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50Religious Commitment and Secular ReasonPhilosophical Quarterly 52 (206): 134-137. 2002.Many religious people are alarmed about features of the current age - violence in the media, a pervasive hedonism, a marginalization of religion, and widespread abortion. These concerns influence politics, but just as there should be a separation between church and state, so should there be a balance between religious commitments and secular arguments calling for social reforms. Robert Audi offers a principle of secular rationale, which does not exclude religious grounds for action but which rul…Read more
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19Philosophic Silence and the 'One' in Plotinus by Nicholas BannerJournal of the History of Philosophy 57 (3): 554-555. 2019.The principle that is, for Plotinus, both origin and goal of all things is labelled, for convenience, the One, or—equivalently—the Good. Plotinus is clear that even these titles may be misleading, since this principle is not one thing among many, nor can we even truly say that it exists. Nothing that we can say of it is really true, and we cannot ever strictly know or understand it. It must seem to follow that, having nothing true to say of it, nor any way of grasping its nature, we had better s…Read more
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4Abstract Morality, Concrete CasesRoyal Institute of Philosophy Lecture Series 22 35-53. 1987.Practitioners of disciplines whose problems are debated by moral philosophers regularly complain that the philosophers are engaged in abstract speculation, divorced from ‘real-life’ consequences and responsibilities, that it is the practitioners (doctor, research scientist, politician) who must take the decisions, and that they cannot (and should not) act in accordance with strict abstract logic.
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11Value Judgments: How to Reason About Value JudgmentsRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 24 173-190. 1988.When opinion polls are conducted on some urgent matter of the day those polled are permitted to declare themselves ‘Don't Knows’. It is usually a minority who are so ill-disposed as to forget their civic duty to have an opinion on each and every subject, and they can usually expect to be rebuked as fence-sitters or slugabeds. People confronted by the demand that they take sides can generally produce a ‘view’ which they maintain against all-comers without the slightest attempt to seek out confirm…Read more
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34Citizens of the World and their ReligionPhilosophical Papers 48 (1): 103-122. 2019.The notion of a ‘cosmopolites’ has diverged quite far from its philosophical origins, but may eventually serve a similar function. The hope of a global peace or any sort of global managemen...
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25Animal Rights - Daniel A. Dombrowski: The Philosophy of Vegetarianism. Pp. iv+188. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984. $20.00 (review)The Classical Review 37 (2): 224-225. 1987.
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15Plotinus on Number - Slaveva-Griffin Plotinus on Number. Pp. xii + 176. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Cased £39.99, US$74, ISBN: 978-0-19-537719-4 (review)The Classical Review 60 (1): 91-93. 2010.
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23Book Reviews STEPHEN R. L. CLARK, Religious Studies, FirstView Article
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8Plotinus: myth, metaphor and philosophical practiceUniversity of Chicago Press. 2016.A study of Plotinus's use of myth and metaphor, with special attention to the historical context and therapeutic use of his work.
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11Supernatural Explanations and InspirationsEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 9 (3): 49-63. 2017.I propose, in partial response to the rich essays by Millican & Thornhill-Miller and Salamon that religious traditions are too diverse to be represented either by a cosmological core or even an ethical. Religious sensibility is more often inspirational than explanatory, does not always require a transcendent origin of all things, and does not always support the sort of humanistic values preferred in the European Enlightenment. A widely shared global religion is more likely to be eclectic than ca…Read more
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25How Many Selves Make Me?Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 29 213-233. 1991.Cartesian accounts of the mental make it axiomatic that consciousness is transparent: what I feel, I know I feel, however many errors I may make about its cause. ‘I’ names a simple, unextended, irreducible substance, created ex nihilo or eternally existent, and only associated with the complete, extended, dissoluble substance or pretend-substance that is ‘my’ body by divine fiat. Good moderns take it for granted that ‘we’ now realize how shifting, foggy and deconstructible are the boundaries of …Read more
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36Who is GodEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 8 (4): 3--22. 2016.The Hindu Brahmanas record that God’s reply to the question ”Who are you?’ was simply ”Who’: ”Who is the God whom we should honour with the oblation’: an indicative, as well as interrogative! Might this also be what Aeschylus intended by his reference to ”Zeus hostis pot’estin’ : not an expression of doubt, but of acknowledged mystery? The name by which He is to be called, perhaps, is not ”Zeus’ but, exactly, ”Whoever’. And most famously the God that Moses encountered, asked who He is, answered …Read more
