This book's activities highlight the important cycle of exploration, conjecture, and justification in all five mathematical strands. Students recognize patterns and make conjectures, learn the value of a counterexample, explore the strengths and weaknesses of visual proofs, discover the power of algebraic representations, and learn that theoretical approaches can substantiate empirical results. The supplemental CD-ROM features interactive electronic activities, master copies of activity pages for students, and additional readings for teachers. --publisher description.

This book examines spectral haunting through the philosophies of Levinas and Derrida. Arguing that moral obligation can appear terrifying to the complacent self, the text interrogates ethical responsibility in contemporary horror genres.

In this essay, we suggest practical ways to shift the framing of crisis standards of care toward disability justice. We elaborate on the vision statement provided in the 2010 Institute of Medicine (National Academy of Medicine) “Summary of Guidance for Establishing Crisis Standards of Care for Use in Disaster Situations,” which emphasizes fairness; equitable processes; community and provider engagement, education, and communication; and the rule of law. We argue that interpreting these elements through disability justice entails a commitment to both (...) distributive and recognitive justice. The disability rights movement's demand “Nothing about us, without us” requires substantive inclusion of disabled people in decision‐making related to their interests, including in crisis planning before, during, and after a pandemic like Covid‐19. (shrink)

Learning in educational settings most often emphasizes declarative and procedural knowledge. Studies of expertise, however, point to other, equally important components of learning, especially improvements produced by experience in the extraction of information: Perceptual learning. Here we describe research that combines principles of perceptual learning with computer technology to address persistent difficulties in mathematics learning. We report three experiments in which we developed and tested perceptual learning modules to address issues of structure extraction and fluency in relation to algebra and (...) fractions. PLMs focus students’ learning on recognizing and discriminating, or mapping key structures across different representations or transformations. Results showed significant and persisting learning gains for students using PLMs. PLM technology offers promise for addressing neglected components of learning: Pattern recognition, structural intuition, and fluency. Using PLMs as a complement to other modes of instruction may allow students to overcome chronic problems in learning. (shrink)

The most recent commentators on Edmund Burke have renewed the charge that his political thought lacks the consistency and coherency necessary to even claim the status of a political philosophy and that he is indeed a "utilitarian." They mark him off as an "ideologist," a "rhetorician," and a "deliberate propagandist." Even Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, his most profound statement of a political philosophy, is regarded by some as a work of mere "persuasion," not "philosophy." All (...) this occurs in spite of the seminal work of Stanlis, Canavan, and Wilkins, who in the 1950s and ‘60s, demonstrated the natural law foundations of Burke’s politics. Burke revisionists, forced to acknowledge his use of the "natural law," label such use as a rhetorical means for utilitarian ends. Directly opposed to this renewed "utilitarian" interpretation of Burke is Joseph Pappin’s work The Metaphysics of Edmund Burke. Not only does this work challenge the "utilitarian" view of Burke, it sets out, as not other work on Burke has attempted to do, "to make explicit the implicit metaphysical core of Burke’s political thought." Pappin does this by examining both Burke’s critics and Burke’s own attack on a rationalist, ideologically inspired metaphysics. Drawing from Burke’s vast writings, Pappin establishes as his goal "to demonstrate that Burke’s political philosophy is grounded in a realist metaphysic, one that is basically consonant with the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition." Does the author succeed? According to Francis Canavan, in his Foreword to this work, the "explanatory key" of a realist metaphysics grounding Burke’s politics "is a key that fits the lock better than any other that scholars have offered." Canavan further holds that the author offers "us a more thorough analysis of Burke’s understanding of God, the creation, nature, man, and society than has previously appeared.". (shrink)

The monarchic, and aristocratical, and popular partisans have been jointly laying their axes to the root of all government, and have in their turns proved each other absurd and inconvenient. In vain you tell me that artificial government is good, but that I fall out only with the abuse. The thing! the thing itself is the abuse! ~ Edmund Burke, 1756..

This collection of writings on aesthetics includes selections from Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Mikhail Bakhtin, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Amy Mullin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Frederich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. This collection may still be available as a print-on-demand title at the Ryerson University bookstore.

