_Taking Religious Claims Seriously_ is a systematic, critical, and comprehensive study of the fundamental questions of the philosophy of religion: religious experience, the existence and nature of God, religious knowledge and truth, good and evil, immortality of the soul, religious diversity, religious claims about the person, faith, and the religious way of life. In this study the author seeks to capture the reality and meaning of the religious as such: What is the foundation of religion? Under what conditions is an (...) authentic religious way of life possible? His method of inquiry is phenomenological. The author begins his discussion with a general characterization of the basic features of all the literate and illiterate religions of the world. He then identifies the ideas, beliefs, and concerns which are common to these religions: What are the central claims of these religions? How did the various religions understand these claims? The author makes a serious attempt to clarify these claims and explore the possibility for a reconcilation between them. For him, the foundation of religion is the religious experience, and the essence of this experience consists in a serious, cognitive, and meaningful encounter with the Ultimate Being. This being is the ground of the world and human life. This book is a comparative, pluralistic study of the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

The Search for the Legacy of the USPHS Syphilis Study at Tuskegee is a collection of essays from experts in a variety of fields seeking to redefine the legacy of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study. The essayists place the legacy of the study within the evolution of racial and ethnic relations in the United States. Contributors include two leading historians on the study, two former United States Surgeons General, and other prominent scholars from a wide range of fields.

Engineered microbes are of great potential utility in biotechnology and basic research. In principle, a cell can be built from scratch by assembling small molecule sets with auto‐catalytic properties. Alternatively, DNA can be isolated or directly synthesized and molded into a synthetic genome using existing genomic blueprints and molecular biology tools. Activating such a synthetic genome will yield a synthetic cell. Here we examine obstacles associated with this latter approach using a model system whereby a donor genome from H. influenzae (...) is fragmented, and the pieces are then modified and reassembled stepwise in an E. coli host cell. There are obstacles associated with this strategy related to DNA transfer, DNA replication, cross‐talk in gene regulation and compatibility of gene products between donor and host. Encouragingly, analysis of gene expression indicates widespread transcription of H. influenzae genes in E. coli, and analysis of gap locations in H. influenzae and other microbial genome assemblies reveals few genes routinely incompatible with E. coli. In conclusion, rebuilding and booting a genome remains a feasible and pragmatic approach to creating a synthetic microbial cell. BioEssays 29:580–590, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This book is an appealing, worthwhile, even illustrated study of the life and thought of an idealistic philosopher who has not been given the attention his originality deserves. John Elof Boodin belongs to what we may call the second generation of American idealists. Most of them studied under thinkers who represented the first real surge of idealistic thought on this continent. That group includes: G. S. Morris, B.P. Bowne, G. H. Howison, Josiah Royce, J. E. Creighton, and Mary W. Calkins. (...) Boodin’s generation includes J. A. Leighton, W. E. Hocking, Elijah Jordan, E. S. Brightman and Brand Blanshard. Only Jordan and Leighton are less well-know than Boodin. (shrink)

This book is an appealing, worthwhile, even illustrated study of the life and thought of an idealistic philosopher who has not been given the attention his originality deserves. John Elof Boodin belongs to what we may call the second generation of American idealists. Most of them studied under thinkers who represented the first real surge of idealistic thought on this continent. That group includes: G. S. Morris, B.P. Bowne, G. H. Howison, Josiah Royce, J. E. Creighton, and Mary W. Calkins. (...) Boodin’s generation includes J. A. Leighton, W. E. Hocking, Elijah Jordan, E. S. Brightman and Brand Blanshard. Only Jordan and Leighton are less well-know than Boodin. (shrink)

The life, works, and philosophy of rabbi Hasdai Crescas.

