A clearly written book by an accomplished teacher. Though obviously published as a textbook, it contains a kind of learning which can only be possessed by a mature philosopher, and perhaps appreciated in full only by a peer. The book is an introduction to philosophy, philosophy broadly and classically conceived, encompassing metaphysics, a theory of knowledge, and philosophical reflections on science, man, nature, and art. The ten chapters devoted to knowledge present to the beginner, simply and lucidly, a review of (...) some of the best work published in the fields of epistemology and the philosophy of science in recent decades. Abel’s approach is both systematic and historical. He allows philosophers to speak to each other across the ages where they have addressed common problems, but the focus is on the problems. His own viewpoint has obviously been shaped by the naturalism of Dewey and Woodbridge, but the book has the merit of being temperate and fair to other fundamentally different metaphysical positions. Throughout his presentation, the philosophical enterprise is seen, not as a critical one of tearing down, but as a collaborative effort in which the best minds of the past, through their various insights, have contributed to the solution of ancient problems relating to man and knowledge. In effect, the book is a refreshing synthesis, and is apt to be far more valuable as a teaching instrument than the usual heterogeneous anthology published for the same purpose.—J.P.D. (shrink)

Suppose a computer prints out the following little "poem": The shooting of the hunters she heardBut to pity it moved her not. What can we say about the meaning of this "poem"? We can say that it is ambiguous. It could mean: She heard the hunters shooting at animals, people, etc., but she had no pity for the victims. . . . She heard the hunters being shot but did not pity them. . . . She heard the hunters shooting (...) at someone or something and she heard the hunters being shot but did not pity either. An author could use the above word sequence to convey either , , or . But since we cannot treat the text produced by the computer as anyone's use of the words in question, it would not make sense to decide among its linguistically possible readings, just as it would not make sense to choose among the linguistically possible readings of an ambiguous sentence if it is considered in abstraction from its use by a speaker on a particular occasion. For example, it would not make sense to say of the sentence "He saw the man carrying the suitcase" that it just means "He saw the man who is carrying the suitcase" if we know that and in which what ways the sentence is ambiguous. If someone did say this, we would be inclined to think either that he does not know that the sentence is ambiguous or that he is talking not about the sentence but about an utterance of that sentence by a speaker on some occasion. Hence all we can do in interpreting the computer "poem" is to specify the set of its linguistically possible readings, namely, {, , }. But it would not make sense to select , for example, and say, "That is what the computer poem means, not , nor ." P. D. Juhl is an assistant professor of German at Princeton University. The present essay, in a different form, will appear in his forthcoming book, The Nature of Literary Interpretation. See also: "Against Theory" by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels in Vol. 8, No. 4. (shrink)

The place of scientific results, the role of scientific method, and the impact of the scientific temper in ethical theory are surveyed. The concept of an "existential perspective of an ethical theory"--"its view of the world and its properties, man's nature and condition, insofar as these enter into its understanding of moral processes and moral judgments"--is sketched and used to clarify the diversity of ethical approaches. Edel promises, but does not here develop, a scientific ethics based on the behavioral sciences.--A. (...) P. D. M. (shrink)

A series of four lectures given in Athens during the author's tenure of a Fulbright Fellowship. The intention is to introduce Athenian public to three classical American philosophers, as well as to contemporary trends. The author sees interesting parallels between Emerson and the Byzantine Mystics and predicts that the interest of Americans in Ancient Greek philosophy will lead to closer studies of Byzantine philosophy. The chief defect of the book is its willingness to sacrifice content for coverage. Presentation is cursory (...) and often by terms which are misleading in themselves and particularly unfortunate when rendered into modern Greek.--. (shrink)

One does not need to read many pages of this very rich book to realize that it is the fruit of a lifetime of study and that it is both speculatively wise and prudent. Though it may not receive the same degree of attention as other well publicized studies it clearly ranks with studies such as Hart's The Concept of Law and Erlich's The Sociology of Law. The author intends to develop a systematic theory of positive law, with close attention (...) to the circumstances that bring law into being, the purposes that law is designed to serve, and the structure of the legal system itself. He also proposes to apply this theory to an examination of the problems that law faces and the conditions that it must satisfy if it is to be an effective force in society. Nineteen chapters follow. Jenkins is aware that the study of law is but part of the larger study of society from which law receives its tasks and form. To determine the origin, end and functions of law is to search for those objective principles that define the conditions of man's well-being. While the first part of the book is concerned with the formulation of a general theory of law, the second explores the role of law in the social order and the conditions of legal effectiveness. Jenkins provides dramatic evidence that in our day, particularly in the United States, law is being employed for purposes that are unprecedented. "The legal apparatus," he writes, "is being asked to intervene in areas of social and personal life that have hitherto been handled by other agencies in other ways." It is the author's judgment that these nontraditional uses of law have for the most part been disappointing in their results. "We abuse the legal apparatus," writes Jenkins "because we have inadequate notions both of what the law is and how it works." Jenkins is convinced that law supplies the compelling social need for a force that is at once sovereign and principled. As sovereign it is entitled to habitual obedience and to the use of force when necessary. As sovereign, subject to no external control, it must be principled. It must govern itself by self-imposed provisions and mechanisms that determine the use of this power and prevent it from becoming autocratic and arbitrary. (shrink)

