In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:HUME'S BUNDLES, SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND KANT Even if we are inclined to view Hume's attempt to explain ascriptions of personal identity as an abysmal failure, we might still be sympathetic toward his proposal to replace the going substance theory of the nature of mind with his bundle account. Thus we might fault Hume for erecting an unachievably high standard for personal identity, or round on him for excluding bodily criteria (...) 2... from his solution, but nonetheless applaud his spiriting away of the Cartesian soul substance leaving his "true idea of the human mind" (261) as a collection of perceptions in its stead. However, Hume's concern to give an account of the idea of the unity of a human mind in terms of related perceptions has run into notoriously rough sledding, not the least of which is the fact that Hume himself in his Appendix to "Of Personal Identity" seems to abandon his bundle theory in despair. In this paper I shall first be concerned to examine the criticism of his bundle theory which Hume brings forth in the Appendix and explain why I think the core difficulty remains insoluble for Hume. I shall then go on to suggest that the unworkability of Húmete bundle theory is directly tied to his failure to appreciate certain features of the peculiarly first person nature of his question about the make-up of minds. In thus emphasizing the place of the first person voice in my interpretation I am stealing a leaf, if not a chapter, from Kant. But this is as it should be since one of the aims of this essay is to provide an interpretation of Hume's difficulties with his account of the nature of mind which explains part of the reason why 'self-consciousness' (or 'apperception') looms so very large in the Critique of Pure Reason attack upon Hume's type of bundle theory. 60. 1. Hume's Second Thoughts In a burst of self criticism at the Appendix to the section on personal identity, Hume brings forth this objection to his own efforts:...Having thus loosen' d all our particular perceptions, when I proceed to explain the principle of connexion, which binds them together, and makes us attribute to them a real simplicity and identity; I am sensible, that my account is very defective, and that nothing but the seeming evidence of the precedent reasonings cou'd have indue' d me to receive it (635). After additional reflections Hume encapsulates his objection thus:...All my hopes vanish, when I come to explain the principles, that unite our successive perceptions in our thought or consciousness (6SS-6). What is the defect Hume calls to our attention? Notice first that the footnote on page 635 explicitly refers us back to that part of his account Hume considers defective; and when we look back to the text of the Treatise in question, page 260, we find it is precisely there that Hume uses the analogy of a republic to sketch his bundle theory of the unity of mind in terms of the two associative principles, resemblance and causation. So it must somehow be that this account in terms of the associative principles is mistaken. But what then is the mistake? According to Hume it is that he cannot 'explain' the principles which unite the discrete percepts. Now it seems to me there are only two possible things Hume could mean in saying this. He could mean either (1) that the principles which connect the percepts of one mind are instances of the associative principles, but he cannot explain them; or (2) there must be other, non-associative, principles which connect the percepts of a single mind and these he cannot explain. 61. I think we can safely conclude (1) cannot represent Hume's misgivings when he says he is unable to explain the uniting principles of the mental bundles. There is first the fact that he does not call into question his general programme of accounting for the nature of the unity of complex things by the principles of causation, resemblance and contiguity — for example, ships, plants, animals, houses and rivers (e.g. 257f) — but only his... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:How Old Are Modern Rights? On the Lockean Roots of Contemporary Human Rights DiscourseS. Adam SeagraveArguing for the proper placement of John Locke’s natural rights theory within intellectual history is a particularly high-stakes enterprise for historians of political thought and political theorists alike. This is due in large part to the fact that, as Brian Tierney notes in his recent study, it is “widely agreed that Locke’s work was (...) an important influence in the formation of modern liberal ideas, including ideas concerning rights.”1 Our understanding of Locke thus contributes to our reflective self-understanding as “modern liberals” (of one stripe or another) to an extent perhaps unequaled by any other thinker so far removed from our own time.As a result of the rare promise of studying Locke’s natural rights theory, there has been no shortage of scholarly attempts to determine its place in intellectual history on the basis of Locke’s own writings and their relation both to preceding and subsequent traditions and modes of thought. Although John Dunn had argued in his influential study that Locke’s political thought was too thoroughly steeped in theology to remain relevant in the contemporary context, this thesis has since been persuasively challenged (albeit in very different ways) by Simmons, Zuckert and Waldron, among others.2 Each of these scholars has contributed to an emerging agreement [End Page 305] that the thread of Locke’s natural rights theory may indeed be carried all the way up to current political and moral debates in some form or another. The precise length of this thread as it extends in the other historical direction has, however, remained a point of heated controversy. The scholarly literature on this issue may be broadly described in terms of a spectrum determined by two opposing emphases in understanding the relation of Locke’s natural rights theory to its medieval predecessors: a continuity emphasis and a discontinuity emphasis.On the discontinuity end of the spectrum stand those such as Michel Villey, Leo Strauss, C. B. Macpherson and, more recently, Michael Zuckert who argue for the existence of some sort of “Copernican moment” separating medieval natural rights theories from their modern counterparts.3 Whether this moment is identified with William of Ockham in the fourteenth century or Hobbes in the seventeenth century, these scholars tend to emphasize the distinctively “modern” character of Lockean natural rights theory and its significant departures from medieval modes of thought. According to many of the advocates of discontinuity, Lockean natural rights are not only “modern” in their political applications but also in their more profound meaning as foundations for morality, and particularly in their newly conceived relation to the concept of natural law.4The continuity end of the spectrum is, perhaps, more variegated, including scholars such as Tuck, Tierney, Tully, Oakley, Nederman, Coleman, and Swanson, among others.5 Despite their many important differences, [End Page 306] these scholars each focus upon the similarities between various elements or strains of medieval thought and modern natural rights theories rather than the differences between them. Insofar as the scholars on this end of the spectrum explicitly consider Locke’s natural rights theory, they tend to emphasize Locke’s intellectual debt to various preceding traditions and thinkers rather than his innovations upon them. Building explicitly upon the work of Tuck, Tierney and Tully, Janet Coleman finds “some extraordinarily Lockean moments” in the medieval thinkers John of Paris and Godefroid of Fontaines, and argues that Locke ought to be understood as contributing to this medieval tradition of thought rather than departing from it.6 Scott Swanson, in turn, builds upon Coleman’s scholarship in carefully connecting medieval understandings of the rights of subsistence and the principle of extreme necessity to Locke’s natural rights theory. Swanson initially goes even further than Coleman in asserting that “all of Locke’s celebrated doctrine is here [in John of Paris’s writings] offered in a nutshell” before concluding on the more moderate note, echoed by Cary Nederman, that Locke’s “application of natural rights of subsistence to politics” may indeed have been something “new under the sun.”7Brian Tierney, who has long been a prominent... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Consciousness and Machines:A Commentary Drawing on Japanese PhilosophyS. D. Noam Cook (bio)Viewed from within the great unity of consciousness, thinking is a wave on the surface of a great intuition.Kitarō NishidaIntroductionRecent developments in AI have made the long-standing debate about what computers can and can't do a major public concern. What we understand the properties of such machines to be, and consequently how we design [End Page 305] and (...) deploy them, will increasingly shape how we live and how we understand ourselves. Thus, there is an urgent need for better understanding of these issues.Susan Schneider, in her book Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, offers an exceptionally careful and insightful examination of key issues entailed in how we understand AI and ourselves. One of her central concerns is how we might test for machine consciousness. Given the variations in design and function among current and projected AIs, Schneider sees no likely one-size-fits-all test. So, she offers a battery of different tests that she believes together will make such testing more reliable. This seems a wise approach, and reflects the conceptual and pragmatic care Schneider takes throughout the book.Similarly, it seems to me that the question of machine consciousness should also include various understandings of consciousness itself. What consciousness is taken to be has varied widely both historically and culturally. No commonly accepted single understanding has emerged, and may never emerge. Just as having a battery of tests might help us better assess possible machine consciousness, having different understandings of consciousness might give us a better understanding of what we are testing for. The two should work in tandem, each gauging and shaping the other.Like the development of computers themselves, the predominant thinking about AI has been shaped, in part, by key presuppositions of a scientific worldview, with its origins in Western thought and culture. Among these presuppositions are materialism, reductionism, and a primary focus on objective behavior. These are reflected in the common concern with observable behavior of physical aspects of the brain in efforts to understand human consciousness, which in turn has become a familiar model for work on machine consciousness. All this is important and valuable work. But, in the spirit of Schneider's cautions, it should not be taken as one-size-fits-all. Accordingly, I offer one view of consciousness from a different perspective.In what follows, I sketch out an understanding of consciousness that draws on Japanese philosophy, particularly that of the highly influential early twentieth-century Japanese philosopher Kitarō Nishida (1870–1945). I then explore how the tests for machine consciousness that Schneider proposes might be viewed from that perspective.Consciousness: A Perspective from Japanese PhilosophyConsciousness was a central concern for Nishida, whose philosophy is deeply informed by Japanese culture and by Zen theory and practice. As one might expect from such a philosopher, Nishida's exploration of consciousness is not concerned with properties of the brain, but with what we might discern through disciplined reflection on the experience of our own consciousness. Ultimately, he views consciousness as an organic whole [End Page 306] of systemically organized interrelationships of activities and sensations within our subjective experience. This may be understood by first considering 'nothingness'.For Nishida, nothingness does not suggest an ultimate and absolute vacuity, as is often understandably assumed. In Nishida's sense, it is a singular "place" that mirrors the multifaceted world of our common experience. In understanding this, I am told by native Japanese speakers that the English word 'nothingness' has an advantage over the Japanese equivalent, 'mu', in that 'nothingness' can usefully be broken down as 'nothing-ness'. This suggests that nothingness is a state of consciousness where what we commonly experience as distinct (self, other, world, blue, ache, joy, etc.) is indistinct, a state of unified experience. This is consciousness without our finding or discriminating in it the myriad "things" of common experience, but rather a "pure experience" of a singular whole. Nishida introduces his concept of "pure experience" as follows:To experience means to know facts just as they are, to know in accordance with facts by completely relinquishing one... (shrink)