Transpersonal psychology: Dean, S. R. The ultraconscious mind. Arasteh, A. R. Final integration in the adult personality.--The nature of madness: First, E. Visions, voyages, and new interpretations of madness. Van Dusen, W. Hallucinations as the world of spirits.--Biofeedback: White, J. The yogi in the lab. Kiefer, D. EEG alpha feedback and subjective states of consciousness.--Meditation research: Griffith, F. F. Meditation research: its personal and social implications. Kiefer, D. Intermeditation notes: reports from inner space.--Psychic research: Honorton, C. Tracing ESP through altered (...) states of consciousness. Johnson, C. W. Unexplored areas of parapsychology.--Paraphysics: White, J. Plants, polygraphs, and paraphysics. Reiser, O. L. Messages to and from the galaxy.--Biotechnology: Beal, J. B. The new biotechnology. Tiller, W. A. Energy fields and the human body.--The neurosciences: Conway, H. Life, death, and antimatter. Floyd, K. Of time and mind: from paradox to paradigm.--Ecological consciousness: Smith, R. A. Our passport to evolutionary awareness. Esser, A. H. Synergy and social pollution in the communal imagery of mankind.--Space travel and extraterrestrial life: Mitchell, E. D. Global consciousness and the view from space. White, J. Exobiology--where science fiction meets science fact.--Death as an altered state of consciousness: Tietze, T. R. Some perspectives on survival. Noyes, R. Dying and mystical consciousness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Alcaics In Exile: W. H. Auden’s “In Memory Of Sigmund Freud”Rosanna WarrenOn September 23, 1939, Sigmund Freud died in exile in London, a refugee from Nazi Austria. Within a month, Auden, who had been living in the United States since January of that year, wrote a friend in England that he was working on an elegy for Freud. 1 The poem appeared in The Kenyon Review early in 1940. (...) A stately public ode, the poem mourns not only the death of a publicly significant individual, but the collapse of a world. Hitler had overrun Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland; assaults on Jews had intensified; England and France had just declared war on Germany. There would be, indeed, many who would have to be mourned:When there are so many we shall have to mourn, when grief has been made so public, and exposed to the critique of whole epoch the frailty of our conscience and anguish,of whom shall we speak?...Someone encountering this poem for the first time, on the page or in the ear, might be pardoned for puzzling over its form. It sounds prosy. It seems to have some recognizable English cadences, pentameters (“[inline-graphic 01]”), tetrameters (“ ”), and even trimeters (“ ”). But the pattern seems unruly, with some [End Page 111] lines stretching out beyond five traditional beats, and ignoring any iambic order: “turned elsewhere with their disappointment as he.” Groping for a more satisfactory principle of organization, a reader with some knowledge of versification may be moved to count syllables. Such a reader will discover that the poem is indeed organized syllabically in lines of 11, 11, 9, and 10 syllables. “Aha,” says the reader, alert to Auden’s intimacy with Classical civilization: “A Horatian ode. Not inappropriate for a formal elegy.” Reflecting further, and leafing through the pages of Horace, that reader will find, or remember, that two thirds of Horace’s odes are in these quatrains, the alcaic stanza. Auden, it appears, has composed his elegy in some version of the meter of Alcaeus, the 7th century b.c.e. Greek poet whose stanza became second nature to Horace. And we cannot enter the world of Auden’s poem without asking, why alcaics? And how do they work here?“In Memory of Sigmund Freud” is sometimes said to be Auden’s first syllabic poem. 2 Others demur, proposing both earlier and later examples. 3 Whatever the spats about dating Auden’s early syllabic practice, scholars conventionally agree that his turn toward syllabic composition reflects his evolving interest in a discursive poetry; in the poet as a private intelligence with a public voice; and in the work, respectively, of Horace and Marianne Moore. Having identified the poem as syllabic, many critics move on to heftier topics like psychoanalysis versus Marxism, Auden more than most poets having laid himself open to an overridingly thematic criticism of Big Ideas. But if, having acknowledged the influence of Horace and Moore in Auden’s refusal of English iambic lyricism here, we stay with the question of meter, we are led back to the older progenitor, Alcaeus, a great poet of exile, whose stanza Auden adopts and adapts. I shall ask how it affects our reading to observe that the stanza itself has a genealogy, and brings its expressive burden to bear on Auden’s poem.“In Memory of Sigmund Freud” relies on a counterpoint of two metrical systems, the largely iambic accentual/syllabic system, traditional in English since Wyatt, and a flattened version of Greek quantitative meter, which was a musical notation of syllable length. For Auden, whose great prosodic facility was almost a handicap, the problem was, “not how to write in iambics but how not to write in them from automatic habit.” 4 Throughout his poetic life, he reached for cadences to interrupt the “natural” iambics, sometimes recalling the Old English alliterative beat, and often turning to ballads and popular tunes for rhythmical variation. By the late thirties, he was not only disillusioned [End Page 112] with the Spanish Civil War and his role as quasi-Socialist bard, but was seeking new compositional principles as well. Free verse was not an alternative: his ear required an evident... (shrink)

This volume collects contributions from leading scholars of early modern philosophy from a wide variety of philosophical and geographic backgrounds. The distinguished contributors offer very different, competing approaches to the history of philosophy.

