William Blake’s prophetic works seem to present the reader with a puzzling contradiction. On the one hand Blake can be read as a prophet of sexual revolution with his attacks on puritanism and hypocritical chastity. On the other hand, in many passages he seems to express characteristically Platonic/Patristic skepticism concerning bodily experience. What is more he often portrays sexuality and indeed femininity as manipulative and cruel. Is there a coherent attitude to sexuality in Blake? This paper argues (...) that Blake’s soteriology strongly implies that the ‘return’ to unity with the divine pivots on the incarnation which Blake even insists is the product of natural sexuality. To this extent there is a place for the sexualized body in the economy of salvation. This economy links Blake to a larger Platonist and Christian Platonist tradition that understands salvation in terms of an exitus/reditus pattern. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sophocles’s Enemy Sisters: Antigone and IsmeneWm. Blake Tyrrell (bio) and Larry J. BennettAt the core of the Oedipus myth, as Sophocles presents it, is the proposition that all masculine relationships are based on reciprocal acts of violence. Laius, taking his cue from the oracle, violently rejects Oedipus out of fear that his son will seize his throne and invade his conjugal bed. Oedipus, taking his cue from the (...) oracle, does away with Laius, violently rebuffs the sphinx, then takes their places—as king and “scourge of the city,” respectively. Again, Oedipus, taking his cue from the oracle, plots the death of that unknown figure who may be seeking to usurp his own position. Oedipus, Creon, and Tiresias, each taking his cue from the oracle, seek one another’s downfall.All these acts of violence gradually wear away the differences that exist not only in the same family but throughout the community.—René Girard, Violence and the SacredRené Girard does not include feminine relationships in his assessment of the Oedipus myth, yet the same redundancy that characterizes the males marks the females.1 Jocasta conjoins in one person multiple and redundant social roles: she is the mother and wife of the same person, for which she [End Page 1] hangs herself, leaving for Oedipus “many pains that a mother’s furies fulfilled” (Homer Odyssey 11.279–80). Her daughters, their father’s sisters, manifest kinship redundancy in two persons. Incest produces circularly, reverting to a sibling of the parent rather than moving forward with a descendant. The absence of linear progression from one generation to the next creates a sameness and equilibrium that thwart separation and individuality. Oedipus’s brothers/sons fail in their adult roles, because neither can overcome the other’s right to the throne of Thebes and the mastery of its royal household. They are enemy brothers locked in reciprocal violence.2 Antigone and Ismene have escaped notice not only as enemy sisters but even as products of the same incest. Audiences for Sophocles’s Antigone have viewed them as “normal” women and cooperated with his characters in emphasizing the differences between them. They have assumed from Antigone’s betrothal to Haemon and resistance to Creon that she is the elder, more mature sister.3 They tend to accept without question that Antigone engages in burial rituals with Polyneices’s corpse (241–58) and returns to it (442–35).4 Bernard M. W. Knox’s critically powerful concept of the “Sophoclean hero” has bolstered this view of Antigone while reducing Ismene to a foil, and abetted the tendency of modern producers of the play to cast an older or more famous actress in the role of Antigone.5 Naturalistic readings like that of C. M. Bowra—“seeing that Ismene is her only close relative in the world, Antigone is remarkably cold to her”6—have masked the source and hence the vehemence of Antigone’s fury.That the reciprocity of the violence between Ismene and Antigone has gone unnoticed is understandable in view of the familiarity of the conflict between their brothers. Males in Greek society pursued difference by striving to excel as aristoi (best) in competition for prestige, wealth, and power.7 Whenever Eteocles and Polyneices came together, each asserted a right to Oedipus’s household and throne that was equally matched, and violence ensued from the equilibrium. On the other hand, Greek women were not supposed to compete with one another for distinction. They wove wool for clothes, maintained the household, and cared for the children, the sick, and the dead, activities that required cooperation away from public view.8 Proximity to other women was the norm and desideratum. Moreover, lawgivers like Solon based their funeral legislation on the premise that every woman wanted to participate in mourning.9 For the sake of public tranquillity, legislators tried to limit the numbers of women participants by imposing restrictions according to degrees of kinship, for instance, to children of fifth cousins. In this context, women were interchangeable, and the places they held during birth, coming of age in wedding ceremonies, and death, [End Page 2] were open to more than one woman. Closeness and... (shrink)

