Catherine Osborne
Biographic Data
| ID | 3601876 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Catherine Osborne |
| GIVEN NAMES | Catherine |
| FAMILY NAME | Osborne |
| SIGNATURE | OSBORNE C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of East Anglia |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 14 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
White Elephants on Campus: The Decline of the University Chapel in America
This slim, highly readable monograph explores the paradoxical situation at a number of elite American universities in the first half of the twentieth century: just as student religious practice was
From Sputnik to Spaceship Earth: American Catholics and the Space Age
This essay considers American Catholics who, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, reflected seriously on the religious significance of technology in general, and space science in particular. American Catholics, while no more immune from the belief that space science would create fundamental changes in human life than their Protestant, Jewish, and secular counterparts, nevertheless sought to understand the Space Age in their own distinctive ter…
Migrant Domestic Careworkers: Between the Public and the Private in Catholic Social Teaching
This essay argues that Catholic (magisterial) social teaching's division of ethics into public and private creates a structural lacuna which makes it almost impossible to envision a truly just situation for migrant domestic careworkers (MDCs) within the current horizon of Catholic social thought. Drawing on a variety of sociological studies, I conclude that it is easy for MDCs to “disappear” between two countries, two families, and, finally, two …
La revue “L’art sacré”: Le débat en France sur l’art et la religion. (1945‐1954)
Plato's Natural Philosophy: A Study of the Timaeus-Critias
Book Review| October 01 2008 Plato's Natural Philosophy: A Study of the Timaeus-Critias T. K. Johansen, Plato's Natural Philosophy: A Study of the Timaeus-Critias. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. vi + 218 pp. Catherine Osborne Catherine Osborne Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2008) 117 (4): 610–614. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-2008-018 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook …
Sexual Ethics: The Meaning and Foundations of Sexual Morality – Aurel Kolnai
This is a book which deserves to generate a lot of interest. One likely audience will be those working on phenomenology and related philosophical traditions in the twentieth century; another will be those working on sexual ethics, and looking for a clear statement of a position that might well strike us now as unfashionable but important, perhaps even enlightening. Aurel Kolnai, born in Budapest in 1900, studied in Austria in the 1920s, where he …
Dumb Beasts and Dead Philosophers: Humanity and the Humane in Ancient Philosophy and Literature
The book is about three things. First, how Ancient thinkers perceived humans as like or unlike other animals; second about the justification for taking a humane attitude towards natural things; and third about how moral claims count as true, and how they can be discovered or acquired. Was Aristotle was right to see continuity in the psychological functions of animal and human souls? The question cannot be settled without taking a moral stance. As…
Socrates in the Platonic Dialogues
If Socrates is portrayed holding one view in one of Plato's dialogues and a different view in another, should we be puzzled? If (as I suggest) Plato's Socrates is neither the historical Socrates, nor a device for delivering Platonic doctrine, but a tool for the dialectical investigation of a philosophical problem, then we should expect a new Socrates, with relevant commitments, to be devised for each setting. Such a dialectical device – the tailo…
Presocratic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction
Presocratic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction introduces the first thinkers to explore ideas about the nature of reality, time, and the origin of the universe. It begins by discussing a new papyrus fragment of Empedocles, and uses the story of its discovery and interpretation to highlight the way our understanding of early philosophers is marked by their presentation in later sources. Generations of philosophers have traced their inspiration …
Presocratic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
Generations of philosophers, both ancient and modern, have traced their inspiration back to the Presocratics. Part of the fascination stems from the fact that little of what they wrote survives. Here Osborne invites her readers to dip their toes into the fragmentary remains of thinkers from Thales to Pythagoras, Heraclitus to Protagoras, and to try to reconstruct the moves that they were making, to support stories that Western philosophers and hi…
The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity
Late antique philosophy grew out of the mé'lange of cultures and traditions flourishing during the Augustan pax Romana. It took its quintessential attributes in the pressures besetting the late Roman Empire, and it quietly came to an end when the Mediterranean no longer linked but divided the shores it washed, becoming a barrier separating the Islamic Abbasids, the Byzantines and the Frankish empire. According to the church historian Eusebius of …
Aristotle on the Fantastic Abilities of Animals in De Anima 3.3
