This volume of the Chicago series is an anthology of what might be called religious literary criticism, where 'religious' speaks of a concern for particular motifs not of any didactic intent on the part of the critics, all of whom, as in the other volumes of the series, are either alumni or faculty of Chicago Divinity School. The contributors on the whole seem to be sound secular scholars with an interest in and passion for literature as a window on life's (...) hard questions. Scott's introduction and his lead article on Saul Bellow are erudite, vast, esoteric, and exhausting. The rewards of careful, hard-work reading are high; but the price will turn many back. All the entries except one focus on recent American prose: Malamud, Heller, Pynchon, Salinger, Flannery O'Conor, J. F. Powers, Styron, and Mailer.--S. O. H. (shrink)

Thirty three years lie between Geoffrey Mure’s beginning upon the study of Literae Humaniores at Oxford before the First World War, and my own arrival there for the same purpose at the end of the Second. To read this book is to be made vividly aware how far the world moved in the single human generation. That I shared so many of Mure’s ideals and enthusiasms made me something of a freak in the Oxford of my own time; yet I (...) remember vividly my feeling, when I first read his Study of Hegel’s Logic, that here was someone talking to himself in an empty room. I was a student reading Hegel’s Logic while everyone else was discussing The Concept of the Mind. No one was ever more consciously out of step than I. Yet I felt no urge to seek out the Warden of Merton; and with this small testament of a philosopher’s life before me, I can see that this was because I belonged as firmly to my generation as he did to his. He was a pupil of H.H. Joachim and I of H.H. Price. Price was not my “tutor”, but it was from his living example, more than any other, that I learned that philosophy is a perennial activity in which many discordant voices can have their place - and perhaps be brought to concord. I was lucky, I think, to learn this from one whose principal concerns were so far removed from mine, and not - like Mure - to take the impress of philosophy as a perpetual concordia discors from someone with whom I was in perfect sympathy. To comprehend discordia concors as a young rebel is better than to find that one’s concordia has become discordant in later years. (shrink)

Epistemologists have not usually had much to say about believing ‘in’, though ever since Plato's time they have been interested in believing ‘that’. Students of religion, on the other hand, have been greatly concerned with belief ‘in’, and many of them, I think, would maintain that it is something quite different from belief ‘that’. Surely belief ‘in’ is an attitude to a person, whether human or divine, while belief ‘that’ is just an attitude to a proposition? Could any difference be (...) more obvious than this? And if we over-look it, shall we not be led into a quite mistaken analysis of religious belief, at any rate if it is religious belief of the theistic sort? On this view belief ‘in’ is not a propositional attitude at all. (shrink)

The subject of my lecture is an appropriate one for several reasons. The first is purely chronological. Hume's first and greatest work, the Treatise of Human Nature, was published in 1739, two hundred years ago. Its illustrious author was then quite unknown in the world, and as he tells us himself the book “fell dead-born from the press.” But by the end of the eighteenth century its reputation was securely established, and it has long been regarded as one of the (...) masterpieces of European thought, and as the classical statement of the Empiricist Philosophy. It is true that, like other classics, it has had its ups and downs. During the Absolute Idealist period, which ended early in the present century, Hume was the great bogey-man, and the duty of all self-respecting philosophers was to refute him. In our own day things are different. Empiricism, despite many obituary notices, is very much alive again. And this time it is in close alliance with Natural Science, and has equipped itself with all the technique of modern Symbolic Logic; it is more vigorous in construction and more formidable in criticism than it has ever been before. Consequently Hume is no longer the bogey-man. People now read the Treatise not as an awful warning, but as a source of stimulus and illumination. Incidentally, we can now enjoy his admirable style without any qualms. It is no longer thought that if a philosopher writes in clear and entertaining English, what he writes must therefore be either superficial or false. We regard obscurity and turgidity as demerits, not as signs of profound thinking. Moreover, we have learned to appreciate the eighteenth century, of which Hume was one of the most characteristic products. (shrink)

