Abstract: Contrary to received opinion, Descartes' view on the merits of the ontological proof may actually agree with that of Thomas Aquinas, whose rejection of the a priori existence proof has stocked the armories of anti-Anselmians ever since. In a rarely noted passage of the First Replies, Descartes claims not to differ in any respect from Thomas on the proof, a claim that gains sense in light of recent work on the Fifth Meditation. That work in turn reveals a well-founded, (...) if surprising, understanding of the Cartesian proof and of Cartesianism's true relation to Thomism. (shrink)

In the fifth of his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes offers a version of the ontological proof for the existence of God. As Caterus argues in the First Objections, however, it seems that if this argument were valid, then so also would be any number of absurd arguments, for insofar as Descartes infers that God exists from the fact that existence belongs to His essence, we should also be able to infer that other objects---the fictitious existing lion, say---exist on similar (...) grounds. Descartes's lone defense against this objection is to distinguish true and immutable essences from fictitious ones , a distinction that, in its details, seems to imply a realistic view of essences. Such a view of essences, though, conflicts with Descartes's explicit rejection of Platonism in the Principles of Philosophy , among other places. ;In this dissertation, I offer an interpretation of the Fifth Meditation that resolves this problem by treating true and immutable natures as nothing more than ideas, and I argue that, by a careful reading of several crucial yet rarely noticed texts, we can bring Descartes's cryptic and confusing Fifth Meditation claims under an anti-Platonic rubric. As an upshot of this interpretation, I propose an unusual reading of Descartes's ontological proof, one that draws it much closer to the proof of the Third Meditation and one that, in the end, forces us to reevaluate Descartes's connection to three great figures in the tradition of the ontological proof. St. Anselm, St. Thomas, and Kant. (shrink)

This is a study of the rise of Hegelian thought throughout the intellectual world in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century. The book has three interrelated purposes. First, it constitutes the first synthetic description and comprehensive reconstruction of the historical genesis and humanist transformation of Hegelian ideology. Secondly, the study addresses the problem of recurrent patterns of hope and disillusionment in the successive phases of dialectical thought. Finally, the book is concerned with ideological responses to the experience (...) of communal and religious disintegration. (shrink)

Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards has argued that rock and roll happens from the neck down. In this contribution to The Rolling Stones and Philosophy, edited by Luke Dick and George Reisch, I draw on neuroscience to argue that, in the parlance of John Stuart Mill, rock and roll is both a higher and a lower pleasure.

Excerpt from John Dewey: His Thought and Influence Any valid appraisal and criticism Of a man's thought, however, must well up from intellectual charity (sympathy, if you will) and not from either resentment fed by hearsay, or at best, superficial study, nor from partisanship. NO true understanding of a man's thought can be had unless we learn by critical and historical study to see how he came to put his questions in the way he did and give the answers (...) he gave to them. You need to go on and see how far a man's theory will really take you, and how much truth can be got out Of it, and just where and Why it breaks down. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

The objectives of this book are to provide a new translation of Plato's M eno together with a series of studies on its philcisophical argument in the light of recent secondary literature. My translation is based mainly on the Oxford Classical Text, 1. Burnet's Platonis Opera (Oxford Clarendon Press 1900) Vol. III. In conjunction with this I have made extensive use of R.S. Bluck's Plato's Meno (Cam bridge University Press, 1964). At critical places in the dialogue I have also consulted (...) A. Croiset's Gorgias, Menon (Bude text). My debt ~o two other sources will be clearly in evidence. They are E.S. Thompson's Plato's Meno (London, MacMillan 1901), and St. George Stock's The Meno of Plato (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1894). One of the greatest difficulties facing a translator is to achieve a balance between accuracy and elegance. Literal translations are more likely to be accurate, but, alas, they also tend to be duller. Free translations run into the opposite danger of paying for elegance and liveliness with the coin of inaccuracy. Another hurdle, for a translator of a Platonic dialogue, is posed by the challenge to maintain the conversational pattern and fast moving character of the discussion. This is easier where the exchang~s are short, but much more difficult where Socrates gets somewhat long-winded. (shrink)

In Physics Book 2, Aristotle defines nature as an internal source of change. By elaborating Aristotle's view of change, Book 3 takes an important step in establishing the claim - to be made in Book 8 - for a divine mover who causes change but in whom no change occurs. Book 3 also introduces Aristotle's doctrine of infinity as always potential, but never actual and never traversed.