A series of four lectures given in Athens during the author's tenure of a Fulbright Fellowship. The intention is to introduce Athenian public to three classical American philosophers, as well as to contemporary trends. The author sees interesting parallels between Emerson and the Byzantine Mystics and predicts that the interest of Americans in Ancient Greek philosophy will lead to closer studies of Byzantine philosophy. The chief defect of the book is its willingness to sacrifice content for coverage. Presentation is cursory (...) and often by terms which are misleading in themselves and particularly unfortunate when rendered into modern Greek.--. (shrink)

In saying that sensible things exist "by convention" he does not, of course, mean that the sensible world is something we will or make up. He no doubt was aware of the fact that "sweet, bitter, hot, cold, and color" are given to us, that we do not establish them or enact them the way we establish an institution or enact a law. It is in the logic of his thesis that sensible things are appearances of atoms in configuration. They (...) exist by convention in this sense: we refer to them as if they were individuals, things; as if their character and existence were self-contained and not entirely conditioned and dependent on something else. Strictly speaking, instead of referring to "honey" we should refer to "the constellation of atoms which we experience as something sweet, fluid, etc." The mental attitude which treats animals, plants, houses, tables as ultimate, the attitude which stops with sensation is "obscure knowledge"; the attitude which sees through and beyond these is "genuine knowledge." The thesis is that we never see the world as it is; the nature of things, the reality of the world is something to be apprehended by rational inference, to be seen by a sort of mental vision. For a man who wants to know, the logically correct attitude toward the familiar sensible world is one of going beyond, penetrating beneath, transcending it. (shrink)

There is evidence that asexual reproduction has a long-term disadvantage when compared to sexual reproduction. This disadvantage is usually assumed to arise from the more efficient incorporation of advantageous mutations by sexual populations. We consider here the effect on asexual and sexual populations of changes in the fitness of harmful mutations. It is shown that the re-establishment of equilibrium following environmental change is generally faster in sexual populations, and that the mutational load experienced by the sexual population can be significantly (...) less during this period than that experienced by an asexual one. Changes in the fitness of harmful mutations may therefore impose a greater long-term disadvantage on asexual populations than those which are sexual. (shrink)

Many NLP tasks rely on accurately estimating word dependency probabilities P(w1|w2), where the words w1 and w2 have a particular relationship (such as verb-object). Because of the sparseness of counts of such dependencies, smoothing and the ability to use multiple sources of knowledge are important challenges. For example, if the probability P(N |V ) of noun N being the subject of verb V is high, and V takes similar objects to V , and V is synonymous to V , then (...) we want to conclude that P(N |V ) should also be reasonably high—even when those words did not cooccur in the training data. (shrink)

Most scholars regard Ernst Cassirer as a thinker in the Marburg Neo-Kantian tradition whose writings take him from its concern with the analysis of the logical foundations of science to problems in intellectual history, theory of language, and culture. The critical work on his thought has reflected and supported this view. There is a second image of Cassirer which is shared by the large number of students and general readers who have come to his thought through two works that appeared (...) at the end of his life—An Essay on Man and the Myth of the State. These works have gone through numerous printings and have appeared in editions in most major Western and Oriental languages. These readers have found in Cassirer not primarily an epistemologist and historian of thought but a philosopher of humanity, an interpreter of the fragmentation of contemporary cultural life and the nature of the political world. These two sides shown by Cassirer’s thought are not exactly opposed, but also they are not joined. (shrink)

Twelve essays from a symposium concerned with the influence of relativistic concepts on the development of the social sciences. There is general agreement that methodological relativism, though often appropriate to scientific inquiry, has lead to a normative relativism which is inappropriate to the study of man.--R. D. P.

A new and idiomatic translation of the most important questions in the Summa Theologica pertaining to the nature of the human soul and human knowledge.--D. P. B.

