Peter Geach brings the same careful attention to logical detail to these studies in the philosophy of religion and philosophy of mind as he has brought to other philosophical works. Some of the topics discussed here, however, will surprise some readers of Geach's earlier works, e.g., reincarnation, immortality, creation, praying for things to happen, and worshipping the right God. There are separate chapters on these topics as well as chapters on thought, form and existence, and the moral law. It should (...) be noted for readers who may not share Geach's interest in some of these topics that each of the chapters makes important points about issues which go beyond the topics of immediate interest. For example, Geach's two chapters on reincarnation and immortality are very interesting commentaries on the problem of personal identity, and the chapter on praying for things to happen is an interesting essay on time. The chapters on existence and thought pick up themes from Geach's earlier writing on Aquinas and Frege and mental acts. The Aristotelian roots of Geach's thought are clear in these essays from his account of existence and thought to his denial of clear sense to the idea of an immortality of a separate soul or its reincarnation. There is a helpful analytical index.--R. H. K. (shrink)

This is a systematic and critical account of Berkeley’s philosophy of science. Brook’s intention is to evaluate Berkeley’s analysis of significant scientific concepts, his general theories in optics, physics, and mathematics, and finally Berkeley’s own interpretation and criticism of Newton’s principles. That Berkeley’s writings are pervaded with ambiguities, inconsistencies, and misinterpretations of Newton seems to be the conclusion that Brook reaches, although he does distinguish in the writings the areas in which he feels Berkeley is on target. Berkeley conceived the (...) purpose of science to be the practical mastery of nature, and his philosophy is indicative of a phase in the evolution of a "new" science that had its roots as far back as Galileo who envisioned a universe that could be read off in terms of mathematical relationships. This view entailed the overthrow of traditional physics and its concern with substantial forms and qualitative changes. As Brook points out, the object of physics for Berkeley is a phenomenal order that can at best display only uniformities, efficient causality belongs to the realm of metaphysics. Brook does not go into the metaphysical or historical foundations of Berkeley’s philosophy of science, but his first chapter on the theory of signification presents sufficient background for the more detailed and complex chapters that deal with his theory of vision, philosophy of physics and mathematics. This is not an easy book to read, and the chapter on Berkeley’s mathematics may prove to be especially difficult to those who lack an orientation to this field. Yet Brooks could hardly do better than he does considering the obscurities and obfuscatory trappings that are to be found in the primary sources from which he is working. A good bibliography is included that should serve to facilitate a reading of this book. Brook’s study is the only work to date that takes into account Berkeley’s scientific works as a whole and not just some aspects.—K.R.M. (shrink)

In an attempt to discover that which makes man distinctively human Wilson takes as his starting point two opposing accounts of what distinguishes man from inanimate objects and indicates why both of them are invalid. The Cartesian concept maintains that man is distinct from the inanimate by virtue of his consciousness, the neo-Wittgensteinian views the distinction as one of behavior and interaction explicable in terms of reason and motives. Wilson agrees that emotion and behavior constitute the primary difference between man (...) and the inanimate but that this human type of activity is analyzable in causal terms. He refutes certain anti-causal arguments that posit a non-contingent connection between an emotion and its object. Wilson rightly points out that a necessary proposition is one that is necessarily true, but a relation cannot be true or false, and therefore cannot be necessarily or contingently true or false. In order to prove his thesis that the emotion-object relationship is one of causality the term "object" is restricted to that which has existential status. Emotions referable to non-existent objects are malfounded emotions and not causally connected. Wilson proposes that the problem does not lend itself to a logico-grammatical analysis of statements that assign objects to emotions, but that the approach requires a study in the philosophy of mind. Such an inquiry discloses that emotion is caused by a mental state, i.e., attention to the object in which a thought or belief about the object causes a certain feeling or reaction. After a rather complicated analysis of the emotion-object relationship in which he considers the questions of materialism, free will intentionality, and rationality, Wilson returns to his original concern and concludes that "a person’s action and his end of action make sense and form a coherent whole because they are rooted in a complex network of feelings and attitudes." This is what makes man distinctively human.—K. R. M. (shrink)

Section 1. Prologue -- section 2. The whole being -- section 3. Engaging with wholeness -- section 4. Wholeness in Kashmiri Shaivism -- section 5. The Buddhist perspective -- section 6. Wholeness in the modern world -- section 7. The workings of wholeness in our world -- section 8. Epilogue.