The first half of Mr. Burgener's article is a very clear and very just exposition of my views. There is, however, one point which he may not have appreciated fully, and that is the "climate of opinion" in which I was writing, and against which I was reacting. One of my main aims was to protest against the transformation of the empiricist epistemology into a linguistic epistemology, a transformation initiated by the Logical Positivists of the 1930's, and completed by Wittgenstein (...) and his disciples. Hence the amount of space devoted to sign-cognition, to the intelligence of animals, and to image-thinking, all of which are non-verbal or pre-verbal. But, as he has surmised, I am really just an old-fashioned British empiricist. I am fighting on two fronts, as it were, throughout the book: against a purely linguistic conception of thinking on one side, and against the "classical" inspective conception of it on the other. And in this two-fold battle, I am taking just the line which Locke, Berkeley, and Hume would have taken if they had been alive today: one which they do in fact suggest in their writings, though of course they could not anticipate the lengths to which the purely linguistic or verbalistic conception of thinking would go, or how it would ally itself with a behavioristic conception of human personality. One of the things I most object to in current British philosophy is the attack which is made on all sides of the "inner life," the attempt to show that there is no such thing, or that it is a mere muddle to suppose there is, or that to the extent that it does exist it is of no importance. Perhaps there is some connection between this attack on the inner life and the attack on private life which is made by the politicians, social reformers, and economic planners. Perhaps they are only two aspects of the same thing. Anyway, between them they have gone a long way towards a kind of "dehumanisation" of man; and this seems to me one of the darkest features of the very dark age in which we live. I feel concerned about it not only as an epistemologist, but also as a religious person, or at least as a person who is interested in religion in a very undenominational way. Religion, as I view it, is very closely connected with the "inner life"; and if one is forbidden to take an interest in the "inner life," religion will wither away from sheer inanition. At any rate, the most mystical types of religion will, and these are the ones which seem to me the most important. (shrink)

I am very grateful to Professor R. W. Sleeper for his critical comments on my article, as also for the kind way in which he has expressed them. I should now like to make a few comments on his comments. May I first say that I have no objection to being metaphysical? I do not like the word ‘metaphysics’ very much, and wish that we could find a less provocative one. But still, I do think that the difference between the (...) reducible and the irreducible belief-in is a difference which there really is . Moreover, I fully admit that when we believe in God we are making a factual claim. It is, of course, a factual claim of rather a special kind. If it is a fact that there is a supreme Being, ‘The Lord of All’, this is not just one fact among others. It is not quite like the fact that there is a stormy north-westerly wind this morning. One could not just give a list of facts and add at the end, ‘There is also another fact which I had forgotten to mention: there is a God’. All the same, this factual claim, like others, does need to be justified; and how is it to be justified? I am afraid that the brief hint which I offered elsewhere on this subject is indeed ‘not good enough’ as it stands . To be even half good enough, it needs much more elaboration, and I agree that there is much force in Mr Gunderson's criticisms. (shrink)

The founder of Psychical Research, though he has not yet received the honour due to him, seems to have been King Croesus of Lydia, who reigned from 560 to 546 B.C. He carried out an interesting experiment, recorded in detail by Herodotus,2 to test the clairvoyant powers of a number of oracles. He sent embassies to seven oracles, six Greek and one Egyptian. They all started on the same day. On the hundredth day each embassy was instructed to ask its (...) oracle, “What is King Croesus, the son of Alyattes, now doing?” The answer was to be written down and brought back. The oracle of Delphi replied as follows, in hexameters, as its custom was: “I know the number of the sands and the measures of the sea. I understand the dumb, and I hear him who does not speak.” Then it went on: “There comes to my mind the smell of a strong-shelled tortoise, which is being cooked along with lamb's flesh in a brazen vessel; brass is spread beneath it, and with brass it is covered.” As a matter of fact, this answer was perfectly correct. Herodotus tells us that “having considered what would be the most difficult thing to discover and to imagine,” Croesus “cut up a tortoise and a lamb, and himself boiled them together in a brazen pot.” What happened afterwards illustrates the difficulties of this sort of investigation, difficulties which still perplex us to this day. Croesus argued, reasonably enough, that if the Delphic priestess had clairvoyant powers, she probably also had the precognitive powers, she probably also had the precognitive powers which she claimed to have. But when he consulted the oracle later about his forthcoming expedition against the Persians, he received two answers, one of which was ambiguous—“When Croesus crosses the Halys he shall destroy a great empire”—and the other correct, but too obscure to be easily interpreted. (shrink)

Dowe (1996) argues that the success of the backward causation hypothesis in quantum mechanics would provide strong support for a version of Reichenbach's account of the direction of causal processes, which takes the direction of causation to rest on the fork asymmetry. He also criticises my perspectival account of the direction of causation, which takes causal asymmetry to be a projection of our own temporal asymmetry as agents. In this reply I take issue with Dowe's argument at three main points: (...) his claim that the backward causation hypothesis in QM is incompatible with my perspectival approach to the direction of causation; his defence of the fork asymmetry approach against a general criticism of mine based on the time-symmetry of microphysics; and his application of his preferred account of the direction of causal processes to the relevant cases in QM. (shrink)

Alzheimer's disease results from the degeneration of neurons. Degenerating nerve cells express atypical proteins, and amyloid is deposited. We suggest that some of these events are strongly influenced by genetic factors and age. Animal models should be useful in investigating the pathogenic mechanisms that lead to the brain abnormalities seen in this disease.

