There is widespread agreement among philosophers that William James's well-known attempt to justify religious faith in ‘The Will to Believe’ is a failure. But despite the fact that James wrote his essay as a reply to the ‘tough-minded’ ethics of belief represented by such thinkers as W. K. Clifford and T. H. Huxley, the reasons commonly given today for rejecting James's position seem to be mostly based on the same principle of intellectual ethics that motivated Clifford and Huxley. Clifford, it (...) may be recalled, maintained that ‘It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence’. Although this is a rather rhetorical way of stating it, the principle is basically the same one adhered to by most scientists and philosophers who consider themselves rigorous and ‘objective’ thinkers. Even philosophers not associated with the hardheaded modern Anglo-American style of empiricism commonly pledge their allegiance to such a principle. For example, Brand Blanshard holds that the ‘main principle’ of the ethics of belief is that one should ‘equate one's assent to the evidence’ and he then goes on to criticize James, on the basis of this principle, for advocating self-deception and intellectual dishonesty. (shrink)

In this paper I want to discuss a certain way of understanding the concept of religion which I think is more satisfactory than other ways that have often been proposed in the literature, arguing, in brief, that the way to an adequate understanding does not lie through an analysis of the concept of ‘worship’ or ‘the worshipful’ or any notions derivative from these, as some writers have maintained, but instead through a comparative analysis of the various concepts of a ‘highest (...) good’, thought of as a final salvation or ‘liberation’ for its seekers, found in the major religions. I shall also discuss some of the advantages of this way of regarding religion, as well as what I take to be certain of its consequences for the philosophy of religion. The discussion will also lay the groundwork for a pragmatic justification of religious belief , and will, I hope, help to shed light on the question of what would constitute a religiously satisfactory notion of the highest good. (shrink)

Overzicht van de rationalistische traditie in de filosofie van de kunst sinds Kant door een hoogleraar aan de Leuvense universiteit.

A highly original reading of Immanuel Kant that demonstrates his interest in the social realm of human interaction.

A function is recursive (in given operations) if its values are computed explicitly and uniformly in terms of other "previously computed" values of itself and (perhaps) other "simultaneously computed" recursive functions. Here, "explicitly" includes definition by cases. We investigate those recursive functions on the structure $\mathbf{N} = \langle \omega, 0, \operatorname{succ,pred}\rangle$ that are computed in terms of themselves only, without other simultaneously computed recursive functions.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Matter and Spirit in the Age of Animal MagnetismEric G. WilsonDuring the Romantic period, writers on both sides of the Atlantic explored the sleepwalker as a merger of holiness and horror. Emerging when scientific thinkers for the first time were connecting spirit to electricity and magnetism, the somnambulist became to certain Romantics a disclosure of the difficulty of harmonizing unseen and seen, agency and necessity. This problem prominently arose (...) in Anton Mesmer's late eighteenth-century experiments in animal magnetism, in which the sleepwalker proved a paradox: an opaque revelation of transparent currents and an unconscious vehicle of sophisticated thought. Romantics such as Coleridge embraced the somnambulist as an embodiment of these troubles involved in relating motion and meaning. Coleridge and those who responded to him saw in the hypnotized human this sobering possibility: the invisible requires the visible to make itself manifest while the visible needs the invisible to become significant. 1 This is sublime and sinister: to elevate a material form to spiritual power is transcendence; to sink the boundless into a body is grotesque.Here I explore the philosophical implications of animal magnetism, the place of the sleepwalker in the history of ideas, and the role of the hypnotized human in Romantic writers, especially Coleridge. I also meditate on relationships between matter and spirit, machine and human, word and thing. Along the way, I place the history of ideas and the works of Romantic writers in mutually illuminating dialogues. The literary texts shed fresh light on philosophical problems while the ideas reveal hidden literary elements.The somnambulistic trance had been around long before Mesmer's magnetic sleeps. For centuries, shamans had used auto-hypnosis to sound [End Page 329] their souls and other-hypnosis to cure their tribe-members' ailments. However, somnambulism could not become a scientific phenomenon until Europeans in laboratories began to study electricity and magnetism. In the early modern period, Paracelsus argued that a vital fluid courses through the cosmos. The human being draws this flow like a magnet attracts force. When the body pulls to itself evil effluvia, it falls ill. To return patients to health, Paracelsus placed magnets on painful areas. He hoped to extract the unwanted current and return it to the cosmic swirl. 2 In "magnetizing" spirit, Paracelsus opened a door for empirical inquiry into the invisible world. In 1600, William Gilbert claimed that magnets correspond to the earth: both are animated by universal attraction and repulsion. 3 By the end of the seventeenth-century, Newton proposed that things are impelled by a force that draws and repels. Newton's theory of gravity inspired natural philosophers of the next centuries to search for a principle of which the magnet and the spark are manifestations. 4During the second half of the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth, natural philosophers explored electricity and magnetism with unprecedented precision. In 1752, Benjamin Franklin revealed the mystery of lightning and perhaps the spark of life. 5 Inspired by Franklin, F. C. Oetinger, J. L. Fricker, and Prokop Divisch developed a theology of electricity, based on the belief that God is the electrical current. 6 Later in the century, Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta debated over whether the galvanic flow might be the origin and principle of life itself. 7 A few years before Franklin harvested lightning, John Michell argued that the magnetic force is not constrained to lodestones but is possibly pervasive. Some years later, Franz Aepinus suggested that magnetism and electricity manifest a deep energy. Soon after, C. A. de Coulomb discovered the mathematical law by which electrical and magnetic forces operate (Whittaker, pp. 50–59).These findings led to the breakthroughs of the nineteenth century. 8 In 1807, Humphry Davy hypothesized that chemical elements interact through electromagnetic affinity or repulsion. 9 In 1820, H. C. Oersted demonstrated the correspondence between electricity and magnetism. The same year, A. M. Ampere formulated the laws by which electrical and magnetic currents interact (Whittaker, pp. 81–86). Michael Faraday in 1831 revealed electromagnetic induction and thus inaugurated a second Copernican revolution: he showed that matter is not solid and discrete but a field of electromagnetic energy. 10 The dreams of [End... (shrink)

