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7 - Ockham and the Foundations of Modality in the Fourteenth Century
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- By Calvin G. Normore, University of Queensland
- Edited by Max Cresswell, Victoria University of Wellington, Edwin Mares, Victoria University of Wellington, Adriane Rini, Massey University, Auckland
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- Logical Modalities from Aristotle to Carnap
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- 05 September 2016
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- 15 September 2016, pp 133-153
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Summary
Prologue
There was a very considerable development of modal logic within the mediaeval Latin tradition both before and rather soon after the translation of Aristotle's Prior Analytics. The subject was explored, largely without benefit of the Prior Analytics, by Abelard and his generation and with the Prior Analytics in hand by Kilwardby and his. By the early fourteenth century we find a good deal of reflection on just what was involved in a modal logic. In particular by this time there are a well-developed propositional logic and a well-developed syllogistic and the question of how modality interacted with each could be and was posed directly. In this chapter I hope first to present a sketch of the semantic and metaphysical foundation of modality as it appeared in the first half of the fourteenth century and then some of the nuts and bolts of modal logic as it was developed by Ockham.
Part I. The Foundation
Something between a Fable and a Fact
Once upon a time, perhaps by the mid- to late thirteenth century, the concept of possibility was intimately connected with that of power – some state of affairs was thought possible just in case it was thought there was some agent who could bring it about. For adherents of the Abrahamic religions the chief among these agents was an omnipotent God. Exactly what omnipotence meant is not entirely clear (it does not seem to require that God be able to make it true that Adam freely eats forbidden fruit, for example) but it at least entailed that if any agent could make or destroy a thing then God could make or destroy that thing. For the Latin West this picture had already been given a vivid and interesting formulation by Anselm of Canterbury and it had been developed in some earlier thirteenth century thinkers, Robert Grosseteste, for example. It remained central until the middle of the fourteenth century when a number of writers, Thomas Bradwardine and Gregory of Rimini notable among them, launched us on a path which broke the connection between possibility and power and eventually replaced it with a conception of possibility as a semantic or logical matter.
Contributors
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- By Mitchell Aboulafia, Frederick Adams, Marilyn McCord Adams, Robert M. Adams, Laird Addis, James W. Allard, David Allison, William P. Alston, Karl Ameriks, C. Anthony Anderson, David Leech Anderson, Lanier Anderson, Roger Ariew, David Armstrong, Denis G. Arnold, E. J. Ashworth, Margaret Atherton, Robin Attfield, Bruce Aune, Edward Wilson Averill, Jody Azzouni, Kent Bach, Andrew Bailey, Lynne Rudder Baker, Thomas R. Baldwin, Jon Barwise, George Bealer, William Bechtel, Lawrence C. Becker, Mark A. Bedau, Ernst Behler, José A. Benardete, Ermanno Bencivenga, Jan Berg, Michael Bergmann, Robert L. Bernasconi, Sven Bernecker, Bernard Berofsky, Rod Bertolet, Charles J. Beyer, Christian Beyer, Joseph Bien, Joseph Bien, Peg Birmingham, Ivan Boh, James Bohman, Daniel Bonevac, Laurence BonJour, William J. Bouwsma, Raymond D. Bradley, Myles Brand, Richard B. Brandt, Michael E. Bratman, Stephen E. Braude, Daniel Breazeale, Angela Breitenbach, Jason Bridges, David O. Brink, Gordon G. Brittan, Justin Broackes, Dan W. Brock, Aaron Bronfman, Jeffrey E. Brower, Bartosz Brozek, Anthony Brueckner, Jeffrey Bub, Lara Buchak, Otavio Bueno, Ann E. Bumpus, Robert W. Burch, John Burgess, Arthur W. Burks, Panayot Butchvarov, Robert E. Butts, Marina Bykova, Patrick Byrne, David Carr, Noël Carroll, Edward S. Casey, Victor Caston, Victor Caston, Albert Casullo, Robert L. Causey, Alan K. L. Chan, Ruth Chang, Deen K. Chatterjee, Andrew Chignell, Roderick M. Chisholm, Kelly