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Theologians have always struggled to understand how humanity and divinity coexisted in the person of Christ. Proponents of the Arian heresy, which held that Jesus could not have been fully divine, found significant scriptural evidence of their position. The defenders of orthodoxy, such as Hilary of Poitiers, Ambrose of Milan, Jerome, and Augustine, believed that these biblical passages could be reconciled with Christ's divinity. Medieval theologians such as Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, and Bonaventure, also grappled with these texts when confronting the rising threat of Arian heresy. They too faced the need to preserve Jesus' authentic humanity and to describe a mode of experiencing the passions that cast no doubt upon the perfect divinity of the Incarnate Word. However, they also confronted an additional obstacle. The medieval theologians had inherited from the Greek and Latin fathers a body of opinion on the passages in question, which by this time had achieved normative cultural status in the Christian tradition. However, the Greek and Latin fathers wrote in a polemical situation, responding to the threat to orthodoxy posed by the Arians. As a consequence, they sometimes found themselves driven to extreme and sometimes contradictory statements. These statements seemed to their medieval successors either to compromise the true divinity of Christ, his true humanity, or the possibility that the divine and human were in communication with or metaphysically linked to one another. As a result, medieval theologians also needed to demonstrate how two equally authoritative but apparently contradictory statements could be reconciled. This book examines the arguments that resulted from these dual pressures and finds that, under the guise of unchanging assimilation and transmission of a unanimous tradition, there were in fact many fissures and discontinuities between the two bodies of thought, ancient and medieval. Rather than organic change or development, the book finds radical change, trial, novelty, and even heterodoxy.

In the 1980s, this book contends, an uncritical affirmation of anti-essentialism turned this important feminist critique into a disciplinary dogmatism that constrained and homogenized feminist thinking. Feminist work in the academy became forgetful of both women and nature, and began to exchange an engaged politics for the intensity of sublime experience in its postmodern form. This book works between the modern and postmodern notions of the sublime to show that the gendered politics and effacement of nature, central to the modern sublime, especially in Kant's account, are at the heart of the postmodern sublime as well. It turns to Lyotard's postmodern sublime to argue that this sublime is hard at work in feminist poststructuralism, especially the early texts of Judith Butler. The melting away of the extra-discursively real in these accounts tends to make feminist thinking incapable of meaningfully articulating our relations to the natural world and to one another. Yet these very relations are necessarily tied to powerful aesthetic experiences of beauty and sublimity.

Given the almost universal assumption that democracy is a ‘good thing’, the goal of mankind, it is easy to forget that ‘rule by the people’ has been vehemently opposed by some of the most distinguished thinkers in the Western tradition. The book attempts to combat collective amnesia by systematically exploring the evaluating anti‐democratic thought since the French Revolution. Using categories first introduced by A. O. Hirschman in The Rhetoric of Reaction, it examines the various arguments under the headings of ‘perversity’, ‘futility’, and ‘jeopardy’. This classification scheme makes it possible to highlight the fatalism and pessimism of anti‐democratic thinkers, their conviction that democratic reform would be either pointless or destructive. They failed to understand the adaptability of democracy, its ability to coexist with traditional and elitist values. Nevertheless, it must be granted that some of their predictions and observations have been confirmed by history.

This book focuses on Plotinus' notion of Intellect. Intellect comes second in Plotinus' hierarchical model of reality, after the One, which is an unknowable first cause of everything. Intellect is also the sphere of being, the Platonic Ideas, which exist as its thoughts. Plotinus' doctrine of Intellect raises a host of questions that the book seeks to answer: Intellect's thought is described as an attempt to grasp the One and at the same time as self-thought. How are these two claims related? How are they compatible? What lies in Plotinus' insistence that Intellect's thought is a thought of itself? The minimal requirements thought must satisfy according to Plotinus is that it must involve a distinction between thinker and object of thought, and the object itself must be varied. How are these two claims which amount to holding that Intellect is plural in two different ways related? What is the relation between Intellect as a thinker and Intellect as an object of thought? Plotinus' position here seems to amount to a form of idealism, a claim that is explored in the book. As opposed to ordinary human discursive thinking, Intellect's thought is all-at-once, timeless, truthful, and a direct intuition into ‘the things themselves’; it is presumably not even propositional. This strong notion of non-discursive thought is discussed and explained as well as Plotinus' claim that this must be the primary form of thought. The main conclusion of the book is that though clearly dependent on the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition, Plotinus' theory of Intellect contains very significant innovations.

The broad aim of this work is to explain how mere noises, marks, gestures, and mental/neural symbols are able to capture the world, that is, how words and sentences (in whatever medium) come to mean what they do, to stand for certain things, to be true or false of reality. Paul Horwich’s answer takes off from Wittgenstein’s appealingly demystifying remark, that the meaning of a term is nothing over and above its use, and proceeds with a groundbreaking articulation and defence of that idea, showing how it can deal successfully with Quinean and Kripkean forms of scepticism about meaning, with the various normative features of thought and language, with the paradoxical phenomenon of vagueness, with the way that word-meanings combine to yield sentence-meanings, and with Chomsky-style models of the language faculty. The main lines of this theory were first suggested in Horwich’s 1998 book, Meaning. The present volume (which requires no familiarity with its predecessor) provides a host of improved, formulations, fresh arguments, responses to criticism, and extensions of the position into new areas.

