'One may state Dilthey's significance in most general fashion by characterizing his work as the first thorough-going and sophisticated confrontation of history with positivism and natural science. Dilthey's sweep was universal: he strove to reduce to order the multifarious realms of knowledge, the conflicting traditions of cultural study, that he had embraced. Thus Dilthey laid out a program that no mortal - and certainly no one whose mind had been formed in the third quarter of the nineteenth century - could (...) hope to bring to completion. Yet despite its inconclusiveness, Dilthey's work exerted enormous influence. The distinction he had drawn between natural and cultural science became standard for historians and, to a lesser extent, for social scientists also. After Dilthey historians no longer needed to apologize for the "unscientific" character of their discipline: they understood why its methods could never be quite the same as those of natural science. And the contemporary tradition of intellectual history grew naturally out of Dilthey's teaching.' - H. Stuart Hughes. (shrink)

G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), the influential German philosopher, believed that human history was advancing spiritually and morally according to God’s purpose. At the beginning of this masterwork, Hegel writes: “What the history of Philosophy shows us is a succession of noble minds, a gallery of heroes of thought, who, by the power of Reason, have penetrated into the being of things, of nature and of spirit, into the Being of God, and have won for us by their labours the (...) highest treasure, the treasure of reasoned knowledge.” In his introduction to this Bison Book edition, Frederick C. Beiser notes the complex and controversial history of Hegel’s text. He makes a case that this English-language translation by E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson is still the most reliable one. (shrink)

This new abridgment of a well-known edition makes the main insights of Hegel's famous Lectures on the History of Philosophy widely available in an inexpensive edition.

The scope of this study is both ambitious and modest. One of its ambitions is to reintegrate Hegel's theory of knowledge into main stream epist~ology. Hegel's views were formed in consideration of Classical Skepticism and Modern epistemology, and he frequently presupposes great familiarity with other views and the difficulties they face. Setting Hegel's discussion in the context of both traditional and contemporary epistemology is therefore necessary for correctly interpreting his issues, arguments, and views. Accordingly, this is an issues-oriented study. I (...) analyze Hegel's problematic and method by placing them in the context of Sextus Empiricus, Descartes, Kant, Carnap, and William Alston. I discuss Carnap, rather than a Modern empiricist such as Locke or Hume, for several reasons. One is that Hegel himself refutes a fundamental presupposition of Modern empiricism, the doctrine of "knowledge by acquaintance," in the first chapter of the Phenomenology, a chapter that cannot be reconstructed within the bounds of this study. (shrink)

The selfish goal metaphor is interesting and intriguing. It accounts for the idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies in peoples' goal pursuits without invoking free will, self-regulatory, or self-control failures. However, people pursue multiple goals, sometimes simultaneously. We argue that the model proposed in the target article may gain significant theoretical and practical value if the principles underlying goal selection and/or balancing on a moment-to-moment basis are clearly specified and integrated with the notion of the selfish goal.

Professor C. G. Hempel (known to a host of admirers and friends as 'Peter' Hempel) is one of the most esteemed and best loved philosophers in the If an Empiricist Saint were not somewhat of a Meinongian Impos world. sible Object, one might describe Peter Hempel as an Empiricist Saint. In deed, he is as admired for his brilliance, intellectual flexibility, and crea tivity as he is for his warmth, kindness, and integrity, and does not the presence of so many (...) wonderful qualities in one human being assume the dimensions of an impossibility? But Peter Hempel is not only possible but actual! One of us (Hilary Putnam) remembers vividly the occasion on which he first witnessed Hempel 'in action'. It was 1950, and Quine had begun to attack the analytic/synthetic distinction (a distinction which Carnap and Reichenbach had made a cornerstone, if not the keystone, of Logical Em piricist philosophy). Hempel, who is as quick to accept any idea that seems to contain real substance and insight as he is to demolish ideas that are empty or confused, was one of the first leading philosophers outside of Quine's immediate circle to join Quine in his attack. Hempel had come to Los Angeles (where Reichenbach taught) on a visit, and a small group consisting of Reichenbach and a few of his graduate students were gath ered together in Reichenbach's home to hear Hempel defend the new posi tion. (shrink)