In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:RANSOM'S GOD WITHOUT THUNDER: REMYTHOLOGIZING VIOLENCE AND POETICIZING THE SACRED Gary M. Ciuba Kent State University From tree-lined Vanderbilt University of 1930 Nashville, the modernist poet and critic John Crowe Ransom longed to hear in his imagination the God who thundered fiercely in ancient Greece, Rome, and Israel. The God of sacrifice who in Homer's Iliad, "his thunder striking terror," received libations from the warring armies (230). The God (...) of jealousy who in Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound "drove the sleepless thunderbolt, / plunged the fire spurting shaft/ down" on Typhon for defying heaven with his violence (46). The God of vengeance who in Ovid's Metamorphoses sent "blinding / Thunder [to shake] Olympus, and Pelim / Thrust down by heaven's bolt crashed over Ossa" when the giants piled mountain upon mountain to reach Jove's throne (35). The God ofviolence who in Psalm 78:48 delivered the cattle ofthe obstinate Egyptians "to the hail, and their flocks to hot thunderbolts" or who in 1 Samuel 7:10 "thundered with great thunder" to smite the Philistines. In God Without Thunder: An Unorthodox Defense of Orthodoxy Ransom attacked the modern heresy that deprived the deity ofsuch awful might and summoned Americans to live under a new myth of sacred violence. IfRansom listened with the ears ofthe Methodist faith in which he had been raised, he might have heard how the god of old was muted at the university where he studied and later taught. Ten years before Ransom was born, Methodist-sponsored Vanderbilt had eliminated the lectureship of naturalist Alexander Winched because hisPre-Adamites had challenged the Creation story in Genesis. But in 1914, when Ransom returned to his alma Gary M. Ciuba41 mater to begin more than two decades of teaching there, the Methodists ended their affiliation with Vanderbilt because of a dispute about church governance of the university (Bailey 9-10, 31-4). When the Scopes Trial caused a furor in 1925, Ransom was invited by Vanderbilt to condemn the Fundamentalists to the southeast in Dayton. He refused-not because he sided with the anti-Darwinists but because he believed that the tyranny of science was threateningthe poetic foundation ofreligion (Quinlan 40, n. 3). Ransom's thunderless plight was virtually imagined by H.L. Mencken, one of the most stinging critics of the creationists, when in 1922 he penned a tongue-in-cheek lament forthe passing ofthe ancient deities. "Where is the graveyard of dead gods? What lingering mourner waters their mounds? There was a time when Jupiter was the king ofthe gods, and any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus," Mencken mock-elegized in "Memorial Service." "But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter today?" (95). God Without Thunder provides the answer to Mencken's archly lugubrious question: it is John Crowe Ransom. Grieving the demise ofthe deity ofyore, Ransom's treatise on the religious imagination heralds a one-man revival of Jupiter Tonans. Ransom believes that the god ofantiquity has been muffled bythe spirit of scientific abstraction that reigns notjust in Tennessee but across all of America.7 Hetraces this modern cult ofthe mind beyond the current efforts ofreligion to seek a rapprochement with biology and physics; beyond the science-driven Prometheus of Shelley, the rationalism of the Protestant Reformation, and the inquiry of Copernicus; beyond the errors of early Christianity, to a kind of primal sin. Humans have used their intelligence first to set themselves above nature, then to order the world according to their ways, and finally to exploit all ofcreation for their use. Demystified by science, thunder has become not the mighty weapon ofthe ancient God who tolerated no rivals but only the noise of heated and expanding air. Ransom views science as having such ultimacy that it exercises a mimetic function: it provides Girardian models for desire. "Science directs us to amuse ourselves, between desires," Ransom writes, "by simulating 7 Louis Rubin reads Ransom's "Armageddon" as a poetic companion piece to God Without Thunder, for it tells how divine wrath has been compromised amid the suavities of the modern world At the apocalyptic battle of the poem's title, a militant... (shrink)

The distinguished philosopher Louis Loeb examines the epistemological framework of Scottish philosopher David Hume, as employed in his celebrated work A Treatise of Human Nature. Loeb's project is to advance an integrated interpretation of Hume's accounts of belief and justification. His thesis is that Hume, in his Treatise, has a "stability-based" theory of justification which posits that his belief is justified if it is the result of a belief producing mechanism that engenders stable beliefs. But Loeb argues that the (...) striking corollary to this theory is that no belief generating mechanism is fully stable - or fully justified - for a fully reflective person. This carefully argued and original interpretation of Hume makes sense of seemingly contradictory ideas and will provoke serious discussion among Hume scholars. (shrink)

