Volume 89, Issue 2

Democritus is generally understood to have anticipated the seventeenthcentury distinction between primary and secondary qualities. I argue that this is not the case, and that instead for Democritus all sensible qualities are conventional.

This paper intends to show that Aquinas gives a non-deterministic account of free decision. Angelic sin is the eminent test case: ex hypothesi , angels are supremely intelligent and not subject to ignorance, passions, or negatively disposing habits. Nothing predetermines their choice; rather it ultimately depends on their freedom alone. All angels acted based upon reasons, but why certain angels acted for an inadequate reason whereas others for an adequate reason cannot be fully explained. Thomas's action theory allows him to explain angelic choice as contingent and selfdetermined. The salient features of this explanation are transferable to human free decision.

According to Margaret Cavendish the entire natural world is essentially rational such that everything thinks in some way or another. In this paper, I examine why Cavendish would believe that the natural world is ubiquitously rational, arguing against the usual account, which holds that she does so in order to account for the orderly production of very complex phenomena (e.g. living beings) given the limits of the mechanical philosophy. Rather, I argue, she attributes ubiquitous rationality to the natural world in order to ground a theory of the ubiquitous freedom of nature, which in turn accounts for both the world's orderly and disorderly behavior.

O'Keefe's contention that Epicurus devised the atomic swerve to counter a threat to the efficacy of reason posed by the thesis that the future is fixed regardless of what we do, is not supported by the evidence he adduces. Epicurus' own words in On nature XXV , and testimony from Lucretius and Cicero, tell far more strongly in favour of the traditional view, that Epicurus' concerns were causal determinism and its threat to moral responsiblity for our actions and characters.

In this paper I examine G. R. Carone's interpretation of the mind-body problem in late Plato, published in a recent issue of this review. Against Carone's attempt to attribute Plato with a reductionist thesis, whereby the soul can be reduced to the body, I argue that a careful reading of the Timaeus confirms that Plato held a dualist thesis, the soul consisting of an incorporeal substance which cannot be reduced to the corporeal substance the body consists of.

Lorenzo Vinciguerra: Spinoza et le signe. La genèse de l'imagination . Paris: Vrin 2005, 334 Seiten. (Ursula Renz) Andrea Falcon: Aristotle and the Science of Nature: Unity without Uniformity . Cambridge New York: Cambridge University Press 2005, xvii+139 pp. (Lindsay Judson)