philopapers

According to libertarian views of free will, people sometimes act freely, but this freedom is incompatible with causal determinism. While attractive to many, philosophers have long been skeptical of such views. Two concerns have been central: (i) How can a person have control over an undetermined action? Wouldn’t it just be a matter of chance […]

Annamaria Schiaparelli has provided readers with a reliable translation and an informative commentary for book six of the Topics, the book in which Aristotle speaks at length on definition and how it may be (truly) predicated. As the core books of the Topics (i.e., books II–VII) have not been explored very much at all in the English-language commentary

In The Cognitive Life of Maps, Roberto Casati reflects on how maps, as well as many other superficially different but fundamentally similar kinds of representation, such as clocks and musical notation, aid us in navigation and other cognitive tasks. Chapter 1 begins by describing how using a map aids navigation by offloading the difficult task of

This monograph provides a compact thematic overview of an understudied and often misunderstood terrain, the ethical and political thought of early modern Protestant Aristotelians. Indeed, the topic might appear to many readers as a contradiction in terms: didn’t the Reformation throw out Aristotle along with the whole baggage of medieval scholasticism? After all, Martin Luther

“Philosophers don’t often write about the heart,” Stephen Darwall begins in The Heart & Its Attitudes, “At least, analytical philosophers don’t” (1). In taking up “matters of the heart,” Darwall means to consider our mutual emotional vulnerabilities and the attitudes that mediate our personal and social relationships. His journey leads the reader through ten chapters: an

This is a collection of essays most of which have been published before, between 2001 and 2018. They all deal with John Rawls’ political philosophy, defending it against various criticisms and what Freeman takes to be misinterpretations. The essays are of admirable clarity, arguing for their positions in meticulous detail. For those interested in a

According to a traditional view, whether a subject is in an epistemic state like knowledge (justified belief, etc.) depends only on epistemic, truth-related factors like reliability or evidence. According to a relatively recent view, the pragmatic encroachment view, this also depends on non-epistemic, pragmatic factors like what is practically at stake for the subject. If

Stephen S. Bush takes on the difficult task of building an account of William James’s democratic political thought. As Bush notes, a number of scholars have dismissed the idea that James had anything to say politically, with the exception of a few condemnations of lynching. Bush clearly succeeds in rebutting those dismissive of James as

This book is a collection of interesting papers edited by Walter Ott and Lydia Patton. It fills an oft-noted gap in the laws literature: namely, connecting familiar contemporary accounts to their early modern predecessors. Chapters one through six describe and evaluate several different notions of laws that appear in early modern history and explore how

Roger Karny takes another look at liberty and alienation. The New York Times called the 1953 novel The Outsider by African-American author Richard Wright (1908-1963) “prophetic… a book people should ponder”. The Outsider’s protagonist, Cross Damon, is an African-American intellectual who majored in philosophy at the University of Chicago. Victimized by white oppression, he is