J. Clark, E. J. Coffman, Robin Collins, Brian P. Copenhaver, John Corcoran, John Cottingham, Roger Crisp, Frederick J. Crosson, Antonio S. Cua, Phillip D. Cummins, Martin Curd, Adam Cureton, Andrew Cutrofello, Stephen Darwall, Paul Sheldon Davies, Wayne A. Davis, Timothy Joseph Day, Claudio de Almeida, Mario De Caro, Mario De Caro, John Deigh, C. F. Delaney, Daniel C. Dennett, Michael R. DePaul, Michael Detlefsen, Daniel Trent Devereux, Philip E. Devine, John M. Dillon, Martin C. Dillon, Robert DiSalle, Mary Domski, Alan Donagan, Paul Draper, Fred Dretske, Mircea Dumitru, Wilhelm Dupré, Gerald Dworkin, John Earman, Ellery Eells, Catherine Z. Elgin, Berent Enç, Ronald P. Endicott, Edward Erwin, John Etchemendy, C. Stephen Evans, Susan L. Feagin, Solomon Feferman, Richard Feldman, Arthur Fine, Maurice A. Finocchiaro, William FitzPatrick, Richard E. Flathman, Gvozden Flego, Richard Foley, Graeme Forbes, Rainer Forst, Malcolm R. Forster, Daniel Fouke, Patrick Francken, Samuel Freeman, Elizabeth Fricker, Miranda Fricker, Michael Friedman, Michael Fuerstein, Richard A. Fumerton, Alan Gabbey, Pieranna Garavaso, Daniel Garber, Jorge L. A. Garcia, Robert K. Garcia, Don Garrett, Philip Gasper, Gerald Gaus, Berys Gaut, Bernard Gert, Roger F. Gibson, Cody Gilmore, Carl Ginet, Alan H. Goldman, Alvin I. Goldman, Alfonso Gömez-Lobo, Lenn E. Goodman, Robert M. Gordon, Stefan Gosepath, Jorge J. E. Gracia, Daniel W. Graham, George A. Graham, Peter J. Graham, Richard E. Grandy, I. Grattan-Guinness, John Greco, Philip T. Grier, Nicholas Griffin, Nicholas Griffin, David A. Griffiths, Paul J. Griffiths, Stephen R. Grimm, Charles L. Griswold, Charles B. Guignon, Pete A. Y. Gunter, Dimitri Gutas, Gary Gutting, Paul Guyer, Kwame Gyekye, Oscar A. Haac, Raul Hakli, Raul Hakli, Michael Hallett, Edward C. Halper, Jean Hampton, R. James Hankinson, K. R. Hanley, Russell Hardin, Robert M. Harnish, William Harper, David Harrah, Kevin Hart, Ali Hasan, William Hasker, John Haugeland, Roger Hausheer, William Heald, Peter Heath, Richard Heck, John F. Heil, Vincent F. Hendricks, Stephen Hetherington, Francis Heylighen, Kathleen Marie Higgins, Risto Hilpinen, Harold T. Hodes, Joshua Hoffman, Alan Holland, Robert L. Holmes, Richard Holton, Brad W. Hooker, Terence E. Horgan, Tamara Horowitz, Paul Horwich, Vittorio Hösle, Paul Hoβfeld, Daniel Howard-Snyder, Frances Howard-Snyder, Anne Hudson, Deal W. Hudson, Carl A. Huffman, David L. Hull, Patricia Huntington, Thomas Hurka, Paul Hurley, Rosalind Hursthouse, Guillermo Hurtado, Ronald E. Hustwit, Sarah Hutton, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, Harry A. Ide, David Ingram, Philip J. Ivanhoe, Alfred L. Ivry, Frank Jackson, Dale Jacquette, Joseph Jedwab, Richard Jeffrey, David Alan Johnson, Edward Johnson, Mark D. Jordan, Richard Joyce, Hwa Yol Jung, Robert Hillary Kane, Tomis Kapitan, Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley, James A. Keller, Ralph Kennedy, Sergei Khoruzhii, Jaegwon Kim, Yersu Kim, Nathan L. King, Patricia Kitcher, Peter D. Klein, E. D. Klemke, Virginia Klenk, George L. Kline, Christian Klotz, Simo Knuuttila, Joseph J. Kockelmans, Konstantin Kolenda, Sebastian Tomasz Kołodziejczyk, Isaac Kramnick, Richard Kraut, Fred Kroon, Manfred Kuehn, Steven T. Kuhn, Henry E. Kyburg, John Lachs, Jennifer Lackey, Stephen E. Lahey, Andrea Lavazza, Thomas H. Leahey, Joo Heung Lee, Keith Lehrer, Dorothy Leland, Noah M. Lemos, Ernest LePore, Sarah-Jane Leslie, Isaac Levi, Andrew Levine, Alan E. Lewis, Daniel E. Little, Shu-hsien Liu, Shu-hsien Liu, Alan K. L. Chan, Brian Loar, Lawrence B. Lombard, John Longeway, Dominic McIver Lopes, Michael J. Loux, E. J. Lowe, Steven Luper, Eugene C. Luschei, William G. Lycan, David Lyons, David Macarthur, Danielle Macbeth, Scott MacDonald, Jacob L. Mackey, Louis H. Mackey, Penelope Mackie, Edward H. Madden, Penelope Maddy, G. B. Madison, Bernd Magnus, Pekka Mäkelä, Rudolf A. Makkreel, David Manley, William E. Mann (W.E.M.), Vladimir Marchenkov, Peter Markie, Jean-Pierre Marquis, Ausonio Marras, Mike W. Martin, A. P. Martinich, William L. McBride, David McCabe, Storrs McCall, Hugh J. McCann, Robert N. McCauley, John J. McDermott, Sarah McGrath, Ralph McInerny, Daniel J. McKaughan, Thomas McKay, Michael McKinsey, Brian P. McLaughlin, Ernan McMullin, Anthonie Meijers, Jack W. Meiland, William Jason