A consideration of the argument developed by Thomas Aquinas in Summa contra gentiles, II c. 46.

It is now a commonplace that premodern reflection, whether mythical, philosophical, or theological, was terminally “anthropomorphic,” given to the erroneous supposition that the human shape offers genuine insight into the shape of everything else.1 It is also commonly assumed that modern philosophy distinguishes itself from its precursors by placing the human being at the center of its concerns. Thus Kant, for example, claimed that the question “what is man?” recapitulates the whole of systematic philosophical inquiry.2 First impressions notwithstanding, these two (...) convictions are not really at odds. For it is precisely through their “turn to the subject” that modern thinkers…. (shrink)

From an etymological standpoint the word "interest" is well suited to phenomenological investigations, lnteresse, to be among, 1 or as Husserl sometimes translates, Dabeisein, 2 succinctly expresses the sense ofHusserl's more usual term, "intentionality." Mind, he never tired or saying, is not at all another thing alongside the various things of the world; it is already outside itself, and in the company of the things it thinks. Yet despite the appropriateness of "interest" to name this fact of psychic life, only (...) gradually does the word assume a place in the phenomenological vocabulary. The reason is not hard to find. Husserl's early work treats intentional achievements statically and hence rather thinly. Once he secured the transcendental or properly phenomenological stance he was free to move beyond his initial "Platonism" to a more truly Platonic position, which attempts to think the forms in motion. That is to say, Husserl discovered genetic phenomenology. 3 Mind is now considered in light of its purposiveness: genetic phenomenology highlights the teleological character of our thinking engagement with the world. "Interest," accordingly, may be said to name the history of our readiness to take up with things in their intelligibility. Alternately stated, Husserl's account of interest displays the drawing power of the real in virtue of its being thinkable or ideal. It is perhaps not too grave an injustice to read interest as the Husserlian analogue to the "idea of the good" proposed by Socrates to Glaucon and Adeimantus as that which lights the mind's way. (shrink)

AMONG THE BEINGS KNOWN TO US, the human being is, so far as we are aware, the only one to trouble himself about his origins. Mountains have no more care for such matters than it is in their power to leap like rams. As for the rams, they have perhaps some mute memory of their parents, and some abiding affection for them, yet they clearly lack all ambition to retrace the steps of their ovine past. We alone desire to know (...) whence we came. It is true that some among us manifest this desire in an obsession about “ethnic origins,” for example, but this need not signify that our interest in our predecessors must be a purely parochial affair. While a concern for our past seems to be peculiar to our species, and while it necessarily finds its initial expression in questions about our immediate precursors, origins being what they are, we cannot long wonder about our own without soon having to consider the origins of the whole human race, and of everything else besides. (shrink)

The bulk of the writings Husserl himself saw through to publication were, in one way or another, successive attempts at an "introduction" to phenomenology. That not a single one of these works is of easy access to those for whom phenomenology is something novel in no way contravenes the use of the term 'introduction" to name them. After all, to the end of his days Husserl spoke of himself as a philosophical beginner, and not from any false modesty, but because (...) he knew that the philosopher has access to the archai or old beginnings only if, by his persistent questioning, he is always ready to make a new beginning. "Introduction" amounts, then, to a term of art in his philosophy, describing as much a work in progress as an invitation to the dance. (shrink)

Metaphysics, the most concrete of human inquiries, cannot rightly leave anything out, not even or especially its own history. At the very least, a consideration of the history of metaphysical investigation is necessary in order to recover the peculiar naivete proper to the discipline, for any language at our immediate disposal comes to us already stamped by the thinking of our predecessors. Nor may we rule out of hand the possibility that metaphysics is itself in some way subject to "physics" (...) or time. Finally, only arrogance could keep us from admitting that the "history" of metaphysics might hold answers to our most pressing questions, and indeed put questions to us we had not thought to ask. Metaphysics is, in short, an archeological science in a double sense. (shrink)

“Scholasticism” has not always been a term of opprobrium. Strictly speaking, the word simply targets a “school of thought,” and schools, like thoughts, can be good, bad, or indifferent. Francis Bacon did much to foster common derision of scholasticism. As he observed, “it is scarcely possible at once to admire authors and to surpass them, knowledge being like water, which will not rise above the level from which it fell.” Insofar as great thinkers do not reliably engender their equals, much (...) less set the cause of truth in motion by logarithmic progression, Bacon has a point. Yet the premise of the best schools of philosophy has always been the modest one that by standing on a giant’s shoulders one is sometimes able to see what would otherwise have lain hidden in the distance. In any case, Bacon did little to stem the scholastic tide. Despite all the antischolastic vitriol of the last several centuries, philosophical schools have multiplied profusely. Neo-Kantianism, logical positivism, existentialism, structuralism, feminism, and postmodernism represent only a small sample of recent possibilities. One can safely conclude from this list that as long as there is thinking, there will be schools of thought. A corollary suggests itself: the most antischolastic forms of thinking usually engender the most rigidly scholastic forms of thought. (shrink)

