This paper provides a methodological schema for interpreting Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion that supports the traditional thesis that Philo represents Hume's views on religious belief. To understand the complexity of Hume's ‘naturalism’ and his assessment of religious belief, it is essential to grasp the manner in which Philo articulates a consistently Humean position in the Dialogues.

Although it is widely recognized that David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) belongs among the greatest works of philosophy, there is little agreement about the correct way to interpret his fundamental intentions. It is an established orthodoxy among almost all commentators that skepticism and naturalism are the two dominant themes in this work. The difficulty has been, however, that Hume's skeptical arguments and commitments appear to undermine and discredit his naturalistic ambition to contribute to "the science of man". (...) This schism appears to leave his entire project broken-backed. The solution to this riddle depends on challenging another, closely related, point of orthodoxy: namely, that before Hume published the Treatise he removed almost all material concerned with problems of religion. Russell argues, contrary to this view, that irreligious aims and objectives are fundamental to the Treatise and account for its underlying unity and coherence. It is Hume's basic anti-Christian aims and objectives that serve to shape and direct both his skeptical and naturalistic commitments. When Hume's arguments are viewed from this perspective we can solve, not only puzzles arising from his discussion of various specific issues, we can also explain the intimate and intricate connections that hold his entire project together. This "irreligious" interpretation provides a comprehensive fresh account of the nature of Hume's fundamental aims and ambitions in the Treatise. It also presents a radically different picture of the way in which HUme's project was rooted in the debates and controversies of his own time, placing the Treatise in an irreligious or anti-Chrisitan philosophical tradition that includes Hobbes, Spinoza and freethinking followers. Considered in these terms, Hume's Treatise constitutes the crowning achievement of the Radical Enlightenment. (shrink)

At the turn of the twentieth century, biologists such as Oscar Riddle, Thomas Hunt Morgan, Frank Lillie, and Richard Goldschmidt all puzzled over the question of sexual difference, the distinction between male and female. They all offered competing explanations for the biological cause of this difference, and engaged in a fierce debate over the primacy of their respective theories. Riddle propounded a metabolic theory of sex dating from the late-nineteenth century suggesting that metabolism lay at the heart of (...) sexual difference. Thomas Hunt Morgan insisted on the priority of chromosomes, Frank Lillie emphasized the importance of hormones, while Richard Goldschmidt supported a mixed model involving both chromosomes and hormones. In this paper, I will illustrate how the older metabolic theory of sex was displaced when those who argued for the relatively newer theories of chromosomes and hormones gradually formed an alliance that accommodated each other and excluded the metabolic theory of sex. By doing so, proponents of chromosomes and hormones established their authority over the question of sexual difference as they laid the foundations for the new disciplines of genetics and endocrinology. Their debate raised urgent questions about what constituted sexual difference, and how scientists envisioned the plasticity and controllability of this difference. These theories also had immediate political and cultural consequences at the turn of the twentieth century, especially for the eugenic and feminist movements, both of which were heavily invested in knowledge of sex and its determination, ascertainment, and command. (shrink)

"This reviewer had to be restrained from stopping people in the street to urge them to read it: They would learn something of the way science is done,...

The article develops a philosophical approach on how to handle the riddle of creativity. Section I presents reflections on the concept of creativity: its value; the meaning and sense of the word; the possibility of a science of creativity; and on different types of creativity. Section II focuses on the differences and relations between psychological and philosophical conceptions of creativity, introducing a signo-interpretational approach that is developed in more details in Section III. There the discussion also deals with the (...) conditions, structures and functions of creativity processes: the space of arbitrariness and polysemiosis; rule-following; rule violation; rule invention; and the shifting from possibilities to potentialities. (shrink)