Empathy remains poorly understood, under-theorized, and subject to conflicting and opportunistic uses. Its systematic role in human experience has not been analyzed and interpreted from top to bottom. In this book, the author attempts to provide such an analysis in the philosophical traditions of hermeneutics, phenomenology, analytic philosophy of language, and psychoanalysis. applying his interpretation of empathy to the philosophical issues of intentionality, the emotions, and the checkered transformations of empathy itself. In doing so the author aims to rescue empathy (...) from the margins of intelligibility and reveal its central role in our understanding of the emotions, the integrity of our relations with others, and human community (“intersubjectivity”). -/- The work draws on both the Anglo-American (“analytic”) tradition of ordinary language philosophy and the continental ones of phenomenology and hermeneutics. This work follows the movement of empathy from the periphery of ethics, aesthetics, and theory of mind to a key place in establishing and maintaining the integrity and emotional equilibrium of dynamic interrelations with other individuals. Beginning with the philosophical infrastructure of the hermeneutics of empathy, this work thoroughly explains the complex architecture of empathy, tracing it downward through the levels of authentic human interrelations, empathy with unexpressed emotions, the empathic penetrability of cognitively impenetrable affect, the first-ever intentional analysis of both the empathizer and the “empathasand” in interrelation, and the hermeneutic infrastructure. The consequences of empathy are exposed in the context of the emotions, cognitive impenetrability, empathy and altruism, and the intentionality of empathy as accessed through language and story telling. Drawing on the multi-method approach of hermeneutics, phenomenology, and story telling, this work demonstrates that empathy forms the foundation for community in ways not clearly appreciated in the on-going debate. In a bootstrap operation that is guided by Heidegger’s call for a “special hermeneutic of empathy,” this work achieves a delicate balancing act of unpacking the rich intellectual traditions from which empathy - the phenomenon itself, not the concept - emerged historically. The result is an exposure of the deep structure of empathy as a fundamentally human capability for creating possibilities of community and human relations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.2 (2003) 125-132 [Access article in PDF] Incomprehensibility and Understanding:On the Interpretation of Severe Mental Illness Louis A. Sass Keywords hermeneutics, psychopathology, paradox, Wittgenstein, solipsism, delusion, principle of charity, phenomenological psychopathology. I would like to begin by thanking Rupert Read for the care he has put into reading my work, and into thinking through its implications in the context of the "new-Wittgensteinian" interpretation of (...) the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein. This interpretation derives from an influential reading of this philosopher's early book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1961), that is not explicitly discussed in Read's article, yet that lies behind much of his argument. Read does allude to this reading of the Tractatus when he refers to the concept of "logically alien thought" (see Conant [1992]), and by citing, in his endnotes, the Diamond, Conant, and Cerbone articles that appear in Crary and Read's edited collection, The New Wittgenstein (2000). In an earlier paper that also addresses my work, "On approaching schizophrenia through Wittgenstein," Read (2001) explicitly discusses the relevance of the new-Wittgensteinian interpretation of the Tractatus.According to this new-Wittgensteinian interpretation of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein took absolutely seriously his own realization (explicitly stated at the end of the Tractatus) that his book was internally self-contradictory, and he therefore realized that all or nearly all the sentences of the Tractatus must be totally devoid of any meaning or semantic reference. According to this austere view, the vast bulk of the Tractatus only pretends to be making meaningful statements about the nature of logic and semantics; its real purpose is to give the reader the illusion of meaning, and this it does in order to lead the reader to the eventual realization that there can in fact be no meaningful statements or thoughts at the level of self-referential abstraction at which the Tractatus pretends to be operating. Further, when Wittgenstein (1961) writes (in the famous last line of the book), "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" (p. 189), this statement should, supposedly, not be taken as any kind of mystical pointing toward some ineffable realm or truth, but, rather, as an austere recognition that there just are no ineffable truths—that, so to speak, there just is no mystical there there. [End Page 125]Rupert Read sees an analogy between, on the one hand, the (supposedly mistaken) readers of Wittgenstein's Tractatus who think that Wittgenstein is exploiting self-contradiction to allude to some higher, ineffable truth (i.e., something that can be pointed at even if it cannot be said), and, on the other hand, my own elucidation of Schreber's contradictions (see especially Chapter 2 of Paradoxes of Delusion [1994]) to argue that Schreber can be said to be having particular kinds of experiences, which I refer to as solipsistic or quasi-solipsistic in nature. Just as Wittgenstein's self-contradictions can (supposedly) point nowhere other than to their own failure to mean, so Schreber's self-contradictory and other nonstandard statements cannot (according to Read) be used to illuminate in any meaningful way the form of experience that supposedly lies behind them—as I, for example, have tried to do by offering a phenomenological account of Schreber and schizophrenia. Patients like Schreber and Renée cannot really be understood, just as we cannot really understand logically alien thought—which, in fact, is not really thought at all; in both cases, there is only the illusion of meaning, only the mirage of an alternative mode of thinking or of living. This, at least, is Read's new-Wittgensteinian claim.Few readers of Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology will, I suspect, be familiar with these discussions centering on Wittgenstein's Tractatus, which were introduced largely by the philosophers Cora Diamond and James Conant (see Crary and Read [2000]). (I myself have found their writings fascinating and inspiring in many ways, despite my ultimate disagreement on fundamental issues.) 1 Most readers of Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology will have no way of assessing the validity of this austere reading of the Tractatus... (shrink)