It is, if not a happy accident, then surely a pleasing peripety that despite Pascal's intention to complete an Apology for the Christian Religion, the fragmentary character of his Pensées should, by its very incompleteness, so well have served his purpose, as the vitality of the torso he left us attests. Yet there is ample evidence in the Pensées themselves that the book's orderless order captures both the rhetorical problem Pascal confronted and the solution he envisaged. More broadly stated, the (...) literary form of the work, such as it is, mirrors its substance, namely, the fragmentary character of the created whole and the human part of that whole. In short, the last thing Pascal wished to do was to make things easy for his reader, and in this respect the Pensées he left us serve his intentions admirably. While Kolakowski's study of "Pascal's religion" ultimately denies that the rigors of Pascal's argument are compatible with human happiness or reason, God Owes Us Nothing does honor Pascal's purpose by refusing to ease our way by making things simple. (shrink)

For biblical or more precisely Christian theology the way up and the way down are not one and the same. Christian theology could attempt to avoid this potentially embarrassing impasse and, refusing to speak to the philosophers, retreat to a comfortable interiority were it not for the fact that the founder of Christianity and indeed the theologians' own humanity demand otherwise. Philosophy in turn might have chosen to disregard the claims of a theology emboldened by reason and Revelation were it (...) not for its own desire to be comprehensive. Accordingly, no major philosopher of the last millennium has passed over the Bible in silence. Admittedly, the theologians have been reticent of late, yet it is by no means clear that the philosophers have succeeded in restoring thought to its former state of Greek "innocence." It is no surprise, then, that the crisis it is the fashion to call "postmodernism" should have reawakened the old question, Quid sit deus? Marion's short, demanding, and at times repetitive book, written "at the border between philosophy and theology," meets this question in a provocative way. This careful translation will surely win him both theologically and philosophically minded readers, as did the French original. His formation points to his currency: among his "teachers" we may mention Derrida; Levinas and Balthasar number among his "masters"; and as he himself admits, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger form his "horizon". (shrink)

If modern natural science were to be our guide, the truth of cosmology ought to be fully expressible in the abstruse but concise language of mathematics. As an account of the genesis of the universe as a whole and in its every part, however, a truly completed cosmology would culminate in an understanding of its own coming to be, and thereby provide both a recapitulation of the many past attempts human beings have made to understand themselves and their place, and (...) an explanation of the genesis of that which is true and false in each such attempt. For this and for other reasons one might well doubt whether a genuinely comprehensive cosmogenesis is possible for us, to say nothing of one set forth in exclusively mathematical terms. It seems fair to say, in any case, that that part of a conjectural history of the universe devoted to “the history of the human experience of the universe” would easily dwarf all of its other parts in size, and not only in size. (shrink)

There is something rather comical about the nihilist, who makes such a passionate ado about precisely nothing. This is not to deny the tragic consequences, in Russia and elsewhere, of the nihilist’s revolutionary fury. It is only to suggest that, despite what he may say about himself, the nihilist himself is no more animated by “the tragic sense of life” than he is elevated by a sense of humor. Tragedy requires “some error” in an agent and his agency. Such an (...) error presupposes in turn some standard of the human good by virtue of which that error comes to light, but the reality of such a standard is the one thing nihilism cannot allow. It is given to us, but not to the nihilist, to see the tragedy and the comedy of nihilism. One might therefore be inclined to wonder whether nihilism really has anything to do with philosophy, which, if Socrates is to be trusted, requires the self-conscious possession of the tragic and the comic art in equal measure. (shrink)

In his earlier writings Hans Jonas has offered searching criticism of modern philosophic and scientific attempts to reduce the living to a mode of the non-living, and advanced some promising suggestions for a more adequate understanding of the phenomenon of life. With this book he has set himself a more ambitious task: to provide an ethics--although not a politics --which will enable man to secure human and non-human life from the threat posed by man's technology.

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where (...) they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.Cormac McCarthy, The Road. (shrink)

This book provides practical and research-based chapters that offer greater clarity about the particular kinds of teacher reflection that matter and avoids talking about teacher reflection generically, which implies that all kinds of reflection are of equal value.

We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

These notes discuss formalizing contexts as first class objects. The basic relationships are: ist(c,p) meaning that the proposition p is true in the context c, and value(c,p) designating the value of the term e in the context c Besides these, there are lifting formulas that relate the propositions and terms in subcontexts to possibly more general propositions and terms in the outer context. Subcontextx are often specialised with regard to time, place and terminology. Introducing contexts as formal objects will permit (...) axiomatizations in limited contexts to be expanded to transcend the original limitations. This seems necessary to provide AI programs using logic with certain capabilities that human fact representation and human reasoning possess. Fully implementing transcendence seems to require further extensions to mathematical logic, ie. beyond the nonmonotonic inference methods first invented in AI and now studied as a new domain of logic. (shrink)

