This essay argues that the many allusions to the golden fleece motif in The Merchant of Venice provide us with the key to unlocking the meaning of its plot, one that Shakespeare has deliberately shrouded in mystery but at the same time has made available to us.

This essay turns from a discussion of measure as it pertains to poetry to a discussion of Hölderlin’s poem “In Lovely Blueness” in the context of Heidegger’s essay on that poem, “Poetically Man Dwells.” For Hölderlin, paradoxically, although man measures himself against the godhead, there is a sense in which, for man, there is no measure on earth. I argue that Heidegger’s attempt to bridge the gap between absence and presence has the effect of “retheologizing” the poem and distorting its (...) meaning. The argument proceeds partly by measuring several English translation of the poem against one another. (shrink)

At the center of_ In Dark Again in Wonder_ are readings of René Char and George Oppen. Both of these poets achieved recognition at a young age, Char among the French surrealists in the 1930s, Oppen among the American objectivists in the same decade. Both were independent individuals who, having found their way to communities of inventive writers, stepped back and shaped their own idiosyncratic paths. Both responded decisively to the social upheavals of the 1930s and ‘40s. Oppen committed himself (...) to radical politics in the ‘30s, a decision that, as it turned out, led to his not writing poetry for nearly twenty-five years. Char fought in the Resistance in the '40s. Both, in their mature work, developed a kind of poetry that is at once a love poetry, a meditative poetry, and a poetry of encounter. The concluding chapter of the book places the questions raised by Char’s and Oppen’s work in a larger context, tracing the cultural history that shapes our modern experience of inhabiting a tension between an historical and a metaphysical horizon of experience, or, as this appears in a different but related light, a tension between a sociological and an existential understanding of our lives. Char and Oppen are both poets concerned with the old philosophical questions that are still with us—the nature of spiritual freedom, the gathering of the self in relation to death, the meditation on the whole, the turn to Nature as the open space of the whole under the conditions of modernity, the clarification of the ground of vision in eros and love, and the search for the good life—while at the same time they fully engage the social predicaments and promises of their world. "A brilliant, philosophical, and aesthetic approach to twentieth-century poetry that casts important light on the great poetic works of René Char and George Oppen. Revealing the ongoing role of wonder in the post-Romantic tradition, it points to two remarkable poets whose work embodies imagination in the knowledge of inevitable loss, renewal in the awareness of despair. This is a book worth reading for its insight into two poets and the larger literary and philosophical currents in which they lived and worked." _—Sandra L. Bermann, Princeton University_ "This is a brilliant, erudite, beautifully written, and compelling book, one that makes an important contribution to our understanding not only of the two poets on whom it focuses but of the period they inhabit and that we, as their inheritors, continue to inhabit. Robert Baker wears his considerable learning lightly, but he has deep knowledge both of the history of European and American poetry and of the history of philosophy. He has thought deeply and passionately about poetry, philosophy, history, and the ways in which they intertwine." —_Henry Weinfield, University of Notre Dame_ "Robert Baker has written a fine and unusual book: a study of two remarkable poets, one French and the other American, and a concluding reflection of considerable literary and intellectual reach on the gap between history and metaphysics in which both poets found themselves and in which we still subsist. Bake'rs style is synthetic, magisterial, drawing on a capacious knowledge of literature and the history of ideas." —_Kevin Hart, University of Virginia_. (shrink)

This book constitutes one of the most important contributions to recent Kant scholarship. In it, one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Kant, Henry Allison, offers a comprehensive, systematic, and philosophically astute account of all aspects of Kant's views on aesthetics. The first part of the book analyses Kant's conception of reflective judgment and its connections with both empirical knowledge and judgments of taste. The second and third parts treat two questions that Allison insists must be kept distinct: the normativity (...) of pure judgments of taste, and the moral and systematic significance of taste. The fourth part considers two important topics often neglected in the study of Kant's aesthetics: his conceptions of fine art, and the sublime. (shrink)

Bringing together evolutionary biology, psychology, and philosophy, Henry Plotkin presents a new science of knowledge, one that traces an unbreakable link between instinct and our ability to know.

Henry Allison is one of the foremost interpreters of the philosophy of Kant. This new volume collects all his recent essays on Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy. All the essays postdate Allison's two major books on Kant, and together they constitute an attempt to respond to critics and to clarify, develop and apply some of the central theses of those books. Two are published here for the first time. Special features of the collection are: a detailed defence of the (...) author's interpretation of transcendental idealism; a consideration of the Transcendental Deduction and some other recent interpretations thereof; further elaborations of the tensions between various aspects of Kant's conception of freedom and of the complex role of this conception within Kant's moral philosophy. (shrink)

Human brain research is moving into a dilemma. The best way to understand how the human brain works is to study living human brains in living human beings, but ethical and legal standards make it d...