This book is a study of Wittgenstein’s early masterpiece, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. It argues that Wittgenstein’s aim in that deeply puzzling work is to show that the ‘intelligibility of thought’ and the ‘meaningfulness of language’, which logical truths would delimit, and metaphysics and the philosophy of mind and language would explain are issues constituted by confusions. What is exposed is a mirage of a kind of self-consciousness, a misperception of the ways in which we happen to think, talk, and act as reasons why we ought to think, talk, and act as we do. The root of that misperception is our confusedly endowing words with a life of their own: we enchant and are enchanted by words, colluding in a confusion that transposes on to them and the world which we then see them as ‘fitting’, responsibilities that are actually ours to bear. Such words promise to spare us the trouble not only of thinking, but of living. In presenting this view, the book offers readings of all of the major themes of the Tractatus, including its discussion of logical truth, objects, names, inferential relations, subjectivity, solipsism, and the inexpressible. It offers novel explanations of what is at stake in Wittgenstein’s comparison of propositions with pictures, of why Wittgenstein declared the point of the Tractatus to be ethical, of how a book — which infamously declares itself to be nonsensical— can clarify our thoughts and require of us that we exercise our capacity to reason in reading it, and of how Wittgenstein later came to re-evaluate the achievement of the Tractatus.

In a world where natural selection has shaped adaptations of astonishing ingenuity, what is the scope and unique power of rational thinking? This book looks at the twin set of issues surrounding the power of natural selection to mimic rational design, and rational thinking as itself a product of natural selection. While we commonly deem ourselves superior to other species, the logic of natural selection should not lead us to expect that nature does everything for the best. Similarly, rational action does not always promote the best possible outcomes. So what is the difference? Is the pursuit of rationality actually an effective strategy? Part of the answer lies in language, including mathematics and science. Language is the most striking device by which we have made ourselves smarter than our nearest primate cousins. Sometimes the purely instinctual responses we share with other animals put explicit reasoning to shame: the movements of a trained athlete are faster and more accurate than anything she could explicitly calculate. Language, however, with its power to abstract from concrete experience and to range over all aspects of nature, enables breathtakingly precise calculations, which have taken us to the moon and beyond. Most importantly, however, language enables us to formulate an endless multiplicity of values, in potential conflict with one another as well as with instinctual imperatives. This book shows how our rationality and our irrationality are inextricably intertwined. It explores the true ramifications of being human in the natural world.

The thesis that the mind cannot directly apprehend features of the physical world — what Thomas Reid calls the Way of Ideas — is a staple of Early Modern philosophical tradition. This commitment to the direct awareness of, and only of, mental representations unifies the otherwise divergent philosophical systems of Rationalists and Empiricists. Thomas Reid battles against this thesis on many fronts, in particular over the nature of perception. This book lays the groundwork for Reid's theory of perception by developing Reid's unheralded argument against a representational theory of thought, which this book applies to the discussion of the intentionality of perceptual states and Reid's appeal to ‘signs’. Reid's efforts to preserve common sense epistemic commitments also lead him to adopt unique theories about our concepts of primary and secondary qualities, and about original and acquired perceptions. About the latter pair, the book argues that most perceptual beliefs depend for their justification upon inferences. The Way of Ideas holds that sensations are objects of awareness and that our senses are not robustly unified. This book develops Reid's counter-proposals by examining his discussion of the evolutionary purpose of sensations, and the nature of our awareness of sensations, as well as his intriguing affirmative answer to Molyneux's questions.

Decartes' maxim Cogito, Ergo Sum (from his Meditations) is perhaps the most famous philosophical expression ever coined. The author of this book, Joseph Almog, is a Descartes scholar whose last book What Am I? focused on the second half of this expression asking who is the “I”, who is thinking, and how does this entity somehow incorporate both body and mind? This book looks at the first half of the proposition — cogito. The book calls this the “thinking man's paradox”: how can there be, in and part of the natural world, a creature that thinks? Descartes' proposition declares that such a fact maintains and is self-evident; but as this book points out, from the point of view of Descartes' own skepticism it is far from obvious. How can it be that a thinking human can be both part of the natural world and yet somehow distinct and separate from it? How did “thinking” arise in an otherwise “thoughtless” universe and what does it mean for beings like us to be thinkers? The book goes back to the Meditations, and using Descartes' own methodology — and his naturalistic, scientific worldview — tries to answer the question.

In children, magical thinking has traditionally been viewed as an immature form of thinking that is destined to diminish with age. With some exceptions, the study of magical thinking and magical beliefs in adults has mostly remained on the fringes of psychology, along with the study of such topics as superstitions, anomalistic beliefs, and parapsychology. In this book, I argue that the role of magical thinking in child development and in adult life should be reconsidered. In children, magical thinking is an important part of cognitive development. In adults, magical thinking and magical beliefs assist individuals as they struggle with situations that are beyond rational control. There is evidence that suggestive techniques used in politics, commercial advertising, and psychotherapies target magical thinking and magical beliefs. In this book, the mechanisms and development of magical thinking and beliefs throughout the lifespan are discussed.

How can one think about the same thing twice without knowing that it's the same thing? How can one think about nothing at all (for example Pegasus, the mythical flying horse)? Is thinking about oneself special? One could mistake one's car for someone else's, but it seems one could not mistake one's own headache for someone else's. Why not? This book provides an entirely new theory which answers these puzzles and more. The framework is an account of the mind that sees it as part of nature, as opposed to something with supernatural powers. This means that human beings have more opportunities to make mistakes than many have liked to think.