The general topic is morality, divided into three notions, Action, Wisdom and Grace. The lectures are lively historical reflections on these notions seen in the context of Greek thought, especially that of Plato and Aristotle.--R. D. P.

Science studies not only material entities and phenomena, but their reflections in the minds of men, in the form of sensations, perceptions, concepts, and the like. The study of a phenomenon like language involves simultaneous examinations of material entities and the aspect of language which pertains to meaning, which takes shape as a result of man's reflection in cognition of the world around him.

A distinguishing characteristic of the biomedical model is its compartmentalized view of man. This way of seeing human beings has its origin in Greek thought; it was stated by Descartes and to this day it still considers humans as beings composed of distinct entities combined into a certain form. Because of this observation, one began to believe that the focus of a health treatment could be exclusively on the affected area of the body, without the need to pay attention to (...) patient’s subjectivity. By seeing pain as a merely sensory response, this model was not capable of encompassing chronic pain, since the latter is a complex process that can occur independently of tissue damage. As of the second half of the twentieth century, when it became impossible to deny the relationship between psyche and soma, the current understanding of chronic pain emerges: that of chronic pain as an individual experience, the result of a sum of physical, psychological, and social factors that, for this reason, cannot be approached separately from the individual who expresses pain. This understanding has allowed a significant improvement in perspective, emphasizing the characteristic of pain as an individual experience. However, the understanding of chronic pain as a sum of factors corresponds to the current way of seeing the process of falling ill, for its conception holds a Cartesian duality and the positivist premise of a single reality. For phenomenology, on the other hand, the individual in his/her unity is more than a simple sum of parts. Phenomenology sees a human being as an intending entity, in which body, mind, and the world are intertwined and constitute each other mutually, thus establishing the human being’s integral functioning. Therefore, a real understanding of the chronic pain process would only be possible from a phenomenological point of view at the experience lived by the individual who expresses and communicates pain. (shrink)

This collection of reprinted social philosophy broadly surveys and introduces problems and positions vis-à-vis the concept of right. Using the tools of ordinary language analysis, M. MacDonald evaluates the attempts of other writers to resolve the tensions between civil and moral responsibility. H. L. A. Hart argues that "... if there are any moral rights at all, it follows that there is at least one natural right." His laudatory deductive exercise and categorization of rights suggests no leads for answering the (...) hypothetical he poses. While MacDonald and Hart raise no gut issues, G. Vlastos gives a common sense analysis of the main stream of classical debate, couching his inquiry in terms of conflicts between collective and distributive justice. His article both includes the scope and surpasses the stopping points of the earlier selections. Through leading to a philosophical discussion of the workings of the denial of human rights within the segregationist position, R. Wasserstrom unmasks the practical stakes involved in what the others leave as an academic problem. H. Morris's witty analysis of a hypothetical "right to be punished" lays bare the fact that social institutions embody some concept of right, duty, and obligation. He leaves the reader with the unanswered but clearly indicated question of which concept of right does one want society to sanction. Also included are: J. Locke's The Second Treatise of Civil Government, Chapters two and five; J. Bentham's Anarchical Fallacies; The Virginia Declaration of Rights ; Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens ; Universal Declaration of Human Rights ; and a portion of the Declaration of Independence of the U.S.A.--M. D. P. (shrink)

Background: Concern has been expressed about the process of consent to clinical trials, particularly in phase I “first-in-man” trials. Trial participant information sheets are often lengthy and technical. Content-based readability testing of sheets, which is often required to obtain research ethics approval for trials in the USA, is limited and cannot indicate how information will perform. Methods: An independent-groups design was used to study the user-testing performance of the participant information sheet from the phase I TGN1412 trial. Members of the (...) public were asked to read it, then find and demonstrate understanding of 21 key aspects of the trial. The participant information sheet was then rewritten, redesigned and tested on 20 members of the public, using the same 21-item questionnaire. Results: On the original TGN1412 participant information sheet, participants could not find answers and some of the found information was not understood. Six of 21 questions, including those relating to placebo, follow-up visits and the emergency phone number, were found by eight or fewer of 10 participants. The revised information sheet performed better, with the answers to 17 of 21 questions found and understood by all 20 participants. Conclusions: Tests showed that the TGN1412 participant information sheet may not inform participants adequately for consent. Revising its content and design led to significant improvements. Writers of materials for trial participants should take account of good practice in information design. Performance-based user testing may be a useful method to indicate strengths and weaknesses in trial materials. (shrink)