Henry E. Allison presents a comprehensive commentary on Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Allison pays special attention to the structure of the work and its historical and intellectual context. He argues that, despite its relative brevity, the Groundwork is the single most important work in modern moral philosophy.

Henry E. Allison presents a comprehensive commentary on Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals . Allison pays special attention to the structure of the work and its historical and intellectual context. He argues that, despite its relative brevity, the Groundwork is the single most important work in modern moral philosophy.

In this volume Henry Corbin emphasizes the differences between the exoteric and esoteric forms of Islam. He also reveals that whereas in the West philosophy and religion were at odds, they were inseparably linked, at least during this period, in the Islamic world. A valuable section of notes and appendices includes original translation of numerous Sufi treatises.

With the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, the discourse of an authoritarianism and the echoes of a fascist past have moved from the margins to the center of American politics. A culture of war buttressed by the forces of white supremacy and militarization has been unleashed in a series of policies designed to return the United States to a history in which the public sphere was largely white and Christian, and the economy and the (...) state were governed by a ruling corporate elite. Militarization and a war culture have become normalized in the United States and this article explores the ways in which a neo-fascism has emerged that furthers war not only abroad but also at home, especially with regards to the ongoing assaults waged by the state against Muslims, immigrants, women’s reproductive rights, and poor minorities of class and color. Against the rise of neo--fascism, this article advances the idea that education is central to any viable notion of politics, that progressives... (shrink)

Direct-to-Consumer genomics has been a controversial topic for over a decade. Much work has been done on the legal issues it raises. This article asks a different question: What will DTC genomics and its legal issues look like in ten to twenty years? After discussing the five current uses of DTC genomics, it describes three current legal issues: medical uses, privacy of genomic information, and privacy in collection and analysis of human DNA. It then suggests that changes in human genomics (...) and how it is used will make the first of those DTC genomics legal issues less important in the future, but that the third will be increasingly significant. (shrink)

Resolution of the problem of mass nouns depends on an expansion of our semantic/ontological taxonomy. Semantically, mass nouns are neither singular nor plural; they apply to neither just one object, nor to many objects, at a time. But their deepest kinship links them to the plural. A plural phrase — 'the cats in Kingston' — does not denote a single plural thing, but merely many distinct things. Just so, 'the water in the lake' does not denote a single aggregate — (...) it is not ONE, but rather MUCH. The world is not the totality of singular objects, plural objects, and mass objects; for there are no plural or mass objects. It is the totality of single objects and (just) stuff. (shrink)

A central question for philosophical psychology is which mental faculties form natural kinds. There is hot debate over the kind status of faculties as diverse as consciousness, seeing, concepts, emotions, constancy and the senses. In this paper, I take emotions and concepts as my main focus, and argue that questions over the kind status of these faculties are complicated by the undeservedly overlooked fact that natural kinds are indeterminate in certain ways. I will show that indeterminacy issues have led to (...) an impasse in the debates over emotions and concepts. I first consider and reject one way of resolving this impasse. I then suggest a different method, which places more emphasis on a close analysis of predictive and explanatory practices in psychology. I argue that when we apply this method, a new position emerges: that it is indeterminate whether concepts or emotions are natural kinds. They are neither determinately natural kinds, nor determinately not natural kinds. Along the way, we will see that natural kinds have been put to two completely different theoretical uses, which are often been blurred together, and that they are ill-suited to fulfil one of them. (shrink)

Introduction This book is not a systematic commentary on the canonicaJ topoi of "Nietzsche's philosophy." Since my emphasis is on those parts or aspects of ...

This is the first comprehensive study of the sublime in Lucan. Drawing upon renewed literary-critical interest in the tradition of philosophical aesthetics, Henry Day argues that the category of the sublime offers a means of moving beyond readings of Lucan's Bellum Civile in terms of the poem's political commitment or, alternatively, nihilism. Demonstrating in dialogue with theorists from Burke and Kant to Freud, Lyotard and Ankersmit the continuing vitality of Longinus' foundational treatise On the Sublime, Day charts Lucan's complex (...) and instructive exploration of the relationship between sublimity and ethical discourses of freedom and oppression. Through the Bellum Civile's cataclysmic vision of civil war and metapoetic accounts of its own genesis, through its heated linguistic texture and proclaimed effects upon future readers and, most powerfully of all, through its representation of its twin protagonists Caesar and Pompey, Lucan's great epic emerges as a central text in the history of the sublime. (shrink)