Essays that put noted political thinkers of the past—including Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Wollstonecraft, Marx, and Confucius—in dialogue with current environmental political theory. Contemporary environmental political theory considers the implications of the environmental crisis for such political concepts as rights, citizenship, justice, democracy, the state, race, class, and gender. As the field has matured, scholars have begun to explore connections between Green Theory and such canonical political thinkers as Plato, Machiavelli, Locke, and Marx. The essays in this volume put important figures (...) from the political theory canon in dialogue with current environmental political theory. It is the first comprehensive volume to bring the insights of Green Theory to bear in reinterpreting these canonical theorists. Individual essays cover such classical figures in Western thought as Aristotle, Hume, Rousseau, Mill, and Burke, but they also depart from the traditional canon to consider Mary Wollstonecraft, W. E. B. Du Bois, Hannah Arendt, and Confucius. Engaging and accessible, the essays also offer original and innovative interpretations that often challenge standard readings of these thinkers. In examining and explicating how these great thinkers of the past viewed the natural world and our relationship with nature, the essays also illuminate our current environmental predicament. Essays on Plato • Aristotle • Niccolò Machiavelli • Thomas Hobbes • John Locke • David Hume • Jean-Jacques Rousseau • Edmund Burke • Mary Wollstonecraft • John Stuart Mill • Karl Marx • W. E. B. Du Bois • Martin Heidegger • Hannah Arendt • Confucius Contributors Sheryl D. Breen, W. Scott Cameron, Peter F. Cannavò, Joel Jay Kassiola, Joseph H. Lane Jr. Timothy W. Luke, John M. Meyer, Özgüç Orhan, Barbara K. Seeber, Francisco Seijo, Kimberly K. Smith, Piers H. G. Stephens, Zev Trachtenberg, Andrew Valls, Harlan Wilson. (shrink)

What is a human person? Two general accounts have been offered in answer to this question. According to the one, human persons are immaterial minds or souls. According to the other, human persons are identical with the material bodies that constitute them. Both accounts have serious problems. In this dissertation I present a position that is not a version of any of the currently fashionable or unfashionable "isms"--Cartesian dualism, reductive materialism or property dualism. Taking my lead from recent work on (...) the constitution relation by Mark Johnston, E. J. Lowe, Michael Burke and David Wiggins, I argue in my dissertation for a constitution account of human persons. A constitution account of human person solves many of the problems that plague traditional dualist and materialist theories of persons while at the same time doing justice to our well founded intuitions about persons. According to the constitution view, human persons are concrete physical particulars numerically distinct from the concrete physical particulars that constitute them. Not only are the relata involved in the constitution relation--the constituting object and the constituted object--numerically distinct but they are also objects that fall under different sortals. The constitution view is not without costs. Perhaps the biggest is this: it entails that in the same region of space that presently contains my body there is another numerically distinct physical entity--Me--that shares with my body all of the same parts. This seems to raise insurmountable problems for the constitution view. I supply plausible solutions to these problems and show how the "constitution" view preserves our most deeply held and well-founded beliefs about persons. (shrink)

Moral leadership matters. As world politics enters a new and dangerous era, judgment, constancy, moral purpose, and a willingness to overcome partisan politicking are essential for America's leaders. Tempered Strength finds the alternative standard of leadership that Americans are seeking in the classical philosophy of prudence. Ethan Fishman's new work brings together leading American political scientists—including Ronald Beiner, Kenneth L. Deutsch, and George Anastaplo—to discuss the evolution of a standard of prudential leadership both reasonable in nature and practical in scope. (...) Section One studies the meaning of prudence and its evolution in the history of political science from Aristotelian phronesis to Xenophon, Thomas Aquinas, Edmund Burke, and Michael Oakeshott. Section Two demonstrates how the theory of prudential leadership can be applied to practical political issues. (shrink)

Resumen en español. En esta tesis indagamos en el pensamiento de tres autores contrarrevolucionarios europeos de la primera mitad del siglo XIX (1789-1848): Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) y Juan Donoso Cortés (1809-1853). A partir de un estudio de sus obras principales, destacamos las limitaciones de las caracterizaciones contemporáneas sobre el pensamiento conservador y proponemos una clasificación alternativa ajustada a los orígenes políticos de dicha corriente: la distinción entre un conservadorismo como sustantivo y un conservadorismo como (...) adjetivo. Delineada esta distinción, que funciona como hipótesis de trabajo, demostramos su capacidad heurística para conceptualizar el conservadorismo de los autores escogidos. Concluimos destacando las ventajas del punto de vista propuesto para definir a esta corriente de la teoría política y su capacidad de extenderse a otros autores, períodos y corrientes. (shrink)