The introduction of computer simulation to paleobiology ushered in a new, experimental style of reasoning. Rather than starting with observed fossil patterns and hypothesizing causal processes that may have produced them, it became possible to start with a process model, and from it to simulate a range of possible patterns. ;The MBL Model is a stochastic model of phylogenetic evolution . Computer simulations conducted with the MBL Model served as thought experiments in stochastic evolution. In the MBL work, similarities between (...) empirical and stochastically simulated clades mounted a visual argument that stochastic processes potentially explained large fluctuations in diversity. Stanley and others countered that the similarities were an artifact of scaling. The scaling problem may have been obscured by visual bias: measures of clade shape are scale-invariant, but diversification itself is highly scale-dependent. ;Null and neutral models are frequently conflated. Null models generate hypothetical data distributions under conditions that exclude some process of interest to test whether patterns in an actual data distribution provide statistical evidence for that process. A neutral model assumes selective equivalence among all units at a specified hierarchical level in the evolving system. Neutral models are often inappropriate as null models. Pattern recognition presupposes a null model, but tacit null models are subject to persistent cognitive biases, necessitating explicit formulation of null models. Nonetheless, failure to reject the null model should not preclude further investigation of a pattern. ;Often, models are not candidates for falsification, but serve to simulate data for testing concepts or methods. Sepkoski and Kendrick , and Robeck, Maley, and Donoghue used the MBL Model to test whether mass extinction periodicity is an artifact of paraphyly in taxonomic data. Such numerical experiments, which make all assumptions explicit, can serve as templates for localizing points of disagreement. Models may fall into lineages, each generation providing lessons for the next, but often sharing operational assumptions. Artifacts of shared operational assumptions are often a threat to the validity of inferences. Results holding across models should not be accepted unless they withstand rigorous robustness analysis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:John Edward MacKinnon BORIS PASTERNAK'S CONCEPTION OF REALISM To desire truth is to desire direct contact with a piece of reality. To desire contact with a piece of reality is to love. —Simone Weil, The Needfor Roots According to czeslaw milosz, Boris Pasternak "did not pluck fruits from the tree of reason, the tree of life was enough for him. Confronted by argument, he replied with his sacred (...) dance." Pasternak's poetry, he concludes, is "antispeculative, anti-intellectual," and though he was compelled to make certain concessions in the course of writing Doctor Zhivago, speculative thought nonetheless remained for him a perennial and decided "adversary." ' However, the familiar and conveniently stark distinction between lyricist and thinker upon which such judgments depend is in fact both naive and tiresome since, plainly, creativity and reflection need in no way necessarily subvert one another. Accordingly, while it is indeed likely that the most valued feature of Pasternak's poetry and best prose is its detailed recording ofthe world's incessant change, of the magic and movement of weather and gardens, seasons and landscapes, Milosz is far from just in so readily and categorically dismissing any attribution of poetic thought to Pasternak. For as much as the whole of his poetry amounts to a celebration of life's small wonders, unrivaled in their greatness, there remains at bottom the inspiration of the thinker, of one who has seen and felt, but who at the same time has had to compile and consider in an attempt to make sense of the whole. As if in open challenge to Milosz, CM. Bowra notes that Pasternak's poetic sensibility is "both physical and intellectual." The mental states described in his poems, Bowra writes, "begin with sensations of the eye and ear but contain something else in their mental appreciation of the 211 212Philosophy and Literature situation," namely, his "gift for grasping abstract problems." 2 If Milosz remains unconvinced, and if Wladimir Weidle dismisses Pasternak's poetic thought as "puny and piteous," still more poets and critics have shared Bowra's view.3 Henry Gifford refers to Pasternak's "philosophical habit of mind," Ronald Hingley to the "pyrotechnics" ofhis "darting intellect," and Yury Lotman to his personal and "thoroughly professional philosophical culture." 4 In her review ofPasternak's My Sister, Life, meanwhile, Marina Tsvetaeva observes that "thought is what works in him, burrows in subterranean passages...." 5 And though Nadezhda Mandelstamclaims that the word of all poets "flows from a general, integrated view of the world," she acknowledges too that poets "vary in the range and depth of their understanding" and proceeds to cite Pasternak as her one example of a poet with a particularly unified worldview.6 If we were to agree with Francis Sparshott that "the fiercest hatreds spring from the closest relationships," we could assume in turn that the fundamental antagonism customarily alleged to obtain between the creative and critical faculties in fact indicates only some common, if confused, origin or inspiration.7 In creating, after all, it is predictable rather than idiosyncratic that the artist will be led to investigate the roots ofart within himself, tiiat he will be tempted by the urge to define, to entertain, that is, some rudimentary theory. And indeed, in Pasternak 's case, it is not simply a matter of his poetry and prose having been informed by certain tacit, if stray, aesthetic conceptions, but rather of his having supplemented his intensely thoughtful artwith aconcurrently developed theory. In this article, I want specifically to consider Pasternak's conception of realism, that standard of achievement which, according to his theory, constitutes the touchstone of all great art. In order more firmly to ground this notoriously vague and unwieldy notion, I will appeal not only to complementary theoretical conceptions of Pasternak's, but also to those central ideas advanced by Iris Murdoch in The Sovereignty of Good. My intention will be to locate Pasternak's brand of realism within what I take to be an identifiable tradition, or at least a conspicuous and pervasive theoretical tendency, according to which the most crucial criterion of artistic realism is judged to be not any properly physical aspect ofthe completed work, and certainly... (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 28, Issue 3, Page 293-305, September 2021.