_The purpose _of the article is to introduce into scientific circulation works by Ukrainian scholar Taras Zakydalsky on the philosophy of Hryhorii Skovoroda. Taras Zakydalsky is a representative of the Ukrainian diaspora, philosopher, and member of Canadian NTSh (Shevchenko Scientific Society of Canada). _Theoretical basis._ We consider the uniqueness of H. Skovoroda’s philosophy, which stimulates not only intellectually but also spiritually enlightens the reader. The reasons for the complex perception and interpretation of Hryhorii Skovoroda’s philosophy are highlighted. We have verified (...) the main methods of its interpretation given in the works by Dmytro Chyzhevskyi. The influence of philosophical thought of thinkers of Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Aristotle, Epicurus, the Church Fathers, and Tertullian has been studied. We have comprehended H. Skovoroda’s interpretation of the Bible as a two-layer existence, the symbolic world that makes the foundation of his philosophy. The peculiarity of the thinker’s division of the heart into "internal" and "external" is analyzed. Hryhorii Skovoroda’s position on the Good and the evil is stated. The Good is identified with God, and the evil – with the real world, the man can choose between the two. Much attention is paid to the understanding of man as a microcosm – rational thinking, and thought is the fundamental cause of human activity, which generates all existence. Hryhorii Skovoroda’s philosophy of metaphysics as the existence of three worlds is highlighted: the first is the macrocosm (the whole surrounding world), the second is the microcosm (the man), and the third is the symbolic world (the Bible). "Monodualism" as a characteristic feature of H. Skovoroda’s work is analyzed. We have highlighted H. Skovoroda’s attitude to the transcendence of God, which is not separated from the world but is present in it directly. The understanding of faith as a forced act of self-love is analyzed because by loving ourselves we love God. The criteria for true and false faith have been clarified. The significance of H. Skovoroda’s aphorism that _what is necessary is useful, and not useful is unnecessary_ is considered. Examples of ethical principles in H. Skovoroda’s philosophy are considered. Peculiarities of the concept HAPPINESS are revealed. This concept is a universal means of existence of the Good, its source is gratitude to God. _Originality_ of the article is in the systematic presentation of the philosophy of the heart by Hryhorii Skovoroda and the analysis of the integrity of the "inner man", the true meaning of life as interpreted by Taras Zakydalsky. _Conclusions_ summarize the "anthropological pragmatism" of the philosopher, whose main idea is to apply practical skills for the benefit of society. (shrink)

Directed to the non-philosopher, this is an attempt to sketch briefly a public philosophy for contemporary America. It attacks the "enfeebling naturalism" of Dewey and espouses the right of suffrage as the most fundamental right of man.--D. P. B.

Purpose of the paper is to establish the emergence and evolution of a gender problematics from the foundations of classical philosophy, namely, from the phenomenon of will-to-truth as the spontaneous desire of man to understand the life. To achieve this purpose, the following tasks are solved: 1) to investigate the way in which philosophy constitutes itself; 2) to establish how the category of "sex" manifests, both in the natural and in the social contexts; 3) to determine the correlation of gender (...) studies and philosophy. Theoretical basis. If for the methodology of gender studies it is inherent to proceed from the contextuality and value foundations of knowledge, then in this paper gender is considered directly from the being-in-world, human presence. Originality. The distinction between will-to-truth and will-to-knowledge, conducted for the first time by Michel Foucault, is used as a method by which the ontological demand of sex is revealed. Conclusions. As a result of the study, it was found that scientific developments in the field of gender issues in their subject matter are not mainly descended from subject sphere of classical philosophy. Sex is not substantiated metaphysically, and it is ontical, not ontological attribute of the human kind; its presentation as the determining factor of the cultural history in context of femininity/masculinity dichotomy is biased. This quality is similar to Nietzsche’s will to power, i.e., determination of definite knowledge that is later used in legal, socio-political discourse, corrects language practice, determines scientific researches making them dependant on axiological component of culture. As the social justice problem is solved, gender as the subject of social study loses its actuality. (shrink)