Is it permissible to use a human embryo in stem cell research, or in general as a means for benefit of others? Acknowledging each embryo as an object of moral concern, Louis M.Guenin argues that it is morally permissible to decline intrauterine transfer of an embryo formed outside the body, and that from this permission and the duty of beneficence, there follows a consensus justification for using donated embryos in service of humanitarian ends. He then proceeds to show how (...) this justification commands assent even within moral and religious views commonly thought to oppose embryo use. Beneath his moral reasoning lies a carefully constructed metaphysical foundation incorporating accounts of the ontology of development, embryos, and species. He also incisively discusses nonreprocloning, reprocloning, ectogenesis, and related scientific frontiers. This compelling philosophical study will interest all concerned to understand virtue and obligation in the relief of suffering. (shrink)

Argues that outdated institutional structures and higher educational philosophies are negatively contrasting with significant changes in today's faculties and student bodies with a result that higher education is more competitive and less ...

On received philosophical doctrine, history is simply methodologically immature. History's autonomy can be established not by showing scientific explanations impossible for "history," but by coupling a demonstration that hypothetico-deductive explanation cannot exhaustively analyze historical knowledge with a critique of the proto-science view's assumption that legitimate modes of understanding must be analyzable by an explicit methodology. Certain views historians accept, e.g., that events are unique, while inadequate as a general theory of events, reveal historical understanding's distinctive feature: synoptic judgment, which, irreducible (...) to analytic techniques, interprets a complex process as a function of component events, their interrelationships, importance, and context. (shrink)

Summary of, and response to criticism of, the authors' book, Fairness versus welfare (Harvard University Press, 2002).

Axiomatizations of measurement systems usually require an axiom--called an Archimedean axiom--that allows quantities to be compared. This type of axiom has a different form from the other measurement axioms, and cannot--except in the most trivial cases--be empirically verified. In this paper, representation theorems for extensive measurement structures without Archimedean axioms are given. Such structures are represented in measurement spaces that are generalizations of the real number system. Furthermore, a precise description of "Archimedean axioms" is given and it is shown that (...) in all interesting cases "Archimedean axioms" are independent of other measurement axioms. (shrink)

This study examines steroid production in fathers watching their children compete, extending previous research of vicarious success or failure on men’s hormone levels. Salivary testosterone and cortisol levels were measured in 18 fathers watching their children play in a soccer tournament. Participants completed a survey about the game and provided demographic information. Fathers with higher pregame testosterone levels were more likely to report that referees were biased against their children’s teams, and pre- to postgame testosterone elevation was predicted by watching (...) sons compete rather than daughters as well as perceptions of unfair officiating. Pregame cortisol was not associated with pregame testosterone or with perceived officiating bias, but cortisol did fluctuate synergistically with testosterone during spectator competition. Although fathers showed no consistent testosterone change in response to winning or losing, pregame testosterone may mediate steroid hormone reactivity to other aspects of their children’s competition. (shrink)

The development of quantum information theory has renewed interest in the idea that the state vector does not represent the state of a quantum system, but rather the knowledge or information that we may have on the system. I argue that this epistemic view of states appears to solve foundational problems of quantum mechanics only at the price of being essentially incomplete.

