In an effort to explicate this mysterious conceptual ability, Reid examines theories of thought of Aristotle and medieval philosophers.
The concept of nature is notorious for its complexity, and for this reason most attempts to explicate the meaning of the term end up with a confusing catalog of its many, seemingly disjointed, meanings.
If one understands philosophy as the discipline that attempts to explicate the totality of being, the difference between philosophy and theology becomes apparent.
What all these different Hitlers represent are different ways of looking at evil, at free will, at personal responsibility and at the workings of history, and in "Explaining Hitler, Mr. Rosenbaumm not only re-examines a myriad of scholarly writings on the Nazi leader, but also attempts to explicate the explanations.
Her efforts to explore the metaphorical connection between the notions of "home" and "motherhood" (i.e. the house as womb, as a refuge of safety and comfort) feel vague and pretentious, as do her attempts to explicate the metaphor of the "house as body" or container for the soul.
Two broad strategies have emerged in response to this challenge: attempts to quantify approximate truth by formally defining the concept and the related notion of relative approximate truth; and attempts to explicate the concept informally.
1. Copp 2003 gives a useful survey of attempts to explicate the "natural" in talk of natural properties and makes an intriguing nonstandard proposal.
Soon after this, however, Rorty comes to doubt the point of any theory of truth, and, following Davidson's lead explicitly rejects all attempts to explicate the notion of truth in terms of other concepts.
It presents such theories with a dilemma: either they are attempts to explicate the concept of consciousness, in which case they are circular; or they are attempts to provide a reductive explanation of the property of being conscious, in which case they generate a vicious regress (Rowlands 2001).
