Issues
Issue 50: March/April 2005
EDITORIAL
Let’s Get Medieval
by Rick Lewis
NEWS
News: March/April 2005
French Philo Savaged • Nature vs Nurture in Birds • Iris Murdoch Throws Light on Alzheimers’ • Pentagon Tried to Build ‘Love Bomb’ — News reports by Sue Roberts in London and Lisa Sangoi in New York
The Cathartic Potion of Living Together
Panayiota Vassilopoulou and Jonardon Ganeri report on a convivium in Delhi.
MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY
An Introduction to Medieval Philosophy
Mark Daniels introduces a whole millenium of ideas.
Finding a Philosophy in Leonardo
Chad Trainer on Leonardo da Vinci as a philosopher.
Ibn Khaldun and the Philosophy of History
Imadaldin Al-Jubouri on the medieval Islamic philosopher who pioneered the scientific understanding of history.
Talking About God
In which Mark Goldblatt starts off by discussing Thomas Aquinas and ends up by killing theology.
The Aquinas Inquiry
What would the medieval philosophers who developed the theory of a Just War have thought about the invasion of Iraq? Ian Dungate imagines their response.
The Carolingians
Stephen Stewart on a forgotten golden age of philosophy.
The Perplexing Nature of the Guide for the Perplexed
Mark Daniels introduces the most famous work of Moses Maimonides and asks – was he a philosopher, a heretic or a mystic?
ARTICLES
Ships on a Collision Course
Roger Caldwell revisits reality (and postmodernism, too!).
Why Abstract Painting Isn’t Music
Patricia Railing on the point of abstract art, and on how it works.
CROSSWORD
Crossword
Deiradiotes strikes again with the fourth of his philosophical crosswords. Have a go, if you think you’re hard enough.
LETTERS
Letters
Cover Boy Kant • Faith and Logic • Colin Wilson • Contradictions • Myths and Meanings • Beware of the Triads! • Not Natural? • Consciousness Goes Pop • Trypogaphical Error
COLUMNS
Dear Socrates
Having returned from the turn of the Fourth Century B.C. to the turn of the Twenty-First A.D., Socrates has eagerly signed on as a Philosophy Now columnist so that he may continue to carry out his divinely-inspired dialogic mission.
Calling a Spade a Shovel
by Joel Marks
Wittgenstein Solves (Posthumously) the Species Problem
Our science columnist Massimo Pigliucci on a longstanding problem in biology and how philosophy helps.
REVIEWS
Challenging Postmodernism by David Detmer
Barry Seidman enjoys David Detmer’s provocative book about Postmodernism, Humanism and the Left.
The Return of the Design Argument
Taner Edis reviews two books about evolution and design.
Spanglish
Thomas Wartenberg ponders the classic dilemma of the Good Mother in a film about ethnicity, renunciation and cookery: Spanglish.
FICTION
A Bale of Woe
The name of the medieval logician Jean Buridan (c.1295-1358) is forever linked to a curious problem in decision-making. Peter Cave recounts his own sad but instructive meeting with Buridan’s Ass.