In this masterful work, both an illumination of Kant's thought and an important contribution to contemporary legal and political theory, Arthur Ripstein gives a comprehensive yet accessible account of Kant's political philosophy. In addition to providing a clear and coherent statement of the most misunderstood of Kant's ideas, Ripstein also shows that Kant's views remain conceptually powerful and morally appealing today.

In this new edition, Arthur Fine looks at Einstein's philosophy of science and develops his own views on realism. A new Afterword discusses the reaction to Fine's own theory. "What really led Einstein . . . to renounce the new quantum order? For those interested in this question, this book is compulsory reading."--Harvey R. Brown, American Journal of Physics "Fine has successfully combined a historical account of Einstein's philosophical views on quantum mechanics and a discussion of some of the (...) philosophical problems associated with the interpretation of quantum theory with a discussion of some of the contemporary questions concerning realism and antirealism. . . . Clear, thoughtful, [and] well-written."--Allan Franklin, Annals of Science "Attempts, from Einstein's published works and unpublished correspondence, to piece together a coherent picture of 'Einstein realism.' Especially illuminating are the letters between Einstein and fellow realist Schrodinger, as the latter was composing his famous 'Schrodinger-Cat' paper."--Nick Herbert, New Scientist "Beautifully clear. . . . Fine's analysis is penetrating, his own results original and important. . . . The book is a splendid combination of new ways to think about quantum mechanics, about realism, and about Einstein's views of both."--Nancy Cartwright, Isis. (shrink)

First published in 1818, The World as Will and Representation contains Schopenhauer's entire philosophy, ranging through epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and action, aesthetics and philosophy of art, to ethics, the meaning of life and the philosophy of religion, in an attempt to account for the world in all its significant aspects. It gives a unique and influential account of what is and is not of value in existence, the striving and pain of the human condition and the possibility of (...) deliverance from it. This new translation of the first volume of what later became a two-volume work reflects the eloquence and power of Schopenhauer's prose and renders philosophical terms accurately and consistently. It offers an introduction, glossary of names and bibliography, and succinct editorial notes, including notes on the revisions of the text which Schopenhauer made in 1844 and 1859. (shrink)

This edition includes an Introduction by David Cartwright, a translator’s preface, biographical note, selected bibliography, and an index.

In this acclaimed work, first published in 1986, world-renowned scholar Arthur C. Danto explored the inextricably linked but often misunderstood relationship between art and philosophy. In light of the book's impact--especially the essay "The End of Art," which dramatically announced that art ended in the 1960s--this enhanced edition includes a foreword by Jonathan Gilmore that discusses how scholarship has changed in response to it. Complete with a new bibliography of work on and influenced by Danto's ideas, _The Philosophical Disenfranchisement (...) of Art_ continues to be of interest to anyone who thinks seriously about art, as well as to philosophers, aestheticians, and art historians. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: General editor's preface; Editorial notes and references; Introduction; Notes on text and translation; Chronology; Bibliography; Part I. On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason: 1. Introduction; 2. Survey of what is most important in previous teachings about the principle of sufficient reason; 3. Inadequacy of previous accounts and sketch of a new one; 4. On the first class of objects for the subject and the form of the principle of sufficient reason governing in (...) it; 5. On the second class of objects for the subject and the form of the principle of sufficient reason governing in it; 6. On the third class of objects for the subject and the form of the principle of sufficient reason governing in it; 7. On the fourth class of objects for the subject and the form of the principle of sufficient reason governing in it; 8. General remarks and results; Variants in different editions; Collation of the two editions; Part II. On Vision and Colours: 9. On vision; 10. On colours; Variants in different editions; Part III. On Will in Nature: 11. Introduction; 12. Physiology and pathology; 13. Comparative anatomy; 14. Plant physiology; 15. Physical astronomy; 16. Linguistics; 17. Animal magnetism and magic; 18. Sinology; Reference to ethics; Conclusion; Variants in different editions; Glossary of names; Index. (shrink)

In The Abuse of Beauty, art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto explains how the notion of beauty as anathema to art arose and flourished and offers a new way of looking at art and beauty. He draws on the thought of artists, critics, and philosophers such as Rimbaud, Fry, Matisse, and Greenberg, to reposition beauty as one of many modes -- along with sexuality, sublimity, disgust, and horror -- through which the human sensibility expresses itself. 20 black-and-white illustrations are (...) included. (shrink)