La Revolución Francesa alteró profunda mente la vida europea y su influencia no tardó en llegar a América. Muy pronto surgieron frente a ella posturas que se oponían a sus postulados ideológicos y políticos. Dos de estas posturas llaman la atención: la de Edmund Burke y la de Joseph de Maistre. Ambas reacciones cuestionan la Revolución desde una perspectiva conservadora, pero toman caminos diferentes. La de Burke dará origen a un conservadurismo posibilista y procedimental, compatible con el (...) liberalismo, mientras que la de De Maistre inicia una tradición conservadora contrarrevolucionaria y maximalista que derivará en el integrismo. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Edmund Burke and His Critics: The Case of Mary WollstonecraftJames ConniffA number of interesting questions concerning the development of English political thought in the French Revolutionary period remain matters of controversy. In this essay I propose to consider two of them: why did the Whigs split on the Revolution, and why and how did some of the disaffected Whigs reconcile with Edmund Burke. Various answers have been (...) suggested. The currently dominant position was first articulated some years ago when J. G. A. Pocock suggested that the revolutionary debate was largely a struggle between Whig ancient constitutionalists, Burke among them, and a republican alliance of disciples of Harrington and Machiavelli. 1 In his Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism Isaac Kramnick disagreed, arguing that the late eighteenth-century radicals should be seen as Lockeans pursuing “a new Liberal ideal, a society of achievement, a social order of competitive individualism in which social mobility was possible and the rightful reward for ingenious people of talent and hard work” was economic success crowned by wealth. 2 In his view English society was then characterized by a struggle in which the middle class, led by religious Dissenters, was rising to challenge the domination of the existing economic and political elite. For Kramnick such figures as Joseph Priestley, Thomas Paine, and Richard Price were advocates for this class, and their political theories represented its ideology. 3 According to Kramnick, these writers were intent on creating a practical science which could be used to promote the happiness of mankind through reform of the political system. Intent on rewarding merit, the radicals advocated the virtues of commercial civilization and [End Page 299] opposed the lazy indolence of both rich and poor. 4 Other scholars have followed Kramnick’s lead and sought to expand the reach of his thesis. In a recent biography of Paine, Jack Fruchtman treated Paine as a civic humanist, a radical critic of English society, and a defender of commercial republics. 5 Similarly, Joyce Appleby and Drew McCoy have employed republicanism to explain American politics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. 6It seems to me that the focus on the radical Whig’s critique of Edmund Burke is indeed a good place to start. In the preface to the English edition of The Rights of Man Paine maintained that “from the part Mr. Burke took in the American Revolution, it was natural that I should consider him a friend to mankind... but no sooner did he see the old prejudices wearing away, than he immediately began sowing the seeds of a new inveteracy, as if he were afraid that England and France would cease to be enemies.” 7 In Paine’s view Burke and his allies among the Old Whigs were simply hypocrites. They supported reform, he said, only when it benefitted themselves. Intent on their own self-interest, they could never admit that, “it is to a nation that the right of forming or reforming, generating or regenerating constitutions and governments belong;... those subjects... are always before a country as a matter of right....” 8 Yet as James Boulton has suggested, Paine actually spoke for only a relatively small segment of Burke’s critics. 9 Other more moderate Whigs like Philip Francis and James Mackintosh disagreed with Paine while also rejecting Burke’s violent rhetoric and what they perceived as his opposition to all reform. Over the course of the controversy these moderates maintained contact with Burke, argued respectfully with him, and often continued to work with him on other issues. Moreover, Burke and at least some of his critics shared a common commitment to progress achieved by gradual reform within a context of social stability. Where they differed most was in two areas of subordinate theoretical concern. First, within the common framework of progress, they debated matters of detail, timing, and pace. Second, they disagreed on a number of specific issues which involved such concepts as human nature, equality, the degree of flexibility within the social system, and the value of education, associated with progress. It is, I believe, the disagreement on these subordinate issues which [End Page 300] explains the Whig split. Their limited reconciliation followed in turn... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.3 (2003) 207-222 [Access article in PDF] Burke Contra Kierkegaard:Kenneth Burke's Dialectic via Reading Søren Kierkegaard G. L. Ercolini Isaac—to his children Lived to tell the tale— Moral—with a Mastiff Manners may prevail. —Emily Dickinson Kenneth Burke employs the term dialectic throughout his works and yet, despite its profuse recurrence, the term remains ambiguous. Much secondary scholarship has focused on Burke and (...) dialectics, and still the term in Burke remains—if not already complicated—cloudy. 1 Part of the difficulty regarding this term stems from Burke's own ambiguity; another part from critics' tendency to rely on Burke's own use and definitions for clarification of this concept. The arguments have been helpful and illuminating, yet Burke's dialectic can be further clarified by going beyond what Burke means by the term by focusing on how he deploys dialectical criticism in his own work. 2 This article focuses on Burke's appropriation of the existential thinker Søren Kierkegaard as a particularly clear and remarkable instance of the operation of Burke's dialectic in his criticism. I maintain that although Burke's reading of Kierkegaard is arguably a misreading, his strategic appropriation of Kierkegaard in A Rhetoric of Motives (1950) not only serves as a clear deployment of the dialectic, but also functions as a foil against which Burke defines his own critical method. Burke's reading of Kierkegaard emphasizes the function of resolution in Burke's critical project.The current literature, although quite informative, does not put Burke's dialectic in sharp focus. Rueckert argues that Burkean dialectics "is really a branch of what Burke was to later call logology, the study of words, of language, of symbol systems" (1994, 14). Heath claims that dialectic "is an analytical tool to help us diagnose perspectives so that we can [End Page 207] examine whether they make sense and consider their implications for social relations" (1986, 162). Crusius contends that, "dialectic for Burke is the study of verbal universes, the disinterested pursuit of a vocabulary's implications" (1986, 24). While Brummett and Crusius show similarity between Hegel's and Burke's dialectic, Heath and Wess distinguish Burke's dialectic from Hegelian idealism and teleological history respectively. 3 Most of the arguments concerning Burke and dialectic focus on "The Dialectic of Constitutions" in A Grammar of Motives (1969), while A Rhetoric of Motives (1962), where Burke identifies humankind as homo dialecticus, is hardly engaged with regard to this concept. 4 Burke's working through Kierkegaard in A Rhetoric of Motives demonstrates Burke's dialectical criticism—thus providing an operational account of Burke's dialectic—and allows for his revelation of the three motives in the realm of rhetoric: the Order, the Secret, and the Kill. 5 And yet, despite this centrality of Fear and Trembling, surprisingly little has been said about Burke's Kierkegaard beyond passing mention. 6Despite editorial advice to the opposite regarding an article that would later become a part of the book, Burke evidently regarded his reading of Kierkegaard as important. Joseph Bennett, editor of Hudson Review, responded as follows to Burke's 1948 submission of the article entitled "Imagery of Killing": "I would like to request that you eliminate Kierkegaard from the article in question, confining it simply to literary exegesis and excluding the philosopher theologian." 7 Although he complied for the article, Burke retained his reading of Kierkegaard in A Rhetoric of Motives. Despite the lack of attention given to it, Burke's engagement with Kierkegaard clearly demonstrates how Burke views ethical criticism as that which resolves opposition, negation, and paradox to a higher order. Burke contra Kierkegaard The section entitled "Order" in A Rhetoric of Motives contains a detailed, twenty-three-page discussion of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. In this discussion, Burke primarily attacks Kierkegaard for encouraging what Burke enigmatically and elliptically identifies as the "cult of the Kill."Burke's portrayal of Kierkegaard is hardly flattering: at the crescendo of his analysis in A Rhetoric of Motives he claims that thinking such as Kierkegaard... (shrink)