Purpose. The research is aimed at substantiation of the process of formation of various human images in the postmodernism era in the context of biophilosophy, taking into account the need to find an adequate response to historical challenges and the production of new value orientations reflecting succession of civilization development. Theoretical basis. The author in his theoretical constructs proceeds from the need of taking into account the biophilosophical aspect of postmodern man, as the one who, remaining a representative of the (...) species Homo sapiens, began to dynamically change, losing its own natural and functional qualities, acquiring to a large extent the socio-technology-related qualities. The thesis that in the postmodern society the moral and legal foundations of existence of human being, as the subject of actions and responsibility for these actions, practically coincide with the biological foundations is taken as initial argument. New biological knowledge, as well as the related technologies, orient the public consciousness towards production of fundamentally new or modernization of the existing bio-philosophical ideas. The author's vision of the anthropological collision of the Post-Modernism era is caused by the fact that the issues of a postmodern man acquire a special urgency at the end of the ХХ – early XXI century. A progressive disproportion between a human being, whose abilities as a representative of the species Homo sapiens are biologically limited, and the human community, which sees no limits in its information and technological expansion, is of current interest. Originality. The author reveals the key features of the Post-Modernism era, in which a fundamentally different civilizational space originates, and where a new type of person emerges in its internal culture, which is called the postmodern man. The postmodern man was considered through the prism of bio-philosophy. Its interest in man is caused by his or her place in nature, the prospects of development at the individual, population and species levels. Conclusions. In the process of development of bio-philosophy, its research field will be naturally expanded with the use of philosophical means of perception of life as such and filling the bio-philosophy with philosophical and biological issues. In contemporary conditions, the study of the boundaries of biological reality and its previously unknown properties, definition of new horizons of theoretical knowledge in the science of life, the critical rethinking of the concepts of biocentrism and anthropocentrism in the space of modern scientific knowledge, the definition of perspective trends in the study of man, his or her place and role in the planetary being is of great importance. (shrink)

Attempts to think anew about philosophical questions from the perspective of breath and breathing. As a physiological or biological matter, breath is mostly considered to be mechanical and thoughtless. By expanding on the insights of many religions and therapeutic practices, which emphasize the cultivation of breath, the contributors argue that breath should be understood as fundamentally and comprehensively intertwined with human life and experience. Various dimensions of the respiratory world are referred to as “atmospheres” that encircle and connect human existence, (...) coexistence, and the world. Drawing from a number of traditions of breathing, including from Indian and East Asian religion and philosophy, the book considers breath in relation to ontological, hermeneutical, phenomenological, ethical, and aesthetic concerns in philosophy. The wide-ranging topics include poetry, theater, environmental issues and health, feminism, and media studies. “Atmospheres of Breathing, the first collection of its kind, explores an emerging ‘respiratory philosophy’ of great consequence for philosophy and other fields. Its rich and diverse essays, many written by the pioneers of this radically new direction, show the deep historical and intercultural roots of such a philosophy, ranging from treatments of forerunners like Zhuangzi and Heraclitus to contemporary theorists of breathing such as Abram and Kleinberg-Levin. Presented here is the vision of innovative ways in which philosophy, on its own or inspired by spiritual practices, can bring breathing into the center of its concern. This is a landmark book that scintillates with brilliant and original insights. If taken as seriously as it deserves, this book has the potential to revolutionize contemporary and future thought.” — Edward S. Casey, author of The World at a Glance and The World on Edge “Air, the misunderstood element, finds ways and means of advancing to places where no one reckons with its presence; and, more significantly, it makes space on its own strength for strange places where there were previously none.” — Peter Sloterdijk. (shrink)

The idea of doing something for its own sake interests me for two reasons. First, I should like to understand better two opposing reactions that I have felt on coming across the phrase ‘for its own sake’ used in earnest. When told that knowledge is worth pursuing for its own sake and that this is what the study of science at a university ought to be like—not an adjunct to commercially motivated research in a product I design and development team (...) funded by local industry—I, and others, feel that something pure and noble, holy, good and true is being said. On the other hand, I recognize that to some, who would probably describe themselves as more realistic than myself, the claim that knowledge should be, and is being, pursued for its own sake has a hollow ring. Nowadays, academics themselves feel uneasy when they hear this sort of thing being said in public in mixed company. But they do continue to say such things to each other, at least occasionally in private, among consenting adults. Furthermore, I do attach impor- tance to the thought that to do the right thing for its own sake is a shining example of moral goodness. At the same time I acknowledge that the idea of a good deed done for its own sake is less than crystal clear I and that, to many, the person who claims to be doing something for its own sake sounds like someone who smiles at himself in the mirror in the morning in order to find one approving face before setting out to commit his next crime against humanity. I should like to know whether this phrase ‘for its own sake’ will bear the weight I want to place on it or whether a more sceptical attitude is called for. (shrink)

The idea of doing something for its own sake interests me for two reasons. First, I should like to understand better two opposing reactions that I have felt on coming across the phrase ‘for its own sake’ used in earnest. When told that knowledge is worth pursuing for its own sake and that this is what the study of science at a university ought to be like—not an adjunct to commercially motivated research in a product I design and development team (...) funded by local industry—I, and others, feel that something pure and noble, holy, good and true is being said. On the other hand, I recognize that to some, who would probably describe themselves as more realistic than myself, the claim that knowledge should be, and is being, pursued for its own sake has a hollow ring. Nowadays, academics themselves feel uneasy when they hear this sort of thing being said in public in mixed company. But they do continue to say such things to each other, at least occasionally in private, among consenting adults. Furthermore, I do attach impor- tance to the thought that to do the right thing for its own sake is a shining example of moral goodness. At the same time I acknowledge that the idea of a good deed done for its own sake is less than crystal clear I and that, to many, the person who claims to be doing something for its own sake sounds like someone who smiles at himself in the mirror in the morning in order to find one approving face before setting out to commit his next crime against humanity. I should like to know whether this phrase ‘for its own sake’ will bear the weight I want to place on it or whether a more sceptical attitude is called for. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:104 COMMENTARY ON PROFESSOR TWEYMAN ' S 'HUME ON EVIL' Philo concludes his long and celebrated debate with Cleanthes on the problem of evil (Parts X and Xl of Hume's Dialogues) with the assertion that the "true conclusion" to be drawn from the "mixed phenomena" in the world is that "the original source" of whatever order we find in the world is "indifferent" to matters of good and evil. (...) From what Philo says immediately thereafter it is clear that by the phrase "The true conclusion is..." he does not mean 'The truth is...' but rather something like 'The conclusion best supported by the available evidence is....' (D 212) Now according to both Nelson Pike and Stanley Tweyman, the claim made by Philo in these passages involves him in a shift or departure from the procedure he adopted in earlier dialogues when he examined the design argument set forth by Cleanthes. It is claimed that whereas in the earlier dialogues Philo emphatically professed a sceptical outlook — "the view requiring that one embrace no metaphysical position of one's own" (to quote Nelson Pike ) — in the quoted passage he seems to abandon this scepticism in favor of embracing what amounts to being a metaphysical position in natural theology. Pike thinks that this alleged shift is only an apparent one, that the central import of these passages is sceptical rather than metaphysical, and that here, as elsewhere in the earlier dialogues, Philo's sole purpose in offering a more plausible counter-hypothesis is to show that Cleanthes' hypothesis is false. Tweyman, on the other hand, argues that the shift is a very real one and that Hume does indeed "intend Philo's conclusion in Part XI to be a truth in natural theology [.]... Philo is 105 not arguing as a sceptic; rather he is employing the hypothetico-deductive method for testing Cleanthes' 2 hypothesis. " Let me say at once that I agree with Tweyman, as against Pike, that in these passages Philo does claim to put forward a truth Jji natural theology, and I also agree with just about everything that Tweyman says in his paper concerning the proper interpretation of Philo's views in Parts X and XI leading up to this conclusion. I follow the lead of those scholars who, at least since Kemp Smith, have argued that Philo's whole purpose in demonstrating such "truths" is to discredit natural theology in the eyes of a true Christian believer by dramatizing the enormous gulf between the very attenuated form of theism ("diaphonous deism" one scholar calls it), which is the most one can hope to get out of Cleanthes' experimental approach to religion, and the claim of Christian theism to which Cleanthes aspires. But I do not accept the view that Philo's claim in these dialogues represents any sort of sudden departure (and certainly not a "fundamental methodological difference") from his critical stance against the design argument in earlier dialogues. What I hope to show below is that not only does this view distort what Philo does in the earlier dialogues, but it also distracts our attention from the true nature of Hume's achievement in Parts X and XI of the Dialogues. (Incidentally, I will assume throughout the sequel that Kemp Smith's identification of Hume with Philo is essentially correct. ) It would indeed be extremely paradoxical, in the face of Philo's famous (or notorious) peroration at the end of Part VIII proclaiming the "complete triumph of the sceptic" in regard to "all religious 106 systems," to raise any doubts about Philo's acceptance of the sceptical import of his own earlier arguments. But this still leaves unsettled the question as to what sort of scepticism it is whose triumph Philo proclaims at this point and whether it is inconsistent with the conclusion he reaches at the end of his discussion of evil. One would have hoped that at this late stage in the scholarship on the Dialogues, if there is one issue on which all of us could agree it is that Philo at no time in the Dialogues takes the (easy) Pyrrhonian line against Cleanthes' "hypothesis of experimental theism." I mention this because at several places... (shrink)

Peirce’s doctrine of God has scarcely been studied at all. This is surprising because his own naturally religious temperament, his desire for philosophical completeness and the influence of Kant, all led him to give an important place to theistic speculation in his philosophy. It is true that few parts of his philosophy reveal more than the fragmentary and unfinished nature of his thinking. This however does not take away from its importance both for the interpretation of his philosophy and (...) for the evaluation of its contribution. In this paper I want to examine his doctrine of God mainly in order to discover and outline what views he held in the matter. Such examination is an essential preliminary to any consideration of the value of his theistic thinking. Moreover, an objective exposition is already the best beginning of evaluation. However it is impossible to undertake this kind of examination without a careful search into various corners of his writings and a meticulous and slightly laboured presentation of one’s findings. But I think that the patience involved in such research has a rich reward. (shrink)