A long tradition of research including classical rhetoric, esthetics and poetics theory, formalism and structuralism, as well as current perspectives in (neuro)cognitive poetics has investigated structural and functional aspects of literature reception. Despite a wealth of literature published in specialized journals like Poetics, however, still little is known about how the brain processes and creates literary and poetic texts. Still, such stimulus material might be suited better than other genres for demonstrating the complexities with which our brain constructs the world (...) in and around us, because it unifies thought and language, music and imagery in a clear, manageable way, most often with play, pleasure, and emotion (Schrott and Jacobs, 2011 ). In this paper, I discuss methods and models for investigating the neuronal and cognitive-affective bases of literary reading together with pertinent results from studies on poetics, text processing, emotion, or neuroaesthetics, and outline current challenges and future perspectives. (shrink)

In this paper, I first present an overview of Asay’s _A Theory of Truthmaking_, highlighting what I take to be some of its most attractive features, especially his re-invigoration of the ontological understanding of truthmaking and his defence of ontology-first truthmaking over explanation-first truthmaking. Then, I articulate what I take to be a puzzling potential inconsistency: (a) he appeals to considerations to do with aboutness in criticising how well ontological views account for truth while (b) ruling out aboutness from the (...) right account of truthmaking. He argues, instead, that necessitation is both necessary and sufficient for truthmaking (§3.3). I suggest that adding aboutness to one’s account in the right way is not just compatible with but important for ontology-first truthmaking. I do all this to invite Asay to clarify his position on these matters. Overall, Asay’s worldview displays the fruitfulness of an ontologically serious approach to metaphysics that puts truthmaking centre-stage. (shrink)

What is it to be a work of art? Renowned author and critic Arthur C. Danto addresses this fundamental, complex question. Part philosophical monograph and part memoiristic meditation, _What Art Is _challenges the popular interpretation that art is an indefinable concept, instead bringing to light the properties that constitute universal meaning. Danto argues that despite varied approaches, a work of art is always defined by two essential criteria: meaning and embodiment, as well as one additional criterion contributed by the (...) viewer: interpretation. Danto crafts his argument in an accessible manner that engages with both philosophy and art across genres and eras, beginning with Plato’s definition of art in _The Republic_, and continuing through the progress of art as a series of discoveries, including such innovations as perspective, chiaroscuro, and physiognomy. Danto concludes with a fascinating discussion of Andy Warhol’s famous shipping cartons, which are visually indistinguishable from the everyday objects they represent. Throughout, Danto considers the contributions of philosophers including Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, and artists from Michelangelo and Poussin to Duchamp and Warhol, in this far-reaching examination of the interconnectivity and universality of aesthetic production. (shrink)

Now in its third edition, _Narration and Knowledge_ is a classic work exploring the nature of historical knowledge and its reliance on narrative. Analytical philosopher Arthur C. Danto introduces the concept of "narrative sentences," in which an event is described with reference to later events and discusses why such sentences cannot be understood until the later event happens. Danto compares narrative and scientific explanation and explores the legitimacy of historical laws. He also argues that history is an autonomous and (...) humanist discipline incapable of being reduced to scientific descriptions. Lydia Goehr's new introduction illustrates Danto's main arguments by questioning her very role, first, as an introducer of a book that has not yet been read by readers and, second, as an interpreter of a book written forty years ago. Frank Ankersmit's conclusion revisits the initial impact of the publication of _Narration and Knowledge_ and considers its enduring legacy. (shrink)

Over a decade ago, Arthur Danto announced that art ended in the sixties. Ever since this declaration, he has been at the forefront of a radical critique of the nature of art in our time. After the End of Art presents Danto's first full-scale reformulation of his original insight, showing how, with the eclipse of abstract expressionism, art has deviated irrevocably from the narrative course that Vasari helped define for it in the Renaissance. Moreover, he leads the way to (...) a new type of criticism that can help us understand art in a posthistorical age where, for example, an artist can produce a work in the style of Rembrandt to create a visual pun, and where traditional theories cannot explain the difference between Andy Warhol's Brillo Box and the product found in the grocery store. Here we are engaged in a series of insightful and entertaining conversations on the most relevant aesthetic and philosophical issues of art, conducted by an especially acute observer of the art scene today.Originally delivered as the prestigious Mellon Lectures on the Fine Arts, these writings cover art history, pop art, "people's art," the future role of museums, and the critical contributions of Clement Greenberg--who helped make sense of modernism for viewers over two generations ago through an aesthetics-based criticism. Tracing art history from a mimetic tradition through the modern era of manifestos, Danto shows that it wasn't until the invention of Pop art that the historical understanding of the means and ends of art was nullified. Even modernist art, which tried to break with the past by questioning the ways of producing art, hinged on a narrative.Traditional notions of aesthetics can no longer apply to contemporary art, argues Danto. Instead he focuses on a philosophy of art criticism that can deal with perhaps the most perplexing feature of contemporary art: that everything is possible. (shrink)

