In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge's Oriental PilgrimageRoger CorlessThe Victorian Translation of China: James Legge's Oriental Pilgrimage. By Norman J.Girardot. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2002. xxx + 780 pp.Don't make the mistake I made and allow the size of this book intimidate you. I let it sit around for many months, fearing, as did the author, to "[row] out over the great ocean (...) of material" (pp. xix-xx), but once I had set sail I found myself in enjoyable, if sometimes irascible, company and I was unwilling to jump ship. Girardot is in full command of his ark of fascinating and diverse creatures, and his main argument is never lost in the details. His writing is lucid and the text is broken up into manageable blocks by subheadings with intriguing titles, rendering each segment ehipassiko, encouraging us to keep reading.A book of this importance and weight (about 1.5 kg) deserves a review article more than just a review, or, better, a discussion panel at a major academic conference. This journal is notorious for reviews of astonishing length, but I would like my review to be short enough that it will actually be read, so that it will entice you to read the book. I will not attempt a summary nor will I critically address all the issues that are brought up. Instead, I will try to show why I regard this book as an instant classic and even, I would say, a watershed in the meta-science of sinological and Religionswissenschaftlich self-reflection.We all know James Legge as the perpetrator of The Chinese Classics, the multivolume opus that, in the 1960 Hong Kong University Press revision, dominates the Chinese religion(s) section of our personal libraries. Since there is nothing like it, we consult it, but we pretend we do not, for, after all, it's out of date, surely, and Legge was an old fuddy-duddy—Scottish, a Protestant missionary, and, worst of all, a Victorian. Girardot seems to have had somewhat this opinion of Legge when he assayed a brief biography of him, but he discovered that his "Legge work" (as he calls it) opened the door to a pivotal era in academe and world culture. Once the door to the long-neglected cupboard had been opened, all kinds of fascinating objects came tumbling out. "Oh, so that's how it used to be, and that's why it's like this today!" No scholar of Chinese religion(s) can afford to ignore Girardot's extensive and insightful ruminations on the state of the field then and now.The point of the book is summed up on page 531: "[Legge] is an outstanding [End Page 276] example of the difficult nineteenth-century passage from religious discourse to what Edward Said calls the 'secular criticism' of the modern world." To study Legge is to study the origins of our discipline. He may have been a fuddy-duddy; he was certainly a workaholic, putting his Sassenach colleagues at Oxford to shame by sleeping little and rising in the middle of the night to persist in his hermeneutic labors. But he was also a student of the heathen land he went to convert, and he tried his best not only to see (the presumed universal) God in the ancient texts but also to find something noble in apparent atheists and agnostics such as Confucius. In his interaction with Max Mueller (and this book is as much about Mueller as it is about Legge) he both agreed and disagreed, in a complex choreography, with the comparative method underpinning The Sacred Books of the East. He was a Scotsman's Scotsman, a stag at bay, dourly standing his ground (as a Congregationalist, and therefore a nonconformist both north and south of the border) against, first, the London Missionary Society and, later, the prevailing academic and ecclesiastical climate at Oxford.No armchair orientalist, as were some of his colleagues across the Channel, he befriended native informants and studied the indigenous commentaries (mostly Qing) to which they referred him, so that his translations, although not as fluid as Waley... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 159-161 [Access article in PDF] Benedict's Dharma: Buddhist Reflections on the Rule of Saint Benedict. By Norman Fischer, et al. Edited by Patrick Hart, with an afterword by David Steindl-Rast and a translation of the Rule by Patrick Berry. New York: Riverhead Books, 2001. xvi + 222 pp. When Buddhist and Christian monastics meet, they recognize each other as brothers and sisters engaged in a (...) similar quest, despite their doctrinal differences. The nature of this quest is explored in Benedict's Dharma, in which four Buddhists (Norman Fischer, Joseph Goldstein, Judith Simmer-Brown, and Yifa, representing the Zen, Theravadin, Tibetan, and Chinese Buddhist traditions) ruminate on their fraternal and sororal feelings.Venerable Yifa, a nun of the prominent Taiwanese monastery Fo Guang Shan, is the only one of the four in monastic vows, and the reader may wonder what the three non-monastics could offer to a discussion on the monastic life. This