Una importante causa filosófica e ideológica de la inhumanidad de la sociedad rusa durante las décadas del marxismo-leninismo fue la obsesiva orientación de los marxistas-leninistas hacia el futuro histórico (futuro comunismo) en aras de lo cual, comunidades, culturas y personas podían ser reducidas a medios para alcanzar ese fin histórico. El autor de los debates apoyándose en los propios pensadores rusos de la "tradición clásica", como por ejemplo Herzen, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, Leontiev y Berdiaev. No se opone a cualquier tipo de (...) orientación de futuro, pero recalca la importancia de las personas actuales. (shrink)

In CQ n.s. 26 . 62–84 I argued that the defeat of Sparta in 371 B.C. was not due to the pursuit of unwise policies towards the other Greek states. Unwise policies there had been. Sparta being by no means superior to Athens in the formulation of foreign policy, but these did not affect the position on the eve of Leuctra when, with Thebes politically isolated, and with some of the Boeotians disaffected, Cieombrotus at the head of a numerically superior (...) Spartan and allied army was poised for the, destruction of Theban power; a triumph of policy it must have seemed. Sparta failed for military reasons. Her army was unequal to the military genius of Epaminondas. (shrink)

Literary criticism at the present moment seems ready to open its doors once again to the outside world, even if that world is only a series of other academic disciplines, each cloistered in its own way. For the reader of black African literature in French, the opening comes none too soon. The program for reading Camara Laye, Ahmadou Kourouma, and Yambo Ouologuem should never have been the program prescribed for Rousseau, Wordsworth, or Blanchot. If one is willing to read a (...) literature that might not be a rewriting of Hegel , and if the negative knowledge of recent theoretical criticism is questioned in the universality of its applications, then what is really open to a Western reader of non-Western literature? Claiming a break with his/her own culture and critical upbringing, can he/she the Other, the African, as if from an authentically African point of view, interpreting Africa in African terms, perceiving rather than projecting?The goal of breaking through the nets of Western criticism, of reading African literature in a nonethnocentric, nonprojective fashion, will remain both indisputably desirable and ultimately unattainable. No matter how many languages I learn or ethnologies I study, I cannot make myself into an African. The Western scholar’s claim to mastery of things African, albeit motivated by xenophilia rather than xenophobia, risks subjugation of the object to a new set of Western models. J. P. Makouta-M’Boukou rightly scolds Western critics who refuse to take into account the distance between themselves and African culture, and who read African literature only in function of their own cultural context.1 Wole Soyinka, more forbiddingly, complains: “We black Africans have been blandly invited to submit ourselves to a second epoch of colonisation—this time by a universal-humanoid abstraction defined and conducted by individuals whose theories and prescriptions are derived from the apprehension of their world and their history, their social neuroses and their value systems.”2 1. See J. P. Makouta-M’Boukou, Introduction à l’étude du roman négro-africain de langue française , p. 9.2. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World , p. x. Christopher L. Miller, Charles B. G. Murphy Assistant Professor of French and of African and Afro-American Studies at Yale University, is author of Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French . He is working at present on a study of francophone black African literature, for which he will have a Fulbright Africa Research grant. (shrink)

