Project MUSE®: Journal of the History of Philosophy - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/76
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Journal of the History of Philosophy.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1963) through current issueLatest Articles: Journal of the History of PhilosophyTWOProject MUSE®Journal of the History of Philosophy1538-45860022-5053Latest articles in Journal of the History of Philosophy. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Soul and Body in Aristotle's Theory of Perception
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986602
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aristotle famously says that perception involves the reception of an object's "perceptible form" without its "matter." In relation to perceptible objects, we are like pieces of wax that receive a ring's impression without retaining its iron or gold (De an. 2.12, 424a17–20).1Let us call this the "form without matter" doctrine of perception. It served as the basis for theories of cognition in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, and it might seem to belong with the geocentric model of the universe or the theory of humors as part of a scientific worldview that we abandoned centuries ago. That is certainly how it seemed to early modern philosophers at the vanguard of the New Science: in the Leviathan, Hobbes ridicules
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/76/image/coversmallSoul and Body in Aristotle's Theory of Perception2026-03-31text/htmlen-USSoul and Body in Aristotle's Theory of Perception2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®1519822026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Maimonides's Skeptical Critique of a Divine Intellect, or the Curious Case of Guide I.68
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986603
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few chapters in maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed are situated as centrally in the history of philosophy as part I, chapter 68 (henceforth: I.68). It opens by addressing the reader:
You already know that the following dictum of the philosophers with reference to God … is generally admitted: [i] the dictum being that He is the intellect as well as the intellectually cognizing subject and the intellectually cognized object, and [ii] that those three notions form in Him … one single notion in which there is no multiplicity.
(I.68, 163, my roman numerals).1
This dictum has its origins in Aristotle and the Arabic falasifa and in turn influenced figures such as Leibniz, Solomon Maimon, and Spinoza.2 In two
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/76/image/coversmallMaimonides's Skeptical Critique of a Divine Intellect, or the Curious Case of Guide I.682026-03-31text/htmlen-USMaimonides's Skeptical Critique of a Divine Intellect, or the Curious Case of Guide I.682026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®1734672026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Berkeley's Theory of Vision: A New Look
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986604
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berkeley's theory of vision is both an important part of his idealist philosophical system1 and an influential early work in the foundations of vision science.2 According to the theory, the visual process begins with experience of the proper object of sight, a collection of visible ideas of light and color that occur when an image is projected onto the retina. Through experience, we come to associate these visible ideas with tangible ideas of distance, size, shape, and situation.3 These tangible ideas consist in tactile, haptic, or kinesthetic experiences—feeling the bulgy, rounded shape of an object, feeling your body move a certain distance through space as you traverse a landscape, and so on.4 Once visible ideas
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/76/image/coversmallBerkeley's Theory of Vision: A New Look2026-03-31text/htmlen-USBerkeley's Theory of Vision: A New Look2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®1446472026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Bagehot on Belief
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986606
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the victorian political commentator Walter Bagehot (1826–77) is best known today for his analysis of the efficient and the dignified functions of government in The English Constitution (1867), and perhaps also for his formative and agenda-setting editorship of The Economist from 1861 to 1877. Some will also know him for his natural history of civilization in Physics and Politics (1872) or for his seminal study of the financial market in Lombard Street (1873). Scholars of the nineteenth-century "higher journalism" are familiar with his prolific outpouring of social and economic commentary, his historical essays, and his literary criticism.For philosophers and historians of philosophy, however, Jacques Barzun's
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/76/image/coversmallBagehot on Belief2026-03-31text/htmlen-USBagehot on Belief2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®1188702026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Spinoza: Scholarship Since 2000
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986607