This volume will thus appeal to advanced students and scholars not just in the history of early modern philosophy but in epistemology and other core areas of ...

In the pages that follow I looked closely at two major paintings by Gustave Courbet : the After Dinner at Ornans, perhaps begun in the small town of the title but certainly completed in Paris during the winter of 1848-49; and the Stonebreakers, painted wholly in Ornans just under a year later. The After Dinner and the Stonebreakers are the first in a series of large multifigure compositions--others are the Burial at Ornans and the Peasants of Flagey Returning from the (...) Fair —that mark not only Courbet's maturity as an artist but his emergence as a disruptive force, almost a one-man wrecking crew, in the cultural politics of his time. They are also those works in which his self-declared identity as a Realist first becomes manifest, and probably the chief concern of the most interesting recent scholarship on Courbet has been to try to decode that epithet in social-historical terms, or at any rate to situate his activity as a painter during the years 1848-55 in the context of the social and political struggles that accompanied the creation of the Second Republic and its subversion by Louis Bonaparte.2 At the core of that tradition, motivating and, as it were, mobilizing it, is the demand that the painter succeed in placing in abeyance the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld—that he contrive in one way or another to establish the fiction, the meta-illusion, that the beholder does not exist, that there is no one standing before the picture. From Greuze through Gèricault, this was chiefly to be accomplished in and through the medium of visual drama, that is, by representing figures so deeply absorbed in their actions, emotions, and states of mind and furthermore so efficaciously bound together in a single comprehensive dramatic situation that they would strike one as absolutely immured in the world of the painting and a fortiori as oblivious to the very possibility of being viewed. And one way of describing the crisis that I believe overtook French painting by the 1820s and '30s is to say that the dramatic as such came more and more to be revealed as inescapably theatrical—that the array of conventions that once had served to establish the meta-illusion of the beholder's nonexistence now seemed merely to attest to his controlling presence.1. The present essay is adapted from a book-length study, in progress, of Courbet's art. Recent books and articles emphasizing social and political considerations include Linda Nochlin, Gustave Courbet: A Study of Style and Society ; T.J. Clark, "A Bourgeois Dance of Death: Max Buchon on Courbet," Burlington Magazine 111 : 208-12, 282-89, and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848-51 ; Jack LIndsay, Gustave Courbet: His Life and Art ; Klaus Herding, ed., Realismus als Widerspruch: Die Wirklichkeit in Courbets Malerei ; Herding, "Les Lutteurs 'détestables': Critique de style, critique sociale," Histoire et critique de l'art 4-5 : 94-122; and James Henry Rubin, Realism and Social Vision in Courbet and Proudhon .2. For an account of the early evolution of that tradition, see my Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot , as well as the essays on Courbet cited in n. 3.Michael Fried, professor of humanities and the history of art at the Johns Hopkins University, is the author of Morris Louis and Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. He is currently at work on a book on Courbet. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Three Ovidian Tails PAUL BAROLSKY Kneeling at the edge of a pond in push-up position, a beautiful nude boy crowned with flowers gazes down at the water in which he beholds his reflection. In love, he is enthralled. Thus, the image of Narcissus rendered by the Florentine painter Alessandro Allori in a work that has been largely overlooked until recently. Datable to the second half of the sixteenth century, (...) it now hangs in the Turkish Embassy in Washington, DC. In the distant background of the picture we behold Echo, who extends an arm upward seemingly in a gesture of despair, since she is rejected by Narcissus. She stands before a mass of rock, her left leg beginning to turn to stone, the very stone into which she vanishes as only her voice remains when she echoes her beloved. The painting abounds in Alessandro Allori, Narcissus. Photograph © Patricia Rubin. arion 26.3 winter 2019 closely observed passages such as the little fish in the pond, one of which has captured a worm. There are other notable details such as the crab on a rock in the foreground, or the clusters of pendulous, ripe grapes, fruit of Bacchus, to whom androgynous Narcissus is likened in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Allori also employs poetic simile in his picture, since the fingers of the youth’s left hand rhyme with the finger-like roots that emerge from the water. These roots are magnified in turn by their reflected image on the water’s surface. 136 three ovidian tails Abraham Janssens, Nymph and Pan Among the Reeds. AKG / Museen Böttcherstra ße. The apex of the picture, we might say, is baby Cupid who, hovering above, aims his dart at Narcissus and thus arouses the boy’s desire. The shape of Cupid’s bow echoes that of Narcissus ’s prominent buttocks which are framed by the attractive, bright golden drapery fluttering prominently around the youth’s posterior. One might well say that Allori features the buttocks of Narcissus’s body most provocatively in a kind of butt which recalls that of Cupid in the famous Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time painted by the artist’s teacher, Bronzino. What Allori pictures is not exactly what Ovid writes. It is, however, how Allori imagines the Narcissus of Ovid’s tale. Allori is not alone among Ovidian artists in focusing on the backside of the human body. The posterior is especially prominent in another mythological picture, this one from the early seventeenth century, executed by a disciple of Rubens, Abraham Janssens. This work has found its way to Bremen, where it is now housed in the Ludwig Roselius Museum. It illustrates Pan’s pursuit of Syrinx, who is metamorphosed into reeds in a story told by Mercury in order to put Argus asleep. Ovid is Janssens’s point of departure. The artist depicts the moment when a muscular Pan with a ruddy, almost leathery face embraces Syrinx in her new form as a bunch of reeds. Janssens departs from Ovid with a most novel invention. He depicts a woman, seen from behind, who dominates the composition. With sharp contrasts of lights and darks, vestiges of Caravaggio, the painter emphasizes the female’s imposingly broad backside, which is framed by a billowing, bright, attention-grabbing red drapery that she seems to hold across the front of her body. Could it be that Janssens here alludes to the backside of Syrinx as Pan would have seen it when he chased her? It would seem that we are given not only a view of Pan embracing reeds, we are simultaneously given a Pan’s-eye view of Syrinx’s prominent and provocative backside before her metamorphosis. I wish to consider one final example of the derrière in Ovidian art, this one prominent in a picture painted well Paul Barolsky 137 over a hundred years after Janssens worked: Louis-JeanFran çois Lagrenée’s Abduction of Deianira by the Centaur Nessus, a work which is now in the Louvre. In Ovid’s story, Hercules arrives with his bride Deianira at the shore of the river Evenus where she is abducted by Nessus, who flees only to have Hercules shoot him with... (shrink)