A central problem for any truthmaker theory is the problem of negative truths. In this paper, I develop a novel, piecemeal strategy for solving this problem. The strategy puts central focus on a truth-relevant notion of aboutness within a metaphysically modest version of truthmaker theory and uses key conceptual tools gained by taking a deeper look at the best attempts to solve the problem of intentionality. I begin this task by critically discussing past proposed solutions to P-NEG in light of (...) Russell’s debate with Demos. This reveals a central difficulty with addressing the problem, specifically that one cannot be committed to incompatibility facts in one’s account of negation and of the truth of negative truths. I then present an aboutness-based version of truthmaker theory. Utilising what I call the strict and full account of aboutness, I extract aboutness-based theories of truth and falsity. I use this machinery to present a promising new strategy for solving P-NEG which does not have the problems of alternative approaches. Finally, I present and respond to some potential objections. (shrink)

Reading is not only “cold” information processing, but involves affective and aesthetic processes that go far beyond what current models of word recognition, sentence processing, or text comprehension can explain. To investigate such “hot” reading processes, standardized instruments that quantify both psycholinguistic and emotional variables at the sublexical, lexical, inter-, and supralexical levels (e.g., phonological iconicity, word valence, arousal-span, or passage suspense) are necessary. One such instrument, the Berlin Affective Word List (BAWL) has been used in over 50 published studies (...) demonstrating effects of lexical emotional variables on all relevant processing levels (experiential, behavioral, neuronal). In this paper, we first present new data from several BAWL studies. Together, these studies examine various views on affective effects in reading arising from dimensional (e.g., valence ) and discrete emotion features (e.g., happiness ), or embodied cognition features like smelling. Second, we extend our investigation of the complex issue of affective word processing to words characterized by a mixture of affects. These words entail positive and negative valence, and/or features making them beautiful or ugly. Finally, we discuss tentative neurocognitive models of affective word processing in the light of the present results, raising new issues for future studies. (shrink)

1. Bd. Vier Bücher, nebst einem Anhange, der die Kritik der kantischen Philosophie enthält -- 2. Bd. Welcher die Ergänzungen zu die den vier Büchern des ersten Bandes enthält.

ABSTRACTIn this article we investigate structural differences between “literary” metaphors created by renowned poets and “nonliterary” ones imagined by non-professional authors from Katz et al.’s 1988 corpus. We provide data from quantitative narrative analyses of the altogether 464 metaphors on over 70 variables, including surface features like metaphor length, phonological features like sonority score, or syntactic-semantic features like sentence similarity. In a first computational study using machine learning tools we show that Katz et al.’s literary metaphors can be successfully discriminated (...) from their nonliterary ones on the basis of response measures, in particular the ratings for familiarity, ease of interpretation, semantic relatedness, and comprehensibility. A second computational study then shows that the classifier can reliably detect and predict between-group differences on the basis of five QNA features generalizing from a... (shrink)

A discussion on antiquity with Anthony A. Long, one of the most distinguished scholars in the field of ancient philosophy, would be engaging in any case. All the more so, since his two recently published works, Greek Models of Mind and Self and How to be Free: An Ancient Guide to the Stoic Life, provide the opportunity to revisit key issues of ancient philosophy. The former is a lively and challenging work that starts with the Homeric notions of selfhood, and (...) leads the reader all the way through classical and Hellenistic philosophical psychology; the latter is a profound analysis of the Stoic ethics that focuses in particular on its foundation and principles, followed by Long’s re-worked translation of Epictetus’ Encheiridion and carefully selected parts of his Discourses. Anthony Long kindly accepted the invitation to discuss several issues that are in the core of scholarly concern, sharing interpretations and thoughts that originate from his long acquaintance with the ancient literary tradition. (shrink)

This innovative - and pessimistic - view has proved powerfully influential upon philosophy and art, directly affecting the work of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and ...