The publication of Dr. Warren E. Blake's edition of the romance of Chariton has at last made it possible to know what the tradition of the text amounts to and form some opinion of its principal weaknesses. That these include lacunae will be obvious to anyone who even glances through his apparatus criticus; I think there are at least three which neither he nor any of the former editors has noted. The supplements I propose are of course mere examples (...) of how they might be filled; their existence seems pretty certain, but no more than the general sense of what is missing is likely to be got unless some new papyrus or other unexpected find puts us in possession of more evidence. (shrink)

The introduction explain the need for how an international, inclusive discussion about the range of different methodological approaches from different traditions of philosophy can be read alongside each other and be seen in sometimes very critical conversation with each other. In addition, the introduction identifies four broad themes in the volume: the largest group of chapters advocate methods that promote history of philosophy as an unapologetic, autonomous enterprise with its own criteria within philosophy. Second, three chapters can be seen as (...) historicizing the history of philosophy from within. Third, four chapters argue for history of philosophy as a means toward making contributions to contemporary philosophy. Finally, two chapters explore the relationship between the history of philosophy and the history of science. (shrink)

The title of Stewart’s biography is a tribute to Alain Locke’s seminal work, The New Negro: An Interpretation. This 1925 anthology highlighted the works of several up-and-coming black writers of the 20th century, planting these authors and, thus, a new black intellectual movement squarely in the public eye. While Alain Locke and John Dewey did not work directly together, Dewey’s philosophical approaches, specifically aesthetic valuation, significantly influenced Locke’s life. John C. Stewart provides a dense and thorough illustration of Locke’s use (...) of aesthetic valuation in his personal, professional, and educational experiences. Locke was pursuing his doctoral degree at Harvard University in Dewey’s discipline at... (shrink)

In a career that spans 60 years so far, W.W. Tait has made many highly influential contributions to logic, the philosophy of mathematics, and their history. The present collection of new essays - contributed by former students, colleagues, and friends - is a Festschrift, i.e., a celebration of his life and work. The essays address a variety of themes prominent in his work or related to it. The collection starts with an introduction in which Tait's contributions are sketched and put (...) into context. The eleven essays that follow are arranged in three parts: Part I. Proof Theory and its History; Part II. Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics; and Part III. History of Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics. Each of the essays contributes substantially to one or several of these areas. The authors included are: Steve Awodey, Solomon Feferman, Michael Friedman, Warren Goldfarb, Geoffrey Hellman, William Howard, Stephen Menn, Rebecca Morris, Charles Parsons, Erich Reck, Thomas Ricketts, and Wilfried Sieg. The editor, Erich H. Reck is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Riverside. (shrink)

In a review of a book by the British idealist, A. E. Taylor, some years ago, C. D. Broad commented: “What of the nightmarish appearance, stupid perseveration and meaningless fecundity in organic nature? If the teleologist would consider the ways of the locust and the lemming, he would be a sadder and perhaps a wiser man.” Of course, others besides idealists are teleologists, but in the idealist tradition since Plato, the question of overall teleology has been a fundamental one. It (...) may be that idealists have a peculiar problem in trying to reconcile apparent dysteleological facts with their overall belief in purpose. The question is a basic one. It may also be regarded as a watershed dividing Eastern idealists, especially Indian, from their Western counterparts. (shrink)

To understand any genuine theism we must recognize at once that we are dealing with a problem of a different order than technical puzzles in epistemology or conundrums in modal logic. That is not to say that theism is above rational investigation, that acceptance of it presupposes some special access, or that it cannot be examined philosophically. But it cannot be discussed fruitfully unless there is some grasp of what refined religious feeling in fact is. A lot of discussion about (...) God comes from the lips of people who have never visited temple, mosque, or meeting house, and who have not tried to find out what it is like to have a religious attitude toward an object of belief for forty years without a break. They have little interest in understanding the experience of prayer or finding out what it is like to commit oneself sincerely to a religious ideal. Invariably they know little about the teachings and claims of the eleven world religions, but they surely know how to find an assortment of flaws in St. Thomas’s “Five Ways” and they are consummate experts in showing up weaknesses in Paley’s “watchmaker” argument. They have a veritable field day in ridiculing the extravagances of uncritical Fundamentalism. (shrink)

There is increasing evidence that a clear battleline is forming again between reductive materialism and general idealistic philosophy. In the days of Royce and Bowne in this country and Bradley and Bosanquet in Britain, the stimuli to a revived materialism came from the theory of evolution and from the natural sciences generally. And there was some growing analytic aversion to Hegel’s system. Idealists today have clearly shown that their views are not easily annulled by facile citations to modern scientific activity. (...) One need only call to mind the solid work of Errol Harris, whose brilliant Nature, Mind and Modern Science of 1954 has just been translated by Philip Mueller as Nature, l’esprit et science moderne. In a recent article dealing with the changing relations of nature, man, and modern science, Harris points out that current biology in conjunction with holistic physics has produced an organismic conception of nature which incorporates man and his activities “as a dialectical scale of forms in which human mentality is a late stage.” Nature is then not something to be exploited but to be viewed as an ecological system, a matrix of human life. (shrink)