Monograph comprising two essays on Marxism and the social theory of social class, social conflict and the social role of the working class.

This paper is addressed to recent theoretical discussions of the Anthropocene, in particular Bernard Stiegler’s Neganthropocene (Open Universities Press, 2018), which argues: “As we drift past tipping points that put future biota at risk, while a post-truth regime institutes the denial of ‘climate change’ (as fake news), and as Silicon Valley assistants snatch decision and memory, and as gene-editing and a financially-engineered bifurcation advances over the rising hum of extinction events and the innumerable toxins and conceptual opiates that Anthropocene Talk (...) fascinated itself with—in short, as ‘the Anthropocene’ discloses itself as a dead-end trap…”. The objective of this paper is therefore twofold: (1) to discuss how the Anthropocene is appropriated to certain ideological discourses (paradoxically) to maintain the hegemony of precisely those systems of production that have most accelerated climate change etc.; (2) to consider how the factography of the Anthropocene is exploited in this process to mask the ideological character of industry-aligned “technocratic” environmental management. The paper is not concerned with specific case studies in terms of government and industry policy, or climate science, but rather with the ways in which the discourse of the Anthropocene has been inflected within the humanities and the broader cultural field—that is to say, ideologically, as a system or logic of meaning. How the Anthropocene “means” is, in this respect, a question of some importance. This paper does not attempt to address all the facets of this question, but focuses upon a central “apocalyptic” strain in the discourse of the Anthropocene drawn particularly from Francis Fukuyama’s millennial posthumanism and centred in the question of “sustainability” as catastrophe management—with the risk that real environmental degradation will become an alibi for a revived neoliberalism. In other words, that the critical Earth system transformations that characterise the Anthropocene are themselves commodities, and that the project of their amelioration is in process of defining a future (opportunistic) “crisis” rhetoric with a global political franchise. The ideological import of the Anthropocene stems precisely from the fact that it is planetary and, while catalysed by human agency, independent in its specific behaviour from it. The Anthropocene objectively presents as the contemporary counterpart of the Cold War doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction and the most compelling argument for a new kind of technological “arms race.” But it also presents as the condition of an emerging ideological discourse which will determine how this race is run. From the discourse on “energy security” to the widespread “security crackdown” on environmental activists across the so-called developed & developing world, the Anthropocene has come to represent the co-option of a scientific factography for the thinly disguised resurgence of “ideological science” of the Fukuyamaesque variety (post-history, post-human). For Fukuyama, the true meaning of “posthuman” is thus the accomplishment of humanity’s historical mission. As the “End of History” designates an end of ideological struggle, so too the dénouement of the Anthropocene and the “ends of man” represent the accomplished purpose of species warfare: dominion, not simply over the world, but over all possible worlds. According to this narrative, science—like technology—must be uniquely at the service of the maintenance of the global order, organised around a universal appeal to “crisis management.” It is precisely for this reason that what calls itself post-human masks the return of an ever-more-apocalyptic Humanism. (shrink)