1. Fixing the problem: can animals have a successful life without vovs-? My topic in this paper concerns the connection between the objects of perception and the objects of thought. Do we think about, or know, the same objects as we perceive? It is easy to suppose that Aristotle, given his hostility to Plato’s separation of Forms, must have a clear and unambiguous anti-metaphysical answer to this question: there had better be no parallel set of o…
Perceiving white and sweet (again): Aristotle, De Anima 3.7, 431a20-b1
In chapter 7 of the third book of De anima Aristotle is concerned with the activity of the intellect ( nous ), which, here as elsewhere in the work, he explores by developing parallels with his account of sense-perception. In this chapter his principal interest appears to be the notion of judgement, and in particular intellectual judgements about the value of some item on a scale of good and bad. In this paper I shall argue, firstly that there is…
Space, Time, Shape, and Direction: Creative Discourse in the Timaeus
In this chapter, I explore the parallel between the shape of Timaeus’ discourse in Plato’s dialogue and the shape of the world that he describes. There is, plainly, an analogy between Timaeus’ act of describing a world in words and the demiurge’s task of making a world of matter. This analogy implies a parallel between language as a system of reproducing ideas in words, and the world, which reproduces reality in particular things. It becomes clea…
Eros Unveiled: Plato and the God of Love (Clarendon Paperbacks)
Few books on love can claim to make significant contributions to our understanding both of ancient views on Eros and its place in the Christian tradition. On the basis of a new and sympathetic reading of Plato, this book shows that the long-standing distrust of Eros, rather than agape, as a model for the believer's relation to God in Christian thought derives from a misunderstanding of ancient thought on love. Focusing on a number of classic text…
Eros Unveiled: Plato and the God of Love
Few books on love can claim to make significant contributions to our understanding both of ancient views on eros and its place in the Christian tradition. On the basis of a new and sympathetic reading of Plato, Catherine Osborne shows that the long-standing distrust of eros, rather than agape, as a model for the believer's relation to God in Christian thought derives from a misunderstanding of ancient thought on love. Focusing on a number of clas…
The Poem of Empedocles
Rethinking Early Greek Philosophy: Hippolytus of Rome and the Presocratics
Boundaries in Nature: Eating With Animals in the Fifth Century B.C
‘On the day that Adam went out of the garden he offered frankincense, galbanum and stacte and spices, as a food offering of soothing odour; and so he did every day in the morning, at sunrise from the day he covered his shame. And on that day the mouths of all the wild animals and the cattle and the birds, and of everything that walks or moves, were shut, so that they could no longer speak (for up till then they had all spoken with one another in …
Heraclitus: Fragments: A Text and Translation with a Commentary
Matter, Space, and Motion: Theories in Antiquity and Their Sequel. Richard Sorabji
Philoponus on the origins of the universe and other issues
Topography in the Timaeus: Plato and Augustine on mankind's place in the natural world
In this paper I shall be considering the relationship between the shape or structure of the world and the moral position occupied by human beings, particularly with regard to man's attitude towards and use of the natural resources of the material world he inhabits. 1. The shape of the world There are two basic spatial metaphors that we frequently use in analysing notions of value and morality: one is the scale of up and down, with high and low or…
The Greek Cosmologists. Volume I: The Formation of the Atomic Theory and Its Earliest Critics . David Furley
Empedocles Recycled
It is no longer generally believed that Empedocles was the divided character portrayed by nineteenth-century scholars, a man whose scientific and religious views were incompatible but untouched by each other. Yet it is still widely held that, however unitary his thought, nevertheless he still wrote more than one poem, and that his poems can be clearly divided between those which do, and those which do not, concern ‘religious matters’.1 Once this …
Empedocles Recycled
It is no longer generally believed that Empedocles was the divided character portrayed by nineteenth-century scholars, a man whose scientific and religious views were incompatible but untouched by each other. Yet it is still widely held that, however unitary his thought, nevertheless he still wrote more than one poem, and that his poems can be clearly divided between those which do, and those which do not, concern ‘religious matters’.1 Once this …
Aristotle, De anima 3. 2: How do we perceive that we see and hear
The second chapter of book three of the De anima marks the end of Aristotle's discussion of sense-perception. The chapter is a long one and apparently rambling in subject matter. It begins with a passage that is usually taken as a discussion of some sort of self-awareness, particularly awareness that one is perceiving, although such an interpretation raises some difficulties. This paper reconsiders the problems raised by supposing that the questi…
From Sputnik to Spaceship Earth: American Catholics and the Space Age
