This book presents new research into key areas of the work of German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). Reflecting various aspects of Leibniz's thought, this book offers a collection of original research arranged into four separate themes: Science, Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Religion and Theology. With in-depth articles by experts such as Maria Rosa Antognazza, Nicholas Jolley, Agustín Echavarría, Richard Arthur and Paul Lodge, this book is an invaluable resource not only for readers just beginning to discover Leibniz, (...) but also for scholars long familiar with his philosophy and eager to gain new perspectives on his work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Genevieve Lloyd THE SELF AS FICTION: PHILOSOPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY And so it goes on. All the time I'm dressing up the figure of myself in my own mind, lovingly, stealthily, not openly adoring it, for if I did that, I should catch myself out, and stretch my hand at once for a book in self-protection. Indeed it is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from (...) idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed in any longer. Or is it not so very curious at all? It is a matter of great importance. Suppose the looking-glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people — what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. Virginia Woolf, "The Mark on the WaIl" ' The anxiety Virginia Woolf describes is, at one level, a familiar, everyday one of self-esteem. But the passage can also be read as expressing a more metaphysical unease about our conception ofwhat it is to be a self at all. Our difficulties in preventing the "romantic figure with the green of forest depuis all about it" from collapsing back into mat "shell of a person which is seen by other people" have philosophical roots. We have inherited ideals of objective knowledge which put severe restraints on the capacity to construct our selves as fictions. Our selves are part ofthe world and our representations of mem must conform to standards of truth. Yet we also want to separate our selves out from the world we know. As a knowing self, I am not merely an object of knowledge, but its luminous, though elusive, source and structuring center. My subjectivity seems to give me a special status in the world. But it is difficult to see how mat special status is to be reconciled with ideals of objective knowledge. As Thomas Nagel sums up the philosophical dilemma, in Mortal Questions, we are impelled, on the one hand, to resist an entirely "external" view ofwhat we most essentially are and do. But this sense ofour irreduci168 Genevieve Lloyd169 ble subjectivity comes up against an equally strong drive to include human beings and everything about diem as contents of a world mat can be understood "objectively." Our awareness of ourselves involves a sense of how the world is experienced from a particular point of view. But this idea of what the world is like from different points of view is at odds with our inherited ideals ofknowledge. To qualify as real, diings must be there independendy of particular points of view. Objectivity demands setting aside the "internal" viewpoint in an attempt to see die world, as it were, from no point of view at all. Yet we do feel mat our awareness of being ourselves cannot be reduced to the awareness of being the particular persons with the determinate properties we have, there to be perceived from perspectives not our own.2 As Arthur Prior puts the point, in his paper "Identifiable Individuals," an exchange of properties between Julius Caesar and Mark Antony might leave the world looking exacdy the same to us, but certainly not to Caesar or Antony. The experience of being called Julius Caesar or being murdered on me ides of March are very different experiences from being called Mark Antony or dallying on the Nile with Cleopatra.3 This seems to suggest mat my awareness ofbeing myself cannot be equated wim awareness of being some person with a determinate set of properties. It was, of course, precisely that kind of consideration which prompted Descartes, in the Meditations, to postulate the self as a pure ego, which remains the same regardless ofany imagined change in outer circumstances. It is the thought experiment of shedding all his actual properties which prompts him to treat the self as a special kind of object, immune to the fluctuations and uncertainties that afflict others. But, as Bernard Williams has pointed out, in his article "Imagination and... (shrink)

This is the first volume of a collection of papers in honor of the fiftieth birthday of Jean-Yves Béziau. These 25 papers have been written by internationally distinguished logicians, mathematicians, computer scientists, linguists and philosophers, including Arnon Avron, John Corcoran, Wilfrid Hodges, Laurence Horn, Lloyd Humbertsone, Dale Jacquette, David Makinson, Stephen Read, and Jan Woleński. It is a state-of-the-art source of cutting-edge studies in the new interdisciplinary field of universal logic. The papers touch upon a wide range of topics (...) including combination of logic, non-classical logic, square and other geometrical figures of opposition, categorical logic, set theory, foundation of logic, philosophy and history of logic. This book offers new perspectives and challenges in the study of logic and will be of interest to all students and researchers interested the nature and future of logic. (shrink)

