Recent technical developments in the logic of nominalism make it possible to improve and extend significantly the approach to mathematics developed in Mathematics without Numbers. After reviewing the intuitive ideas behind structuralism in general, the modal-structuralist approach as potentially class-free is contrasted broadly with other leading approaches. The machinery of nominalistic ordered pairing (Burgess-Hazen-Lewis) and plural quantification (Boolos) can then be utilized to extend the core systems of modal-structural arithmetic and analysis respectively to full, classical, polyadic third- and fourthorder number (...) theory. The mathenatics of many structures of central importance in functional analysis, measure theory, and topology can be recovered within essentially these frameworks. (shrink)

Possibilities haunt history. The force of our explanations of events turns on the alternative possibilities these explanations suggest. It is these possible worlds which give us our understanding; and in human affairs we decide them by practical rather than theoretical judgement. In his widely acclaimed account of the role of counterfactuals in explanation, Geoffrey Hawthorn deploys extended examples from history and modern times to defend his argument. His conclusions cast doubt on existing assumptions about the nature and place of (...) theory, and indeed of the possibility of knowledge itself, in the human sciences. (shrink)

A history of the pre-Socratic philosophers, with selected writings and texts.

Bernard Williams is remembered as one of the most brilliant and original philosophers of the past fifty years. Widely respected as a moral philosopher, Williams began to write about politics in a sustained way in the early 1980s. There followed a stream of articles, lectures, and other major contributions to issues of public concern--all complemented by his many works on ethics, which have important implications for political theory.This new collection of essays, most of them previously unpublished, addresses many of the (...) core subjects of political philosophy: justice, liberty, and equality; the nature and meaning of liberalism; toleration; power and the fear of power; democracy; and the nature of political philosophy itself. A central theme throughout is that political philosophers need to engage more directly with the realities of political life, not simply with the theories of other philosophers. Williams makes this argument in part through a searching examination of where political thinking should originate, to whom it might be addressed, and what it should deliver.Williams had intended to weave these essays into a connected narrative on political philosophy with reflections on his own experience of postwar politics. Sadly he did not live to complete it, but this book brings together many of its components. Geoffrey Hawthorn has arranged the material to resemble as closely as possible Williams's original design and vision. He has provided both an introduction to Williams's political philosophy and a bibliography of his formal and informal writings on politics.Those who know the work of Bernard Williams will find here the familiar hallmarks of his writing--originality, clarity, erudition, and wit. Those who are unfamiliar with, or unconvinced by, a philosophical approach to politics, will find this an engaging introduction. Both will encounter a thoroughly original voice in modern political theory and a searching approach to the shape and direction of liberal political thought in the past thirty-five years. (shrink)

It is a remarkable feature of most contemporary discussions of emotion that they have been conducted without any reference to what it could mean to talk of the expression of emotion in music. This is a crucial absence, I shall argue, since a proper understanding of music's expression of emotion must lead to a correct view of the nature of emotion itself. Such an understanding will yield the view that emotion is a state of consciousness which is both intentional and (...) affective, and at the same time totally undermine the view that emotions are, or necessarily involve, judgments or evaluations. (shrink)

Neuroscientists have long sought to study the dynamic activity of the human brain—what's happening in the brain, that is, while people are thinking, feeling, and acting. Ideally, an inside look at brain function would simultaneously and continuously measure the biochemical state of every cell in the central nervous system. While such a miraculous method is science fiction, a century of progress in neuroimaging technologies has made such simultaneous and continuous measurement a plausible fiction. Despite this progress, practitioners of modern neuroimaging (...) struggle with two kinds of limitations: those that attend the particular neuroimaging methods we have today and those that would limit any method of imaging neural activity, no matter how powerful.In this essay, I consider the liabilities and potential of techniques that measure human brain activity. I am concerned here only with methods that measure relevant physiologic states of the central nervous system and relate those measures to particular mental states. I will consider in particular the preeminent method of functional neuroimaging: BOLD fMRI. While there are several practical limits on the biological information that current technologies can measure, these limits—as important as they are—are minor in comparison to the fundamental logical restraints on the conclusions that can be drawn from brain imaging studies. (shrink)

