During the First World War, Bertrand Russell was political commentator for _The Tribunal_, the official weekly publication of the No-Conscription Fellowship, of which Russell was Action Chairman. This volume contains many short papers from that period, which reflect Russell's immediate reponses to developments in the conflict. These documents bear witness to Russell's growing commitment to pacifism, and reveal the development of the patterns of political argument, rhetoric and activism which were to characterise his work throughout his life.

Geraud de Cordemoy, 1600-1684 -- Clerselier, 1614-1684, and Rohault, 1620-1675 -- Louis de la Chambre, 1594-1669 -- Samuel Sorbière, 1615-1670 -- Louis de la Forge and the critique of substantial forms -- Cartesian doctrine and the animal soul -- Clauberg and the development of occasionalism -- Some historical steps towards parallelism -- Cartesian refutations of Spinoza -- Matter and scientific efficiency -- Man, Thomistic and Cartesian.

I respond to Albert Mosley’s critique that I only attack straw men arguments against affirmative action by showing both that his own argument is a version of one of these “straw men” and that his objections to my arguments can be rebutted.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Supplement News from the Russell Editorial Project by Louis Greenspan As 1 WRITE, the Project room is completely silent. Richard Rempel is pu~suing the elusive tracks of Russell as ghost-writer, Research Associate Mark Lippincott is deciphering some manuscripts and our typesetter, Arlene Duncan, is keying in new texts for Volume 4. Albert Lewis vigilant-' Iy works daily on the computer, and over in the Russell Archives Ken (...) Blackwell, with the assistance ofSheila Turcon, continues to sleuth out new Russell writings, which we accept eagerly and appreciatively. In the age of the wordprocessor, silence has replaced the clacking of typewriters and the din of machinery. Silence signifies that there are people hard at work. Indeed we are! 1990 will be an important year. Volume 2, Philosophical Papers, 1896-99 (editedby Nicholas Griffin and Albert Lewis) has reached the publisher; we plan to have the first volume of the Bibliography (by Kenneth Blackwell and Harry Ruja) and Volume 6, Logical andPhilosophical Papers, 1909-13 (edited by John Slater) there by the end of the year; and Volume 3, Toward the "Principles", 1900-02 (edited by Gregory Moore), will not be far behind in 1991. Also in 1991 Volume 14, Pacifism and Revolution, 1916-18 (edited by L. Greenspan and R.A. Rempel with M. Lippincott) will be ready, and Volume 4, Foundations ofLogic, 190205 (edited by Alasdair Urquhart) will be coming to the home stretch. We will soon be working as quickly as Russell did! There are problems. In an age when even the Pentagon is suffering from cutbacks, so are we. The copy must be prepared by one typesetter who also acts as the Project secretary. That one person is handling a load that had previously been handled by three. Our university, like most others, is slashing budgets so that it has been forced to reduce its contributions to our funding. While we remain relatively fortunate in our level of university support, we in the Project have had to tighten our already taut belts even more. McMaster's budget cuts could mean that we cannot hire summer students for our research. This loss would be difficult but bearable. Next year some of the grants will run out. Then we will be even more dependent on a university, like others in Ontario, which is retrenching through a hiring 96 Russell summer 1990 freeze and other mortifications. Fortunately our May 1989 grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada remain unchanged. But the Russell Project has demonstrated that it is a hardy survivor. In the past we have endured cuts from S.S.H.R.C.C. and cutbacks from the university. But we have persevered and certainly accelerated our output significantly as our understanding of this massive enterprise has continued to develop. We welcome the fact that, through McMaster's support, John Passmore will be back this summer to give guidance, support and wisdom. The Bertrand Russell Editorial Project McMaster University... (shrink)

