Three artworks are discussed in detail by Heidegger in his lecture “Origin of the Work of Art.” Prioritizing one work above the others affects what is understood to be the overall project of the lecture. Because of this, we need to attend closely to the debate in the literature about the most important work of art in Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art.” This article explores the debate by looking at three positions. I examine each of these positions independently. In the final section I side with those scholars who take the ancient Greek temple to be the most important work in Heidegger’s lecture. I argue that the reason why the temple is the most important is its ability to disclose community.

Current trends in scholarship—epitomized in the works of, inter alia, Lewis Ayres, Adrian Pabst, and Rowan Williams—argue for a metaphysics of relationality at the heart of Christian thought that is at its root Platonic. This metaphysic is in turn typified by its commitment to divine simplicity and its corresponding apophatic grammar, which serve as useful points of contact with Plotinus’s own thought. Examination of key texts in Plotinus’s Enneads demonstrates a shared trinitarian grammar when speaking about the first principle. These connections prompt a need to articulate trinitarian dogma as an important step in the history of philosophy, and not just theology, especially for resolving the perennial problem of the one and the many. This “Christian Platonism” has been in a necessary process of recovery and re-articulation, of which the above is put forward as a contribution.

This essay examines the early Stoic debates concerning the number of virtues and the differentiation among them. It begins with the defense of virtue’s unity offered by the heterodox Stoic Aristo of Chios and with a comparison between the definitions that Aristo and Zeno offered for the four primary virtues. Aristo maintained that virtue consists exclusively in the knowledge of good and bad. Zeno and his successors presented the virtues as epistemic dispositions whose scopes differ. I conclude that by adding the knowledge of indifferents to the definition of virtue, Zeno and his successors were able to avoid the circularity to which Aristo’s definition of virtue fell victim while providing a way to differentiate among the virtues.

This paper will investigate the roots of intentionality in Aristotle’s theory of perception and assess the accuracy of Brentano’s proposed location of intentionality in Aristotle. When introducing intentionality into contemporary philosophy, Brentano attributed it to Aristotle, whose theory of psychology he believed to reveal the characteristics of intentional inexistence. After setting up a working definition of intentionality that stresses such features as immanent content and intentional directedness, I will then clarify Aristotle’s theory of perception with regard to these two characteristics. I draw the conclusion that we can only find the roots of immanent content in Aristotle’s perceptual theory. For him, directedness moves from the sensible object to the sensitive soul, and thus it does not correspond to what contemporary philosophers define as intentional directedness.

In his most recent book Alasdair MacIntyre criticizes the dominant moral system of advanced societies, which “presents itself as morality as such.” Yet, he argues, its primary function is to channel human desires into patterns that will minimize conflict amid distinctively modern economic and political arrangements. Although he appreciates how what he calls “expressionism” has unmasked this ideological function of modern morality, he points out that expressionism is also impotent to provide adequate moral guidance amidst the “conflicts of modernity.” He proposes that Neo-Aristotelianism’s account of reasoning and desire has the ability to overcome the moral failings of these modern modes of thought. Yet he relies on an excessively deductive version of reason and overlooks Aristotle’s fuller account of desire. The article shows how Bernard Lonergan’s account of both provides a superior account of both Aristotle’s own writings and the actual human phenomena of reasoning and desire.

In this paper we discuss the two-system framework, examine its strengths, point out a fundamental weakness concerning the unity of conscious experience, and then propose a new hypothesis that avoids that weakness and other related concerns. According to our strong emergence hypothesis, what emerges are not merely mental properties in specialized, distributed neural areas, but also a new, irreducibly singular entity (i.e., an emergent self) that functions in a recurrent (or top-down) manner to integrate its mental properties and to rewire its brain. We argue that the former function is suggested, in part, by the effects of anesthetics on sensory integration, and that the latter function is suggested by evidence garnered from the neuroscience of mindfulness, constraint-induced movement therapy for stroke, and neuroimaging data surrounding mental illness. We then discuss how our strong emergence hypothesis relates to the description and treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders. Finally, potential objections are addressed.