Professor Ayer's lecture is not only a most auspicious inauguration; it is also an important contribution to philosophy. It is perhaps the best and the most exciting work he has written, and that is saying a good deal. There is a certain theory about thought and its objects which is often hinted at in the utterances and the writings of contemporary empiricist philosophers, but so far as I know it has never before been stated in print. Mr. Ayer has stated (...) it, clearly and in detail, with all his well-known force and felicity of style. It is a strange and rather shocking theory, very different from the one which most philosophers hitherto have believed. But if we are shocked by it, the shock will be salutary. The dragon has at last come clearly into view. If we resolve to accustom ourselves to it and treat it kindly, we may hope that it will transform itself by degrees into a nice gentle domestic pet, as other philosophical dragons have before. (shrink)

Simone Weil's Leçons de Philosophie are derived from a course she taught at the lycée for girls at Roanne in 1933–4. Anne Reynaud-Guérithault was a pupil in the class; her notes are not a verbatim record but are a very full and, as far as one can judge, faithful rendering, often catching the unmistakable tone of Simone Weil's voice as well as the force and the directness of her thought. The lectures form a good general introduction to philosophy, ranging widely (...) over problems about perception, mind, language, reasoning and problems in moral and political philosophy too. Her method of presentation is a characteristic combination of abstract argument, personal experience and literary or historical reference. Peter Winch points out in his introduction to the book some of the more systematic connections in her philosophical work, and makes a number of suggestive comparisons between Simone Weil and Wittgenstein. The translation is by Hugh Price from the Plon edition of 1959. Dr Price has added some notes to explain references in the text that might be unfamiliar to English speaking students beginning philosophy. (shrink)

We must begin by asking; What exactly is common sense? No doubt the word was originally used as a translation of Aristotle's; κοί⋯νη αἴσθησις but that is not its modern meaning. When Reid or more recent philosophers speak of common sense, they clearly have something else in view. At the present day, it is perhaps most often used to mean a quality of a mind, as when we say that jurymen or Members of Parliament should be men of common sense, (...) meaning that they should show intelligence in the ordinary affairs of life; or again, we say that a little common sense would enable us to solve this or that political problem. But we are not concerned with that meaning either, though it would be interesting to discuss it. Common sense, as we are concerned with it here, means rather a body of very general principles commonly accepted by ordinary non-philosophical men in the ordinary affairs of life. These principles are really philosophical—that is to say, they belong to the proper subject-matter of philosophy—but, of course, the plain man who accepts or applies them at every moment of his life is far from being aware of this. Some of them are metaphysical, or epistemological, others are ethical; and whether or not there can be a common-sense theology, as a recent writer has asserted, it seems quite possible that there may be one or two among them which properly belong to the theologian's province. All these principles, taken together, make up what is usually called the common-sense view of the world. But in this discussion we shall confine ourselves to the metaphysical or epistemological ones, which are more frequently appealed to than the others, and which, besides, seem to be more interesting. But our conclusions, if valid, will apply to the others also. (shrink)

We present a one per cent measurement of the cosmic distance scale from the detections of the baryon acoustic oscillations in the clustering of galaxies from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. Our results come from the Data Release 11 sample, containing nearly one million galaxies and covering approximately 8500 square degrees and the redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.7. We also compare these results with those from the publicly released (...) DR9 and DR10 samples. Assuming a concordance Λ cold dark matter cosmological model, the DR11 sample covers a volume of 13 Gpc3 and is the largest region of the Universe ever surveyed at this density. We measure the correlation function and power spectrum, including density-field reconstruction of the BAO feature. The acoustic features are detected at a significance of over 7σ in both the correlation function and power spectrum. Fitting for the position of the acoustic features measures the distance relative to the sound horizon at the drag epoch, rd, which has a value of rd,fid = 149.28 Mpc in our fiducial cosmology. We find DV = at z = 0.32 and DV = at z = 0.57. At 1.0 per cent, this latter measure is the most precise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey. Separating the clustering along and transverse to the line of sight yields measurements at z = 0.57 of DA = and H =. Our measurements of the distance scale are in good agreement with previous BAO measurements and with the predictions from cosmic microwave background data for a spatially flat CDM model with a cosmological constant. © 2014 The Author Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. (shrink)

