Edward Halper

Maimonides’ claim, in Guide of the Perplexed I.68, that our intellect, like God’s, becomes one with the object it knows would seem to be at odds with his injunction to his readers to set their “thought to work on the first intelligible” and to “rejoice in what [it] apprehends”. The former passage supposes that we grasp individual essences by themselves, whereas the latter supposes that such essences are known only through their first cause. Since we cannot grasp the first cause, God, we cannot, apparently, grasp anything else or rejoice in it. After briefly sketching the solutions of Aristotle and Avicenna, this paper argues that Maimonides resolves these issues by distinguishing the metaphysical grasp of a single essence from the grasp of its relations - due to God’s will - with other essences and, more specifically, the metaphysical grasp of our own human essence from the grasp of ourselves through our physical and moral relations with the world. Insofar as we know ourselves by knowing everythi...

This paper explores two issues: (1) how our thought about nature could reflect natural processes, and (2) how our thoughts about nature are connected with each other. It argues, first, that the standard ways philosophers try to make sense of the notion that thought is separate from nature cannot be made intelligible and, second, that the conceptual schemes used to grasp nature fall broadly into two groups each of which presupposes the other, even though the two are incompatible. Although these conclusions pose obstacles to the rationality of nature, the paper concludes by arguing for some significant degree of rationality of nature and explaining what this means for science. In brief, our ability to have an experience of nature and, especially, to connect disparate features of that experience with each other presupposes some intrinsic connections within nature itself, even if these are inaccessible to us.

ABSTRACT In Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, Jacob Klein contrasts ancient Greek philosophy's direct engagement with things through arithmetic with the ancient science of numeric calculation, logistic. By chronicling the later development of logistic, by means of increasing symbolization, ultimately into algebra, he argues that logistic has come to displace arithmetic and, thereby, to submerge the ontological issues at the center of Greek thought. This article argues, first, that Klein's target is Ernst Cassirer's notion of number as a “symbolic function”—what Cassirer would later call “symbolic form.” In Substance and Function Cassirer argues that number constitutes a conceptual structure progressively extended by thought so as to include the results of different sorts of calculation within itself and, thereby, to be a closed system. Drawing upon Dedekind, Cassirer claims that no individual number can be understood apart from the entire conceptual structure. This article argues, second, that Cassirer recognizes, as it were, a different set of things, namely, relations, and that it is possible to engage these “things” directly by recognizing the ontological issues they raise.

This paper uses self-relation to reconstruct Hegel's reasoning in the Logic. In the sphere of "being," selfrelation is self-predication, and the predicate is the active, participial form of the category. Examining the first three and the last category in this sphere, I explain how Hegel argues that each category is itself engaged in the activity that it signifies. However, this self-predication adds new content to the category transforming it into a new category. Ultimately, this process leads to the collapse of "being" into "essence." Categories in this later sphere exhibit a different kind of self-relation : each contains its relation to itself as an activity that negates itself and then, negating this negation, returns to itself. Hegel's analysis at the beginning of "essence" is, I argue, parallel to Kant's "Transcendental Deduction," but relations among categories replace the transcendental ego. The significance of self-relation is that it (1) effects transitions to new categories by an internal mechanism, thereby (2) allowing the Logic to be a self-exposition of the categories that (3) avoids an external (Kantian) transcendental ground.

Drawing principally on the Symposium, this paper argues that humor in Plato’s dialogues serves two serious purposes. First, Plato uses puns and other devices to disarm the reader’s defenses and thereby allow her to consider philosophical ideas that she would otherwise dismiss. Second, insofar as human beings can only be understood through unchanging forms that we fail to attain, our lives are discontinuous and only partly intelligible. Since, though, the discontinuity between expectation and actual occurrence is the basis for humor, Plato can use humor to express who we are as human beings.

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

For Aristotle and other Greek thinkers, philosophy is itself a rethinking. There are other branches of knowledge, like medicine and mathematics, that each grasp some particular subject matter. Since philosophy or, as it has come to be called, metaphysics is the highest science, its job is to grasp somehow all the other sciences and all their subjects. If the science of a subject requires a type of thinking proper to the subject, then the science of that science requires a rethinking of this and all other subjects. In this paper I explore some of Aristotle’s modes of rethinking philosophy. I am interested in the connection between rethinking philosophy and the kinds of philosophical principles that emerge from this rethinking. I argue that reflexive principles are implicit in rethinking but that theyare projected onto things for systematic reasons. Because my time is short, my discussion is limited to broad brush strokes, but there are so many textual details and so much that is contentious about them that a broad sketch may be the best way to set out my point. It is plausible to proceed this way because Aristotle’s main themes are often much clearer than the details of his discussions and my argument relies only on the broad lines of his organization.