This article is courtesy of Academic Ledger contributor Phin Upham Excerpt Having a justified belief does require you to know that your belief is justified but it does not require you to know what this justification is. You need not be able to defend your beliefs against criticism. In holding these beliefs I take the [...]
Read more →By Phin Upham In Question 89, article one of Aquinas’s Summa the question of the separability of the soul from the body is explored. Since our understandings are so dependent on our bodies (senses, phantasms, brains, etc.) it is hard to imagine the way in which we could understand independent of our bodies. Aquinas defends [...]
Read more →Book information via PhilosophersInConversation.com This volume brings together for the first time thirteen recent interviews with the brightest names in contemporary philosophy, including W.V.O. Quine, Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, Hilary Putnam, as well as the only known interview with John Rawls. The pieces are taken from the Harvard Review of Philosophy. Covering a wide range of [...]
Read more →By Phin Upham Aristotle presents desire as the motive force that connects an end to an action, thus producing deliberate movement. He claims that at the root of all deliberate movement lies desire. Can a state – one perceived and understood through phantasia – generate an action without desire? What is the “good” that is [...]
Read more →
By Phin Upham Chapter 2.7 of De Anima uses Aristotle’s understandings about actuality and potentiality in order to define and better understand the nature of sight and the transparent. Along the way he introduces and holds up to his analysis a number of interesting problems regarding the world. Aristotle understands seeing as the combination of [...]
Read more →Who, and what, am I? This question seems to be central to our existence as individuals, yet it has stumped philosophers for decades. Recently, psychologists have begun to use their methodologies to tackle this question, with illuminating results. Phin Upham presents some of the seminal works by psychologists. A few things seem clear about our identities: One, our identities [...]
Read more →How do we organize and understand the world around us? In this review of seminal scholarship on the subject Phin Upham reviews some of the major theories and integrates their conclusions. Construal, the sense in which we organize our world around facts rather than facts organizing the world for us, is a crucial concept in psychology, and, [...]
Read more →