Thomas Reid, the Scottish natural and moral philosopher, was one of the founding members of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society and a significant figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. Reid believed that common sense should form the foundation of all philosophical inquiry. He criticised the sceptical philosophy propagated by his fellow Scot David Hume and the Anglo-Irish bishop George Berkeley, who asserted that the external world did not exist outside the human mind. Reid was also critical of the theory (...) of ideas propagated by Locke and Descartes, arguing that it was incompatible with physical and experiential facts. For Reid, our senses demonstrate that the external world must exist, and this work is organised in chapters examining each of the senses in turn. The book, based on his lectures, was first published in 1764 when Reid was a regent professor at King's College, Aberdeen, and was reissued in 1818. (shrink)

Thomas Reid is now recognized as one of the towering figures of the Enlightenment. Best known for his published writings on epistemology and moral theory, he was also an accomplished mathematician and natural philosopher, as an earlier volume of his manuscripts edited by Paul Wood for the Edinburgh Reid Edition, Thomas Reid on the Animate Creation, has shown. The Correspondence of Thomas Reid collects all of the known letters to and from Reid in a fully (...) annotated form. Letters already published by Sir William Hamilton and others have been reedited, and roughly half of the letters included appear in print for the first time. Writing in 1802, Reid's disciple and biographer Dugald Stewart doubted that Reid's correspondence &"would be generally interesting.&" This collection proves otherwise, for the letters illuminate virtually every aspect of Reid's life and career and, in some instances, provide us with invaluable evidence about activities otherwise undocumented in his manuscripts or published works. Through his correspondence we can trace Reid's relations with contemporaries such as David Hume and his colleagues at both King's College, Aberdeen, and the University of Glasgow, as well as his engagement with the most controversial philosophical, scientific, and political issues of his day. If anything, the letters assembled here serve as the starting point for understanding Reid and his place in the Enlightenment. (shrink)

Thomas Reid , the Scottish natural and moral philosopher, was one of the founding members of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society and a significant figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. Reid believed that common sense should form the foundation of all philosophical inquiry. He criticised the sceptical philosophy propagated by his fellow Scot David Hume and the Anglo-Irish bishop George Berkeley, who asserted that the external world did not exist outside the human mind. Reid was also critical of the (...) theory of ideas propagated by Locke and Descartes, arguing that it was incompatible with physical and experiential facts. For Reid, our senses demonstrate that the external world must exist, and this work is organised in chapters examining each of the senses in turn. The book, based on his lectures, was first published in 1764 when Reid was a regent professor at King's College, Aberdeen, and was reissued in 1818. (shrink)

Thomas Reid saw the three subjects of logic, rhetoric, and the fine arts as closely cohering aspects of one endeavor that he called the culture of the mind. This was a topic on which Reid lectured for many years in Glasgow, and this volume presents as near a reconstruction of these lectures as is now possible. Though virtually unknown today, this material in fact relates closely to Reid's published works and in particular to the late Essays on (...) the Intellectual Powers of Man and Essays on the Active Powers of Man. When composing these works, Reid drew primarily on his lectures on "pneumatology," which presented a theory of the mental powers, broadly conceived. These lectures were basic to the course on the culture of the mind that explained the cultivation of the mental powers. Although the Essays also included some elements from the material on the culture of the mind, the bulk of the latter was left in manuscript form, and Alexander Broadie's edition restores this important extension of Reid's overall work. In addition, this volume continues the attractive combination of manuscript material and published work, in this case Reid's important and well-known essay on Aristotle's logic. This text was corrupted in earlier editions of Reid's works and is now restored to the state in which Reid left it. This volume underscores Reid's great and growing significance, viewed both as a historical figure and as a philosopher. At the same time, it is of great interdisciplinary importance. While the material emerges directly from the core of Reid's philosophy, as now understood, it will appeal widely to people in literary, cultural, historical, and communications studies. In this regard, the present volume is a true fruit of the Scottish Enlightenment. (shrink)

This volume brings together for the first time a significant number of Reid's manuscript papers on natural history, physiology and materialist metaphysics. An important contribution not only to Reid studies but also to our understanding of eighteenth-century science and its context.