This book examines the ways in which selfhood and cultural solidarity came to be understood and lived as historical identities during the 1800s. It examines the stages and conflicts in the process of 'becoming historical' through the works of prominent Prussian artists and intellectuals who attached their personal visions to the reformist agenda of the Prussian regime that took power in 1840. The historical account of the evolution of analogous and inter-related commitments to a cultural reformation that would create communal (...) solidarity through subjective identification with public memory is framed by the philosophical perspectives on historical selfhood provided by F. W. J. Schelling and his radical critics, Karl Marx and Søren Kierkegaard, thus drawing this story of building selves and communities in early nineteenth-century Berlin into debates about historical determined and contingently constructed identities. (shrink)

Originally published in 1966, this volume reappraises the educational philosophy of Comenius. Until recently the attention given to Comenius and his work concentrated on a narrow interpretation of his pedagogy which played down his pansophic theory. In the second half of the nineteenth century Germany led the way in pedagogical study and Comenius was widely accepted as having laid the foundations of a science of education. The emergence of education as an academic subject in England and the USA led to (...) a considerable interest in the history of educational ideas and Comenius’ work. (shrink)

There is a phenomenology of the body worked out implicitly in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, in which the full implications of a rejection of a dualistic conception of self and body are articulated. A concept of body can be derived from Hegel's analysis of life, according to which the body is the phusis, hexis and logos of the self, that is, it is the qualitatively determinate conditions--hexis--of un-self-conscious comportment to the world in and by which a situation is constituted which (...) allows immediate satisfaction for the self-conscious will--phusis--and which expresses the pre-reflective commitments of the self--logos. This is a dynamic concept, and its dialectic is one side of the dialectic of selfhood which is the explicit theme of the Phenomenology of Spirit. In its dialectic, the body develops through stages in which each one of these moments in turn takes precedence. The three stages are the natural body, the institutional body, and the self-communicative body. ;Chapters 1 and 2 develop the adequate concept of self-conscious selfhood by analyzing, respectively, Chapter IV, Section B, "Freedom of Self-Consciousness," and Chapter V, "Reason." Chapter 3 develops the concept of body in relation to self-consciousness based on an analysis of the sections of Chapter IV, "Self-Consciousness" which deal with "Desire," "Life" and "Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness," and considers natural embodiment. Chapter 4 analyzes Chapter VI, "Spirit," to develop the notion of institutional embodiment. Chapter 5 analyzes Chapter VIII, "Absolute Knowing," to develop the concept of self-communicative embodiment. ;The conclusion of the Hegelian phenomenology of the body is that self-conscious selfhood can only be adequately embodied by a situation in which the totality of its otherness constitutes a living system of signs, the very life of which is the process of coming to self-understanding as such a system. The dialectic of body is the process of the body's overcoming of its own naturalness, and the bringing of itself to self-consciousness as mind. (shrink)

This collection of lectures by world-renowned philosopher Agnes Heller, edited and introduced by John Grumley, covers a range of political and cultural issues, from the highly topical to modern classics.

This book is a masterpiece of critical theory. It provides an illuminating and original meta-theoretical account of Marx's general views of critical economic theory. Sympathetic to the general aims of Marx, it also excavates the internal contradictions of the Marxian theory with unparalleled care. Written in Hungarian in the early 1970s, it was censored by the communist authorities immediately after its completion. Its belated publication in English signifies a major boon for research scholars in a range of disciplines, including philosophy, (...) political economy, Marxism, intellectual history, and Eastern European studies. (shrink)

Completed shortly before her death in 2019, _Tragedy and Philosophy. A Parallel History_ is the sum of Agnes Heller’s reflections on European history and culture, seen through the prism of Europe’s two unique literary creations: tragedy and philosophy.