Even a decade after the end of the 1914–1918 war, economic theory assumed that the world was tranquil and orderly. By 1939 an economic slump without parallel, allied to the re-emergence of military ambition in Europe, had brought economic theorists face to face with reality. In this classic book, first published in 1967, Professor Shackle provides a study, in exact and professional language, of the precise nature, structure, presuppositions, language and inter-relations of the theories which were formulated in these fourteen (...) years - unparalleled in the whole history of economics except perhaps by the years of the Physiocrats and Adam Smith. These theories are not prototypes on the way to something better but are of essential and permanent importance. (shrink)

Time, of course, will provide the opportunity for a deeper and fuller contemplation of the historical significance of the June 1983 Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU. But even now it is clear that it went far beyond the mere examination of current questions of the ideological and general political work of the party, above all because the speech of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Comrade Iu. V. Andropov set forth the most important (...) theoretical positions having to do with the preparation of the new version of the program of the CPSU, positions which over the long term will determine the activity of the party and the nation and the development of Soviet society. The importance of the plenum also consisted in the fact that its proceedings brought to light the full scope of the tremendous role played by ideology, by the ideological struggle, and by ideological activity in today's world. There is a struggle going on between two polar opposite world outlooks, two political courses, socialism and imperialism, which is unprecedented throughout the entire postwar period as regards its intensity and ascerbity. There is a struggle taking place for the hearts and minds of billions of people on the planet. The future of mankind depends to no little degree on the outcome of this ideological struggle. Finally, the importance of the Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU also lay in the fact that it posed a whole series of extremely important practical tasks in the area of ideological activity, including scientific activity, and the task of intensifying the influence of ideology on solving economic, social, political, and educational problems. (shrink)

Professor Pandit, working among the admirable group of philosophers at the University of Delhi, has written a fundamental criticism and a constructive re-interpretation of all that has been preserved as serious epistemological and methodological reflections on the sciences in modern Western philosoph- from the times of Galileo, Newton, Descartes and Leibniz to those of Russell and Wittgenstein, Carnap and Popper, and, we need hardly add, onward to the troubling relativisms and reconstructions of historical epistemologies in the works of Hanson, Kuhn, (...) Lakatos and Feyerabend. His themes are intrigu ing, set forth as they are with masterly case studies of physics and the life sciences, and within an original conceptual framework for philosophical analysis of the processes, functions, and structures of scientific knowing. Pandit's contributions deserve thoughtful examination. For our part, we wish to point to some among them: (1) an interactive articulation of subjective and objective factors of both problems and theories in the course of scientific development; (2) a striking contrast between the explanatory power of a scientific theory and its 'resolving power', i. e. (shrink)

In 404 Sparta stood supreme, militarily and politically master of Greece, in concord with Persia. By 362, the year at which Xenophon terminated his history on the sad note of ‘even greater confusion and uncertainty’, she was eclipsed militarily, never to win a great battle again; and so far from being master even of the Peloponnese that she would spend the rest of time struggling to recover her own ancestral domain of Messenia, no longer a world power, merely a local (...) wrangler. The reasons for all this which are to seek are of absorbing interest and prime importance for the history of Greece, but it is hard to resist the temptation to connect the change with the policies of Agesilaus whose reign virtually coincided with the period in question. He was king for forty-one years and over thirty of them well before the battle of Leuctra and he had influence in the state unequalled as far as we can tell by any other king. (shrink)

In Metamorphoses 1. 461–8 Ovid lists islands visited by Minos and brought into his realm during his journey from Crete to Aigina on the way to avenge the death of Androgeos in Attica.