In _Philosophers as Educators_ Brian Patrick Hendley argues that philosophers of edu­cation should reject their preoccupation with defining terms and analyzing concepts and embrace the philosophical task of con­structing general theories of education. Hendley discusses in detail the educational philosophies of John Dewey, Bertrand Rus­sell, and Alfred North Whitehead. He sees in these men excellent role models that contem­porary philosophers might well follow. Hendley believes that, like these men­tors, philosophers should take a more ac­tive, practical role in education. Dewey and (...) Russell ran their own schools, and Whitehead served as a university admin­istrator and as a member of many com­mittees created to study education. (shrink)

This study by George Kimball Plochmann, a former student of McKeon's, is the first book-length treatment of the ideas of this legendary teacher, scholar, and diplomat who outlined a profound and creative vision for the reorganization of all ...

D'Arcy Thompson looked upon himself as a follower of Aristotle in biology, and was an erudite student and translator of biological writings of the Stagyrite. A number of Aristotle's chief terms are to be found in Thompson's masterpiece, On Growth and Form, although these terms—such as ‘cause,’ ‘form,’ ‘movement,’ and the like—undergo some change, generally a contraction, of meaning. But as a tireless investigator of living bodies of all sorts, Thompson developed his own methods for manipulating his concepts, and it (...) is my hope to indicate briefly but critically what the methods are. In so doing, it will be profitable to make comparisons with certain other biologists of past and present, to point up the issues more sharply. (shrink)

Plochmann and Robinson closely analyze this great dialogue in the first two-thirds of their book, turning in the final four chapters to a broader discussion of its unity, sweep, and philosophic implications.

1. To begin with, if metaphysics is a science at all, it must be so in a sense quite different from that in which we understand the remaining sciences, empirical and mathematical, to be what they are. The metaphysician is indeed a man rich in observations, a man who wears a knowing smile about the world's sad intricacies. Yet he seeks not so much to show facts or even to demonstrate to us that their causes are necessarily such and such, (...) as he seeks to illuminate the facts at a further remove by disentangling the many senses in which facts and their causes--and the relations between them--can be said to exist in the first place. To the very limits of human reason and inquiry, metaphysics is an account, patterned roughly with the sciences, of the conditions of being and the kinds of beings. (shrink)

Hendley argues that philosophers of edu­cation should reject their preoccupation of the past 25_ _years with defining terms and analyzing concepts and once again embrace the philosophical task of con­structing general theories of education. Exemplars of that tradition are John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, and Alfred North Whitehead, who formulated theo­ries of education that were tested. Dewey and Russell ran their own schools, and Whitehead served as a university admin­istrator and as a member of many com­mittees created to study education. After (...) providing a general introduction to the present state of educational phi­losophy, Hendley discusses in detail the educational philosophies of Dewey, Rus­sell, and Whitehead. He sees in these men excellent role models that contem­porary philosophers might well follow. Hendley believes that like these men­tors, philosophers should take a more ac­tive, practical role in education. (shrink)

This study of Western philosophic systems, their types, history, relations, and projected future in the next half century, stems from Robert S. Brumbaugh’s forty-year fascination with the paradox of the many consistent overarching systems of ideas that are nevertheless mutually exclusive. Brumbaugh argues that when we isolate these systems’s patterns and look at them more abstractly, they consistently fall into four main types, and the interaction of these four types of explanation and order is a dominant theme in the history (...) of Western philosophy. In Brumbaugh’s view these four philosophic systems are not, as some critical historians and thinkers have claimed, so different that they are mutually unintelligible, forcing us to make a choice among them that is entirely arbitrary. But neither are they, as a majority of past thinkers and historians have hoped, simply parts of some single "right" or "orthodox" scheme. Their mutual understanding requires a method of transformation that interprets one to another without destroying their diversity. The history of Western philosophy from the fifth century A.D. to the present shows a pattern of alternating revolutions in systematic method and direction of explanation. Brumbaugh feels that the pattern is continuing in a change toward a revised Platonism, just beginning with the twenty-first century. He anticipates that it will be a Platonism of a new texture, one that has matured and learned a great deal in the course of the adventures of its ideas through space and time. (shrink)

Collins’ method is to make an internal textual study of Spinoza’s doctrine on nature with emphasis on his general model of nature that underlies and gov­erns his arguments on particular issues. Separate chapters are devoted to each of his early writings. Two chapters discuss the _Ethics. _Collins concludes with a uni­fying view of Spinoza’s perspective on nature that has a bearing upon many contemporary philosophical issues.

Eternal Possibilities: A Neutral Ground for Meaning and Existence builds on David Weissman's earlier Dispositional Properties and makes a signal contribution to the study of metaphysics.

Professor Eames explores the development of Russell’s own philosophy in interaction with ten of his contemporaries: Bradley, Joachim, Moore, Frege, Meinong, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Schiller, James, and Dewey. Her examination of these interactions affords a new historical perspective on 20th century analytic philosophy as well as a deeper understanding of Russell’s philosophy and its influence.

This essay is intended to raise, rather than answer, a number of questions thought pertinent to a more adequate understanding of the "meno" as a whole. These questions are grouped under the headings drama, dialogue, and dialectic, the last of these groups being the largest and most articulated. Kinds of goodness, kinds of ruling, levels of discussion, the intrusion of mathematical examples, etc., Are topics of these questions, most of which have been treated rather more sporadically than the complexities of (...) the "meno" would appear to encourage. (shrink)