Returning to the Heavens: Plato’s Socrates on Anaxagoras and Natural Philosophy

Readers of Plato since antiquity have generally taken Socrates’ intellectual autobiography in the Phaedo as a signal of his turn away from the study of natural philosophy. They have turned instead to characters such as Timaeus for evidence of Plato’s pursuit of physics. This article argues that Plato’s Socrates himself developed a philosophy of nature in his criticism of Anaxagoras and his subsequent philosophic pursuits. Socrates’ autobiography places the study of nature in a foundational position within the development of his philosophic method. In the Apology, Socrates further elaborated his investigation into nature through his understanding of theology. Finally, in the Phaedrus, Socrates connects the study of nature with the study of rhetoric as tools for virtue. Therefore, Plato’s Socrates does not reject or abandon physics, as has often been suggested, but rather, he incorporates it into his own philosophic project and challenges its practitioners to connect their own inquiries with human affairs.

Beyond Abstraction: Philosophy as a Practical Qualitative Research Method

In this paper, I take up a discussion of what philosophic method is, and why it should be viewed as an important qualitative research method. After clarifying the nature of philosophic method within the larger framework of social practices, I argue that philosophy is important to both practice and research, and I suggest that philosophers work in concert with other qualitative researchers. I argue that recently (relatively speaking) philosophy has been viewed with some understandable disdain among both practitioners and researchers as an enjoyable but abstract (and therefore useless) social practice. That perception can be fixed but only if philosophical research becomes once again explicitly relevant to practice (particularly educational practice). Finally, I provide a brief example of how philosophy can indeed be relevant to practice from a recent symposium that I participated in on reflection in service-learning education.

On the Lack of ‘True Philosophic Spirit’ in Aquinas: Commitment v. Tracking in Philosophic Method

Bertrand Russell famously disparaged Thomas Aquinas as having ‘little of the true philosophic spirit’, because ‘he does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead.’ Like many of Russell's pronouncements, this is breathtakingly supercilious and unfair. Still, even an enthusiastic admirer of Aquinas may worry that there is something in it, that there is something wrong with religious ‘commitments’ in philosophy. I examine Russell's objection by comparing standards of permissibility in epistemology with standards of permissibility in ethics, where these issues are better understood. I conclude that the epistemic standard behind Russell's criticism is no less contentious in epistemology than, say, direct utilitarianism is in ethics.

Charles Hartshorne on Metaphysical Statements

This article supplements Wolfhart Pannenberg's Metaphysics and the Idea of God by offering a systematic introduction to the tasks and criteria of metaphysics through an exposition of various statements of Charles Hartshome on the subject, chiefly his Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method. The article is focused around Hartshorne's understanding of the precise roles of empirical verification and falsification in relation to metaphysical statements, and his challenge to the empiricist dogmas that “necessary truths = a priori = analytic,” and that a statement is rendered contingent by the mere fact that it asserts existence. Some elaboration follows of the implications of Hartshorne's neoclassical metaphysics for theism, and for modal logic.

A Woman's Thought or a Man's Discipline? The Letters of Abelard and Heloise

This paper is part of a larger project of recovering the work of women thinkers. Heloise has traditionally been read as either a foil of Abelard or his intellectual appendage. In this paper, I present her views on love, religious devotion, and language as an alternative to philosophic method as it is conceived by Abelard.