From ancient times to the present, the discovery and presentation of new proofs of previously established theorems has been a salient feature of mathematical practice. Why? What purposes are served by such endeavors? And how do mathematicians judge whether two proofs of the same theorem are essentially different? Consideration of such questions illuminates the roles that proofs play in the validation and communication of mathematical knowledge and raises issues that have yet to be resolved by mathematical logicians. The Appendix, in (...) which several proofs of the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic are compared, provides a miniature case study. (shrink)

With this issue History and Philosophy of Logic begins its twenty-fifth year of publication. In the years since its founding, by virtue of its high standards and broad scope of coverage, it has bec...

Recent reports of the discovery of a “God module” in the human brain derive from the fact that epileptic seizures in the left temporal lobe are associated with ecstatic feelings sometimes described as an experience of the presence of God. The brain area involved has been described as either (a) the seat of an innate human faculty for experiencing the divine or (b) the seat of religious delusions.In fact, religious experience is extremely various and involves many parts of the brain, (...) including some that are prehuman in their evolutionary history and some that are characteristically human. In the continuing integration of such experiences, spiritual formation takes place. Thus the entire human brain might be described as a “God module.”Such a process is only possible because of the brain's complexity. The human brain is the most complex entity for its size that we know of. As used here, complexity is a specialized term denoting the presence of a web of interlinked and significant connections—the more intricate the web, the more complex the entity. Complex systems develop only in a milieu that provides both lawfulness and freedom, and they tend to be self‐organizing, becoming more complex and more effective as a result of both inward and outward experience. The evidence suggests that both personal growth and spiritual growth are processes of complexification of character, and of the brain itself. This thesis is tested in light of the work of William James and James W. Fowler. (shrink)

Die von Karl Menger und seinen Mitarbeitern (darunter Kurt Gödel) herausgegebenen "Ergebnisse eines Mathematischen Kolloquiums" zählen zu den wichtigsten Quellenwerken der Wissenschafts- und Geistesgeschichte der Zwischenkriegszeit, mit bahnbrechenden Beiträgen von Menger, Gödel, Tarski, Wald, John von Neumann und vielen anderen. In diesem Band liegt der Inhalt erstmals gesammelt vor. Der Nobelpreisträger Gerard Debreu schrieb die Einleitung, die Kommentare wurden vom Logiker und Gödel-Biographen John Dawson jr., dem Topologen Ryszard Engelking und dem Wirtschaftstheoretiker Werner Hildenbrand verfasst. Außerdem enthält der (...) Band einen biographischen Aufsatz über Karl Menger sowie einen von Menger verfassten Überblick über die wichtigsten topologischen und geometrischen Arbeiten des Kolloquiums. (shrink)

Material acquisition—buying, inheriting, being given—and nonmaterial—learning a word, assimilating a form—have been likened, and in both, meaningful acquisition cannot take place without a taxonomy, a scheme of categories into which the acquired element can be fitted. Then with these elements—both material and nonmaterial—we create a world or build and project a self, the painter and the interior decorator equally manipulating the elements in a vocabulary. The coarseness of such an outlook seems to bludgeon away long-established fine distinctions. We need not (...) deny, however, that there may be a kind of "indifference" in regard to "the real existence of the thing" which allows us "to play the part of judge in matters of taste," as Kant would have it,1 we need not deny the existence of an "aesthetic attitude: it is just that such indifference and such an attitude probably don't have much to do with our day-to-day experience of artifacts and perhaps needn't. The "aesthetic attitude" was not long ago defined by Jerome Stolnitz as "disinterested and sympathetic attention to and contemplation of any object of awareness whatever, for its own sake alone."2 Stolnitz is at pains to distinguish the aesthetic attitude from "interests" with which it may be preferable to confuse it. "One of them," he writes, "is the interest in owning a work of art for the sake of pride or prestige". And again, "Another nonaesthetic interest is the 'cognitive,' i.e., the interest in gaining knowledge about an object". Both these interests sound rather acquisitive, and let us consider the "aesthetic attitude" as somehow tied in everyday practice to the bundle of "acquiring" activities. · 1. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith, p. 43.· 2. Jerome Stolnitz, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art Criticism, excerpted in Introductory Readings in Aesthetics, ed. John Hospers, p. 19; all further citations in text. Hiram W. Woodward, Jr. is a lecturer in the department of the history of art at the University of Michigan. He is editor of Eighty Works in the University of Michigan Museum of Art: A Handbook and coeditor of Barabudur: History and Significance of a Buddhist Monument. (shrink)