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a random sampling of citizens today in any number of countries around the world would turn up very few, if any, Cartesians, Gassendists, or Leibnizians. The same polling, however, would very likely reveal quite a few Spinozists—individuals who have not only read Spinoza (in university classes, reading groups, or on their own) but also believe that he pretty much got it all right, and thus who have taken his ideas on God, religion, ethics, and politics to heart. Early modern scholars, of course, continue to produce serious work on Descartes, Gassendi, Locke, Leibniz, and their contemporaries. But Spinoza also has many fans—civilians outside academia (the Dutch would call them liefhebbers, amateurs) who are deeply
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/76/image/coversmallSpinoza: Scholarship Since 20002026-03-31text/htmlen-USSpinoza: Scholarship Since 20002026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®2345302026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Fractured Goodness: Aristotle's Response to Plato's Form of the Good by Christopher Shields (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986609
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Christopher Shields's Fractured Goodness is a welcome study of Aristotle's criticisms of the Platonic Form of the Good.The focus of the book is Nicomachean Ethics (NE) 1.6, though Shields occasionally supplements his discussion with material from the parallel chapter in the Eudemian Ethics, 1.8. The book naturally divides into three parts. Its first part, comprising chapters 1 and 2, is preliminary. Here, Shields sketches an account of the Form of the Good, translates NE 1.6 in its entirety, and presents reconstructions of Aristotle's arguments that he goes on to discuss later in the book. He also outlines two common, if extreme, reactions to NE 1.6—that it is either a dismal failure or a rousing success—between
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/76/image/coversmallFractured Goodness: Aristotle's Response to Plato's Form of the Good by Christopher Shields (review)2026-03-31text/htmlen-USFractured Goodness: Aristotle's Response to Plato's Form of the Good by Christopher Shields (review)2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®72162026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31The Politics of German Idealism: Law and Social Change at the Turn of the 19th Century by Christopher Yeomans (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986610
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Christopher Yeomans's The Politics of German Idealism articulates and applies a distinctive historiographical method for writing the history of German Idealist political philosophy. Yeomans's excellent book will be required reading both for historians of philosophy working on the particular figures and topics he deals with, and for those interested in the history of political thought more broadly.Yeomans adopts an interpretative framework developed by Reinhart Koselleck for understanding the Sattelzeit period of German history (roughly, 1770–1830). Yeomans's approach is a specific kind of Koselleckian historicism, which views the German Idealists' historical present as a "field of tension" between three poles:
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/76/image/coversmallThe Politics of German Idealism: Law and Social Change at the Turn of the 19th Century by Christopher Yeomans (review)2026-03-31text/htmlen-USThe Politics of German Idealism: Law and Social Change at the Turn of the 19th Century by Christopher Yeomans (review)2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®95682026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Transcendental Idealism and Metaphysics: Husserl's Critique of Heidegger. Vol I by Daniele De Santis; and: Transcendental Idealism and Metaphysics: Husserl's Critique of Heidegger. Vol 2 by Daniele De Santis (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986611
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Any number of commentators have summarized the history of early phenomenology as the transition from Edmund Husserl's phenomenology to Martin Heidegger's fundamental ontology, a narrative that views Heidegger's ontology as having dealt a fatal blow to Husserl's phenomenology. Daniele De Santis challenges this narrative. In a manner at once historical, systematic, and exhaustive, he reinterprets and reevaluates Husserl's response to Heidegger and positions Husserl's late philosophy as a carefully wrought challenge to Heidegger's fundamental ontology. De Santis's research is meticulous and thorough, but the urge to incorporate all of it into this work leads to excessive length, digressions, and repetitions. The urge
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/76/image/coversmallTranscendental Idealism and Metaphysics: Husserl's Critique of Heidegger. Vol I by Daniele De Santis; and: Transcendental Idealism and Metaphysics: Husserl's Critique of Heidegger. Vol 2 by Daniele De Santis (review)2026-03-31text/htmlen-USTranscendental Idealism and Metaphysics: Husserl's Critique of Heidegger. Vol I by Daniele De Santis; and: Transcendental Idealism and Metaphysics: Husserl's Critique of Heidegger. Vol 2 by Daniele De Santis (review)2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®129542026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31La notion de volonté dans les écrits de saint Augustin entre 388 et 404 by Evgenia Moiseeva (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986612