Joseph de Maistre is usually portrayed as Edmund Burke’s French counterpart, as they both wrote important treatises against the French Revolution. Although Maistre did share many of Burke’s conservative political views, he was much more than a political thinker. He was above all a religious thinker who interpreted political events through the prism of a particular retributionist theology. According to this theology, God punishes evil deeds, not only in the afterlife, but also in this terrestrial life; and (...) sometimes, he may even use human tyrants as instruments of his wrath. This interpretation especially evident in Maistre’s Considerations sur la France, an early work in his philosophical career. In that book, Maistre interprets the French Revolution as divine punishment, and in that regard, his views bear some similarities to the Deuteronomist historian in the Hebrew Bible, who interpreted the destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian Exile, as divine punishment in retribution of Israel’s sins. (shrink)

Joseph Pappin attempts to find in Edmund Burke's political writings a consistent metaphysical foundation. Pappin understands metaphysics as a search for knowledge of some suprasensible source. It is an exact science which supplies the ends for which politics is the inexact means. Burke, however, is a practical politician who writes for the occasion. This has led many to take Burke's evident distaste for speculation and theory and preference for prudence as evidence for an anti-metaphysical position. Pappin (...) argues that, on the contrary, Burke distinguishes abstraction from universals. In the Aristotelian tradition, concrete reason is a form of the practical intellect. On the other hand, Burke's pragmatism has led a number of commentators to identify utilitarian themes in his writings. While these are undoubtedly present, Pappin argues that they ignore the legitimate role Burke assigns to reason and natural law. Pappin understands Burke's metaphysics in the light of the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition, particularly as that tradition has been interpreted by Jacques Maritain. Secondarily, he juxtaposes Burke's thought to existentialism. The young Burke was educated in this Aristotelian-Thomist tradition. It reinforces his later prudential concerns and distrust for the individual as opposed to cumulative tradition. Pappin concludes that Burke's metaphysics occupies an Aristotelian middle ground, "avoiding on the one hand the extremes of radical essentialism and on the other hand radical existentialism. Instead, his thought reveals a metaphysics much nearer the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, a tradition enhanced for Maritain, by Aquinas' authentic existentialism". (shrink)

Der in Chambéry geborene Joseph de Maistre ist, mit Louis-Ambroise de Bonald, einer der vehementesten Gegner der Französischen Revolution. Seine 1796 veröffentlichten Considérations sur la France schließen sich an Burkes Considerations on the Revolution in France an, übertreffen diese aber noch an Vehemenz, bedingt vor allem durch de Maistres ultramontane Einstellungen. In seinem posthum veröffentlichten De la souveraineté populaire setzt sich de Maistre polemisch mit Rousseaus Thesen auseinander, in denen er den Keim der Revolution sieht.