A co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, its newspaper, and hospitality houses, the writer Dorothy Day promoted public peace nationally and internationally as a journalist, an organizer of public protests, and a builder of associational communities. Drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s conceptions of the role of speech and action in creating the public realm, this paper focuses on several of Day’s most controversial public positions: her leadership of non-cooperation against Civil Defense drills intended to prepare New York City residents to (...) survive a nuclear war; her urging of Catholics to find common cause with the Cuban revolutionary government; and her support for interracial farming communities in the Southern United States. As Arendt asserts about Rahel Varnhagen’s salon in Berlin, by being public meeting spaces hosted in private houses, Catholic Worker communities fostered egalitarian rather than “agonal” politics. Like Gandhi’s newspapers and ashrams as well as “Occupy” communities such as Zuccotti Park, Day’s newspaper was a center for incubating and implementing social reform. The Catholic Worker provided a place where writers could question the official rhetoric of such conflicts as World War II and the Cold War, put forward different interpretations of unfolding events, and chart possible alternatives to establishment agendas. (shrink)

In a number of influential articles published since 1972, Dorothy Grover has developed the prosentential theory of truth. Brought together and published with a new introduction, these essays are even more impressive as a group than they were as single contributions to philosophy and linguistics. Denying that truth has an explanatory role, the prosentential theory does not address traditional truth issues like belief, meaning, and justification. Instead, it focuses on the grammatical role of the truth predicate and asserts that (...) “it is true” is a prosentence, functioning much as a pronoun does. Grover defends the theory by indicating how it can handle notorious paradoxes like the Liar, as well as by analyzing some English truth-usages. The introduction to the volume surveys traditional theories of truth, including correspondence, pragmatic, and coherence theories. It discusses the essays to come and, finally, considers the implications of the prosentential theory for other theories. Despite the fact that the prosentential theory dismisses the “nature of truth” as a red herring, Grover shows that there are important aspects of traditional truth theories that prosentential theorists have the option of endorsing. (shrink)

The article develops a philosophical approach on how to handle the riddle of creativity. Section I presents reflections on the concept of creativity: its value; the meaning and sense of the word; the possibility of a science of creativity; and on different types of creativity. Section II focuses on the differences and relations between psychological and philosophical conceptions of creativity, introducing a signo-interpretational approach that is developed in more details in Section III. There the discussion also deals with the (...) conditions, structures and functions of creativity processes: the space of arbitrariness and polysemiosis; rule-following; rule violation; rule invention; and the shifting from possibilities to potentialities. (shrink)

What should we make of the vagueness we find in our language and thought? This has been one of the most debated questions in philosophy in recent decades. Crispin Wright has been a key figure in this area since the 1970s, and now at last his highly influential work on the topic is drawn together in a book.

Theories of Truth introduces readers to issues that have been connected with truth—the only book of its kind. Richard Kirkham has an easy writing style and a good sense of what needs to be explained to students new to the literature. These facts make Theories of Truth a serious contender for use in the classroom. As with most introductions, use of the book should be supplemented with readings from the major authors covered. Beyond that supplementation, however, the text still needs (...) to be used with some caution, for there are shortcomings that could seriously mislead students. (shrink)

There are three riddles of induction. The New Riddle is this: How do we give a definition of 'projectible hypothesis' which is noncircular, and which yet divides all universal hypotheses unerringly into two disjoint classes--the projectible and the unprojectible? This is a purely analytical problem: build a machine which sorts hypotheses in the intuitively correct way, it making no difference why the machine works, so long as it works : Why should we rely on inductions to acquire beliefs about (...) the unobserved, rather than on any other method of inference to acquire alternative beliefs about the unobserved? ;Here, we solve all three riddles. Chapter One is devoted to the New Riddle. Chapter Two serves to introduce some important matters concerning counterfactuals and causation, necessary for the hard labor of Chapter Three, which addresses the Old Riddle. The true pattern of inference from experience is discussed and two kinds of counterfactuals are distinguished, suggesting an answer to Hume. (shrink)

Until now, adult crying has received relatively little interest from investigators, whereas in the popular media there are many strong claims about crying of which the scientific basis is not clear. In this review, we provide an overview of the current state of the scientific literature with respect to crying. We identify gaps in knowledge and propose questions for future research. The following topics receive special attention: Ontogenetic development, antecedents, individual and gender differences, and the intra- and interindividual effects of (...) crying. We conclude that the study of crying may help us obtain better insight into human nature, that is, not only our emotional, but also social, and moral functioning. (shrink)

Plato's lectures: a hypothesis for an enigma.--Speusippus, Xenocrates, and the polemical method of Aristotle.--The Academy: orthodoxy, heresy, or philosophical interpretation?