Every year, the Vietnamese people reportedly burned about 50,000 tons of joss papers, which took the form of not only bank notes, but iPhones, cars, clothes, even housekeepers, in hope of pleasing the dead. The practice was mistakenly attributed to traditional Buddhist teachings but originated in fact from China, which most Vietnamese were not aware of. In other aspects of life, there were many similar examples of Vietnamese so ready and comfortable with adding new norms, values, and beliefs, even contradictory (...) ones, to their culture. This phenomenon, dubbed “cultural additivity”, prompted us to study the co-existence, interaction, and influences among core values and norms of the Three Teachings –Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism–as shown through Vietnamese folktales. By applying Bayesian logistic regression, we evaluated the possibility of whether the key message of a story was dominated by a religion (dependent variables), as affected by the appearance of values and anti-values pertaining to the Three Teachings in the story (independent variables). Our main findings included the existence of the cultural additivity of Confucian and Taoist values. More specifically, empirical results showed that the interaction or addition of the values of Taoism and Confucianism in folktales together helped predict whether the key message of a story was about Confucianism, β{VT ⋅ VC} = 0.86. Meanwhile, there was no such statistical tendency for Buddhism. The results lead to a number of important implications. First, this showed the dominance of Confucianism because the fact that Confucian and Taoist values appeared together in a story led to the story’s key message dominated by Confucianism. Thus, it presented the evidence of Confucian dominance and against liberal interpretations of the concept of the Common Roots of Three Religions (“tam giáo đồng nguyên”) as religious unification or unicity. Second, the concept of “cultural additivity” could help explain many interesting socio-cultural phenomena, namely the absence of religious intolerance and extremism in the Vietnamese society, outrageous cases of sophistry in education, the low productivity in creative endeavors like science and technology, the misleading branding strategy in business. We are aware that our results are only preliminary and more studies, both theoretical and empirical, must be carried out to give a full account of the explanatory reach of “cultural additivity”. (shrink)

In the article three tragedies: ‘The Battle of Arminius‘ by Christian Dietrich Grabbe, ‘Nibelungs‘ by Friedrich Hebbel, ‘The Ring of the Nibelung‘ by Richard Wagner are considered. The aim of this paper is to investigate how history reception and mythological material correlates with the idea of national identity. The comparative-historical, typological and historical-genetic methods are applied in this publication. The genres of historical, philosophical and mythological tragedy became the most popular genres in the socio-political conditions in the 30s of the (...) 19th century in Germany. Grabbe underlines the idea of the presence of the ‘local‘ regional history within the framework of the ‘big‘ and significant one. Grabbe paid attention to the historical process and historical figures, not to any particular historical event. In his last work, tragedy ‘The Battle of Arminius‘, Grabbe showed his understanding of the country’s historical origins and the creation of a national myth. F. Hebbel and R. Wagner comprehend the images and motifs of Norse mythology as a universal model of human existence. While interpreting the story of Nibelungs, F. Hebbel notes not only its national roots but its universal source; he models the image of the world through the prism of the microcosm of Burgundians/Nibelungs. Wagner’s tetralogy is not so much an interpretation as a creation of the ‘new myth‘. The images of Arminius and Siegfried have the features of the archaic primal forefather, ‘cultural hero‘ of the nation, who intimately related with Nature and home ground. Myth and mythological history are not only the tools of attainment of national identity but the means of reversion the modern man to the lost harmony of the Universe, which pertains to the mythological mind. (shrink)

Работа будет интересна преподавателям, аспирантам и студентам гуманитарных специальностей и тем, кто интересуется проблемами становления личности.

The World Medical Association’s revised Declaration of Helsinki endorses the view that all trial participants in every country are entitled to the worldwide best standard of care. In this paper the authors show that this requirement has been rejected by every national and international committee that has examined this issue. They argue that the consensus view now holds that it is ethically permissible, in some circumstances, to provide research participants less than the worldwide best care. Finally, the authors show that (...) there is also consensus regarding the broad conditions under which this is acceptable. (shrink)

For those to whom John Bowring's name means anything, the most likely association with it is the complex and question-begging term ‘Benthamite’. Contemporaries certainly used the term, particularly when they wanted to suggest that his actions were narrowly ideological or theoretical. But to some of Bowring's contemporaries another association served hostile intent almost as well: his Unitarianism.

