Evan Dutmer

Marcus Tullius Cicero was an important Roman statesperson and philosopher who lived during the end of the Roman Republic. Widely read during his lifetime and in the centuries after his death, the influence of his writings was central to the development of the Renaissance, and he is among the most commonly cited ancient thinkers among the American and French revolutionaries. Cicero's On the Republic, modelled in some ways on Plato's Republic, was Cicero's most widely read work in antiquity. In On the Republic, Book 1, Cicero's dialogue participants set out to answer two questions that will guide the entire dialogue, "What is the best form of government?" and "What is the best kind of citizen?" Their discussion in Book 1 contains important definitions of republic, mixed government, monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. It also includes impassioned arguments in favor of political participation for philosophers. In this commentary, we explore Cicero's dialogue, its importance, and the ways it can continue to stimulate our thinking on political philosophy.

There has been much scholarly discussion regarding the supposed inadequacies of the traditional account of lying, the general form of which can be seen in Augustine’s De mendacio (On Lying), 3–4. This account, stated simply, is that a subject S lies if and only if S says something that S believes to be false, and S says that with the intent to deceive another. But recent contributions to the philosophy of lying press our intuitions on this final condition. They point to counterexamples which seem to show that the intention to deceive clause is not a necessary condition for lying. If correct, this would drastically change our understanding of lying, and it would perhaps make it more difficult to see the moral wrongness of different types of lying. Contrary to this trend, Jennifer Lackey, in her essay, “Lying and Deception: An Unhappy Divorce” (2013) brings deception back into our account of lying. Her essay serves as a prominent example of a “Deceptionist” account of lying. In this essay, I shall first outline my own view, which I’ve called “Neo-Augustinian,” but which also builds on some of Lackey’s interventions. I then further motivate Lackey’s moves by looking at the three main types of lies that are used as counterexamples to the traditional account and show that they are unsuccessful for both Lackey’s account and mine. I shall then turn to a consideration and extended discussion of my own definition of lying through such examples. My Neo-Augustinian, Lackey-style account will be seen to best handle these difficult examples, retrieve the intuitive moral wrongness of lying, and vindicate important elements of Augustine’s original analysis of lying in the De mendacio. Nevertheless, my account does not require adopting Augustine’s absolutism regarding lies; hence, it is importantly Neo-Augustinian rather than strictly Augustinian.

In this paper we argue that God and the Good Life, a prominent philosophy as a way of life (PWOL) undergraduate course, serves the needs of novices in philosophy classrooms, whether they plan to continue in the study of philosophy or not. We draw from both philosophy and educational psychology in making our case and highlight four distinctive components of God and the Good Life pedagogy at the University of Notre Dame: 1) transformative learning goals, 2) immersive experiences, 3) deep personal connections to students’ everyday lives, and 4) cooperative relationships of mutual support in a community of dialogue. We end with a coda on even wider relevance for PWOL pedagogies in bringing about the pluralistic society we hope for, even in our deeply polarized societal moment.

The so-called “analytical” appendix to the first part of Spinoza’s Ethics has at times puzzled scholars. It notably breaks with the geometrical method adopted in most of the text, and includes an impassioned argument against teleology, popular morality, and, ultimately, the faculty of imagination. In this essay I seek to resolve this interpretive difficulty by side-by-side comparison with philosophical resources from one of Spinoza’s main influences. In particular, I argue that analysis of the appendix to the first part of his Ethics is benefitted by comparison with certain Maimonidean arguments regarding the “imagination”—themselves part of a long tradition of debate on the powers of the imaginative faculty in ancient and medieval philosophy—contained in The Guide of the Perplexed. I introduce and trace this connection across both texts. This helps us to better appreciate both the appendix and its place within the Ethics and Spinoza’s sustained, complicated relationship with Medieval Judaism’s greatest thinker.

Many introductory courses in ethics stress competence in ethical theories popular in modern Western, Anglophone philosophy. This is limiting to ethics students in two ways: 1) it privileges theory over practice in the area of philosophy that has the most intuitive practical importance and application and 2) it privileges modern Western ethical theory at the expense of philosophical and practical engagement with all other world ethical systems. This essay seeks to provide a pedagogical corrective for both of these trends in the context of a virtue ethics course in offering 1) a blueprint for a course in practiced virtue ethics at the high school level based on my version of a required course, “Ethics and the Cultivation of Character” in the Leadership Education Department at Culver Academies (where I am one of the Ethics instructors) that 2) draws on a theoretical apparatus for virtue ethics derived from both Western and non-Western world philosophies.

"Augustine's City of God is not a treatise of political or social philosophy." So begins Christian Tornau's section on political philosophy in his entry on Augustine for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Evident in this remark is the ambivalence with which historians of philosophy have generally treated the political philosophy of the great late antique philosopher of northern Africa. Despite its suggestive title and its extended apologetical attacks on the Earthly City, the City of God is decidedly not a work of political philosophy in the traditional sense: it does not reason about the best form of government; it only rarely functions as a mirror for Christian princes; it recommends no real social or...

In this essay I will argue for an interpretation of the remarks of Physics 1.1 that both resolves some of the confusion surrounding the precise nature of methodology described there and shows how those remarks at 184a15-25 serve as important programmatic remarks besides, as they help in the structuring of books 1 and 2 of the Physics. I will argue that “what is clearer and more knowable to us” is what Aristotle goes on to describe in 1.2—namely, that nature exists and that natural things change—his basic starting-point for natural science. This, I shall hope to show, is the kind of “immediate” sense datum which Aristotle thinks must be further analyzed in terms of principles and then causes over the course of Physics books 1 and 2 to lead to knowledge about the natural world.[1] Such an analysis arrives at, as I shall show, a definition of nature not initially available from the starting-point just mentioned, and which is clearer by nature.[2] It is not my aim here to resolve longstanding debates surrounding Aristotle’s original intent in the ordering and composition of the first two books of the Physics, nor how the Physics is meant to fit into the Aristotelian corpus taken as a coherent whole, but rather to show that the first two books of the Physics, as they stand, fit with the picture of methodology for natural science presented to us in 1.1. [1] An interesting consequence of this, and one which I shall not pursue in this paper at any length, is that the progression from what is clearer to us and what is clearer by nature is by necessity a form of revision: i.e., the Physics should not be seen as a work validating the “starting-point” of 1.2 contra the monists, but a work which gradually builds to the language of matter and form as what is clearer by nature. [2] Viz., what we find at the beginning of 2.1: “this suggests that nature is a sort of source and cause of change and remaining unchanged in that to which it belongs primarily of itself, that is, not by virtue of concurrence”.