Miller first examines the New Critics’ theory of metaphor, then presents his own views. There is one chapter on Hulme and Richards, one on Empson, Tate, Ransom and Brooks, and a third on Wimsatt, Wheelwright, and Krieger. Chapter Four contains Miller’s position and applies it to some metaphors from the metaphysical poets, and Chapter Five examines the problem of the objective status of a work of verbal art. Miller uses Richards’ distinction between the tenor and vehicle of a metaphor; in (...) "My love is a red, red rose," "love" is the tenor and "rose" the vehicle, and a metaphor occurs only in the tense convergence of tenor and vehicle. With this formal scheme he defines surface and submerged metaphors—the former having both elements stated, the latter having the tenor unstated but implied; Miller distinguishes these from moribund metaphors, like the "foot" of a mountain, in which the appropriate tenors are forgotten, not submerged. He distinguishes positive and negative metaphor, depending upon the emphasis the metaphor places on either the fusion or the resistance between tenor and vehicle, for both forces must operate within a lively metaphor. He distinguishes simple, complex and compound metaphors, to the extent that tenor and vehicle are either simple terms or else contain, each or both of them, metaphors inside themselves. In the case of compound metaphors, sometimes the vehicle can be submerged, and if the critic can find what the vehicle is, the poetic passage acquires a more condensed and unified logical form. Miller’s application of these schemes to concrete instances of metaphor are carried out to good effect. His treatment of the epistemology and ontology of a work of verbal art is less successful; he wishes to accommodate both subjective and objective aspects, but tends to consider a manifestation of a poem as the poem itself. He considers the written documentation of a poem to be marks on a surface which serve as stimuli to the reader’s awareness; but units of documentation are written words, not marks, and the process of reading is not, as he claims, a process of decoding. He distinguishes between oral documentation and performance, but seems to think records, tapes and films are instances of the former; would not memory, or perhaps even recitation by rote, be better examples of oral documentation? He considers Saussurian langue as an example of a "cultural object" which finds manifestation in parole; but if this is so, how can there ever be intermediate cultural objects like poems or stories? Langue would be the only verbal cultural object there is. It would be better to consider poems and stories as cultural objects, and language as a potential matrix for them, much as matter is a matrix for substances. Miller objects to the metaphor of "organism" for a poem, because, he says, when we take a poem apart in critical analysis, we do not kill it; therefore the metaphor of "machine" is better—something that can be taken apart and put together again. But surely the correction here is not to replace organism by machine, but to change one’s understanding of what it is to take apart. The critic takes apart in thought, the way a mathematician does, and not like a butcher. Miller’s book is extremely interesting, asks many good questions, and should be read with profit and delight by philosophers interested in language.—R. S. (shrink)

Miller first examines the New Critics’ theory of metaphor, then presents his own views. There is one chapter on Hulme and Richards, one on Empson, Tate, Ransom and Brooks, and a third on Wimsatt, Wheelwright, and Krieger. Chapter Four contains Miller’s position and applies it to some metaphors from the metaphysical poets, and Chapter Five examines the problem of the objective status of a work of verbal art. Miller uses Richards’ distinction between the tenor and vehicle of a metaphor; in (...) "My love is a red, red rose," "love" is the tenor and "rose" the vehicle, and a metaphor occurs only in the tense convergence of tenor and vehicle. With this formal scheme he defines surface and submerged metaphors—the former having both elements stated, the latter having the tenor unstated but implied; Miller distinguishes these from moribund metaphors, like the "foot" of a mountain, in which the appropriate tenors are forgotten, not submerged. He distinguishes positive and negative metaphor, depending upon the emphasis the metaphor places on either the fusion or the resistance between tenor and vehicle, for both forces must operate within a lively metaphor. He distinguishes simple, complex and compound metaphors, to the extent that tenor and vehicle are either simple terms or else contain, each or both of them, metaphors inside themselves. In the case of compound metaphors, sometimes the vehicle can be submerged, and if the critic can find what the vehicle is, the poetic passage acquires a more condensed and unified logical form. Miller’s application of these schemes to concrete instances of metaphor are carried out to good effect. His treatment of the epistemology and ontology of a work of verbal art is less successful; he wishes to accommodate both subjective and objective aspects, but tends to consider a manifestation of a poem as the poem itself. He considers the written documentation of a poem to be marks on a surface which serve as stimuli to the reader’s awareness; but units of documentation are written words, not marks, and the process of reading is not, as he claims, a process of decoding. He distinguishes between oral documentation and performance, but seems to think records, tapes and films are instances of the former; would not memory, or perhaps even recitation by rote, be better examples of oral documentation? He considers Saussurian langue as an example of a "cultural object" which finds manifestation in parole; but if this is so, how can there ever be intermediate cultural objects like poems or stories? Langue would be the only verbal cultural object there is. It would be better to consider poems and stories as cultural objects, and language as a potential matrix for them, much as matter is a matrix for substances. Miller objects to the metaphor of "organism" for a poem, because, he says, when we take a poem apart in critical analysis, we do not kill it; therefore the metaphor of "machine" is better—something that can be taken apart and put together again. But surely the correction here is not to replace organism by machine, but to change one’s understanding of what it is to take apart. The critic takes apart in thought, the way a mathematician does, and not like a butcher. Miller’s book is extremely interesting, asks many good questions, and should be read with profit and delight by philosophers interested in language.—R. S. (shrink)

The Fate of Desire examines the problems of living in a decentered world. Assuming that the poststructuralist declaration of the end of man is an essential aspect of our current ways of thinking, the book focuses on the positive values inherent in this shift. In substituting multiplicity and fields of play for identity and hierarchy, and in distinguishing between desire as fullness and desire as lack, Hans argues for a vision of existence that is based on the difficulties Nietzsche posited (...) as an inevitable part of fully affirming the rich but tragic nature of life. These reconceptions of the human scene redefine self-discipline in terms of understanding and loving one's fate. Instead of providing yet one more critique of the flawed values through which the Western world has constituted itself, The Fate of Desire takes up the task of weighing the things of the world anew, revaluing them in terms of our present understanding of our positions in the world. Hans suggests that if we are fated to be driven by desire, and if we are led to accept the ways in which our desire manifests itself according to our own individual fates, there is still every reason to believe that humans can find a productive way of understanding and fully occupying their place in the world. (shrink)

Plotinus knew that evils “wander about mortal nature and this place forever” and Schäfer begins his analysis of evil in the Enneads with a very helpful survey of the philosophical schools and literary tradition of ancient Greece which influenced Plotinus. These opening pages thus treat χαχόν as understood by Heraclitus, Plato, and Sophocles. Schäfer stresses the quasi-dualism present in these earlier thinkers in order to show how Plotinus’ insistence that all is derived from a single origin, the One, forced (...) him to give a more precise account of evil’s origins. He therefore set out to explain how the individuality caused by material substantiation is that which brings about an Unwissenheit und Harmoniestörung. The human soul becomes enamored by that which is good and an instance of the One-on-a-lower-level; paradoxically, therefore, evil is brought about not by some competing substance of the One but by its own emanated beauty. As the soul freely chooses diversity over unity, it finds itself more and more “fanned out”, forgetful of its true origin. (shrink)

I do not mean to suggest that Kroner's book is not in many places interesting and learned, nor that, in its original form of lectures, it had no value. But, apart from the exaggeration and distortion of the central thesis, the detailed treatment of historical points leaves one with little confidence and robs the work of what usefulness it might have had. Thus an unquestioning application of Nietzche's division of Greek thinkers into 'Dionysiac' and 'Apollonian' leads to remarks like the (...) following: "Aristotle has little in common with the Dionysian romanticism and universal dynamism of Heraclitus, and yet there is a kinship between them based upon becoming instead of being". What evidence we have for the Presocratic period is harshly treated. On p. 85 this is the 'more literal' of two versions of Anaximander's fragment and its introduction: "All things are going back through destruction, whence they had come through generation, according to what is due; for they suffer just punishment by repayment to each other the wrong in the succession of time"--but Anaximander did not, in fact, write nonsense like this. Even a simple sentence like Heraclitus fr. 113 is mistranslated as "Thinking is the same for all," where the Greek is ξυνόν and not τὸ αὐτό. Nor is Kroner incapable of rebuking others for mistakes of his own; thus on p. 110 he writes: "J. Burnet, e.g., waters down the words of Parmenides which literally rendered are: 'The same is to know and that on behalf of which thought is,' by letting Parmenides say: 'You cannot find thought without something that is as to which it is uttered.'" But Burnet was translating not the line translated by Kroner, but the following one, a line ignored by Kroner and one which seriously damages his interpretation of Parmenides. Then the Greek word ἰδέαι, used of Plato's Forms, is implied to connote ideas existing in the mind; Socrates is the most worth-while of Greek thinkers because in some respects he resembled Jesus Christ; he was not really an ethical thinker, though, and in any case Plato's Forms owed nothing to him--and so on. The best treatment is of Aristotle; and there are many short sections of acute discussion, as, for example, on the meaning of the second part of the Parmenides. But the mind may be spinning so wildly by the time it reaches them that it is incapable of recognizing them. Cambridge University. (shrink)