This is the first book to offer the best essays, articles, and speeches on ethics and intelligence that demonstrate the complex moral dilemmas in intelligence collection, analysis, and operations. Some are recently declassified and never before published, and all are written by authors whose backgrounds are as varied as their insights, including Robert M. Gates, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency; John P. Langan, the Joseph Cardinal Bernardin Professor of Catholic Social Thought at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, (...) Georgetown University; and Loch K. Johnson, Regents Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia and recipient of the Owens Award for contributions to the understanding of U.S. intelligence activities. Creating the foundation for the study of ethics and intelligence by filling in the gap between warfare and philosophy, this is a valuable collection of literature for building an ethical code that is not dependent on any specific agency, department, or country. (shrink)

Taxation and government policy related to it have only episodic appearance in classical Protestant ethical sources. Of the early sixteenth century reformers, Luther gave most attention to the subject, justifying taxation in general as necessary for the just service of government to the public good and calling the princes to spend tax monies for that good rather than their own luxury. Calvin made much the same claims but called more clearly for official church scrutiny of all government than did Luther. (...) Two centuries later John Wesley criticized English tax policy, appealing to standards of economic efficiency and compassion for the poor with little reference overtly to theology. The churches of colonial and post-revolutionary America developed no systematic, theologically rooted rationale for taxation ethics, either; but official Protestant denominational concern for such ethics has grown measurably in the most recent fifteen years. After a survey of these recent national church statements, and on the basis of them and the slender Protestant heritage on this issue, we end by posing four questions which we see as worthy of much serious thinking by contemporary American Protestant ethicists and church bodies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defense of Rationality in the Early English Enlightenment by Frederick C. BeiserJohn W. YoltonFrederick C. Beiser. The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defense of Rationality in the Early English Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Pp. xi + 332. Cloth, $39.50.Beiser characterizes the methodology of his study as historical and philosophical: historical in placing texts in their own context and in uncovering the intentions (...) of their authors; philosophical in reconstructing and appraising arguments (ix). Both methods are necessary for good historical work. The second is often practiced without the first, to the detriment of philosophy and its history. “A philosopher who reconstructs arguments without the aid of history indulges in mere guesswork and anachronism, measuring the standards of philosophical relevance and importance by the concerns of his own age” (x). Equally, understanding the arguments and ideas of, e.g., seventeenth-century writers, “also involves testing their truth: seeing how they cohere with one another, what their consequences are, whether they follow from the evidence adduced for them, and if they reply to the objections made against them” (x). This splendid study of the role of reason in seventeenth-century religion, science, and philosophy is a fine example of careful textual-historical scholarship with rigorous philosophical analysis.The goal of his study is to tell “the story of how rationalism, in the very specific sense of the sovereignty of reason, arose in seventeenth-century England” (5). Starting with an introduction which discusses such topics as “The Paradox of the English Enlightenment,” “Rationalism in the English Church,” “The Enlightenment and the New Sciences,” Beiser proceeds to detailed presentations and discussions of “The Protestant Challenge” (Chap. 1); Richard Hookers’s defense of reason (Chap. 2); the views of the Great Tew Circle, e.g., Falkland, Chillingworth, Hammond, Hales (Chap. 3); the Cambridge Platonists (Chap. 4); the nature of Enthusiasm (Chap. 5); John Toland and Deism (Chap. 6); and ethical rationalism (Chap. 7).Many of the topics covered have been the subjects of other books and articles. What marks Beiser’s account is the freshness of his approach, the many new insights and suggestions about the tensions between the holders of traditional doctrines and newer challenges. Beiser’s writing is clear, and the issues are carefully presented and analyzed. One of the central themes is the mistake of equating “rationalism with the critique or rejection of religion” (15), of identifying enlightenment with secularization (14). The appeals to reason often emerge from within orthodox religion, whose defenders were trying to cope with their own internal tensions. “Once we consider the Cambridge Platonists’ early reaction to predestination, it becomes clear that it was not Hobbes but Calvin who first posed the danger of atheism for them. For it was Calvin’s theology, and not Hobbes’s materialism, that inspired the fear of God that [End Page 138] they regarded as the source of atheism. In the eyes of the Cambridge Platonists, Hobbes’s materialism was only a false remedy for that fear...” (147). A similar point is made later: “the foundations of a rational theology” in Whichcote “did not arise from any need to combat a creeping Hobbesianism. Rather, it grew up from the inner struggles and torments of the Protestant soul” (165).Equally significant is Beiser’s analysis of enthusiasm, the appeals to divine inspiration rather than to reason or evidence: “We should be aware of accepting the contemporary caricature of the enthusiasts, which portrayed them as zealous and ignorant anti–intellectuals with no cogent or coherent philosophical position of their own” (187). His analysis of the enthusiasts stresses the epistemological nature of their position, rather than the usual theological, ethical, or political dimensions (193). He insists that “enthusiasm is essentially a philosophical concept. Historically, it arose as a response to the problem of the sources and criteria of religious knowledge” (187). The search for criteria is a pervasive feature of Beiser’s study: Luther’s and Calvin’s efforts to draw the boundary between faith and reason (24); Richard Hooker’s failure to “provide an epistemological foundation for his theory of natural law” (67); the need for a criterion to distinguish genuine from false revelation... (shrink)