Persuasive and humane, this classic of philosophy offers Schopenhauer's fullest examination of ethical themes, articulating a descriptive form of ethics that contradicts the rationally based prescriptive theories. Starting with his polemic against Kant's ethics of duty, Schopenhauer argues that compassion forms the basis of morality, and he outlines a perspective on ethics in which passion and desire correspond to different moral characters, behaviors, and worldviews. He further defines his metaphysics of morals, employing Kant’s transcendental idealism to illustrate both the interconnectiveness (...) of being and the affinity of his ethics to Eastern thought. (shrink)

Block’s, 5–43 1981) anti-behaviourist attack of the Turing Test not only illustrates that the test is a non-sufficient criterion for attributing thought; I suggest that it also exemplifies the limiting case of the more general concern that a machine which has access to enormous amounts of data can pass the Turing Test by simple symbol-manipulation techniques. If the answers to a human interrogator are entailed by the machines’ data, the Turing Test offers no clear criterion to distinguish between a thinking (...) machine and a machine that merely manipulates representations of words and sentences as it is found in contemporary Natural Language Processing models. This paper argues that properties about vagueness are accessible to any human-like thinker but do not normally display themselves in ordinary language use. Therefore, a machine that merely performs simple symbol manipulation from large amounts of previously acquired data – where this body of data does not contain facts about vagueness – will not be able to report on these properties. Conversely, a machine that has the capacity to think would be able to report on these properties. I argue that we can exploit this fact to establish a sufficient criterion of thought. The criterion is a specification of some of the questions that, as I explain, should be asked by the interrogator in a Turing Test situation. (shrink)

Two main goals of the emerging field of neurocognitive poetics are the use of more natural and ecologically valid stimuli, tasks and contexts and providing methods and models allowing to quantify distinctive features of verbal materials used in such tasks and contexts and their effects on readers responses. A natural key element of poetic language, metaphor, still is understudied insofar as relatively little empirical research looked at literary or poetic metaphors. An exception is Katz et al.’s corpus of 204 literary (...) metaphors by authors such as Shakespeare or Dylan Thomas, for which various rating data are available. We reanalyzed their corpus using a combination of quantitative narrative analysis, latent semantic analysis, and machine learning in order to identify relevant features of the metaphors that influenced the ratings. The combined application of computational tools sheds light on surface and affective-semantic features that co-determine the reception of poetic metaphors and successfully predicted the period of origin, authorship and goodness ratings of the metaphors. The present results can be used for generating quantitative hypotheses or selecting and matching verbal stimuli in empirical studies of literature and neurocognitive poetics. (shrink)

_A lively meditation on the nature of art by one of America's most celebrated art critics_ What is it to be a work of art? Renowned author and critic Arthur C. Danto addresses this fundamental, complex question. Part philosophical monograph and part memoiristic meditation, _What Art Is _challenges the popular interpretation that art is an indefinable concept, instead bringing to light the properties that constitute universal meaning. Danto argues that despite varied approaches, a work of art is always defined (...) by two essential criteria: meaning and embodiment, as well as one additional criterion contributed by the viewer: interpretation. Danto crafts his argument in an accessible manner that engages with both philosophy and art across genres and eras, beginning with Plato’s definition of art in _The Republic_, and continuing through the progress of art as a series of discoveries, including such innovations as perspective, chiaroscuro, and physiognomy. Danto concludes with a fascinating discussion of Andy Warhol’s famous shipping cartons, which are visually indistinguishable from the everyday objects they represent. Throughout, Danto considers the contributions of philosophers including Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, and artists from Michelangelo and Poussin to Duchamp and Warhol, in this far-reaching examination of the interconnectivity and universality of aesthetic production. (shrink)

