Few men have had as much cultural and educational influence on their own countries as the philosopher and educator Antonio Caso (1883-1946). He was above all a patriot of his beloved Mexico, and he sought to deliver his humanitarian message to his countrymen. In his youth, after the revolt against Díaz, he was a member of the Ateneo de la Juventud, a group that sought to bring Mexico, spiritually and economically, back to the Mexicans. Caso realized that this effort involved (...) the forming of a national consciousness among his people, whom he saw divided by their private and public interests. As an educator of Mexican youth for more than thirty years, Caso sought to imbue in his students the desire to search and to question. He saw education as a perpetual search for truth, and his own life and philosophy reflect this search. He rejected any system that proposed to describe all of reality, and he despised all dogmas—official or unofficial. He particularly fought against positivism and Marxism, systems current in his youth. The first part of this book is an introduction to the philosophical and educational ideas of Caso, as well as to the intellectual and political ideas in his life. Mr. Haddox skillfully shows the development of Caso's ideas and how they took shape from his own reading as well as from the experiences of his age and of his country. The second part contains Mr. Haddox's translations of selections from Caso's writings. They give a moving picture of Caso's hopes for Mexico and for humanitiy. (shrink)

José Vasconcelos—lawyer, politician, writer, educator, philosopher, prophet, and mystic—was one of the most influential and controversial figures in the intellectual life of twentieth-century Mexico. Vasconcelos was driven by the desire to gain a complete and comprehensive vision of reality, employing his own aesthetic-emotive method and a poetic mode of expression. The complex philosophical system that resulted is what he called “aesthetic monism.” But this is only one side of the man. Vasconcelos was also vitally interested in both the proximate realities (...) and remote possibilities of Mexico, in the character of the “cosmic race” of his homeland, and in the relations between his own country and the others of this hemisphere. Soon after Vasconcelos’s death in 1959, Eduardo García Máynez spoke of him, in a moving tribute, as “without question the most inspiring intellectual and human figure that Mexico has produced.” Unhappily—and perhaps disgracefully—he has remained almost unknown outside the Spanish-speaking world. Histories of Mexico published in English usually give passing mention to his role as Minister of Public Education or his unsuccessful campaign for the presidency, but his aesthetic system and his socio-political ideas have been ignored by philosophers in the United States. Here, for the first time, is a unified, inclusive, and occasionally critical presentation of the entire range of Vasconcelos’s thought, from his metaphysics and theory of knowledge through his aesthetics and ethics to his social and political philosophy. It is enriched by an appendix in which the most significant passages from Vasconcelos’s own philosophical writings are presented in English translations. (shrink)

This book explores how and when biology emerged as a science in Germany. Beginning with the debate about organism between Georg Ernst Stahl and Gottfried Leibniz at the start of the eighteenth century, John Zammito traces the development of a new research program, culminating in 1800, in the formulation of developmental morphology. He shows how over the course of the century, naturalists undertook to transform some domains of natural history into a distinct branch of natural philosophy, which attempted not (...) only to describe but to explain the natural world and became, ultimately, the science of biology. (shrink)

The two theories that revolutionized physics in the twentieth century, relativity and quantum mechanics, are full of predictions that defy common sense. Recently, we used three such paradoxical ideas to prove “The Free Will Theorem” (strengthened here), which is the culmination of a series of theorems about quantum mechanics that began in the 1960s. It asserts, roughly, that if indeed we humans have free will, then elementary particles already have their own small share of this valuable commodity. More precisely, if (...) the experimenter can freely choose the directions in which to orient his apparatus in a certain measurement, then the particle’s response (to be pedantic—the universe’s response near the particle) is not determined by the entire previous history of the universe. Our argument combines the well-known consequence of relativity theory, that the time order of space-like separated events is not absolute, with the EPR paradox discovered by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen in 1935, and the Kochen-Specker Paradox of 1967 (See [2].) We follow Bohm in using a spin version of EPR and Peres in using his set of 33 directions, rather than the original configuration used by Kochen and Specker. More contentiously, the argument also involves the notion of free will, but we postpone further discussion of this to the last section of the article. Note that our proof does not mention “probabilities” or the “states” that determine them, which is.. (shrink)

Most scholars think not. But in this pioneering book, John H. Zammito challenges that view by revealing a precritical Kant who was immensely more influential than the one philosophers think they know.