Logical AI develops computer programs that represent what they know about the world primarily by logical formulas and decide what to do primarily by logical reasoning--including nonmonotonic logical reasoning. It is convenient to use logical sentences and terms whose meaning depends on context. The reasons for this are similar to what causes human language to use context dependent meanings. This note gives elements of some of the formalisms to which we have been led. Fuller treatments are in [McC93], [Guh91] and (...) [MB94] and the references cited in the Web page [Buv95]. The first main idea is to make contexts first class objects in the logic and use the formula ist(c,p) to assert that the proposition p is true in the context c. A second idea is to formalize how propositions true in one context transform when they are moved to different but related contexts. An ability to transcend the outermost context is needed to give computer programs the ability to reason about the totality of all they have thought about so far [McC96]. (shrink)

For many years, the downtown in Clarksdale, with a municipal population of 17,960 and located in the northern part of the Mississippi Delta, had lost its role as the centre providing a wide range of jobs and services to those living in the surrounding region. For many cities and towns in America, downtown decline has been associated with the flight to the suburbs and the growth in shopping malls serving flourishing gated communities. In Clarksdale’s case, downtown decline has been due (...) largely to the advent of big box retailing and the location of new retail and commercial developments along the state highway on the edge of town, combined with the loss of jobs and population associated with agricultural restructuring. Today, however, Clarksdale has taken up the challenge to ‘revitalize’ the downtown in the face of economic adversity. Recovery is under way, and much of this is associated with blues music and Delta culture: Clarksdale is situated at the fabled ‘crossroads’ of Highways 49 and 61 and is also the home to national icons in literature, art and other cultural pursuits. These are key elements around which the downtown revitalization effort is focused. This paper charts the process by which the Clarksdale community has embarked on the road to downtown recovery, and highlights the town’s indelible links with the blues, borne out of years of toil, hardship and social deprivation. The paper emphasizes the importance of ‘champions’ and ‘creative people’, drawing on community support, in achieving downtown revitalization. Positive results are becoming evident with new businesses and jobs, improved levels of service, refurbishment of derelict buildings, a renewed sense of place, and an uplift in community confidence. The significance of cultural tourism to downtown revitalization is highlighted, with particular emphasis on the global appeal of blues, but with its roots firmly established in Clarksdale and the Delta. (shrink)

One of the paradoxes of the physical sciences is that as our knowledge has progressed, more and more diverse physical phenomena can be explained in terms of fewer underlying laws, or principles. In Hidden Unity, eminent physicist John Taylor puts many of these findings into historical perspective and documents how progress is made when unexpected, hidden unities are uncovered between apparently unrelated physical phenomena. Taylor cites examples from the ancient Greeks to the present day, such as the unity of (...) celestial and terrestrial dynamics (17th century), the unity of heat within the rest of dynamics (18th century), the unity of electricity, magnetism, and light (19th century), the unity of space and time and the unification of nuclear forces with electromagnetism (20th century). Without relying on mathematical detail, Taylor's emphasis is on fundamental physics, like particle physics and cosmology. Balancing what is understood with the unestablished theories and still unanswered questions, Taylor takes readers on a fascinating ongoing journey. John C. Taylor is Professor Emeritus of Mathematical Physics at the University of Cambridge. A student of Nobel laureate Abdus Salam, Taylor's research career has spanned the era of developments in elementary particle physics since the 1950s. He taught theoretical physics at Imperial College, London, and at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and he has lectured worldwide. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of the Institute of Physics. (shrink)

This book presents the first detailed history of the modern passport and why it became so important for controlling movement in the modern world. It explores the history of passport laws, the parliamentary debates about those laws, and the social responses to their implementation. The author argues that modern nation-states and the international state system have 'monopolized the 'legitimate means of movement',' rendering persons dependent on states' authority to move about - especially, though not exclusively, across international boundaries. This new (...) edition reviews other scholarship, much of which was stimulated by the first edition, addressing the place of identification documents in contemporary life. It also updates the story of passport regulations from the publication of the first edition, which appeared just before the terrorist attacks of 9/11, to the present day. (shrink)

A DISQUISITION ON GOVERNMENT. In order to have a clear and just conception of the nature and object of government, it is indispensable to understand ...

This is a paperback edition of a major contribution to the field, first published in hard covers in 1977. The book outlines a general theory of rational behaviour consisting of individual decision theory, ethics, and game theory as its main branches. Decision theory deals with a rational pursuit of individual utility; ethics with a rational pursuit of the common interests of society; and game theory with an interaction of two or more rational individuals, each pursuing his own interests in a (...) rational manner. (shrink)

This bibliography is a comprehensive listing of published works by John Locke, including all known editions and translations of his works, abridgments and selections in anthologies and several works which he edited or translated, from the first editions to the present. It covers not only the works published during Locke's lifetime, but also those printed from the voluminous manuscripts he left behind at his death in 1704. In addition, Locke's works are set in their original controversial context: entries are (...) provided for the works Locke wrote about and for the attacks and defenses his writings provoked during and immediately following his lifetime. An appendix contains a list of works incorrectly attributed to Locke. Three indexes complete the bibliography: an index to the names of the editors, the translators, and authors of works cited in the annotations; an index to the titles of anonymous works; and a language index that lists all the works that have been translated into each language. (shrink)