Jonathan Miller

Early modern philosophers looked for inspiration to the later ancient thinkers when they rebelled against the dominant Platonic and Aristotelian traditions. The impact of the Hellenistic philosophers on such philosophers as Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza and Locke was profound and is ripe for reassessment. This collection of essays offers precisely that. Leading historians of philosophy explore the connections between Hellenistic and early modern philosophy in ways that take advantage of new scholarly and philosophical advances. The essays display a challenging range of methods and will be an invaluable point of reference for philosophers, historians of ideas and classicists.

For many years, philosophers and other scholars have commented on the remarkable similarity between Spinoza and the Stoics, with some even going so far as to speak of 'Spinoza the Stoic'. Until now, however, no one has systematically examined the relationship between the two systems. In Spinoza and the Stoics Jon Miller takes on this task, showing how key elements of Spinoza's metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical psychology, and ethics relate to their Stoic counterparts. Drawing on a wide-range of secondary literature including the most up-to-date scholarship and a close examination of the textual evidence, Jon Miller not only reveals the sense in which Spinoza was, and was not, a Stoic, but also offers new insights into how each system should be understood in itself. His book will be of great interest to scholars and students of ancient philosophy, early modern philosophy, Spinoza, and the philosophy of the Stoics

Scorned by analytic philosophers for much of the twentieth century, the a priori has been newly befriended in recent years. This development is healthy but there is reason to be concerned about how it is unfolding. In particular, it is largely characterized by a certain historical myopia: contemporary philosophers are able to see back to Kant but not much beyond him. While it may be true that the a priori changed with Kant, this in itself provides us with a reason to go back before him. For other conceptualizations of the a priori, all but forgotten now, might help us to meet worries about it that Kant's familiar version cannot.

Philosophers have long debated whether any ideas are innate in the human mind and if so, what they might be. The issues here are real and important but it often seems that the discussion of them isn’t. One of the main reasons that these discussions are frequently so frustrating is that the various sides seem to be talking past each other rather than engaging in genuine argument. When this happens, it seems to me that it is usually because the issues they are discussing have not been formulated clearly enough. To avoid that problem and also to motivate what follows, I want to begin with an overview of some philosophical concepts and questions before I get to the historical part of my paper.

This paper examines Grotius's knowledge of Stobaeus's magnificent anthology of classical literature. After summarizing the contents and significance of that anthology, it shows that Grotius had a life-long interest in and extensive knowledge of the work. Despite this, and even though Grotius made important contributions to the revitalization of Stoicism in the seventeenth century, he never once mentions the material in Chapter Seven of Book II of Stobaeus's work, material which is widely regarded nowadays as a vital source for the ethical views of ancient Stoics. The paper concludes by exploring the implications of this omission for the broader revival of Stoicism in the early modern period

If the later Middle Ages may reasonably be considered the high point of Aristotelianism in western Europe, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high point of the renewal of Hellenistic philosophy. Scepticism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism all make powerful appearances, and indeed debates between the adherents of the modern variations on these schools echo and mirror the debates that took place in the third and second centuries BCE. Not surprisingly, the ancient philosophies (to the extent that they were stable in any case) did not remain unchanged: Stoic natural law, Epicurean atomism, and Pyrrhonist doubt all are employed in new and different ways, and the arguments are often strengthened, or at least changed. Comparison of the old and new versions is often illuminating: to see the Christian Epicureanism of Gassendi can improve one's understanding of the original form; to see how Hume deals with Academic scepticism makes the process of sceptical doubt clearer on both sides.

¿Cómo reacciona la ciudadanía en un sistema político polarizado ante una emergencia como la pandemia de la COVID-19?, ¿cómo procesa la ciudadanía las narrativas polarizadas que están en conflicto?, y ¿qué imagen se forman de la gestión política de la amenaza de la pandemia? En EE. UU, hay que retrotraerse a la epidemia de la polio de hace 70 años para encontrar una emergencia sanitaria como la pandemia de la COVID-19. No obstante, hay importantes diferencias; en la década de 1950, el clima político de los EE.UU. era mucho más uniforme y consensuado que el actual, profundamente dividido y polarizado. Este trabajo utiliza datos de un estudio longitudinal realizado durante 35 años en personas jóvenes de la Generación X (ahora ya en la cuarentena) y datos provenientes de encuestas realizadas en Estados Unidos durante tres décadas, con el propósito de examinar los patrones de adquisición de la información en la comprensión de una nueva amenaza. Nuestro análisis de los últimos 35 años de la Generación X muestra que, en las elecciones de 2020, el factor predictivo del voto individual que tuvo más fuerza fue una ideología política polarizada, pero, aquellas personas que contaban con una mejor comprensión del coronavirus fueron más críticas con la gestión de la pandemia de la COVID-19 que realizó la administración de Donald Trump y estuvieron más predispuestas a votar por Joe Biden que a votar por Trump. Un análisis paralelo de una muestra probabilística representativa de personas adultas estadounidenses en 2020 reveló el mismo patrón de influencia del partidismo ideológico, la comprensión del coronavirus y la evaluación de la administración de Trump. Los resultados muestran que el conocimiento y la comprensión pueden proporcionar un efecto moderador crítico en un sistema político polarizado y dividido.

There are at least two ways of writing the history of philosophy: the first and most common among those self−identified as "philosophers" treats philosophers of the past as if they were in live dialogue with the present. Only the text is dissected, studied, and analyzed as the interpreter attempts to reconstruct, examine, and occasionally challenge the arguments under consideration. Practitioners of this first way assume that systematic and seemingly internally coherent styles of thought are most worthy of the name "philosophy." These thinkers believe that the term "philosophy," as Richard Rorty pointed out long ago, has an "honorific" sense: philosophy as such stands above other forms of thought, it is regulative in scope, and it serves as something that examines the conclusions of other, necessarily less rigorous fields. The second way is more explicitly contextualist, seeking to understand what a past thinker may have meant in his own time, what outside factors may have shaped his arguments, and how his thought may be part of broader historical currents that are none the less worthy of being remembered and studied now. Practitioners of this way are more likely to believe that ambiguities or seeming deficiencies of clarity that we find in the work of a past thinker are unlikely to be resolved by hypothetical, propositional reconstruction; rather the ambiguities are apparent to us because we are differently situated, so that the study of history is a more powerful tool in helping us satisfactorily access the work ofa past thinker than rationalistic reconstruction. (Full disclosure: I am an advocate of the second way.) This volume presents studies that fall into both of the two camps, as Jerome..