Owen Goldin

Human concern over the urgency of current environmental issues increasingly entails wide-ranging discussions of how we may rethink the relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world. In order to provide a context for such discussions this anthology provides a selection of some of the most important, interesting and influential readings on the subject from classical times through to the late nineteenth century. Included are such figures as Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Hildegard of Bingen, St Francis of Assisi, Bacon, Decartes, Kant, Mill, Emerson and Thoreau. As the collection as a whole amply demonstrates, the history of western philosophical accounts of nature can help us to better understand current attitudes and problems. Human Life and the Natural World may also be of interest to a broad range of philosophers and students of philosophy, and more generally to those with a concern for the environment that engages the intellect as well as the heart

Within the third book of Porphyry's On Abstinence from Animal Food, an ethic of community is developed in order to provide the basis of an account of our ethical obligations to animals. I argue that in spite of Porphyry's rejection of this account, it constitutes a coherent and comprehensive nonanthropocentric ethical theory. It conforms with ethical intuitions insofar as it grants that animals are moral subjects, but does not demand impartiality. By appealing to Theophrastus's notion of to oikeion and to the Stoic notion of oikeic6is it provides the theoretical resources for showing why it is often appropriate to favor human beings over other animals.

Contrā Dale Jamieson, the study of the metaethical foundations of environmental ethics may well lead students to a more environmentally responsible way of life. For although metaethics is rarely decisive in decision making and action, there are two kinds of circumstances in which it can play a crucial role in our practical decisions. First, decisions that have unusual features do not summon habitual ethical reactions, and hence invite the application of ethical precepts that the study of metaethics and ethical theory isolate and clarify. Second, there are times in which the good of others may well be given greater weight in one’s ethical deliberations if theory has made clear that the good to be promoted is ontologically independent of one’s own good.

abstract What gives ethical and political validity to a state? This is to ask what a state is for and to provide a means to determine whether or not a constitution is just. In this paper I compare the account given by Tamir in Liberal Nationalism with that of Rawls, in order to clarify the decisive differences. Although both recognize the importance of particular associations and the moral imperative to be fair, Tamir places priority on the first and Rawls on the second. I explore their practical implications in regard to the ethical defensibility of Israel's self‐identification as a Jewish state and to conflicting nationalistic territorial claims for the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. I suggest that if Tamir is correct in her analysis of nationalism, the Israeli‐Palestinian conflict is a problem that is without the sort of solution that is sought by those who are both interested parties and rational agents of good will

It is now a commonplace that Aristotle and Theophrastus systematically misunderstood Heraclitus in interpreting fire as an ἀρχή of the kind posited by the Milesians. While air in the thought of Anaxamines and the ἄπειρον in the thought of Anaximander can be considered to play the role of the Aristotelian material substrate without too much distortion, this is not so for fire in the thought of Heraclitus. As Cherniss has indicated, while a substrate of the kind posited by the Milesians is a permanent being underlying change, Heraclitean fire is change itself.

Aristotle described the scientific explanation of universal or general facts as deducing them through scientific demonstrations, that is, through syllogisms that met requirements he first formulated of logical validity and explanatoriness. In Chapters 19-23, he adds arguments for the further logical restrictions that scientific demonstrations can neither be indefinitely long nor infinitely extendible through the interposition of new middle terms. Chapters 24-26 argue for the superiority of universal over particular demonstration, of affirmative over negative demonstration, and of direct negative demonstration over demonstration to the impossible. Chapters 27 34 discuss different aspects of sciences and scientific understanding, allowing us to distinguish between sciences, and between scientific understanding and other kinds of cognition, especially opinion. Philoponus' comments on these chapters are interesting especially because of his metaphysical analysis of universal predication and his understanding of the notion of subordinate sciences. We learn from his commentary that Philoponus believed in Platonic Forms as inherent in, and posterior to, the Divine Intellect, but ascribed to Aristotle an interpretation of Plato's Forms as independent substances, prior to the Demiurgic Intellect. A very important notion from Aristotle's Posterior Analytics is that of the 'subordination' of sciences, i.e. the idea that some sciences depend on 'higher' ones for some of their principles. Philoponus goes beyond Aristotle in suggesting a taxonomy of sciences, in which the subordinate science is the same in genus as the superordinate, but different in species.

Within The Guide of the Perplexed Maimonides presents an argument that is intended to render probable the temporal creation of the cosmos. In one of these arguments Maimonides adopts the Kalamic strategy of arguing for the necessity of there being a “particularizing” agent. Maimonides argues that even one who grants Aristotelian science can still ask why the heavenly realm is as it is, to which there is no reply forthcoming but “God so willed it.” The argument is effective against the Arabic Neoplatonic Aristotelians, but not against Aristotle himself. Aristotle’s response to Maimonides would be that the latter is in effect asking, “Why are there the essences there are?”, a question that Aristotle would take to be fundamentally misplaced, since he holds that the existence of the theoretical primitives of every science is to be assumed. Nevertheless, Maimonides’ challenge has force for those who recognize a demand for a metaphysical explanation for there being those kinds of things posited as primitive by the natural sciences.

This paper examines how within De Caelo Aristotle argues that the heavens rotate to the right, because this is best. I isolate and evaluate its presuppositions and show how it comprises both a dialectical argument to cosmological principles and a partial demonstrative explanation on the basis of such principles. Second, I consider the expressions of epistemological hesitation that Aristotle offers in regard to this arguments, and draw conclusions concerning the status of cosmology as an Aristotelian science. In order to "save the phenomena," to allow the endoxon that the heavens are alive and divine to stand, Aristotle needs to make the point that the world and its doings, including all of our human doings, depend on an actuality that is in some sense better than the occasional, incomplete activities in which we engage.