Edward Halper

Pangle’s thesis is that Aristotle’s account of friendship in Nicomachean Ethics 8 and 9 addresses multiple audiences. For his ostensible audience, statesmen and other men of action, Aristotle paints an enticing picture of friendship that is based on moral virtue and issues in acts of benevolence. However, he embeds within this analysis subtle “tensions” designed to signal to thoughtful readers the limits of moral virtue and so to provoke them to pursue a philosophical life as well as to provide them the material for philosophical contemplation. Pangle thinks that this second group, potential philosophers, is Aristotle’s principal audience, even if unannounced.

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.

The last chapter of Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise (TTP) is a brief for freedom of religion. In our enthusiasm for Spinoza's conclusion it is easy to overlook the blatant contradiction between this thesis and the central claim of the immediately preceding chapter that "right over matters of religion is vested entirely in the sovereign." There Spinoza emphasizes the necessity that there be but one sovereign in the state and the threat that autonomous religious authorities would pose to the authority of this sovereign. This last claim is, in turn, bolstered by his analysis of the deficiencies of the Hebrew state in the chapter before, chapter 18, according to which it was the usurpation of political authority by priests that ultimately undermined the state. In other words, in chapters 18 and 19, Spinoza makes the case for the strict political control of religion only to conclude his treatise by arguing, in chapter 20, that the purpose of the state is, in reality, freedom and that that freedom manifests itself, in part, in freedom of religion. How could this latter not pose exactly the sort of threat to the sovereign and the state that leads Spinoza to insist on the sovereign's absolute control of religion? How can Spinoza insist that religion be both free and controlled by the state? This paper aims to answer this question and, in the process, explains a number of troubling features of the Theological-Political Treatise.

By examining Klein’s discussion of the difference between Plato and Aristotle regarding the ontology of number, this article aims to spells out the significanceof that debate both in itself and for the development of the later mathematical sciences. This is accomplished by explicating and expanding Klein’s account of the differences that exist in the understanding of number presented by these two thinkers. It is ultimately argued that Klein’s analysis can be used to show that the transition from the ancient to the modern number concept has some roots in this disagreement between Plato and Aristotle regarding number. This, in turn, sets up that dispute as an essential part of the background to the more general break between ancient and modern conceptuality, the uncovering of whichis Klein’s main concern.

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.