is not a new problem. Patrick Henry and Donald Swearer's groundbreaking study, For the Sake of the World: The Spirit of Buddhist and Christian Monasticism (1989), spends a great deal of time on Zen monks, even though there are no Zen monks, theVinaya is kept by the Zen nuns or by the monastics of the parent and sibling lineages of Chan, Son, and Thien. (See my review article, "Why Are There Monks and Nuns?" in Buddhist-Christian Studies 12.) The monastic, it seems, is not confined to the habit.Brother David Steindl-Rast, a monk of Mount Saviour Monastery, grapples with this problem in his afterword, "Conclusions about a Beginning." It was at Mount Saviour that the phrase "the monastic dimension" was coined, to refer to those of monastic bent who for one reason or another did not or could not live in the cloister. One of Brother David's books was to be called, he told me, The Monk in Us, "us" meaning laypeople, but the title had an odd sound and was dropped. So, what is the monastic dimension? Brother David suggests that it is mindfulness, and he comes close to saying that wherever there is mindfulness, there is monasticism. "If mindfulness is all that matters, the monastery is merely a most convenient environment for this kind of life, but it can be lived anywhere, by anyone" (126). He goes on to discuss the phenomenon of monasteries shrinking in size at the same time as the number of long- and short-term visitors to monasteries grows, and proposes that we are moving toward a new understanding of the terms "contemplative," "monastic," and "lay."This insight may point to the most important contribution of this book. It is not about monasticism per se, and it is not a comparative study of the Rule and the Vinaya, with practical suggestions for their mutual reform; rather, it is a meditation on how anyone, monastic or lay, might live the contemplative or mindful life. Throughout the history of the Church and the sangha, laypeople have been in the majority, but attention has been focused on the priests and monastics. Pope Pius X [End Page 159] put it bluntly: the laypeople are the sheep who are to be led, and the clergy are the shepherds who lead. The Church, he added, is not a democracy. I do not know of a Buddhist who has been quite this straightforward, but many have come close, and the history of Buddhism is not that of a democracy. Occasionally, lay movements in both traditions have arisen, basing themselves on the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers or on the teaching of universal Buddha-nature, but they have quickly been co-opted by leaders who proclaimed themselves to be more equal than their fellows. The tragedy for both Buddhism and Christianity is that the contemplative or mindful life has become restricted to a group of professionals, with the attendant belief that such a life is unattainable by most Buddhists and Christians. Now that the dharma has come to the land of the red-faced people, where democracy is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 234-236 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Dreaming Me: An African American Woman's Spiritual Journey Dreaming Me: An African American Woman's Spiritual Journey. By Jan Willis. New York: Riverhead Books, 2001. 321 pp. This book invites comparison with Diana Eck's Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras(Boston: Beacon Press, 1993). Both are by prominent women scholars, both have "spiritual journey" in the subtitle, (...) and both are about Christians who come to terms with a non-Christian religion—Hinduism in Eck's case, Buddhism in Willis's case. But as soon as one gets past the titles, it is the differences that strike one. Where Eck maintains an Olympian poise, hobnobbing with Hindus but remaining a Christian and an objective scholar, interpreting and analyzing as she goes, Willis plunges into Buddhism without rejecting her family's Baptist tradition, becoming a fully participant observer so as to ask how her own history and the history of her fellow African Americans can be healed by an intensely personal internal dialogue. Eck gives us theology. Willis gives us herself. Recognized as "one of the first American scholar-practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism" (294), her students ask her if she practices meditation as well as teaching it. She gives a carefully crafted answer that unifies the practice of Buddhism with the practice of academic teaching as an authentically human activity within the Humanities.The book has the form of a Hindu epic, incidents from Willis's life interrupting the frame story, the dreaming of the title. This dream (whether actual or metaphorical, we are not told) moves with considerable dramatic power from the terror of being pursued by lions to the dreamer's transformation into a lioness who roars the Dharma like Queen Shrimala. Its five parts are called Birth, Odyssey, Choices, Becoming, and Return, taking us from her childhood as a Baptist in