Lucas plays off his understandings of the problem of freedom and Gödel's Theorem, concluding that, "... a human being cannot be represented by a logistic calculus and therefore cannot be described completely in terms of physical variables, all of whose values are completely determined by the conjunction of their values at some earlier time". Lucas approaches the problem of freedom from the perspective of a computer programmer. His argument is as follows. Men can construct a logistic calculus, L, of which (...) Gödel's theorem is a theorem. Gödel's theorem is known-by-men-to-be-true, which is a fact. Facts have ontological status. Any attempt to represent this fact by a definite description must result in an infinite regress of meta-L's, for a Gödel theorem can be constructed in any meta-L powerful enough to show that Gödel's theorem is a theorem of L. Accordingly, men can do something which cannot be represented within L; men are therefore undeterminable. Lucas's position amounts to a rethinking of Fichte's position, set in the metaphor of meta-mathematical logic. However, whereas Fichte concluded that a man can choose to posit that he is free, and thereby make himself free, Lucas concludes that all men are free since some men know that Gödel's theorem is true. One question suggested by Lucas's argument is ontological, and another is epistemological. First, what is the ontological status of facts? Secondly, what is the distinction between knowing-that-p and showing-that-p? Ultimately, Lucas's demonstration pivots on equating the-completeness-of-L with knowing-the-completeness-of-L. It remains to be shown that that which is capable of knowing-that-p is governed in the act of knowing-that-p by the conditions which determine p.--M. D. P. [[sic]]. (shrink)

Tertium Organum, published in Russian in 1912, is the most interesting and important of these works. The title is explained as meaning that the book is about "the third canon of thought," namely the mystical, which has always existed, although for us moderns it appears as a third method after the deductive and inductive methods described by Aristotle and Bacon. The English translation by Nicholas Bessaraboff and Claude Bragdon was published by Manas Press in 1920, and again, revised, by Knopf (...) in 1922. The simplicity of the literary style, the short sentences and paragraphs, and the clarity with which subtle arguments are developed show the influence of the author's training as a journalist. In content Tertium Organum is a systematic treatise on epistemology. The first seven chapters are an objective survey of the physical world. The author considers that the most basic problem of physics is why space has just three dimensions, and he concludes that it is impossible to find any answer to this question in an objective study of the world of space and time. Consequently, taking as a clue Kant's thesis that space and time are forms of intuition, and inferring from this that "we bear within ourselves the conditions of our space," he approaches the problem subjectively. In the following chapters he endeavors to show how our mode of consciousness makes space three-dimensional, how other modes of consciousness would, and for other beings do, make it of fewer or more dimensions, and how these different spaces are related to each other. The next to last chapter is a collection of selections from mystical literature, with comments, and the concluding chapter considers the "cosmic consciousness" with has for its object a world of four dimensions. An appendix gives a table showing the space and time sense, psychology, logic, mathematics, forms of action, morals, forms of consciousness, forms of knowledge, and forms of science characteristic of, as well as the different beings characterized by, four "forms of the manifestation of consciousness.". (shrink)

Study of Bhāvanaviveka of Maṇḍanamiśra, work on the Purva-mīmāṃsā doctrine of causation.

Plato's Euthyrphro, Apology, andCrito portray Socrates' words and deeds during his trial for disbelieving in the Gods of Athens and corrupting the Athenian youth, and constitute a defense of the man Socrates and of his way of life, the philosophic life. The twelve essays in the volume, written by leading classical philosophers, investigate various aspects of these works of Plato, including the significance of Plato's characters, Socrates's revolutionary religious ideas, and the relationship between historical events and Plato's texts.

Tha aim of the paper is to point out some of the characteristics of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology as embodied in his vision of man and world and developed in his Phenomenology of Perception. The author focuses especially on Merleau-Ponty's criticism of several essential theses of J.-P. Sartre's Being and Nothingness. Merleau-Ponty tries to revitalize the bonds between those spheres of being, which in Sartre's vision are antithetical, and thus fully alienated. It should be remembered, however, that the essential problems of Phenomenology (...) of Perception have their origins in his previous work, namely in The Structure of Behaviour , in which they have been formulated independently of Sartre's vision. (shrink)

It is known that antiquity understood man as an organic part of the cosmos, which occupies the highest place among natural beings. Instead, the Middle Ages led man beyond the limits of cosmic natural life, proclaiming, on the one hand, an invisible connection with the transcendent God, and, on the other, humiliating the complete dependence caused by his fall upon Divine grace. The Middle Ages are about the discovery of the "inner man", who in the cosmos does not meet anything (...) and know the depths of which can only be obtained by the supernatural light of grace [Haydenko P.P. Evolution of the concept of science.- M., 1980.- C. 409, 425]. Self-knowledge, like the knowledge of God, medieval philosophical thought subordinated the religious task of saving the soul. She transferred the center of gravity of ethics from the sphere of knowledge to the sphere of faith, giving priority to freedom rather than reason - which led to the assertion of man as an active subject of action as opposed to the objectively contemplative attitude of antiquity. Such activity of the subject, despite its purely religious orientation, subsequently played an important role in the formation of the identity of the Renaissance individual. (shrink)

Discusses the work of G.I. Gurdjieff and his establishment of the Institute for the Harmonious Development of man, and examines the contributions of Gurdjieff's two major disciples, P.D. Ouspensky and A.R. Orage.