In this philosophically sophisticated and historically significant work, John H. Zammito reconstructs Kant's composition of The Critique of Judgment and reveals that it underwent three major transformations before publication. He shows that Kant not only made his "cognitive" turn, expanding the project from a "Critique of Taste" to a Critique of Judgment but he also made an "ethical" turn. This "ethical" turn was provoked by controversies in German philosophical and religious culture, in particular the writings of Johann Herder and (...) the Sturm und Drang movement in art and science, as well as the related pantheism controversy. Such topicality made the Third Critique pivotal in creating a "Kantian" movement in the 1790s, leading directly to German Idealism and Romanticism. The austerity and grandeur of Kant's philosophical writings sometimes make it hard to recognize them as the products of a historical individual situated in the particular constellation of his time and society. Here Kant emerges as a concrete historical figure struggling to preserve the achievements of cosmopolitan Aufkl-rung against challenges in natural science, religion, and politics in the late 1780s. More specifically Zammito suggests that Kant's Third Critique was animated throughout by a fierce personal rivalry with Herder and by a strong commitment to traditional Christian ideas of God and human moral freedom. "A work of extraordinary erudition. Zammito's study is both comprehensive and novel, connecting Kant's work with the aesthetic and religious controversies of the late eighteenth century. He seems to have read everything. I know of no comparable historical study of Kant's Third Critique."-Arnulf Zweig, translator and editor of Kant's ;IPhilosophical Correspondence, 1759-1799;X "An intricate, subtle, and exciting explanation of how Kant's thinking developed and adjusted to new challenges over the decade from the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason to the appearance of the Critique of Judgment. "--John W. Burbidge, Review of Metaphysics "There has been for a long time a serious gap in English commentary on Kant's Critique of Judgment Zammito's book finally fills it. All students and scholars of Kant will want to consult it."--Frederick Beiser, Times Literary Supplement. (shrink)

Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-226-97861-3 (alk. paper) — isbn 0-226-97862-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Science — Philosophy. 2. Science — History. 3. Progress. I. Title. Q175 .Z25 2004 501 — dc2i 200301 1970 ...

This book is a study of comparative philosophy and theology. The themes are the critical issues arising from the modern interpretation of Confucian doctrine as they confront the Christian beliefs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Through the back door: the problem of history and the African American philosopher/philosophy -- The problem of philosophy: metaphilosophical considerations -- The search for values: axiology in ebony -- Philosophy of science: African American deliberations -- Mapping the disciplinary contours of the philosophy of religion: reason, faith, and African American religious culture.

Kant’s philosophy of science takes on sharp contour in terms of his interaction with the practicing life scientists of his day, particularly Johann Blumenbach and the latter’s student, Christoph Girtanner, who in 1796 attempted to synthesize the ideas of Kant and Blumenbach. Indeed, Kant’s engagement with the life sciences played a far more substantial role in his transcendental philosophy than has been recognized hitherto. The theory of epigenesis, especially in light of Kant’s famous analogy in the first Critique, posed crucial (...) questions regarding the ‘looseness of fit’ between the constitutive and the regulative in Kant’s theory of empirical law. A detailed examination of Kant’s struggle with epigenesis between 1784 and 1790 demonstrates his grave reservations about its hylozoist implications, leading to his even stronger insistence on the discrimination of constitutive from regulative uses of reason. The continuing relevance of these issues for Kant’s philosophy of science is clear from the work of Buchdahl and its contemporary reception. (shrink)

From its beginnings, Confucianism has vibrantly taught that each person is able to find the Way individually in service to the community and the world. For over 2,600 years, Confucianism has sustained a continual process of transformation and growth. In this comprehensive new work, John Berthrong examines the vitality and expansion of the Confucian tradition throughout East Asia and into the entire modern world.Confucianism has been credited with being the dominant social and intellectual force shaping the enduring civilizations of (...) East Asia. If we are to grasp the history of East Asia, we must understand the role that Confucianism has played in the social and cultural formation of the entire region. Just as civilizations are ever-changing, there has been nothing timeless or static about Confucianism.Berthrong’s study is unique in its discussion of each of the historical and regional phases of the development of the Confucian Tao. All too often, Confucian studies have focused exclusively on the classical early period and the great thinkers of the later neo-Confucian revival in the Sung Ming dynasties. Berthrong’s work opens the reader’s eyes to the often neglected gifts of scholars of the Han, T’ang, and the modern periods, as well as to the vast contributions of Korea and Japan. The author concludes this revelatory study with an examination of the contemporary renewal of the Confucian Way in East Asia and its recent spread to the West. (shrink)

A cross-cultural comparsion of creativity that introduces Neo-Confucian discourse as a sophisticated dialogue partner with modern western speculative philosophy and theology.