Der in Chambéry geborene Joseph de Maistre ist, mit Louis-Ambroise de Bonald, einer der vehementesten Gegner der Französischen Revolution. Seine 1796 veröffentlichten Considérations sur la France schließen sich an Burkes Considerations on the Revolution in France an, übertreffen diese aber noch an Vehemenz, bedingt vor allem durch de Maistres ultramontane Einstellungen. In seinem posthum veröffentlichten De la souveraineté populaire setzt sich de Maistre polemisch mit Rousseaus Thesen auseinander, in denen er den Keim der Revolution sieht.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Joseph de Maistre’s Civilization and its DiscontentsGraeme GarrardIn his study of Sigmund Freud’s social and political thought Paul Roazen claims that Freud was the first to depict the human psyche as torn between two fundamentally antithetical tendencies:The notion of a human nature in conflict with itself, disrupted by the opposition of social and asocial inclinations, the view that the social self develops from an asocial nucleus but that (...) the social trends are also dynamic and emotional in nature, and finally the conception that reason’s control can be extended by a detailed knowledge of the repressed asocial tendencies—all this was not known before Freud. 1Although Freud is undoubtedly the most famous modern exponent of this conception of human nature at war with itself, he was by no means its first, let alone only, proponent. Kant, for example, wrote of the “unsocial sociability of men” over a century earlier. 2 An even more unlikely precursor of this basic assumption of Freudian social psychology is the Catholic reactionary Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821). The social theory elaborated by this arch-paladin of throne and altar—who was, quite literally, plus royalist que le roi, plus catholique que le Pape—is strikingly similar to that expressed by Freud in his famous essay Civilization and Its Discontents (1929). 3 [End Page 429]Both conceived of the individual as “a being both social and evil,” 4 perpetually struggling to prevent the innate aggressiveness of the species from plunging society into a Hobbesian war of all against all. That is why Freud insisted that it “has to use its utmost efforts in order to set limits to man’s aggressive instincts,” 5 a view advanced over a century earlier by Maistre. Events in Europe after 1789 led many conservatives such as Maistre, as events after 1914 would lead Freud, to reject the common Enlightenment view of human beings as naturally sociable and of social life as a reflection of the spontaneous harmony of a natural world governed by laws established by God and discoverable by reason. In Maistre’s view, social and political life are better understood as the artificial and fundamentally precarious imposition of order on the violent flux of nature. Anticipating Freud, he asserts that individuals, if left to their own devices in society, would soon be plunged into a state of social warfare identical to that which Hobbes had attributed to the state of nature. His particular brand of extreme conservative thought derives its social and political authoritarianism from these deeply pessimistic social assumptions, which leave him with more in common (on this subject) with Freud than with either the Enlightenment or fellow conservatives such as Edmund Burke.Homo Homini LupusThe pessimistic, even tragic, argument of Civilization and Its Discontents is that human beings are driven by extremely powerful instincts, the full satisfaction of which is incompatible with social life. According to Freud, the “cultural frustration” that ensues from this incompatibility “dominates the large field of social relationships between human beings. As we already know, it is the cause of the hostility against which all civilizations has to struggle.” 6 Unhappiness, understood as the non-satisfaction of these basic libidinal urges, is therefore a necessary part of human association. “One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be ‘happy,’” Freud writes pessimistically, “is not included in the plan of ‘Creation.’” 7Freud also argues that, in addition to these basically erotic instincts, there is a “constitutional inclination in human beings to be aggressive towards one another,” 8 which “constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.” 9 [End Page 430] This ineliminable tendency accounts for Freud’s Hobbesian view of the precariousness of civilization: 10[M]en are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbour is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to... (shrink)

Was Joseph de Maistre a conservative thinker?; an actor who might at any time switch roles with his alleged British counterpart Edmund Burke in a show called “Reactions to the French Revolution”? Or was de Maistre (as Sir Isaiah Berlin saw him) a milestone on mankind’s rush to the “Age of Unreason” in general, and to the Nazi folly in particular? To answer this controversy, Professor Michael Shafir called on the witness’ stand an unexpected expert in conservatism and (...) the folly of revolutions: Romanian playwright Ion Luca Caragiale. Using as evidence before the court Caragiale’s famous farce “Master Leonida Facing Reaction”, this exercise in literary counterfactualism demonstrates, according to Shafir, the fig of reason and faith is too small to cover the wastelands of unreason and Social-Darwinist-like psychopathology. (shrink)