Introduction: Schools have become a primary setting for providing mental health care to youths in the U.S. School-based interventions have proliferated, but their effects on mental health and academic outcomes remain understudied. In this study we will implement and evaluate the effects of a flexible multidiagnostic treatment called Modular Approach to Therapy for Children with Anxiety, Depression, Trauma, or Conduct Problems on students' mental health and academic outcomes.Methods and Analysis: This is an assessor-blind randomized controlled effectiveness trial conducted across five (...) school districts. School clinicians are randomized to either MATCH or usual care treatment conditions. The target sample includes 168 youths referred for mental health services and presenting with elevated symptoms of anxiety, depression, trauma, and/or conduct problems. Clinicians randomly assigned to MATCH or UC treat the youths who are assigned to them through normal school referral procedures. The project will evaluate the effectiveness of MATCH compared to UC on youths' mental health and school related outcomes and assess whether changes in school outcomes are mediated by changes in youth mental health.Ethics and Dissemination: This study was approved by the Harvard University Institutional Review Board. We plan to publish the findings in peer-reviewed journals and present them at academic conferences.Clinical Trial Registration:ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT02877875. Registered on August 24, 2016. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to outline challenges associated with the inclusion of welfare issues in breeding goals for farm animals and to review the currently available methodologies and discuss their potential advantages and limitations to address these challenges. The methodology for weighing production traits with respect to cost efficiency and market prices are well developed and implemented in animal breeding goals. However, these methods are inadequate in terms of assessing proper values of traits with social and ethical values (...) such as animal welfare, because such values are unlikely to be readily available from the product prices and costs in the market. Defining breeding goals that take animal welfare and ethical concerns into account, therefore, requires new approaches. In this paper we suggest a framework and an approach for defining breeding goals, including animal welfare. The definition of breeding goals including values related to animal welfare requires a multidisciplinary approach with a combination of different methods such as profit equations, stated preference techniques, and selection index theory. In addition, a participatory approach involving different stakeholders such as breeding organizations, food authorities, farmers, and animal welfare organizations should be applied. We conclude that even though these methods provide the necessary tools for considering welfare issues in the breeding goal, the practical application of these methods is yet to be achieved. (shrink)

Between two reasonably priced paper covers, in print of adequate size, we have an extensive and unified collection of primary sources displaying the continuity and periodic adjustment of the ideals and practical considerations of democracy. Between Pericles and the present Sherover finds four basic periods: The Classical Heritage, The Democratic Revolutions, The Priority of Freedom, and Contemporary Groundings. The editor introduces each section with a clear and simply stated digest of each thinker's basic ideas and how the thinkers compare with (...) each other. These introductions contain no novel interpretations and will give the student a running start on the readings that follow them. The introductions are also important transitions whose historical perspective gives the book its continuity. The volume might have been strengthened by allowing some of those who have fundamentally challenged the democratic tradition to speak for themselves.--S. O. H. (shrink)

This volume of the Chicago series is an anthology of what might be called religious literary criticism, where 'religious' speaks of a concern for particular motifs not of any didactic intent on the part of the critics, all of whom, as in the other volumes of the series, are either alumni or faculty of Chicago Divinity School. The contributors on the whole seem to be sound secular scholars with an interest in and passion for literature as a window on life's (...) hard questions. Scott's introduction and his lead article on Saul Bellow are erudite, vast, esoteric, and exhausting. The rewards of careful, hard-work reading are high; but the price will turn many back. All the entries except one focus on recent American prose: Malamud, Heller, Pynchon, Salinger, Flannery O'Conor, J. F. Powers, Styron, and Mailer.--S. O. H. (shrink)

Is helping those whose subsistence needs are not meet a matter of charity or an obligation? What role should ordinary citizens of developed nations play? In a globalized world, the causes, connections, and responsibilities become complicated. Agriculture subsidies that keep food prices low for many in relatively rich countries may, for example, negatively impact poor farmers in developing countries. Students in Ethics/Philosophy 352 report on their project examining whether, and to what extent, a true obligation to aid exists.