This paper introduces the medical factual matrix as a new and potentially valuable tool in medical ethical analysis. Using this tool it demonstrates the idea that a defined medical intervention can only be meaningfully declared futile in relation to a defined goal of treatment. It argues that a declaration of futility made solely in relation to a defined medical intervention is inchoate. It recasts the definition of goal futility as an intervention that cannot alter the probability of the existence of (...) the important outcome states that might flow from a defined intervention. The idea of value futility and the extent of physician obligations in futile situations are also addressed. It also examines the source of substantive conflicts which commonly arise within the doctor-patient relationship and the ensuing power relations that operate between doctor and patient when questions of futility arise. (shrink)

R K Elliott; Education, Love of One’s Subject, and the Love of Truth, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 8, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 135–153, https:/.

This paper implements the continuous Hindi Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system using the proposed integrated features vector with Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based Language Modeling (LM). The proposed system also implements the speaker adaptation using Maximum-Likelihood Linear Regression (MLLR) and Constrained Maximum likelihood Linear Regression (C-MLLR). This system is discriminatively trained by Maximum Mutual Information (MMI) and Minimum Phone Error (MPE) techniques with 256 Gaussian mixture per Hidden Markov Model(HMM) state. The training of the baseline system has been done using (...) a phonetically rich Hindi dataset. The results show that discriminative training enhances the baseline system performance by up to 3%. Further improvement of ~7% has been recorded by applying RNN LM. The proposed Hindi ASR system shows significant performance improvement over other current state-of-the-art techniques. (shrink)

R K Elliott; Education, Love of One’s Subject, and the Love of Truth, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 8, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 135–153, https:/.

R K Elliott; Versions of Creativity, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 5, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 139–152, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1971.

R K Elliott; The Concept of Development: A Reply to Professor Hamlyn, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 9, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 40–48, https://d.

R K Elliott; The Concept of Development: A Reply to Professor Hamlyn, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 9, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 40–48, https://d.

R K Elliott; The Concept of Development: A Reply to Professor Hamlyn, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 9, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 40–48, https://d.

R K Elliott; Versions of Creativity, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 5, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 139–152, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1971.

The theoretical framework adopted in the exact sciences, for constructing and testing deterministic theories on the one hand, and modelling and analysis of observed phenomena on the other, is often implicitly assumed to be that of structural stability. In view of recent developments in nonlinear dynamics, it is argued here that in general it may not be possible to assume strict determinism and structural stability simultaneously; either strict determinism holds, in which case the fragility framework may turn out to be (...) the appropriate framework for the study of certain phenomena in the exact sciences, or ‘structural stability’ is restored at the expense of introducing stochasticity. In this sense a certain degree of indeterminacy may be unavoidable even at the classical level. (shrink)

R K Elliott; Aestheticism, Imagination and Schooling: a reply to Ruby Meager, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 15, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 33–42.

R K Elliott; Aestheticism, Imagination and Schooling: a reply to Ruby Meager, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 15, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 33–42.

R K Elliott; D. W. Hamlyn on Knowledge and the Beginnings of Understanding, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 14, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 109–116.

R K Elliott; D. W. Hamlyn on Knowledge and the Beginnings of Understanding, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 14, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 109–116.

R. K. Elliott; VIII—Aesthetic Theory and the Experience of Art, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 67, Issue 1, 1 June 1967, Pages 111–126, https:/.

The essay begins by the author's recollections of his younger days when people were seldom worried about moral decline in society. Today, however, it has become a real concern. Literature, philosophy, spiritual works are all essentially a celebration of human values. The paper examines the issue of scale of graded values as against that of absolutist universal values. A scrutiny of English literature reveals that some key literary figures in eighteenth-nineteenth century England drew attention to the decline of human values (...) accompanying increasing industrialization. The author discusses his own views on the management and role of human values in it, as also on human values and man's divine nature. He discusses the leader's role and an action programme for human values. The universality of Vedantic monism, and its triple idealism, is suggested as a basis for the regeneration of human values. (shrink)

R K Elliott; Education and Justification, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 11, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 7–27, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1.

R K Elliott; Education and Justification, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 11, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 7–27, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1.