The Art of Being Human: A Project for General Philosophy of Science

Throughout the medieval and modern periods, in various sacred and secular guises, the unification of all forms of knowledge under the rubric of ??science?? has been taken as the prerogative of humanity as a species. However, as our sense of species privilege has been called increasingly into question, so too has the very salience of ??humanity?? and ??science?? as general categories, let alone ones that might bear some essential relationship to each other. After showing how the ascendant Stanford School in the philosophy of science has contributed to this joint demystification of ??humanity?? and ??science??, I proceed on a more positive note to a conceptual framework for making sense of science as the art of being human. My understanding of ??science?? is indebted to the red thread that runs from Christian theology through the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment to the Humboldtian revival of the university as the site for the synthesis of knowledge as the culmination of self-development. Especially salient to this idea is science??s epistemic capacity to manage modality (i.e. to determine the conditions under which possibilities can be actualised) and its political capacity to organize humanity into projects of universal concern. However, the challenge facing such an ideal in the twentyfirst century is that the predicate ??human?? may be projected in three quite distinct ways, governed by what I call ??ecological??, ??biomedical?? and ??cybernetic?? interests. Which one of these future humanities would claim today??s humans as proper ancestors and could these futures co-habit the same world thus become two important questions that general philosophy of science will need to address in the coming years.     

Arthur Prior and medieval logic

Though Arthur Prior is now best known for his founding of modern temporal logic and hybrid logic, much of his early philosophical career was devoted to history of logic and historical logic. This interest laid the foundations for both of his ground-breaking innovations in the 1950s and 1960s. Because of the important r?le played by Prior??s research in ancient and medieval logic in his development of temporal and hybrid logic, any student of Prior, temporal logic, or hybrid logic should be familiar with the medieval logicians and their work. In this article we give an overview of Prior??s work in ancient and medieval logic.     

On the Argument from Divine Arbitrariness

William Rowe in his Can God be Free? (2004) argues that God, if there is a God, necessarily chooses the best. Combined with the premise that there is no best act of creation, this provides an a priori argument for atheism. Rowe assumes that necessarily God is a ??morally unsurpassable?? being, and it is for that reason that God chooses the best. In this article I drop that assumption and I consider a successor to Rowe??s argument, the Argument from Arbitrariness, based on the premise that God does not act arbitrarily. My chief conclusion will be that this argument fails because, for all we know, there can be non-arbitrary divine choices even if there is no best act of creation.     

Before and after Ritual: Two Accounts of Li as Virtue in Early Confucianism

In this article, I probe the nature of Confucian virtue with special focus on ritual propriety (li). I examine two classic, mutually competing accounts of li??as moral virtue and as civic virtue??in early Confucianism by investigating the thoughts of Mencius and Xunzi. My primary aim in this article is to demonstrate how their different accounts of human nature and equally different understandings of the natural state (that is, the pre-li state) led them to the development of two distinctive political theories of virtue in the Confucian tradition. More specifically, they justified the nature of the li on different terms??human/moral on the one hand and civic/political on the other. I conclude by revisiting the contemporary debate on the nature of Confucian ethics from the perspective of early Confucianism represented by Mencius and Xunzi.     

Some aspects of the assertoric syllogism in medieval hebrew logic

This paper introduces the reader to the medieval Hebrew tradition of logic by considering its treatment of Aristotelian syllogistic. Starting in the thirteenth century European Jews translated Arabic and Latin texts into Hebrew and produced commentaries and original compendia.Because they stood culturally and geographically at the cross-roads of two great traditions they were influenced by both.This is clearly seen in the development of syllogistic theory, where the Latin tradition ultimately replaces, though never entirely, its Arabic counterpart.Specific attention is devoted to the debate about the so-called Galenian fourth figure.In medieval Hebrew logic one finds both defenders and detractors of the figure, the former appearing towards the beginning of the period in question.With the ascendancy of scholastic logic the fourth figure virtually disappears from Hebrew texts     

Social Representations of Memory and Gender in Later Medieval England

Social representations in later medieval culture have attracted little attention amongst psychologists, pre-dating the development of the so-called ??public sphere?? in the eighteenth century. In addition, the association of pre-modern societies with ??traditional?? modes of communication in social psychology places implicit limits on areas that may be studied through the lens of social representation theory. This article analyses the way in which knowledge circulated in late medieval society, noting initially the plural nature of representations of events and marginal groups, and the myriad channels through which beliefs were consolidated. In later medieval England perceptions of the past depended on collective and group memory, with customary rights and local histories forged through ??common knowledge??, hearsay and the opinions of ??trustworthy men?? of the village. The final section of this commentary provides an analysis of testimony from the late medieval church courts, in which witnesses articulated gender ideologies that reflected perceptions drawn from everyday life. Social representations of women were thus deployed in ecclesiastical suits, on the one hand supporting evidence of female witnesses and on the other justifying misogynistic stereotypes of women??s behaviour.     

Alfarabi's imaginative critique: overflowing materialism in Virtuous Community

Though currently marginalised in Western philosophy, tenth-century Arabic philosopher Abu Nasr Alfarabi is one of the most important thinkers of the medieval era. In fact, he was known as the ‘second teacher’ (after Aristotle) to philosophers such as Avicenna and Averroes. As this epithet suggests, Alfarabi and his successors engaged in a critical and creative dialogue with thinkers from other historical traditions, including that of the Ancient Greeks, although the creativity of his part is often marginalised as well. In this article, I offer a new interpretation of Alfarabi's sweeping volume, The Principles of the Opinions of the Virtuous Community. My focus is the materialism that overflows Alfarabi's account of soul in general and the imaginative power in particular. The political conclusion of this account is that Virtuous Community does not directly present Alfarabi's ideal ruler or community. Instead, it offers a materialist critique that prefigures critical theory and post-structuralism and thereby provides guidelines for how to more effectively engage monotheistic communities in the pursuit of social justice – including along the axes of race, gender and sexual orientation.     

