Illustrations include a reconstruction of the first map.

This present study began as the author's extension and application of ideas from Whitehead's work to the subject of education, using a chapter from Whitehead's book Science and the Modern World and a pamphlet, The Rhythm of Education as the starting point.

This is the story of philosophy in ancient and classical Greece. Robert Brumbaugh brings out the intrinsic and current importance in the development of Western philosophy from Thales to Aristotle. He emphasizes the insights and ideas that have proven crucial to later Western thought and reveals the success of the classical thinkers in forming systematic philosophic syntheses. This book is a useful introduction to philosophy. The ancient Greek discoveries led to the major systems used by the West today.

This book recognizes and questions a key assumption about time which is shared by common sense and philosophy—the assumption that time, like a single substance or a homogeneous quality, is subject to the law of contradiction. This leads to the logical conclusion that among different and mutually exclusive accounts of time, whether in science, practical action, or fine art, only one can be the “right” one. Four such accounts are shown here to be internally consistent though mutually incompatible, suggesting that (...) the initial assumption is mistaken, and that in some way each alternative concept of time must be incomplete. Brumbaugh suggests that we must choose the one appropriate to a particular purpose: artistic creation, technological efficiency, discovery of mathematical laws of nature, or work with biological and social phenomena. The selection should allow coherence between that aspect of reality which the selected time concept emphasizes, and the aspect of reality most relevant to a successful execution of our purpose. (shrink)

The first one-volume introduction to Plato's biography with a complete account of his works since A.E. Taylor's. It includes a systematic explanation of Plato's theory of forms and concludes with an application of Plato's ideas to the world today.

The first one-volume introduction to Plato's biography with a complete account of his works since A.E. Taylor's. It includes a systematic explanation of Plato's theory of forms and concludes with an application of Plato's ideas to the world today.

Collaborative work with Robert S. Brumbaugh, first published in 1950. This work, intended as a textbook for undergraduates and also as a reader for the literate layperson, is a survey of Western philosophy from its beginnings until the mid-point of the t20th century. The chapters are divided according to traditional historical markers with Stallknecht and Brumbaugh also providing chapters on the major movements in philosophy from 1850 to 1950, and discussions of moral philosophy as well as symbolic (...) logic. (shrink)

This study of Western philosophic systems, their types, history, relations, and projected future in the next half century, stems from Robert S. Brumbaugh’s forty-year fascination with the paradox of the many consistent overarching systems of ideas that are nevertheless mutually exclusive. Brumbaugh argues that when we isolate these systems’s patterns and look at them more abstractly, they consistently fall into four main types, and the interaction of these four types of explanation and order is a dominant theme (...) in the history of Western philosophy. In Brumbaugh’s view these four philosophic systems are not, as some critical historians and thinkers have claimed, so different that they are mutually unintelligible, forcing us to make a choice among them that is entirely arbitrary. But neither are they, as a majority of past thinkers and historians have hoped, simply parts of some single "right" or "orthodox" scheme. Their mutual understanding requires a method of transformation that interprets one to another without destroying their diversity. The history of Western philosophy from the fifth century A.D. to the present shows a pattern of alternating revolutions in systematic method and direction of explanation. Brumbaugh feels that the pattern is continuing in a change toward a revised Platonism, just beginning with the twenty-first century. He anticipates that it will be a Platonism of a new texture, one that has matured and learned a great deal in the course of the adventures of its ideas through space and time. (shrink)

When Mr. Levinson refers to the etymologies as a "circus parade" without underscoring the fact that they take up better than half of the dialogue, he is suppressing a detail that fits his figure of speech rather badly: surely this is an extravagantly long parade for the one-ring Heraclitean-taming act that follows! If this major section were an unordered collection of linguistic facts, puns, and free associations, one could only think that Plato's usual uncanny sense of coherence and proportion had (...) lapsed completely when he perpetrated it. (shrink)

But this is only half of the picture. Plato makes sense to the modern American reader because that reader is influenced by a physics and cosmology radically Platonic in historic origin and in content; and because he is influenced by mathematics and formal logic which are producing challenging original speculation, and which are of a Platonic character both in genesis and nature.

This paper is an application of a more general formula of transformation which seems to sharpen the issues and explain the opposed reactions involved in treating Aristotle as a contemporary philosopher. In my discussion, I intend to show that Aristotle can be read as a Pythagorean scientist if we concentrate on his applications of mathematics; that he must be read as an anti-Platonic intuitionist if we concentrate on his account of the nature and foundations of mathematics; that the way in (...) which he conceives his theory and practice to be related exactly reverses our contemporary idea of what constitutes explanation and what constitutes pre-demonstrative inquiry. (shrink)