International Philosophical Quarterly

In his Ethics, Spinoza maintains that God’s essence is expressed as both thought and extension. Despite this claim, however, Spinoza’s very definition of truth, understood as adequation, would seem to reduce the aspect of extension to an exclusively intellectual paradigm. I question the extent to which a body remains a body throughout the Ethics in the transition from the first knowledge of the imagination to the highest know ledge of adequate ideas. As a way to think beyond the totality of adequation, I tum to Emmanuel Levinas’s distinction between totality and infinity. I reference Levinas in order to highlight certain impasses within Spinoza’s system and to serve as a possible alternative articulation of an extensional love of God.

The reflections of Jean-Luc Marion on Aquinas’s notion of esse not only confirm the continued importance of the latter’s doctrines in the history of metaphysical speculation, but also reveal intriguing convergences of concern between Aquinas and this significant postmodern thinker. Marion’s embrace of phenomenological reflection tinted with Barthean and Heideggerian themes in order to retrieve Neoplatonic ‘theo-ontology’ ironically finds unsuspected corroborations along with important clarifications in Aquinas’s subtle assimilation of Neoplatonic sources and his rigorous causal analyses of the metaphysical constitution of things and knowledge.

The paper explores the methodology and goals of H. Odera Oruka’s sage philosophy project. Oruka interviewed wise persons who were mostly illiterate and from the rural areas of Kenya to show that a long tradition of critical thinking and philosophizing exists in Africa, even if there is no written record. His descriptions of the role of the academic philosopher turned interviewer varied, emphasizing their refraining from imposition of their own views (the social science model), their adding their own ideas (like Plato), or their midwifery in helping others give birth to their own ideas (like Socrates). The accuracy and consistency of the various metaphors used by Oruka is the main focus of the article’s analysis. The article sums up the shortcomings of Oruka’s method as well as its strengths and concludes with Oruka’s challenge to academic philosophers to rethink their own roles in society.

In the first chapter of Confucius: The Secular as Sacred, Herbert Fingarette argues that in the Analects Confucius holds the essence of human virtue to be a kind of magic power and this magic can be explained in terms of J. L. Austin’s analysis of the “performative utterance.” This paper attempts to explicate what Fingarette’s claims concerning magic and the “performative” amount to. I will argue that even though there is something to the underlying spirit of Fingarette’s project, he either misused or simply misunderstood Austin and, because of this misuse or misunderstanding, he has possibly misunderstood Confucius as well.

An examination of Schopenhauer’s epistemology can considerably enhance our appreciation of his philosophical achievement in at least three major ways: First, by shedding light on the unity and internal coherence of his system (especially on the relation between its epistemological and metaphysical components); second, by clearly revealing some of his fundamental disagreements with Kant; and, finally, by making it plain that he is less removed from the mainstream epistemology-centred tradition of modern philosophy than some (including many of his detractors) have supposed. To make good on these claims, I address three questions about his epistemology:(l) Does Schopenhauer accept a foundationalist theory of epistemic justification? (2) On what grounds does he reject skepticism concerning our knowledge of the external world? and (3) In what does he think the true philosophical significance of skepticism consists?

Examining the literature on Aristotelian psychology can leave one with the impression that his theory of perception and emotion is credible primarily because it accords with contemporary functionalism, a physicalist theory that has achieved orthodoxy in contemporary philosophy of mind. In my view, squeezing Aristotle into a functionalist mold is a mistake, for functionalism entaiIs at least two theses that Aristotle would reject: (1) that material types make no essential difference to perception and emotion (and to mental states in general), and (2) that mental states are reducible to functional states of matter (a reductionism of the token-specific sort). Against these functionalist theses, Aristotle would include within his analysis of human perception and emotion (and other psychological activities) the biological material and the characteristic operations associated with it. Although Aristotle would insist that this biological material makes an essential difference to conscious experience, conscious experience is not reducible to its biological basis. I defend the positions that Aristotle’s philosophy of perception and emotion is not compatible with contemporary functionalism and that conscious experience of perception and emotion is irreducible to its essential biological basis.