It was a strange posthumous fate that awaited the Englishman Robert of Ketton : he was to be both best known and most strenuously criticized for a work that he surely viewed as a sideline to his own interests and career. By trade Robert was a Latin translator of Arabic scientific and mathematical works, one of those remarkable twelfth-century men who, as his contemporary Petrus Alfonsi put it, were willing “to traverse distant provinces and withdraw into remote regions so as (...) to be able to attain fuller knowledge of the astronomical art.” Like other contemporary translators, such as the Italian Gerard of Cremona , Robert had left his birthplace—in his case Rutlandshire—and traveled to Spain in order to have access to the great works of Arabic astronomy and mathematics that could be found in the still very Arab Iberian Peninsula. By 1141 we find him and his close friend Herman of Carinthia studying and translating scientific works together in northeastern Spain, and in later years his astronomical interests and ecclesiastical responsibilities led him to travel widely in Spain and England. As a scientific translator, he is perhaps best known for his Liber algebrae et Almucabola, a Latin version of al-Khwarazmī's great manual of algebra, Al-Kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-jabr wa-al-muqābalah. (shrink)

Ludovico Marracci at Work: The Evolution of His Latin Translation of the Qurʾān in the Light of His Newly Discovered Manuscripts. With an Edition and a Comparative Linguistic Analysis of Sura 18. By Reinhold F. Glei and Roberto Tottoli. Corpus Islamo-Christianum, Arabica-Latina, vol. 1. Wiesbaden: harraSSoWitz, 2016. Pp. 188. €48.

Thomas E. Hill, Jr.; Servility and Self-Respect, The Monist, Volume 57, Issue 1, 1 January 1973, Pages 87–104, https://doi.org/10.5840/monist197357135.

This chapter discusses Arnold Lobel's story “Cookies,” a story about will‐power, a concept central to moral psychology. The question of whether Frog and Toad both, or one or neither, possess will‐power at the end of the story is a good one to begin a discussion of this interesting philosophical topic with children. The concept of will‐power is linked to an important philosophical concept, weakness of the will. The Greek philosopher Aristotle first identified this phenomenon. This area of philosophical investigation bridges (...) the fields of ethics and philosophy of mind, developing an account of the mental faculties necessary for moral — and immoral — behavior. Moral psychology integrates ethics with the philosophy of mind. While ethics discusses questions of right and wrong, moral psychology focuses on what gives us the ability to do what's right despite the attractions of morally problematic courses of action. (shrink)

This is followed by a section about action in general: it establishes the standpoint of the agent and makes an inventory of several species of action.

Thomas Hill, a leading figure in the recent development of Kantian moral philosophy, presents a set of essays exploring the implications of basic Kantian ideas for practical issues. The first part of the book provides background in central themes in Kant's ethics; the second part discusses questions regarding human welfare; the third focuses on moral worth-the nature and grounds of moral assessment of persons as deserving esteem or blame. Hill shows moral, political, and social philosophers just how valuable moral (...) theory can be in addressing practical matters. (shrink)

Respect, Pluralism, and Justice is a series of essays which sketches a broadly Kantian framework for moral deliberation, and then uses it to address important social and political issues. Hill shows how Kantian theory can be developed to deal with questions about cultural diversity, punishment, political violence, responsibility for the consequences of wrongdoing, and state coercion in a pluralistic society.

James Fitzjames Stephen is remembered as a judge, legal historian, and the author of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, a reply to J. S. Mill's late works. He is less well remembered for his journalism, though it earned him a reputation among his contemporaries as one of the most trenchant writers on topics ranging across the social, religious, political, moral, and philosophical questions debated in his time. It was largely in his journalistic writing that Stephen set forth his views on these questions. (...) Despite such a reputation, however, only a small proportion of this writing was collected during his lifetime, and very little has been republished since his death.Selected Writings of James Fitzjames Stephen: On Society, Religion, and Government includes thirty-five essays expressing Stephen's views on the questions of his day, which have not lost their interest in ours. He wrote at a time when much of the finest writing in English was published in periodicals, often anonymously. The essays in this volume are drawn mostly from Stephen's unsigned contributions to the Saturday Review, with additions, both signed and unsigned, from other periodicals, extending from the 1850s to the 1880s. (shrink)