The Riddling between Oedipus and the Sphinx, Ontology, Hauntology, and Heterologies of the Grotesque probes the polemic status of the other and the dubious nature of the subject from a heterodox perspective of an emblematic grotesque figure, the Sphinx—the mystical trickster and the guardian of sacred knowledge in Egyptian culture.

This brilliant and absorbing study examines the image of Judaism and the Jews in the work of two of the most influential modern philosophers, Hegel and Nietzsche. Hegel was a proponent of universal reason and Nietzsche was its opponent; Hegel was a Christian thinker and Nietzsche was a self-proclaimed "Antichrist"; Hegel strove to bring modernity to its climax, and Nietzsche wanted to divert the evolution of modernity into completely different paths. In view of these conflicting attitudes and philosophical projects, how (...) did each assess the historical role of the Jews and their place in the modern world? The mature Hegel partly overcame the fierce anti-Jewish attitude of his youth yet continued to see Judaism as the alienation of its own new principles. Post-Christian Judaism no longer had a real history, only a contingent protracted existence, and although modern Jews deserved civil rights, Hegel saw no place for them in modernity as Jews. Nietzsche, on the contrary, who grew to be a passionate anti-anti-Semite, admired Diaspora Jews for their power and depth and assigned them a role as Jews in curing Europe of the decadent Christian culture that their own ancestors, the second-temple Jewish "priests," had inflicted upon Europe by begetting Christianity. The ancient corrupters of Europe are thus to be its present redeemers. Through his masterly analysis of the writings of Hegel and Nietzsche, Yovel shows that anti-Jewish prejudice can exist alongside a philosophy of reason, while a philosophy of power must not necessarily be anti-Semitic. (shrink)

This is an introduction to metaphysics for students and non-philosophers. (Philosophers: it's supposed to be the kind of book you can give to your friends and family, when they ask what you do for a living.) Contents: personal identity, fatalism, time, God, why not nothing?, free will, constitution, universals, necessity and possibility, what is metaphysics? (There is a second edition, which adds chapters on meta-metaphysics and the metaphysics of ethics.).

John Martin Fischer has recently proposed that actions and omissions are asymmetric with respect to the requirement of alternative possibilities for moral responsibility: whereas moral responsibility for an action does not require freedom to refrain from performing the action, moral responsibility for failure to perform an action does require freedom to perform the action. In what follows, I first critically assess Fischer's asymmetry principle. In arguing against the principle, I raise some concerns about Fischer's association of responsibility with control. I (...) then motivate a riddle regarding omissions: some cases appear to show that a person is not responsible for failing to bring about something in virtue of the fact that the person could not bring about that thing. Other cases, though, seemingly show that a person is responsible for failing to bring about something even though the person could not bring about that thing. What explains the asymmetry in responsibility attributions in these cases involving omissions? Third, I consider some answers to this riddle and explain why they are inadequate. Finally, I sketch my own answer. (shrink)

The Oxford or Tractarian Movement and later Ritualists and Anglo-Catholics schooled numerous converts in elements of the Catholic faith. Foremost among them was John Henry Cardinal Newman, one of the original founders of the Oxford Movement. Converts numbered in the hundreds and included another cardinal, Henry Edward Manning, the second Archbishop of Westminster, the religious foundress Cornelia Connelly, the priest novelist Robert Hugh Benson and later literary figures such as G.K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh and Mgr Ronald Knox. American historian, Patrick (...) Allitt, has argued that on both sides of the Atlantic converts dominated Catholic intellectual life between 1840 and 1960. While such 'Tractarian' converts have indeed greatly influenced Catholic life, many 'Tractarians' who never converted have also had a considerable impact on English-speaking Catholicism. C.S. Lewis is an obvious example. But there have been others, including author Charles Williams, poet T.S. Eliot and theologians John Macquarrie and Michael Ramsey. The author Dorothy L. Sayers also deserves to be counted among their number. (shrink)

(2011). The Riddle of Hume's Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 348-353.