Knowing Persons is an original study of Plato's account of personhood. For Plato, embodied persons are images of a disembodied ideal. The ideal person is a knower. Hence, the lives of embodied persons need to be understood according to Plato's metaphysics of imagery. For Gerson, Plato's account of embodied personhood is not accurately conflated with Cartesian dualism. Plato's dualism is more appropriately seen in the contrast between the ideal disembodied person and the embodied one than in the contrast between mind (...) or soul and body. (shrink)

In this book, S. A. Lloyd offers a radically new interpretation of Hobbes's laws of nature, revealing them to be not egoistic precepts of personal prudence but rather moral instructions for obtaining the common good.

This is a revised and expanded edition of a seminal work in the logic and philosophy of time, originally published in 1968. Arthur N. Prior (1914-1969) was the founding father of temporal logic, and his book offers an excellent introduction to the fundamental questions in the field. Several important papers have been added to the original selection, as well as a comprehensive bibliography of Prior's work and an illuminating interview with his widow, Mary Prior. In addition, the Polish logic (...) which made Prior's writings difficult for many readers has been replaced by standard logical notation. This new edition will secure the classic status of the book. (shrink)

The winning entry in a competition held by the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences, Schopenhauer's 1839 essay brought its author international recognition. Its brilliant and elegant treatments of free will and determinism elevated it to a classic of Western philosophy, and its penetrating reflections still remain relevant. Schopenhauer makes a distinction between freedom of acting (which he endorses) and the freedom of willing (which he refutes) in a clear and rigorous treatment that reveals many basic features of his philosophy. A (...) useful introduction to Schopenhauer for students of philosophy and religion. (shrink)

This innovative - and pessimistic - view has proved powerfully influential upon philosophy and art, directly affecting the work of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and ...

Contemporary health care often lacks generosity of spirit, even when treatment is most efficient. Too many patients are left unhappy with how they are treated, and too many medical professionals feel estranged from the calling that drew them to medicine. Arthur W. Frank tells the stories of ill people, doctors, and nurses who are restoring generosity to medicine--generosity toward others and to themselves. The Renewal of Generosity evokes medicine as the face-to-face encounter that comes before and after diagnostics, pharmaceuticals, (...) and surgeries. Frank calls upon the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin to reflect on stories of ill people, doctors, and nurses who transform demoralized medicine into caring relationships. He presents their stories as a source of consolation for both ill and professional alike and as an impetus to changing medical systems. Frank shows how generosity is being renewed through dialogue that is more than the exchange of information. Dialogue is an ethic and an ideal for people on both sides of the medical encounter who want to offer more to those they meet and who want their own lives enriched in the process. The Renewal of Generosity views illness and medical work with grace and compassion, making an invaluable contribution to expanding our vision of suffering and healing. (shrink)

In The Sleepwalkers and The Act of Creation Arthur Koestler provided pioneering studies of scientific discovery and artistic inspiration, the twin pinnacles of human achievement. The Ghost in the Machine looks at the dark side of the coin: our terrible urge to self-destruction... Could the human species be a gigantic evolutionary mistake? To answer that startling question Koestler examines how experts on evolution and psychology all too often write about people with an 'antiquated slot-machine model based on the naively (...) mechanistic world-view of the nineteenth century. His brilliant polemic helped to instigate a major revolution in the life sciences, yet its 'glimpses of an alternative world-view' form only the background to an even more challenging analysis of the human predicament. Perhaps, he suggests, we are a species in which ancient and recent brain structures - or reason and emotion - are not fully co-ordinated. Such in-built deficiencies may explain the paranoia, violence and insanity that are central strands of human history. And however disturbing we find such issues, Koestler contends, it is only when we face our limitations head-on that we can hope to find a remedy. (shrink)

Introduction -- Euripides, philosopher of the stage -- The world of men and gods -- Agreeing with nature : fate and providence in stoic ethics -- Augustine : divine justice and the "ordering" of evil -- The philosopher and the princess : Descartes and the philosophical life -- Living with necessity : Spinoza and the philosophical life -- Designer worlds -- Providence as progress -- Providence lost.

