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41. International Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 53 > Issue: 3
Brian Gregor Kierkegaard and the Quest for Unambiguous Life: Between Romanticism and Modernism: Selected Essays. By George Pattison
42. International Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 53 > Issue: 3
Brendan Palla Deep Control: Essays on Free Will and Value. By John Martin Fischer
43. International Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 53 > Issue: 3
Vincent Shen From Gift to Law: Thomas’s Natural Law and Laozi’s Heavenly Dao
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For Thomas Aquinas, the creator of natural law is a personal, substantial, and relational God. For Laozi, it is an impersonal, non-substantial, self-manifesting dao. There are similarities, and this article will consider several of them. For Thomas, the act of creation comes from God, and for Laozi the giving birth of the universe is from the dao’s unconditional generosity. Thus it is possible to compare the way in which the world-originating generosity of God generates the moral law and the way in which the self-manifesting dao generates the moral law. In Thomas’s view the natural law is the rational participation of the human being in God’s eternal law. Laozi’s heavenly dao governs all things in the universe, and for this reason human beings and their techniques should comply with dao. Thomas emphasizes human freedom of will and the responsibility to pursue what is good and to avoid what is evil. Laozi emphasizes the objectivity of heavenly dao without any reference to human freedom of will or individual responsibility. With religious Daoism there develops the idea of collective responsibility and the divinization of dao, a point that invites further comparative study of Thomism and Daoism.
44. International Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 53 > Issue: 3
Books Received
45. International Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 53 > Issue: 3
Raymond Dennehy Reason Fulfilled by Revelation: The 1930s Christian Philosophy Debates in France. Edited and translated by Gregory B. Sadler
46. International Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 53 > Issue: 3
About Our Contributors
47. International Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 53 > Issue: 3
Jean W. Rioux What Counts as a Number?
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Georg Cantor argued that pure mathematics would be better-designated “free mathematics” since mathematical inquiry need not justify its discoveries through some extra-mental standard. Even so, he spent much of his later life addressing ancient and scholastic objections to his own transfinite number theory. Some philosophers have argued that Cantor need not have bothered. Thomas Aquinas at least, and perhaps Aristotle, would have consistently embraced developments in number theory, including the transfinite numbers. The author of this paper asks whether the restriction of arithmetic to the natural numbers that is apparently assumed by Aristotle and Aquinas is necessary in the light of their stated principles. The author concludes that, while some texts from Aristotle and Thomas suggest that such discoveries as zero, rational, and real numbers, and even Cantor’s own transfinite numbers, are legitimate objects of scientific knowledge, a careful analysis shows that they are incompatible with the ultimate arithmetical principle, the unit.
48. International Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 53 > Issue: 3
Charles A. Hobbs Reconsidering John Dewey’s Relationship with Ancient Philosophy
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There has been little scholarly attention to the tension within Dewey’s comments on the ancients. On the one hand, Dewey’s polemics condemn the lasting influence of Greek philosophers as deleterious. He charges the Greeks with originating a quest (“the quest for certainty”) that has led Western philosophy into such dualisms as reason and emotion, mind and nature, individual and community, and theory and practice. On the other hand, Dewey often has many sympathetic things to say about the Greeks. Taking account of the limited scholarship done on this topic, this essay articulates the dimensions of the tension and tries to put it into a Deweyan perspective.
49. International Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 53 > Issue: 4
Daniel F. Lim Causal Exclusion and Overdetermination
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Jaegwon Kim argues that if mental properties are irreducible with respect to physical properties, then mental properties are epiphenomenal. I believe that this conditional is false and argue that mental properties, along with their physical counterparts, may causally overdetermine their effects. Kim contends, however, that embracing causal overdetermination in the mental case should be resisted for at least three reasons: (1) it is implausible, (2) it makes mental properties causally dispensable, and (3) it violates the Causal Closure Principle. I believe, however, that each of these reasons can be defeated. Moreover, further reflection on (3), according to Kim’s implicit logic, may lend support to the claim that physical properties, and not mental properties, are in danger of losing their causal relevance.