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There is a substantial body of scholarship that recognizes Augustine as a pivotal figure in the development of the concept of will within Western thought. For example, Hannah Arendt's opinion, as expressed in The Life of the Mind, is well known: Augustine was "the first philosopher of the will." However, the formation of the concept of will within Augustine's own thought has never been subjected to systematic study until now. This comprehensive monograph by Evgenia Moiseeva addresses this gap by focusing on the process that led Augustine to the renowned description of his own will in book 8 of the Confessions.An initial attempt to examine the notion of will in Augustine's works prior to the Confessions was made by
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/76/image/coversmallLa notion de volonté dans les écrits de saint Augustin entre 388 et 404 by Evgenia Moiseeva (review)2026-03-31text/htmlen-USLa notion de volonté dans les écrits de saint Augustin entre 388 et 404 by Evgenia Moiseeva (review)2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®110292026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31On the Divine Things and Their Revelation by Friedrich Henrich Jacobi (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986613
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This is the first English translation of Jacobi's condensed and richly evocative final book, published with a valuable introductory "Study" by the translator, Paolo Livieri. On the Divine Things was not included in the landmark Main Philosophical Writings edited and translated by George di Giovanni in 1994 (McGill-Queen's University Press), so this is a welcome addition to Jacobi's work in English. Livieri consulted with di Giovanni and correlated the translation of key terms in the two volumes. The translated book and Livieri's "Study" also work in tandem on several levels. Livieri's treatment of the historical and intellectual context is thoroughly researched; it locates the Divine Things within the framework of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/76/image/coversmallOn the Divine Things and Their Revelation by Friedrich Henrich Jacobi (review)2026-03-31text/htmlen-USOn the Divine Things and Their Revelation by Friedrich Henrich Jacobi (review)2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®71792026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Neoplatonic Pedagogy and the Alcibiades I: Crafting the Contemplative by James M. Ambury (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986614
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This monograph adds to the growing interest among English-language scholars in late Neoplatonist readings of Plato, in this case the Alcibiades I. Taking the extant commentaries of Proclus and Olympiodorus as his central sources, Ambury places the Alcibiades I within the pedagogical framework developed by the late Neoplatonists, who made this dialogue the first Platonic work to be read in the Academy's curriculum, implicitly bracketing the modern dispute over its authenticity and treating the dialogue, as the Neoplatonists did, as a natural part of the Platonic course of study. Using the Neoplatonic reading as a point of departure, Ambury treats Alcibiades I as a work that transforms its students' souls, inasmuch
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/76/image/coversmallNeoplatonic Pedagogy and the Alcibiades I: Crafting the Contemplative by James M. Ambury (review)2026-03-31text/htmlen-USNeoplatonic Pedagogy and the Alcibiades I: Crafting the Contemplative by James M. Ambury (review)2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®75932026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Rousseau's God: Theology, Religion, and the Natural Goodness of Man by John T. Scott (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986615
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In Rousseau's God, John Scott offers a bold, dense, nuanced, diachronic overview of the role of God in Rousseau's philosophical, political, and religious writings. The chapters of the book follow the chronological order of Rousseau's publications from his second Discourse (1755) to Emile and The Social Contract (1762). One notable exception is the first chapter, which expands both before and after the said publication period.The question of Rousseau's God can be approached from various angles that are not easily reconcilable. While Rousseau's doctrine of the natural goodness of man is often interpreted in light of the concept of theodicy as a theoretical or practical response to the problem of evil, Scott argues
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/76/image/coversmallRousseau's God: Theology, Religion, and the Natural Goodness of Man by John T. Scott (review)2026-03-31text/htmlen-USRousseau's God: Theology, Religion, and the Natural Goodness of Man by John T. Scott (review)2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®76732026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31The "Critique of Judgment" and the Unity of Kant's Critical System by Lara Ostaric (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986616
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Lara Ostaric's The "Critique of Judgment" and the Unity of Kant's Critical System is an ambitious work, confronting three topics that interpreters of Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment (CPJ) usually treat separately. Ostaric explains why the CPJ signals the end of the Critical system, why it forms a systematically unified whole, and how it successfully proves the objective reality of freedom in nature.Ostaric's interpretation unfolds across nine individually readable chapters. The three chapters composing part I focus on Kant's moral philosophy. Chapter 1 argues that construing our freedom as "objectively real" is tantamount to saying we can practically (not theoretically) cognize the object corresponding to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/76/image/coversmallThe "Critique of Judgment" and the Unity of Kant's Critical System by Lara Ostaric (review)2026-03-31text/htmlen-USThe "Critique of Judgment" and the Unity of Kant's Critical System by Lara Ostaric (review)2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®78382026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Consciousness, Time, and Scepticism in Hume's Thought by Lorne Falkenstein (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986617