Presents Bernard Lonergan's five "verbum" articles that originally appeared in Theological studies. For Thomist students and scholars this "verbum" study offers a careful appraisal of the Thomist theory of knowledge as well as an introduction to the concepts found in Father Lonergan's "Insight". Since the concept of "verbum" dynamically affects the thought of Aquinas, it is necessary to grasp this concept to understand Thomist metaphysics and rational psychology. Lonergan has carefully analyzed and explicitly outlined "verbum"--An integral part of the (...) Thomist theory of knowledge. "Verbum" is examined as a tool of definition and for its impact on understanding, logical thought procession and related ideas stemming from "verbum". Discusses "the word" and its relation to abstraction. Focusses on St. Thomas' immediate concern in finding in Aristotle the point of insertion for Augustinian thought and in fusing a phenomenology of the subject with a psychology of the soul. (shrink)

Nuclear War, edited by Fox and Groarke, is one of five recent anthologies containing new essays by philosophers on the subject of nuclear war. The Blake and Pole volumes, containing essays mainly by British philosophers, are distinguished by unrelenting and comprehensive opposition to British and American policy, and by the fame of the contributors, which include Anthony Kenny, Michael Dummett, and Bernard Williams. The Chicago volume contains a number of excellent papers by philosophers and the added bonus of (...) nine papers by established specialists in national security issues; it attempts, with partial success, to cover the full range of strategic nuclear options. The Cohen and Lee and the Fox and Groarke volumes consist largely of papers by strategic outsiders far from the centres of political power; the debate in these volumes is not between the principal versions of nuclear deterrence but between nuclear deterrence in any form and some scheme that transcends the present arrangement of mutually deterring superpowers. Of these last two books, Cohen and Lee contains relatively longer and more detailed essays. (shrink)

Moving forward rapidly in the clinical research phase, uterus transplantation may be a future treatment option for women with uterine factor infertility, which accounts for three per cent of all infertility in women. This new method of treatment would allow women, who currently rely on gestational surrogacy or adoption, to gestate and birth their own genetic offspring. Since uterus transplantation carries significant risk when compared with surrogacy and adoption as well as when compared with other organ transplants, it requires greater (...) justification because its goals are quality of life, not life-saving, in their scope. It is important to address questions regarding the physical, psychosocial and ethical risks and benefits of uterus transplantation for all three parties involved—the patient, the donor and the potential child—as well as discuss the regulatory implications as research on uterus transplantations moves forward. (shrink)

Philosophy should not try to assimilate itself to the aims of the sciences. Scientism stems from the false assumption that a representation of the world minimally based on local perspectives is what best serves self-understanding. Philosophy must concern itself with the history of our conceptions, and we must overcome the need to think that this history should ideally be vindicatory. There is no basic conflict between arguing within the framework of our ideas, reflectively making better sense of them, and understanding (...) their highly contingent history. The third of these activities is an inescapable part of the second. (shrink)

A computable structure $\mathcal {A}$ is $\mathbf {x}$-computably categorical for some Turing degree $\mathbf {x}$ if for every computable structure $\mathcal {B}\cong\mathcal {A}$ there is an isomorphism $f:\mathcal {B}\to\mathcal {A}$ with $f\leq_{T}\mathbf {x}$. A degree $\mathbf {x}$ is a degree of categoricity if there is a computable structure $\mathcal {A}$ such that $\mathcal {A}$ is $\mathbf {x}$-computably categorical, and for all $\mathbf {y}$, if $\mathcal {A}$ is $\mathbf {y}$-computably categorical, then $\mathbf {x}\leq_{T}\mathbf {y}$. We construct a $\Sigma^{0}_{2}$ set whose degree (...) is not a degree of categoricity. We also demonstrate a large class of degrees that are not degrees of categoricity by showing that every degree of a set which is 2-generic relative to some perfect tree is not a degree of categoricity. Finally, we prove that every noncomputable hyperimmune-free degree is not a degree of categoricity. (shrink)

This essay asks why Aristotle, certainly no friend to unlimited democracy, seems so much more comfortable with unconstrained rhetoric in political deliberation than current defenders of deliberative democracy. It answers this question by reconstructing and defending a distinctly Aristotelian understanding of political deliberation, one that can be pieced together out of a series of separate arguments made in the Rhetoric, the Politics, and the Nicomachean Ethics.