This essay considers American Catholics who, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, reflected seriously on the religious significance of technology in general, and space science in particular. American Catholics, while no more immune from the belief that space science would create fundamental changes in human life than their Protestant, Jewish, and secular counterparts, nevertheless sought to understand the Space Age in their own distinctive ter…
Perceiving white and sweet (again): Aristotle, De Anima 3.7, 431a20-b1
In chapter 7 of the third book of De anima Aristotle is concerned with the activity of the intellect ( nous ), which, here as elsewhere in the work, he explores by developing parallels with his account of sense-perception. In this chapter his principal interest appears to be the notion of judgement, and in particular intellectual judgements about the value of some item on a scale of good and bad. In this paper I shall argue, firstly that there is…
Eros Unveiled: Plato and the God of Love (Clarendon Paperbacks)
Few books on love can claim to make significant contributions to our understanding both of ancient views on Eros and its place in the Christian tradition. On the basis of a new and sympathetic reading of Plato, this book shows that the long-standing distrust of Eros, rather than agape, as a model for the believer's relation to God in Christian thought derives from a misunderstanding of ancient thought on love. Focusing on a number of classic text…
Aristotle, De anima 3. 2: How do we perceive that we see and hear
The second chapter of book three of the De anima marks the end of Aristotle's discussion of sense-perception. The chapter is a long one and apparently rambling in subject matter. It begins with a passage that is usually taken as a discussion of some sort of self-awareness, particularly awareness that one is perceiving, although such an interpretation raises some difficulties. This paper reconsiders the problems raised by supposing that the questi…
Archimedes on the Dimensions of the Cosmos
Empedocles Recycled
It is no longer generally believed that Empedocles was the divided character portrayed by nineteenth-century scholars, a man whose scientific and religious views were incompatible but untouched by each other. Yet it is still widely held that, however unitary his thought, nevertheless he still wrote more than one poem, and that his poems can be clearly divided between those which do, and those which do not, concern ‘religious matters’.1 Once this …
Topography in the Timaeus: Plato and Augustine on mankind's place in the natural world
In this paper I shall be considering the relationship between the shape or structure of the world and the moral position occupied by human beings, particularly with regard to man's attitude towards and use of the natural resources of the material world he inhabits. 1. The shape of the world There are two basic spatial metaphors that we frequently use in analysing notions of value and morality: one is the scale of up and down, with high and low or…
The Greek Cosmologists. Volume I: The Formation of the Atomic Theory and Its Earliest Critics . David Furley
Philoponus on the origins of the universe and other issues
Boundaries in Nature: Eating With Animals in the Fifth Century B.C
‘On the day that Adam went out of the garden he offered frankincense, galbanum and stacte and spices, as a food offering of soothing odour; and so he did every day in the morning, at sunrise from the day he covered his shame. And on that day the mouths of all the wild animals and the cattle and the birds, and of everything that walks or moves, were shut, so that they could no longer speak (for up till then they had all spoken with one another in …
Heraclitus: Fragments: A Text and Translation with a Commentary
Matter, Space, and Motion: Theories in Antiquity and Their Sequel. Richard Sorabji
Rethinking Early Greek Philosophy: Hippolytus of Rome and the Presocratics
The Poem of Empedocles
Eros Unveiled: Plato and the God of Love
Few books on love can claim to make significant contributions to our understanding both of ancient views on eros and its place in the Christian tradition. On the basis of a new and sympathetic reading of Plato, Catherine Osborne shows that the long-standing distrust of eros, rather than agape, as a model for the believer's relation to God in Christian thought derives from a misunderstanding of ancient thought on love. Focusing on a number of clas…
Space, Time, Shape, and Direction: Creative Discourse in the Timaeus
In this chapter, I explore the parallel between the shape of Timaeus’ discourse in Plato’s dialogue and the shape of the world that he describes. There is, plainly, an analogy between Timaeus’ act of describing a world in words and the demiurge’s task of making a world of matter. This analogy implies a parallel between language as a system of reproducing ideas in words, and the world, which reproduces reality in particular things. It becomes clea…
Eros Unveiled: Plato and the God of Love (Clarendon Paperbacks)
Few books on love can claim to make significant contributions to our understanding both of ancient views on Eros and its place in the Christian tradition. On the basis of a new and sympathetic reading of Plato, this book shows that the long-standing distrust of Eros, rather than agape, as a model for the believer's relation to God in Christian thought derives from a misunderstanding of ancient thought on love. Focusing on a number of classic text…
Perceiving white and sweet (again): Aristotle, De Anima 3.7, 431a20-b1