Get down as far as possible the minute inflections of day to day thought. Get down the key ideas as they occur. . . . Write on, not over again. Let it flow. . . . Don’t be stopping to jam the idea down somebody’s throat. Give it a chance. If there can be concrete philosophy, give it a chance. Let one perception move instantly on another. Where they come from is to be trusted. Unless this is so, after all (...) is said and done, philosophy is arbitrary and idle. I first heard the name “Henry Bugbee” several years ago in a graduate seminar on Heidegger. After discussing the mystical-poetic aspects of Heidegger’s later thought, the question was posed as to what possibilities were left for philosophy. A silence fell .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:AbusesC. S. SchreinerAbuses, by Alphonso Lingis; 268 pp. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, $25.00 paper.Long ago and far away it seemed that academia served as a way station for inventive figures whose nonconformism, demonstrated in their work and lifestyles, was welcomed with graceful suspicion by their colleagues. Philosophy has had its share: one thinks of Wittgenstein and C. S. Peirce, but many lesser Wittgensteins and Peirces somehow (...) adapted and became tenured. In regard to such figures “eccentric” meant outside the circle or off center; “radical” meant surprising, original, sincere. Today radical has a murky political sense. Most radicality takes place in a discourse, or as a discourse—in the title of a university press book—which when invoked aligns the writer with the orthodoxy of a speech community. No surprise; only a dull echo as membership is [End Page 516] confirmed and the circle remains unbroken. Contrary to almost everyone’s intentions, never has so much “identity politics” been melded with the writing act in a metaphysical proof. We write about pragmatism, therefore we are new pragmatists. We write eco-feminism, therefore we are radical eco-feminists.Yet the nonconformist self-image of many philosophers is belied less by the uniformity of their discourse than of their lives, constrained as they are by professional protocol. This situation has become especially painful for phenomenologists whose credos “to the things themselves” and “towards the concrete” mandate a method of worldbound description confirmed by first-person evidence. It is a longstanding embarrassment that most phenomenological studies are either studies about phenomenology, or phenomenologies of books. In this regard even before Of Grammatology it was obvious that there was nothing outside the text.The rare exception is Alphonso Lingis, author of Excesses (1983), Libido: The French Existential Theories (1985), and The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (1994). So much is obvious to anyone who leafs through his Abuses. The vistas and catastrophes we access through this book cannot be easily disengaged from the personality that guides us to Tenochtitlan, Matagalpa, Kuta, Bali, the Sambodromo in Rio de Janeiro, Khlong Toei, and Chichicastenango. From these places and others Lingis reports the sometimes macabre longings and vulnerabilities of those who have nothing in common except violent changes in heritage and landscape. He speaks to their wounds and of his own ailments he acquires by exposing himself to forsaken circumstances: it is all material for his philosophy. In this work speech is primary, as it was for phenomenologists before Derrida.Merleau-Ponty’s writing remains unsurpassed as an eloquent transcript of perceptual life as expression and bodily engagement. Lingis, who translated The Visible and the Invisible, has from the start of his career been the most interesting and outlandish promulgator of this style of phenomenology. But his focus was decisively turned by Emmanuel Lévinas (whom Lingis has also translated) towards alterity relations, intimate events in which persons defer to and ennoble strangers by taking responsibility for them. Speech and physical contact are precious components of these relations, allowing persons to disburden themselves, to exchange pain and betrayal for tenderness and trust.Lingis shows how alterity relations suffer abuses at the face-to-face level and in the global network of electronic media. We enter his work breathlessly, as into a deep valley where there is gunfire and tropical birds. Spy satellites pass overhead. The human beings are strangely quiet. Women and children are being herded into canvas-covered trucks by youthful militia with oversized weapons. The volatile prose lifts up the voices of the damned just before they vanish around the bend in the jungle. Lingis speaks for them. This is the mandate of his research: “One has to speak for the silenced” (p. 36).How does highly educated thought speak for the tortured and dispossessed [End Page 517] without looking absurd or merely pretentious? Here it won’t do to speak of the world as a text. In this regard the kind of work we find in Abuses is at a vast remove from something like Susan Suleiman’s recently published Risking Who One Is: Encounters With Contemporary Art and Literature. There is nothing peculiar... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Keeping Faith with Human Rights by Linda HoganCarol S. RobbKeeping Faith with Human Rights Linda Hogan WASHINGTON, DC: GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2015. 240 PP. $29.95As her title suggests, the relationship between theological and secular traditions in human rights discourse is one important topic of Hogan's book. A second topic is the significant challenge to both theological and secular grounding of human rights norms coming from postcolonial, feminist, and (...) postmodern critics.Regarding the relationship between theological and secular traditions in human rights discourse, Hogan finds evidence of theological treatment of "rights" as early as jurisprudence of the twelfth century; early modern Calvinists then drew on classical and Catholic resources for rights talk. More recently, contemporary human rights discourse has come to function independently of theism as "the common language of humanity" (12). Some human rights theorists claim there is no longer any possible rapprochement with Christian tradition because human rights are grounded in liberalism, which has ruptured with Christianity. Some theologians concur, finding the limitations of liberalism so significant as to prohibit accommodation. Liberalism here means a conviction that human beings can construct an account of morality that is binding for all peoples and in all places, the content of which could be known through universal reason (38); it is furthermore a conviction that human persons are distinct, autonomous individuals whose social and political contexts, cultures, and religious beliefs should neither decisively construct nor constrict individuals' human rights (32).Despite these difficulties, Hogan believes there are good historical and theological reasons to "keep faith with human rights." During the last six decades, human rights discourse has welcomed the articulation of tradition-specific accounts of the grounding of human rights, some secular and some religious, satisfied that there are different ways of accounting for why human beings can be said to have universal rights. It has flourished as a result. The morality of [End Page 208] human rights becomes more durable when citizens draw upon their own communities' narratives and doctrines to make their case.The pluralist approach to justifying human rights theory and politics is consistent with the weight Hogan gives to postcolonial, feminist, and postmodern critiques of the liberalism undergirding the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, embedded in three main pillars of human rights discourse: the nature of personhood, the structure of moral truth, and the role of community. Regarding how the subject of human rights is constructed, she argues that the manner in which we understand our subjectivity is intimately connected with and dependent upon our respective world views, not a consequence of a universal account of human nature (86). On moral truth, Hogan argues that rationality is contingent and justification is always contextual, and yet we do not have to accept a relativist position in respect to truth (104). In her discussion of the role of community, it would have been appropriate to include consideration of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.Hogan encourages human rights theorists to pay serious attention to the critics of human rights, insofar as the political grounding for it appears to be fracturing, even as appeals to its protections are spreading. I recognize the appeal of many of the critiques of liberalism, yet I found myself asking, what besides the discourse would change in light of them? How would the formulation of the norms and their justifiability be changed? Hogan avoids projecting such consequences but warns the reader who acknowledges the need for pluralism that they will need a critical, genealogical approach to the traditions, one that recognizes the embeddedness of power struggles over who authorizes what and who gets included in the community's traditions.Carol S. RobbSan Francisco Theological Seminary and The Graduate Theological UnionCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Thirty three years lie between Geoffrey Mure’s beginning upon the study of Literae Humaniores at Oxford before the First World War, and my own arrival there for the same purpose at the end of the Second. To read this book is to be made vividly aware how far the world moved in the single human generation. That I shared so many of Mure’s ideals and enthusiasms made me something of a freak in the Oxford of my own time; yet I (...) remember vividly my feeling, when I first read his Study of Hegel’s Logic, that here was someone talking to himself in an empty room. I was a student reading Hegel’s Logic while everyone else was discussing The Concept of the Mind. No one was ever more consciously out of step than I. Yet I felt no urge to seek out the Warden of Merton; and with this small testament of a philosopher’s life before me, I can see that this was because I belonged as firmly to my generation as he did to his. He was a pupil of H.H. Joachim and I of H.H. Price. Price was not my “tutor”, but it was from his living example, more than any other, that I learned that philosophy is a perennial activity in which many discordant voices can have their place - and perhaps be brought to concord. I was lucky, I think, to learn this from one whose principal concerns were so far removed from mine, and not - like Mure - to take the impress of philosophy as a perpetual concordia discors from someone with whom I was in perfect sympathy. To comprehend discordia concors as a young rebel is better than to find that one’s concordia has become discordant in later years. (shrink)

This paper asks whether adult children have aduty of justice to act as caregivers for theirfrail, elderly parents. I begin (Sections I.and II.) by locating the historical reasons whyrelationships within families were not thoughtto raise issues of justice. I argue that thesereasons are misguided. The paper next presentsspecific examples showing the relevance ofjustice to family relationships. I point outthat in the United States today, the burden ofcaregiving for dependent parents fallsdisproportionately on women (Sections III. andIV.). The paper goes on to (...) use Rawls''theoretical tool of the veil of ignorance toargue that caring for parents should not belinked to a person''s sex and more generally,that there is no duty of justice to assume therole of caregiver for dependent parents(Sections V.). Although justice does notprovide the moral foundations for parent care,I show that it nonetheless places importantlimits on the instinct to care. I concludethat the voice of justice should be audible,and is intrinsically present, withinfamilies. (shrink)

What is it that enables agents to find the business of reflective endorsement, deliberation, and willing meaningful? I argue that our having motivating reasons to act-and thus reason to lead a life-depends on a set of background "frames" of agency being in place. These "frames" are attitudes toward and beliefs about our own agency that, under normal conditions, are simply taken for granted as we lead our lives as agents and that thus do not enter into our normative reflection, (...) deliberation, planning, and intending. Those frames include a perception of our lives as meaningful, lack of alienation from one's own normative outlook, a belief in the effectiveness of instrumental reasoning, and confidence in our relative security from disastrous misfortune. When those background frames are disrupted, we may find our agency not defeated, but emptied of significance. (shrink)

Under normal circumstances, we experience that our center of awareness is located behind our eyes and inside our own body. To learn more about the perceptual processes that underlie this tight coupling between the spatial dimensions of our consciously perceived self and our physical body, we conducted a series of experiments using an ‘out-of-body illusion’. In this illusion, the conscious sense of self is displaced in the testing room by experimental manipulation of the congruency of visual and tactile information and (...) a change in the visual perspective. We demonstrate that when healthy individuals experience that they are located in a different place from their real body, they disown this body and no longer perceive it as part of themselves. Our findings are important because they reveal a relationship between the representation of self-location in the local environment and the multisensory representation of one’s own body. (shrink)