The singular ‘farm’ is increasingly a place of ever-greater multitudes, a deceptive and porous whole that is, in so many ways, very much less than the sum of its constituent parts. What might stand as a seemingly fixed entity or unit is, in reality, a constant flow and passage of multiple life ( zoe) and individual lives ( bios). To borrow from Heraclitus’ attributed aphorism, you can never really go into the same farm twice. Yet farms are, arguably, amongst the (...) most defining sites of contemporary human/animal relations. The vast majority of the 24 or so billion terrestrial farm animals that are kept and grown for human and other consumption at any one time do so on farms, with an increasing proportion of them on large scale, industrial farm units. Here is where kingdoms most emphatically meet, collide, intertwine, entangle, respond: the sovereign and the beast, the beast and the sovereign. Three questions: who meets who on the farm, what do they meet, and how does such meeting matter? (shrink)

A new research programme conceives of consciousness as a natural kind. One proposed virtue of this approach is that it can help resolve the methodological puzzle of consciousness, which involves distinguishing consciousness from cognitive access. The present article raises a novel problem for this approach. The problem is rooted in the fact that there may be episodes of conscious experience that have not been classified as such. I argue that conceiving of consciousness as a natural kind cannot distinguish consciousness from (...) cognitive access. (shrink)

Einstein's principle that no signal travels faster than light suggests that observations in one spacetime region should not depend on whether or not a radioactive decay is detected in a spacelike-separated region. This locality property is incompatible with the predictions of quantum theory, and this incompatibility holds independently of the questions of realism, objective reality, and hidden variables. It holds both in the pragmatic quantum theory of Bohr and in realistic frameworks. It is shown here to hold in a completed (...) realistic quantum theory that reconciles Einstein's demand for a description of reality itself with Bohr's contention that quantum theory is complete. This completed realistic quantum theory has no hidden variables, and no objective reality in which observable attributes can become definite independently of observers. The theory is described in some detail, with particular attention to those aspects related to the question of locality. This completed realistic quantum theory is in principle more comprehensive than Bohn's pragmatic quantum theory because it is not limited in principle by the requirement that the observed system be physically separated from the observing one. Applications are discussed. (shrink)

Decisions concerning proof of facts in criminal law must be rational because of what is at stake, but the decision‐making process must also be cognitively feasible because of cognitive limitations, and it must obey the relevant legal–procedural constraints. In this topic three approaches to rational reasoning about evidence in criminal law are compared in light of these demands: arguments, probabilities, and scenarios. This is done in six case studies in which different authors analyze a manslaughter case from different theoretical perspectives, (...) plus four commentaries on these case studies. The aim of this topic is to obtain more insight into how the different approaches can be applied in a legal context. This will advance the discussion on rational reasoning about evidence in law and will contribute more widely to cognitive science on a number of topics, including the value of probabilistic accounts of cognition and the problem of dealing with cognitive biases in reasoning under uncertainty in practical contexts. (shrink)

This work, incorporating previously unpublished interviews and articles, retraces the quest of Henry Corbin into the imaginal realm of the unseen self, the domains of angels and numinous beings. A study of religious philosophy, exploration of visionary faith, these pages offer a superb meditation of the great themes of Perso-Islamic mysticism—the Sufi theory of knowledge, the voyage within the soul, le rituel de la coupe—and an illuminating glimpse into the philosophic universes of Sohravardi, Ibn Arabi, and Molla Sarda Shirazi.

This is a reprint of the classic work by Henry Churchill King, "The Seeming Unreality of the Spiritual Life."At Oberlin College from 1884, he taught in mathematics, philosophy, and theology. From 1902 to 1927, he was president of the college. With a tenure of 25 years, is Oberlin's longest-serving president. In 1919, he served on the King-Crane Commission, whose recommendations on the fair and just disposition of non-Turkish areas of the Ottoman Empire might, had they been followed, would have (...) averted many of the tragedies that have come to pass in the Middle East since that time. The findings of that commission, suppressed until 1922, were finally made public in the King-Crane Commission Report and shed tremendous light on the wishes of the indigenous peoples of the region, as to who would be entrusted with the various mandates, the future of Palestine, and other vital issues.He was prominent in the councils of the Congregational Church and a moderator (1919-21) of its National Council as well as chairman (1921-27) of the Congregational Foundation for Education. (shrink)

The philosophy of quantum mechanics has often been conceived by physicists as a collection of dogmas concerning what can be measured, observed and known. To this branch of dialectics the present paper does not attempt to contribute, chiefly because it is written from the conviction that no part of science, nor any philosophy, can safely predict what may be feasible or knowable. Rather, this brief essay endeavors to expose the epistemology of quantum physics in a way which allows it to (...) be recognized as an extension of the ordinary processes of cognition, as the continuation of a line which starts in sensory perception, leads straight through the methods of classical physics into quantum mechanics and shows no signs of terminating even there. (shrink)