A central tenet of truthmaker theory is that necessitation is necessary for truthmaking (NEC). This paper defends NEC in a novel, piecemeal way, namely by responding to a potential counterexample involving a changing past. If Carter won a race at t1 but is later disqualified at t2, then Carter no longer won at t1. A wholly past event seems to have changed in the future. The event makes ‘Carter won the race at t1’ (RACE) true between t1‐2 but fails to (...) make it true at t2. So, we have a potential counterexample to necessitation: a truthmaker of RACE fails in another context to make the same truthbearer RACE true. I argue that the best solution to this challenge is not that there are different truthbearers at t1‐2 and t2 (the semantic response), or that RACE was never true because of the future disqualification or will always be true despite the future disqualification. The best solution is to accept that the past can change: past events can change based on what happens in the future (e.g., via their effects). This paper's novel defence of necessitation will illustrate the importance of utilising explicitly ontological and commonsensical tools in accounting for truth. (shrink)

This book examines responsibility and luck as these issues arise in tort law, criminal law, and distributive justice. The central question is: whose bad luck is a particular piece of misfortune? Arthur Ripstein argues that there is a general set of principles to be found that clarifies responsibility in those cases where luck is most obviously an issue: accidents, mistakes, emergencies, and failed attempts at crime. In revealing how the problems that arise in tort and criminal law as well (...) as distributive justice invite structurally parallel solutions, the author also shows the deep connection between individual responsibility and social equality. This is a challenging and provocative book that will be of special interest to moral and political philosophers, legal theorists, and political scientists. (shrink)

This is the only complete English translation of one of the most significant and fascinating works of the great philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. The Parerga are six long essays; the Paralipomena are shorter writings arranged under thirty-one different subject-headings. These works won widespread attention on their publication in 1851, and helped secure lasting international fame for Schopenhauer. Their intellectual vigour, literary power, and rich diversity are still striking today. They are essential to a full understanding of Schopenhauer's thought.

"Popular summaries of existentialism and Sartre's ideas have ensured a wide currency for such words as 'absurdity', 'nothingness', 'engagement', 'shame', and 'anguish'. But for Sartre, each of these words embodies a precise philosophical concept which he applies and explores further in his fiction and plays. Synthesized in 'Being and Nothingness' and 'Critique of Dialectical Reason', these concepts comprise a fully articulated philosophical system which, as Arthur C. Danto argues, in its vision and scope, logical responsibility and human relevance, takes (...) its place among the greatest of philosophical achievements. This book offers a synoptic and sympathetic reconstruction of the Sartrean system and in particular Sartre's analysis of the nature of language, consciousness, knowledge, self, and values." --Descripción del editor. (shrink)

Newton and Leibniz had profound disagreements concerning metaphysics and the relationship of mathematics to natural philosophy, as well as deeply opposed attitudes towards analysis. Nevertheless, or so I shall argue, despite these deeply held and distracting differences in their background assumptions and metaphysical views, there was a considerable consilience in their positions on the status of infinitesimals. In this paper I compare the foundation Newton provides in his Method Of First and Ultimate Ratios (sketched at some time between 1671 and (...) 1684, and published in the Principia of 1687) with that provided independently by Leibniz in his unpublished manuscript De quadratura arithmetica (1675-6) as well as in later writings. I argue that both appeal to a version of the Archimedean Axiom to underwrite their use of infinitesimal techniques, which must be interpreted as a shorthand for rigorously finitist methods. (shrink)

Both individuals and organizations can engage in unethical behaviors. Across six experiments, we examine how people’s ethical judgments are affected by whether the agent engaging in unethical action is a person or an organization. People believe organizations are more unethical than individuals, even when both agents engage in identical behaviors. Using both mediation and moderation analytical approaches, we find that this effect is explained by people’s beliefs that organizations produce more harm when behaving unethically, even when they do not, as (...) well as people’s perceptions that organizations are relatively more blameworthy agents. We then explore how these judgments manifest across different kinds of organizations as well as how they produce discrepant punishments following ethically questionable business activities. Although society and the law often treat individuals and organizations as equivalent, people believe for-profit organizations’ behaviors are less ethical than identical individual behaviors. We discuss the ethical implications of this discrepancy, as well as additional implications concerning reputation management, punishment, and signaling in organizational contexts. (shrink)

How do we appreciate a work of art? Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to explore connections between art, mind, and brain, Arthur Shimamura takes findings from psychological and brain sciences to address ways of understanding our aesthetic responses.

On the sufferings of the world.--On the vanity of existence.--On suicide.--Immortality; a dialogue.--Further psychological observations.--On education.--On women.--On noise.--A few parables.

The growing area of military bio-technologies, especially the use of cogniceuticals, raises several ethical concerns for military physicians. These include the role of military physicians in prescr...

