Project MUSE®: The Review of Metaphysics

Project MUSE®: The Review of Metaphysics - Latest Articles https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/755 Project MUSE®: Latest articles in The Review of Metaphysics. daily 1 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 text/html en-US Vol. 72 (2018) through current issue Latest Articles: The Review of Metaphysics TWO Project MUSE® The Review of Metaphysics 2154-1302 0034-6632 Latest articles in The Review of Metaphysics. Feed provided by Project MUSE® Avicenna's Aristotelian Account of Chance https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985674 In the Physics of Healing (Physics of Aš-Šifāʾ) 2.13–14, Avicenna offers an account of chance (ittifāq) that is indebted to Aristotle's analysis of τύχη. From the perspective of contemporary interpreters, this fact is particularly noteworthy given Avicenna's commitment to causal determinism,1 and their interpretations have been guided by their concern to reconcile Avicenna's acceptance of chance with his determinism. However, no consensus has been reached on how Avicenna achieves this reconciliation. Wisnovsky, who offers one of the two main treatments of this problem, argues that, for Avicenna, chance is an epistemic conception: While everything at the microscopic level is causally determined, human beings, who ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985694">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/755/image/coversmall Avicenna's Aristotelian Account of Chance 2026-03-23 text/html en-US Avicenna's Aristotelian Account of Chance 2026-03-23 2026 TWO Project MUSE® 134322 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 2026-03-23 Necessity, Certainty, and Innateness in Avicenna's Rationalism https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985675 Whether Avicenna's epistemology is rationalist or empiricist has been the subject of a vigorous debate in the study of medieval Islamic philosophy. Scholars have generally divided into two camps, emanationists and abstractionists. Emanationists argue that he adheres to emanationism, as he holds that intelligible forms emanate from the active intellect, making him a rationalist. Abstractionists, however, contend that he subscribes to abstractionism, as he holds that intelligible forms are acquired via abstraction, making him an empiricist.1 I have summarized this debate elsewhere and argued that the abstractionist method is not empirical but rationalistic, as it involves the claim that one intuits the intelligible ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985694">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/755/image/coversmall Necessity, Certainty, and Innateness in Avicenna's Rationalism 2026-03-23 text/html en-US Necessity, Certainty, and Innateness in Avicenna's Rationalism 2026-03-23 2026 TWO Project MUSE® 210196 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 2026-03-23 The Problem of Method and Self-Knowledge in Kant's Transcendental Philosophy https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985676 Philosophy is a discipline that seeks to know everything. Since philosophy seeks to know everything, philosophy must philosophize about not only things that it knows but also its own philosophical knowing. Moreover, philosophy seeks to know everything through concepts and gain conceptual knowledge. Given these two demands, philosophy must philosophize about its own conceptual knowing. In other words, philosophy must know its own structure of conceptual knowledge. Furthermore, philosophy must not only know the structure of its conceptual knowledge but also know it philosophically. Since philosophy must know its own conceptual knowing within philosophy itself, and philosophy knows conceptually, philosophy must know ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985694">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/755/image/coversmall The Problem of Method and Self-Knowledge in Kant's Transcendental Philosophy 2026-03-23 text/html en-US The Problem of Method and Self-Knowledge in Kant's Transcendental Philosophy 2026-03-23 2026 TWO Project MUSE® 214965 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 2026-03-23 Asceticism and Negative Virtue Epistemology: Nietzsche and Adorno https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985677 This article examines a marked convergence (or, at any rate, what initially looks like one) between some of Nietzsche's and Adorno's epistemological ideas, in particular, their conceptions of cognitive success and diagnoses of cognitive failure. Here at the outset, I use the deliberately vague language of "success" and "failure" because these authors' various reservations about standard philosophical conceptualizations of truth and knowledge make it either misleading or uninformative to state, without addendum, that success is a matter of "truth" or "knowing." Both are plainly concerned with topics like truth, knowledge, reality, and experience, but these concerns manifest themselves more in the form of normatively ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985694">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/755/image/coversmall Asceticism and Negative Virtue Epistemology: Nietzsche and Adorno 2026-03-23 text/html en-US Asceticism and Negative Virtue Epistemology: Nietzsche and Adorno 2026-03-23 2026 TWO Project MUSE® 154415 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 2026-03-23 Nishida, Husserl, and the Problem of Continuity of Objects https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985678 As Jiang puts it, the work of Kitarō Nishida is best characterized as a Mahāyāna-inspired "nonsubstance philosophy": a philosophy that, in contrast to the Western tradition, avoids appealing to the "grammatical subject" to guarantee the coherence and continuity of reality and experience.1 In place of that, Nishida famously advances an account oriented toward the predicate, which functions as the "place" (basho) where distinct entities can differentiate themselves and appear as such. In Nishida's frequent example, red and blue can be apprehended in their mutual, yet interdependent, differentiation only against the backdrop of color as such; in this relation, the universal "color" must itself be a relative ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985694">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/755/image/coversmall Nishida, Husserl, and the Problem of Continuity of Objects 2026-03-23 text/html en-US Nishida, Husserl, and the Problem of Continuity of Objects 2026-03-23 2026 TWO Project MUSE® 154232 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 2026-03-23 Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology as First Philosophy by Roger T. Ames (review) https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985679 Ames's latest book proposes Confucian cosmology, or what he calls "zoetology," the art of living, as a meaningful contrast and even a preferable alternative to Aristotelian substance ontology. In making this claim, Ames does not adopt the essentialist approach; instead, he advocates for cultural pluralism that treats other traditions of thinking, such as Confucianism, as correlative and open-ended, rather than exclusively other, for example, Orientalist. Indeed, as Ames shows, the ethical and practical corollaries that can be drawn from Confucian cosmology overlap much with the pragmatic philosophy of Dewey, James, and Whitehead. Whether Eastern or Western, we learn the qualities of things and how to do certain ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985694">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/755/image/coversmall Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology as First Philosophy by Roger T. Ames (review) 2026-03-23 text/html en-US Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology as First Philosophy by Roger T. Ames (review) 2026-03-23 2026 TWO Project MUSE® 9177 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 2026-03-23 The Unity of the Virtues in the Eudemian Ethics by Giulia Bonasio (review) https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985680 What is required for eudaimonia? How does one become kalos kagathos (one who is "beautiful-and-good")? In the first English-language monograph dedicated to the Eudemian Ethics (EE) and using Christopher Rowe's new Oxford Classical Text edition, Bonasio presents a meticulous and original argument that only the kalos kagathos, who has virtue as a whole—that is, all of the virtues—is eudaimôn. The book takes careful positions on a range of enduring questions, treating them in an exclusively Eudemian context. Bonasio's inclusion of the so-called common books makes the argument also a test of the hypothesis that these belong to the EE in their current form.Bonasio's first chapter enumerates ways in which the human soul ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985694">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/755/image/coversmall The Unity of the Virtues in the Eudemian Ethics by Giulia Bonasio (review) 2026-03-23 text/html en-US The Unity of the Virtues in the Eudemian Ethics by Giulia Bonasio (review) 2026-03-23 2026 TWO Project MUSE® 10224 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 2026-03-23 The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth and On Plato's Euthyphro: New Edition by Ronna Burger (review) https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985681 This book collects three reprints. The first is The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth, which was first published by Yale University Press in 1984. This book had been reprinted before, in 1999, by St. Augustine's Press; the 1999 reprint had a preface that is now expanded and presented here as "The Death of Socrates and the Post-Socratic Schools." Lastly, there is "On Plato's Euthyphro," which was first published in 2015. Only the second, the expanded preface, has been altered from its original.The reprint of The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth divides the Phaedo into thirteen sections: the prologue (57a–59d); logos and mythos (59d–63e); the practice of dying (63e–69e); genesis (69e–72e); amamnēsis (72e–77d); likeness ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985694">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/755/image/coversmall The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth and On Plato's Euthyphro: New Edition by Ronna Burger (review) 2026-03-23 text/html en-US The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth and On Plato's Euthyphro: New Edition by Ronna Burger (review) 2026-03-23 2026 TWO Project MUSE® 7115 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 2026-03-23 Pathos and Praxis: An Integrated Phenomenology of Life by Scott Davidson (review) https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985682 Scott Davidson's Pathos and Praxis offers a comparative study of Michel Henry and Paul Ricoeur, advancing a phenomenology that places life itself, rather than death, at the center of philosophical reflection. Its central claim is that human existence, whether in birth, bodily movement, or desire, exhibits a dual structure: Life is received and enacted, passive and active, immediate and differentiated. The book guides Henry's maximalist phenomenology—emphasizing life's immanent auto-affectivity as the basis of all appearing and knowledge—along a minimalist, hermeneutical trajectory that situates lived experience within social, historical, and interpretive contexts. In doing so, it illuminates the interplay of pathos ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985694">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/755/image/coversmall Pathos and Praxis: An Integrated Phenomenology of Life by Scott Davidson (review) 2026-03-23 text/html en-US Pathos and Praxis: An Integrated Phenomenology of Life by Scott Davidson (review) 2026-03-23 2026 TWO Project MUSE® 7870 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 2026-03-23 The Remains of Reason: On Meaning After Lacan by Dominik Finkelde (review) https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985683 Twisting free of a decades-long policy permitting Lacanian insights on language, desire, and subjectivity to unfold all but only at a distal remove from mainstream debates on these latter topics, The Remains of Reason ably constructs a whole spate of bridges spanning in their generous scope this seemingly uncrossable conceptual divide. What is more, the author brings about this cluster of, in large part, novel syntheses with a measured brevity—concision that in no wise sacrifices on either sober directness or pedagogical