Docena, Alabama, to Cornell University, to India and Nepal, and back to Docena, as a self-described Baptist-Buddhist (310).Willis's journey is intimately bound up with her search for self-acceptance as a "white gal"—a noticeably light-complexioned black woman in the Jim Crow South —and for the nobility of African Americans as fully human beings. Her early experiences [End Page 234] were not encouraging. Blacks were not only physically segregated in Docena, they were electronically expunged from television shows by spurious technical difficulties ("trouble along the cable"), and she endured an attack by the Ku Klux Klan on her family's home. The customary but thoroughly illegal suffrage examination administered to her father included such questions as "How many words are there in the U.S. Constitution?" (58, italics in original). He had been specially prepared for such absurdities, and he passed. Midway in her pilgrimage Willis searches for her roots (or "kin," as she says, using the Southern word) in county and federal records, and her initial excitement turns to humiliation as the white historian tells her, with disdainful triumph, that her intelligence must have come from the white slave owner who "everybody says" was her "granddaddy's daddy" (251). A black woman was presumed to be lacking in native intelligence, and Willis's intellectual powers suffered insult not only from whites but from her own mother, who, perhaps having internalized the white folks' contempt, regarded being smart as somehow evil (25). As a student at Cornell, Willis discovered black power and participated in Black Student Alliance (BSA) demonstrations, sometimes involving guns, but she came to believe that direct political action was not for her. She was, she decided, a teacher at heart, and after much soul searching she opted for the "peaceful transformation" (129) that she hoped would come from the study and practice of Buddhism.Although her skin color was a puzzlement to some Indians, who wondered about her caste, her Tibetan teachers in Nepal accepted her as a student who was at least the equal of the white students, and even, perhaps, superior to them. A spot of blonde in her hair was interpreted as the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 296-298 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Le Sutra D'amida Prêché Par Le Buddha Le Sutra D'amida Prêché Par Le Buddha. By Jérôme Ducor. Schweizer Asiatische Studien: Monographien; Vol. 29. Bern: Peter Lang, 1998. 216 pp. Paper. $35.95 (in U.S.A.; available from the New York office of the publisher) It is immediately clear that this edition of the Smaller Sukhavativyuha Sutra must be regarded as (...) the standard work on it in a European language. Ducor is both a scholar (at the University of Lausanne and at the Museum of Ethnography in Geneva) and a practitioner (an ordained minister of the Honganji branch of Jodo Shinshu) [End Page 296] and he combines his skills to produce a well-rounded and balanced treatment that demonstrates, by comparison, the limitations of the standard Buddhological approach to Sutra studies.The methodology of sutra translation is, I believe, a Buddhist-Christian problem, since, ostensibly Buddhist, it often proceeds along crypto-Christian lines. Why do we translate sutras at all? Or, rather, why are the sutras as a rule translated nude, as it were, quivering in the scholar's spotlight, bereft of their seemly covering of s´astras? Sutras are, by themselves, largely unintelligible. They are nuggets of Dharma, to be, on the one hand, digested by the teachers so that they might (to paraphrase St. Bernard of Clairvaux) proffer the milk of nourishing discourses to their disciples and, on the other hand, chanted in mystifying, often artificial, languages, for their meritorious and pacifying effect. When chanted, it is the sound that matters, not the meaning. It is said that a pigeon was reborn as a monk because Asaga compassionately chanted out loud the texts that he was studying. We are to suppose that the fortunate pigeon was not well versed in Sanskrit, yet it benefited remarkably from the chanting. Ducor is aware of this traditional use of the sutras and includes a discussion on "The Amida Sutra in Liturgical Practice" (pp. 131-137). He cites Gyoyo, writing in fifteenth-century Japan, to the effect that the incomprehensible Sino-Japanese "preserves multiple meanings: the masses, on hearing them, mysteriously, according to their capacities, achieve enlightenment," whereas the Japanese translation "bears only a single sense" and therefore "for normal chanting it is best to chant in the Sino-Japanese pronunciation" (p. 134).But Eurocentric, especially Anglophone, Buddhologists have insisted on translating only the sutras and ignoring their attendant s´astras. Often enough the translations are done from an archaic or even an invented version which is never used in practice but is preferred simply because it is in Sanskrit. The scholar then searches, in