Rhetoric -- Paradox -- Space -- Time -- Utopia -- Progress -- Art -- Ethics.

The study of letters, by Norman Foerster.--Language, by J.C. McGalliard.--Literary history, by René Wellek.--Literary criticism, by Austin Warren.--Imaginative writing, by W.L. Schramm.--Notes.--Bibliography (p. 239-255).

Contents.--The theme.--What is music?--Music in nature.--Wherefore?--Law in music.--Correlations of music.--The beautifier of time.--The power of music.--Musico-therapy.--Design in design.--The altruistic art.--The social art.--The religious art.--Music and immortality.--The God of music.

The authors of this study deplore the present gulf that lies between the creative writer and the scholar. In five stimulating essays on letters, language, literary history, criticism, and imaginative writing, they challenge our prevailing pedantries and offer a program for revitalizing literary scholarship in the universities. Authoritative and brilliantly written, this book anticipates a fuller place for humane learning in American life. Originally published in 1941. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in (...) digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value. (shrink)

In 1953 Marshall Clagett presented a preliminary scheme of the medieval Latin versions of Euclid'sElements. Since then a considerable body of these texts has become available in critical editions, thanks to Clagett's labours on the Archimedean tradition and H. L. L. Busard's work on the Euclidean versions. Further, Busard, M. Folkerts, R. Lorch and C. Burnett have scrutinized the pivotal ‘second’ version of Adelard of Bath, and have thereby exposed a diversity of text forms that spells real complications for the (...) effort to establish its provenance and use. In his recent overview of the medieval Euclidean tradition, Folkerts displays not only how these studies have filled out and expanded upon Clagett's initial framework, but also how they have compelled rethinking of some basic issues, such as on the source relations and authorship of the various versions. (shrink)

Philosophers theorizing about ‘evil’ usually distinguish evil actions from acts of ordinary wrongdoing. They either attempt to isolate some quality or set of qualities shared by all evil actions that is not found in other wrongful actions, or they concede that their account of evil is only distinguished by capturing the very worst acts on the scale of moral wrongness. The idea that evil is qualitatively distinct from wrongdoing has recently been under contention. We explore the grounds for this contention, (...) and argue that there is a third option that might be useful for a variety of philosophical accounts of evil. The alternate form of distinctness we propose is called quality of emphasis distinctness. We illustrate this form of concept distinctness with a modified version of Hillel Steiner’s account of evil. We then explain how QE distinctness could also be applied to more complex theories of evil, such as the theories proposed by Claudia Card, John Kekes, and Todd Calder. (shrink)

Traducción de Jaime Bermúdez Escamilla sobre Political Aphorisms (1659), en The Oceana and other Works of James Harrington, with an Account of his Life by John Toland, Londres, printed for T. Becket, T. Cadell y T. Evans, 1771, pp. 483-490. Texto inglés consultado en The Online Library of Liberty, Liberty Fund (www.libertyfund.org).

The requirement of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business to include business ethics in the curriculum has prompted business programs to teach ethics either integrated across the curriculum or in standalone classes. The question addressed here is how to engage students in thinking deeply and empathetically about ethical issues impacting corporate social responsibility. This research focused on using a thought experiment developed by John Rawls in which students examined CSR issues from the perspective of six stakeholder groups. (...) A pre-test/post-test design measured the effectiveness of an instruction module on CSR coupled with an active exercise using Rawls’ veil of ignorance and original position. Results indicate that students placed greater responsibility on the stockholders and board of directors after taking this module. The implication of the Rawlsian technique to use stakeholder empathy is discussed as a tool for engaging business ethics students. (shrink)

In J. B. Schneewind's The Invention of Autonomy we are given a monumental history of moral philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a history more comprehensive and richer in detail than one would have thought possible in a single volume. Though the daunting erudition, agreeably unobtrusive, inspires confidence, it is Schneewind's gift of narrative that makes his book such a pleasure and his story so compelling. Schneewind originally conceived the book, he tells us, to "broaden our historical comprehension of (...) Kant's moral philosophy by relating it to the earlier work to which it was a response", but he does much, much more as he charts the fitful transition from morality as obedience to the later and now widely accepted conception of morality as self-governance. In its broad outline, the story is familiar, beginning with Montaigne's skepticism, moving through modern natural law theory, rationalist, perfectionist, and moral sense responses and ending with Bentham and Kant. But Schneewind adds to acute and deeply informed discussions of Hobbes, Locke, Clarke, Hume, and Kant, clear, often arresting summaries, in varying degrees of detail, of Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Machiavelli, Suarez, Charron, Grotius, Cumberland, Pufendorf, Thomasius, DuVair, Justus Lipsius, Herbert of Cherbury, Descartes, Gassendi, Whichcote, John Smith, More, Cudworth, Spinoza, Leibniz, Barbeyrac, Malebranche, Nicole, Bayle, Harrington, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Butler, Price, Adam Smith, Reid, Paley, Hartley, Helvetius, d'Holbach, Bentham, de Sade, Wolff, Crusius, Voltaire, La Mettrie, Diderot, Rousseau, and others. If, as no doubt they will, some readers will fault some of Schneewind's interpretations, none will fail to admire his achievement in ferreting out and combining in such a fascinating narrative the leading ideas of this host of thinkers. It is safe to predict, moreover, that this study will inspire others to explore some of these less-read authors and to produce more fine-grained monographs, and further to deepen our understanding of the period and of the way we have come to think of ourselves. (shrink)