clarity. As a broad and contemporarily conversant philosophical introduction to the fundamentals of Lacan's erotic ontology, this is something of a wonder. The book, its content originally a ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985694">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/755/image/coversmall The Remains of Reason: On Meaning After Lacan by Dominik Finkelde (review) 2026-03-23 text/html en-US The Remains of Reason: On Meaning After Lacan by Dominik Finkelde (review) 2026-03-23 2026 TWO Project MUSE® 9891 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 2026-03-23 Aquinas, Natural Law, and Social Ontology, Historical and Contemporary Perspectives ed. by Ana Marta González (review) https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985684 This collection of eighteen essays is the fruit of a workshop held by the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences in March 2024. Its purpose was to elaborate the social ontology stemming from Aquinas's thought, his understanding of natural law as it pertains to contemporary social thought, and how political and economic study may draw from Thomas's teaching.I begin with the essays on psychology and cognition. The entire volume brings to mind Norris Clarke's 1993 Aquinas Lecture at Marquette University where he extrapolates Aquinas's thought to include twentieth-century personalism. This extrapolation of Aquinas is particularly true of Yoshihita Yamamoto's treatment of the ontology of love, which further incorporates ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985694">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/755/image/coversmall Aquinas, Natural Law, and Social Ontology, Historical and Contemporary Perspectives ed. by Ana Marta González (review) 2026-03-23 text/html en-US Aquinas, Natural Law, and Social Ontology, Historical and Contemporary Perspectives ed. by Ana Marta González (review) 2026-03-23 2026 TWO Project MUSE® 8542 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 2026-03-23 After the Death of God: Secularization as a Philosophical Challenge from Kant to Nietzsche by Espen Hammer (review) https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985685 Marx famously referred to religion as "the opium of the masses," and Nietzsche wrote that "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him." These are things many remember. In his book, After the Death of God: Secularization as a Philosophica l Challenge from Kant to Nietzsche, Espen Hammer provides a penetrating and precise analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosophy's engagement with the phenomenon of secularization, which reveals things that many have forgotten. This book challenges the simplistic notion that secularization is a straightforward process where religious belief is simply replaced by rationality.Hammer's core argument is that the major figures of this German philosophical ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985694">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/755/image/coversmall After the Death of God: Secularization as a Philosophical Challenge from Kant to Nietzsche by Espen Hammer (review) 2026-03-23 text/html en-US After the Death of God: Secularization as a Philosophical Challenge from Kant to Nietzsche by Espen Hammer (review) 2026-03-23 2026 TWO Project MUSE® 7059 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 2026-03-23 The Way of the Gadfly: A Study of Coherency in Socratic Thought by Ryszard Legutko (review) https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985686 Legutko assumes the mainstream view that Plato's early dialogues provide us with the core of Socrates' ideas, and his aims to reconstruct Socratic philosophy on that basis. More controversial is the thesis of chapter 1, "Knowledge," which also governs the rest of the book, namely, that "for Socrates, knowledge was a system of logically connected propositions and that his philosophical activity was largely an attempt to discover parts of such a system," and that Socratic thinking thus represents a proto-coherentism about knowledge. In spite of his thesis, in actual practice, Legutko rarely forces the ideas found in the early dialogues to fit more neatly together than they actually are, and often even thoughtfully ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985694">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/755/image/coversmall The Way of the Gadfly: A Study of Coherency in Socratic Thought by Ryszard Legutko (review) 2026-03-23 text/html en-US The Way of the Gadfly: A Study of Coherency in Socratic Thought by Ryszard Legutko (review) 2026-03-23 2026 TWO Project MUSE® 9187 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 2026-03-23 Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference: Pascal's Defense of the Christian Proposition by Pierre Manent (review) https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985687 This book contends that Western civilization has become indifferent to Christianity. The modern state has progressively and effectively diminished Christianity's authority—particularly that authority as exercised by the Catholic Church—creating what Pierre Manent calls "the church of separated human wills," a phenomenon that precludes any collective definition of or assent to the true and the good. As a solution to this problem, Manent offers what he terms "the Christian proposition." Importantly, the said proposition signifies not a systematic layout of Christian doctrine but, rather, a "connected series of … doctrines or mysteries" seeking to engage one's understanding and invite the consent of one's will, and in ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985694">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/755/image/coversmall Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference: Pascal's Defense of the Christian Proposition by Pierre Manent (review) 2026-03-23 text/html en-US Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference: Pascal's Defense of the Christian Proposition by Pierre Manent (review) 2026-03-23 2026 TWO Project MUSE® 9286 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 2026-03-23 Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge, and Freedom by Mark Pennington (review) https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985688 This