While we modern folks have a generally clear distinction between law as in descriptive laws of nature and law as in ethical or civil commandments, these Medieval philosophers saw these as very much related if not actually the same thing, given that humans can ignore the dictates ...Show more
Josiah Royce on Interpreting Other People
On "The Problem of Christianity," vol. 2, lecture 12, ch. 9, "The Will to Interpret." The point is to help explain Royce's idea of a community of interpretation, and the idea is that in the very act of interpreting a single individual, I'm bringing in some kind of public lexicon, ...Show more
Hegel on Reason (Part One)
On Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Part C (AA) Reason, V. The Certainty and Truth of Reason. This section comes right after the self-consciousness sections, and so its big puzzle is why? Why is full recognition by another self-consciousness necessary for Reason, and consequently ...Show more
Dispute Between a Man and His Ba
In this famous, impossibly ancient (ca. 1900 BC!) Egyptian text, a man negotiations with the part of his soul that's supposed to help him in the afterlife. Can he kill himself now and still get all the benefits of an honorable death? His ba says no. Is this actually philosophy, o ...Show more
Aquinas and Aristotle on Soul
From Disputed Questions in De Anima (1269) as presented in Thomas Aquinas: Selected Philosophical Writings (Oxford 1993), "Passage 18: Soul in Human Beings." The question is how Aquinas, as an Aristotelian who therefore thinks the mind is the form of the body, can agree with the ...Show more