The self seems to be a unitary entity remaining stable across time. Nevertheless, current theorizing conceptualizes the self as a number of interacting sub-systems involving perception, intention and action (self-model). One important function of such a self-model is to distinguish between events occurring as a result of one's own actions and events occurring as the result of somebody else's actions. We conducted an fMRI experiment that compared brain activation after an abrupt mismatch between one's own movement and its visual consequences (...) with an abrupt mismatch between one's own movement and somebody else's visually perceived hand movement. A right fronto-parietal network was selectively active during a sudden mismatch between one's own observed and performed hand action. (shrink)

A self-admittedly unorthodox attempt to apply the teachings of Buddha to the problems of contemporary India. Unostentatious in design, it is a highly personal interpretation of Buddhist teaching by a sensitive Indian thinker.--J. D. T. Jr.

A detailed scholarly examination of the distorted image of Islam that emerged in the West during the years 1100-1350. Although most of the book is concerned with documenting this image of Islam, Daniel also explores the motives and effects of this distortion. A series of comprehensive bibliographies is included. An authoritative, if somewhat tedious, study.--J. D. T., Jr.

Imagine, if you can, St. Augustine convening a council in the year 430 and announcing, "Sorry, the eschaton has been cancelled. Moreover, the City of Man, with a little time and effort, will gradually transform itself into the City of God." Now imagine the dismay of certain French communists in 1976 when their party’s 22nd Congress dropped the goal of the dictatorship of the proletariat and proclaimed its dedication to a "democratic road to socialism." This imperfect analogy may allow us (...) to sense the passion that motivates Etienne Balibar’s attack on the PCF’s decision and his defense of an orthodox reading of Lenin on the dictatorship of the proletariat. (shrink)

Heidegger’s monumental Gesamtausgabe is divided into four parts. The first, from which the present book comes, will gather, in sixteen volumes, and annotate with Heidegger’s marginalia his already published works with the exception of his courses. The second part will present in some forty volumes his courses from 1923 through 1945. The third part will include some of his unpublished writings and conferences, while the fourth will be dedicated to notes and information on the works. The present work presents the (...) text of his 1950 collection of essays "unchanged"—with two exceptions. The text of the first entry, "The Origin of the Artwork," is that of the slightly revised "Reclam" edition; and, as in the previously published editions of Sein und Zeit and Wegmarken, certain "stylistic or clarificatory corrections from the hand of the author" are made in the text without notation. This practice corresponds to Heidegger’s own wishes to avoid distracting philological apparatus and to present an "Ausgabe letzter Hand.". (shrink)

This book deserves the attention of philosophers of religion. Tracy presents a monumental synthesis of philosophy and history within the context of a "revisionist" theological model. Part I attempts adequately to articulate a method of inquiry by outlining the sets of evaluative criteria, the uses of evidence, and the place of the various philosophical and historical methods within this model. Not only must the method be responsive to the historical tradition, but it also must heed the non-Christian scrutiny of what (...) Van A. Harvey calls the "morality of scientific knowledge," which demands a critical posture toward beliefs and tradition. Tracy’s model involves three steps: 1) phenomenology of the "religious dimension" of our "common experience and language," 2) an "historical and hermeneutical investigation" of the Christian tradition, and 3) "transcendental or metaphysical reflection" in order both to determine the "truth-status" of the previous steps and to effect a critical correlation of philosophy and hermeneutics. (shrink)

There are more philosophy teachers alive today than existed from Socrates until 1900, and this year alone there will be more "contact hours" in philosophical wisdom than in the two millenia before Descartes. One might legitimately wonder what is done with all that time and why the world is not immensely better for it. The first, if not the second, of these questions is addressed and answered in this serious, thorough and much-needed collection of essays. Eduard Fey, founder and long (...) the president of the International Society for Teachers of Philosophy, and a dozen coworkers have surveyed the historical background and present-day structure of philosophical instruction in every country of Western Europe—in sixteen essays, some as long as fifty pages, some as brief as five pages. The volume is thorough. One can learn, for example, exactly what a gymnasium senior in Luxembourg studies during his weekly three hours of philosophy. One can learn how Hans Richert tried to reform high school instruction in Germany in 1925, only to be opposed by the Catholic hierarchy’s insistence that metaphysical questions be treated only in religious instruction, or how the German Idealist Krause influenced Spanish pedagogy through his student Julian Sanz del Rio, and so on. Given the range and detail of the material, the lack of an index to the volume is keenly felt. (shrink)