the presumed "more original" text, for precisely that single meaning against which Gyoyo warns us. Something seems familiar. Can it be Martin Luther whom we espy lurking behind our Monier Williams? Are we still in thrall to Max Muller, who, even after having naturalized as British, was evangelisch to the core and fought in the Academy under the banner of sola scriptura, believing, with Luther, that a sacred text, because it is revealed, is most truly interpreted by reference to itself, and that its meaning would only be obscured by a human, and therefore fallible, commentary? Perhaps: for the bionic Belgian Buddhologists, we note, were more Catholic in their approach, and translated the summa of the great Buddhist scholastics.The point is that a sutra can only be said to have been properly presented for our study when it is displayed in its native context, that is, with full reference to the commentarial tradition. Ducor does this. He opens with a translation from the rufubon (the textus receptus or "vulgate" as he calls it) version of the Chinese, attributed to Kumarajiva, and follows it with notes on Kumarajiva, on the principal doctrines of the sutra, and on the place of the sutra in the trilogy (sambukyo) tradition in Japan. Then he repeats the translation, interspersing it with references to the commentaries in China, Korea, and Japan. This is followed by detailed textual notes... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 296-298 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Le Sutra D'amida Prêché Par Le Buddha Le Sutra D'amida Prêché Par Le Buddha. By Jérôme Ducor. Schweizer Asiatische Studien: Monographien; Vol. 29. Bern: Peter Lang, 1998. 216 pp. Paper. $35.95 (in U.S.A.; available from the New York office of the publisher) It is immediately clear that this edition of the Smaller Sukhavativyuha Sutra must be regarded as (...) the standard work on it in a European language. Ducor is both a scholar (at the University of Lausanne and at the Museum of Ethnography in Geneva) and a practitioner (an ordained minister of the Honganji branch of Jodo Shinshu) [End Page 296] and he combines his skills to produce a well-rounded and balanced treatment that demonstrates, by comparison, the limitations of the standard Buddhological approach to Sutra studies.The methodology of sutra translation is, I believe, a Buddhist-Christian problem, since, ostensibly Buddhist, it often proceeds along crypto-Christian lines. Why do we translate sutras at all? Or, rather, why are the sutras as a rule translated nude, as it were, quivering in the scholar's spotlight, bereft of their seemly covering of s´astras? Sutras are, by themselves, largely unintelligible. They are nuggets of Dharma, to be, on the one hand, digested by the teachers so that they might (to paraphrase St. Bernard of Clairvaux) proffer the milk of nourishing discourses to their disciples and, on the other hand, chanted in mystifying, often artificial, languages, for their meritorious and pacifying effect. When chanted, it is the sound that matters, not the meaning. It is said that a pigeon was reborn as a monk because Asaga compassionately chanted out loud the texts that he was studying. We are to suppose that the fortunate pigeon was not well versed in Sanskrit, yet it benefited remarkably from the chanting. Ducor is aware of this traditional use of the sutras and includes a discussion on "The Amida Sutra in Liturgical Practice" (pp. 131-137). He cites Gyoyo, writing in fifteenth-century Japan, to the effect that the incomprehensible Sino-Japanese "preserves multiple meanings: the masses, on hearing them, mysteriously, according to their capacities, achieve enlightenment," whereas the Japanese translation "bears only a single sense" and therefore "for normal chanting it is best to chant in the Sino-Japanese pronunciation" (p. 134).But Eurocentric, especially Anglophone, Buddhologists have insisted on translating only the sutras and ignoring their attendant s´astras. Often enough the translations are done from an archaic or even an invented version which is never used in practice but is preferred simply because it is in Sanskrit. The scholar then searches, in the presumed "more original" text, for precisely that single meaning against which Gyoyo warns us. Something seems familiar. Can it be Martin Luther whom we espy lurking behind our Monier Williams? Are we still in thrall to Max Muller, who, even after having naturalized as British, was evangelisch to the core and fought in the Academy under the banner of sola scriptura, believing, with Luther, that a sacred text, because it is revealed, is most truly interpreted by reference to itself, and that its meaning would only be obscured by a human, and therefore fallible, commentary? Perhaps: for the bionic Belgian Buddhologists, we note, were more Catholic in their approach, and translated the summa of the great Buddhist scholastics.The point is that a sutra can only be said to have been properly presented for our study when it is displayed in its native context, that is, with full reference to the commentarial tradition. Ducor does this. He opens with a translation from the rufubon (the textus receptus or "vulgate" as he calls it) version of the Chinese, attributed to Kumarajiva, and follows it with notes on Kumarajiva, on the principal doctrines of the sutra, and on the place of the sutra in the trilogy (sambukyo) tradition in Japan. Then he repeats the translation, interspersing it with references to the commentaries in China, Korea, and Japan. This is followed by detailed textual notes... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Deconstructing Life-Worlds: Buddhism, Christianity, CultureRoger CorlessOn Deconstructing Life-Worlds: Buddhism, Christianity, Culture. By Robert Magliola. Preface by Edith Wyschogrod. American Academy of Religion Cultural Criticism Series, edited by Cleo McNelly Kearns, Number 3. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1997. xxii + 202 pp.How does one review a deconstructionist book—a book that seeks not only to discuss deconstruction but to be deconstructionist, a book that simultaneously takes books seriously and mocks (...) both the author and the reader for imagining there could ever be such a thing as a book, a something that is written and then read, a writing that says that everything is Writing but that all Writing/writing is written under erasure and so is (as p. 202 explicitly, self-reflexively proclaims itself) an empty page that is, by that very emptiness, marked? Derrida derides the Introduction, for, he asks (without speaking, parlant avec dénégations, denying that he is expressing denials) what is being Introduced? What do we think we are doing when we lead a reader into (introducere) something that is not there to be lead into until a reader is lead or leads himself or herself into it? Do we not, thus, need an Introduction to the Introduction, and another Introduction to that Introduction, a regressus ad infinitum introductionum? Edith Wyschogrod writes a Preface. Does she mean us to think that the book has a Face, and that it therefore needs a pre-Face? Does she think that she/we face toward the book, or does the book face toward her/us, or does/do she/we both together face toward the putative subject matter, which itself has two faces, Buddhism and Christianity? And who am I, the reviewer?This cannot be a review (a looking-over), but it might be a re-view (a looking-again), which informs (in-forms, incarnates) itself so that you, dear Introducer of Yourself, can review (look over) your presuppositions about Buddhism, Christianity, life-worlds, and reality in general, and re-view them (re-visit them, look again at them) so as to reform (re-view, see-again, as formless, and thus re-form) them.One draws a circle, says Charles Fort, beginning anywhere. So let us open the book at random. On page 84 we find: “Taiwan has over 25,000 students studying in the United States, the largest foreign contingent in American universities.” This aggressively logocentric sentence is provided with a footnote: “Statistic of 1987. Since then, the proportion of Chinese from the People’ [sic] Republic has become much more noticeable.” Hmm—a little typo, but nevertheless we are, to our surprise, deep in the overheated hotel conference rooms of the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. So, why are we told this? It is part of a section that cuts (“Lt. sect-, cut”, we are reminded on p. 175) across (cross-hatches) Magliola’s life/lives run/runs (Curriculum Vitae, Curricula Vitae, Curricula Vitae Novae, Curricula Vitarum, as the chapter headings have it) as an academic, a Catholic, an almost-priest, a Buddhist meditator, a husband, a divorcé, an Italian, an American, [End Page 216] a resident of Taiwan. All these spill out from the overstuffed closet of Magliola’s life/lives, which, without warning, he opens upon us and then sits among the salade challenging the reader to become bricoleur. But if we do, we feel we have missed the point. Or we have seen the point—which is just as bad.Crosshatch: that’s the theme, I think. Cross, “X” (both the Roman character “eks” and the Greek character “chi”), crucifix, saltire, cross-religions, cross-cultures, cross-countries, cross-country, crossing-out (rature), and finally, revelation by relationis oppositio under/through four forks (“Il ne s’écrit que sous la grille des quatre fourches”—p. 177, quoting Derrida).Magliola is on this cross, he is cross (angry/mad), he is crucified by it, he hopes to cross over by means of it. “This book is not written for the arrived by the arrived” (p. xix), yet he is “on the water, not at sea” (p. xx).It may not be incorrect to say that the book is in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Pilgrimage of the Mass:The Song of All SongsRoger CorlessI remember,long ago,long, long ago,the sun came up at midnight,seen by no one but myself,and my room was filled with lightand grew so huge(Vimalakirti, do you hear?)that nothing was not there.I sang from the Song of Songsand the sun relaxed, and listened,shining and still and blest,and said, "Yes,it is good, it is good, it is good."the earth was made again,the (...) brown earth smiled,and her creatures ran in her robes,and there was great peace.I could have called it Paradise;yet it was but the forecourt—an earnest of that endless day(Abelard, is it true?)in which the Saints embrace—for the sun went down before dawn,falling behind the dew and the birdsong,and I walked on morning mists to Masslike Lao-tzu riding the clouds.long, long ago.+ may all beings be happy + [End Page 151]Copyright © 2007 The University of Hawai'i Press... (shrink)