One of the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth century, Søren Kierkegaard often expressed himself through pseudonyms and disguises. Taken from his personal writings, these private reflections reveal the development of his own thought and personality, from his time as a young student to the deep later internal conflict that formed the basis for his masterpiece of duality Either/Or and beyond. Expressing his beliefs with a freedom not seen in works he published during his lifetime, Kierkegaard here rejects for the first (...) time his father's conventional Christianity and forges the revolutionary idea of the "leap of faith" required for true religious belief. A combination of theoretical argument, vivid natural description and sharply honed wit, the Papers and Journals reveal to the full the passionate integrity of his lifelong efforts "to find a truth which is truth for me." For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. (shrink)

The historian of philosophy often encounters arguments that are enthymematic: they have conclusions that follow from their explicit premises only by the addition of "tacit" or "suppressed" premises. It is a standard practice of interpretation to supply these missing premises, even where the enthymeme is "real," that is, where there is no other context in which the philosopher in question asserts the missing premises. To do so is to follow a principle of charity: other things being equal, one interpretation is (...) better than another just to the extent that the one produces a better argument than the other. We show that this principle leads to paradoxical conclusions, including the following: there is no objectively correct interpretation of any real enthymeme found in the text of a major philosopher; an interpreter will not regard a real enthymeme of a major philosopher as adequately interpreted until he has found a way of reading it that makes it into a good argument; every classical philosopher is infallible and omniscient; major philosophers never disagree. These conclusions are preposterous, but there are indications that they are in fact being reached, as we show by means of a case study of recent scholarship on Plato's Third Man Argument. To avoid the overinterpretation and anachronism that result from the unrestrained use of the principle of charity, one must employ a counterbalancing principle of parsimony: to seek the simplest explanation for the text under discussion. We study the role of the principle of parsimony by means of a mathematical case study, involving the suppressed premises in Euclid's Elements. Here the principle of parsimony plays a larger role than it does in the interpretation of philosophical texts, leading to a sharper distinction between Euclid's geometry and Euclidean geometry than we find between Plato and Platonism. We conclude by comparing two models of interpretation, which we call prospective and retrospective. Although the prospective model of interpretation leads to Platonism rather than to Plato, we argue that it still has a place in Platonic scholarship. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What Power Do I Have? A Nursing Student’s Concerns Lead to a Passion for EthicsAnonymous OneThe day began like many in our ten–week rotation, around the large table in the brightly lit ICCU nurses’ station. Report, which was given by the night charge nurse, included information on all the patients on the unit. Since I had cared for A. G. the previous day, I was eager to know how (...) she had spent the night. She had a debilitating neuro–muscular disease known as myasthenia gravis. Placed on the ventilator days before, it was reported that she was likely to be dependent on the machine for life. In the late 1970’s there were very few facilities that accepted ventilator dependent patients. She might be with us for a long time.When I entered her room for the first time, I saw a frail older woman with kind eyes and a warm smile. She was breathing with the help of the ventilator through her tracheostomy tube. I learned through her chart that she had no known family. On the day I took care of her, no one came to see her and she had no visitors the previous evening. She lived in a local long–term care facility and was brought to the hospital after she developed respiratory distress. A. G. was unable to move in the bed due to her condition and required frequent suctioning along with turning and repositioning for comfort.Despite her weakness, A. G. was able to communicate silently by mouthing the words for what she wanted and by nodding and shaking her head. I found her to be quite skilled in non–verbal [End Page 93] communication since it took minimal effort to understand what she wanted, but the activity tired her easily. I had just completed A. G.’s morning care when her physician came in to examine her. After completing his assessment, he stopped and leaned in closely to speak with her. He began asking a number of questions about whether she wanted to spend the rest of her life in this way, on a ventilator. She shook her head. Continuing the line of questioning in different ways, she responded to him. I wondered why he was asking these questions. After seeing her response, the physician asked me to get 30 mg of morphine from the narcotics cabinet. Although I didn’t understand the implication of the request, I complied.While I was retrieving the medication from the narcotics cabinet, the charge nurse came to tell me I was being reassigned to a new admission. When I asked why, she told me she couldn’t discuss it, but asked me to please do what she said. I left her standing there, wondering what was going on. After assisting with the new admission, I went back to see A.G.; her door was closed. When I opened the door, the ventilator tubing hung over the side of the machine. Looking down at the bed, I was shocked to find A.G. had been disconnected. She was dead. In a state of disbelief and panic, I sought out the charge nurse to find out what happened. It was clear that I was not to know. I asked her a number of questions but she adeptly changed the subject and redirected me to other activities. By then it was lunchtime and my instructor had left the unit. I asked to be excused and went to seek her out.When I told my instructor what happened, a look of doubt came over her face. “You think Doctor M. killed your patient? That would never happen.” Although I tried to tell her the story, she too, dismissed me, telling me my story didn’t make sense. I was distraught. An overwhelming sense of dread came over me and I began to cry. She encouraged me to go home, which I did.Happily, I had the weekend to recover before returning to clinical. I never found out what happened to A. G. and neither my instructor nor the charge nurse ever spoke to me about my experience. In fact, it seemed no one believed my story... (shrink)

Contesting that a debate on evidence-based health care has taken place, this article charts three paths to the future: continuing avoidance of debate by proponents of evidence-based medicine (EBM); conflict, which the EBM movement courts and critics have espoused, and dialogue. The last portal allows for integration, which would end the disagreement between EBM and its critics and make a debate unnecessary. In search of integration, I sketch a bridge whose construction requires not compromise but a win- win approach. (...) The bridge is a medicine of meaning (MOM). Consolidating multiple pillars of evidence to unify questions that are not necessarily the same for protagonists and critics of EBM, a MOM contends that the purpose or meaning of medicine is always healing and helping, and each party finds meaning in medicine by contributing to this common purpose in its own distinctive way. (shrink)

The present study examined what participants perceive of their hand movements when using a tool. In the experiments different gains for either the x-axis or the y-axis perturbed the relation between hand movements on a digitizer tablet and cursor movements on a display. As a consequence of the perturbation participants drew circles on the display while their covered hand movements followed either vertical or horizontal ellipses on the digitizer tablet. When asked to evaluate their hand movements, participants were extremely uncertain (...) about their trajectories. By varying the amount of visual feedback, findings indicated that the low awareness of one’s own movements originated mainly from an insufficient quality of the humans’ tactile and proprioceptive system or from an insufficient spatial reconstruction of this information in memory. (shrink)

Context: Radical constructivism claims that we have no final truth criteria for establishing one ontology over another. This leaves us with the question of how we can come to know anything in a viable manner. According to von Glasersfeld, radical constructivism is a theory of knowledge rather than a philosophy of the world in itself because we do not have access to a human-independent world. He considers knowledge as the ordering of experience to cope with situations in a satisfactory way. (...) Problem: Von Foerster and Krippendorff show that the central goal of a constructivist theory of knowing must be to find a way of putting the knower into a known that is constructed so as to keep the knower, as well as the knowing process, viable in practice. Method: The conceptual and philosophical analysis of present theories and their necessary prerequisites suggests that such foundation for viable knowing can be built on the analysis of what the ontological prerequisites are for establishing viable observing, cognition, communication and observer-communicators, and communication media and vehicles. Results: The moment an observer chooses to accept his/her own embodied conscious presence in this world as well as language, he/she must accept other humans as partly independently existing conversation partners; if knowledge and knowing has to make sense, he/she must also accept as prerequisites for our observation and conversation a pre-linguistic reality from which our bodies come and which our conversation is often about. Furthermore, we can no longer claim that there is a reality that we do not know anything about: From being here in conversation, we know that the world can produce more or less stable embodied consciousnesses that can exchange and construct conceptual meanings through embodied conversations and actions that last over time and exist in space-time and mind, and are correlated to our embodied practices. We can also see that our communication works through signs for all living systems as well as in human language, understood as a structured and progressively developed system of communication. The prerequisite for this social semiotic production of meaning is the fourfold “semiotic star of cybersemiotics,” which includes at least four different worlds: our bodies, the combination of society, culture and language, our consciousness, and also an outer nature. Implications: The semiotic star in cybersemiotics claims that the internal subjective, the intersubjective linguistic, our living bodies, and nature are irreducible and equally necessary as epistemological prerequisites for knowing. The viable reality of any of them cannot be denied without self-refuting paradoxes. There is an obvious connectedness between the four worlds, which Peirce called “synechism.” It also points to Peirce’s conclusion that logic and rationality are part of the process of semiosis, and that meaning in the form of semiosis is a fundamental aspect of reality, not just a construction in our heads. Erratum: The paper erroneously refers to “pleroma.” The correct term is “plemora.” . (shrink)

Generally, I find gatherings of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness more interesting and congenial than the Tucson conferences. There are at least two reasons for this, the first one obvious: the former is smaller. Less crowds, more chances to participate in discussions . The second reason reflects my predispositions, and of course those of the ASSC: the talks, research, and speculation are closely data-driven. I find it highly refreshing to attend talks on consciousness which are reporting experiments (...) done by groups employing stringent quality controls, and to hear speculation which is carefully restrained to inferences that closely and clearly follow from consensually verified data. I find it hopeful that researchers have not abandoned lines of inquiry which have decades of experiments to back them up merely because they have not yet found answers to some particular questions. But hey, these are my own biases; I'm someone who thinks the Skeptical Inquirer is a valuable resource. (shrink)

This essay examines the role of place in painting. This role is multiple – at once attracting our look but also locatory of whatever is displayed in the painting itself and attracting our attention to it as a place distinct from the place where we are painting it or viewing it. Examined here is also the role of the lived body in the apprehension of place in painting: a corporeal animating force that animates a genuinely lived (...) place as it is set forth or intimated in paintings of seen, remembered, or imagined places. Such placially specific paintings are at once a commentary and a continuation on how we experience places in the context of the lived world. Included are analyses of three placially oriented paintings of my own as well as one by de Kooning – all in an effort to show the multivalence of place in painting. (shrink)

