This book illustrates the extent to which Kant's work has permeated wide areas of learning, across many disciplines, despite a general ignorance, especially in...

My general theme is the extent to which philosophers and others must be taken literally when they have written about angels, or anything else which is no longer generally believed in. However, since the title may perhaps have aroused expectations of angels dancing on points of needles, I shall take as my point of departure the question of whether or not the scholastics ever discussed how many angels could dance on the point of a needle. The answer would in fact (...) seem to be in the negative, the closest parallel being found in the anonymous fourteenth-century mystical treatise Swester Katrei , which refers to a thousand souls in heaven sitting on the point of a needle. (shrink)

George MacDonald Ross; Philosophy in Schools, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 22, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 207–219, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467.

George MacDonald Ross; Philosophy in Schools: a reply to Jonathan & Blake, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 22, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 229–23.

George MacDonald Ross; Philosophy in Schools, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 22, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 207–219, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467.

This chapter contains sections titled: Descartes Malebranche.

This chapter contains sections titled: Spinoza Leibniz.

A biogenetic structural explanation is offered for the cross‐culturally common mystical experience called portalling, the experience of moving from one reality to another via a tunnel, door, aperture, hole, or the like. The experience may be evoked in shamanistic and meditative practice by concentration upon a portalling device (mirror, mandala, labyrinth, skrying bowl, pool of water, etc.). Realization of the portalling experience is shown to be fundamental to the phenomenology underlying multiple reality cosmologies in traditional cultures and is explained in (...) terms of radical re‐entrainment of the neurological systems mediating experience in the brain. Phenomenological experiments with mirror portalling devices from both the Tibetan and the Tsimshian religious traditions are reported. (shrink)

This book illustrates the extent to which Kant's work has permeated wide areas of learing, across many disciplines, despite a general ignorance, especially in England, of the details of his highly technical philosophy. Consisting of nine major contributions to the Leeds Kant Conference in April 1990, Kant and his Influence shows how Kant's thought has had a marked effect on philosophers, both Continental and Analytic, social and art historians, theologians and Church leaders.

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

SUMMARYAs one of his first acts upon becoming Astronomer Royal in 1835, George Airy made moves to set up a new observatory at Greenwich to study the Earth’s magnetic field. This paper uses Airy’s correspondence to argue that, while members of the reform movement in British science were putting pressure on the Royal Observatory to branch out into geomagnetism and meteorology, Airy established the magnetic observatory on his own initiative, ahead of Alexander von Humboldt’s request for British participation in (...) the worldwide magnetic charting project that later became known as the ‘Magnetic Crusade’. That the Greenwich magnetic observatory did not become operational until 1839 was due to a series of incidental factors that provide a case study in the technical and political obstacles to be overcome in building a new government observatory. Airy attached less importance to meteorology than he did to geomagnetism. In 1840, he set up a full programme of meteorological observations at Greenwich – and thus turned his magnetic observatory into the ‘Magnetic and Meteorological department’ – only as the price of foiling an attempt by Edward Sabine and others in the London scientific elite to found a rival magnetic and meteorological observatory. Studying the origins of Airy’s Magnetic and Meteorological department highlights how important the context of other institutions and trends in science is to understanding the development of Britain’s national observatory. (shrink)

This book offers new perspectives on the origins and development of John Ruskin’s political thought. Graham A. MacDonald traces the influence of late medieval and pre-Enlightenment thought in Ruskin’s writing, reintroducing readers to Ruskin’s politics as shaped through his engagement with concepts of natural law, legal rights, labour and welfare organization. From Ruskin’s youthful studies of geology and chemistry to his back-to-the-land project, the Guild of St. George, he emerges as a complex political thinker, a reformer—and what we (...) would recognize today as an environmentalist. John Ruskin’s Politics and Natural Law is a nuanced reappraisal of neglected areas of Ruskin’s thought. (shrink)

Pursuing Justice in Africa focuses on the many actors pursuing many visions of justice across the African continent--their aspirations, divergent practices, and articulations of international and vernacular idioms of justice. The essays selected by editors Jessica Johnson and George H. Karekwaivanane engage with topics at the cutting edge of contemporary scholarship across a wide range of disciplines. These include activism, land tenure, international legal institutions, and post-conflict reconciliation. Building on recent work in sociolegal studies that foregrounds justice over and (...) above concepts such as human rights and legal pluralism, the contributors grapple with alternative approaches to the concept of justice and its relationships with law, morality, and rights. While the chapters are grounded in local experiences, they also attend to the ways in which national and international actors and processes influence, for better or worse, local experiences and understandings of justice. The result is a timely and original addition to scholarship on a topic of major scholarly and pragmatic interest. Contributors: Felicitas Becker, Jonathon L. Earle, Patrick Hoenig, Stacey Hynd, Fred Nyongesa Ikanda, Ngeyi Ruth Kanyongolo, Anna Macdonald, Bernadette Malunga, Alan Msosa, Benson A. Mulemi, Holly Porter, Duncan Scott, Olaf Zenker. (shrink)