Classical Greece is famous for its athletic art, particularly the image of the nude male athlete. But how did the Greeks understand athletic beauty? Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, and others discuss athletes’ beauty, while the educational ideal of kalokagathia conceptually connects athletic beauty with the good. More questions need to be answered, however, if we are to understand ancient athletic beauty. We need to ask ourselves what the Greeks appreciated when they looked at athletic bodies. What did those qualities mean to (...) them? In what way was it erotic? How did it differ for females and males? In this paper I argue that the beautiful athletic body is framed in ancient Greek thought, not just as an aesthetically pleasing image, but as an ideal expression of a certain kind of soul. (shrink)

"This book is very valuable. Today, there are too many books on the Work that are either deliberately impersonal and as a result are just a re-explaining of basic ideas which are already there in Ouspensky.

As an intensive housing construction drive in the late 1950s began to provide separate apartments for millions of Soviet citizens, aesthetic experts envisioned the Soviet home as a potential site for the display of works of art and for amateur aesthetic production. In the context of de-Stalinization, reformist artists and aestheticians committed to the liberalization and modernization of Soviet artistic criteria, promoted the value of amateur art and even of home decorating in the formation of the new person who would (...) live under communism. They also pressed for affordable art and craft to be made available to ordinary people for their new homes. Thereby they would dwell in their new apartments surrounded by beauty in their everyday lives, and would thus, the experts argued, be brought closer to communist consciousness. Moreover sales of art to individual citizens would provide an alternative income stream to fund artists’ production. The possibility of private art consumption would therefore free artists to some extent from their reliance on state commissions and from the strict stylistic and thematic norms and hierarchies of Socialist Realism as established under Stalin. (shrink)

Drawing on radical media archeology and assemblage theory, this article investigates assemblages of computer vision as they construct new spatiotemporal relations and new capacities for seeing and acting.

The goal of this article is to counter a belief, still widely held in the secondary literature, that Anne Conway espoused a theory of monads. By exploring her views on the divisibility of both bodies and spirits, I argue that monads could not possibly exist in her system. In addition, by offering new evidence about the Latin translation of Conway's Principles and the possible authorship of its annotations, I argue that she never even suggested that there could be such things (...) as monads. Alongside this, I explore the theories of monads that did get developed by the philosophers closest to Conway—Henry More, Francis Mercury van Helmont, and Christian Knorr von Rosenroth—thereby further underlining Conway's originality and philosophical daring. (shrink)

In the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel describes at length and in detail the particular workings of animal digestion and excretion, referring to the empirical research of his day (Berzelius, Spallanzani, Traviranus). By becoming engaged in the scientific disputes and insights of the time—regarding, for example, the mechanical versus chemical nature of digestion, immediate digestive assimilation and the chemical composition of feces—Hegel arrives at the novel idea that what the animal excretes as superfluous is its own particular entanglement with inorganic otherness. (...) The animal’s subsequent feeling of triumph and satisfaction constitutes the affirmation of individual purposiveness, a form of immediate ideality that Hegel presents as animal subjectivity. (shrink)

This classic, with a new introduction by Madeleine L'Engle, is by turns an entrancing mediation on language a piercing commentary on the nature of art and why so much of what we read, hear, and see falls short and a brilliant examination of the fundamental tenets of Christianity. The Mind of the Maker will be relished by those already in love with Dorothy L. Sayers and those who have not yet met her. A mystery writer, a witty and perceptive (...) theologian, culture critic, and playwright, Dorothy Sayers sheds new,unexpected light on a specific set of statements made in the Christian creeds. She examines anew such ideas as the image of God, the Trinity, free will, and evil, and in these pages a wholly revitalized understanding of them emerges. The author finds the key in the parallels between the creation of God and the human creative process. She continually refers to each in a way that illuminates both. (shrink)

"This reviewer had to be restrained from stopping people in the street to urge them to read it: They would learn something of the way science is done,...