Idealistically oriented thinkers have persistently fought against any tendencies on the part of diverse philosophies to interpret or explain the fact of self-experience in terms of something less than the self knows itself to be. But this insistence on the centrality of the knowing subject carries with it the obligation to explain not only what that knowing subject is but why it is central and why one must in some way begin with it in his philosophical explorations. The need for (...) such an explanation is laid upon the idealist by those who insist that all explanations, all philosophizing, must begin, rather, with the observable objective facts of the natural sciences and the “external order.” But those who dote so much on alleged “objective” facts then have to try to squeeze the claims of the self-conscious subject into some explanatory formula which accounts for those data causally and views the self as some kind of a product of something more basic ontologically. Is a thinker unalterably “subjectivistic” if he insists on the epistemic centrality of the knower? Is that merely another form of “foundationalism”? Of course, there are other philosophical alternatives, but can idealistic methodology be characterized wholly by the title of Quentin Lauer’s book on Husserl, The Triumph of Subjectivity? (shrink)

Exploration of the philosophical assumptions and presuppositions underlying the nature of science itself, as well as its continued progress, has been limited traditionally and primarily to the physical sciences. In recent years, work in the philosophy of the social sciences has been advancing. And now there is some significant new work being done on the logical and historical bases of the science of psychology. Indeed, as historians of psychology set about their task, they are beginning to find that that science (...) really had strong idealistic roots in its early days. These roots are not only worth studying from the general standpoint of intellectual history, they are also valuable in coming to an appreciation of the recent revival of neoidealistic psychology. (shrink)

No doubt taking his clue from a book published by Friedrich Paulsen under the title Philosophia Militans, Albert C. Knudson placed a chapter in his memorable history of personalistic idealism called “Militant Personalism”. And he raised by that very title, as Paulsen had earlier, the question of the actual forcefulness of philosophical ideas on history and society. Another book, issued three years after Knudson’s, was called Behaviorism: A Battle Line. This volume of collected essays, edited by W. P. King, made (...) the point that behaviorism as a philosophy of mind had such serious negative implications for human beings and the social order that it must be vigorously opposed and literally fought against. (shrink)

The idealistic current of thought has been flowing since the time of Plato and before; and while it has been diverted from time to time and even partially dammed up, it has persisted and found its way into our own period. Those who decide philosophical questions on the strength of what they take the Zeitgeist to be have been sure for a long time that philosophical idealism in its variegated forms is at best a narrow trickle about to disappear in (...) the mud of scientific naturalism or the fine grained sand of Anglo-American analysis. Some view any idealistic utterance as a mere seepage, an oddity; others, in a self-ascribed posture of contemporary “maturity,” ignore even the presence of the seepage, perhaps fearing that it might be a spring. (shrink)

The balance between creative thinking and creative scholarship is a hard one to achieve, partly because the lure to be original is in conflict with the desire to be fair to the insights of past thinkers and partly because one can never be quite sure whether his scholarship is mere pedantry or actually constitutes significant discovery. In his essay, “On Books and Reading,” Schopenhauer distinguishes those who have “read themselves stupid” from those who take time to ruminate and set their (...) own thoughts to work. “A spring never free from the pressure of some foreign body at last loses its elasticity,” he writes, “and so does the mind if other people’s thoughts are constantly forced upon it.” Thomas Hobbes once observed that if he had read as much as other persons of his acquaintance he would have known no more than they. But the trouble is that if one does not read enough of what others have thought, he may repeat mistakes they made or turn down some cul-de-sac which is not worth exploring or is profoundly trivial. More common in philosophy is the arrogant upstart who has fastened onto some formula which he treats as a talisman enabling him to decide what to ignore and what to study. For a time, there were some philosophers who thought that anyone before Hume was not worth reading, and there are still a few who think anyone following in the footsteps of Descartes must surely be wrongheaded. (shrink)

The informal letters of great philosophers often provide valuable clues not only to the development of their thought processes but also to their inner personalities. The austere and distant Hegel comes alive as a man in his correspondence, and the rigorous Spinoza takes on the blood and flesh of a gracious friend in his letters. In Kant’s correspondence, we occasionally find helpful interpretations of his thought as he answers questions put to him by friends and inquirers. And the letters of (...) William James to his wide circle of friends are uniformly charming. We do not usually find a great deal of profound significance in the extant personal correspondence of philosophers but there is an occasional insight, often a clue to the unfolding of a personality, or an unguarded comment here or there which suggests a tendency or trait. (shrink)

That the late civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr., was a devotee of the ethics of nonviolence is generally well-known. What is not so well-known is the fact that he was philosophically trained and that he was a personalist. He began the study of philosophy at Morehouse College in Atlanta, continued it in part at the Crozer Theological Seminary, and enrolled in a doctoral program at Boston University. For a time, he studied Plato with Raphael Demos of Harvard. His (...) doctoral dissertation was entitled: “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.” In it he provides a defense of personalistic theism which he sees as both a mediating position between the thinkers he evaluates as well as a sounder one. In the first of his seven books, Stride Toward Freedom, he affirms his acceptance of personal idealism in these words. (shrink)