A fresh interpretation of this important and widely misunderstood concept as an acquired ability to make principles and essences intelligible.

Examination of the theories of the ancient philosophers, from the materialism of the Presocratics and Hellenists to the dualism of Plato and Plotinus, reveals that psychology had become an established discipline long before Descartes.

Pendlebury alleges that abstraction and rationalization have had a strong and malign influence on normative moral philosophy in the 20th century. Criticizing writers such as Hare, Rawls and Scanlon for pursuing a conception of moral philosophy that bears little resemblance to the way in which human beings actually think and conduct themselves. Pendlebury, instead, suggests a 'Virtue Ethics' inspired by Hegel's and Aristotle's accounts of action as a corrective to this trend, showing that moral activity is historically and socially based and must address the formed character of individual agents.

Aristotle's philosophy of mind has recently attracted renewed attention and respect from philosophers. This volume brings together outstanding new essays on De Anima by a distinguished international group of contributors including, in this paperback efdition, a new essay by Myles Burnyeat. The essays form a running commentary on the work, covering such topics as the relation between body and soul, sense-perception, imagination, memory, desire, and thought. the authors, writing with philosophical subtlety and wide-ranging scholarship, present the philosophical substance of Aristotle's views to the modern reader. they locate their interpretations firmly within the context of Aristotle's thought as a whole.

An overview of biology and philosophy is followed by three sections on individual issues definition and demonstration, teleology and necessity in nature, and metaphysical themes.

This GuideBook looks at the Metaphysics thematically and takes the student through the main arguments found in the text. The book introduces and assesses Aristotle's life and the background to the Metaphysics, its ideas and text.

At opposite ends of over two millenia Hegel and Aristotle, virtually alone of the great European thinkers, consciously attempted to criticize and develop the thought of their predecessors into systems of their own. Both were thus committed in principle to the view that philosophy in each age of civilization is at once a product, a criticism, and a recon struction of the values and insights of its own past; that the fertile mind can only beget anew when it has acknowledged and understood a line of ancestors which has led to its begetting; that the thinker as little as the artist can start with a clean slate and a blankly open-minded atti tude to the world which he finds within him and before him. Man is by definition rational; philosophy is his continuous impulse to grasp and appraise a single universe of which he finds himself a part; philosophy therefore contains its history as a constituent element of its own nature, and the developmental character of philosophy must - unless human reason is, unthinkably and unarguably, a mere delusion - in some sense reflect, or even be in some sense identical with, an essentially develop mental universe - that is roughly the common creed of Aristotle and Hegel. Both of them further believed, as Plato had believed, that what is most real and intelligible in that universe is eo ipso most good.

This book traces the historical roots of the cognitive sciences and examines pre-modern conceptualizations of the mind as presented and discussed in the tradition of commentaries on Aristotle's De anima from 1200 until 1650. It explores medieval and Renai