This paper explores the relation between love, learning and knowledge as found in three dialogues of Plato, Symposium, Phaedrus and Republic. It argues that the account of the ascent from carnal desire to the love of beauty, as set out in the Symposium, is best seen in terms of a genealogy of love in which the object of love is transformed into an object of knowledge. The Phaedrus shows us how affection and love between two individuals can help motivate a (...) love of learning. The Republic demonstrates the value of knowledge through the distinction between knowledge and opinion. A love of learning is, therefore, driven by that which is genuinely valuable and worthy of love. Plato helps us today in two respects: first, he reminds us that learning can have an affective quality. Second, he reminds that the value of learning is related to the knowledge and insight it yields. (shrink)

In this fascinating collection of essays, noted critic Geoffrey Hartman raises the essential question of where we can find the real or authentic in today's world, and how this affects the way we understand our human predicament. Hartman explores such issues as the fantasy of total information and perfect communication encouraged by the internet, the biographical excesses of tell-all talk shows that serve to shore up a personal sense of unreality, the tendency to motivate violence in the name of (...) some moral or spiritual necessity, and the increased difficulty of distinguishing between fakery and truth in confessional and testimonial writing. Underlying the entire book is the crucial issue of how the trauma of the Holocaust and other genocidal acts, brought home to us almost daily by the media, is shaping our quest for agency, identity and meaning. Against what he describes as a contempt for the aesthetic in the face of social suffering, Hartman produces a defense of art that helps to recast these questions. His idea is that the form of contemplation produced by the aesthetic, and particularly by poetry, resists both the fantasy of data delivering up their own final meaning and of ideology as a shortcut seeking to deliver us from literature and other deeply reflective and sometimes vulnerable--because self-critical--modes of expression. (shrink)

In this bold interdisciplinary work, Geoffrey Galt Harpham argues that asceticism has played a major role in shaping Western ideas of the body, writing, ethics, ...

Widely regarded as the most influential proponent of the truth of original sin in the twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr worked hard to excise any "literalistic" element from his interpretation of the doctrine. In his attempt to "correct" the Augustinian tradition on original sin by purging it of all "literalistic errors," however, Niebuhr assumed as his starting point the most characteristically modern objection to the doctrine: that birth is a thoroughly natural, animal, and morally meaningless event. As a result, Niebuhr unnecessarily (...) constrained his vision of the dimensions of human freedom, and hence his description of the dynamic of anxiety and freedom that energizes sin. Through a careful reading of Reinhold Niebuhr's writings on original sin, in light of the truth that the end of human life is inseparable from its origins, a reappraisal and recovery of the meaningfulness of the assertion of original sin as a literal inheritance is possible. The result of such a reappraisal and recovery is an amplified insight into the existential anxiety that Niebuhr otherwise described so convincingly. (shrink)

In a critical scene deeply troubled by questions of justice and responsibility, and beset by political and moral scandals, no issue in recent years has been more urgent or more unsettled than the question of ethics. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, whose previous book, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism, was one of the first to announce the critical renewal of ethics, attempts in this new book to explain why ethical questions resist settlement. He urges a new account of ethics (...) not as a stable set of principles, values, or prescriptions, but as a variable factor of "imperativity" immanent in language, analysis, narrative, and creation. (shrink)

Following a brief preface, the second section of this paper discusses Mill's early reflections on the problem of how deductive inference can be illuminating. In the third section it is suggested that in his Logic Mill misconstrued the feature that the premises of a logically valid argument contain the conclusion as the ground of a charge that deductive proof is question-begging. The fourth section discusses the nature of the traditional petitio objection to syllogism, and the fifth shows that Mill had (...) a theory capable of answering it. The final section cites the confusion described in section 3 to explain why Mill nevertheless continued to think that syllogistic proofs beg the question. (shrink)

This is a critical examination of Quine's "Two Dogmas" that leaves nothing much of Quine's paper still standing. It concludes with a short study of a bit of bad work in philosophy that results from following the doctrines of "Two Dogmas".

