This paper argues that inertia is an inherent principle and that inertia and Newton’s First Law are in this way natural in the Aristotelian sense.  Indeed, many difficulties concerning inertia and the First Law of Motion may be resolved by understanding them through an Aristotelian conception of nature.  The paper proceeds by examining the characteristic activities of inertia, the Aristotelian idea of nature, various accounts of inertia as force and as inert, and the manner in which an Aristotelian conception of nature improves on these accounts.  It concludes that the unsuccessful attempts by physicists to find an extrinsic origin of inertia, though they may eventually lead to new discoveries, support the view that inertia is an inherent principle of nature.  Newton himself understood the principle of inertia through an eclectic but largely nonAristotelian conception of nature and matter and by the problematic notion of a vis inertiae.   However, Newton’s general philosophy of nature should be distinguished from the more specific content of the First Law and of inertia itself.  A general Aristotelian conception of nature can resolve many of Newton’s difficulties.  Thus, inertia and the First Law of Motion are reasonably regarded as natural in the general Aristotelian sense.

Kant’s essay An answer to the question: What is Enlightenment? has developed into the representative text of philosophical Enlightenment in the course of the past two hundred years.  Yet most interpretations tend to assign to it a univocal meaning that is incompatible with its apparent polysemy.  While taking the latter into account, the author closely investigates Kant’s essay and offers a balanced interpretation of its meaning.  On the basis of this reading, it becomes apparent that we should understand Kant’s idea of the enlightenment process in a normative sense.  As a result, the emphasis in the text shifts from a historico-philosophical promise of an “Enlightened Age” to the view of a precarious, risky “Age of Enlightenment” which Kant claims to live in.  There is ample textual evidence that Kant wanted to intervene with this essay by cherishing the hope for more enlightenment.

This paper argues that Husserl’s ethics do not fit into any one of three commonly recognized kinds of ethical theory: virtue (Aristotelian), deontological (Kantian), and consequentialist (especially, utilitarianism).  Husserl’s mature ethical theory, in particular, combines a modern, Kantian or Fichtean approach based on a strong concept of a free and active ego capable of shaping its life autonomously through its own will with a more Aristotelian theory of the virtues that help us to shape our lives in order to reach happiness or eudaimonia.  The paper presents a historical overview of Husserl’s writings on ethics, divided into two main periods with distinct emphases.  It concludes that, on the one hand, Husserl’s theory of the ethical person clarifies the origin of the virtues in the free activity of the subject, and on the other, it extends the voluntaristic conception of subjectivity to encompass the passively constituted habits.  In this way, Husserl combines an Aristotelian-style virtue ethics with modern theories of subjectivity.  It is this combination of modern and Aristotelian elements in Husserl’s ethics that makes it a systematically fruitful and promising contribution to ethical theory.

Whitehead’s process metaphysics, as developed in Process and Reality, is harmed by the incoherence of his notion of eternal objects as timeless and essentially unrelated entities, which therefore need a primordial agent as their ontological ground and the source of their relatedness and relevance. Such nontemporal entities undermine what is supposed to be a thoroughly temporalist metaphysics. Eternal objects can be understood solely as functions of Creativity, however, as features of a purely temporal process. A notion of God is not required. Whitehead’s Categoreal Obligations specify the necessary conditions for this process, including how the novelty is possible that is needed to account for temporal change and the increased complexity that value enhancement presupposes and makes possible. Adventures of Ideas, especially through the notions of Art and Peace, develops at the level of human civilization this same secular interpretation of the capacity of entities to fashion novel and progressive outcomes.