Philosophers analyze the last of the great rock stars.

A long essay, in a collection of essays, about the relationship between rock music and philosophy. Philosophers include Plato, Kant, Vico, Whitehead, Sartre, Cassirer, Langer, Machiavelli, and so forth. Musicians include the Rollings Stones, David Bowie, The Who, Bruce Springsteen, The Grateful Dead, Neil Young, Paul Simon, Jackson Browne, Jimmy Buffett, Led Zeppelin and Rush.

Library of Living Philosophers collection of essays on all aspects of of Hintikka's thought, with his autobiography and replies.

Library of Living Philosophers volume on Hilary Putnam with critical essays, Putnam's autobiography and his replies.

The edited collection Rorty and Beyond assesses and moves beyond Rorty’s legacy, bringing together leading international philosophers. The collection covers diverse territory, from his views about what we may hope for to his personal character, and everything in between.

Joel Katzav's survey of the philosophy of Grace Andrus de Laguna's philosophy covers a broad range of ideas, and I have selected three for further development and commentary: (1) the relationship between naturalism and analytic philosophy, (2) the relationship between classical and radical empiricism, and (3) the historical question of where to situate a view such as de Laguna's in the history, the present, and the future of philosophy. I suggest that the view belongs with a group I call the (...) ‘New Naturalists’, including Theodore de Laguna, Susanne Langer, Marjorie Grene, Michael Polanyi, and others who keep philosophy closer to developments in natural and social science than is typical for pragmatists, process philosophers, and analytic philosophers. This is a position somewhere between classical and radical empiricism, but which insists that reductionism is too limiting and unwise, even when restricted to being only a method. (shrink)

Josiah Royce (1855?-1916) has had a major influence on American intellectual life, both popular movements and cutting-edge thought, but his name often went unmentioned while his ideas marched forward. The leading American proponent of absolute idealism, Royce has come back into fashion in recent years. With several important new books appearing, the formation of a Josiah Royce Society, and the re-organization of the Royce papers at Harvard, the time is ripe for Time, Will, and Purpose. Randall Auxier delves (...) into the primary texts written by Royce. (shrink)

We argue that the relationship between Kant’s theory of imagination and his moral philosophy has not been well understood. Missing is an adequate connection between his idea of sensus communis and the power of imagination to exceed the senses. This connection is close and important, and it has serious implications for how we are to apply and further theorize moral relations among human beings. Especially important in this regard is the ability among humans, in their social setting, to imagine other (...) persons. We do this pre-cognitively, at the level of feeling. The effects of imagining other persons prior to all knowledge of them (as, for instance, rational agents), grounds the autonomy of other persons in a relationship that is far broader than knowledge. (shrink)

The question of the import and role of Christian allusions in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit has received much historical attention, and this continues into the present. Often juxtaposed in this interpretive issue are two questions: Does Hegel think that “the ontological project was first a Greek event from which Christianity would have developed an outer graft”? Or is it more accurate to say that, “for Hegel at least, no ontology is possible before the Gospel or outside it”? In the latter (...) case, Hegel might well place the Greeks precisely where Dante had - in the First Circle of Hell. Those who would make Hegel first a philosopher in the Socratic line tend to emphasize his early work. Those who would make Hegel first a Christian tend to emphasize the later work. This question is too broad to find adequate discussion in the present essay. (shrink)

George Holmes Howison’s 1895 essay entitled “The Limits of Evolution,” argued that there are four things evolutionary theory does not explain. In examining whether 11 decades have made a difference in these four, I argue that the arrogance of scientists over the past century in refusing to distinguish between full explanations and explanatory hypotheses is in some ways responsible for the fundamentalist backlash against evolutionary science. A scientific community that is honest and forthcoming about its limitations is to be sought. (...) The best response to Intelligent Design, Creation Science, and other current trends in pseudoscience is to be very clear about the limits of evolutionary theory and the scope of scientific explanation. (shrink)

The various efforts to put the idea of humanity on a secure ethical, political, and social base have not succeeded. The various post-humanist and transhumanist programs are inadequate. Our deep-seated suspicion of our deepest selves and motives is understandable in light of the barbarity of the twentieth century, but humanism is not to blame. The thought of Ernst Cassirer holds a framework for a new humanism, once it is rid of certain colonialist, triumphalist, and Eurocentric ideas that distorted Cassirer’s understanding (...) of the European role in creating the problems of civilization, especially its mistake of thinking that science was a progressive symbolic form of culture. I set out the basis of a new humanism based upon not the problem of knowledge, but the problem of genuine self-situating socialty, a personalist point of view. (shrink)

This paper aims to consider Peirce and Eco’s approach to signs and semiotics in order to assess their relation to Peirce’s mature pragmatism. Both thinkers attempted to set out a truly general theory of signs, and ran into difficulties on similar points. I show that the responses of Peirce and Eco to the difficulties that arose in seeking a truly general theory of signs were quite different. And yet, the differences are not so deep as to prevent us from thinking (...) of both Peirce and Eco as pragmatists, and perhaps of a similar stripe. (shrink)

Preview: Bergson noted that the cinematographic image does not really move. It is, then as now, a series of still photographs. The real motion in such images is produced by machinery, which imparts a kinesis, an energy of movement, to the succession of fixed images. Our perception then endows such images with their “life,” insofar as they can be said to possess life. It is an illusion, it is “virtual” both as space and time. The real duration, as generated by (...) the machinery or as lived by the perceiver is part of a broader system of images that includes those still photographs and their succession. Images of images of images, by the time they are processed by our bodies and appear to our mind’s eye as inhibited acts we have not enacted. (shrink)

_The Quantum of Explanation_ advances a bold new theory of how explanation ought to be understood in philosophical and cosmological inquiries. Using a complete interpretation of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophical and mathematical writings and an interpretive structure that is essentially new, Auxier and Herstein argue that Whitehead has never been properly understood, nor has the depth and breadth of his contribution to the human search for knowledge been assimilated by his successors. This important book effectively applies Whitehead’s philosophy to (...) problems in the interpretation of science, empirical knowledge, and nature. It develops a new account of philosophical naturalism that will contribute to the current naturalism debate in both Analytic and Continental philosophy. Auxier and Herstein also draw attention to some of the most important differences between the process theology tradition and Whitehead’s thought, arguing in favor of a Whiteheadian naturalism that is more or less independent of theological concerns. This book offers a clear and comprehensive introduction to Whitehead’s philosophy and is an essential resource for students and scholars interested in American philosophy, the philosophy of mathematics and physics, and issues associated with naturalism, explanation and radical empiricism. (shrink)