Modern utilitarianism has largely abandoned the view that human well-being consists solely in pleasurable sensations. Too much was wanting in that view for it to withstand the critique of a more refined philosophical psychology than was available to Bentham and Mill. The objections are by now familiar and need no detailed rehearsal. The older view failed to characterize adequately the structure of human satisfactions, forgetting that we can care about things that will happen after we are dead, that we generally (...) prefer to be told a distasteful truth to a comforting lie, and that we wish to be actors in our own lives and not merely passive recipients of pleasures from external sources. The extent to which a life is a flourishing one cannot be determined by summing the pleasures and pains, and calculating the balance. Nor, indeed, can it be determined by summing anything else. A life that is happy or eudaimon in the Aristotelian sense is an organic unity in which the significance of its parts rests on their contribution to the meaning of the whole. Nur im Zusammenhange eines Lebens hat ein Erlebnis Bedeutung. Utilitarianism needs to find a way of incorporating an organic view of human satisfaction. (shrink)

The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno and the American social scientist Ernest Becker see death as humanity’s fundamental anxiety. My essay explores the ethical ramifications attendant upon making that anxiety a well-spring of human activity. More specifically, I am interested in humanity’s effort to escape death via the secular milieu of social remembrance. Does such an effort produce a vista where the other exhibits an intrinsic value? Alternatively, does the other become a mere means in light of one’s project of (...) self-preservation? Pursuing such questions, this reflection will explore both positive and negative responses. It will take up the Columbine school shootings in reference to the latter and a notion of protest with regard to the former. The treatise will culminate with a discussion of Unamuno’s ethics of irreplaceability and its potential to engender a universal human respect while also endorsing one’s commitment to her concrete individuality. (shrink)

The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno and the American social scientist Ernest Becker see death as humanity’s fundamental anxiety. My essay explores the ethical ramifications attendant upon making that anxiety a well-spring of human activity. More specifically, I am interested in humanity’s effort to escape death via the secular milieu of social remembrance. Does such an effort produce a vista where the other exhibits an intrinsic value? Alternatively, does the other become a mere means in light of one’s project of (...) self-preservation? Pursuing such questions, this reflection will explore both positive and negative responses. It will take up the Columbine school shootings in reference to the latter and a notion of protest with regard to the former. The treatise will culminate with a discussion of Unamuno’s ethics of irreplaceability and its potential to engender a universal human respect while also endorsing one’s commitment to her concrete individuality. (shrink)

How would a liberation theologian respond to Marx’s famous critique that religious belief and, even more specifically, a hope for heaven is “the opium of the people”? I utilize the conceptual resources found within the work of liberation theologians Gustavo Gutiérrez, Enrique Dussel, and Jon Sobrino to argue that a belief in heaven is able to constitute a protest against oppressed persons’ present hell. To strengthen the connection between a believer’s heavenly hope and a commitment to worldly struggle, I examine (...) how the hope must be conceived as the completion and fulfillment of a process of temporal transformation. (shrink)

How would a liberation theologian respond to Marx’s famous critique that religious belief and, even more specifically, a hope for heaven is “the opium of the people”? I utilize the conceptual resources found within the work of liberation theologians Gustavo Gutiérrez, Enrique Dussel, and Jon Sobrino to argue that a belief in heaven is able to constitute a protest against oppressed persons’ present hell. To strengthen the connection between a believer’s heavenly hope and a commitment to worldly struggle, I examine (...) how the hope must be conceived as the completion and fulfillment of a process of temporal transformation. (shrink)

La création d’un système de santé public a été l’un des éléments clés de la Révolution tranquille dans les années 1960 au Québec. Toutefois, le développement de nouveaux traitements et de nouvelles technologies, en particulier des produits pharmaceutiques, ont fait naître un nouveau débat sur la gestion de notre système de santé. En se basant sur une analyse récente des valeurs libérales dans la société québécoise par Claude Ryan, l’auteur souligne l’importance que le gouvernement doit accorder à ces valeurs dans (...) la modernisation de notre système de santé. À la lumière des recommandations présentées par la commission Clair au provincial et par la commission Romanow au fédéral, la situation se prête bien à une modernisation du système de soins au Québec. Les valeurs libérales ont fourni une base au système de santé public ; elles sont plus pertinentes qu’elles ne l’ont jamais été alors que le débat sur notre système de santé est engagé. (shrink)

On Civic Republicanism explores the enduring relevance of the ancient concepts of republicanism and civic virtue to modern questions about political engagement and identity.".