It is necessary to realize first of all that the concept of culture is founded upon two closely related dichotomies: that between the natural and artificial and that between the chaotic and the orderly. In its most primitive signification, culture means simply the imposition of an exquisite order upon the raw givenness of experience. In this sense, nature represents the immediacy of need, culture its formalization. Man may be "a rational animal," as Aristotle said, but in possessing the rational potential (...) which he intermittently actualizes, he never ceases to remain an animal grounded immediately in hunger, lust, and the multiple instances of natural desire. Plato waged a never-ending struggle against the lawless outbreak of the natural appetites, and his efforts to curb, discipline, and form them is a primitive paradigm of the activity of culture. Man's capacity for thought and reason, for sociality and humane consideration has made him a sculpture-building animal and has made it possible for him, as Cassirer said, to live in a symbolic universe which he has himself created. But while his basic reality is not physical but cultural and spiritual, his anchorage forever remains that of nature and of animal need. The measure of culture is, therefore, a measure of artistic transformation. Albert William Levi is the author of The Idea of Culture, of which this essay is a part. The David May Distinguished University Professor of the Humanities at Washington University, St. Louis, he is the author of Philosophy and the Modern World; Literature, Philosophy and the Imagination; Humanism and Politics; and Philosophy as Social Expression. His "De interpretatione: Cognition and Context in the History of Ideas" appeared in Critical Inquiry, Autumn 1976. (shrink)

One can sympathize with [Leo] Strauss' ultimate aim—to protect the validity of moral judgment against that form of relativism which would assess the value of great philosophic works simply in terms of how they satisfied the needs of the times for which they were written. But in believing that "historicism " meant "relativism," and that all attention to the temporal relevance of great doctrines in the history of ideas was somehow perverse, Strauss was profoundly mistaken. Hermeneutics is not axiology. Questions (...) of truth and validity are fundamental, but they are dependent upon a prior solution of the problem of meaning. And for the establishment of meaning, contextual analysis is crucial. For it is not as if ideas were the ghostly inhabitants of another world, logically cut off from human purposes and intentions. All three things exist: ideas, agents, and social contexts, and the best history of ideas is, I believe, constituted by the careful consideration of the multiple interrelationships between them. It is false to believe that texts exhaust their own meaning. For there is always an historical grounding and a web of person and social events that give them wider and deeper significance. And this is precisely why we must ask such questions as: What sort of society was the author writing for and trying to persuade? What were the conventions of communication and the literary forms of discourse current at the time? What was the author's class affiliation, his place in the social hierarchy of his age? And perhaps above all: What were his moral commitments, the structure of his ideals? Albert William Levi, David May Distinguished University Professor of the Humanities at Washington University, Saint Louis, is the author of Philosophy and the Modern World; Literature, Philosophy and the Imagination; Humanism and Politics; and Philosophy as Social Expression, and The Idea of Culture. His "Culture: A Guess at the Riddle" appeared in Critical Inquiry, Winter 1977. (shrink)

In this article, I review some of the arguments presented by Louis Pojman in “The Case Against Affirmative Action,” and attempt to show that Pojman’s main objections only hold against the strawmen Pojman has erected to represent the case for affirmative action. Affirmative action was designed to correct for state-enforced restrictions against blacks, and has been extended to protect a number of other groups, including women. Its principal justification has been that these groups have in the past been the (...) target of group exclusions that were state sanctioned, and such patterns persist into the present. In this regard, the over-representation of Jews or Asians in academia is little more suspect than the over-representation of blacks in the NBA. (shrink)

Wonders of The African World , narrated and hosted by Henry Louis Gates, was presented in three installments on October 25, 26, and 27. When I realized that the series would begin at exactly the time I had scheduled an audition, I frantically made arrangements to have the segment taped so I could view it later.

This anthology on creativity represents a lifetime of reading and study by the late Charles Dewey Tenney, a philosopher who had been a student of Alfred North Whitehead at Harvard. In a series of fourteen essays Tenney considers the various factors that can be identified in creativity, followed by the recorded testimony of philosophers, artists, historians, explorers, scientists and others, both theorists and practitioners. The contributors extend in time from Aristotle and Sophocles to Buckminster Fuller and May Sarton. They include (...) such diverse thinkers as Martin Luther, Karl Marx, Lewis Carroll, Julian Huxley, Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, Gertrude Stein, Henry Nelson Wieman and Alfred North Whitehead. In all, more than 300 of the world's most creative individuals are included. Contents: Discovery, Invention and Creation; Roots of Discovery; Environs of Discovery; Agents of Discovery; Hinderances to Discovery; Observation and Discovery; Reason in Discovery; Reverie Discovery; Imagination in Discovery; Sensibility and Discovery; Method in Discovery; Artistry in Discovery; Diffusion; and Foresight and Discovery. (shrink)

