PHILOSOPHY PATHWAYS Issue 216

I. 'Elaborating Aquinas' Epistemology: from Being to Knowledge' by Nicholas Anakwue

II. 'On Minds in a Physical World: Frank Jackson's Mary-Argument and Mental Causation' by Jani Koskela

III. 'From Quintessence to Spookiness: Evolution of Supernatural in Physicist Mind' by Hossien Hossieni, J.M.A. Fatah, Said Kaki and Kawan Kamal

Readers, you are welcome to Issue 216 of Philosophy Pathways. This issue of Philosophy Pathways features four critical essays by practitioners, each from one of the fields of epistemology, philosophy of mind, history and philosophy of science, and political philosophy. These are works that share the value of opening up usefully new interpretations of some core philosophical issues they address [...]

I. 'ELABORATING AQUINAS' EPISTEMOLOGY: FROM BEING TO KNOWLEDGE' BY NICHOLAS ANAKWUE

Aquinas is largely apathetic to the modern epistemological controversy of which of epistemology or metaphysics is to be honoured as first philosophy. Yet though, Aquinas may be averse to tackling this concern, "he does not build his philosophical system around a theory of knowledge", rather, he founds it on the "basis provided by the other parts of his system, in particular, his metaphysics and psychology". Consequently, building significantly on his concepts of psychology and metaphysics, Aquinas exposes the concept of knowledge through the thematic headings of Sense perception, Cognition, Scientia, and the Foundationalist agenda of justification [...]

II. 'ON MINDS IN A PHYSICAL WORLD: FRANK JACKSON'S MARY-ARGUMENT AND MENTAL CAUSATION' BY JANI KOSKELA

We seem to have introspective access to propositional contents and qualia. If someone asks whether one believes something, there is only one way for a person to find an answer to the question, by introspectively surveying the contents of ones beliefs. Also, it seems intuitively unreasonable to question the immediacy of subjective experiences, which entail qualia: those experiences feel like and are of something and therefore distinguish themselves from other objective relations to the world. Therefore, even if those contents and experiences were causally inert, there would still be reason to think they existed. But also, I think there is a case to be made for mental states being causally efficacious [...]

III. 'FROM QUINTESSENCE TO SPOOKINESS: EVOLUTION OF SUPERNATURAL IN PHYSICIST MIND' BY HOSSIEN HOSSIENI, J.M.A. FATAH, SAID KAKI AND KAWAN KAMAL

In this research we try to find answers for why, how and where great physicists used supernatural concepts in physical theories. We start from Aristotle and end up with Stephen Hawking. Physicists use supernatural concepts in their theories to describe nature. There is a big change in the concept of supernatural in physicists' minds. For instance, supernatural in Aristotle mind is a philosophical God, to Newton it is a personal God, while to Maxwell it is a demon, and according to Einstein, it fluctuates between Spinoza the philosophical God and spookiness to explain entanglement phenomena in quantum mechanics [...]

African historical experience is interesting. It is so because there are events that happened in the African past which have been seen to be largely responsible for the present deplorable conditions of African societies. Events that are slavery and colonization became at different points the daily bread of the African people, who, in the course of those processes, had the bitter taste of dehumanization in the hands of their foreign masters. Colonial rule caused a huge structural change in the cultural and value systems of African people. Africans, it is claimed, used to have grand culture which was the bond between them and which they cherished and respected so much [...]

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