As the international genomic research community moves from the tool-making efforts of the Human Genome Project into biomedical applications of those tools, new metaphors are being suggested as useful to understanding how our genes work – and for understanding who we are as biological organisms. In this essay we focus on the Human Microbiome Project as one such translational initiative. The HMP is a new ‘metagenomic’ research effort to sequence the genomes of human microbiological flora, in order to pursue the (...) interesting hypothesis that our ‘microbiome’ plays a vital and interactive role with our human genome in normal human physiology. Rather than describing the human genome as the ‘blueprint’ for human nature, the promoters of the HMP stress the ways in which our primate lineage DNA is interdependent with the genomes of our microbiological flora. They argue that the human body should be understood as an ecosystem with multiple ecological niches and habitats in which a variety of cellular species collaborate and compete, and that human beings should be understood as ‘superorganisms’ that incorporate multiple symbiotic cell species into a single individual with very blurry boundaries. These metaphors carry interesting philosophical messages, but their inspiration is not entirely ideological. Instead, part of their cachet within genome science stems from the ways in which they are rooted in genomic research techniques, in what philosophers of science have called a ‘tools-to-theory’ heuristic. Their emergence within genome science illustrates the complexity of conceptual change in translational research, by showing how it reflects both aspirational and methodological influences. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Cognition: An Introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of SpiritJohn RussonTom Rockmore. Cognition: An Introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Pp vii + 247. Cloth, $40.00.Rockmore's book is an argument that Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is a rigorous and systematic argument about epistemology (2) and it is a commentary designed to introduce students to the details of Hegel's text (1). The epistemological thesis is (...) stated most concisely in Chapter 9. Chapters 1 through 8 comment on the Phenomenology at something close to a paragraph-by-paragraph level, (in the form of Findlay's appendix to the Miller translation of the Phenomenology).Rockmore's thesis is that Hegel's epistemology is an "anti-foundationalism without [End Page 131] scepticism" (215), or a "tertiary empiricism," (197): following Kant, Hegel holds that all knowledge begins with, but does not arise from, experience, but, against Kant, Hegel maintains that knowledge does not relate to anything beyond experience, but is itself the ultimate or absolute object (3). The "Consciousness" section of the Phenomenology establishes this basic position in three stages: "Sense-Certainty" refutes sense-data empiricism; "Perception" shows that knowing what an object is requires the mind's mediation; "Understanding" shows that no successful theory of the unity of the cognitive object can be accomplished in an epistemology that maintains the independence of the object of cognition, (a "thing-in-itself"), and that epistemology must thus shift its focus from object to subject. The "Self-Consciousness" chapter demonstrates that the subject of knowledge must be self-conscious and free, and therefore social and historical. Hegel's great contribution to epistemology is thus to replace the "minimalist" subject of Early Modern epistemology with the "thick" subjectivity of "social human being" (4, 