First published in 1972, The Hope of Progress presents collection of essays and lectures dealing with the history of scientific ideas and the impact of science on society. The principle piece in this volume is the author's 1969 presidential address to the British Association 'On The Effecting of All Things Possible', an argument for believing in the ability of science to solve the problems it has itself created, and which too many of us believe insoluble. It contains author's Romanes Lecture (...) on 'Science and Literature' and a well known critique of J.D. Watson's notorious account of the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA, The Double Helix. Other chapters discuss the possibility of the control and domination by science of the body and mind of Man- though the author concludes in 'The Genetic Improvement of Man' 'I think that, in the main, for many centuries to come, we shall have to put up with human beings as they are at present constituted'. This book will be useful for scholars and researchers of history of science, philosophy of science, natural science, and philosophy in general. (shrink)

The article by Academician P. L. Kapitsa published below is devoted to problems of the utmost importance, which have come to be termed "global." The Twenty - fifth Congress of the CPSU pointed to the need to study them scientifically and solve them practically, emphasizing that they touch on the interests of humanity as a whole and will exercise an increasingly marked influence on the lives of every people and on the entire system of international relations. In their social philosophical (...) aspects they have been discussed more than once in the pages of Voprosy filosofii. Discussions of these problems took place at the round tables entitled "Man and His Environment" [See translation in our Fall-Winter 1974 number. — Ed., Soviet Studies in Philosophy], "Social Philosophy Problems of Demography," and "Science and Global Problems of Our Time," and numerous articles have been published in such series as "Science and Social Progress," "The Peace Program and the Dialectics of International Relations" [See translation in our Fall 1975 issue. — Ed., Soviet Studies in Philosophy], and "Man — Society — Nature." The editors of the journal, guided by the directives of the Twenty-fifth Party Congress on the need for further investigation of such global problems of our time, are inclined to continue the discussion of them in the future; another round table devoted to these problems is being planned now. The article by Academician P. L. Kapitsa, it seems to us, will provide fruitful stimuli for discussion at this round table, which will probably be published in several installments. As the author himself emphasizes, certain positions in his article are debatable and require discussion. The journal invites philosophers, demographers, economists, and representatives of the natural sciences to take part in discussions of the problems posed. Certain questions examined in Kapitsa's article are also treated in articles by Howard L. Parsons, A. D. Ado, and Iu. A. Kirshin published in this issue of the journal. (shrink)

