A comparative study to determine the significance of essence in the doctrine of three philosophers. By his method of reduction husserl disclosed his version of essence and used it to establish phenomenology as a rigorous science and to see phenomena solely as phenomena. Whitehead identified essence with his "eternal objects" and this identification protected his "actual occasions" from the limitations of empiricism. By means of essence seen exclusively as appearance and relations, Santayana supports his ingenious thesis that nothing given exists. (...) Conclusion: essence is a cardinal element in the philosophy of all three men. (shrink)

Almost everyone who encounters the philosophy of Santayana sees that a crucial aspect of it concerns the relation of essence and existence. About twenty-five years before the publication of the first volume of Realms of Being, Royce pointed out that the gist of Santayana’s thought was the separation of these two states. Perhaps Santayana had that remark in mind in composing much of his subsequent work. At least, for forty years he did not forget it, since he quoted it in (...) the Schilpp volume. It might be appropriate to ask how far Santayana proceeded toward reconciling the apparently incompatible elements of the essence-existence dichotomy. This essay will consider that question, first, in the context of the essence-existence relationship in itself; second, in the context of the direct bearing of this relation on Santayana’s doctrine of truth; and third, in the context of the interrelation of the four realms of being. (shrink)

A theory that treats language not as an abstract symbol system but as a function of our brains and experience, integrating recent findings from biology, ...

Henry Sedgewick's The Methods of Ethics challenges comparison, as no other work in moral philosophy, with Aristotle's Ethics in the depth of its understanding of practical rationality, and in its architectural coherence it rivals the work of Kant. In this historical, rather than critical study, Professor Schneewind shows how Sidgewick's arguments and conclusions represent rational developments of the work of Sidgewick's predecessors, and brings out the nature and structure of the reasoning underlying his position.

Is jealousy eliminable? If so, at what cost? What are the connections between pride the sin and the pride insisted on by identity politics? How can one question an individual's understanding of their own happiness or override a society's account of its own rituals? What is wrong with incest? These and other questions about what sustains and threatens our identity are pursued using the resources of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and other disciplines. The discussion throughout is informed and motivated by the Spinozist (...) hope that understanding our lives can help change them, can help make us more free. (shrink)

There exists a diversity of "evidence-free" religions, contradicting one an- other. There will be an epistemic problem for a religious devotee either because evidence-free belief is in general not epistemically justified in the face of diversity, or because of a special problem in the religious case. I argue that in general evidence-free belief is epistemically justified in the face of diversity. Then I argue that recent arguments of Wykstra and Basinger fail to show that there is a special problem in (...) the religious case. Finally, I give reasons why religious belief is epistemically justified in the face of diversity. (shrink)

Does Freud still have something to teach us? The premise of this volume is that he most certainly does. Approaching Freud from not only the philosophical but also historical, psychoanalytical, anthropological, and sociological perspectives, the contributors show us how Freud gave us a new and powerful way to think about human thought and action. They consider the context of Freud's thought and the structure of his arguments to reveal how he made sense of ranges of experience generally neglected or misunderstood. (...) All the central topics of Freud's work, from sexuality and neurosis to morality, art, and culture are covered. (shrink)

This chapter discusses wide and narrow definitions of “mystical experience” and of “religious experience”; categories and attributes of mystical experience; perennialism vs. constructivism; on the possibility of experiencing God; epistemology: The doxastic practice approach and the argument from perception; criticisms of the doxastic practice approach and the argument from perception; religious diversity; naturalistic explanations; and mysticism, religious experience, and gender.

Second, this collection of cognitive programs evolved in the Pleistocene to solve the adaptive problems regularly faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors-...

This book, the product of a lifetime of research by one of the founders of developmental psychology, takes on the powerful assumptions behind these questions- ...

Provability, Computability and Reflection.

Hall discusses the ideas of modern day legal philosophers such as Duguit, Geny, Ehrlich, & Kelsen, & what their conceptions mean to a democratic society.

L'homme ne se rapporte droitement a lui-meme qu'en se rapportant a la totalite du monde qui l'entoure. Ce monde qui est unique selon Platon, sans qu'il soit double par le monde intelligible dont parlera le neoplatonisme, est rendu possible par la rencontre de l'intelligible et du sensible. Ainsi, le logos, par quoi l'homme a acces aux Formes, est ce qui permet d'operer la deliaison proprement philosophique du corps et de l'ame, selon les termes du Phedon, sans qu'il faille poser un (...) dualisme cosmique qui se retrouverait dans l'homme. De meme que le sensible s'intelligibilise par la Participation et ainsi se maintient comme phenomene stable, de meme l'homme peut avoir un usage harmonieux de son corps et de ses sensations. Deliaison n'est pas rupture. L'enfance, la sexuation, le sommeil, les reves, la mort et la parole, ici interroges, montrent que l'anthropologie de Platon ne condamne ni le plaisir, ni le corps. La vie de la pensee ne s'absente pas des mouvements corporels qu'elle accompagne. C'est pourquoi le corps est le signe de l'ame. (shrink)