This first volume of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe reprints his 1972 collection of the same title, but with some additions. The 1972 edition contained three works: his doctoral dissertation on "The Theory of Judgment in Psychologism", the habilitation work on "Duns Scotus’s Theory of Categories and Meaning", and the lecture on "The Concept of Time in Historical Science". The present volume adds the article "The Problem of Reality in Modern Philosophy" and the long review "New Research on Logic," both from 1912, as (...) well as shorter book reviews from 1913-14. The new volume also prints eleven notes—none of them of great importance—which the young Heidegger jotted down in the margins of the original publications. Perhaps the note on "das Gelten" on p. 166 is the most useful. The title pages reproduce Heidegger’s handwritten dedication of the Gesamtausgabe to his wife, as well as the subtitle he gave to the entire endeavor a few days before he died: "Wege—nicht Werke," "Pathways—not Works.". (shrink)

Heidegger’s monumental Gesamtausgabe is divided into four parts. The first, from which the present book comes, will gather, in sixteen volumes, and annotate with Heidegger’s marginalia his already published works with the exception of his courses. The second part will present in some forty volumes his courses from 1923 through 1945. The third part will include some of his unpublished writings and conferences, while the fourth will be dedicated to notes and information on the works. The present work presents the (...) text of his 1950 collection of essays "unchanged"—with two exceptions. The text of the first entry, "The Origin of the Artwork," is that of the slightly revised "Reclam" edition; and, as in the previously published editions of Sein und Zeit and Wegmarken, certain "stylistic or clarificatory corrections from the hand of the author" are made in the text without notation. This practice corresponds to Heidegger’s own wishes to avoid distracting philological apparatus and to present an "Ausgabe letzter Hand.". (shrink)

McCloskey presents a powerful case for the view, already well argued in briefer form by Mackie, Flew, McCloskey, and others, that the existence of evil—any and particularly actual evil-is, if not logically, morally incompatible with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, all-good creator. While he promises to "take up the challenge" of certain theists who claim no logical contradiction is implied in the position God and evil exist, aside from a few ad hominem arguments directed Plantinga’s way he seems finally (...) to concede their point. The early chapters are of a preliminary nature and aim at defining traditional and parallel forms of the problem of evil, describing the enormity of actual evil, and establishing, by way of assessing particular ethical and linguistic theories, the presuppositions required for the problem to appear as a real one. It is in the later chapters, however, that the author makes his case. Here he considers and rejects for numerous reasons the view that physical evil, pain and suffering, can be justified by the virtuous and other goods they make possible, and the view that they are justified theologically, as punishment for sin. The former view implies an ethic, unacceptable to McCloskey, in which evil befalling a person can be willed or approved as a means. The latter view fails in the case of undeserved suffering, e.g., animals and undeserving children. (shrink)

Some of the best work on American philosophy is being done today in Italy, much of it surrounding Prof. Carlo Sini of the University of Milan. His Whitehead et la funzione della filosofia, Il pragmatismo americano, and most recently Semiotica e filosofia —the last in part on Pierce—has prepared a climate for even more specialized work on American thought. The book presently under review is the first full-length study in Italian on Mead’s thought in its entirety.

