The only collection of Mead's writings published during his lifetime, these essays have heretofore been virtually inaccessible. Reck has collected twenty-five essays representing the full range and depth of Mead's thought. This penetrating volume will be of interest to those in philosophy, sociology, and social psychology. "The editor's well-organized introduction supplies an excellent outline of this system in its development. In view of the scattered sources from which these writings are gathered, it is a great service that this volume (...) renders not only to students of Mead, but to historians."—H. W. Schneider, _Journal of the History of Philosophy_. (shrink)

Ushenko's speculative vision opened on the problem of time and its relation to logic. Profoundly concerned about the theme of time--the theme that intrinsically defines romantic irrationalism--he yet endeavored to vindicate within the bounds of temporality the sovereignty of logic so essential to the continuance of classical philosophy. The dual preoccupation with time and logic urged him into the fields of symbolic logic and relativity physics. From the flux of unrepeatable events he disengaged the laws of logic and the propositions (...) of scientific discourse, while at the same time he sought to keep both orders of entity united without injury to either. He ventured into nature as disclosed by contemporary physics and selected the category of event to supplant substance. He undertook to expound a metaphysics of events, grappled with the problem of the unity not only of nature but of the singular events that make up nature, and fixed upon the overarching structure of the space-time of relativity physics to resolve the problem. But this did not suffice. The metaphysical vision at work in these early books glimpsed at moments a principle beyond time, beyond propositions, beyond events--the principle of power. Power and Events: An Essay on Dynamics in Philosophy focused on the principle of power, integrating the other themes in terms of it. As the mature work of a significant and original thinker, Power and Events posed the principle of power as the central idea for the future course of philosophical investigation. In pursuit of its implications Ushenko embarked upon the philosophy of art in his last book Dynamics of Art and in a consistent yet startling fashion advanced the thesis that the substance of art is in effect a dynamic equilibrium of powers. (shrink)

Ushenko presented his philosophy of logic in vehement opposition to "the postulationist theory." In the endeavor to amputate logic from philosophy and absorb it within mathematics, the postulationists viewed logic as an isolated object-logic to be discussed in meta-logic and construed its symbolic formulas as a game played according to arbitrarily established rules. The objections Ushenko raised are no longer novel, but twenty years ago the entire controversy was new. Above all, he stressed the numerous difficulties entangling the meta-logic. He (...) scored the menace of an infinite regress of meta-logics, and insisted that the consequences of Gödel's work necessarily frustrate the initial great expectations of the postulationists. No purely formal system can be internally proved to be self-consistent and certainly no formal language can ever become as comprehensive as English, though the price of such comprehensiveness is the inevitable occurrence of contradictory sentences. Moreover, he argued that, despite the postulationists' pretense that rules like the principle of non-contradiction were mere conventions for playing the game of logic, these rules proved ubiquitous by trespassing from the object-logic and intruding into the ultimate reaches of the meta-logic. (shrink)

Stressing the immediacy of Being, Hegel placed it categorially first in his logic. But the immediacy of Being, its presence no matter which content or lack of content be presented, signals a purity which ironically deprives it of every specific reality. Hence Hegel emphasized that Being, immediate and pure, is vacuous and collapses into Nothing. Extending a philosophical argument derived from Parmenides and Plato, Hegel further inferred Becoming from the dialectic of Being and Nothing, as though with static concepts he (...) could create the concrete flux. (shrink)

In the foreground of Father Lonergan's analysis of the cognitional process are insight and the heuristic structures it employs. A close study of paradigms of insight exhibits mental acts apprehending intelligibilities logically distinct from, though psychologically conveyed by sense data and images. Because these intelligibilities, e.g., in contemporary physics, bear witness to entities which are unimaginable, knowing is not merely looking. Knowing involves entertaining intelligible meanings and reflecting on them, and though it exists, for men at least, within the boundaries (...) of sensible experience, knowing in its primary activity as insight goes beyond the empirical presentations to grasp intelligible meanings and to judge reflectively their truth or falsity. When judging, a rational self-consciousness affirms a proposition, i.e., an intelligible meaning, in view of its sufficient reason or grounds. In this sense affirmative judgment renders the conditioned "virtually unconditioned" by linking it up with its conditions, as structures immanent and operative within the cognitional process effectuate this linkage of the conditioned with its conditions. These structures, which Father Lonergan supposes he can express as rules for the construction of situations which give rise to insight so that method and not genius suffices to gain truth, are held to be constitutive of the acts of insight and understanding. Accordingly, the positive content of Insight is summed up in the slogan: "Thoroughly understand what it is to understand, and not only will you understand the broad lines of all there is to be understood but also you will possess a fixed base, an invariant pattern, opening upon all further developments of understanding". (shrink)