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Lorne Falkenstein's book is a challenging study of some of the most perplexing, yet underdiscussed problems in Hume's epistemology and metaphysics. The general focus of Consciousness, Time, and Scepticism (CTS) is the reconciliation of Hume's skeptical empiricism with his naturalism. Falkenstein views the problem and its resolution from multiple new angles with the critical insight only a seasoned scholar of Hume and the eighteenth century could possess. Specifically, CTS deals with what Falkenstein calls a "practical" problem about belief for Hume: Hume recommends that we proportion our beliefs to the evidence, but the evidence is always experiential, which Hume shows to be unreliable (1, 3). This problem is
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/76/image/coversmallConsciousness, Time, and Scepticism in Hume's Thought by Lorne Falkenstein (review)2026-03-31text/htmlen-USConsciousness, Time, and Scepticism in Hume's Thought by Lorne Falkenstein (review)2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®73932026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Science of the Soul in Ibn Sīnā's "Pointers and Reminders": A Philological Study by Michael A. Rapoport (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986618
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Avicenna's stance vis-à-vis mysticism and Sufism has been a topic of disagreement among scholars for decades. The proponents of a mystical/Sufi side to Avicenna's thought marshal the last portion of his Pointers and Reminders as supportive evidence. The ninth namaṭ (section) of the second part is crucial in this regard, for there Avicenna adopts a Sufi-colored terminology and addresses traditionally Sufi topics (purification, exercise, knowledge of God).Rapoport weighs in on the debate with the stated goal of proving that, despite appearances to the contrary, Pointers does not support mystical/Sufi readings. Accordingly, Pointers does not deviate from other Avicennian works in any fundamental way, but rather merely
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/76/image/coversmallScience of the Soul in Ibn Sīnā's "Pointers and Reminders": A Philological Study by Michael A. Rapoport (review)2026-03-31text/htmlen-USScience of the Soul in Ibn Sīnā's "Pointers and Reminders": A Philological Study by Michael A. Rapoport (review)2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®86842026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Determinism and Enlightenment: The Collaboration of Diderot and d'Holbach by Ruggero Sciuto (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986619
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Ruggero Sciuto's book is one of several works that, over the last few decades, have helped to shape a new image of Enlightenment philosophy, one that is less simplistic than those produced by the great narratives of modernity, all of which tend to render its content homogeneous and rather superficial. Sciuto does the opposite: he tackles head-on a fundamental philosophical problem, that of determinism, to show that Enlightenment thought responded to it in original, profound, and varied ways. He does so by bringing to the fore two Enlightenment thinkers who have often been neglected, one less so than the other in recent decades: Denis Diderot and Paul Thiry, baron d'Holbach. Sciuto's book thus contributes to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/76/image/coversmallDeterminism and Enlightenment: The Collaboration of Diderot and d'Holbach by Ruggero Sciuto (review)2026-03-31text/htmlen-USDeterminism and Enlightenment: The Collaboration of Diderot and d'Holbach by Ruggero Sciuto (review)2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®64332026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31The Unity of Reason, Reconsidered: On the "Autonomy of Ideas" in the Later Kant
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986620
<p></p>
kant famously treats theoretical and practical reason as two distinct faculties, admitting of two different critiques and resulting in the construction of two different systems—a system of metaphysics (including science) and a system of morals. While theoretical reason is tempted to illegitimately transcend the bounds of experience, practical reason validly derives its principles from pure moral concepts or ideas, abstracted from everything empirical. Thus, as Kant insists in GMS, "Human reason, even in the commonest understanding, can easily be brought to a high measure of correctness and accuracy in moral matters, whereas in its theoretical but pure use it is totally and entirely dialectical" (GMS 4:391).Despite
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/76/image/coversmallThe Unity of Reason, Reconsidered: On the "Autonomy of Ideas" in the Later Kant2026-03-31text/htmlen-USThe Unity of Reason, Reconsidered: On the "Autonomy of Ideas" in the Later Kant2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®1542342026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31