50. International Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 53 > Issue: 4
Kevin E. O’Reilly, O.P. The Significance of Worship in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas: Some Reflections
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This article appeals to Thomas Aquinas in order to offer a construal of the nature of reason arguably preferable to that prominent in the Enlightenment. Thomas’s account neither espouses the notion that reason is devoid of any appetitive influence nor so conflates reason and will as to suggest that thinking becomes essentially a form of willing. His view does respect that the activity of willing is of fundamental import for the life of reason. Since the ultimate object of the will is union with God, it follows that the virtue that specifically promotes the attainment of this end—the virtue of religion—has particular import because it aims at rectifying the will and is the most excellent among the moral virtues. In brief, this virtue promotes the optimal intellectual and moral flourishing of individuals as well as the realization of justice in society.
51. International Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 53 > Issue: 4
James Giles The Metaphysics of Awareness in the Philosophy of Laozi
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This paper shows that a careful reading of Laozi’s The Way and Its Power enables one to come up with a metaphysics of awareness. This is done by rejecting those accounts that paint Laozi as a mystic or cosmologist and by arguing for the human-centeredness of his approach. It is shown that three central ideas in Laozi’s work can all be understood as referring to properties of awareness. These three ideas are the Way (Dao), return (gui gen, fa, fan), and non-action (wuwei). The “Way” refers to awareness itself, “return” refers to the way in which awareness oscillates between activity and stillness, and “non-action” refers to how awareness expresses itself in action. This interpretation fits with the Daoist project of articulating a way of living that brings human existence into harmonious relation to the world.
52. International Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 53 > Issue: 4
Brian Johnson Belief and Truth: A Skeptic Reading of Plato. By Katja Maria Vogt
53. International Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 53 > Issue: 4
Christoph Hanisch An Autonomy-Centered Defense of Democracy
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According to Thomas Christiano, autonomy-centered arguments for democratic rights are not successful. These arguments fail to show that there is anything wrong with citizens who want to trade-off their political rights in exchange for more autonomy regarding their private affairs. The trade-off problem suggests that democratic participation is not necessary for leading a free life. My reply employs recent work in the republican tradition. The republican conception of freedom as non-domination supports the incommensurability of the public and the private aspects of autonomy. Christiano overlooks that trading-off the normative conditions of one’s public autonomy results in agents who are mere subjects to the dominating will of those citizens who retain their democratic rights. Since democratic decisions apply to all citizens, the privatized members end up being dominated, especially with respect to the collective determination of the very border separating the private from the public realm.
54. International Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 53 > Issue: 4
James Lehrberger, O.Cist. Lessons from Aquinas: A Resolution of the Problem of Faith and Reason. By Creighton Rosental
55. International Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 53 > Issue: 4
Philippe Gagnon An Improbable God Between Simplicity and Complexity: Thinking about Dawkins’s Challenge
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Richard Dawkins has popularized an argument that he thinks sound for showing that there is almost certainly no God. It rests on the assumptions (1) that complex and statistically improbable things are more difficult to explain than those that are not and (2) that an explanatory mechanism must show how this complexity can be built up from simpler means. But what justifies claims about the designer’s own complexity? One comes to a different understanding of order and of simplicity when one considers the psychological counterpart of information. In assessing his treatment of biological organisms as either self-programmed machines or algorithms, I show how self-generated organized complexity does not fit well with our knowledge of abduction and of information theory as applied to genetics. I also review some philosophical proposals for explaining how the complexity of the world could be externally controlled if one wanted to uphold a traditional understanding of divine simplicity.
56. International Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 53 > Issue: 4
James M. Jacobs Can Animals Be Moral? By Mark Rowlands; and Animals and the Limits of Postmodernism. By Gary Steiner
57. International Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 53 > Issue: 4
Joseph W. Koterski, S.J. Thomas Aquinas on the Passions: A Study of Summa Theologiae Ia2ae 22–48. By Robert Miner; and The Logic of Desire: Aquinas on Emotion. By Nicholas E. Lombardo, O.P.
58. International Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 53 > Issue: 4
Books Received
59. International Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 53 > Issue: 4
Annual Index
60. International Philosophical Quarterly: Volume > 53 > Issue: 4
Tina Baceski From Enlightenment to Receptivity: Rethinking our Values. By Michael Slote