Part I: WHAT IS ETHICS? Plato: Socratic Morality: Crito. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part II: ETHICAL RELATIVISM VERSUS ETHICAL OBJECTIVISM. Herodotus: Custom is King. Thomas Aquinas: Objectivism: Natural Law. Ruth Benedict: A Defense of Ethical Relativism. Louis Pojman: A Critique of Ethical Relativism. Gilbert Harman: Moral Relativism Defended. Alan Gewirth: The Objective Status of Human Rights. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part III: MORALITY, SELF-INTEREST AND FUTURE SELVES. Plato: Why Be Moral? Richard Taylor: On the Socratic Dilemma. David Gauthier: Morality and (...) Advantage. Gregory Kavka: A Reconciliation Project. Derek Parfit: Later Selves and Moral Principles. Bernard Williams: Persons, Character, and Morality. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part IV: VALUE. Jeremy Bentham: Classical Hedonism. Robert Nozick: The Experience Machine. Richard Taylor: Value and the Origin of Right and Wrong. Friedrich Nietzsche: The Transvaluation of Values. Derek Parfit: What Makes Someone’s Life Go Best? Thomas Nagel: Value: The View from Nowhere. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part V: UTILITARIANISM AND CONSEQUENTIALISM. John Stuart Mill: Utilitarianism. J.J.C. Smart: Extreme and Restricted Utilitarianism. Kai Nielsen: Against Moral Conservatism. Bernard Williams: Against Utilitarianism. John Hospers: Rule-Utilitarianism. Robert Nozick: Side Constraints. Peter Singer: Famine, Affluence and Morality. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part VI: KANTIAN AND DEONTOLOGICAL SYSTEMS. Immanuel Kant: Foundation for the Metaphysic of Morals. W. D. Ross: What Makes Right Acts Right? Onora O’Neill: Kantian Formula of the End in Itself and World Hunger. Thomas Nagel: Moral Luck. Philippa Foot: Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives. Judith Jarvis Thomson: Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part VII: CONTRACTARIAN ETHICAL SYSTEMS. Thomas Hobbes: The Leviathan. David Gauthier: Why Contractarianism? John Rawls: Contractualism: Justice as Fairness. T.M. Scanlon: Contractualism and Utilitarianism. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part VIII: VIRTUE-BASED ETHICAL SYSTEMS. Aristotle: The Ethics of Virtue. Bernard Mayo: Virtue and the Moral Life. William Frankena: A Critique of Virtue-Based Ethics. Walter Schaller: Are Virtues No More than Dispositions to Obey Moral Rules? Alasdair MacIntyre: The Nature of the Virtues. Susan Wolf: Moral Saints. Louis P. Pojman: In Defense of Moral Saints. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part IX: THE FACT/VALUE PROBLEM: METAETHICS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. David Hume: On Reason and the Emotions: The Fact/Value Distinction. G. E. Moore: Non-Naturalism. A. J. Ayer: Emotivism. R. M. Hare: Prescriptivism: The Structure of Ethics and Morals. Geoffrey Warnock: The Object of Morality. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part X: MORAL REALISM AND THE CHALLENGE OF SKEPTICISM. J.L. Mackie: The Subjectivity of Values. Jonathan Harrison: A Critique of Mackie’s Error Theory. Gilbert Harman: Moral Nihilism. Nicholas Sturgeon: Moral Explanations. Bernard Williams: Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Bruce Russell: Two Forms of Ethical Skepticism. Michael Smith: A Defense of Moral Realism. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part XI: RELIGION AND ETHICS. Plato: Morality and Religion. Immanuel Kant: God and Immortality as Necessary Postulates of Morality. George Mavrodes: Religious and the Queerness of Morality. Kai Nielson: Ethics Without God. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part XII: CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES TO CLASSICAL ETHICAL THEORY. Part A. Sociobiology and the Question of Moral Responsibility. Charles Darwin: Ethics and the Descent of Man. E.O.Wilson: Sociobiology and Ethics. Michael Ruse: Evolution and Ethics: The Sociobiological Approach. Elliot Sober: Prospects for an Evolutionary Ethics. J.L. Mackie: The Law of the Jungle, Evolution and Morality. Suggestions for Further Readingon Sociobiology. Part B. The Challenge of Determinism to Moral Responsibility and Desert. Galen Strawson: The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility. Louis Pojman: Free Will, Determinism, and Moral Responsibility:A Response to Galen Strawson. Richard Taylor: A Libertarian Defense of Free Will and Responsibility. Suggestions for Further Reading on Moral Responsibility. Glossary of Ethical Terms. (shrink)