book represents the most sustained effort to date to bring Foucault's work into dialogue with liberal political economy. His relationship with liberalism has been a perennial source of interest to both his followers and detractors, with a recent wave of scholarship addressing the controversy over whether he was seduced by neoliberalism. However, Pennington explicitly avoids the issue of "whether Foucault did in fact come to endorse a liberal political stance prior to his death" and instead pursues a far more interesting line of argument: that "Foucault's commitments should perhaps always have been liberal" given his fundamental epistemological and ontological positions.On this basis, Pennington develops an ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985694">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/755/image/coversmall Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge, and Freedom by Mark Pennington (review) 2026-03-23 text/html en-US Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge, and Freedom by Mark Pennington (review) 2026-03-23 2026 TWO Project MUSE® 9063 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 2026-03-23 Religion For Thought: Writings and Lectures, Volume 5 by Paul Ricoeur (review) https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985689 Originally published in French in 2021, this work is a collection of ten essays on the theme of religion written by Ricoeur between 1953 and 2004, translated from French by Kathleen Blamey and annotated by Daniel Fray. This timeframe marks practically the entirety of Ricoeur's writing life, hinting, in a way, at the fact that although Ricoeur never considered himself as a theologian, the theme of religion was nonetheless a constant presence in his reflections.The editor situates these essays within the movement in secularization and desecularization in Western countries, in which Ricoeur's essays are claimed to both coincide and at the same time "complicate the schema." This is related to what is pointed out as the ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985694">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/755/image/coversmall Religion For Thought: Writings and Lectures, Volume 5 by Paul Ricoeur (review) 2026-03-23 text/html en-US Religion For Thought: Writings and Lectures, Volume 5 by Paul Ricoeur (review) 2026-03-23 2026 TWO Project MUSE® 7877 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 2026-03-23 Varieties of Happiness. Eudaimonism and Greek Ethical Theory by Iakovos Vasiliou (review) https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985691 Varieties of Happiness challenges the idea that ancient ethics is eudaimonist. It examines whether for Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and the early Stoics, eudaimonia plays the following three roles: (i) it is a practical principle, that is, it is the end for the sake of which we ought to act; (ii) it supplies the content of virtuous action—Vasiliou calls this the "Eudaimonist Hope"; (iii) it is the motivation for virtue and virtuous action. Vasiliou criticizes the idea that in ancient ethics, eudaimonia is a Comprehensive Practical Principle, namely, it is what all our actions aim at. He distinguishes eudaimonia conceived as Comprehensive Practical Principle from eudaimonia as Prudential Practical ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985694">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/755/image/coversmall Varieties of Happiness. Eudaimonism and Greek Ethical Theory by Iakovos Vasiliou (review) 2026-03-23 text/html en-US Varieties of Happiness. Eudaimonism and Greek Ethical Theory by Iakovos Vasiliou (review) 2026-03-23 2026 TWO Project MUSE® 8726 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 2026-03-23 Philosophical Abstracts https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985693 Rescher's discussion of Ghazali on choice without preference is revisited in the context of mixed strategy equilibria in the theory of games.G. E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein discussed statements of form "A and I do not believe that A" and offered quite different diagnoses of the apparent absurdity. In this paper, the author examines logical aspects of this paradox, including variants for subjective probability as well as simple belief. In the end the author argues that both Moore's and Wittgenstein's diagnoses appear when we treat belief as a modality, provided we give the language both a third-person and a first-person reading. In this way a classical modal logic can have a nonclassical logic hidden ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985694">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/755/image/coversmall Philosophical Abstracts 2026-03-23 text/html en-US Philosophical Abstracts 2026-03-23 2026 TWO Project MUSE® 111847 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 2026-03-23 A Social History of Analytic Philosophy: How Politics Shaped an Apolitical Philosophy by Christoph Schuringa (review) https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985694 Analytic philosophy (hereafter, AP) was thought to be "unaffected by social and political reality." This was supposed to be a common knowledge, and now Christoph Schuringa aims to debunk this self-understanding in his Social History of Analytic Philosophy (hereafter, SHAP). He argues that, in fact, AP "is the product of, and has continued to be shaped by, the social world in which it finds itself," namely, a liberal free market of abstract arguments. The book is important book—exposing bad-faith positions masqueraded as objective, rational standpoints that are claimed to be the sole heirs of genuine philosophy is a vital task of critical thinking. Revealing AP's misleading methods, ideals, and promises is as ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985694">Read More</a> Project MUSE® https://muse.jhu.edu/ 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/755/image/coversmall A Social History of Analytic Philosophy: How Politics Shaped an Apolitical Philosophy by Christoph Schuringa (review) 2026-03-23 text/html en-US A Social History of Analytic Philosophy: How Politics Shaped an Apolitical Philosophy by Christoph Schuringa (review) 2026-03-23 2026 TWO Project MUSE® 10454 2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00 2026-03-23