Melanson, Alfred R. Mele, Joseph R. Mendola, Christopher Menzel, Michael J. Meyer, Christian B. Miller, David W. Miller, Peter Millican, Robert N. Minor, Phillip Mitsis, James A. Montmarquet, Michael S. Moore, Tim Moore, Benjamin Morison, Donald R. Morrison, Stephen J. Morse, Paul K. Moser, Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, Ian Mueller, James Bernard Murphy, Mark C. Murphy, Steven Nadler, Jan Narveson, Alan Nelson, Jerome Neu, Samuel Newlands, Kai Nielsen, Ilkka Niiniluoto, Carlos G. Noreña, Calvin G. Normore, David Fate Norton, Nikolaj Nottelmann, Donald Nute, David S. Oderberg, Steve Odin, Michael O’Rourke, Willard G. Oxtoby, Heinz Paetzold, George S. Pappas, Anthony J. Parel, Lydia Patton, R. P. Peerenboom, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, Adriaan T. Peperzak, Derk Pereboom, Jaroslav Peregrin, Glen Pettigrove, Philip Pettit, Edmund L. Pincoffs, Andrew Pinsent, Robert B. Pippin, Alvin Plantinga, Louis P. Pojman, Richard H. Popkin, John F. Post, Carl J. Posy, William J. Prior, Richard Purtill, Michael Quante, Philip L. Quinn, Philip L. Quinn, Elizabeth S. Radcliffe, Diana Raffman, Gerard Raulet, Stephen L. Read, Andrews Reath, Andrew Reisner, Nicholas Rescher, Henry S. Richardson, Robert C. Richardson, Thomas Ricketts, Wayne D. Riggs, Mark Roberts, Robert C. Roberts, Luke Robinson, Alexander Rosenberg, Gary Rosenkranz, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Adina L. Roskies, William L. Rowe, T. M. Rudavsky, Michael Ruse, Bruce Russell, Lilly-Marlene Russow, Dan Ryder, R. M. Sainsbury, Joseph Salerno, Nathan Salmon, Wesley C. Salmon, Constantine Sandis, David H. Sanford, Marco Santambrogio, David Sapire, Ruth A. Saunders, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Charles Sayward, James P. Scanlan, Richard Schacht, Tamar Schapiro, Frederick F. Schmitt, Jerome B. Schneewind, Calvin O. Schrag, Alan D. Schrift, George F. Schumm, Jean-Loup Seban, David N. Sedley, Kenneth Seeskin, Krister Segerberg, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Dennis M. Senchuk, James F. Sennett, William Lad Sessions, Stewart Shapiro, Tommie Shelby, Donald W. Sherburne, Christopher Shields, Roger A. Shiner, Sydney Shoemaker, Robert K. Shope, Kwong-loi Shun, Wilfried Sieg, A. John Simmons, Robert L. Simon, Marcus G. Singer, Georgette Sinkler, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Matti T. Sintonen, Lawrence Sklar, Brian Skyrms, Robert C. Sleigh, Michael Anthony Slote, Hans Sluga, Barry Smith, Michael Smith, Robin Smith, Robert Sokolowski, Robert C. Solomon, Marta Soniewicka, Philip Soper, Ernest Sosa, Nicholas Southwood, Paul Vincent Spade, T. L. S. Sprigge, Eric O. Springsted, George J. Stack, Rebecca Stangl, Jason Stanley, Florian Steinberger, Sören Stenlund, Christopher Stephens, James P. Sterba, Josef Stern, Matthias Steup, M. A. Stewart, Leopold Stubenberg, Edith Dudley Sulla, Frederick Suppe, Jere Paul Surber, David George Sussman, Sigrún Svavarsdóttir, Zeno G. Swijtink, Richard Swinburne, Charles C. Taliaferro, Robert B. Talisse, John Tasioulas, Paul Teller, Larry S. Temkin, Mark Textor, H. S. Thayer, Peter Thielke, Alan Thomas, Amie L. Thomasson, Katherine Thomson-Jones, Joshua C. Thurow, Vzalerie Tiberius, Terrence N. Tice, Paul Tidman, Mark C. Timmons, William Tolhurst, James E. Tomberlin, Rosemarie Tong, Lawrence Torcello, Kelly Trogdon, J. D. Trout, Robert E. Tully, Raimo Tuomela, John Turri, Martin M. Tweedale, Thomas Uebel, Jennifer Uleman, James Van Cleve, Harry van der Linden, Peter van Inwagen, Bryan W. Van Norden, René van Woudenberg, Donald Phillip Verene, Samantha Vice, Thomas Vinci, Donald Wayne Viney, Barbara Von Eckardt, Peter B. M. Vranas, Steven J. Wagner, William J. Wainwright, Paul E. Walker, Robert E. Wall, Craig Walton, Douglas Walton, Eric Watkins, Richard A. Watson, Michael V. Wedin, Rudolph H. Weingartner, Paul Weirich, Paul J. Weithman, Carl Wellman, Howard Wettstein, Samuel C. Wheeler, Stephen A. White, Jennifer Whiting, Edward R. Wierenga, Michael Williams, Fred Wilson, W. Kent Wilson, Kenneth P. Winkler, John F. Wippel, Jan Woleński, Allan B. Wolter, Nicholas P. Wolterstorff, Rega Wood, W. Jay Wood, Paul Woodruff, Alison Wylie, Gideon Yaffe, Takashi Yagisawa, Yutaka Yamamoto, Keith E. Yandell, Xiaomei Yang, Dean Zimmerman, Günter Zoller, Catherine Zuckert, Michael Zuckert, Jack A. Zupko (J.A.Z.)