Why should one whose field is not professional philosophy but language in relation to literature and the history of ideas undertake a presentation of Heidegger? Because his studies in Greek tragedy, translation, and the relation between culture and totalitarianism have found Heidegger "massively present and in the path of further thinking," indeed, "a touchstone for a ‘politics of the word’". Steiner’s treatment is admittedly selective and circumscribed by the guiding question, "How is a page of Heidegger to be read, what (...) orders of meaning can be drawn from it?". In answering that question, he gives us an intelligent, critical, and, in the best sense, popular exposition of some main lines in Heidegger’s thought. (shrink)

This slender volume attempts to determine the role of logic in Heidegger’s thought and its incompatibility with logic as others understand it, so as to show that Heidegger’s overcoming of logic entails an overturn of philosophy as conceived since Plato. Fay carries this out in six steps: 1) Heidegger’s critique of logic is motivated by metaphysics’ forgetfulness of Being and by the need for a fundamental ontology of alëtheia; 2) the primacy of the preconceptual, prelogical grasp of Being shows that (...) not logic but "the command of Being," grasped "by a thankful gesture of acceptance", rules thought; 3) discussion of "Nothing" in Wegmarken, Carnap’s attacks thereupon, and Heidegger’s counterclaims; 4) discussion of the devolution from truth as the bond of physis-alëtheia-logos to truth as correspondence; 5) a Heideggerian view of the development of symbolic logic and its relation to technicity; 6) the overcoming of technicity in Heidegger’s meditation on language. Professor Fay concludes that Heidegger’s reflection on logos is incompatible with logic as ordinarily understood but that the attempt to overcome traditional logic delivers Heidegger’s thought not to irrationalism but to the original sense of logos. (shrink)

Full Professor of Law at the University of Padua and guest lecturer at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Antonio Negri, born in 1933 and raised in Catholic Action, had to his credit an impressive series of works on law, historicism, and philosophy before launching himself upon the career of chief philosopher and theoretician of Leninist revolution in Italy. Domination and Sabotage is the fifth in a series of shorter works that have issued from his seminars at the University of Padua, all (...) published by Feltrinelli in the well-known series Opuscoli marxisti and all treating of the relation between advanced industrial society and proletarian revolution. The tract has enjoyed an extraordinarily wide circulation and has been hailed as a new Communist Manifesto. Its particular focus is on the question of Marxist method, and within that question its chief interest for the present reviewer is the secularized religious motif that runs through Negri’s thought. (shrink)

This book ranges over all the conventionally acknowledged fields of philosophy and, despite or perhaps because of its title, its author concedes at the outset that he has sacrificed depth for breadth. In view of its wide compass, not to mention its sometimes evasive dialectical style, it will not be possible to summarize here the book’s main arguments or positions. Instead, attention will be directed to the following areas and corresponding chapters: Theory of Knowledge, Metaphysics, Philosophical Anthropology, and Philosophy of (...) Religion. (shrink)

By pointing out parallels between Kierkegaard's thought and that of the eighteenth century "Dunkers," the author seeks to offer a case for twentieth century "Neo-Sectarianism." As he points out, "S. K. would be listened to where Menno Simons and Alexander Mock would not." Eller leaves no doubt of his devotion to Kierkegaard studies, pointing out on the dedication page that he has named one of his sons Enten Eller--a phrase which in Danish means "Either/or" and which was the title of (...) Kierkegaard's masterwork, Enten-Eller.--J. T. (shrink)

By pointing out parallels between Kierkegaard's thought and that of the eighteenth century "Dunkers," the author seeks to offer a case for twentieth century "Neo-Sectarianism." As he points out, "S. K. would be listened to where Menno Simons and Alexander Mock would not." Eller leaves no doubt of his devotion to Kierkegaard studies, pointing out on the dedication page that he has named one of his sons, Enten Eller--a phrase which in Danish means "Either/or" and which was the title of (...) Kierkegaard's masterwork, Enten-Eller.--J. T. (shrink)

First delivered as a lecture course at the University of Padua by one of Italy’s most brilliant, and certainly its most controversial, Leninists, The Factory of Strategy is concerned to read Lenin in terms of contemporary Marxist exigencies, especially in advanced industrial nations. Divided unequally into five parts, it deals with: the internal dynamism of Lenin’s thought; the question of the organization of the Soviets; methodology, via Lenin’s reading of Hegel; the abolition of the state, via State and Revolution; and (...) a critical reading of Lenin’s attack on German Marxists. Throughout, the work is inspired by two convictions: that Lenin offers the most adequate methodology for revolution, and that his thought must be restructured in terms of the changed situation of the contemporary world. (shrink)