The questions of how we can understand others and how we can know what they feel, think and sense have repeatedly preoccupied Wittgenstein since the 1930s and especially in his last writings. In this article, the author will tackle these questions by focusing on the other as other or strange. For it is also the strangeness of others, their otherness as such, that makes it difficult and even impossible to recognize and understand their inner life. As she will show, such (...) otherness can be made comprehensible by fictional narratives, in which aspects of others’ lives are related to what is one’s own, i.e., our own inner experience, such that we can find ourselves in them. Moreover, she will argue that this idea of making something comprehensible through fictional narratives has a special methodological relevance for Wittgenstein when it comes to understanding what is ‘one’s own’ in the broadest sense. (shrink)

Introduction Reza Davari Ardakni, the Iranian contemporary philosopher, distinguishes development from Western modernity; in that it considers modernity as natural and organic changes that Europe has gone through, but sees development as a planned design for implementing modernity in other countries. As a result, the closedness of development concerns only the developing countries, not Western modern ones. Davari emphasizes that the Western modernity has a universality that pertains to a unique reason and a unified world. The only way of thinking (...) in this world is a philosophical thought based on human self-centered reason, and given the pervasiveness of Western civilization. Therefore, Davari does not consider Westernization as mere imitation of Western customs and methods, but rather as a way of existence in the world. Westernization is a subjective view of the world and beings. Westernization is not optional, enabling non-Western people to avoid it. According to the Westernization scenario, the world today is entirely Westernized, and Davari considers Westernization as the inevitable fate of the people of this era, seeing two alternatives for them, both of which ultimately lead to the same destination, which is to embrace development; either they seize the power of science and technology and join the process of global modernization and participate in it, or they become subdued by this process and accept it without participation. Davari regards the first type of Westernization as active and the second type as passive. Problematique Therefore, underdevelopment is not a concept of the ancient world, nor even of a world between the ancient and the modern, or on the threshold of modernization. Underdevelopment is a condition of suspension and timelessness and being exposed to modernization. To escape the paradox of underdevelopment, which is the inevitable historical fate of non-modernized societies, Davari sees no way out other than embracing development. In other words, Westernized societies, which have become confused due to modernization, have no escape route other than turning to development. Therefore, some critics of Davari accuse the theory of Westernization of being a theoretical rupture. M. T. Tabatabaei, by rejecting the theoretical rupture in the theory of Westernization, believes that in the argument of Davari, we are only faced with a shift from a philosophical to an intellectual level. Tabatabaei, by avoiding providing a philosophical response to the critics of the theoretical rupture, believes that the introduction of active Westernization and collaboration in science and technology as a solution to escape from underdevelopment conditions, is only a shift from a philosophical level to an intellectual level and does not involve a rupture. Therefore, it seems that the philosophical issue of how or the possibility of escaping from underdevelopment conditions is still an open non answered problem. In this study, seeking a philosophical answer to this problem, an attempt has been made to summarize Davari's definitions of development, underdevelopment, participation in the world of science, and the role of humanities and social sciences in development, using his writings and speeches. It is proposed that a way to escape from the clesedness of development based on Davari's views, is to make use of analytical method with emphasizing on concepts and theories of the philosophy and metaphysics of science. Argument According to Davari, the social and human sciences that are responsible for development planning in underdeveloped societies must consider the characteristics of underdevelopment in order to facilitate the transition to more favorable conditions. Davari identifies the following conditions for successful development: 1) replacing tradition with science as the organizing and coordinating principle in society, 2) recognizing the universality of philosophy and science of the Western modernity and the impossibility of blindly imitation and adopting it, 3) inevitability of actively engaging and interacting with development, 4) recognizing the internal dynamics of scientific progress and avoiding authoritarian control, and 5) promoting free participation in the scientific paradigms. Therefore, Davari suggests the following steps towards development: 1) recognizing and understanding the problems of society and the local ecosystem, 2) understanding the philosophical and cultural foundations of Western civilization, 3) understanding the historical context and paradigms of science, 4) understanding the philosophical and metaphysical foundations of science, 5) recognizing the intellectual and philosophical capacities of our own community, and 6) reflecting our own philosophical and metaphysical assumptions in the scientific world in a way that is compatible with scientific methods. Given the motivations for change in science at both the global and national levels, including the emergence of heterodox or indigenous sciences, and the inevitable nature of development, Davari points to the possibility of a path between absolute rejecting or accepting the mainstream social and human sciences. However, this path is challenging and contingent upon the aforementioned conditions and steps of transition. Conclusion It is necessary to seek this path within the realm of the philosophy and metaphysics of science, particularly in the origins and foundations of the social and human sciences. Research in the metaphysics and philosophy of the social sciences provides the opportunity for active scientific engagement in the scientific paradigms and a reconsideration of the foundations of science, allowing for different philosophical foundations while are compatible with scientific methods. Successfully finding a path between absolute rejecting or accepting the existing social sciences will lead to an internal transformation within the field of science and, in fact, will advance the boundaries of knowledge. Therefore, it is possible, while adhering to the conditions of transition and actively participating in the world of science and technology, and accepting the unity of modernity and avoiding selectivity and imitation, to search for a way to overcome the closedness of development through a reconsideration of the philosophical and metaphysical foundations of science, while recognizing our own intellectual heritage and critically assessing Western science and technology. (shrink)

There are good reasons for envisioning a global discourse about God, premised necessarily agreed upon perfections considered to be by definition proper to God, and for thinking through the implications of our understanding of God for morality. Philosophically, it makes sense to hold that claims about omnipotence, omniscience, and other superlative perfections are indeed maximal, and define “God” wherever the terminology of divine persons is taken up. Religiously too, it makes sense to assert that a deity possessed of perfections is (...) not just the deity of one’s own tribe or religion, but also the deity of the whole world, whether acknowledged as such or not. This essay delves into the larger set of rich complexities by three moves. First, I look into a single extended historical case of the extension of the discourse about God beyond the Christian West, the discourse on God proffered by Western Jesuit missionaries in India from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. Second, I place next to that Jesuit learning the instance of a famed Hindu theologian’s discourse on God, God’s perfections, and their moral implications. Third, I briefly step back and assess the dangers and fruitful prospects inherent in thinking about God and morality in an interreligious context. (shrink)

ArgumentIn theAlmagest, Ptolemy finds that the apogee of Mercury moves progressively at a speed equal to his value for the rate of precession, namely one degree per century, in the tropical reference system of the ecliptic coordinates. He generalizes this to the other planets, so that the motions of the apogees of all five planets are assumed to be equal, while the solar apsidal line is taken to be fixed. In medieval Islamic astronomy, one change in this general proposition took (...) place because of the discovery of the motion of the solar apogee in the ninth century, which gave rise to lengthy discussions on the speed of its motion. Initially Bīrūnī and later Ibn al-Zarqālluh assigned a proper motion to it, although at different rates. Nevertheless, appealing to the Ptolemaic generalization and interpreting it as a methodological axiom, the dominant idea became to extend it in order to include the motion of the solar apogee as well. Another change occurred after correctly making a distinction between the motion of the apogees and the rate of precession. Some Western Islamic astronomers generalized Ibn al-Zarqālluh's proper motion of the solar apogee to the apogees of the planets. Analogously, Ibn al-Shāṭir maintained that the motion of the apogees is faster than precession. Nevertheless, the Ptolemaic generalization in the case of the equality of the motions of the apogees remained untouchable, despite the notable development of planetary astronomy, in both theoretical and observational aspects, in the late Islamic period. (shrink)

Inspired by the work of Hannah Arendt, this response article focusses on the tension between hope in the future and lost hope in the present inherent in the modern idea of progress. The backdrop of the Suite ‘Education after Progress’ is some of the interrelated challenges that we are facing today, such as climate change, new pandemics, mass migration, and the rise of populism. Drawing on different philosophical concepts and strands, the five articles in the Suite explore what it would (...) mean to learn and educate beyond the imagery of progress. Thinking beyond, however, is never an easy task and the question becomes how to orient oneself in this new philosophical landscape without losing track of what is educationally important and meaningful. After responding to each article, focussing on five possible connections between them (change, orientation, time, situatedness, and immanence), the response article concludes with the more general question of what place, if any, concepts as the past, conservation, and preservation have in an education ‘after’ progress. (shrink)

One of the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth century, Søren Kierkegaard often expressed himself through pseudonyms and disguises. Taken from his personal writings, these private reflections reveal the development of his own thought and personality, from his time as a young student to the deep later internal conflict that formed the basis for his masterpiece of duality Either/Or and beyond. Expressing his beliefs with a freedom not seen in works he published during his lifetime, Kierkegaard here rejects for the first (...) time his father's conventional Christianity and forges the revolutionary idea of the "leap of faith" required for true religious belief. A combination of theoretical argument, vivid natural description and sharply honed wit, the Papers and Journals reveal to the full the passionate integrity of his lifelong efforts "to find a truth which is truth for me." For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. (shrink)

In this new volume in the Oxford Psychology Series, the author presents a highly readable account of the cognitive unconscious, focusing in particular on the problem of implicit learning. Implicit learning is defined as the acquisition of knowledge that takes place independently of the conscious attempts to learn and largely in the absence of explicit knowledge about what was acquired. One of the core assumptions of this argument is that implicit learning is a fundamental, "root" process, one that lies (...) at the very heart of the adaptive behavioral repertoire of every complex organism. The author's goals are to outline the essential features of implicit learning that have emerged from the many studies that have been carried out in a variety of experimental laboratories over the past several decades; to present the various alternative perspectives on this issue that have been proposed by other researchers and to try to accommodate these views with his own; to structure the literature so that it can be seen in the context of standard heuristics of evolutionary biology; to present the material within a functionalist approach and to try to show why the experimental data should be seen as entailing particular epistemological perspectives; and to present implicit processing as encompassing a general and ubiquitous set of operations that have wide currency and several possible applications. Chapter 1 begins with the core problem under consideration in this book, a characterization of "implicit learning" as it has come to be used in the literature. Reber puts this seemingly specialized topic into a general framework and suggests a theoretical model based on standard heuristics of evolutionary biology. In his account, Reber weaves a capsule history of interest in and work on the cognitive unconscious. Chapter 2 turns to a detailed overview of the experimental work on the acquisition of implicit knowledge, which currently is of great interest. Chapter 3 develops the evolutionary model within which one can see learning and cognition as richly intertwining issues and not as two distinct fields with one dominating the other. Finally, Chapter 4 explores a variety of entailments and speculations concerning implicit cognitive processes and their general role in the larger scope of human performance. (shrink)