Abstract The idea of a purely civic nationalism has attracted Western scholars, most of whom rightly disdain the myths that sustain ethnonationalist theories of political community. Civic nationalism is particularly attractive to many Americans, whose peculiar national heritage encourages the delusion that their mutual association is based solely on consciously chosen principles. But this idea misrepresents political reality as surely as the ethnonationalist myths it is designed to combat. And propagating a new political myth is an especially inappropriate way of (...) defending the legacy of Enlightenment liberalism from the dangers posed by the growth of nationalist political passions. (shrink)

No understanding of morality has more zealous or influential defenders among academic philosophers than Kant’s. Yet as Michael Rosen demonstrates in The Shadow of God, there is a sense in which Kant’s critics take his conception of freedom more seriously nowadays than his defenders. As a result, contemporary versions of “Kantian ethics” often end up challenging what Rosen calls “the ethics of Kant,” not just the claims of rival moral theories. Rosen supports this surprising conclusion with some powerful arguments, showing (...) that we cannot make sense of Kantian moral philosophy or its extraordinary impact on modern philosophy while detaching it from Kant’s conception of transcendental freedom. But Rosen overstates the continuity between Kant and the Idealist philosophers that he inspired. Thinkers like Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel took Kant’s concept of transcendental freedom far more seriously than defenders of Kantian ethics do today. But precisely because they did so, they felt compelled to address a whole new set of problems, which could be solved only by radically transforming the conception of freedom that they received from Kant. (shrink)

An old question, still much discussed in moral philosophy, is whether there is any ethical knowledge. It is closely related, by simple etymology, to the question of cognitivism in ethics. Despite the fact that the terms ‘cognitivism’ and ‘objectivism’ seem sometimes to be used interchangeably, I take it that the question whether there can be ethical knowledge is not the same as the question whether ethical outlooks can be objective. A sufficient reason for this is that an ethical outlook might (...) be taken to consist of rules or principles, which do not admit of truth or falsehood and so cannot be objects of knowledge, but which can be seen as having an objective basis. (shrink)

The Prague Philosopher Bernard Bolzano (1781-1848) has long been admired for his groundbreaking work in mathematics: his rigorous proofs of fundamental theorems in analysis, his construction of a continuous, nowhere-differentiable function, his investigations of the infinite, and his anticipations of Cantor's set theory. He made equally outstanding contributions in philosophy, most notably in logic and methodology. One of the greatest mathematician-philosophers since Leibniz, Bolzano is now widely recognised as a major figure of nineteenth-century philosophy. Praised by Husserl as “one (...) of the greatest logicians of all times,” he has also been recognised by Michael Dummett as one of the first modern analytic philosophers and by Alberto Coffa as the founder of the “semantic tradition.” This volume contains English translations of the essay “On the Mathematical Method,” a concise introduction to Bolzano’s logic and philosophy of mathematics, as well as substantial selections from his correspondence with Franz Exner, Professor of Philosophy at the Charles University in Prague in the 1830s and 40s. It will be of interest to students of Austrian philosophy, the development of analytic philosophy, the philosophy of language, and the history and philosophy of logic and mathematics. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper reconsiders the arguments of my book, The Longing for Total Revolution, in response to the thoughtful analyses collected in this symposium. It restates the book’s main genealogical and critical arguments about the philosophical sources of uniquely modern forms of social discontent, while distinguishing those arguments from recent attempts to uncover the deeper, theological sources of discontent. It focuses, in particular, on the role played in modern social discontent by the group of thinkers I describe as the “Kantian (...) left”: a long line of social critics who sought to “realize” Kant’s understanding of human autonomy in society, thereby gaining what Marx called “control and conscious mastery” over our social world, not just over our wills. (shrink)

This paper uses E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End to help articulate what I describe as a moral pluralist approach to moral conflict. Moral pluralism, I argue here, represents a way of responding to the moral conflicts we encounter in our lives, rather than the mere acknowledgment of their inevitability, as suggested by value pluralists like Isaiah Berlin. The tragic view of moral conflict epitomized by Sophocles’ Antigone and endorsed by most theories of value pluralism, tells us that we must (...) choose between moral commitments and reconcile ourselves to the moral regrets that inevitably follow from moral choice. The moral pluralist view, in contrast, suggests that we should seek means, however imperfect, of satisfying conflicting moral commitments and minimizing causes for moral regret. That view, I argue, drives the words and actions of Forster’s heroine in Howards End, Margaret Schlegel. Confronted with a battle between a willful patriarch and a self-righteous sister, a conflict that maps neatly onto the central conflict in Sophocles’ tragedy, Margaret refuses to take sides without refusing to make moral choices. And in doing so, she comes to exemplify an unexpected kind of moral heroism. (shrink)