Now in its third edition, _Narration and Knowledge_ is a classic work exploring the nature of historical knowledge and its reliance on narrative. Analytical philosopher Arthur C. Danto introduces the concept of "narrative sentences," in which an event is described with reference to later events and discusses why such sentences cannot be understood until the later event happens. Danto compares narrative and scientific explanation and explores the legitimacy of historical laws. He also argues that history is an autonomous and (...) humanist discipline incapable of being reduced to scientific descriptions. Lydia Goehr's new introduction illustrates Danto's main arguments by questioning her very role, first, as an introducer of a book that has not yet been read by readers and, second, as an interpreter of a book written forty years ago. Frank Ankersmit's conclusion revisits the initial impact of the publication of _Narration and Knowledge_ and considers its enduring legacy. (shrink)

The purpose of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Schopenhauer is to offer translations of the best modern German editions of Schopenhauer's work in a uniform format for Schopenhauer scholars, together with philosophical introductions and full editorial apparatus. The World as Will and Representation contains Schopenhauer's entire philosophy, ranging through epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and action, aesthetics and philosophy of art, to ethics, the meaning of life and the philosophy of religion. This second volume was added to the (...) work in 1844, and revised in 1859. Its chapters are officially 'supplements' to the first volume, but are indispensable for a proper appreciation of Schopenhauer's thought. Here we have his most mature reflections on many topics, including sex, death, conscious and unconscious desires, and the doctrines of salvation and liberation in Christian and Indian thought. Schopenhauer clarifies the nature of his metaphysics of the will, and synthesizes insights from a broad range of literary, scientific and scholarly sources. This new translation reflects the eloquence and power of Schopenhauer's prose, and renders philosophical terms accurately and consistently. It offers an introduction, glossary of names, bibliography, and succinct editorial notes. (shrink)

The winning entry in a competition held by the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences, Schopenhauer's 1839 essay brought its author international recognition. Its brilliant and elegant treatments of free will and determinism elevated it to a classic of Western philosophy, and its penetrating reflections still remain relevant. Schopenhauer makes a distinction between freedom of acting (which he endorses) and the freedom of willing (which he refutes) in a clear and rigorous treatment that reveals many basic features of his philosophy. A (...) useful introduction to Schopenhauer for students of philosophy and religion. (shrink)

The overall subject of the essays in _The Body/Body Problem_ is the traditional one of what our ultimate makeup is, as creatures with minds and bodies. The central thesis is that we are beings who represent—and misrepresent—actual and possible worlds. Addressing philosophical questions of mental representation, Danto presents his distinctive approach to some of the most enduring topics in philosophy. He is concerned with the nature of description, the status of the external world, action theory, the philosophy of history, and (...) the philosophical status of psychoanalytic explanation. Representation is a central concept in philosophy, says Danto, with differences among philosophers arising in the ways they account for how representations connect to the world or to the individuals possessing them, and how they connect with one another to form systems of beliefs, feelings, and attitudes. In these essays Danto's own voice, with his arguments and speculations, provides rich philosophical pleasures that will endure, to borrow from Santayana, "under whatever sky." Arthur C. Danto is one of the most original and multitalented philosophers writing today, a thinker whose interests traverse the boundaries of traditional understandings of philosophy. Best known for his contributions to the philosophy of art and aesthetics, Danto is also esteemed for his work in the history of philosophy, the philosophy of history, philosophical psychology, and action theory. These two volumes, each with an introduction by the author, contain essays spanning more than twenty-five years that have been selected to highlight the inseparability of philosophy and art in Danto's work. Together they present the thinking of Arthur C. Danto at his very best. (shrink)

This selection of the major works of constitutional theory during the Weimar period reflects the reactions of legal scholars to a state in permanent crisis, a society in which all bets were off. Yet the Weimar Republic's brief experiment in constitutionalism laid the groundwork for the postwar Federal Republic, and today its lessons can be of use to states throughout the world. Weimar legal theory is a key to understanding the experience of nations turning from traditional, religious, or command-and-control forms (...) of legitimation to the rule of law. Only two of these authors, Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt, have been published to any extent in English, but they and the others whose writings are translated here played key roles in the political and constitutional struggles of the Weimar Republic. Critical introductions to all the theorists and commentaries on their works have been provided by experts from Austria, Canada, Germany, and the United States. In their general introduction, the editors place the Weimar debate in the context of the history and politics of the Weimar Republic and the struggle for constitutionalism in Germany. This critical scrutiny of the Weimar jurisprudence of crisis offers an invaluable overview of the perils and promise of constitutional development in states that lack an entrenched tradition of constitutionalism. (shrink)

On thinking for oneself -- On authorship -- On criticism -- On style -- On reputation -- On human nature -- On suicide -- On the suffering of the world -- On the vanity of existence -- On genius.