Perhaps only Tar Baby is as enigmatic and compelling a figure from Afro-American mythic discourse as is that oxymoron, the Signifying Monkey.3 The ironic reversal of a received racist image of the black as simianlike, the Signifying Monkey—he who dwells at the margins of discourse, ever punning, ever troping, ever embodying the ambiguities of language—is our trope for repetition and revision, indeed, is our trope of chiasmus itself, repeating and simultaneously reversing in one deft, discursive act. If Vico and Burke, (...) or Nietzsche, Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom, are correct in identifying “master tropes,” then we might think of these as the “master’s tropes,” and of signifying as the slave’s trope, the trope of tropes, as Bloom characterizes metalepsis, “a trope-reversing trope, a figure of a figure.” Signifying is a trope that subsumes other rhetorical tropes, including metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, and also hyberbole, litotes, and metalepsis. To this list, we could easily add aporia, chiasmus, and catachresis, all of which are used in the ritual of signifying.The black tradition has its own subdivisions of signifying, which we could readily identify with the typology of figures received from classical and medieval rhetoric, as Bloom has done with his “maps of misprision.” In black discourse “signifying” means modes of figuration itself. When one signifies, as Kimberly W. Benston puns, one “tropes-a-dope.” The black rhetorical tropes subsumed under signifying would include “marking,” “loud-talking,” “specifying,” “testifying,” “calling out”, “sounding,” “rapping,” and “playing the dozens.”4 3. On Tar Baby, see Ralph Ellison, “Hidden Man and Complex Fate: A Writer’s Experience in the United States,” Shadow and Act, p. 147, and Toni Morrison, Tar Baby. On the black as quasi-simian, see Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds, p. 105; Aristotle Historia Animalium 606b; Thomas Herbert, Some Years Travels, pp. 16-17; and John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 8th ed., 2 vols., 2:53.4. Geneva Smitherman defines these and other black tropes and then traces their use in several black texts. Smitherman’s work, like that of Claudia Mitchell-Kernan and Abrahams, is especially significant for literary theory. See Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America, pp. 101-66. See also nn. 13 and 14 below. (shrink)

There are two main groups of essays in this volume. The first centres on Locke's theories of religion and their relation to contemporary scientific thought and the work of Descartes, Leibniz and Hume. The second group explores the relation between biology and physiology, and the science of man.

So, on 22 July 1865, under the title ‘Philosophy and Punch’, did England's premier comic weekly greet the election of J. S. Mill as MP for Westminster. Mill held his seat for only one term, until the general election of 1868, when his Whig-Liberal colleague Robert Wellesley Grosvenor was re-elected, but Mill was replaced by the loser in 1865, the Conservative W. H. Smith, Jr., who, though he never went to sea, became the ruler of the Queen's navy. The reasons (...) for that reversal have engaged the attention of many, including Mill himself; I should like to introduce into the discussion material from an ignored source, the comic weeklies, which took a continued and close look at Mill's behaviour during his parliamentary years. While this evidence generally does not disconfirm earlier judgments—including my own— it does more than merely add to the induction. First, it shows how different political stances led journals to focus on different aspects of Mill's parliamentary career, and to adopt different rhetorical strategies in portraying him in picture and word. Second, it demonstrates how the hardening of party allegiances during the parliament of 1865–68, which accelerated in the preparatory campaigns for the general election of 1868, affected Mill adversely. Third, it suggests strongly that it was not his ‘crotchets’ or ‘whims’, especially women's suffrage and proportional representation, that damaged his chances for re-election, but his advocacy of causes unpopular with the majority of Liberals as well as with Conservatives. (shrink)

The American way of Renaissance and the Humanistic Tradition of Greece -- The Aristotelian tradition in American naturalism -- George Santayana and Greek philosophy -- Frederick J.E. Woodbridge and the Aristotelian tradition -- John Dewey and ancient philosophies -- John H. Randall Jr.'s interpretation of Greek philosophy -- The ontology of Herbert W. Schneider -- Ernest Nagel's pragmatism and Aristotle's principle of contradiction -- The naturalistic metaphysics of Justus Buchler -- Naturalism and the platonic tradition.

This book contains important technical innovations, including comparative measures for the testable content, depth, and unity of scientific theories. Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich (...) scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Rich with historical and cultural value, these works are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.