A new approach to the ancient world is only too often a wrong approach, unless it is based on some concrete discovery. But I think it fair to talk of newperspectives, at least, in the study of Greek mythology. Certainly the old and familiar ones are no longer adequate. Indeed it is surprising, in the light of fresh intuitions about society, literacy, the pre-Homeric world, and relations with the ancient Near East, that myth—one of the most pervasive aspects of Greek (...) culture—has been left in its old and rather cobwebby pigeon-hole. Rose's simple paraphrases are accepted as adequate for students; Nilsson's sparse pages in his history of religion are rightly respected, though some of them are too simple; the Murray-Cook-Harrison-Cornford reconstruction of religion, ritual and myth is regarded as a little excessive, but perhaps not too far out; Kerényi and Eliade are roughly tolerated, if not widely read by Classicists, and their books are ordered in profusion for the library; the psychological side is adequately taken care of, or so it is supposed, by what is left from Freud and Jung, with Cassirer as sufficient authority for the sources of mythical imagination.Many of these critics had their moments of brilliant insight, but most were misleading in their theories taken as a whole. We can now accept that many myths have ritual counterparts, and some have ritual origins, without having to adopt Cornford's belief, developed after Harrison, Frazer and Robertson Smith, that all myths are such. (shrink)

The Allegory of the Cave (Pl. Resp. 514a1–520e2) is often analyzed in terms of metaphysical, epistemological, political, and psychic hierarchies that are clarified and reinforced by philosophical education. But the Allegory also contains an important historical allusion to the silver mining that took place in classical Attica. Examining the Cave in light of the enslaved miners around Lavrio leads us to reconsider the philosophical ‘liberation’ (λύσιν … τῶν δεσμῶν, 515c4) at the Allegory’s heart in the context of Athenian slavery and (...) Plato’s thoughts on the practice. Elsewhere in his work Plato generally uses servile metaphors in two ways: to depict ‘bad’ internal psychic subjection and ‘good’ submission to logos as manifested in various entities. This historical dimension of the Allegory works to undermine the ostensible naturalness of the slave/citizen distinction and suggest that philosophical education has the potential to ‘free’ the former and ‘subjugate’ the latter. The implication that these juridical categories are, to an extent, arbitrary and mutable reveals important differences between Plato’s views and those of his classical peers, and it adds to the dialogue’s protreptic dimension for its readers then and now. (shrink)

A nontechnical review is given of a topological bootstrap theory, with emphasis on theraison d'être for an electromagnetism whose fine-structure constant is of order10 −2.

I will here apply the classical Indian model of the dramatic actor as a methodology for interpreting the soteriological psychology of the Bhagavad Gītā, paying special attention to the usefulness of this approach for clarifying Kṛṣṇa's rationale in showing his divine form in Chapter 11. I argue that the Gītā advocates creative role-play as both the means and the end of liberation. Further, while Kṛṣṇa's teachings can be understood in terms of orthodox Hindu soteriologies that have in view an overcoming (...) of the emotions, I argue that Kṛṣṇa looks to transform Arjuna into an ‘athlete of emotion’, much like traditional Indian-based training methods do for theatrical actors. (shrink)

As soon as he had observed labour to be ‘first of all, a process between man and nature', Marx turned to conscious determination. ‘Man not only affects a change of form in the materials of nature, he also realises his own purpose in these materials. And this is a purpose he is conscious of. It is purpose which distinguishes labour from the activities of animals. Marx called the purposive character of labour ‘an exclusively human characteristic’ and the term indicates its (...) fundamental importance in his thought. As it is purposive activity, so labour is ‘a specific productive activity appropriate to its purpose, a productive activity that assimilate[s] particular natural materials to a particular human requirement'.3 Since ends are specific by definition, this has to be the case, and neither absence of skill nor indifference effect the issue one way or the other. Work does not cease to be particular because it demands no special capacities - tightening screws and stacking shelves do not stop being different kinds of activity by virtue of the fact that anyone can perform them; or because no store its set by its distinctive qualities. In its accounts, capital may treat different kinds of labour uniformly as a cost of production, but this does not alter the fact that the labour it employs comprises different types of labour: ‘the fact that the production of use-values or goods is carried on under the control of a capitalist and on his behalf does not alter the general character of that production'.4 In which case, we ask, what is labour which is not particular? If labour is always and necessarily a specific productive activity, what is abstract labour — ‘homogenous labour’ which, by definition, is not specific? (shrink)

At Cratylus 385b–c, Plato appears to argue that names have truth-value. Critics have almost universally condemned the argument as fallacious. Their case has proven so compelling that it has driven editors to recommend moving or removing the argument from its received position in the manuscripts. I argue that a close reading of the argument reveals it commits no fallacy, and its purpose in the dialogue justifies its original position. I wish to vindicate the manuscript tradition, showing that the argument establishes (...) that there is subject matter for investigation, and there is a correctness of names. (shrink)