This article makes the case that a more capacious understanding of the philosophy of naturalistic monism can place in a new light some of the chief intellectual, cultural, religious and political questions and conflicts in the period between the 1840s and 1940s, making this in many ways a “monist century.” It approaches this task from two directions. First, the article argues that monism represented a peculiar type of socially embodied knowledge that is little understood and yet which illuminates one of (...) the important ways in which religion, science, and philosophy coalesced in social and political movements in this period. It approaches this task through an analysis of two key terms in Ernst Haeckel’s epoch-making book "The Riddle of the Universe" (1899). Haeckel invoked the term “world riddles” to identify those points of conflict between dualistic and monist philosophical systems and to claim that the latter had solved this riddles through science. By contrast, this article identifies in the riddles the nodal points upon which the entire monist edifice was erected. Turning to the social embodiment of monism, I argue that rather than approaching monism as philosophy, religion, scientific paradigm or ideology, it is best understood as a novel formation of knowledge captured in the second key term “worldview.” Indeed, in many ways the German concept of Weltanschauung developed in tandem with and through the history of monism, so that monism offers a particularly rich avenue for exploring what made the monist century also an age of worldviews. (shrink)

While it seems to be evident that the vision of the eternal return of the same is the solution to the riddle mentioned in "On the vision and the riddle," exactly what constitutes the riddle is anything but clear. Li ke all good riddles the solution demands a paradigm shift. Nietzsche's riddle is solved by a radical rethinking of the concept of time, from a straight line to a circle. I give a detailed account of how (...) Nietzsche's riddle is formulated in such a way tha t the eternal return of the same is the only possible solution. (shrink)

Public discourse on race-specific medicine typically erects a wall between the scientific use of race as a biological category and the ideological battle over race as a social identity. Scientists often address the potential for these therapeutics to reinforce a damaging understanding of “race” with precautions for using them rather than questioning their very development. For example, Esteban Gonzalez Burchard, an associate professor of medicine and biopharmaceutical sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, states, “We do see racial differences (...) between populations and shouldn’t just close our eyes. Unfortunately, race is a politically charged topic, and there will be evildoers. But the fear should not outweigh the benefit of looking.” Although it is recognized that ideology influences the social meaning of race, it is usually assumed that there is a separate, prior scientific understanding of race that is not contaminated by politics. (shrink)

Walter Conn's theory of Christian Conversion (1986) provides an illuminating lens for understanding Dorothy Day's conversion experience. Day's story, conversely, offers an opportunity to test selected features of Conn's theory, specifically the affective, cognitive, moral, and religious categories of analysis. The dialectic is a fruitful one, yielding insight into both Day's story and Conn's theory, while at the same time raising provocative questions about and contributing to the current debate regarding an "ethic of care" as distinct from an "ethic (...) of justice.". (shrink)

This book is an introduction to the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, written in a lively, personal style.

Editors and commentators ancient and modern have not responded very well to the challenge of the two riddles which round off the contest between Damoetas and Menalcas at the end of Eclogue 3 . The first is generally regarded as impossibly difficult; the second as impossibly easy. Critics take refuge in quoting Servius' despairing statement: sciendum aenigmata haec sicuti pleraque carere aperta solutione. Yet it is most unlikely that Virgil would introduce insoluble or meaningless riddles into the Bucolica. If there (...) is no solution the lines become pointless, even tasteless; and these are not epithets to be applied lightly to Virgil's poetry. (shrink)

In an era of transition and tension in American health care, Dorothy M. Owens offers a model of empathic communication that benefits both patients and physicians. Drawing from concepts in the domains of psychology and theology, she constructs a model of empathy that is ethical and reciprocal. An integrated model of empathy, she argues, recognizes the physical, psychological, spiritual, and social nature of human beings. empathy is a clinically useful, time effective communication skill that can be taught in medical (...) education. (shrink)

Benedict Spinoza is feted as the philosopher par excellence of the popular democratic multitude by Antonio Negri and others. But Spinoza himself expresses a marked ambivalence about the multitude in brief asides, and as for his thoughts on what he calls “the rule of multitude,” that is, democracy, these exist only as meager fragments in his unfinished Tractatus Politicus or Political Treatise. This essay addresses the problem of Spinoza’s multitude. First, I reconstruct a vision of power that is found in (...) the Ethics but that tends to be overlooked in the scholarly literature: power is not just sheer efficacy or imposition of will, but rather involves a capacity for being-affected; I call this the conception of power as sensitivity. The second part of my argument shows how, given Spinoza’s emphatic political naturalism, the conception of power as sensitivity can be extended to his political philosophy to shed light on what Spinoza calls potentia multitudinis, or “the power of the multitude”—a term found solely in the Political Treatise and nowhere else in his oeuvre. This juxtaposition reveals significant qualifications to the liberatory potential of the multitude currently claimed in the scholarly literature. (shrink)