Lehrer's “reason for writing this book is that the philosophy of Thomas Reid is widely unread, while the combination of soundness and creativity of his work is unexcelled.” The book contributes to the ongoing Reid revival. Chapter 1 presents an overview of Reid's life and works and the last, Chapter 15, gives Lehrer's appraisal of Reid's philosophy. Chapter 2, “Beyond Impressions and Ideas,” outlines Reid's “refutation of what he called the Ideal System” of impressions and ideas that dominated philosophy from (...) Descartes through Hume, and summarizes Reid's theory of the mind. The remaining chapters conduct the reader through the three books Reid published during his lifetime. There are three chapters covering the Inquiry of the Human Mind, five on the Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, a chapter comparing Reid on conception and evidence in the Inquiry and the Essays, and three chapters on Essays on the Active Powers of Man. The index is helpful despite occasional references to a page number larger than the number of pages. The bibliography is generally good, although, oddly, Lehrer lists the inaccessible 1937 Latin edition of Reid's important Philosophical Orations and not the English translation published by the Philosophy Research Archives in 1977 and republished by the Journal of the History of Philosophy Monograph Series early in 1989. The text is remarkably free of typographical errors, but on p. 130 Putnam's 1973 article, “Meaning and Reference,” is said to have been published in 1983. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dharma Bums: The Beat Generation and the Making of Countercultural PilgrimageP. J. JohnstonI believe in the sweetness of Jesus And Buddha— I believe, In St. Francis, Avaloki Tesvara, the Saints Of First Century India A D And Scholars Santidevan And Otherwise Santayanan Everywhere.(Kerouac 1959: 15)Preliminary Polemics“PILGRIM, n. A traveler that is taken seriously.”—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary 2007: 133As Beat commentator Stephen Prothero describes in his article “On the (...) Holy Road: The Beat Movement as Spiritual Protest” (1991), the Beats and their pilgrimages have most emphatically not been taken seriously. Both critics and scholars have been unkind to members of the Beat generation, and this unkindness has manifested itself in relative neglect of the Beats in all possible aspects of scholarly investigation. But nowhere does this appear more pronounced than in the area of Beat religion. Though some recent scholarship has been picking up from this earlier neglect and it is now [End Page 165] possible to find serious biographies of most of the major Beat writers and some belated attention to the movement as a literary phenomenon, the only book-length treatment of Beat Buddhism I was able to locate (Tonkinson 1995) hardly qualifies as a scholarly work and was published not by an academic press but as a special feature of the Buddhist magazine Tricycle. Prothero hypothesizes that this is because of the movement’s reputation as rebellious and antinomian—in its heyday the movement was characterized in identical unsavory terms by publications representing interests as diverse as Life and Playboy, with the latter describing the Beats as “nihilists” and the former claiming that the Beats were at war with “Mom, Dad, Politics, Marriage, the Savings Bank, Organized Religion, Literary Elegance, Law, the Ivy League Suit and Higher Education, to say nothing of the Automatic Dishwasher, the Cellophane-wrapped Soda Cracker, the Split-Level House and the clean, or peace-provoking H-bomb” (Prothero 1991: 206). Norman Podhoretz of Partisan Review went further still, claiming that the Beats were “hostile to civilization” and that the movement as a whole amounted to “a revolt of the spiritually underprivileged and crippled of soul” and “an affirmation of death” (ibid., 206). One couldn’t ask for a more passionate disavowal of the Beats or a more thorough polemic that the movement was profoundly antireligious.This could not contrast more with the Beats’ representation of their movement and its aims, with Jack Kerouac going so far as to reinterpret the crucial term “Beat” (a term for someone down and out originally borrowed from criminal street jive) as a noun derived from the adjective “beatific,” a specifically religious term familiar from such phrases as “the beatific vision” (ibid., 206–207). Several of the representative Beat writers were practicing Buddhists, influencing the entire movement to such an extent that Buddhist ideas and imagery suffused Beat literature as a whole. Ginsberg and Kerouac especially emphasized the positive and constructive elements of their spiritual vision, arguing that literature such as On the Road and Howl should be understood as religious affirmations of what is good and holy rather than as purely critical undertakings: “For the crucifix I speak out, for the Star of Israel I speak out, for the divinest man who ever lived who was German (Bach) I speak out, for sweet Mohammed I speak out, for Buddha I speak out, for Lao-tse and Chuang-tse I speak out” (ibid., 206–207). Or, as Allen Ginsberg put it less lyrically (and rather more bluntly): “Howl is an ‘Affirmation’ by individual experience of God, sex, drugs, and absurdity... the poems are religious and I meant them to be” (ibid., 207).But for the most part, Beat asseverations in no way diminished scholarly wariness about the Beat movement and its spirituality—as Prothero concludes, “the tendency among literary scholars is to see these [religious] concerns as tangential rather than constitutive” while “historians of American religion who have explored beat spirituality have tended to focus almost exclusively on the beats’ engagement with Zen and then to dismiss that engagement as haphazard” (ibid., 207).It is my contention that the mainstream scholarly neglect of Beat spirituality is in some part... (shrink)

In der neuen Literatur tiber Leibniz' Spatphilosophie findet man zwei deutlich einander entgegengesetzte Theorien Uber die Realitat des Körpers. Auf der einen Seite gibt es Gesichtspunkte, die ihn mit einer Phänomenalismuslehre verbinden, nach welcher die Körper nichts anderes als koordinierte Perzeptionen unausgedehnter Monaden sind. Auf der anderen Seite gibt es Griinde, die dafur sprechen, daß Leibniz die Auffassung vertreten muß, daß Körper Aggregate von Monaden sind. In diesem Aufsatz suche ich zu zeigen, daß die phanomenalistische Interpretation aufgrund der starken Textzeugnisse, (...) die Leibniz beständig zur Aggregatthese hindrängen, zuriickzuweisen ist. Daruber hinaus weise ich jedoch die verbreitete Auffassung eben der Aggregatthese zurück, d. h. die Meinung, gewisse Vielheiten von Monaden riefen bloß die Illusion, Körper zu sein, hervor, wenn sie durch andere Monaden M falsch perzipiert" werden. Gegen diese Auffassung des falschen Perzipierens ftihre ich ins Feld, daß die Aggregatthese als ein Deutungsversuch der Natur oder des Wesens des Körpers verstanden werden mufi. Wenn Leibniz sagt, Körper seien Aggregate von Monaden, so ist das nicht als blofie Behauptung, gewisse Monaden erschienen anderen Monaden als Körper, zu verstehen, sondern als die These, daß jeder Körper seinem Wesen nach eine Vielheit von Monadenist. (shrink)