Volume 83, Issue 1

It is agreed by most scholars that the Stoics were compatibilists regarding the relation between responsibility and determinism. On this view, the Stoics depart from two other positions. Unlike some eliminative determinists — labelled in modern discussions “hard-determinists”, but already active in Antiquity — they assert that, despite determinism, there are things that “depend on us”, or are : things for which we are genuinely responsible and for which, therefore, we may justifiably be praised or blamed. But the Stoics also depart from the libertarian or “anti-determinist” 2 a position championed by the Epicureans in the early Hellenistic period and by Alexander of Aphrodisias on behalf of the Peripatetics, towards the end of the second century AD. Unlike the libertarian, who agrees on the incompatibility alleged by the hard-determinist, but preserves responsibility by rejectin necessitation, the Stoics preserve both responsibility and necessitation.

Einleitung Descartes hat sich über 30 Jahre hinweg zu dem Phänomen der Schwere geäuβert. Seine Erklärungsversuche der Schwere in den frühen privaten Notizen, seinen frühen Briefen bis hin zur Niederschrift von Le Monde unterliegen einer deutlichen Entwicklung. Diese Entwicklung ist nicht bloβ von wissenschaftshistorischem Interesse, sondern verspricht auch ein Licht auf diejenigen Gründe zu werfen, die ihn dazu veranlaβt haben, die scholastische Terminologie zu verwerfen, auf die er seine frühen Erklärungsansätze gestützt hatte. Dies gilt besonders für den in diesem Zusammenhang zentralen Begriff der realen Qualität. Es wird sich zeigen, daβ Descartes seine Ablehnung dieses Begriffs zu unterschiedlichen Zeiten mit ganz unterschiedlichen Argumenten begründet hat. Damit möchte ich eine Auffassung korrigieren, die zuweilen in Untersuchungen zu Descartes' Verhältnis zum scholastischen Vokabular wenn auch nicht explizit vorgetragen, so aber doch nahegelegt wird: Descartes habe dieses Vokabular ontologischer Vorbehalte wegen zurückgewiesen. Diese Fehldeutung scheint mir auch Gilsons einfluβreicher Untersuchung zugrunde zu liegen.

More than two hundred years after its publication, David Hume's Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals is still widely regarded as either a footnote to the more philosophically interesting third book of the Treatise , or an abbreviated, more stylish, version of that earlier work. These standard interpretations are rather difficult to square with Hume's own assessment of the second Enquiry . Are we to think that Hume called the EPM “incomparably the best” of all his writings only because he preferred that later style of exposition? Or worse, should we take his preference for the second Enquiry as a sign of aging literary vanity? Does Hume's stated preference for the EPM in no way speak to its philosophical content?

The De causis procatarctis (CP) is one of a number of Galen's works that survive only in medieval Latin translations by Niccolò da Reggio. A version edited and equipped with a Rückübersetzung by Kurt Bardong appeared in the Corpus medicorum graecorum in 1937 (Supp. vol. II). For his edition R. J. Hankinson (RJH) has examined some of the manuscripts afresh, including one that Bardong seems not to have known about (52 ff.). He provides an English translation instead of his predecessor's Rückübersetzung, and has supplied his edition with an extensive introduction, a detailed commentary, indices, bibliographies and a comparative glossary of Greek and Latin terms, which will help make the work available to a broader audience while enhancing its usefulness to all its readers.

Ein gelungener Versuch der Quadratur des Zirkels? Zu H. G. Zekls Neubearbeitung des Aristotelischen Organons . (Hermann Weidemann) Bernd Ludwig: Die Wiederentdeckung des Epikureischen Naturrechts. Zu Thomas Hobbes' philosophischer Entwicklung von De Cive zum Leviathan im Pariser Exil 1640–1651 , Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 1998, 480 S. (Karl Schuhmann) Marleen Rozemond: Descartes's Dualism . Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998. xviii + 279 pp. (Michael Della Rocca) Margaret Dauler Wilson: Ideas and Mechanism. Essays on Early Modern Philosophy , Princeton University Press, 1999, pp. xx, 524. (John Carriero)