This book was originally published in 1981 and the theme of universals attracted a great deal of attention in the decade preceding publication.

Frege's scathing comments on Mill on the empirical grounds of arithmetical truth are elaborated. The suggestion is made that some entities are ‘well-behaved' : if you perform two acts and then two more, the ‘result' will be that exactly four acts have occurred. How much it all matters or means is not further discussed.

Über die Universitäts-Philosophie -- Über Schopenhauer -- Editorische Notiz.

This chapter examines the pioneering work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) on various number systems, in particular binary, which he independently invented in the mid-to-late 1670s, and hexadecimal, which he invented in 1679. The chapter begins with the oft-debated question of who may have influenced Leibniz’s invention of binary, though as none of the proposed candidates is plausible I suggest a different hypothesis, that Leibniz initially developed binary notation as a tool to assist his investigations in mathematical problems that were (...) exercising him at the time, namely those concerning the divisibility of composite numbers, primality, and perfect numbers. The chapter then explores Leibniz’s development of binary, his little-known work on binary fractions and expansions, his use of binary as a symbol for creation in his philosophical-theology, and his response to the suggestion that there was a correlation between binary numeration and the hexagrams of the ancient Chinese divinatory text, the Yijing. The chapter then focuses on Leibniz’s work on other number systems, in particular his invention and exploration of hexadecimal as well as his work on duodecimal. The chapter concludes by revealing a hitherto unknown practical application of binary that Leibniz devised in the last year of his life. (shrink)

The lectures have afforded me an opportunity of developing more fully than in my earlier books the principles of philosophic thought associated with the modern advances of physical science. It is often said that there is no "philosophy of ...

In this ground-breaking presentation of Neo-Hasidic philosophy, Green and Mayse draw together the writings of five great twentieth-century European and American Jewish thinkers--Hillel Zeitlin, Martin Buber, Abraham Joshu Heschel, Shlomo Carlebach, Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, plus some of Green's own youthful writings -- sharing each of their reflections on the inner life of the individual and their dreams of creating Neo-Hasidic spiritual communities.

In At the Will of the Body , Arthur Frank told the story of his own illnesses, heart attack and cancer. That book ended by describing the existence of a "remission society," whose members all live with some form of illness or disability. The Wounded Storyteller is their collective portrait. Ill people are more than victims of disease or patients of medicine they are wounded storytellers. People tell stories to make sense of their suffering when they turn their diseases (...) into stories, they find healing. Drawing on the work of authors such as Oliver Sacks, Anatole Broyard, Norman Cousins, and Audre Lorde, as well as from people he met during the years he spent among different illness groups, Frank recounts a stirring collection of illness stories, ranging from the well-known--Gilda Radner's battle with ovarian cancer--to the private testimonials of people with cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, and disabilties. Their stories are more than accounts of personal suffering: they abound with moral choices and point to a social ethic. Frank identifies three basic narratives of illness in restitution, chaos, and quest. Restitution narratives anticipate getting well again and give prominence to the technology of cure. In chaos narratives, illness seems to stretch on forever, with no respite or redeeming insights. Quest narratives are about finding that insight as illness is transformed into a means for the ill person to become someone new. (shrink)

Reviewing his life's work in several areas, Koestler shows that the development of human intelligence mirrors the hierarchical order of the universe, examines links between creativity and humor, science, and art, and criticizes the behaviorist theory of cultural evolution.

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1962, given by Arthur N. Prior (1914-1969).