Henry Habberley Price, who published as H. H. Price, was born in 1899. From 1935 to 1959 he was Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University. Price was a major figure in his lifetime well-known especially for the “clarity and elegance of style”, which, according to Martha Kneale (1996: xix), make his works readable in spite of changing fashions in philosophy. Many people’s acquaintance nowadays with Price’s philosophical work derives from his being a target in Austin’s (1962) famous attack on (...) the sense-datum theory. This restricted acquaintance with his output is one reason that Price has been ignored in recent philosophy. -/- Mainstream philosophy neglected him after the Second World War, perhaps partly because, when articulating his ideas, he mainly engaged with philosophers of the past, such as Locke and Hume. His thought was, however, valued by fellow philosophers such as Broad, Moore, Ayer, and generations of his students at Oxford, including Sellars, Armstrong, and Anscombe. -/- Although Price is seen mainly as a philosopher of perception, only two of his six books are about perception and he had a major influence, also publishing many articles, on a variety of topics, including some we cannot focus on here, e.g., our evidence of other minds (1938; 1930b: 195) and psychical research (1940c; 1953b; 1972; 1995; an interest he claims to share with Neo-Platonists [1968a: 447]). We can only provide a sketch of his rich contributions. After briefly sketching his life (§1), we discuss his philosophy’s general features (§2), contributions to the studies of perception (§3), properties (§5.1), recognition (§5), belief (§6), religious belief (§6.8), his revival and serious study of Hume (§4), and some remarkable anticipations (§7). (shrink)

Schopenhauer's prize essay On the Freedom of Will is one of the classics of Western philosophy, dealing with the question of free will versus determinism. His treatment of the problem of free will is by no means obsolete, containing penetrating reflections relevant to contemporary discussion. The argument of the essay is clearly and rigorously presented, and reveals many basic features of Schopenhauer's thought. As such, it forms a useful introduction to Schopenhauer's philosophy in general. Equally, the essay can be studied (...) with profit independently of Schopenhauer's metaphysical views. This new edition of the sole English translation of this classic text contains and expanded bibliography, index and preface in which the translator comments on recent scholarship on Schopenhauer. The translator's introduction puts the essay into the context of Schopenhauer's general philosophy and suggests some possible criticisms of his position. (shrink)

Linguistic ontologists and antilinguistic, ‘serious’ ontologists both accept the inference from ‘Fido is a dog’ to ‘Fido has the property of being a dog’ but disagree about its ontological consequences. In arguing that we are committed to properties on the basis of these transformations, linguistic ontologists employ a neo-Fregean meta-ontological principle, on which the function of singular terms is to refer. To reject this, serious ontologists must defend an alternative. This paper defends an alternative on which the function of singular (...) terms is not generally to refer and on which they are generally ontologically noncommittal. This is the best way to reject linguistic, ‘easy’ arguments for the existence of properties. The account recommends neutralism about quantification (drawing on Barcan Marcus and Meinongianism), coherently bringing together two important yet uncombined meta-ontological movements. Moreover, it employs Ramseyan insights about the transformations to provide a nonreductionist, non-error-theoretic redundancy approach to explicit talk about properties. (shrink)

If the words of natural human language possess a universal positivity bias, as assumed by Boucher and Osgood’s (1969) famous Pollyanna hypothesis and computationally confirmed for large text corpora in several languages (Dodds et al., 2015), then children and youth literature (CYL) should also show a Pollyanna effect. Here we tested this prediction applying a vector space model- based sentiment analysis tool called SentiArt (Jacobs, 2019) to two CYL corpora, one in English (372 books) and one in German (500 books). (...) Pitching our analysis at the sentence level, and assessing semantic as well as lexico-grammatical information, bBoth corpora show the Pollyanna effect and thus add further evidence to the universality hypothesis. The results of our multivariate sentiment analyses provide interesting testable predictions for future scientific studies of literature. (shrink)