In chapter 7 of the third book of De anima Aristotle is concerned with the activity of the intellect ( nous ), which, here as elsewhere in the work, he explores by developing parallels with his account of sense-perception. In this chapter his principal interest appears to be the notion of judgement, and in particular intellectual judgements about the value of some item on a scale of good and bad. In this paper I shall argue, firstly that there is…
The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity
Late antique philosophy grew out of the mé'lange of cultures and traditions flourishing during the Augustan pax Romana. It took its quintessential attributes in the pressures besetting the late Roman Empire, and it quietly came to an end when the Mediterranean no longer linked but divided the shores it washed, becoming a barrier separating the Islamic Abbasids, the Byzantines and the Frankish empire. According to the church historian Eusebius of …
Aristotle on the Fantastic Abilities of Animals in De Anima 3.3
1. Fixing the problem: can animals have a successful life without vovs-? My topic in this paper concerns the connection between the objects of perception and the objects of thought. Do we think about, or know, the same objects as we perceive? It is easy to suppose that Aristotle, given his hostility to Plato’s separation of Forms, must have a clear and unambiguous anti-metaphysical answer to this question: there had better be no parallel set of o…
Presocratic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction
Presocratic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction introduces the first thinkers to explore ideas about the nature of reality, time, and the origin of the universe. It begins by discussing a new papyrus fragment of Empedocles, and uses the story of its discovery and interpretation to highlight the way our understanding of early philosophers is marked by their presentation in later sources. Generations of philosophers have traced their inspiration …
Presocratic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
Generations of philosophers, both ancient and modern, have traced their inspiration back to the Presocratics. Part of the fascination stems from the fact that little of what they wrote survives. Here Osborne invites her readers to dip their toes into the fragmentary remains of thinkers from Thales to Pythagoras, Heraclitus to Protagoras, and to try to reconstruct the moves that they were making, to support stories that Western philosophers and hi…
Socrates in the Platonic Dialogues
If Socrates is portrayed holding one view in one of Plato's dialogues and a different view in another, should we be puzzled? If (as I suggest) Plato's Socrates is neither the historical Socrates, nor a device for delivering Platonic doctrine, but a tool for the dialectical investigation of a philosophical problem, then we should expect a new Socrates, with relevant commitments, to be devised for each setting. Such a dialectical device – the tailo…
Dumb Beasts and Dead Philosophers: Humanity and the Humane in Ancient Philosophy and Literature
The book is about three things. First, how Ancient thinkers perceived humans as like or unlike other animals; second about the justification for taking a humane attitude towards natural things; and third about how moral claims count as true, and how they can be discovered or acquired. Was Aristotle was right to see continuity in the psychological functions of animal and human souls? The question cannot be settled without taking a moral stance. As…
Plato's Natural Philosophy: A Study of the Timaeus-Critias
Book Review| October 01 2008 Plato's Natural Philosophy: A Study of the Timaeus-Critias T. K. Johansen, Plato's Natural Philosophy: A Study of the Timaeus-Critias. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. vi + 218 pp. Catherine Osborne Catherine Osborne Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2008) 117 (4): 610–614. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-2008-018 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook …
Sexual Ethics: The Meaning and Foundations of Sexual Morality – Aurel Kolnai
This is a book which deserves to generate a lot of interest. One likely audience will be those working on phenomenology and related philosophical traditions in the twentieth century; another will be those working on sexual ethics, and looking for a clear statement of a position that might well strike us now as unfashionable but important, perhaps even enlightening. Aurel Kolnai, born in Budapest in 1900, studied in Austria in the 1920s, where he …
La revue “L’art sacré”: Le débat en France sur l’art et la religion. (1945‐1954)
Migrant Domestic Careworkers: Between the Public and the Private in Catholic Social Teaching
This essay argues that Catholic (magisterial) social teaching's division of ethics into public and private creates a structural lacuna which makes it almost impossible to envision a truly just situation for migrant domestic careworkers (MDCs) within the current horizon of Catholic social thought. Drawing on a variety of sociological studies, I conclude that it is easy for MDCs to “disappear” between two countries, two families, and, finally, two …
Philosophy (21 works) · Epistemology (17 works) · Classical Philosophy and Thought (15 works) · Art (13 works) · History (11 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Literature (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Art history (7 works)