The sudden death of Fridolin Wiplinger of Vienna in 1973 at the age of 41 cut short a brilliant career that had already found expression in two important works: Wahrheit und Geschichtlichkeit and Physis und Logos. In the former he entered into dialogue with Heidegger on the question of truth in the "correlativity" of Being and logos, whereas in the latter, still in connection with Heidegger, he attempted to work out the bond between physis and logos as the concretion of (...) the Being-question, a topic which Heidegger himself treated inchoatively in his early Freiburg courses on Aristotle: the unity of logos as letting-be-seen and physis as the self-hiding Being of beings. The present work on the basic questions of the origin and "fulfillment" of metaphysics is edited from Wiplinger’s 1972-73 lecture course at Vienna, "Basic Questions of Metaphysics," and was conceived of as the introduction to a whole series of lecture courses on the topic. The next semester was to have treated Fichte as the end or fulfillment of metaphysics, followed by a course on the overcoming of metaphysics. (shrink)

This book is dedicated to showing that Heidegger’s work contains a philosophy of religion despite his own rejection of the term, and that Heidegger’s religious significance can best be understood and supplemented from the standpoint of American philosophy of religion, especially Leslie Dewart’s description of God in terms of meaning.

They met in 1920 and for some years nurtured hopes of a cooperative renewal of Western philosophy. In June of 1921 Heidegger sent Jaspers a lengthy criticism of his Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, but Jaspers neither read it fully nor took it seriously, and thereby no doubt miffed Heidegger. When reports reached Heidelberg that the younger man was criticizing him behind his back, Jaspers confronted Heidegger and received both a categorial denial and protestations of "der alles tragende Glaube in der Liebe". (...) Apart from Heidegger’s 1921 effort, they apparently neither read nor understood each other’s work during the time of their relationship. Then everything fell apart in 1933. Perhaps there was already some tension between their wives, something never to be discounted in philosophical circles. And even though Jaspers never took Heidegger for an anti-Semite, and although he warmly congratulated him on the inaugural address as rector of Freiburg, he was shocked at Heidegger’s naïveté about Hitler and the future. They last saw each other in June of 1933, and thereafter Jaspers received damning evidence of the extent of Heidegger’s compromise. He read a copy of a 1933 letter in which Heidegger would have a certain Mr. Baumgarten excluded both from the Nazi S.A. and from teaching, due to his origins in "the liberal-democratic circle of Heidelberg intellectuals around Max Weber" and because of his association with "the Jew Frankel". Later, in 1937-38 he heard that Heidegger maintained the no longer obligatory Hitler salute before lectures. After 1936 correspondence between them ceased, but Heidegger continued sending Jaspers his publications and in 1945 requested from him a letter of support to the Freiburg commission that would decide Heidegger’s post-war academic fate. Jaspers’s letter mentioned the Baumgarten affair and said that Heidegger’s 1933 capitulation seemed to justify excluding him from teaching, but that he should have every freedom to continue his research. (shrink)

In this text, the reader will find a well focused, clearly written, and concise review of major themes in the philosophy of Edmund Husserl. This work could well serve the beginning student to focus on the major problems in Husserlian thought. Fuchs argues that Husserl’s phenomenology is in conformity with and an outgrowth of the traditional orientation of Western philosophy called the metaphysics of presence. In separate discussions of evidence, temporality, and intersubjectivity, the author attempts to demonstrate both that Husserl (...) is tied to this traditional metaphysical doctrine which grants primacy to presence over absence, and that he nonetheless laid the foundation for the overcoming of this metaphysic. Throughout, Husserl is portrayed as wrestling with the juxtaposition of presence and absence; and yet on each point, presence is said to remain of primary constitutive status: evidence is seen as "absolute presence," the presence of impression plays a stronger constitutive role than the absences of past and future, and knowledge of other human beings is secured on the ground of presence. In short, the author claims that Husserl provided the foundation for the overcoming of the prejudice of the metaphysics of presence, and yet did not succeed in fully extricating himself from the confusions of this tradition. (shrink)

The primary and secondary school systems of the United States fail to develop individuals who grow into thinking and critical persons; additionally, there is a moral vacuum within the schools. These are assertions made by Lipman, Sharp, and Oscanyan, and the remedy proposed is a reading program called "Philosophy in the Classroom.".