Against the background of the Second World War and post-war cultural change in Australia, this review article discusses the establishment of the profession of art history and art curatorial scholarship in Australia in the 1940s and 1950s. The key figures in this transformation were Franz Philipp and Ursula Hoff (European ‘savant’ refugees from Nazism and anti-Semitism), and the British scholar Joseph Burke (appointed as Herald Professor of Fine Arts at Melbourne University). These figures played pivotal roles in Sir (...) Keith Murdoch's ‘civilizing mission’ to reform Australian culture – a mission centred on Melbourne University and the National Gallery of Victoria under its new director, Daryl Lindsay. Within the context of the ‘culture wars’ dividing the Australian art world at this time, these reformers and pioneering scholars found themselves opposed by a radical art avant-garde under the leadership of the art patron John Reed. The work of key modernist Australian artists, above all Sidney Nolan and Russell Drysdale, became touchstones for radical and conservative positions in this conflict. (shrink)

This essay compares and contrast Priestley and Burke on the nature of progress and politics and why, after having begun as political comrades, they arrived at such different evaluations of the French Revolution. Priestley had a robust account of progress, Burke a fragile one. Priestley's ideal, unlike Burke's, was not that of civic virtue but that of commercial virtue. By restricting the scope of government, Priestley diminished the status of the political virtues.

Joseph Priestley was a man of many and varied intellectual interests. This thesis surveys his philosophical thought, with a central focus on his philosophical theology. The subject can be divided into two parts, natural theology and moral theology. Priestley's natural theology is a perhaps unique attempt to combine and harmonize materialism, determinism and theism, under the auspices of Newtonian methodology. His materialism is based on three arguments: that interaction between matter and spirit is impossible; that a dynamic theory of (...) matter breaks down the active/passive dichotomy assumed by many dualists; and that Newton's "Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy" require the rejection of the "hypothesis" of the soul. His determinism arises from his theory of causation. He attempts to show that the only acceptable account of causation is one in which every cause is invariably followed by the same effect, and that libertarianism violates this central assumption of scientific thought. His theism rests on the Argument from Design. He defends the Argument by trying to show that none of the alternatives to Design advanced in Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion constitute a plausible scientific hypothesis. His critics accused his synthesis of materialism, determinism and theism of leading to atheism or pantheism. His defence against these charges is that his system is essentially theistic, and that its ontology is determined by the Argument from Design. Priestley's moral theology is also in part a response to Hume's Dialogues. He offers a number of replies to the "problem of evil". Evil and adversity heighten our appreciation of good; they are a consequence of the finitude of the creation; they follow from the desirability of having a world governed by general laws; and they make possible the achievement of moral character. Character-formation is his main defence, and his methodology requires him to show that adversity leads more often than not to positive results. This requirement is embodied in his progressivist philosophy of history. History, he holds, exhibits temporal purpose and Design, just as nature exhibits atemporal purpose and Design. Priestley's political thought can be seen as arising from his moral theology, mediated by the notions of "luxury", which he regards as morally harmless, and "idleness", which is the main source of moral evil. His combination of liberalism and radicalism is examined both for internal consistency and as a response to the events of his day, ending with the French Revolution. Priestley is interesting partly for his unorthodoxy, partly for the inter-connectedness of his diverse concerns, and partly because he debated with distinguished contemporaries. Throughout the thesis his views are juxtaposed with those of Hume, Reid, Price, Boscovich, Burke and a number of other thinkers. (shrink)

ABSTRACT George Berkeley is usually not discussed in the canonical histories of modern aesthetics. Similarly, Berkeley scholars do not seem to have paid attention to his possible contribution to modern aesthetics. Berkeley exploited certain theoretical potentials of the emerging aesthetic experience that was invented and formulated especially by his contemporaries like Joseph Addison, Richard Steele and Lord Shaftesbury. He applied these elements in shaping a theologico-aesthetic language in the very same period when Francis Hutcheson and Alexander Baumgarten wrote their (...) widely acclaimed first aesthetic theories in Europe. At the same time, Berkeley advances the linguistic and religious aspects of the modern aesthetic experience not in his theoretical, but in his pragmatical and popularizing writings. Instead of relying on a purely rational theology or a negative theology, he offers an ‘aesthetic’ one based on the model of the beautiful and the sublime. Aesthetically, this meant a re-interpretation and re-configuration of the duality of the beautiful and the sublime – decades before Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry. (shrink)

Joseph Raz presents a penetrating exploration of the interdependence of value, reason, and the will. These essays illuminate a wide range of questions concerning fundamental aspects of human thought and action. Engaging Reason is a summation of many years of original, compelling, and influential work by a major contemporary philosopher.

