. First, a possibility is considered that, according to Blanchot, in genuine artistic experience the mundane everyday life falls silent, and an autonomous fictional world opens up. The paper argues that (...) while Blanchot does oppose art to everyday life, this interpretation is insufficient. Firstly, because on the basis of the phenomenological premise, all possible worlds fall within the universal world-horizon, and secondly, the function Blanchot attributes to art is considerably more radical, as when he speaks about the directedness of art outside of all possible worlds. While such an aim may seem impossible from the viewpoint of the phenomenological premise, the second part of the paper demonstrates that it can indeed be meaningfully interpreted on the basis of Martin Heidegger’s transcendent approach to the world. According to this interpretation, while the phenomenological premise prevents all discussion of places and experiences outside the world, a liminal experience can nevertheless be discussed. If this is true, it is not an entity within the world which opens up, but rather the world-horizon itself in the form of an anxious silence. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the Tractatus classifies names into constant names and variable names. A variable name, via the application of the existential quantifier against the background of picturing, picks out and denotes an unspecified object from the range of objects of the form shown by the relevant variable. A constant name labels an object picked out from a scope of the existential quantifier. I also refute two types of attempts to argue that the Tractarian relation between a (...) name and its meaning is not realist, and to explain why it is more reasonable to hold that it is. (shrink)

While relatively unknown to Anglophone circles, there was a thriving Anabaptist community in Italy during the reformation. It is the scope of this article to help retrace the origins of the Anabaptist movement in Italy and to set straight some misconceptions unintentionally perpetuated by some who have attempted this journey in the past. This is done in the hopes of raising appreciation for the movement and of enticing future research interest in this forgotten branch of the Radical Reformation.

In an actual conflict situation many different factors can contribute to the view that a recourse to violence is inescapable and even desirable. Among them are natural responses to repression, encouragement from interested parties outside, and the oversimplification of the situation as it is described in the militant ideologies of the organizers of the conflict and in the moral evaluations of those who take sides in it. The reality is far more complex and the situation far less determined than it (...) seems. Taking the South African situation, the question of whether violence can be avoided can still be seen to depend on the kind of action that is taken. There is a relationship between ends and means. If the end is racial domination (by Africans in place of Afrikaners), then violence is the appropriate means. If the end is racial integration then violence must be avoided. Whether non-violence can serve this end of racial integration depends on its being consistently practiced and on the provision of the necessary outside encouragement. (shrink)

The present volume contains articles of well-known representatives of the Meaning-Text Theory (MTT) and other related linguistic theories. Founded by I. Mel'cuk and A. Zholkovsky in the sixties in Moscow, MTT soon became known in the West as a “prominent outsider” theory. The picture changed since then, though. MTT gained importance in several areas of linguistics and computational linguistics. It influenced the design of new grammar formalisms such as Dependency Tree Grammars. Also, specific parts of MTT have been directly overtaken (...) into other theories; consider, for example, the work on integrating Lexical Functions into Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon. The present volume is a further convincing demonstration of MTT's liveliness and relevance to the field's “burning” issues. The focus of the volume is on semantics, semantic representation and relation of semantics to surface in MTT. Six out of eight articles (Polguère; Escalier & Fournier; Paducheva; St.-Germain; Beck; Bogulavsky) deal with problems related to these topics, while the last two articles of the volume (Sgall and Rambow; Joshi) throw a bridge between MTT, or, more precisely, between dependency-based theories of which MTT is one instantiation, and other linguistic theories. (shrink)