Marguerite Deslauriers

Aristotle on Definition

This work examines Aristotle’s discussions of definition in his logical works and the Metaphysics, and argues for the importance of definitions of simple substances, drawing the connection between definitions as first principles of demonstration and as statements of essence.

The common good

One of the hot topics in the presidential election campaign is healthcare and healthcare reform, but is there a Christian perspective on healthcare? If so, what is it? I had the privilege of attending the annual bioethics conference hosted by the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity and Trinity International University this past July. Guided by this year’s theme, “Healthcare and the Common Good,” some of the health profession’s leading practitioners discussed issues of healthcare and the health profession from a Christian perspective.

marie de gournay and montaigne

introduction On 2 May 1596, Marie de Gournay, in correspondence with Juste Lipse about her relationship with Montaigne, who had died in 1592, wrote: ‘‘J’ étois sa fille; je suis son sepulcre. J’ étois son second estre; je suis ses cendres [I was his daughter; I am his sepulcher. I was his second self; I am his ashes]’’ (Œuvres complètes, Annexe IX: Correspondance, 1937). It is unlikely to be a spontaneous expression of grief. More probably, these lines are a well-considered statement of her claim to a kind of identity with Montaigne, and her intention to preserve that identity in her life after his death. Most commentators have read this and other remarks by Gournay about her relationship with and to Montaigne as crude attempts to assert her own worth by associating herself with him. They may be such. But the reception of Gournay’s work is so often informed by hostility towards her that we ought to be cautious in accepting this as a complete explanation. This is especially true because the metaphysical starkness of her claims indicates that something more may be at work. Gournay, I will argue, asserts three different identity claims: first, that she and Montaigne are one, or that she is his ‘‘second estre’’; second, that friendship implies that the two friends are one, in sharing a soul; third, that the male and female of a species are one because they share the same species form, or soul. We can trace the links between Gournay’s stated project of perpetuating Montaigne’s person and promoting his work posthumously, her conceptualization of friendship, and her political claim of equality for women through the identity of male and female. Gournay may well have had self-interested motives in linking herself with Montaigne. I argue that she also had philosophical and political reasons for asserting their unity through friendship and the possession of reason, and for using the récit, or essay, as a form for their expression. I offer first an outline of Gournay’s biography, insofar as this is necessary to understand her work and her relationship with Montaigne. I then turn to consider the context and substance of her statements of identity with Montaigne, beginning with the epithet ‘‘fille d’alliance de Montaigne’’ that she adopted at the outset of her publishing career. In the next section I examine the conception of friendship that Gournay borrows from Montaigne and elaborates, insofar as it involves the identity of friends. The subsequent section likens this view of friendship to Gournay’s argument for the equality of women with men through the identity of their souls. marguerite deslauriers

The Allure of the Archives

index sets an agenda as the opening chapter, and after this the archive fever is contagious, with roughly half of the 14 chapters engaging with Derrida’s Mal d’Archive to one extent or another. Perhaps Martin McQuillan deploys the deconstruction of the library to most enlightening (and readable) effect, showing, via Derrida’s Post-Card, how its authority is always compromised from within; its classification systems never more than a secondary outcome of their own performance. A similar point is conveyed, albeit in a quite different mode, by Elizabeth Evenden in her chapter on early modern collector Archbishop Matthew Parker, whose library created an authoritative version of church history, harnessed to his own political agenda. Parker not only selectively bound and categorised Anglo-Saxon manuscripts into codex books to suit his own ends, but even counterfeited material where necessary, effectively producing the very texts on which he based his authority. The strength of Evenden’s piece lies in its thorough grounding in historical and material specifics. Elsewhere, ‘The Library’ threatens to become a rather diffuse term, with a tendency to slip too easily between designating physical books, buildings, cultural institutions or, more nebulously, a rhetorical figure or a concept. ‘The Archive’ is even more mutable; assuming forms as diverse as a landscape, the contents of a carrier bag, a general and abstract ‘encyclopaedic principle’ and a shared store of cultural memory. Indeed, following the train of Derridean logic, as Tom Cohen does in his chapter, there is no ‘outside’ to the archive. Its logic is inescapable; it is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere in particular. And yet, even if this collection risks losing purchase on its object at times, its attempt to map out this speculative and interdisciplinary field of study is nevertheless a bold, not to say necessary one. Its diverse perspectives on archives and libraries may not quite cohere into a whole, but their juxtaposition hints at future trajectories for research and at conversations yet to be had across boundaries of period and discipline.

Aristotle on Imagination and Action: Introduction

Ever since Brentanos development of intentional psychology at the end of the nineteenth century, philosophers have turned to Aristotles philosophical account of the soul with more than merely antiquarian interests in mind. In the last fifty years in particular, after the post-Rylean rebirth of the philosophy of mind, people have consistently turned to the compressed and complex discussion in DeAnima in order to discover the philosophical origins of their own developed notions of the mind. Aristotle has been hailed as a physicalist of a variety of types, a functionalist avant la lettre, as well as a more traditional sort of dualist. Unsurprisingly, given the nature of Aristotles works, none of these attributions is uncontroversial, and all of them issue from reading into Aristotles recalcitrant texts the philosophical prejudices of their authors. More recently still there have been those who have sought to deny that Aristotles philosophy of mind bears any resemblance to its modern counterparts, and that it has anything of interest to say to contemporary philosophy of mind. In their turn, they have been answered by a second wave of apologists of a coolly modern Aristotle. And there have been those too who have sought to find in Aristotles hylomorphism an intriguing alternative to contemporary ways of treating of the mental and the physical, one which might still be of active interest. The impact of these debates in the interpretation of Aristotles philosophy of