The Greeks are on trial. They have been for generations, if not millennia, from Rome in the first century, to Romanticism in the nineteenth. We debate the place of the Greeks in the university curriculum, in New World culture--we even debate the place of the Greeks in the European Union. This book notices the lingering and half-hidden presence of the Greeks in some strange places--everywhere from the US Supreme Court to the Modern Olympic Games--and in so doing makes an important (...) new contribution to a very old debate. (shrink)

La quatrième de couverture indique : "Cette "Introduction au cours de philosophie pour scientifiques" a été prononcée en octobre-novembre 1967 à l'Ecole normale supérieure. Nous avions alors à plusieurs amis, intéressés par les problèmes de l'histoire des sciences, et des conflits philosophiques auxquels elle donne lieu, frappés par la lutte idéologique et les formes qu'elle peut prendre chez les intellectuels de la pratique scientifique, décidé de nous adresser à nos collègues en un cours public. Cette expérience, inaugurée par l'exposé que (...) voici, devait durer jusqu'à la veille des grands événements de 1968. C'est pour répondre à de nombreuses demandes que je publie aujourd'hui, avec un grand retard, mon Introduction de 67, sur 'la philosophie et la philosophie spontanée des savants". A l'exception de la moitié du premier cours et de la critique de Jacques Monod, que j'ai reproduits sans rien y changer, j'ai repris le reste de ce cours : pour rendre plus lisible ce qui n'était qu'une improvisation hâtive, et aussi pour développer certaines formules qui étaient restées à l'état d'esquisse, souvent énigmatique. Mais j'ai tenu à respecter pour l'essentiel les limites théoriques de cet essai, qu'on voudra bien lire comme un essai daté. Je le publie aussi comme un témoignage rétrospectif. On y trouvera en effet les premières formules qui ont "inauguré" un tournant dans nos recherches sur la philosophie en général et la philosophie marxiste en général. Auparavant en effet (dans "Pour Marx" et "Lire le Capital"), je définissais la philosophie comme "théorie de la pratique théorique". Or, dans ce cours apparaissent de nouvelles formules : la philosophie, qui n'a pas d'objet (comme une science a un objet), a des enjeux, la philosophie ne produit pas des connaissances, mais énonce des Thèses, etc. Les Thèses ouvrent la voie à la position juste des problèmes de la pratique scientifique et de la pratique politique, etc. Formules encore shématiques, qui exigent un long travail pour les préciser et les compléter. Mais du moins indiquent-elles un ordre de recherche, dont on trouvera la trace dans des ouvrages ultérieurs. Le 14 mai 1974.". (shrink)

A modified version of the mere exposure effect paradigm was utilized in an implicit artificial grammar learning task in an attempt to develop a procedure that would be more sensitive in assesing nonconscious learning processes than the methods currently utilized within the field of implicit learning. Subjects were presented with stimuli generated from a finite-state artificial grammar and then had to either decide if novel items conformed to the rule structure of the grammar or rate the degree to which they (...) liked novel items. Because the latter of the task was more indirect of the two procedures, subjects′ availability to discriminate between well-formed and ill-formed items on this liking task was taken as a more sensitive piece of evidence of implicit learning, compared to performance on the rule conformity task. A subsequent test of subjects′ explicit knowledge of the rules of the grammar showed that subjects do have some conscious knowledge of the artificial grammar, but subjects making liking decisions exhibited significantly less conscious rule knowledge than subjects initially making rule-conformity judgements. The findings are discussed in relation to synergistic relationships among implicit perception, implicit memory, and implicit learning proceses. (shrink)