The feeling of error (FOE) is the subjective experience that something went wrong during a reasoning or calculation task. The main goal of the present study was to assess the accuracy of the FOE in the context of mental mathematical calculation. We used the number bisection task (NBT) to evoke this metacognitive feeling and assessed it by asking participants if they felt they have committed an error after solving the task. In the NBT participants have to determine whether the number (...) presented in the middle of a triplet corresponds to the arithmetic mean of the two outer numbers (e.g., 07_16_25) with a Yes/No answer. Our results show that FOE reports were strongly correlated with arithmetic errors and numerical properties of the NBT, suggesting that the FOE accurately represents the error. This finding indicates that even very fast metacognitive feelings are reliable when it comes to evaluating one’s own mental performance. Moreover, our results suggest that the occurrence of FOEs is determined by the fluency with which each triplet was solved and the post-decision evaluation processes that occurred after the NBT was solved. Additionally, we asked participants to report their confidence in the given answer for the cases where they did not report FOEs. Participants reported less confidence for the (objectively) incorrect answers than for the (objectively) correct ones, suggesting that in cases where they did not have a conscious FOE they still were able to implicitly detect their errors. Remarkably, confidence was also determined by the fluency of the NBT. (shrink)

I BEGIN WITH A PUZZLE of sorts. Time is one; space is two—at least two. Time comes always already unified, one time. Thus we say “What time is it now?” and not “Which time is it now?” We do not ask, “What space is it?” Yet we might ask: “Which space are we in?”. Any supposed symmetry of time and space is skewed from the start. If time is self-consolidating—constantly gathering itself together in coherent units such as years or hours (...) or semesters or seasons— space is self-proliferating. Take, for example, the dimensionality of space. One dimension in space is represented by a point or a line, whose radically reduced format mocks the extensiveness of cosmic space. Two dimensions, as in a plane figure, also falls far short of our sense that space spreads out indefinitely far beyond the perceiving subject. Only with three dimensions do we begin to approach an adequation between the structure and the sense of space. For then the subject is surrounded by something sufficiently roomy in which to live and move. Indeed, as Aristotle, Kant, and Merleau-Ponty all remark, the three-dimensionality of space directly reflects our bodily state, that is, the fact that as upright beings three perpendicular planes implicitly meet and intersect in us. Even here, proliferation abounds: our bilateral symmetry means that each dimension is doubled: one vertical plane bifurcates into “up” and “down,” the other vertical plane into “front” and “back,” and the horizontal plane into “right” and “left.” Thus subject-centered space is triple, only to be redoubled. Further, if we think of spatiality not as body-based but as locatory—as determined by landmarks and other locales in the environment—the proliferation is more striking still. There are the four cardinal directions, which themselves split easily into the thirty two points of a compass. Nor need we be so arithmetically well-rounded. Even apart from fancy mathematical models of n –dimensional space, and recent technological instantiations of virtual space, there is no end to the number or ways in which we can be oriented in space—in accordance with what Deleuze and Guattari call “the variability, the polyvocity of directions” by which we can move in any given spatial scene. Beyond direction, however, is place. Heidegger remarks that “space has been split up into places.” The fact is that we continually find ourselves immersed in a multiplex spatial network whose nodal points are supplied by particular places. If space is infinitely large, place is indefinitely many. (shrink)

I BEGIN WITH A PUZZLE of sorts. Time is one; space is two—at least two. Time comes always already unified, one time. Thus we say “What time is it now?” and not “Which time is it now?” We do not ask, “What space is it?” Yet we might ask: “Which space are we in?”. Any supposed symmetry of time and space is skewed from the start. If time is self-consolidating—constantly gathering itself together in coherent units such as years or hours (...) or semesters or seasons— space is self-proliferating. Take, for example, the dimensionality of space. One dimension in space is represented by a point or a line, whose radically reduced format mocks the extensiveness of cosmic space. Two dimensions, as in a plane figure, also falls far short of our sense that space spreads out indefinitely far beyond the perceiving subject. Only with three dimensions do we begin to approach an adequation between the structure and the sense of space. For then the subject is surrounded by something sufficiently roomy in which to live and move. Indeed, as Aristotle, Kant, and Merleau-Ponty all remark, the three-dimensionality of space directly reflects our bodily state, that is, the fact that as upright beings three perpendicular planes implicitly meet and intersect in us. Even here, proliferation abounds: our bilateral symmetry means that each dimension is doubled: one vertical plane bifurcates into “up” and “down,” the other vertical plane into “front” and “back,” and the horizontal plane into “right” and “left.” Thus subject-centered space is triple, only to be redoubled. Further, if we think of spatiality not as body-based but as locatory—as determined by landmarks and other locales in the environment—the proliferation is more striking still. There are the four cardinal directions, which themselves split easily into the thirty two points of a compass. Nor need we be so arithmetically well-rounded. Even apart from fancy mathematical models of n –dimensional space, and recent technological instantiations of virtual space, there is no end to the number or ways in which we can be oriented in space—in accordance with what Deleuze and Guattari call “the variability, the polyvocity of directions” by which we can move in any given spatial scene. Beyond direction, however, is place. Heidegger remarks that “space has been split up into places.” The fact is that we continually find ourselves immersed in a multiplex spatial network whose nodal points are supplied by particular places. If space is infinitely large, place is indefinitely many. (shrink)

Objectives: This study aimed to determine attitudinal and self reported behavioural variations between medical students in different years to scenarios involving academic misconduct.Design: A cross-sectional study where students were given an anonymous questionnaire that asked about their attitudes to 14 scenarios describing a fictitious student engaging in acts of academic misconduct and asked them to report their own potential behaviour.Setting: Dundee Medical School.Participants: Undergraduate medical students from all five years of the course.Method: Questionnaire survey.Main measurements: Differences in medical students’ attitudes (...) to the 14 scenarios and their reported potential behaviour with regards to the scenarios in each of the years.Results: For most of the scenarios there was no significant difference in the response between the years. Significant differences in the responses were found for some of the scenarios across the years, where a larger proportion of year one students regarded the scenario as wrong and would not engage in the behaviour, compared to other years. These scenarios included forging signatures, resubmitting work already completed for another part of the course, and falsifying patient information.Conclusion: Observed differences between the years for some scenarios may reflect a change in students’ attitudes and behaviour as they progress though the course. The results may be influenced by the educational experience of the students, both in terms of the learning environment and assessment methods used. These differences may draw attention to the potential but unintentional pressures placed on medical students to engage in academic misconduct. The importance of developing strategies to engender appropriate attitudes and behaviours at the undergraduate level must be recognised. (shrink)

Book description: * Seventeen brand-new essays by leading philosophers and psychologists * Genuinely interdisciplinary work, at the forefront of both fields * Includes a valuable introduction, uniting common threads Leading philosophers and psychologists join forces to investigate a set of problems to do with agency and self-awareness, in seventeen specially written essays. In recent years there has been much psychological and neurological work purporting to show that consciousness and self-awareness play no role in causing actions, and indeed to demonstrate that (...) free will is an illusion. The essays in this volume subject the assumptions that motivate such claims to sustained interdisciplinary scrutiny. Patients with Anarchic Hand syndrome sometimes find their hands perform apparently goal-directed actions which the patients disown, yet seem to be unable to suppress (for example, reaching out for someone else's food in a restaurant). On the face of it, these patients lack the kind of control and self-awareness we ordinarily take ourselves to have when acting intentionally. Questions raised by this phenomenon include: What is involved in being aware of an action as one's own? What is the nature of the control these patients are lacking and which characterizes normal intentional actions? What is the relation between a priori explanations of consciousness and self-consciousness, on the one hand, and empirical work on the information-processing mechanisms involved in action control, on the other? Questions of action control and self-awareness tend to be treated separately in both philosophy and psychology. The central idea behind this volume is that outstanding unresolved issues on both topics, and in both disciplines, can only be resolved by an interdisciplinary examination of the relations between them. The editors' useful introductory essay offers a guide to cross-disciplinary reading of the contributions, and makes connections between them explicit. The book will be compulsory reading for psychologists and philosophers working on action explanation, and for anyone interested in the relation between the brain sciences and consciousness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Scheeben's Place in Nineteenth-Century Catholic Theology and the Question of His Theological MethodEvan S. KoopMatthias Joseph Scheeben (1835–1888) is enjoying a moment in English-speaking Catholic theological circles. In recent years his thought has attracted increasing interest from scholars who view him as an important forerunner to some of the central currents of Catholic theology in the twentieth century,1 a trend that promises only to accelerate with the (...) recent publication of the initial volumes of the first complete translation of his monumental Handbuch der katholischen Dogmatik into English.2 The much-debated question of Scheeben's proper place in the history of Catholic theology in the nineteenth century therefore, has gained a new relevance. While the present study of course, cannot and does not claim to bring this dispute to a definitive resolution, nevertheless it is hoped that it may at least help to clarify some common misunderstandings that can arise from hasty generalizations, and offer a few insights—which are not in fact new, but which are too often ignored by English-speaking scholars today—into the way in which the thought of the Jesuit theologians of the so-called "Roman School" may have served to influence Scheeben's unique theological method.In the past, numerous attempts have been made to situate Scheeben's thought within a particular theological school, and members of rival schools, in turn, have sought to claim him (or indeed repudiate him) as one of their [End Page 471] own.3 Amid the flood of divergent assessments of Scheeben's theological affinities, there at least exists some scholarly consensus about his greatness as a theologian. In 1935, during the centenary celebrations of Scheeben's birth, Pope Pius XI lauded him as a "man of genius" and proposed his thought to the students of the Germanicum as a model of the proper unity of theology's ascetical and dogmatic elements.4 In a Festschrift dedicated to Scheeben's theology published in the same year, Martin Grabmann judged that Scheeben was "the greatest dogmatic theologian of the nineteenth century,"5 and Carl Feckes, Scheeben's successor at the Cologne seminary, named him "the greatest Mariologist of our time."6 On the eve of the Second Vatican Council, no less an authority than Hans Urs von Balthasar could proclaim that Scheeben was "the greatest German theologian to-date [1961] since the time of Romanticism."7Nearly all, likewise, acknowledge the great difficulty of comprehending Scheeben's theology: even a German theologian of the stature of Joseph Ratzinger laments that Scheeben "has not made it easy, either as a professor for his hearers or as a writer for his readers. His language is rigorous, marked by the laborious travail of thought." The fact that he draws abundantly from such sources as Aquinas and the Greek Fathers "lends to his work [End Page 472] breadth and depth, but does not necessarily facilitate easy access."8 Similarly, the ultramontane Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, in his preface to an English abridgment of Scheeben's Dogmatik, warned that Scheeben's greatest work "requires not only reading but study; and study with patient care and conscientious desire to understand."9 Perhaps it is for this reason that it has become almost proverbial to observe that Scheeben's works are much praised, but seldom read.10Far less agreement, however, exists when it comes to the question of what kind of theologian Scheeben was, or to what theological school he belonged. Was he, asks the great Scheeben scholar Eugen Paul, "the prototype of those theologians who represent (if not establish) the infamous 'two-storey theory [Stockwerkstheorie] with respect to nature and grace—or does he rather belong to those who insist precisely on the transcendental unity of nature and grace?"11 Is Scheeben, in other words, a Neo-Scholastic, even "the most precious flower ever granted to the spring of Neo-Scholasticism,"12 as he was called in the first major study of his theology produced in the twentieth century? Or is he, instead, to be classed with the theologians of the Tübingen School who, under the influence of Romantic Idealism, sought to renew Catholic theology through... (shrink)