The inspiration for this paper came rather unexpectedly. In February 2006, I made the long trip from my home in Sioux City, Iowa, to Torino, Italy in order to witness the Olympic Winter Games. Barely a month later, I found myself in California at the newly-renovated Getty Villa, home to one of the world's great collections of Greco-Roman antiquities. At the Villa I attended a talk about a Roman mosaic depicting a boxing scene from Virgil'sAeneid.The tiny tiles showed not only (...) two boxers, but a wobbly looking ox. ‘What is wrong with this ox?’ asked the docent. ‘Why is he there at the match?’ The answer, of course, is that he is the prize. And the reason he is wobbly is because the victor has just sacrificed this prize to the gods in thanksgiving, by punching him between the eyes. A light went on in my head; I turned to my husband and whispered, ‘Just like Joey Cheek in Torino.’ My husband smiled indulgently, but my mind was already racing. I realized that by donating his victory bonus to charity, Cheek had tapped into one of the oldest and most venerable traditions in sport: individual sacrifice for the benefit of the larger community. It is a tradition that derives from the religious function of the ancient Olympic Games and it deserves to be revived the modern world. (shrink)

The paper explores Hegel's theory of language, from the Subjective Spirit book of his Encyclopedia. Hegel distinguishes between linguistic signs, as arbitrary signifiers and words, which occur when the signs are filled with thought or meaning. Words have greater objectivity than signs. The words of the positive, empirical sciences are taken up into Hegelian Science (system), affording it greater objectivity, which it, reciprocally re-confers on its linguistic contents.

There has been a long debate on whether demonstratives are directly referential as Kaplan originally argued, or indirectly referential like a definite description. I propose a new analysis of demonstratives that combines intuitions from both direct and indirect approaches. The demonstrative is analyzed as an indirectly referential expression with a binary maximality operator that takes two arguments, where the second argument can be a deictic pointing, an anaphoric index, or a relative clause. Direct reference is encoded not in the meaning (...) of the demonstrative but in the meaning contributed by the pointing gesture, thus capturing both direct and indirect uses. I further propose that some pronouns in English function as demonstratives, realizing the binary structure and competing with the demonstrative. The main advantages of this proposal include (a) deriving the distribution of pronominal and adnominal demonstratives systematically; (b) capturing the unique interaction that demonstratives have with a pointing gesture; and (c) locating English demonstratives against a larger, cross-linguistic picture. (shrink)

Benedict Spinoza is feted as the philosopher par excellence of the popular democratic multitude by Antonio Negri and others. But Spinoza himself expresses a marked ambivalence about the multitude in brief asides, and as for his thoughts on what he calls “the rule of multitude,” that is, democracy, these exist only as meager fragments in his unfinished Tractatus Politicus or Political Treatise. This essay addresses the problem of Spinoza’s multitude. First, I reconstruct a vision of power that is found in (...) the Ethics but that tends to be overlooked in the scholarly literature: power is not just sheer efficacy or imposition of will, but rather involves a capacity for being-affected; I call this the conception of power as sensitivity. The second part of my argument shows how, given Spinoza’s emphatic political naturalism, the conception of power as sensitivity can be extended to his political philosophy to shed light on what Spinoza calls potentia multitudinis, or “the power of the multitude”—a term found solely in the Political Treatise and nowhere else in his oeuvre. This juxtaposition reveals significant qualifications to the liberatory potential of the multitude currently claimed in the scholarly literature. (shrink)

The developmental importance to humans of the human-constructed physical environment, including myriad modified natural objects or manufactured objects, is well recognized. The importance of the physical dimension of the constructed niche has also been recognized in nonhuman animals with respect to dwellings (e.g., beavers’ dams, birds’ nests, and bees’ hives), but has not previously been applied to technical traditions, despite the fact that enduring alterations of the physical environment left by social partners are part of the constructed niche that supports (...) the learning of technical skills through the phenomenon of delayed social facilitation. These alterations aid learning over a longer time scale than the actions themselves. Thus, technical skills that result in enduring physical artifacts, which themselves aid learning the skills, should be both more persistent in a population and more widespread than technical skills that do not share this feature. This perspective gives us a new lens through which to understand the origins of technical traditions in nonhuman animals, and by extension, in human ancestors. Understanding the process by which traditional technical skills are acquired in nonhuman species gives us insight into the ways that the combination of social and physical niche construction can support the evolution of technical aspects of culture from modest beginnings. (shrink)