How should philosophy approach religious experience, which by definition surpasses its competence? Can philosophy do more than describe the religious experience without discussing its object? Can religion make genuine truth claims - especially when the prevalence of suffering and evil in the world seems to belie those claims? These are some of the basic questions raised in this engaging collection of essays by philosopher Louis Dupre. According to Dupre, a philosophical analysis of faith must take account of the unique (...) system of symbols in which it expresses its beliefs, rituals, and modes of worship. The justification of religious symbols has become a particular problem in an age that tends to separate the objective from the subjective, interpreting the former literally and denying objective reality to the latter. Dupre's essays on von Balthasar's theory of religious form and on the nature of ritual attempt to restore the original meaning of religious symbols, while integrating them with the modern emphasis on human creativity. "As this slim but remarkable book of essays makes abundantly clear, its author bids fair to have an influence that will last into the next century, at the last: there is something about his philosophy that seems not just nourishing for a day or hour but perennially satisfying. " - Commonweal "Dupr writes with the clarity of an analytical philosopher about the issues of experience dear to phenomenologists and with a depth of historical understanding and sensitivity to the life of faith that is rare now in philosophy. In short, this book is that all too unusual phenomenon, religious philosophy. It is done very well, indeed." - Theology Today " This is a wise and thought-provoking collection." - Modern Theology. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Some Context The Traditional Interpretation Disarming the Evidence for the Traditional Interpretation Evidence that Hume Considers Inductive Inference Justified The Traditional Interpretation Revisited Hume's Epistemic Options Applications to Extended Objects and Belief in God Limitations on Enumerative Induction Acknowledgments References.

Do the demands of egalitarian justice extend to the international realm? Some believe that a positive answer follows from a simple line of reasoning: where a child happens to be born is a morally arbitrary fact; accordingly, it shouldn’t unduly influence her life prospects, as will inevitably be the case unless economic inequalities between countries are ironed out. I argue that this style of argument overlooks an important problem concerning the extent to which a person can unilaterally impose enforceable obligations (...) on others by choosing to have a child. I maintain that properly egalitarian duties of distributive justice only arise when this problem of unilateral imposition has been solved. I further argue that solving the problem requires robust political institutions that do not exist in the international context—institutions instantiating a version of what John Rawls calls pure procedural justice, to ensure that the aggregate result of individual reproductive choices is acceptable to all. (shrink)

Describes 100 real-life ethical dilemmas faced by school administrators.