Michael Bergmann claims that all versions of epistemic internalism face an irresolvable dilemma. We show that there are many plausible versions of internalism that falsify this claim. First, we demonstrate that there are versions of ‘‘weak awareness internalism’’ that, contra Bergmann, do not succumb to the ‘‘Subject’s Perspective Objection’’ horn of the dilemma. Second, we show that there are versions of ‘‘strong awareness internalism’’ that do not fall prey to the dilemma’s ‘‘vicious regress’’ horn. We note along the way that (...) these versions of internalism do not, in avoiding one horn of the dilemma, succumb to the dilemma’s other horn. The upshot is that internalists have many available strategies for avoiding dilemmatic defeat. (shrink)

One concern bothering ancient and medieval philosophers is the logical worry discussed in Aristotle's De Interpretatione 9, that if future contingent propositions are true, then they are settled in a way that is incompatible with freedom. Another is if we grant God foreknowledge of future contingent events then God's foreknowledge will determine those events in a way precluding freedom. ;I begin by discussing the standard compatibilist solution to these problems as represented in Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy and then examine theories (...) that allegedly deviate from the Boethian solution. Boethius's solution to these separate problems involves showing that both problems operate on an ambiguity in the scope of the modal operator 'necessarily' present in the articulation of the problem. Once the ambiguity is removed we see that both disambiguations fail to offer a sound argument against the compatibility of free action with either God's omniscience or future contingent proposition's being true. The only difference between the solutions is that before executing the scope distinction strategy in the theological problem, Boethius reminds us that God knows future contingents rather than foreknowing them, since God is timeless. ;The rest of my discussion examines positions that allegedly deviate from the Boethian solution: positions held by Peter de Rivo, William Ockham and Plotinus. I argue that Ockham doesn't in fact deviate from the Boethian solution to the theological problem as is commonly held. Instead of offering a compatibilist position where God's omniscience includes foreknowledge, Ockham denies that God foreknows the future advocating instead a more sophisticated Boethian position. The other two philosophers, Rivo and Plotinus, deviate from Boethius, but unfortunately neither position appears philosophically plausible. Rivo's incompatibilist solution to the logical problem is inconsistent with his retention of the Boethian solution to the theological problem and is probably implausible on its own. Plotinus's compatibilist account fails not because it claims that necessity and freedom are compatible, but because the account of moral responsibility Plotinus offers to justify the compatibility fails. (shrink)

In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin put forward his theory of natural selection. Conventionally, Darwin's argument for this theory has been understood as based on an analogy with artificial selection. But there has been no consensus on how, exactly, this analogical argument is supposed to work – and some suspicion too that analogical arguments on the whole are embarrassingly weak. Drawing on new insights into the history of analogical argumentation from the ancient Greeks onward, as well as on (...) in-depth studies of Darwin's public and private writings, this book offers an original perspective on Darwin's argument, restoring to view the intellectual traditions which Darwin took for granted in arguing as he did. From this perspective come new appreciations not only of Darwin's argument but of the metaphors based on it, the range of wider traditions the argument touched upon, and its legacies for science after the Origin. (shrink)

As part of a review symposium on DARWIN'S ARGUMENT BY ANALOGY: FROM ARTIFICIAL TO NATURAL SELECTION (2021), the journal METASCIENCE invited Roger White, Jon Hodge and me to submit a response to the thoughtful commentaries on our book by Andrea Sullivan-Clarke, David Depew and Andrew Inkpen.