My objective in this paper is to contribute to our understanding of Aristotle’s science of ethics by defending two claims. (1) There is a way in which generalizations hold only for the most part that is unlike any of the types of generalizations in the natural sciences that hold only for the most part. These ethical generalizations depict ideals that, although grounded in and perfective of our human nature, are only rarely realized. (2) Aristotle’s account of practical wisdom provides all the resources we need for understanding how the person with practical wisdom can tell when the for the most part generalization in ethics is true and when it is not.

The normalized, deterministic conception of evolution espoused by Dennett is increasingly being challenged by theorists who, following Gould, emphasize the role that historical contingencies play in it. I explore the conflict between these views and argue that correcting our understanding of the relationship between nature’s systematic necessities and historical temporality can resolve it. The mathematically precise laws science formulates describe the systematic patterns of nature abstractly and, as abstractions, these laws do not preclude but allow for the contingencies of historical time. Drawing on Heidegger and Hume, I argue that historical time is characterized by the ingression of the unprecedented future into the present. This is the ontological infrastructure that makes the evolution of unprecedented ontological alterities possible.

Ambivalence is often presented through cases of defeated ambivalence and multivalence, in which opposed attitudes suggest mutual isolation and defeat each other. Properly understood, however, ambivalence implies the existence of poles that are conflictually yet rationally interlinked and are open to non-defeated joint conduct. This paper considers cases that range from indecisiveness and easy adoption of conflicting attitudes (when hungry, stressed, or exhausted), to tragically conflicted deliberation and to cases of shifting between self-deceptively serious attitudes. Analyzing such cases as variants of defeated ambivalence, I argue that the phenomena of defeated ambivalence are marginal to ambivalence even though they are by the same token exemplary of it. The poles in such cases are connected as opposing attitudes in such a way that the attitudes and the opposition are both undermined. The article focuses on two forms of vague multivalence, one of which is taken from Heidegger’s analysis of curiosity.

The paper deals with an argument reported by Razi (d. 1210) that was used to attempt to refute the immateriality of human nature. This argument is based on an epistemic asymmetry between our self-knowledge and our knowledge of immaterial things. After some preliminary remarks, the paper analyzes the structure of the argument in four steps. From a methodological point of view, the argument is similar to a family of epistemological arguments (notably, the Cartesian argument from doubt) and is vulnerable to the same objection that can be raised against that form of reasoning. The last section points out that the argument can be used indirectly to highlight the weakness in some arguments for the claim that there is something immaterial in human beings.

Philosophers in China during the Warring States period generally saw themselves as investigators into the Dao—the uniquely authoritative Way to live and to flourish. Certain voices found in the Zhuangzi, however, offer a radical response to this project by rejecting the premise that there exists such a uniquely authoritative Dao. Instead, they argue that there exist myriad, diverse dao, none of which has absolute moral authority. Yet the very texts that undermine the idea of an authoritative Dao simultaneously make positive ethical suggestions regarding how to live and flourish. In this paper I explore texts in the Zhuangzi that discuss the diversity of dao and sagely flourishing, and I argue that these two themes come together to form the basis of a comprehensive ethical view that I call Zhuangist pluralism.

This paper defends the cognitive value of literary fiction by showing how Paul Ricoeur’s account of narrative understanding emphasizes the productive and creative elements of fictional discourse and defends its referential capacity insofar as fiction reshapes reality according to some universal aspect. Central to this analysis is Ricoeur’s retrieval of Aristotelian mimesis and mythos and their convergence in the notion of emplotment. This paper also supplements and specifies further Ricoeur’s account by retrieving an Aristotelian concept disregarded by Riceour, namely, synesis (understanding). Although Ricoeur connects narrative understanding to the intelligibility of praxis and in turn phronêsis, as opposed to theoretical knowledge (theōria or epistēmē), he overlooks Aristotle’s discussion of synesis. This paper then clarifies how the fictional truth of narrative understanding remains related to, and yet distinct from, both theoretical discourse (science) and praxis (politics).