After brief remarks on his childhood in Breslau, Gadamer’s philosophical-autobiographical memoir covers four periods: his time as student and Privatdozent at Marburg, his teaching at Leipzig, including two years as rector under Russian occupation, the brief interlude at Frankfurt, and the crowning years at Heidelberg, during which Wahrheit und Method was completed. Interspersed with these autobiographical reflections are personal and philosophical recollections of the intellectual greats of his time: Natorp, Scheler, Schürer, Kommerell, Reinhardt, Lipps, Jaspers, Heidegger, Krüger, and Löwith. These (...) two themes of "the self and the other" blend together smoothly, and Gadamer’s genial character suffuses the whole. (shrink)

Like "being" according to Aristotle, Martin Heidegger can be spoken about in many ways. Caputo has chosen one of those ways, the fruitful path of a concrete elaboration of the analogies between Eckhart’s mystical breakthrough to a trans-metaphysical understanding of God, man, thought, and will and Heidegger’s overcoming of metaphysics. Precisely this analogical kinship of structure, but not content, between the overcoming of metaphysics and the mystical leap is what Caputo means by the "mystical element" in Heidegger, viz., his appropriation (...) of Eckhart’s structural relationship between the soul and God to help in articulating the relation between Dasein and Being. The book does not try to reduce Heidegger’s thought to Eckhart’s mysticism, but rather uses the analogies and differences to highlight and criticize Heidegger’s uniqueness. Although the thinker found in Eckhart an ally whose language and structure he adapted to his own ends, the differences between them are "decisive", and "Heidegger remains his own man". In fact, speaking in criticism Caputo says: "The difficulty with Heidegger is not that he is a mystic but that he is not". (shrink)

After a discussion of Bacon's views on the subject, Van Leeuwen examines a different theory of certainty. This is the theory that was elaborated by Chillingworth and Tillotson, two English Protestant clergymen, in the course of a controversy centering upon the problem of deciding with certainty which beliefs constituted a Rule of Faith, i.e., the basic requirements of belief for Salvation. Chillingworth and Tillotson attempted to avoid both dogmatism and total skepticism by insisting on the existence of levels of certainty (...) and maintaining that the criteria of common sense are appropriate for the solution of theoretical religious questions. According to Van Leeuwen, the application of this theory is extended to scientific contexts in the work of Wilkins and Glanvill and is inherent in the scientific work of such members of the Royal Society as Boyle and Newton. The exposition is good; but the author's claim to a rigorous evolutionary line in the development of the doctrine of certainty among the figures he has treated is sometimes overstated.—T. J. C. (shrink)

Having defined moral responsibility as "acting in a way that will contribute to human well-being," Kimpel views moral philosophy as an empirical discipline that is concerned with the relation of means to end. However, he does not sufficiently clarify the nature of ends.--J. D. T. Jr.

In 1976 Gallimard in Paris issued: Martin Heidegger, Questions IV, which contained, among other things, the French protocols of four seminars that Heidegger held in 1966, 1968, and 1969 in Le Thor, Provence and in 1973 at his own home in Zaehringen, outside Freiburg. The present volume is the German "translation" of those protocols with the addition of a translator’s afterword, which mostly discusses the historical circumstances of the texts. The texts, then, are some four times removed from Heidegger: 1) (...) they stem from his auditors, 2) who published them in French, not German; 3) they were then "revised" and 4) translated into German. For all that, they are valuable and will probably be treated by scholars as a kind of primary source. (shrink)