Determining whether a person who appears to have committed an offence should then be prosecuted for it requires a number of assessments and weighing of interests. Yet, to read the latest Code for Crown Prosecutors, one would think that the exercise of prosecutorial discretion is a relatively unstructured process. This is because the Code does not require prosecutors to identify an aim in seeking the punishment of the accused, and because it does not distinguish between the harms caused to the (...) defendant by punishment and the distinct harms which are caused to him by prosecution. I shall argue that the aim of the prosecutor (assuming that guilt will be proven) should be to decide whether the aims of punishment of the accused would be justified by the likely costs of the proceedings, but that this aim may be constrained by considering the harms which may be caused to the defendant by prosecution. If this structure were to be accepted, then it would both be easier to draft a Code for Crown Prosecutors which has useful guiding value and to identify to whom the prosecutor should be accountable for his decisions. (shrink)

Three experiments with 88 college-aged participants explored how unlabeled experiences—learning episodes in which people encounter objects without information about their category membership—influence beliefs about category structure. Participants performed a simple one-dimensional categorization task in a brief supervised learning phase, then made a large number of unsupervised categorization decisions about new items. In all three experiments, the unsupervised experience altered participants’ implicit and explicit mental category boundaries, their explicit beliefs about the most representative members of each category, and even their memory (...) for the items encountered during the supervised learning phase. These changes were influenced by both the range and frequency distribution of the unlabeled stimuli: mental category boundaries shifted toward the middle of the range and toward the trough of the bimodal distribution of unlabeled items, whereas beliefs about the most representative category members shifted toward the modes of the unlabeled distribution. One consequence of this shift in representations is a false-consensus effect (Experiment 3) where participants, despite receiving very disparate training experiences, show strong agreement in judgments about representativeness and boundary location following unsupervised category judgments. (shrink)

The inaugural collection in an exciting new exchange between philosophers and geographers, this volume provides interdisciplinary approaches to the environment as space, place, and idea. Never before have philosophers and geographers approached each other's subjects in such a strong spirit of mutual understanding. The result is a concrete exploration of the human-nature relationship that embraces strong normative approaches to environmental problems.

Introduction: Conversion and the practice of transformation -- The philosophical structure of Jonathan Edwards's religious affections -- Habit, habit change, and conversion in C.S. Peirce -- Reconstructing faith : religious overcoming in Dewey's pragmatism -- Transforming obligation in William James -- Dwelling in absence: the reflective origin of conversion -- Creative transformation : the work of conversion -- The evasion of conversion in recent American philosophy.

A growing literature testifies to the persistence of place as an incorrigible aspect of human experience, identity, and morality. Place is a common ground for thought and action, a community of experienced particulars that avoids solipsism and universalism. It draws us into the philosophy of the ordinary, into familiarity as a form of knowledge, into the wisdom of proximity. Each of these essays offers a philosophy of place, and reminds us that such philosophies ultimately decide how we make, use, and (...) understand places, whether as accidents, instruments, or fields of care. (shrink)

Because the main difference between combinatory weak equality and λβ-equality is that the rule \begin{equation*}\tag{\xi} X = Y \vdash \lambda x.X = \lambda x.Y\end{equation*} is valid for the latter but not the former, it is easy to assume that another way of defining combinatory β-equality is to add rule (ξ) to the postulates for weak equality. However, to make this true, one must choose the definition of combinatory abstraction in (ξ) very carefully. If one tries to use one of the (...) more common abstraction algorithms, the result will be an equality, = ξ , that is either equivalent to βη-equality (and so strictly stronger than β-equality) or else strictly weaker than β-equality. This paper will study the relations = ξ for several commonly used abstraction algorithms, distinguish between them, and axiomatize them. (shrink)