In the last few years, there has been a notable surge of interest in the themes of civil religion and the battle against “priestcraft” among historians of political thought. Examples include Eric Nelson’s The Hebrew Republic; Paul Rahe’s Against Throne and Altar; Jeffrey Collins’s The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes; Jonathan Israel’s work on the legacy of Spinoza; Justin Champion’s work on John Toland; and my own book, Civil Religion. Within the intellectual space created by this recent scholarship, this article (...) focuses on relevant themes in the work of the one of the two thinkers who J.G.A. Pocock identified as most responsible for the “implantation of the values of civic humanism in English political thought” – namely, James Harrington (the other being the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury). (shrink)

John Scottus Eriugena (d. ca. 877) is regarded as the most important philosopher and theologian in the Latin West from the death of Boethius until the thirteenth century. He incorporated his understanding of Latin sources, Ambrose, Augustine, Boethius and Greek sources, including the Cappadocian Fathers, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Maximus Confessor, into a metaphysics structured on Aristotle's Categories, from which he developed Christian Neoplatonist theology that continues to stimulate 21st-century theologians. This collection of essays provides an overview of the latest scholarship (...) on various aspects of Eriugena's thought and writings, including his Irish background, his use of Greek theologians, his Scripture hermeneutics, his understanding of Aristotelian logic, Christology, and the impact he had on contemporary and later theological traditions. Contributors: David Albertson, Joel Barstad, John Contreni, Christophe Erismann, John Gavin, Adrian Guiu, Michael Harrington, Catherine Kavanagh, A. Kijewska, Stephen Lahey, Elena Lloyd-Sidle, Bernard McGinn, Ernesto Sergio Mainoldi, Dermot Moran, Giulio D'Onofrio, Willemien Otten, and Alfred Siewers. (shrink)

Avec sa succession de bouleversements institutionnels, le dix-septième siècle anglais fut un fabuleux terrain d'expérimentation et de réflexion politique d'où surgirent les grandes théories modernes. A cette période, philosophes et acteurs engagés tentèrent de penser, avec une acuité particulière liée aux événements (guerres civiles, régicide, république, dictature), les tensions inhérentes au pouvoir, tout à la fois perçu comme contraignant, tyrannique et libérateur. Quatre d'entre eux ont été retenus : Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), le théoricien de l’absolutisme, James Harrington (1611-1677), le républicain (...) classique, Algernon Sidney (1623-1683), le martyr whig, John Locke (1632-1704), le père du libéralisme. Le propos de l’ouvrage est de montrer que, par-delà leurs différences, ces quatre penseurs partagent une approche qui constitue le socle commun d’une théorie de l’Etat moderne. Leur doctrine s’affranchit de l’exercice utopique comme de la théorie de la raison d’Etat et se conçoit comme une anatomie du corps politique. Par un examen minutieux des textes, l’auteur cherche à s’écarter de l' interprétation trop « idéologique » sans doute accentuée par les combats de l’histoire. Elle met en évidence un objet philosophique commun aux quatre auteurs, que l’on retrouve au cœur de toute conception moderne du pouvoir. (shrink)

Physicians, philosophers, and theologians consider how to address death and dying for a diverse population in a secularized century.Most of us are generally ill-equipped for dying. Today, we neither see death nor prepare for it. But this has not always been the case. In the early fifteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church published the Ars moriendi texts, which established prayers and practices for an art of dying. In the twenty-first century, physicians rely on procedures and protocols for the efficient management (...) of hospitalized patients. How can we recapture an art of dying that can facilitate our dying well? In this book, physicians, philosophers, and theologians attempt to articulate a bioethical framework for dying well in a secularized, diverse society.Contributors discuss such topics as the acceptance of human finitude; the role of hospice and palliative medicine; spiritual preparation for death; and the relationship between community, and individual autonomy. They also consider special cases, including children, elderly patients with dementia, and death in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, when doctors could do little more than accompany their patients in humble solidarity.These chapters make the case for a robust bioethics—one that could foster both the contemplation of finitude and the cultivation of community that would be necessary for a contemporary art of dying well.ContributorsJeffrey P. Bishop, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Daniel Callahan, Farr A. Curlin, Lydia S. Dugdale, Michelle Harrington, John Lantos, Stephen R. Latham, M. Therese Lysaught, Autumn Alcott Ridenour, Peter A. Selwyn, Daniel Sulmasy. (shrink)

The significance of Machiavelli's political thinking for the development of modern republicanism is a matter of great controversy. This reassessment examines the character of Machiavelli's own republicanism by charting his influence on Marchamont Nedham, James Harrington, John Locke, Algernon Sidney, John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, David Hume, the baron de Montesquieu, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton. Concluding that although Machiavelli himself was not liberal, Paul Rahe argues that he did, nonetheless, (...) set the stage for the emergence of liberal republicanism in England. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article traces the reception of Hume's ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’ (1752) among a circle of Scottish Whigs supportive of the French Revolution. While the influence of Hume's essay on American Federalists like James Madison has long been a subject of debate, historians have overlooked the appeal that the plan held for Hume's intellectual heirs in Scotland. In the early 1790s, theorists such as John Millar, James Mackintosh, and Dugald Stewart believed European governments – above all France (...) – could progress in the direction of the ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’. Hume modelled his plan after The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) by James Harrington. In so doing, he helped transmit a version of institutional republicanism to a generation of Scottish intellectuals searching for more explicit political reforms. Thinkers like Millar and Stewart interpreted Hume's essay as both a justification for idealist political ‘speculation’ and a ‘practicable’ plan for rebalancing political power in a large commercial state. (shrink)