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26Slaves and CitizensPhilosophy 60 (231): 27-46. 1985.R. M. Hare has argued1 that there are conceivable circumstances in which it would be right not to abolish the institution of slavery: in the imaginary land of Juba established slave-plantations are managed by a benevolent elite for the good of all, no ‘cruel or unusual ’ punishments are in use, and citizens of the neighbouring island of Camaica, ‘free ’but impoverished, regularly seek to become slaves. Hare adds that it is unlikely, given human nature, that ‘masters ’would treat ‘slaves ’humanel…Read more
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17Thinking About How and Why to ThinkPhilosophy 71 (277): 385-403. 1996.1. Believing Enough to ThinkThe Scottish system of university education requires most aspirants to an Ordinary Degree to study some philosophy. Philosophers in Scottish Universities must therefore contend with enormous first-year classes, stocked with youngsters who have little real desire to be philosophers, or even to philosophize. Some years ago, at Glasgow, a question in the final exam was as follows: ‘“Philosophy is of no use, and so should not be studied.” Discuss’. A couple of hundred stu…Read more
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75Therapy and Theory Reconstructed: Plato and his SuccessorsRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 66 83-102. 2010.When we speak of philosophy and therapy, or of philosophy as therapy, the usual intent is to suggest that ‘philosophizing’ is or should be a way to clarify the mind or purify the soul. While there may be little point in arguing with psychoses or deeply-embedded neuroses our more ordinary misjudgements, biases and obsessions may be alleviated, at least, by trying to ‘see things clearly and to see them whole’, by carefully identifying premises and seeing what they – rationally – support, and by se…Read more
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34Non-Personal MindsRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 53 185-209. 2003.Persons are creatures with a range of personal capacities. Most known to us are also people, though nothing in observation or biological theory demands that all and only people are persons, nor even that persons, any more than people, constitute a natural kind. My aim is to consider what non-personal minds are like. Darwin's Earthworms are sensitive, passionate and, in their degree, intelligent. They may even construct maps, embedded in the world they perceive around them, so as to be able to co…Read more
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35Plotinus: Charms and CountercharmsRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 65 215-231. 2009.For the last few years, thanks to the Leverhulme Trust, I've been largely absent from my department, working on the late antique philosopher Plotinus. To speak personally – it's been a difficult few years, since my youngest daughter has been afflicted with anorexia during this period, and my own bowel cancer was discovered, serendipitously, and removed, at the end of 2005. Since then I've had ample occasion to consider the importance – and the difficulty – of the practice of detachment, and also…Read more
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42How to Become UnconsciousRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 67 21-44. 2010.Consistent materialists are almost bound to suggest that ‘conscious experience’, if it exists at all, is no more than epiphenomenal. A correct understanding of the real requires that everything we do and say is no more than a product of whatever processes are best described by physics, without any privileged place, person, time or scale of action. Consciousness is a myth, or at least a figment. Plotinus was no materialist: for him, it is Soul and Intellect that are more real than the phenomena w…Read more
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39Global ReligionRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 36 113-128. 1994.The social and environmental problems that we face at this tail end of twentieth-century progress require us to identify some cause, some spirit that transcends the petty limits of our time and place. It is easy to believe that there is no crisis. We have been told too often that the oceans will soon die, the air be poisonous, our energy reserves run dry; that the world will grow warmer, coastlands be flooded and the climate change; that plague, famine and war will be the necessary checks on pop…Read more
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9Animal Rights - Daniel A. Dombrowski: The Philosophy of Vegetarianism. Pp. iv+188. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984. $20.00 (paper, 9.95) (review)The Classical Review 37 (2): 224-225. 1987.
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14Non-Personal MindsRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 53 185-209. 2003.Persons are creatures with a range of personal capacities. Most known to us are also people, though nothing in observation or biological theory demands that all and only people are persons, nor even that persons, any more than people, constitute a natural kind. My aim is to consider what non-personal minds are like. Darwin's Earthworms are sensitive, passionate and, in their degree, intelligent. They may even construct maps, embedded in the world they perceive around them, so as to be able to co…Read more
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6Substance: or Chesterton's Abyss of LightAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 69 (1): 1-14. 1995.
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University of BristolHonorary Research Fellow
Liverpool, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Applied Ethics |
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy |
Philosophical Traditions |