Edward Halper

Jacob Klein raises two important questions about Aristotle’s account of number: (1) How does the intellect come to grasp a sensible as an intelligible unit? (2) What makes a collection of these intelligible units into one number? His answer to both questions is “abstraction.” First, we abstract (or, better, disregard) a thing’s sensible characteristics to grasp it as a noetic unit. Second, after counting like things, we again disregard their other characteristics and grasp the group as a noetic entity composed of “pure” units. As Klein explains them, Aristotle’s numbers are each “heaps” of counted units; in contrast, each of Plato’s numbers is one. This paper argues that Klein is right to understand a noetic unit existing in the sensible entity, but that his answer to the second question is not consonant with Aristotle’s insistence that Plato cannot account for the unity of a number, whereas he can. Slightly modifying Klein’s analysis, I show that Aristotle’s numbers are each one.

Why should the work of the ancient and the medievals, so far as it relates to nature, still be of interest and an inspiration to us now? The contributions to this enlightening volume explore and uncover contemporary scholarship's debt to the classical and medieval past. Thinking About the Environment synthesizes religious thought and environmental theory to trace a trajectory from Mesopotamian mythology and classical and Hellenistic Greek, through classical Latin writers, to medieval Christian views of the natural world and our relationship with it. The work also offers medieval Arabic and Jewish views on humanity's inseparability from nature. The volume concludes with a study of the breakdown between science and value in contemporary ecological thought. Thinking About the Environment will be a invaluable source book for those seeking to address environmental ethics from a historical perspective.

The aim of this paper is to explain how to design and teach a course that meets the special requirements of Freshman Seminar programs by using feature films to examine philosophical themes. Two such courses are discussed. By organizing each course around a theme, the teacher can use the films to illustrate and, sometimes, critique philosophical positions that she elaborates. Discussing the films, the students develop analytical and interpretive skills important for more rigorous philosophy courses as well as for work in other disciplines.

This paper aims to show Hegel’s system to be a self-generating and conceptually closed system and, therefore, an idealism. Many readers have agreed that Hegel intends his logic to be a self-generating, closed system, but they assume that the two branches of Realphilosophie, Nature and Spirit, must involve the application of logical categories to some non-conceptual reality external to them. This paper argues that Nature emerges from logic by the reapplication of the opening logical categories to the final category of logic, Absolute Idea, and that the resulting categories are irreducible bipartite compounds that develop into new categories by characteristic forms of self-relation following, roughly, the sequence in logic from Being through Essence. With the determination of Absolute Idea by Concept, Spirit emerges, and it develops through its own characteristic forms of self-relation until Absolute Idea is self-determined. Hence, Realphilosophie is a rigorous conceptual development that goes beyond logic without introducing anything that is not conceptual.

FEW PHILOSOPHERS, NONE APPROACHING HIS STATURE, would agree with Hegel’s claim that we have an ethical duty to marry. More commonly, philosophers sanction marriage as ethically permissible, as Kant does, or even, at least in recent years, reject marriage as ethically illegitimate. Hegel’s view reflects his understanding of the family as a moral institution, that is, an institution in which mere participation is a moral act and, therefore, obligatory. The notion that the family is or, at least, is supposed to be moral has become so deeply ingrained that it may sound perverse to suppose that its morality needs any sort of justification; on the other hand, it is difficult to understand why marriage and family should be obligatory. The first aim of this paper is to answer the question, why does Hegel think that marriage is a moral institution that we have a duty to enter? The issue here is not how to recover or preserve “family values” but why the family has any value at all morally. To refine the issue, I will contrast Hegel’s approach with that of someone who, surprisingly, denies the intrinsic moral value of the family, Aristotle.