201, 208). The analysis of this "thick" subject is carried out through the "Reason" chapter, (which shows that abstract reason cannot account for the whole of the human subject), and especially the "Spirit" chapter, (though this latter is "perhaps also the most defective part of the Phenomenology" [204]). The "Religion" chapter shows human religious history to be faulty epistemology, that is, an attempt to know that fails because of religion's non-conceptual formulation of its own significance. "Absolute Knowing" rectifies this problem by putting religion's (Christianity's) own ultimate truth—that God is Spirit—into conceptual form in the recognition that human social experience is the absolute. While Rockmore's overall thesis is reasonable, there is much to argue with in the specifics.Kant's philosophy is indisputably a central concern in the Phenomenology, but Rockmore sees Kant in every central move of the book. In his treatment of the "Introduction" and "Consciousness" this is more misleading than helpful (37-8). In discussing the "Introduction," Rockmore helpfully shows that consciousness is a self-comparison, but is weak in discussing the "in-itself." The discussion of "Consciousness" is likewise weak in its treatment of textual specifics, but does assert a reasonable interpretation of this section as a refutation of immediate knowledge that demonstrates the problems of reconciling unity and diversity in objects of experience, and the need for a science of subjectivity.Rockmore portrays the "Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness" as establishing that freedom is to be found in equal recognition, a social situation that is not yet established (70-2). "The Freedom of Self-Consciousness" shows the inadequacy of abstract, individualistic conceptions of freedom (76, 202). Here again, Rockmore's claims are more overlain on the text than derived from it. The treatment of the "Freedom of Self-Consciousness" is disappointing in failing to recognize a systematic character to Hegel's study. Indeed, while claiming to defend Hegel against charges of non-rigorous, non-systematic idiosyncracy (195), Rockmore is surprisingly inattentive to the systematic shape of Hegel's argument.In discussing "Reason," Rockmore again treats Kant as Hegel's major antagonist. His introduction to the "Reason" chapter is helpful, but his treatment of "Observing Reason" suffers from lack of attention to Schelling's philosophy of nature, and lack of historical precision in the discussion of Early Modern science and philosophy. The [End Page 132] discussions of the later... (shrink)

Dialogic Teaching is effective in fostering student learning; yet, it is hard to implement. Little research focused on secondary teachers’ learning of DT and on the link between teachers’ understanding and practices, although these two are usually strongly intertwined. Using a wide range of evidence, this case study systematically investigated and compared two secondary teachers’ understanding and practice of DT during their participation in a continuing professional development programme. The CPDP appeared effective to some extent. The History teacher’s understanding of (...) DT, i.e. being a co-learner, appeared highly effective in implementing DT, whereas the Mathematics teacher’s understanding of DT, i.e. creating a democratic learning environment, seemed only effective to some extent. Focusing on both teachers’ understanding and practice when developing DT seemed fruitful in explaining differences in practice. Future research could further explore to what extent understanding DT as being a co-learner facilitates professional development. (shrink)