Human intentional action, including the design and use of artifacts, involves the prior mental representation of the goal (end) and the means to achieve that goal. This representation is part of the efficient cause of the action, and thus can be used to explain both the action and the achievement of the end. This is intentional teleological explanation. More generally, teleological explanation that depends on the real existence of a representation of the goal (and the means to achieve it) can (...) be called representational teleological explanation. Such explanations in biology can involve both external representations (e.g., ideas in the mind of God) and internal representations (souls, vital powers, entelechies, developmental programs, etc.). However, another type of explanation of intentional action (or any other process) is possible. Given that an action achieving a result occurs, the action can be explained as fulfilling the necessary conditions (means) for that result (end), and, reciprocally, the result explained by the occurrence of those necessary conditions. This is conditional teleological explanation. For organisms, natural selection is often understood metaphorically as the designer, intentionally constructing them for certain ends. Unfortunately, this metaphor is often taken rather too literally, because it has been difficult to conceive of another way to relate natural selection to the process of evolution. I argue that combining a conditional teleological explanation of organisms and of evolution provides such an alternative. This conditional teleology can be grounded in existence or survival. Given that an organism exists, we can explain its existence by the occurrence of the necessary conditions for that existence. This principle of the 'conditions for existence' was introduced by Georges Cuvier in 1800, and provides a valid, conditional teleological method for explaining organismal structure and behavior. From an evolutionary perspective, the conditions for existence are the range of boundary conditions within which the evolutionary process must occur. Moreover, evolutionary change itself can be subjected to conditional teleological explanation, because natural selection theory is primarily a theory about the relation between the conditions for the existence of organisms and the conditions for the existence of traits in populations. I show that failure to distinguish representational from conditional teleological explanation has confused previous attempts to clarify the relation of teleology to biology. (shrink)

Interest in subjective values and decision responses are investigated empirically, including statistically testing the predictive relationships between subjective values, other independent variables such as level and area of executive responsibility, and decision responses.

Introduction We live in an age in which new levels of technical achievement impose new requirements of responsibility, corresponding to the ever- broadening ...

A veritable tidal shift in Herder scholarship has taken place over the last quarter century, primarily but not exclusively in German. This review essay seeks to evoke the richness and vitality of this revival with the hope of persuading American academics that some ill-founded opinions still circulating concerning Herder's "irrationalism" and chauvinistic, even racist nationalism, and his philosophical naivety and literary effrontery, might at last be put to rest. The recent revival has brough sharply to the fore two crucial aspects (...) of Herder. First, there is the contribution of Herder's thought to the emergent cultural and social sciences. Second, for Herder the "science of man" was also a natural science: the division between the humanities and the natural sciences that has been such a hallmark of the age from Kant until very recently did not exist for Herder. (shrink)

Although best known as a scientific instrument maker, John Rowley extended his sphere of activity very considerably as Master of Mechanics to George I and as a hydraulic engineer at the Offices of Ordnance and Works. Re-examined and untapped sources provide fresh evidence of these aspects of his work and highlight his predilection for the arts and the virtuosity of his artefacts. The findings also have implications for studies of the instrument-making trade in the early eighteenth century.

Margery Kempe and her Book studied in both literary and historical context.

ABSTRACTRheinberger's brief history brings into sharp profile the importance of history of science for a philosophical understanding of historical practice. Rheinberger presents thought about the nature of science by leading scientists and their interpreters over the course of the twentieth century as emphasizing increasingly the local and developmental character of their learning practices, thus making the conception of knowledge dependent upon historical experience, “historicizing epistemology.” Linking his account of thought about science to his own work on “experimental systems,” I draw (...) extensive parallels with other work in the local history of science and consider the epistemological implications both for the relation between history and philosophy of science and between history and theory more broadly. In doing so, I suggest that the long‐standing gap between the natural sciences and history as a “human science” has been significantly bridged by the insistence upon the local, mediated, indeed “historicized epistemology” of actual science. (shrink)

_Brings Chinese Daoist and Confucian thought into conversation with Western process, pragmatic, and naturalist philosophy and theology._.