Summarizing this century's major debates over realism and the rationality of scientific knowledge, Joseph Rouse believes that these disputes oversimplify the ...

Naturalism as a guiding philosophy for modern science both disavows any appeal to the supernatural or anything else transcendent to nature, and repudiates any philosophical or religious authority over the workings and conclusions of the sciences. A longstanding paradox within naturalism, however, has been the status of scientific knowledge itself, which seems, at first glance, to be something that transcends and is therefore impossible to conceptualize within scientific naturalism itself. In Articulating the World, Joseph Rouse argues that the most (...) pressing challenge for advocates of naturalism today is precisely this: to understand how to make sense of a scientific conception of nature as itself part of nature, scientifically understood. Drawing upon recent developments in evolutionary biology and the philosophy of science, Rouse defends naturalism in response to this challenge by revising both how we understand our scientific conception of the world and how we situate ourselves within it. (shrink)

The importance of ethical consumerism to many companies worldwide has increased dramatically in recent years. Ethical consumerism encompasses the importance of non-traditional and social components of a company's products and business process to strategic success - such as environmental protectionism, child labor practices and so on. The present paper utilizes a random utility theoretic experimental design to provide estimates of the relative value selected consumers place on the social features of products.

Truth is a pervasive feature of ordinary language, deserving of systematic study, and few theorists of truth have endeavoured to chronicle the tousled conceptual terrain forming the non-philosopher’s ordinary view. Joseph Ulatowski recasts the philosophical treatment of truth in light of historical and recent work in experimental philosophy. He argues that the commonsense view of truth is deeply fragmented along two axes, across different linguistic discourses and among different demographics. Call this endoxic alethic pluralism. To defend this view, four (...) conclusions must be reached: (1) endoxic alethic pluralism should be compatible with how the everyday person uses truth, (2) the common conception of truth should be derivable from empirical data, (3) this descriptive metaphysical project is one aspect of a normative theory of truth, and (4) endoxic alethic pluralism is at least partially immune to challenges facing the ecological method in experimental philosophy and alethic pluralism. (shrink)

Joseph Houston’s book is a fine contribution to the philosophical investigation of the value of miracle reports for religious apologetics. It covers a wide range of arguments of interest to philosophers about the concept of miracles and the justifiability of belief in their occurrence, but it is also rich in theological and biblical sources. Houston’s reasoning throughout is careful and subtle, but neither technical nor excessively pedantic. So while the book is primarily intended for scholars, students should find it (...) within their reach. (shrink)

This discussion begins from the dilemma, posed in some earlier writing by Alasdair MacIntyre, that education is essential but also, in current economic and cultural conditions, impossible. The potential for resolving this dilemma through appeal to ‘practice’, ‘narrative unity’, and ‘tradition’(three core concepts in After Virtue and later writings) is then examined. The discussion also explores the relationship of education to the modern state and the power of a liberal education to create an ‘educated public’ very different in character from (...) the electorates of contemporary democratic regimes. It concludes with some remarks on the role of education in combating prejudice against certain kinds of human difference. (shrink)

Joseph Agassi is a critic, a gadfly, a debunker and deflater; he is also a constructor, a speculator and an imaginative scholaro In the history and philosophy of science, he has been Peck's bad boy, delighting in sharp and pungent criticism, relishing directness and simplicity, and enjoying it all enormously. As one of that small group of Popper's students (ineluding Bartley, Feyerabend and Lakatos) who took Popper seriously enough to criticize him, Agassi remained his own man, holding Popper's work (...) itself to the criteria of critical refutation. Agassi's range is wide and his publications proliik. He has published serious studies in the historiography of science, applied sociology (on Hong Kong with LC. Jarvie), foundations of anthropology, interpretive scientific biography (Faraday), Judaic studies, philosophy of technology (which Agassi pioneered, particulady in distinguishing it from the philosophy of science), as weIl as the many works on the Iogic, methodoI­ ogy, and history of science. Even as we go to press, Agassi's works are appearing; we append an imperfect and selected bibliography. For Agassi, the test of relevance is whether something is interesting. (shrink)

_If you were free in doing something and morally responsible for it, you could have done otherwise. That_ _has seemed a pretty firm proposition among the old, new, clear, unclear and other propositions in the_ _philosophical discussion of freedom and determinism. If you were free in what you did, there was an_ _alternative. It is also at least natural to think that if determinism is true, you can never do otherwise than_ _you do. G. E. Moore, that Cambridge reasoner in (...) whose shadow Wittgenstein ought to be standing,_ _considered the matter. He pointed out that even if determinism is true, there remains a sense in which you_ _can still do otherwise than you do: you will do otherwise if you so choose. That, on reflection, is consistent_ _with determinism. The doctrine of the compatibility of freedom and determinism is saved. Joseph Keim_ _Campbell, strong philosopher at Washington State University, provides the latest thinking on this seemingly_ _unavoidable dispute. You do not have to agree that either compatibilism or incompatibilism must be true in_ _order to appreciate the carefulness of his reasoning in this piece of ongoing American philosophy. It_ _requires and repays attention._. (shrink)