- Edited by Robert Audi, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy
- Published online:
- 05 August 2015
- Print publication:
- 27 April 2015, pp ix-xxx
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49 - Accidents and modes
- from VIII - Metaphysics
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- By Calvin G. Normore, University of California, Los Angeles
- Edited by Robert Pasnau, University of Colorado Boulder
- Edited in association with Christina van Dyke, Calvin College, Michigan
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- Book:
- The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy
- Published online:
- 05 August 2014
- Print publication:
- 19 June 2014, pp 674-686
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Summary
The Middle Ages inherited from antiquity an approach to metaphysics which supposed both that, to provide an account of being, one provides a theory of categories, and that a division into substance and accident is fundamental to such an account. During the thousand years between Boethius and Descartes, this fundamental division was subjected to careful scrutiny and modified dramatically. Eventually even the term ‘accident’ was partially eclipsed by a competing term, ‘mode,’ which bespoke a competing metaphysical picture; by the mid-seventeenth century Descartes was able to contrast his ontology of substances and modes with an ontology of substances and “real” accidents.
The doctrine of real accidents that Descartes rejects has two medieval roots. One lies in the related theological mysteries of the Eucharist and the Incarnation, and the other lies in the perceived need for real accidents to account for at least some physical phenomena. This chapter explores how these roots formed and developed, how accidents came to be “real,” and how real accidents came to be perceived as a philosophical mistake.
THE CATEGORIES FRAMEWORK
In his Categories chapter 4, Aristotle lists ten heads under which nouns and adjectives fall: Substance, Quality, Quantity, Relative, Place, Time, Situation, Habit, Action and Passion. Although there is little reason to think Aristotle was wedded to this list, it had special salience in the early medieval period, both because the Categories was translated and commented on by Boethius and because the list was also found in “On the Ten Categories” (De decem categoriae), a work attributed to Augustine (but likely from a hand influenced by Themistius).
Decadence and Objectivity: Ideals for Work in the Post-consumer SocietyLawrence Haworth Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977. Pp. xi, 169. $8.50
- Calvin G. Normore
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- Journal:
- Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie / Volume 22 / Issue 4 / December 1983
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 05 May 2010, pp. 743-748
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4 - Duns Scotus’s Modal Theory
- Edited by Thomas Williams, University of Iowa
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- The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus
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- 28 May 2006
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- 09 December 2002, pp 129-160
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Summary
Recent interest in John Duns Scotus’s modal theory derives largely from the suggestion that Scotus was the first in the Middle Ages, and perhaps the first ever, to employ a synchronic conception of modality, one that allowed for alternative possibilities at a given time, and from the debate about whether Scotus introduced a notion of logical possibility divorced from any question of what powers there are. These issues interact in the question of whether Scotus had any analogue of the notion of possible world in either the Leibnizian or the late twentieth-century sense. Late medieval interest in Scotus’s modal theory derived largely from its role in his account of divine and human freedom and from the debate about whether possibility itself depended in any way upon God. This discussion attempts to shed some light on these issues and to locate them in the context of the issues in the theory of modality with which Scotus and his contemporaries were themselves concerned.