The point of the present paper is to draw attention to some interesting similarities, as well as differences, between the approaches to the logic of noncontingency of Evgeni Zolin and of Claudio Pizzi. Though neither of them refers to the work of the other, each is concerned with the definability of a (normally behaving, though not in general truth-implying) notion of necessity in terms of noncontingency, standard boolean connectives and additional but non-modal expressive resources. The notion of definability involved is (...) different in the two cases (‘external’ for Zolin, ‘internal’ for Pizzi), as are the additional resources: infinitary conjunction in the case of Zolin, and for Pizzi, first, propositional quantification, and then, later, most ingeniously, the use of a propositional constant. As well as surveying and comparing of the work of these authors, the discussion includes some some novelties, such as the confirmation of a conjecture of Zolin’s (Theorem 2.7). (shrink)

Drawing broadly on environmental philosophy, literary theory, settler colonial studies, decolonial theory, and speculative realism, Eggan quarries uncanny depictions of the natural world to unsettle not just the concept of nature but the coloniality of Nature. Unsettling Nature at once critiques Heidegger's home(l)y phenomenology and brings it forward through chapters on Willa Cather, D. H. Lawrence, Olive Schreiner, and Doris Lessing. The book concludes with a speculative proposal to transform eco-phenomenology into "exo-phenomenology," which emphasizes ways of being and perceiving (...) that bring us out of ourselves into contact with the Other, and into an encounter with the self as Othered. (shrink)

I am grateful to Donald Ainslie, Lisa Austin, Michael Blake, Abraham Drassinower, David Dyzenhaus, George Fletcher, Robert Gibbs, Louis-Philippe Hodgson, Sari Kisilevsky, Dennis Klimchuk, Christopher Morris, Scott Shapiro, Horacio Spector, Sergio Tenenbaum, Malcolm Thorburn, Ernest Weinrib, Karen Weisman, and the Editors of Philosophy & Public Affairs for comments, and audiences in the UCLA Philosophy Department and Columbia Law School for their questions.

THE PRE-SOCRATIC ORIGINS OF NATURAL THEOLOGY § INTRODUCTION St Augustine informs us that pagan philosophers divided theology into three parts: () civic ...

Written for students coming to Spinoza for the first time, Spinoza and the Ethics is the ideal guide to this rich and illuminating work. This GuideBook provides an overview of critical interpretations, relating the Ethics to its intellectual context, considers its historical reception; and highlights why the work continues to be relevant today. In addition, the most intriguing final sections of the Ethics , usually ignored in introductory commentaries, are given special attention and illuminated as the climax of the work.

This paper examines the fortunes of non-European philosophies in histories of philosophy written by European and American philosophers from the 17th century to the present day. It charts the shift from inclusive histories of philosophy, which included non-European philosophies, to exclusive histories of philosophy, which excluded and/or marginalized non-European philosophies, at the end of the 18th century. This shift was motivated by racial Eurocentrism, which cast a long shadow over histories of philosophy written during the 19th and 20th centuries. The (...) paper also considers recent attempts to produce a more inclusive history of philosophy. By examining the history of the inclusion and exclusion of non-European philosophies in histories of philosophy, this paper seeks to challenge the assumption that philosophy began and has been practised exclusively by European or western thinkers. (shrink)

The contributors to this volume cover a wide range of philosophers, from Simplicius to John Wyclif, and philosophical problems, including: the harmony of ...

_ Source: _Volume 10, Issue 1, pp 65 - 94 In his highly influential 1928 article ‘The _Parmenides_ of Plato and the Origin of the Neoplatonic “One”,’ E.R. Dodds argued, _inter alia_, that among the so-called Neoplatonists Plotinus was the first to interpret Plato’s _Parmenides_ in terms of the distinctive three ‘hypostases’, One, Intellect, and Soul. Dodds argued that this interpretation was embraced and extensively developed by Proclus, among others. In this paper, I argue that although Plotinus took _Parmenides_ to (...) contain a sort of outline of the true metaphysical principles, he understood the One of the first hypothesis of the second part of the dialogue in a way importantly different from the way that Proclus understood it. The characterization of this One, especially its identity with the Idea of the Good of _Republic_, has significant ramification for Plotinus’ philosophy that set it apart from Proclus’ philosophy in ways hitherto infrequently noted. The widely accepted reasons for rejecting Proclus’ interpretation do not apply to the interpretation of Plotinus. The two different interpretations help explain why Proclus’ notorious proliferation of entities in the intelligible realm is not found in Plotinus. (shrink)