Each contributor to this book has used personal experience as the basis from which to frame his individual sociological perspectives. Because they have personalized their work, their accounts are real, and recognizable as having come from 'real' persons, about 'real' experiences. There are no objectively-distanced disembodied third person entities in these accounts. These writers are actual people whose stories will make you laugh, cry, think, and want to know more.

The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.

Reproduces the text of Newton's dissertation on the nature and properties of light.

It is a commonplace that in making decisions agents often have to juggle competing values, and that no choice will maximise satisfaction of them all. However, the prevailing account of these cases assumes that there is always a single ranking of the agent's values, and therefore no unresolvable conflict between them. Isaac Levi denies this assumption, arguing that agents often must choose without having balanced their different values and that to be rational, an act does not have to be (...) optimal, only what Levi terms 'admissible'. This book explores the consequences of denying the assumption and develops a general approach to decision-making under unresolved conflict. Professor Levi discusses conflicts of value in several domains - those arising in moral dilemmas, the drawing of scientific inferences, decisions taken under uncertainty, and in social choice. In each of these he adapts his theoretical framework, showing how conflict may often be reduced though not always altogether eliminated. (shrink)

Isaac explores how influential thinkers in the mid-twentieth century understood the relations among science, knowledge, and the empirical study of human affairs. He places special emphasis on the practical, local manifestations of their complex theoretical ideas, particularly the institutional milieu of Harvard University.

This volume presents a series of essays which investigate the nature of intellectual inquiry: what its aims are and how it operates. The startingpoint is the work of the American pragmatists C.S. Peirce and John Dewey. Inquiry according to Peirce is a struggle to replace doubt by true belief. Dewey insisted that the transformation was from an indeterminate situation to a determinate or non-problematic one. So Isaac Levi's subject is changes in doxastic commitments, which may involve changes in attitudes (...) or changes in situations in which attitudes are entangled. The question of what justifies modification of doxastic commitments is a normative one, and so may not be understandable in purely naturalistic terms."--Dust jacket. (shrink)

The present book is a sequel to Ephraim Chamiel's two previous works The Middle Way and The Dual Truth-studies dedicated to the "middle" trend in modern Jewish thought, that is, those positions that sought to combine tradition and modernity, and offered a variety of approaches for contending with the tension between science and revelation and between reason and religion. The present book explores contemporary Jewish thinkers who have adopted one of these integrated approaches-namely the dialectical approach. Some of these thinkers (...) maintain that the aforementioned tension-the rift within human consciousness between intellect and emotion, mind and heart-can be mended. Others, however, think that the dialectic between the two poles of this tension is inherently irresolvable, a view reminiscent of the medieval "dual truth" approach. Some thinkers are unclear on this point, and those who study them debate whether or not they successfully resolved the tension and offered a means of reconciliation. The author also offers his views on these debates. This book explores the dialectical approaches of Rav Kook, Rav Soloveitchik, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Samuel Hugo Bergman, Leo Strauss, Ernst Simon, Emil Fackenheim, Rabbi Mordechai Breuer, his uncle Isaac Breuer, Tamar Ross, Rabbi Shagar, Moshe Meir, Micah Goodman and Elchanan Shilo. It also discusses the interpretations of these thinkers offered by scholars such as Michael Rosenak, Avinoam Rosenak, Eliezer Schweid, Aviezer Ravitzky, Avi Sagi, Binyamin Ish-Shalom, Ehud Luz, Dov Schwartz, Rabbi Yuval Cherlow, Lawrence Kaplan, and Haim Rechnitzer. The author questions some of these approaches and offers ideas of his own. This study concludes that many scholars bore witness to the dialectical tension between reason and revelation; only some believed that a solution was possible. That being said, and despite the paradoxical nature of the dual truth approach (which maintains that two contradictory truths exist and we must live with both of them in this world until a utopian future or the advent of the Messiah), increasing numbers of thinkers today are accepting it. In doing so, they are eschewing delusional and apologetic views such as the identicality and compartmental approaches that maintain that tensions and contradictions are unacceptable. (shrink)

Aside from the Principia and occasional appearances of the Opticks , Newton' writings have remained largely inaccessible to students of philosophy, science, and literature as well as to other readers. This book provides a remedy with wide representation of the interests, problems, and diverse philosophic issues that preoccupied the greatest scientific mind of the seventeenth century. Grouped in sections corresponding to methods, principles, and theological considerations, these selections feature explanatory notes and cross-references to related essays.

Motus quidem veros corporum singulorum cognofcere , & ab apparentibus actu diícriminare, difficillimum est ; propterca quod partes ípatij illius immobilis in quo corpora vere moventur, non incurrunt in sensus.