We prove that the poset algebra of every scattered poset with finite width is embeddable in the poset algebra of a well ordered poset.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Causation, Extrinsic Relations, and Hume's Second Thoughts about Personal Identity Louis E. Loeb According to the account offered in Treatise 1.4.6, "Of personal identity," the identity of a mind over time consists in a sequence of perceptions related by causation. In both ofHume's two definitions of cause, causation is an external or extrinsic relation. Hume is explicit that this result is tolerable. If causation is an extrinsic relation, (...) and personal identity is analysed in terms of causation, then personal identity is an extrinsic relation. I suggest that Hume finds this consequence intolerable, and that his finding it so is the source ofhis famous misgivings in the appendix in regard to his section on personal identity.1 In the appendix, Humeindicates that "there wou'dbe no difficulty" in regard to his section concerning personal identity, if the mind perceived some "real connexion" among perceptions.2 In book 1, however, Hume maintains that causation does not involve a real connection, and that personal identity depends on causation; and he seems content with the result that personal identity does not involve a real connection. At 1.3.14, "Ofthe idea ofnecessary connexion," Hume insists that there is no "real connexion" between causes and effects and, more generally, that there is no "real intelligible connexion" between external objects (T 168; cf. T 103). At T 169-70, he offers two ("exact") definitions of the relation of cause and effect. Hume thinks there are causes and effects, even though there are no real connections. At 1.4.6, Hume writes that whether or not the relation ofpersonal identity is a "real bond" or "real connection" among perceptions is a "question we might easily decide, ifwe wou'd recollect whathas been already pro^d at large, that the understanding never observes any real connexion among objects, and that even the union of cause and effect, when strictly examin'd, resolves itselfinto a customary association ofideas" (T 259-60). A mere three paragraphs later, Hume writes that "the true idea of the human mind, is to consider it as a system of different perceptions or different existences, which are link'd together by the relation ofcause and effect, and mutually produce, destroy, influence, and modify each other" (T 261). So Hume's view, at 1.4.6, is that personal identity requires causation, but does not require a real connection. It is curious that in the appendix Hume takes the claim Volume XVIII Number 2 219 LOUIS E. LOEB thatthereis noreal connectionbetween perceptions toruinhis account of personal identity, whereas in book 1 he treats this result with equanimity. Thispuzzlecan begeneralized somewhat. Hume observesin 1.3.14 that "the terms of efficacy, agency, power, force, energy, necessity, connexion, andproductive quality, are all nearly synonimous" (T 157). His principal negative claim in that sectionis that(takingefficacy, and the other nearly synonymous concepts, to require something in objects over and above constant conjunction) there is no efficacy, necessity, or connection in causation. Hume targets a number of the nearly synonymous notions not only in 1.3.14, but also at T 246-51 of 1.4.5, and T 632-33 ofthe appendix. In the discussion ofpersonal identity in the appendix, Hume seems to be in search of the sort of bond or connection that he has forcefully rejected, as if he has a lingering commitment to real connections, or to necessity, despite himself. From this perspective, his misgivings easily appear to constitute a retrogression, orlapse, into amode ofthought, or metaphysical picture, that he has taken pains to reject. This is not an attractive explanation ofHume's misgivings. It has the consequence that Hume simply changes his mind, or is of two minds, inregard to therole ofreal connections in an account ofpersonal identity. Although I do not think these possibilities are to be dismissed outofhand, much oftheir support would have to derive from the failure of alternative accounts of what is bothering Hume. At the same time, a solution ought in some way to relate to Hume's thinking about real connections. Hume does write in the appendix, In short there are two principles, which I cannot render consistent; nor is it in my power to... (shrink)

In this essay I begin with Aristotle’s perplexing observation that a tragic drama is a “whole,” one identified by a clear beginning, middle and ending. I pause to wonder how Aristotle imagines such ends, given his contention that a play concludes in such a way that “nothing can follow from it.” On the face of it, it is very difficult to imagine what Aristotle has in mind here. I suggest that one clue may be found in his title, Poetics, with (...) its clear suggestion that a dramatic event is in fact a making, a poiesis. I develop this idea to suggest that the end of a story, any story, tends to be something the reader imposes, often in the interest of generating a specific moral. I then display these readerly dynamics by providing a close reading of the famous story from Genesis, concerning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. I explore a number of different ways in which this story may be thought to “end,” as well as the implications of each such ending. (shrink)

Les principes fondamentaux régissant les rapports entre l’espace, le temps, l’objet et la causalité sont présentés et examinés. Il est découvert, par des expériences de pensée successives, que l’abandon de l’un ou l’autre de ces principes permettrait peut-être de résoudre de façon neuve des difficultés classiques de la philosophie comme la flèche de Zénon, Achille et la tortue ou le bateau de Thésée. Sont révélés à cette occasion plusieurs asymétries importantes existant entre l’espace et le temps, dans leurs rôles respectifs (...) vis-à-vis des objets matériels et de la relation causale. Le rapport entre le temps et la causalité est, enfin, plus particulièrement étudié. (shrink)

Les principes fondamentaux régissant les rapports entre l’espace, le temps, l’objet et la causalité sont présentés et examinés. Il est découvert, par des expériences de pensée successives, que l’abandon de l’un ou l’autre de ces principes permettrait peut-être de résoudre de façon neuve des difficultés classiques de la philosophie comme la flèche de Zénon, Achille et la tortue ou le bateau de Thésée. Sont révélés à cette occasion plusieurs asymétries importantes existant entre l’espace et le temps, dans leurs rôles respectifs (...) vis-à-vis des objets matériels et de la relation causale. Le rapport entre le temps et la causalité est, enfin, plus particulièrement étudié. (shrink)