A concise and readable account of Burke's political philosophy.

First published in 1973, this title offers a concise and readable account of Burke's political philosophy. As well as examining the foundation for Burke's thought, the book also provides much needed connections between the fields of history and political theory. Critical comment and analysis of Burke's attitudes to the problems of the second half of the eighteenth century are also included.

How can different religions be compared? Which religions are true? To raise such questions univocally of all religions there first needs to be some objective grounds of comparison. Neville's book develops and empirically tests a speculative hypothesis that provides these grounds. This hypothesis has two parts--the ontological and cosmological. Neville maps out these parts along with his primary concept of divinity explicated in terms of creation ex nihilo. He then uses his hypothesis to compare the multiple-layered concept of divinity--masks of (...) God--found in various religions, especially the Christian and Chinese. (shrink)

In this essay I wish to raise the question of whether it is meaningful to say that a certain sort of robot is in pain. This is, of course, not an empirical question. There exists no robot of the sort I shall describe. But, I shall argue, if such a robot did in fact exist, it would be meaningful to say it is in pain.

Martine argues that "the relation between the determinate and indeterminate dimensions of our experiences precludes any attempt to restrict our conceptions of intelligibility to the determinately biased models that we have used in the past". Consider the world we experience in our daily lives. We come into contact with all sorts of things. What these things are and what we know of them is determined as much by what they are not as by what they are. This suggests there are (...) boundaries to be drawn, but not eternal, unchanging, absolutely clear and distinct boundaries, between what is determinate and what is not. Yet our Western bias is for the absolutely clear, the certain. Such clarity, however, is found only in our maps of reality which, divorced from the phenomenal world, we confuse with that world. (shrink)

What are the relations, if any, between philosophy and literary style? Lang asserts "that the 'literariness' of philosophical writing is not accidental or ornamental but unavoidable--imbedded in that discourse and so also in its substantive questions and proposed solutions". Lang attempts to clarify and support his thesis in discussions of philosophy as literature and philosophy of literature.

This volume consists of papers given to the Royal Institute of Philos ophy Conference on 'Philosophy and the Visual Arts: Seeing and Abstracting' given at the University of Bristol in September 1985. The contributors here come about equally from the disciplines of Philosophy and Art History and for that reason the Conference was hosted jointly by the Bristol University Departments of Philosophy and History of Art. Other conferences sponsored by the Royal Institute of Philosophy have been concerned with links between (...) Philosophy and related disciplines, but here, with the generous support of South West Arts and with the enthusiastic co-operation of the staff of the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol we were able to attempt even more in the way of bridge building; not only were we able to hold some of our meetings in as possible to the general the Gallery, thus making them as accessible public, but we were also privileged in having our discussions supported by two exhibitions of contemporary painting that together presented contrasting aspects of the abstracting enterprise. One, featuring works by Ian McKeever, and drawings and painting by Frank Auerbach, some of which are discussed and illustrated in the present volume, was about the painterly exploration of 'abstracting from' images in nature and in painting itself. The other, curated by Waldemar Januszczak, while showing some figurative works, was concerned with the 'pure' power of colour perceived 'abstractly, in its own right. (shrink)

Lucas van Valckenborch’s Winter Landscape hangs in the Kinsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It was painted four hundred years ago as one of a set of the four seasons. Measured by sales of reproductions, it is one of the most popular paintings in the museum, though it is by no means the most distinguished example of the genre to which it belongs. The picture is a snow scene. In the long series of represented planed that recede from foreground to horizon, fallen (...) snow covers fields and roves. Across the surface of the canvas and scarcely diminishing in scale from bottom to top, touches of white paint represent falling snow. It is not a small painting, and these are not mere feathery indications, but palpable dabs from a loaded brush. To a taste fed on Modernist painting—or, for the pedantic, to a prejudice fuelled by Modernist accounts of painting—it is by virtue of this surprising frankness that the painting achieves more than mere anecdotal charm. It is not the illusion of depth in the picture that holds our sophisticated attention, nor the atmospheric re-creation of a leaden sky, nor do we admit to being engaged by the over-rehearsed animation of the peasants. What gives us pleasurable pause is the strange and distinctive form of skepticism about appearances that is set in play when the allure of imaginative depth meets resistance from the vividness of decorated surface.5 5. Wollheim uses the term ‘twofoldness’ for ‘this strange duality—of seeing the marked surface, and of seeing something in the surface.’ In his account this experience leads to a thematizing of the image, which ‘ushers in representation.’ Translated into his terminology, my suggestion would be that the Winter Landscape can be seen as catering to a Modernistic taste for the thematizing of ‘twofoldness’ itself. Charles Harrison is staff tutor and reader in the history of art at the Open University. He is the author of English Art and Modernism 1900-1939 , and he is now completing a second volume, English Art and Modernism 1940-1985. He is co-author of A Provisional History of Art & Language , and his most recent book—Essays on Art and Language—is due out in 1989. He has been associated with the Art & Language group since 1971 and is editor of the journal Art-Language. (shrink)

Abstract:Although the idea of intellectual property (IP) rights—proprietary rights to what one invents, writes, paints, composes or creates—is firmly embedded in Western thinking, these rights are now being challenged across the globe in a number of areas. This paper will focus on one of these challenges: government-sanctioned copying of patented drugs without permission or license of the patent owner in the name of national security, in health emergencies, or life-threatening epidemics. After discussing standard rights-based and utilitarian arguments defending intellectual property (...) we will present another model. IP is almost always a result of a long history of scientific or technological development and numbers of networks of creativity, not the act of a single person or a group of people at one moment in time. Thus thinking about and evaluating IP requires thinking about IP as shared rights. A network approach to IP challenges a traditional model of IP. It follows that the owner of those rights has some obligations to share that information or its outcomes. If that conclusion is applied to the distribution of antiretroviral drugs, what pharmaceutical companies are ethically required to do to increase access to these medicines in the developing world will have to be reanalyzed from a more systemic perspective. (shrink)

Ned O'Gorman's Politics for Everybody is, at its core, a defense of politics for our polarized times. In an accessible and impassioned style, O'Gorman argues for a political middle ground, which is not aligned with any particular party or ideology, but which embraces the worth, value, and importance of politics itself. Inspired by Hannah Arendt, O'Gorman shows how political thinking is rooted in common sense and everyday experiences, and is rooted in all of us, even and especially (...) when politics is the last thing we want to talk about. Resisting the deadening of political experience by the bombast of contemporary media, the impoverishment of public discourse, and the low-minded violence of smear campaigns, O'Gorman calls for a purer, simpler relation to politics, one that does justice to the virtues of open, honest exchange, which can be critical without being hateful. Politics for Everybody is, in short, a defense of the dignity of politics in the age of its infamy, and a plea for the notion that to give politics a thinking chance, we must take it more seriously, not write it off. (shrink)

Examines the history and the consequences of living in the contemporary culture of forgetfulness.