James Oldfield

This article reviews Bryan Lueck’s book Obligation and the Fact of Sense. In this quite original book, Lueck considers what he argues are the failures of various modern ethical theories to decisively identify the ground of obligation, and proposes a new account of obligation in light of those failures. The book traces the concept of obligation through its history in early modern thought up to Kant’s idea that the ground of obligation is the so-called fact of reason, that we simply find ourselves bound by the moral law. Lueck’s own account begins from this point, but he recasts Kant’s idea of the fact of reason as the fact of sense, drawing on figures such as Merleau-Ponty, Serres, and Nancy. Ultimately, however, he argues that only a very deflationary version of obligation can be defended, as the failures of the early modern ethicists prove not to be accidental, but to emerge from the very phenomenon of obligation.

A surprising feature of Aristotle’s thought is the fact that he does not offer a single, extended account of truth. He makes passing references to the meaning of truth in various texts, and his comments at times seem hard to reconcile. A preponderance of these comments occur in the Metaphysics, where he seems to adopt two quite different models for thinking about truth: truth is on the one hand a kind of touching or contact, and on the other a matter of joining or dividing subjects and predicates correctly. This paper proposes a reading that reconciles these two models with one another, one that assigns to each model its appropriate place in what Aristotle thinks of as the process of inquiry, a process exemplified by the text of the Metaphysics itself.

A surprising feature of Aristotle’s thought is the fact that he does not offer a single, extended account of truth. He makes passing references to the meaning of truth in various texts, and his comments at times seem hard to reconcile. A preponderance of these comments occur in the Metaphysics, where he seems to adopt two quite different models for thinking about truth: truth is on the one hand a kind of touching or contact, and on the other a matter of joining or dividing subjects and predicates correctly. This paper proposes a reading that reconciles these two models with one another, one that assigns to each model its appropriate place in what Aristotle thinks of as the process of inquiry, a process exemplified by the text of the Metaphysics itself.

Though Aristotle is universally acknowledged as having a mighty influence on the history of philosophy, large parts of his writings are often thought to be interesting to nobody except the historian. This includes those treatises known as the theoretical works (preeminently the Metaphysics, Physics, De Anima, and Posterior Analytics). However, the contributions in this book show that these old treatises are still profound resources for philosophical inquiry. Not only do they inform us about the origins of our ideas, but equally they express insights that always stand in need of reinterpretation, and thus challenge our understanding. That challenge to understanding - and ultimately the desire for self-understanding, the desire to know what stands at the source of thinking itself - this was at the heart of the Greek ideal of philosophy, and some would say that this is still the task of the discipline. The essays included here cover a wide range of topics, including Aristotle's treatment of non-contradiction, the tension between his conceptions of knowledge and being, the complexity of the term 'potency,' and the relation between psychology and physics.