Proceedings of the Fifty-sixth Annual Meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, held in Houston, Tex., Apr. 16-18, 1982. Includes bibliographical references.

The article starts with stating the fact that today there is an increasing recognition of difficulties with Darwinism accompanied by vigorous responses on the part of Darwin’s defenders; among the instances of challenge to the dominant theory, one can find a book of Gilson, From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again, and those behind the Intelligent Design movement. Inrelating the book of Gilson to the ID proponents, the author concludes that, while in some ways they are on the same side (...) in opposing the anti-creation thrust of Darwinism, Gilson is neutral on the validity or truth of Darwin’s biological hypothesis. Gilson, however, whose book preceded the ID movement by some twenty years, seeks to analyze Darwinism from the perspective of the classical philosophy of nature. He well understands that, according to modern scientific method, final causes are excluded from consideration, but he calls for a biophilosophy which will be open to the reality of human experience as Aristotle was and recognize that teleology is present in nature. According to him, even if teleology seems to be a contestable explanation, chance as understood by Darwinists is the pure absence of explanation. (shrink)

This volume presents a series of lectures given at the Catholic University of America seeking to show the impact Aristotle had on modern, that is, postmedieval philosophy. The lectures were invited to focus on their philosopher’s response to Aristotle’s intellectual virtues — art, prudence, science, wisdom, and understanding — as given in the Nicomachean Ethics, book 6. Most participants did not follow this direction, but in one way or another studied their philosopher’s relation to Aristotle. The volume is remarkable both (...) in the varied experts’ knowledge of Aristotle and contemporary Aristotelian scholarship, but also in the range of scholarship in their own topic. Ricardo Pozzo, who edited the volume, wrote an excellent introduction reviewing the contributions and giving the background of the series. (shrink)

ONE Introduction Rene Descartes is, in many ways, a victim of his own success as a philosopher. He notoriously wrote a small number of readily accessible, ...

In recent years scholars have begun to question the usefulness of the category of ''religion'' to describe a distinctive form of human experience and behavior. In his last book, The Ideology of Religious Studies (OUP 2000), Timothy Fitzgerald argued that ''religion'' was not a private area of human existence that could be separated from the public realm and that the study of religion as such was thus impossibility. In this new book he examines a wide range of English-language texts (...) to show how religion became transformed from a very specific category indigenous to Christian culture into a universalist claim about human nature and society. These claims, he shows, are implied by and frequently explicit in theories and methods of comparative religion. But they are also tacitly reproduced throughout the humanities in the relatively indiscriminate use of ''religion'' as an a priori valid cross-cultural analytical concept, for example in historiography, sociology, and social anthropology. Fitzgerald seeks to link the argument about religion to the parallel formation of the ''non-religious'' and such dichotomies as church-state, sacred-profane, ecclesiastical-civil, spiritual-temporal, supernatural-natural, and irrational-rational. Part of his argument is that the category ''religion'' has a different logic compared to the category ''sacred,'' but the two have been consistently confused by major writers, including Durkheim and Eliade. Fitzgerald contends that ''religion'' imagined as a private belief in the supernatural was a necessary conceptual space for the simultaneous imagining of ''secular'' practices and institutions such as politics, economics, and the Nation State. The invention of ''religion'' as a universal type of experience, practice, and institution was partly the result of sacralizing new concepts of exchange, ownership, and labor practices, applying ''scientific'' rationality to human behavior, administering the colonies and classifying native institutions. In contrast, shows Fitzgerald, the sacred-profane dichotomy has a different logic of use. (shrink)

This book analyses the concept of scientific explanation developed by French disciples of Descartes in the period 1660-1700. Clarke examines the views of authors such as Malebranche and Rohault, as well as those of less well-known authors such as Cordemoy, Gadroys, Poisson and R'egis. These Cartesian natural philosophers developed an understanding of scientific explanation as necessarily hypothetical, and, while they contributed little to new scientific discoveries, they made a lasting contribution to our concept of explanation--generations of scientists in subsequent centuries (...) followed their lead. (shrink)

This article is an account of the dynamics of interaction across the social sciences and neurosciences. Against an arid rhetoric of ‘interdisciplinarity’, it calls for a more expansive imaginary of what experiment – as practice and ethos – might offer in this space. Arguing that opportunities for collaboration between social scientists and neuroscientists need to be taken seriously, the article situates itself against existing conceptualizations of these dynamics, grouping them under three rubrics: ‘critique’, ‘ebullience’ and ‘interaction’. Despite their differences, each (...) insists on a distinction between sociocultural and neurobiological knowledge, or does not show how a more entangled field might be realized. The article links this absence to the ‘regime of the inter-’, an ethic of interdisciplinarity that guides interaction between disciplines on the understanding of their pre-existing separateness. The argument of the paper is thus twofold: (1) that, contra the ‘regime of the inter-’, it is no longer practicable to maintain a hygienic separation between sociocultural webs and neurobiological architecture; (2) that the cognitive neuroscientific experiment, as a space of epistemological and ontological excess, offers an opportunity to researchers, from all disciplines, to explore and register this realization. (shrink)