The justification of Bayes' rule by cognitive rationality principles is undertaken by extending the propositional axiom systems usually proposed in two contexts of belief change: revising and updating. Probabilistic belief change axioms are introduced, either by direct transcription of the set-theoretic ones, or in a stronger way but nevertheless in the spirit of the underlying propositional principles. Weak revising axioms are shown to be satisfied by a General Conditioning rule, extending Bayes' rule but also compatible with others, and weak updating (...) axioms by a General Imaging rule, extending Lewis' rule. Strong axioms (equivalent to the Miller–Popper axiom system) are necessary to justify Bayes' rule in a revising context, and justify in fact an extended Bayes' rule which applies, even if the message has zero probability. (shrink)

The scholastic philosopher is interested in definition for a different reason than the lexicographer and linguist. The philosopher is trying to learn things. Fe defines, after investigating reality, in an attempt to describe reality clearly and to sum up some aspect of his understanding of reality. Hence, we find our scholastic philosophers adopting as a main feature of their method this insistence on defining, on precise and detailed explanation of their definitions, and on proving that their definitions da correctly express (...) what a nature or activity is. A dictionary of the language of scholastic philosophy fitted to the needs of beginners and of undergraduate students of the subject is not available in English. (shrink)

We define the bounded jump of $A$ by $A^{b}=\{x\in \omega \mid \exists i\leq x[\varphi_{i}\downarrow \wedge\Phi_{x}^{A\upharpoonright \!\!\!\upharpoonright \varphi_{i}}\downarrow ]\}$ and let $A^{nb}$ denote the $n$th bounded jump. We demonstrate several properties of the bounded jump, including the fact that it is strictly increasing and order-preserving on the bounded Turing degrees. We show that the bounded jump is related to the Ershov hierarchy. Indeed, for $n\geq2$ we have $X\leq_{bT}\emptyset ^{nb}\iff X$ is $\omega^{n}$-c.e. $\iff X\leq_{1}\emptyset ^{nb}$, extending the classical result that $X\leq_{bT}\emptyset '\iff (...) X$ is $\omega$-c.e. Finally, we prove that the analogue of Shoenfield inversion holds for the bounded jump on the bounded Turing degrees. That is, for every $X$ such that $\emptyset ^{b}\leq_{bT}X\leq_{bT}\emptyset ^{2b}$, there is a $Y\leq_{bT}\emptyset ^{b}$ such that $Y^{b}\equiv_{bT}X$. (shrink)

It has long been believed that if man had a special function appropriate to him, and that if we could discover what it was, then we would be in a perfect position to solve all of the basic problems of ethics. For if we were, for example, shovels, and knew ourselves to be shovels, then we would also know that to spend our lives in digging would best serve our fundamental interests, realize our highest aspirations, and be in every respect (...) the correct thing to do. Or so the theory goes; a theory which is shared, interestingly enough, by Aristotle and Sartre, even though they share little else, and even though one of them believes that man has a function and the other does not. (shrink)

Cet article étudie les principales classifications grecques anciennes des sciences mathématiques. Je souligne le rôle joué par Platon dans cette topique.

The scholastic philosopher is interested in definition for a different reason than the lexicographer and linguist. The philosopher is trying to learn things. Fe defines, after investigating reality, in an attempt to describe reality clearly and to sum up some aspect of his understanding of reality. Hence, we find our scholastic philosophers adopting as a main feature of their method this insistence on defining, on precise and detailed explanation of their definitions, and on proving that their definitions da correctly express (...) what a nature or activity is. A dictionary of the language of scholastic philosophy fitted to the needs of beginners and of undergraduate students of the subject is not available in English. (shrink)