Die MISCELLANEA MEDIAEVALIA präsentieren seit ihrer Gründung durch Paul Wilpert im Jahre 1962 Arbeiten des Thomas-Instituts der Universität zu Köln. Das Kernstück der Publikationsreihe bilden die Akten der im zweijährigen Rhythmus stattfindenden Kölner Mediaevistentagungen, die vor über 50 Jahren von Josef Koch, dem Gründungsdirektor des Instituts, ins Leben gerufen wurden. Der interdisziplinäre Charakter dieser Kongresse prägt auch die Tagungsakten: Die MISCELLANEA MEDIAEVALIA versammeln Beiträge aus allen mediävistischen Disziplinen - die mittelalterliche Geschichte, die Philosophie, die Theologie sowie die Kunst- und Literaturwissenschaften (...) sind Teile einer Gesamtbetrachtung des Mittelalters. (shrink)

Die MISCELLANEA MEDIAEVALIA präsentieren seit ihrer Gründung durch Paul Wilpert im Jahre 1962 Arbeiten des Thomas-Instituts der Universität zu Köln. Das Kernstück der Publikationsreihe bilden die Akten der im zweijährigen Rhythmus stattfindenden Kölner Mediaevistentagungen, die vor über 50 Jahren von Josef Koch, dem Gründungsdirektor des Instituts, ins Leben gerufen wurden. Der interdisziplinäre Charakter dieser Kongresse prägt auch die Tagungsakten: Die MISCELLANEA MEDIAEVALIA versammeln Beiträge aus allen mediävistischen Disziplinen - die mittelalterliche Geschichte, die Philosophie, die Theologie sowie die Kunst- und Literaturwissenschaften (...) sind Teile einer Gesamtbetrachtung des Mittelalters. (shrink)

Treating mathematical science as a distinct cultural entity subject to environmental factors which influence its evolution, the author examines the creation and development of its major concepts since early times.

A milestone in the development of post-war Marxist thought.

Empathy remains poorly understood, under-theorized, and subject to conflicting and opportunistic uses. Its systematic role in human experience has not been analyzed and interpreted from top to bottom. In this book, the author attempts to provide such an analysis in the philosophical traditions of hermeneutics, phenomenology, analytic philosophy of language, and psychoanalysis. applying his interpretation of empathy to the philosophical issues of intentionality, the emotions, and the checkered transformations of empathy itself. In doing so the author aims to rescue empathy (...) from the margins of intelligibility and reveal its central role in our understanding of the emotions, the integrity of our relations with others, and human community (“intersubjectivity”). -/- The work draws on both the Anglo-American (“analytic”) tradition of ordinary language philosophy and the continental ones of phenomenology and hermeneutics. This work follows the movement of empathy from the periphery of ethics, aesthetics, and theory of mind to a key place in establishing and maintaining the integrity and emotional equilibrium of dynamic interrelations with other individuals. Beginning with the philosophical infrastructure of the hermeneutics of empathy, this work thoroughly explains the complex architecture of empathy, tracing it downward through the levels of authentic human interrelations, empathy with unexpressed emotions, the empathic penetrability of cognitively impenetrable affect, the first-ever intentional analysis of both the empathizer and the “empathasand” in interrelation, and the hermeneutic infrastructure. The consequences of empathy are exposed in the context of the emotions, cognitive impenetrability, empathy and altruism, and the intentionality of empathy as accessed through language and story telling. Drawing on the multi-method approach of hermeneutics, phenomenology, and story telling, this work demonstrates that empathy forms the foundation for community in ways not clearly appreciated in the on-going debate. In a bootstrap operation that is guided by Heidegger’s call for a “special hermeneutic of empathy,” this work achieves a delicate balancing act of unpacking the rich intellectual traditions from which empathy - the phenomenon itself, not the concept - emerged historically. The result is an exposure of the deep structure of empathy as a fundamentally human capability for creating possibilities of community and human relations. (shrink)

From the author of Quantum Mechanics and Experience, a hugely influential book that challenged key assertions by Niels Bohr and other founders of quantum mechanics, A Guess at the Riddle provides a major metaphysical overhaul of one of physics' most intractable problems-the quest to bridge quantum and classical physics in order to understand the nature of reality.