The sublime evokes our awe, our terror, and our wonder. Applied first in ancient Greece to the heights of literary expression, in the 18th-century the sublime was extended to nature and to the sciences, enterprises that viewed the natural world as a manifestation of God's goodness, power, and wisdom. In The Scientific Sublime, Alan Gross reveals the modern-day sublime in popular science. He shows how the great popular scientists of our time--Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Weinberg, Brian Greene, Lisa Randall, (...) Rachel Carson, Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, and E. O. Wilson--evoke the sublime in response to fundamental questions: How did the universe begin? How did life? How did language? These authors maintain a tradition initiated by Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and Adam Smith, towering 18th-century figures who adapted the literary sublime first to nature, then to science--though with one crucial difference: religion has been replaced wholly by science. In a final chapter, Gross explores science's attack on religion, an assault that attempts to sweep permanently under the rug two questions science cannot answer: What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of the good life? (shrink)

18th-century British aesthetics addressed itself to a variety of questions: What is taste? What is beauty? Is there is a standard of taste and of beauty? What is the relation between the beauty of nature and that of artistic representation? What is the relation between one fine art and another? How ought the fine arts be ranked one against another? What is the nature of the sublime and ought it be ranked with the beautiful? What is the nature of genius (...) and what is its relation to taste? -/- Although none of these questions was peripheral to 18th-century British aesthetics, not all were equally central. The question on which the others tended to turn was the question concerning the nature of taste. But this question was not simply how best generally to define taste. Everyone seems to have been in at least rough agreement with Joseph Addison’s early definition of taste as “that faculty of soul, which discerns the beauties of an author with pleasure, and the imperfections with dislike” (Addison and Steele 1879, no. 409). But agreeing with Addison meant agreeing only to use “taste” to refer to that faculty and to acknowledge that such discerning has something of the phenomenology of sensation. The central question was how to think of taste so defined. Is taste a higher, cognitive faculty, akin perhaps to reason, with objects of a primarily intellectual nature? Or is it a lower, bodily faculty, more akin to the five bodily senses, and with objects of a primarily material nature? The major theories that arose in response to this question can be grouped into three main lineages: (a) internal-sense theories, of which the theories of Shaftesbury (1711), Hutcheson (1725), Hume (1739–40, 1751, and 1757) and Reid (1785) are representative; (b) imagination theories, of which theories of Addison (1712) and Burke (1757/59) are representative; and (c) association theories, of which the theories of Gerard (1757) and Alison (1790) are representative. (shrink)

Frederick the Great of Prussia was hailed by many as the model of an ‘Enlightened Despot’. Historians continue to debate both the concept of ‘Enlightened Despotism’ and Frederick’s credentials as an enlightened monarch. Should we talk in terms of ‘enlightened absolutism’? Of ‘reform absolutism’? Or simply drop the use of any such terms for a monarch who used his enlightened philosophising and flute playing as window dressing for a system of governance that was essentially conventional absolutism? In light of continuing (...) debate about the nature of Frederick’s reign, it is worth revisiting the views of contemporaries. As a friend of Voltaire, Frederick’s place was well established in traditional depictions of the Enlightenment as centred on the French philosophes. In the past two decades, however, scholars have broadened and deepened our conception of Enlightenment by researching the ‘social history of ideas’ and illuminating Enlightenment in various national and cultural contexts. In this vein, an analysis of perceptions of Frederick the Great can shed light on the nature of Enlightenment in Britain. Frederick’s popularity in Britain reached dizzying heights in the late 1750s as he won spectacular victories in the Continental campaign against Britain’s enemies in the Seven Years War. From the 1760s on, however, British opinion was generally critical of his regulated and militaristic state and his aggrandisement through diplomacy. While it is not within the scope of this essay to explore broader perceptions of Frederick II in late eighteenth-century Britain, it appears that writers who can be located within ‘conservative’ enlightened thought had a more positive perception of Frederick than dissenters. Samuel Johnson declared that the King of Prussia could get away with wearing plain cloths because ‘of the dignity of his character’. On separate occasions in 1780 Edmund Burke praised Frederick for the economy and efficiency of his royal court and for his religious toleration. An article is in preparation that will explore the range of British opinion on Frederick the Great at the end of his long reign. This essay, however, will focus on how some leading Rational Dissenters perceived the self-consciously enlightened King of Prussia, and provide an exposition of the Memoirs of the life and reign of Frederick (1788) by Joseph Towers. (shrink)