Abduction was first introduced in the epistemological context of scientific discovery. It was more recently analyzed in artificial intelligence, especially with respect to diagnosis analysis or ordinary reasoning. These two fields share a common view of abduction as a general process of hypotheses formation. More precisely, abduction is conceived as a kind of reverse explanation where a hypothesis H can be abduced from events E if H is a good explanation of E. The paper surveys four known schemes for abduction (...) that can be used in both fields. Its first contribution is a taxonomy of these schemes according to a common semantic framework based on belief revision. Its second contribution is to produce, for each non-trivial scheme, a representation theorem linking its semantic framework to a set of postulates. Its third contribution is to present semantic and axiomatic arguments in favor of one of these schemes, ordered abduction, which has never been vindicated in the literature. (shrink)

Anderson and Csima :245–264, 2014) defined a jump operator, the bounded jump, with respect to bounded Turing reducibility. They showed that the bounded jump is closely related to the Ershov hierarchy and that it satisfies an analogue of Shoenfield jump inversion. We show that there are high bounded low sets and low bounded high sets. Thus, the information coded in the bounded jump is quite different from that of the standard jump. We also consider whether the analogue of the Jump (...) Theorem holds for the bounded jump: do we have A≤bTB\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$A \le _{bT}B$$\end{document} if and only if Ab≤1Bb\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$A^b \le _1 B^b$$\end{document}? We show the forward direction holds but not the reverse. (shrink)

Two main schemes explain how a system adapts to its environment. Evolutionary models are grounded on three usual processes (variation, transmission, selection) acting at the population level. Learning models are concerned with the endogenous search for a better performance at the individual level. The first ones were initially favored by biology and the second well illustrated by game theory. The article examines first how game theory went to evolution and how biology later considered learning. It shows some examples of a (...) hybrid use of models of each type. It finally proposes a common framework for both types of models. (shrink)

The common ancestor of modern humans and the great apes is estimated to have lived between 5 and 8 Myrs ago, but the earliest evidence in the human, or hominid, fossil record is Ardipithecus ramidus, from a 4.5 Myr Ethiopian site. This genus was succeeded by Australopithecus, within which four species are presently recognised. All combine a relatively primitive postcranial skeleton, a dentition with expanded chewing teeth and a small brain. The most primitive species in our own genus, Homo habilis (...) and Homo rudolfensis, are little advanced over the australopithecines and with hindsight their inclusion in Homo may not be appropriate. The first species to share a substantial number of features with later Homo is Homo ergaster, or ‘early African Homo erectus’, which appears in the fossil record around 2.0 Myr. Outside Africa, fossil hominids appear as Homo erectus‐like hominids, in mainland Asia and in Indonesia close to 2 Myr ago; the earliest good evidence of ‘archaic Homo’ in Europe is dated at between 600–700 Kyr before the present. Anatomically modern human, or Homo sapiens, fossils are seen first in the fossil record in Africa around 150 Kyr ago. Taken together with molecular evidence on the extent of DNA variation, this suggests that the transition from ‘archiac’ to ‘modern’ Homo may have taken place in Africa. (shrink)

Let $D_{tt} $ denote the set of truth-table degrees. A bijection π: $D_{tt} \to \,D_{tt} $ is an automorphism if for all truth-table degrees x and y we have $ \leqslant _{tt} \,y\, \Leftrightarrow \,\pi (x)\, \leqslant _{tt} \,\pi (y)$ . We say an automorphism π is fixed on a cone if there is a degree b such that for all $x \geqslant _{tt} b$ we have π(x) = x. We first prove that for every 2-generic real X we have (...) X' $X' \le _{tt} \,X\, \oplus \,0'$ . We next prove that for every real $X \ge _{tt} \,0'$ there is a real Y such that $Y \oplus 0{\text{'}}\, \equiv _{tt} \,Y{\text{'}} \equiv _{tt} \,X$ . Finally, we use this to demonstrate that every automorphism of the truth-table degrees is fixed on a cone. (shrink)

Pope Francis’s decision to establish a Commission for the Study of the Diaconate of Women in August 2016 reemphasizes the question : what do we know about women deacons? We know they existed. There is ample literary, epigraphical, and historical evidence that women deacons ministered in the West at least to the 12th century, and longer in the East. That they existed presents three questions : What do we know about the liturgical ceremonies bishops used to create women deacons? What (...) do we know about their tasks and duties? What do we know about the theology of the diaconate that would admit or restrict women from diaconal ordination? (shrink)