Public discourse on race-specific medicine typically erects a wall between the scientific use of race as a biological category and the ideological battle over race as a social identity. Scientists often address the potential for these therapeutics to reinforce a damaging understanding of “race” with precautions for using them rather than questioning their very development. For example, Esteban Gonzalez Burchard, an associate professor of medicine and biopharmaceutical sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, states, “We do see racial differences (...) between populations and shouldn’t just close our eyes. Unfortunately, race is a politically charged topic, and there will be evildoers. But the fear should not outweigh the benefit of looking.” Although it is recognized that ideology influences the social meaning of race, it is usually assumed that there is a separate, prior scientific understanding of race that is not contaminated by politics. (shrink)

The theory of self-organization of complex systems studies laws of sustainable co-evolutionary development of structures having different speeds of development as well as laws of assembling of a complex evolutionary whole from parts when some elements of “memory” must be included. The theory reveals general rules of nonlinear synthesis of complex evolutionary structures. The most important and paradoxical consequences of the holistic view, including an approach to solving the riddle of human personality, are as follows: 1) the explanation why (...) and under what conditions a part can be more complex than a whole ; 2) in order to reconstruct society it is necessary to change an individual but not by cutting off the supposed undesirable past, since a human being as a microcosm is the synthesis of all previous stages of evolution, and as a result of repression of, it would seem, the wild past one can extinguish a “divine spark” in his soul; 3) in the physical sense, singularity denotes a moment of instability, phase transition; one can talk about the human singularity of co-evolutionary processes, since in such a moment of instability individual actions of a human can play a key role in determining a channel of further development as well as in appearance of a new pattern of collective behavior in society; 4) as the models of nonlinear dynamics, elaborated at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, show, there is a possibility of a direct influence of the future and even a touch of an infinitely remote future in certain evolutionary regimes and under rigorously definite conditions, more over, it turns out that such a possibility exists only for a human but not for the human society. (shrink)

Riddles of the Sphinx CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. § i. The attempt nowadays to solve afresh the world-old problems of philosophy will doubtless be thought to ...

As the euro crisis unfolds, political discourse on both sides of the European Union (EU)’s internal divide—“North” and “South”—becomes ever more exasperated, distant and untranslatable. At the root lies a weak pan-European sense of belonging—a common political identity thanks to which European citizens may regard each other as equals, and therefore as deserving recognition, trust, and solidarity. This paper describes some of the culture-related problems that impact directly on the formation of an eventual political identity for EU citizens. It then (...) suggests that the enacting of an interculturalist paradigm can help untie some of the nuts—political but also cultural—that Europe faces in order to solve the economic crisis. A few remarks are dedicated in the conclusive part to cultural pluralism in Singapore, a key player in any future progress towards the integration of the Asia Pacific Region. (shrink)

Traditionally, ‘René Descartes’ is synonymous with ‘method.’ The so-called father of modern science, he is perhaps the systematic and methodological philosopher par excellence, a fundamental motivation for his attempt to secede from contemporary thought being the possibility of establishing a universally valid method in the search for truth. In a passage in the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Descartes contrasts his method with what he calls scholastic “[r]iddles,” verbal equivocations that hinder the acquisition of knowledge. In this paper (...) I analyze this notion of riddling and the Cartesian method to posit that, finally, Descartes cannot avoid replicating the very riddles he criticizes, that his ‘revolutionary’ method only generates more riddles to be methodically solved. In short, Descartes’ method is dependent upon words but also calls for the effacement of the very words that constitute it. Words are both a methodological necessity and limitation; a double bind, there is no method without words, but, at the same time, there can be no method with words, that is, no methodo-logos. In its broadest formulation, Descartes must always at once say too much and too little. (shrink)