Pessimists about moral testimony hold that there is something suboptimal about forming moral beliefs by deferring to another. This paper motivates an analogous claim about self-knowledge of the reason-responsive attitudes. When it comes to your own mind, it seems important to know things “from the inside”, in the first-personal way, rather than putting your trust in another. After motivating Pessimism, the paper offers an explanation of its truth. First-person knowledge is distinctive because it involves knowing a state of mind and (...) finding it intelligible from one’s point of view. It concludes by considering the value of this form of self-understanding. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume XX, Number 2, November 1994, pp. 261-287 Collingwood's Understanding of Hume S. K. WERTZ What was David Hume's reception in the British idealistic tradition? In this paper, I shall contribute a short chapter on this question by examining Hume's place in R. G. Collingwood's thought.1 Such an examination has been lacking in the literature, so what follows is a comprehensive study of Collingwood's use of (...) Hume throughout all of R.G.'s writings. I shall mainly focus on two main, unrelated discussions of Hume: first is the theory of the imagination which primarily occurs in The Principles of Art, and second is the set of relations between human nature and human history which is principally found in The Idea of History. These sections will be followed by a section on minor discussions and omissions and a conclusion. It is a common misconception that Collingwood (1889-1943) has little to offer Hume scholarship, and I wish to amend that here. Actually, Collingwood has good insights into the nature of the imagination and its role in human understanding, besides instructive thoughts on Hume on human nature and history, even though his discussion of the latter is flawed. This essay serves both historical and philosophical purposes. It is to sample Hume's place in early twentieth century British idealism at a time when he began to emerge as an important philosophical figure worthy of careful study. (By "idealism," I mean the philosophical movement which takes ideas to be an irreducible part of the world and whose program is opposed to both materialism and realism.) So Collingwood's portrait is historically interesting. But over and above this, it carries significant philosophical amendments, S. K. Wertz is at the Department of Philosophy, Texas Christian University, Box 30781, Fort Worth, TX 76129 USA. e-mail: [email protected] 262 S. K. Wertz criticisms, and suggestions about Hume's thought and the eighteenth century intellectual climate. Collingwood has mostly been studied as a philosopher of history or as an aesthetician, but not in toto from the perspective of one of the historical figures to whom he is deeply indebted. Such a view affords a portrait of Hume that is instructive and rewarding. The comparison of Hume and Collingwood lead us to finer appreciation of both philosophers. Let us first look at Collingwood's positive contribution. Imagination Collingwood begins his analysis by declaring his intentions: I shall...try to show that there are such things, to be with what Hume (whose account of them I shall take as my starting-point) called 'ideas' as distinct from 'impressions'. I shall try to show that there is a special activity of mind correlative to them, and that this is what we generally call imagination, as distinct from sensation on the one hand and intellect on the other. (PA 170-71, emphasis added) Why would Collingwood start with Hume's distinction between impressions and ideas? Undoubtedly, this means that Collingwood is willing to accept the validity of the distinction and to build on it. Isn't this a strange place for an idealist to begin? Not really. When we look at British philosophy at the turn of this century, we find idealists preoccupied with the distinction,2 so it is not extraordinary to find Collingwood utilizing it to some extent. Like most Oxford students of the time, Collingwood read Locke, Berkeley, and Hume in his undergraduate program. Consequently we find them in the problems he addresses. "It was Hume who first perceived the [Lockean] problem [of confusing sensation with imagination]," Collingwood attributes, "and tried to solve it by distinguishing ideas from impressions" (PA 200). In detail: He [Hume] was right when he laid it down that the immediate concern of thought is not with impressions but with ideas; that it is ideas, not impressions, that are associated with one another and thus built up into the fabric of knowledge; and that ideas, though 'derived' from impressions, are not mere relics of them like an after-taste of onions or an after-image of the sun (as Lockeans like Condillac supposed), but something different in kind: different, if not in what he... (shrink)

In this article, I seek to illuminate the texture of moral experience. I pursue that aim through a close reading of David Lean's film, Brief Encounter, produced in 1946. The chief protagonist in the film undergoes a moral odyssey that reveals and tests all that she has understood about how to conduct a life. Her experience sheds light on the constituents of an individual moral sensibility as well as how its enactment appears in practice when one confronts a heartfelt difficulty. (...) I argue that moral experience is best understood through the idiom of narrative and character, rather than through ethical language that places formal or universal principle at the center of the moral life. In the workshop of the moral self, as Lean's protagonist reveals, the task is not to fashion or take on universal principles but rather to cultivate virtuous relations with other people in the here-and-now. (shrink)

Antiphon's speech on the murder of Herodes has been variously dated by several scholars, but all seem to agree that it was delivered a good many years after the revolt and recapture of Mytilene. According to this opinion the speaker in § 74 declares himself too young to know much of what happened in those days. Before going into this more carefully, it seems necessary to visualize the situation of the accused man. In order to achieve this the best we (...) can do is to follow his own words in the Sirjyrjcris, §§ 20–24: ‘I travelled from Mytilene on the same ship as the lost man; we were on our journey to Ainos, I to see my father—he happened to be there at that time—he in order to sell some slaves to Thracian natives. These natives, who were to pay the ransom, and the slaves were on board too.—All this I will prove by witnesses.—As we, however, met with stormy weather, we were compelled to put in to a harbour in the territory of Methymna; there we found that* ship into which Herodes changed; in that ship, according to the accusers, he died. Now all this was mere chance: obviously I had not persuaded him to travel with me, no, he was travelling on his own business. Then I, personally, had a very good reason for travelling to Ainos; our putting in to that harbour was not premeditatd, we were compelled to. And again, when we were lying at anchor, the change of ship took place without any trickery or fraud: again, it was done because of necessity. The ship, viz., on which we had been travelling was not covered, the other one on the contrary had a covering; that was because of the rain.—All this I will prove by witnesses.—After boarding the other ship we drank some wine. After that it is only known that he left the ship, but did not return. I myself never left the ship that night at all. When the next day but did not return. I myself never left the ship that night at all. When the next day he had disappeared, we looked for him, I as well as the others. Probably it seemed strange to them, it certainly did to me. And it was I who caused a messenger to be sent to Mytilene, not one of the crew or the passengers belonging to Herodes, but my own servant. If I had been guilty, I would not, of course, have sent a man who might have informed against me. But when the man could not be found in Mytilene, nor anywhere else, and when the weather had improved and all the other ships were putting out, I also sailed.—All this I will prove by witnesses. (shrink)

The starting point of my study is Kant’s remark to the effect that Garve in his treatise on the connection between morality and politics presents arguments in defence of unjust principles. Recognition of these principles is, according to Kant, an inadvisable concession to those who are inclined to abuse it. I interpret this judgement by making a detailed comparison of the texts of the two treatises. I demonstrate that Garve’s work is an eclectic attempt to combine in one concept the (...) lessons of historical experience with the ideas drawn from British empiricism and German rationalism. These ideas were criticised by Kant in his “critical” period. There is a consensus among researchers that Garve condoned the expansionist policy of Frederick II of Prussia, totally denied that legality in international relations was possible and in general deserved the reputation of an conservative. From that point of view the key values for Garve were the security and well-being of the state. I offer an alternative interpretation of Garve’s position because I believe that the value of political stability plays an important role in it. Such an interpretation makes it possible to treat Garve’s narrative as it was assessed by Kant, i.e. as a concession to the common principles of political practice as a result of a failure to find the guiding theory. My study has established that the role of Garve’s work in the writing of Kant’s treatise Toward Perpetual Peace was more significant than Kant’s own words suggest. Besides, I show that it was under Garve’s influence that Kant turned to the problem of excessive complexity of the principles involved in the search for concrete political decisions. Garve obviously laments this complexity and yet makes these principles still more complex. Kant offers a simpler solution of the problem on the basis of his theory of morals and right. (shrink)