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

‘Metaphysics’, said Bradley, ‘is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct, but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.’ This idea that reasoning is both instinctive and feeble is reminiscent of Hume; except that reasons in Hume tend to serve as the solvent rather than the support of instinctive beliefs. Instinct leads us to play backgammon with other individuals whom we assume inhabit a world which exists independently of our own perception and which will (...) continue to exist tomorrow in a similar fashion to today. However, when instinct leads us also to reason about these beliefs they are all subject to sceptical attack. Their defence provides a challenge, a challenge which in thumbnail histories of the subject is met by Kant. He does this by use of a powerful new form of argument which he calls transcendental argument and which, in my opinion, provides not only reasons but also good reasons for the defence of some of our most central instinctive beliefs. The strategy involved in this kind of argument is to reflect on the necessary preconditions for comprehensible experience. In this way, some beliefs which are subject to sceptical attack, such as that there is a causal order between objects which exist independently of our experience of them, can be found to be the essential preconditions for having comprehensible experience at all. The reason for accepting them is, therefore, that they are the necessary preconditions of having any beliefs at all; and this provides a good, rather than a bad, reason for accepting these particular instinctive beliefs. (shrink)

Renunciation as a creative force is the animating idea behind Ross Posnock s new book. Taking up acts of abandonment, rejection, and refusal that have long baffled critics, he shows how renunciation has reframed the relationship of writers, philosophers, and artists to society in productive and unpredictable ways.".

This paper presents a dialogue between a psychotherapist whom we will call Lilly, and Ross Channing Reed, Ph.D., a philosopher and philosophical counselor. Lilly begins by asking Ross a series of questions regarding philosophical counseling and his approach to working with her. Ross discusses his philosophy and approach to philosophical counseling, what it is like to provide counseling for a therapist, and the educational nature of philosophical counseling. Topics addressed include the nature of unarticulated trauma, the repetition (...) compulsion, moral evil, the narrative construction of a human life, the potentially debilitating effects of moralizing about feelings, the importance of humor, spirituality and philosophy, embodiment, the arts, and Alice Miller’s concept of the “Enlightened Witness.” Next, Ross asks Lilly a series of questions relating to her personal and professional journey prior to and during philosophical counseling. Lilly reveals that she spent significant time in therapy with a psychologist prior to philosophical counseling. She discusses why she sought counseling from a philosopher, how philosophical counseling has been beneficial in her personal and professional lives, and how philosophical counseling has been different from other forms of counseling. (shrink)

‘Metaphysics’, said Bradley, ‘is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct, but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.’ This idea that reasoning is both instinctive and feeble is reminiscent of Hume; except that reasons in Hume tend to serve as the solvent rather than the support of instinctive beliefs. Instinct leads us to play backgammon with other individuals whom we assume inhabit a world which exists independently of our own perception and which will (...) continue to exist tomorrow in a similar fashion to today. However, when instinct leads us also to reason about these beliefs they are all subject to sceptical attack. Their defence provides a challenge, a challenge which in thumbnail histories of the subject is met by Kant. He does this by use of a powerful new form of argument which he calls transcendental argument and which, in my opinion, provides not only reasons but also good reasons for the defence of some of our most central instinctive beliefs. The strategy involved in this kind of argument is to reflect on the necessary preconditions for comprehensible experience. In this way, some beliefs which are subject to sceptical attack, such as that there is a causal order between objects which exist independently of our experience of them, can be found to be the essential preconditions for having comprehensible experience at all. The reason for accepting them is, therefore, that they are the necessary preconditions of having any beliefs at all; and this provides a good, rather than a bad, reason for accepting these particular instinctive beliefs. (shrink)

The models used in social simulation to date have mostly been very simplistic cognitively, with little attention paid to the details of individual cognition. This work proposes a more cognitively realistic approach to social simulation. It begins with a model created by Gilbert (1997) for capturing the growth of academic science. Gilbert’s model, which was equation-based, is replaced here by an agent-based model, with the cognitive architecture CLARION providing greater cognitive realism. Using this cognitive agent model, results comparable to previous (...) simulations and to human data are obtained. It is found that while different cognitive settings may affect the aggregate number of scientific articles produced, they do not generally lead to different distributions of number of articles per author. The paper concludes with a discussion of the correspondence between our model and the constructivist view of academic science. It is argued that using more cognitively realistic models in simulations may lead to novel insights. (shrink)

Theoria , the international Swedish philosophy journal, was founded in 1935. Its contributors in the first 75 years include the major Swedish philosophers from this period and in addition a long list of international philosophers, including A. J. Ayer, C. D. Broad, Ernst Cassirer, Hector Neri Castañeda, Arthur C. Danto, Donald Davidson, Nelson Goodman, R. M. Hare, Carl G. Hempel, Jaakko Hintikka, Saul Kripke, Henry E. Kyburg, Keith Lehrer, Isaac Levi, David Lewis, Gerald MacCallum, Richard Montague, Otto Neurath, Arthur (...) N. Prior, W. V. Quine, Nicholas Rescher, Ernest Sosa, Robert C. Stalnaker, P. F. Strawson, Patrick Suppes, Johan van Benthem, Georg Henrik von Wright and many others. Hempel's confirmation paradoxes, Ross's deontic paradox, Montague's universal grammar and Lindström's theorem are among the contributions to philosophy that were first published in Theoria. (shrink)

Catullus' cunning dinner invitation to Fabullus continues to generate a rich variety of interpretations of its memorable central image, the promised gift of a certain unguentum Veneris . Three Latomus articles, by Littman, Hallett, and Case, have explored possible origins of and uses for that mysterious substance, suggesting, for example, that it might even contain female secretions with powerful aphrodisiac properties, or some other unmentionable sexual lubricant.