MICHAEL KAMMEN in his book, A Machine That Would Go of Itself, has provided a comprehensive but highly readable history of the role of the Constitution in American culture. He has commented, with notable insight, on the capacity of Americans "to view their Constitution with a vision that was occasionally clouded and frequently bifocal: bifocal in the sense that the Constitution as a cultural symbol, rationalized in various ways, could be seen on a separate plane--or literally through a discrete lens--from (...) the Constitution as a 'practical system.' " While Kammen has devoted much detailed attention to "that discrepancy between the applied Constitution and the symbolic constitution," the bulk of his large book centers on the role of the Constitution as cultural icon. In this paper I shall explore what the Constitution as icon represents, although I shall also attend to some critical facets of the Constitution as a practical system. What the Constitution symbolizes has been a major moral and intellectual strand threading together the fabric of Western civilization from antiquity to the present. (shrink)

THE opening paragraph of the Declaration of Independence invokes, as every American should know, "the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God." The import of this invocation may be discerned by examining the appeals to natural law in the polemical literature of the American revolutionary period against the background of natural law/natural rights philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, within the particular historical context of events constituting the American Revolution. The (...) phrase "the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God" in the Declaration is revealing. It simplifies what had, in earlier times, been referred to as "fundamental law," omitting and de-emphasizing, however, some rather essential elements. Historically, fundamental law had always been esteemed to be a law superior to statutory or positive law. Unless the latter conforms to the former, it is not valid, and invalid positive laws are null and void, so that there is no obligation to obey them. In the history of British jurisprudence, which includes colonial American jurisprudence, fundamental law embraced divine law, natural law, the British constitution beginning with Magna Carta, common law, and the colonial charters. Appeals to fundamental law were made when protesting statutory or positive laws and decrees. Thus the Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress in October, 1774, invokes "the immutable laws of nature, the principles of the British constitution, and the several charters and compacts" as the moral, rational, and ultimate legal basis for protesting alleged British encroachments on American rights. Yet less than two years later, the Declaration of Independence, abandoning the British constitution and dissolving the political band—the charters and compacts—between Great Britain and America, rests simply on "the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.". (shrink)

THE REVIVAL OF ONTOLOGY, the study of being, is a conspicuous feature of the present philosophical scene. Analytic philosophers and phenomenological researchers concur in admitting the validity of ontological questions, although they disagree about the manner in which these questions may be expressed and answered. Few philosophers in ancient or modern times have matched Paul Weiss in the field of ontology, and I esteem it a privilege, for which I wish to state my thanks, to have been invited here to (...) participate in this symposium in Weiss's honor and to have as my topic for discussion his concept of being. (shrink)

In the beginning Weiss had no intention of publishing his journal, at least not during his lifetime. But urged by friends, colleagues, and an inspired press director, he has so far published two volumes of his journal, exceeding 1500 pages, and he promises still more. Unrevised, except for minor corrections of typography, grammar, and rhetoric, Weiss's daily jottings began in 1963 to appear quarterly as fascicles, bearing the title, Philosophy in Process. Each fascicle was 64 pages in length, and consisted (...) of dated entries of varying length, some fascicles beginning and ending in the middle of sentences. Twelve fascicles were published; these were subsequently collected and, in early 1966, were published in hardcover format as Philosophy in Process: Volume 1: 1955-1960. Volume 2: 1960-1964, published in late 1966, appeared all in one piece. In the Preface to Volume 2 Weiss says that, while writing the journal was initially incidental to writing books, it had become, at least during the composition of the second volume, his "major concern." Consequently, the second volume, in contrast with the first, "consists of sustained discussions carried out almost daily.". (shrink)

Schneider's History appeared at the right moment in America's cultural history. World War II had just ended; college enrollments were bursting with veterans curious about their heritage and anxious over their destiny; and the patriotic pride of an America emerging victoriously from war to take first place among the nations of the world found a partial outlet in those intellectual pursuits which inspired the introduction of college and university programs in American studies, on American history, American institutions, American literature, and (...) American thought. Above all, Schneider's book became the incomparable guide to the philosophic literature. If the reader was dismayed by Schneider's narrative, which was often too sketchy, sometimes too desultory, to portray the movement in and the depth of American thought, he could at least regale himself with the rich and copious bibliographies. Here, indeed, was food for thought, nurturing further research. (shrink)

REASON, SKEPTICISM, REVOLUTION, AND COMMON SENSE--these are the four characteristics which Henry F. May has found to designate the four categories, or stages, in the development of the Enlightenment in Europe and America. These categories, useful for the classification, description, and analysis of the copious intellectual and cultural materials which comprise the Enlightenment, overlap in the formulation of basic documents--the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Bill of Rights, which are fundamental American laws. The interweaving (...) of reason and revolution in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States has been examined by direct references to the European philosophers whose ideas were employed, with modifications, and implemented by means of newly invented institutions on the part of the American founders. The ideas of Locke, Montesquieu, Burlamaqui, Hutcheson, Hume, and many other thinkers, became instruments of political change in the hands of the Americans. Revolution, moderated by reason and common sense, led to constitution, in order to secure the gains of revolution. (shrink)