It would be desirable in an essay of this kind to present a picture of the development of Scotus’s thought about modality, but in the current state of scholarship that is not possible. Despite nearly a century of work by the Scotus Commission and by a number of very able scholars outside it, our understanding of the textual tradition of Scotus’s works remains radically incomplete. In such a situation any hypothesis about the development of Scotus’s modal theory must be highly speculative. In what follows I will not attempt to trace such a development but will attempt to limn the modal theory with which Scotus seems to have been working at the end of his (unfortunately short) life.
2 - Some Aspects of Ockham's Logic
- Edited by Paul Vincent Spade, Indiana University
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- The Cambridge Companion to Ockham
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- 28 May 2006
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- 13 December 1999, pp 31-52
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Summary
Medieval logic begins for most purposes with the work of Boethius, who attempted a Latin rendering of the standard late-antique Greek logic course. As the Boethian treatises began to be more widely studied in the ninth and tenth centuries, an indigenous Latin tradition in logic developed that reached its zenith during the twelfth century in the work of figures like Peter Abelard. It was within this indigenous tradition that the major developments in the medieval theory of inference took place and that the foundations of later pictures of meaning were laid. As the work of the Byzantine grammarian Priscian became known in Western Europe, the grammatical and semantic theory embodied in it fused with the indigenous tradition. The resulting picture was then transformed by a flood of new translations of texts of Aristotle, of Greek commentaries, and of Islamic commentaries and treatises. The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw the digestion of this material and its integration into the already existing tradition. Some consequences of this were new theories of the semantic properties of terms (including theories of the analysis of sentences), the development of propositional logic more or less as we know it today, the working out of the theory of the categorical syllogism (including its modal extensions), the flowering of modal logic generally, and the development of a general theory of inference. By the mid-fourteenth century these developments were more or less complete. William Ockham is one of the greatest of the figures who completed them. He is in some ways an idiosyncratic logician, but his importance can hardly be overestimated.
2 - Medieval connectives, Hellenistic connections: the strange case of propositional logic
- Edited by Margaret J. Osler, University of Calgary
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- Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquillity
- Published online:
- 13 November 2009
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- 30 August 1991, pp 25-38
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Summary
One of the more striking differences between medieval and early modern philosophy is the status accorded the study of the theory of valid arguments. The study of this theory dominated the first two years of a medieval arts curriculum, and its influence permeated university life in the Middle Ages. There is nothing shocking about a medieval theologian who is discussing predestination or the creation of the world in time stopping his argument to spend a folio or two outlining some part of a logical system which he intends to use in resolving the question. It is partly this inter-penetration of logic and substantive philosophical discussion which makes much medieval philosophy seem so familiar to someone brought up in the twentieth-century Anglo-American tradition.
Within early modern philosophy the attitude is very different, an attitude exemplified by Descartes's discussion of the role of deduction in his Regulae:
Let us now review all the actions of the intellect by means of which we are able to arrive at a knowledge of things with no fear of being mistaken. We recognize only two: Intuition and deduction.
By intuition I … mean … the conception of a clear and attentive mind which is so easy and distinct that there can be no room for doubt about what we are understanding. Alternatively, and this comes to the same thing, intuition is the indubitable conception of a clear and attentive mind which proceeds solely from the light of reason. Because it is simpler it is more certain than deduction, though deduction, as we noted above, is not something a man can perform wrongly.
Doxology and the History of Philosophy
- Calvin G. Normore
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- Journal:
- Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume / Volume 16 / 1990
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 01 January 2020, pp. 203-226
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- 1990
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Philosophy is not history, not even intellectual history. The history of philosophy is history, a branch of intellectual history. Yet it is widely believed, by philosophers and historians of philosophy alike, that the study of the history of philosophy is an important part of the study of philosophy.
Robert Nozick Anarchy, State, and Utopia, New York: Basic Books, Don Mills, Ontario; General Publishing. 1974. Pp. XVI, 367.
- Calvin G. Normore
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- Journal:
- Canadian Journal of Philosophy / Volume 7 / Issue 1 / March 1977
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 01 July 1976, pp. 187-201
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