Varieties of failure (of warrant transmission: what else?!)

In the contemporary expanding literature on transmission failure and its connections with issues such as the Closure principle, the nature of perceptual warrant, Moore??s proof of an external world and the effectiveness of Humean scepticism, it has often been assumed that there is just one kind of it: the one made familiar by the writings of Crispin Wright and Martin Davies. Although it might be thought that one kind of failure is more than enough, Davies has recently challenged this view: apparently, there are more ways in heaven and earth that warrant can fail to transmit across valid inference from one (set of) belief(s) to another, than have been dreamt of in philosophy so far. More specifically, Davies thinks that a second kind of transmission failure has to be countenanced. He connects each kind of failure of transmission of warrant with two different kinds of epistemic project, respectively, and with the exploration of whether the current dispute between conservatives such as Wright, and liberals such as Jim Pryor, on the nature of perceptual warrant, would have a bearing on them. I point out why Davies??s second kind of transmission failure is indeed no such thing. I then move on to canvass another kind of transmission failure, different from the one studied by both Wright and Davies, and dependent on an alternative conception of the structure of empirical warrants, which I dub ??moderatism??. I then consider how this alternative notion of transmission failure fares with respect to Moore??s proof, its relationship with Wright??s kind of transmission failure and with the Closure principle. In closing, I defend it from criticisms that can be elicited from Pryor??s recent work.     

Some comments on Lehrer semantics

Lehrer Semantics, as it was devised by Adrienne and Keith Lehrer, is imbedded in a comprehensive web of thought and observations of language use and development, communication, and social interaction, all these as empirical phenomena. Rather than for a theory, I take it for a ??model?? of the kind which gives us guidance in how to organize linguistic and language-related phenomena. My comments on it are restricted to three aspects: In 2 I deal with the question of how Lehrerian sense can be empirically distinguished from Lehrerian reference as a precondition for the claim that sense relationships are in general more stable than reference relations. It seems that this very claim must already be presupposed for doing the respective empirical investigation. But in 3, I argue for the option to interpret the Lehrers?? concept of sense resp. sense vectors as intension concepts, by which move one may gain a generalized concept, so-to-say ??graded analyticity??, containing Carnapian strict analyticity for language systems as the extreme case of sense vectors with maximum value. Such graded sense may also be empirically investigated in the case of normal languages. In 4, I plead for my view that what the Lehrers take for communal languages are really collections of family-resembling idiolects of individual speakers and hypotheses of individual speakers about the idiolects of their fellow speakers. This move should free us from the fiction of, and sterile discussions about, the ??true?? meanings of words, but nevertheless keep normal language communication possible. As a concluding remark I propose in 5 to have both: normal languages from an empirical point of view, and codified languages from a logical reconstructionist one.     

Two accounts of laws and time

Among the most important questions in the metaphysics of science are ??What are the natures of fundamental laws and chances??? and ??What grounds the direction of time??? My aim in this paper is to examine some connections between these questions, discuss two approaches to answering them and argue in favor of one. Along the way I will raise and comment on a number of issues concerning the relationship between physics and metaphysics and consequences for the subject matter and methodology of metaphysics.     

赵用贤本《管子》论略

明万历十年赵用贤本《管韩合刻》本《管子》,是在南宋浙刻本和明刻刘绩本《管子补注》基础上形成的新版本。此本补充浙本、刘本没有的文句,修订讹误之字,将刘绩本注释的精华部分刊印于上栏,并将赵用贤本人补充的注释亦刊印于上栏,印刷精美。此本用字比较正规,影响很大,明清众多版本以此为母本,清代研究《管子》的学者亦多以此本为底本。     

RE-SITUATING SCOTIST THOUGHT

In "Duns Scotus: His Historical and Contemporary Significance", Catherine Pickstock presents several levels of a critique against Scotist thought. My response focuses upon the assumptions that ground her critique. In sum, I think that Pickstock's argument errs on two counts. While her contemporary critique may be better lodged upon the interpreters and not the Franciscan himself, her much more elaborated critique of Scotus is not well founded. I conclude my essay with a few comments about the danger of historical categories such as "voluntarism" or "intellectualism" for any authentic retrieval of a medieval thinker.     

The twofold role of diagrams in Euclid’s plane geometry

Proposition I.1 is, by far, the most popular example used to justify the thesis that many of Euclid??s geometric arguments are diagram-based. Many scholars have recently articulated this thesis in different ways and argued for it. My purpose is to reformulate it in a quite general way, by describing what I take to be the twofold role that diagrams play in Euclid??s plane geometry (EPG). Euclid??s arguments are object-dependent. They are about geometric objects. Hence, they cannot be diagram-based unless diagrams are supposed to have an appropriate relation with these objects. I take this relation to be a quite peculiar sort of representation. Its peculiarity depends on the two following claims that I shall argue for: (i) The identity conditions of EPG objects are provided by the identity conditions of the diagrams that represent them; (ii) EPG objects inherit some properties and relations from these diagrams.