“Supererogation” is now a technical term in philosophy for a range of ideas expressed by terms such as “good but not required,” “beyond the call of duty,” “praiseworthy but not obligatory,” and “good to do but not bad not to do” (see Duty and Obligation; Intrinsic Value). Examples often cited are extremely generous acts of charity, heroic self-sacrifice, extraordinary service to morally worthy causes, and sometimes forgiveness and minor favors. These concepts are familiar in institutional contexts, for example, when teachers (...) give points for “extra credit” work, corporations give “bonuses” for profitable leadership, and armies award medals for extraordinary service and valor. Moral philosophers, however, have generally focused on whether or not some of these terms refer to a fundamental moral category and, if so, how the category should be defined, which acts the category includes, and whether various moral theories adequately acknowledge it. The idea that acts can be good and praiseworthy but beyond duty has seemed puzzling for several reasons. For example, it seems that “good and praiseworthy” appeals to scalar standards of (“more or less”) value and virtue whereas “duty,” “required,” and “obligatory” invoke nonscalar norms that make (“all or nothing”) demands. This raises the theoretical question whether morality presupposes two distinct conceptual schemes, and, if so, to what extent and how these can be unified in a consistent and coherent moral theory. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Back to Kant is a study of the rise of the neo-Kantian movement from its origins in the 1850s to its academic preeminence in the years before World War I. Thomas E. Willey describes early neo-Kantianism as a reaction of scientists and scientific philosophers against both the then discredited Hegelianism and Naturphilosophie of the preceding era and the simplistic and deterministic scientific materialism of the 1850s. "Back to Kant" was the slogan of a revolt against theories of knowledge which (...) seemed inadequate to recent discoveries in thermodynamics, physiology, optics and other fields. Because Immanuel Kant was the philosopher who placed Newtonian physics on new epistemological foundations and demonstrated the possibility of universal scientific truth, he was the right thinker for a generation of scholars living through a new scientific revolution in Germany and dissatisfied with both speculative idealism and crude materialism. The second wave of neo-Kantians continued to discuss problems of scientific epistemology in the 1880s and after, but they also showed a keen interest in political and social matters, attempting to bridge liberalism and socialism with Kantian ethics. Neo-Kantians had to face questions of socialism, the place of the working class in society, the phenomenon of social welfare, the challenge of political democracy. Willey uses the biographical approach to develop the relationship between unity and diversity in the movement, and to underscore the importance of personality in history. While individual dissertations and monographs have been written on various thinkers and schools within neo-Kantianism, this is the first wide-ranging history of the entire phenomenon. Willey observes that the movement did succeed in reasserting ethical values and in separating humanistic studies from the methods of physical science. He also discusses the possibility that a wider acceptance of neo-Kantian ideals among bourgeois intellectuals and socialist leaders might have reduced class antagonisms and sustained a stronger feeling of community between Germany and the West. (shrink)

Exploring the predicates of education from theoretical, practical and historical perspectives, this book revalorizes the central role of the humanities in the ethical and aesthetic formation of the individual.

Thoughtful Images: Philosophy Illustrated is the first systematic investigation of how artists throughout the ages have illustrated philosophical texts, ideas, concepts, and theories. The book begins by developing a theory of visual illustrations of philosophical texts and undermining what the author calls "the denigration of illustration." The book then takes a more historical approach, beginning in Ancient Greece and Rome and proceeding through Medieval illuminations and printed broadsides to the frontispieces of philosophical texts. Throughout, attention is paid to how technological (...) developments enable different means for illustrating philosophy. (shrink)

The tendency to attribute foundationalist ambitions to the Vienna Circle has long obscured our view of its attempted revolution in philosophy. The present paper makes the case for a consistently epistemologically anti-foundationalist interpretation of all three of the Circle's main protagonists: Schlick, Carnap, and Neurath. Corresponding to the intellectual fault lines within the Circle, two ways of going about the radical reorientation of the pursuit of philosophy will then be distinguished and the contemporary potential of Carnap's and Neurath's project explored.

It is a violation of legitimate academic freedom to attempt to link Catholicism to a particular school of economic thought and shut down all further debate. Whether the realm of human choice, which economics describes, is subject to an array of cause-and-effect relationships is obviously a matter for human reason to determine. From there, reason can then investigate these relationships. Although economic policy has a moral dimension, economics as a positive scienceconsists merely of an edifice of cause-and-effect relationships, and to (...) that extent is as autonomous as the purely descriptive sides of all other sciences. (shrink)

Re-analysis of the data provided in the target article reveals a lack of evidence for a strong, universal relationship between parasite stress and the variables relating to sociality. Furthermore, even if associations between these variables do exist, the analyses presented here do not provide evidence for Fincher & Thornhill's (F&T's) proposed causal mechanism.

Released in 1999, _Fight Club_ is David Fincher’s popular adaption of Chuck Palahniuk’s cult novel, and one of the most philosophically rich films of recent years. This is the first book to explore the varied philosophical aspects of the film. Beginning with an introduction by the editor that places the film and essays in context, each chapter explores a central theme of _Fight Club_ from a philosophical perspective. Topics discussed include: _Fight Club_, Plato’s cave and Descartes’ cogito moral disintegration identity, (...) gender and masculinity visuals and narration. Including annotated further reading at the end of each chapter, _Fight Club_ is essential reading for anyone interested in the film, as well as those studying philosophy and film studies. (shrink)

This chapter talks about Tony Fucile's amusing book, Let's Do Nothing!. This book straddles the boundary between metaphysics and the philosophy of language, for the concept of nothing has been a very puzzling one to philosophers. But before entering those murky waters, let's see how Sal and Frankie fare in their attempt to do nothing. Sal and Frankie were trapped in their own fly bottle when they tried to do nothing. Sal's discovery — that you can't do nothing — was (...) a philosophical discovery, one that freed him and Frankie from the type of bewitchment that Wittgenstein and other ordinary language philosophers saw embodied in the history of philosophy. Discussion of “Nothing” with children is started by asking the children what are some examples of things that they really like to do. (shrink)