The history of research on the genetics of intelligence is fraught with social bias. During the eugenics era, the hereditary theory of intelligence justified policies that encouraged the proliferation of favored races and coercively stemmed procreation by disfavored ones. In the 1970s, Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen argued that black students’ innate cognitive inferiority limited the efficacy of federal education programs. The 1994 controversial bestseller The Bell Curve, by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, rehashed the claim that race and class (...) disparities stem from immutable differences in inherited intelligence, which could not be eliminated through social interventions. Today most scientists studying the genetics of intelligence distance themselves from this history of social bias by arguing that their research need not investigate intellectual differences between social groups. Rather, they argue, examining the heritability of intelligence can be socially neutral and may even help to reduce social inequities. I argue, however, that research on the genetics of intelligence cannot be socially neutral. Even if we divorce the heritability of intelligence from a eugenicist mission, measuring intelligence remains useful only as a gage of individuals’ appropriate positions in society. Research into the genetics of intelligence ultimately helps to determine individuals’ inherited capacity for particular social positions, even when researchers aim to modify the effects of inheritance. (shrink)

It has often been said that the Zhuangzi 莊子 advocates political abstention, and that its putative skepticism prevents it from contributing in any meaningful way to political thinking: at best the Zhuangzi espouses a sort of anarchism, at worst it is “the night in which all cows are black,” a stance that one scholar has charged is ultimately immoral. This article tracks possible political allusions within the text, and, by reading these against details of social, political, and historical context, sheds (...) light on another strand of the Zhuangzi—one that questions prevailing normative values because it is fiercely critical of scholarly complicity with violent imperial territorial consolidation. (shrink)

In a number of influential articles published since 1972, Dorothy Grover has developed the prosentential theory of truth. Brought together and published with a new introduction, these essays are even more impressive as a group than they were as single contributions to philosophy and linguistics. Denying that truth has an explanatory role, the prosentential theory does not address traditional truth issues like belief, meaning, and justification. Instead, it focuses on the grammatical role of the truth predicate and asserts that (...) “it is true” is a prosentence, functioning much as a pronoun does. Grover defends the theory by indicating how it can handle notorious paradoxes like the Liar, as well as by analyzing some English truth-usages. The introduction to the volume surveys traditional theories of truth, including correspondence, pragmatic, and coherence theories. It discusses the essays to come and, finally, considers the implications of the prosentential theory for other theories. Despite the fact that the prosentential theory dismisses the “nature of truth” as a red herring, Grover shows that there are important aspects of traditional truth theories that prosentential theorists have the option of endorsing. (shrink)

Why does Hegel change “Dreaming Soul” to “Feeling Soul” in the 1830 edition of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit? By tracing the content of the Dreaming Soul section, through Hegel’s 1794 manuscript on psychology, to sources such as C.P. Moritz’s Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde, the paper shows how the section embraces a late Enlightenment mission: combating supposedly supernatural expressions of spiritual enthrallment by explaining them as pathological conditions of the soul. Responding to perceived attacks on the 1827 edition of the Encyclopedia (...) by Schleiermacher, Hegel alters the section and its heading, thereby including the pastor’s religion of feeling in the pathology of Schwärmerei. (shrink)

The article argues that Marx’s use of the concept of ideology in The German Ideology is incidental to a sustained critique of how those he described as the German ideologists think and reason about society and history and that this critique is not simply of an idealist theory that represents society and history as determined by consciousness but of methods of reasoning that treat concepts, even of those of political economy, as determinants. His view of how consciousness is determined historically (...) by our social being does not envisage some kind of mechanical transfer of class status to class consciousness. Rather, he works with an epistemology that takes the concepts foundational to political economy as expressions or reflections of the social relations of a mode of production. The difference between ideology and science is the difference between treating those concepts as the primitives of theory and treating them as sites for exploring the social relations that are expressed in them. Thus, the historical rather than further undermining claims to knowledge, provides both the conditions under which knowledge is possible and its limitations. (shrink)

The host actin nucleation machinery is subverted by many bacterial pathogens to facilitate their entry, motility, replication, and survival. The majority of research conducted in the past primarily focused on exploitation of a host actin nucleator, the Arp2/3 complex, by bacterial pathogens. Recently, new studies have begun to explore the role of formins, another family of host actin nucleators, in bacterial pathogenesis. This review provides an overview of recent advances in the study of the exploitation of the Arp2/3 complex and (...) formins by bacterial pathogens. Secreted bacterial effector proteins seem to manipulate the regulation of these actin nucleators or functionally mimic them to drive bacterial entry, motility and survival within host cells. An enhanced understanding of how formins are exploited will provide us with greater insight into how a fundamental eurkaryotic cellular process is utilized by bacteria and will also advance our knowledge of host‐pathogen interactions. (shrink)