Sandia National Laboratories, located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was originally a part of Los Alamos Laboratory. In 1949, AT&T agreed to manage Sandia, which they did for the next 44 years. During those Cold War years, Sandia was the prime weapons engineering laboratory for Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore. As such, it bore prime responsibility for designing and adapting nuclear weapons for the military services' delivery systems, and ensuring the safety and reliability of the stockpile. The Labs' history has been (...) unevenly documented, hindered by the secret nature of its work and the desire of management to maintain a low public profile. There have been three history programs at Sandia: a restricted history published internally in 1963; another history program in the early 1980s that resulted in a history of the Labs' first decade; and the current history program dating from the mid-1990s, which has published a general history and several monographs. This article discusses the challenges and problems inherent in documenting the history of a national weapons laboratory during the last 50 years. (shrink)

Like his earlier study The Phenomenological Movement, Spiegelberg’s latest work is a comprehensive overview—not of the phenomenological movement itself —but of its influence on psychology and psychiatry. Its aim is to show that the presence of phenomenology in these disciplines has broadened the perspectives of these empirical sciences and has loosened the death-grip that positivism and naturalism, behaviorism and atomistic associationism, might otherwise have exerted upon them, Spiegelberg does this "concretely" by a wide ranging account of philosophers, psychologists and psychiatrists (...) which testifies again to his great erudition and incomparable familiarity with phenomenological literature. The index of authors studied covers six pages of double columns. Part One gives a "general orientation" to the field, discussing first the notion of phenomenological psychology and then the presence of phenomenology in psychology, in psychopathology and psychiatry, in psychoanalysis and in American psychology. The second half of the book is devoted to more concentrated studies of "leading figures" and devotes entire chapters to such thinkers as Jaspers, Binswagner, Minkowski, Buytendijk and Frankl. The American student of phenomenology is once again the beneficiary of Spiegelberg’s conscientious and incisive scholarship the beneficiary of Spiegelberg’s conscientious and incisive scholarship.—J. D. C. (shrink)

Almeder's book is a substantive contribution both to Peirce scholarship and to contemporary analytic epistemology. The great strength of The Philosophy of Charles S. Peirce is its engagement of Peirce's later thought with current issues in the foundation of knowledge and the philosophy of science. Almeder brings Peirce's ideas to bear on positions held by Quine, Sellars, Rescher, Hintikka, Scheffler, Popper, Feyerabend, and Russell and in so doing makes Peirce this group's contemporary and, in most cases, its philosophical better. In (...) addition, Almeder provides a rather sophisticated defense of epistemological realism, a defense broadly Peircean but supplemented considerably by Almeder's own friendly arguments. (shrink)

The author, a professor of psychiatry and religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York, is interested in developing a religious consciousness which is in many ways opposed to that of the existentialists, at least the more anguished existentialists. "Many contemporary Christians appear to be taking the advice of the Apostle Paul to 'work out your salvation with fear and trembling' out of context." And again: "Modern man's nibbling on intellectual fodder and breathing of 'existential' complaints has led him far (...) astray from his true destiny and rendered him a caricature of his true nature." Play is neither deadly serious nor mere fun, but these are the only alternatives of which modern man is aware. Modern man has forgotten the unique character of play and since this belongs to the essence of religion and liturgy, he has forgotten the essence of Christianity. True religion is playful. And the age of leisure has the time to cultivate play if it would set about doing so. In the course of his argument the author surveys the views of Freud, Erikson, Brown, Eliade, Otto, Huizinga, and Callois.--J. D. C. (shrink)

In Being and Time and What is Metaphysics? Heidegger made a revolutionary use of the "mood". He said that the mood, and in particular the mood of Anxiety, had ontological significance. Not only is the mood nothing merely "subjective," but it has significance for the understanding of universal being itself. Anxiety is a "moodful experience of Being," a mood in which not one thing or a few things, but the very Being of beings itself, is illuminated and brought into view (...) for "Dasein." In a 1960 review of the third edition of Otto Bollnow's Das Wesen der Stimmungen, Otto Poeggeler reprimanded Bollnow for misunderstanding the genuinely ontological character of Heidegger's investigation, and thus for having reduced it to something anthropological; at the same time Poeggeler called for a recognition of the important place that such an ontological analysis has in the Western tradition. In 1958 Karl Rahner had suggested that the ontological analysis of mood in Heidegger had been anticipated in Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, in the latter's discussion of a "consolation without a preceding cause." De Mendoza's book is an attempt to confirm Poeggeler's criticism of Bollnow and to work out, expand upon, and justify Rahner's thesis. He does this in an elaborately argued work filled with careful textual analyses of the writings of both Loyola and the early Heidegger. The thesis, as De Mendoza points out, is especially provocative in view of the three years which Heidegger spent in Jesuit training, during which time he was thoroughly exposed to Ignatian spirituality. Ignatius may represent another of the long line of religious figures--Augustine, Luther, Kierkegaard--who have influenced Heidegger's thinking in Being and Time.--J. D. C. (shrink)

A reprint of the first edition together with three new chapters and an enlarged index. The new chapters include some previously published material and discuss Aristotle's modal logic of propositions, Lukasiewicz' new system of modal logic, and Aristotle's modal syllogistic. The author relates his interpretation of Aristotle's modal logic to the philosophical issues raised by modern modal logics. -- J. J. C.

In this book Skagestad joins the growing list of Peirce scholars who despair of finding a "comprehensive, unitary interpretation of Peirce's thought as a whole." Nevertheless he offers us the next best thing: a plausible and lucid analysis of several Peircean doctrines which form, in Skagestad's words, the "broadest possible coherent subsystem." While this approach carries with it all the dangers of selective attention, Skagestad is aware of these dangers and handles them frankly and well.

Kostos Axelos, Greek-born Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne and author of a trilogy in French, Le Déploiement de l'errance, and of several French translations of Lucás and Heidegger, attempts an important confrontation of the two thinkers whom many regard as the major thinkers in European thought today: Marx and Heidegger. To some this is a confrontation of the left and the right, but Axelos moves in an entirely different range altogether. Heidegger himself remarks that a confrontation with Marx must (...) be made in terms of the problem of history. Both Heidegger and Marx--to some extent as the heirs of Hegel--are philosophers of the future. Axelos' book is written from the Heideggerian standpoint, centering on Heidegger's interpretation of the present age in terms of Technik, which is itself a movement in the mission of Being. The movements of the Geschick, as Heidegger says in Der Satz vom Grund and as Axelos emphasizes, are a world-play. The task of a thinking concerned with the future is to play along with the play. The future in Marxist and Heideggerian terms is a "planetary" age, beyond all nationalism, ruled by a global or planetary technology. Thinking must decide whether and how such technology will be an instrument of liberation or of oppression. Axelos' confrontation raises many central and interesting questions: what is the relationship between Heidegger's Gelassenheit and Marx's praxis? What hope is there for a future governed by a play? etc. The book can be recommended as both original and provocative.--J. D. C. (shrink)