Originally published in 1966 and now recognized as a classic, Norman O. Brown's meditation on the condition of humanity and its long fall from the grace of a natural, instinctual innocence is available once more for a new generation of readers. Love's Body is a continuation of the explorations begun in Brown's famous Life Against Death . Rounding out the trilogy is Brown's brilliant Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis.

Here is the final volume of Norman O. Brown's trilogy on civilization and its discontents, on humanity's long struggle to master its instincts and the perils that attend that denial of human nature. Following on his famous books _Life Against Death_ and _Love's Body_, this collection of eleven essays brings Brown's thinking up to 1990 and the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. Brown writes that "the prophetic tradition is an attempt to give direction to the (...) social structure precipitated by the urban revolution; to resolve its inherent contradictions; to put an end to its injustice, inequality, anomie, the state of war... that has been its history from start to finish." Affiliating himself with prophets from Muhammad to Blake and Emerson, Brown offers further meditations on what's wrong with Western civilization and what we might do about it. Thus the duality in his title: crisis and the hope for change. In pieces both poetic and philosophical, Brown's attention ranges over Greek mythology, Islam, Spinoza, and _Finnegan's Wake_. The collection includes an autobiographical essay musing on Brown's own intellectual development. The final piece, "Dionysus in 1990," draws on Freud and the work of Georges Bataille to link the recent changes in the world's economies with mankind's primordial drive to accumulation, waste, and death. (shrink)

Originally published in 1966 and now recognized as a classic, Norman O. Brown's meditation on the condition of humanity and its long fall from the grace of a natural, instinctual innocence is available once more for a new generation of readers. _Love's Body_ is a continuation of the explorations begun in Brown's famous _Life Against Death_. Rounding out the trilogy is Brown's brilliant _Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis_.

The implications for the substantivalist–relationalist controversy of Barbour and Bertotti's successful implementation of a Machian approach to dynamics are investigated. It is argued that in the context of Newtonian mechanics, the Machian framework provides a genuinely relational interpretation of dynamics and that it is more explanatory than the conventional, substantival interpretation. In a companion paper (Pooley [2002a]), the viability of the Machian framework as an interpretation of relativistic physics is explored. 1 Introduction 2 Newton versus Leibniz 3 Absolute space versus (...) an affine connection 4 Anti-relationalist arguments 5 Rehabilitating relationalism 6 Dynamics on the relative configuration space 7 Intrinsic particle dynamics 8 Conclusion. (shrink)

Neo-Fregeanism aims to provide a possible route to knowledge of arithmetic via Hume’s principle, but this is of only limited significance if it cannot account for how the vast majority of arithmetic knowledge, accrued by ordinary people, is obtained. I argue that Hume’s principle does not capture what is ordinarily meant by numerical identity, but that we can do much better by buttressing plural logic with plural versions of the ancestral operator, obtaining natural and plausible characterizations of various key arithmetic (...) concepts, including finiteness, equinumerosity and addition and multiplication of cardinality—revealing these to be logical concepts, and obtaining much of ordinary arithmetic knowledge as logical knowledge. Supplementing this with an abstraction principle and a simple axiom of infinity (known either empirically or modally) we obtain a full interpretation of arithmetic. (shrink)

This paper puts forward a new account of rigorous mathematical proof and its epistemology. One novel feature is a focus on how the skill of reading and writing valid proofs is learnt, as a way of understanding what validity itself amounts to. The account is used to address two current questions in the literature: that of how mathematicians are so good at resolving disputes about validity, and that of whether rigorous proofs are necessarily formalizable.

This paper sketches an account of the standard of acceptable proof in mathematics—rigour—arguing that the key requirement of rigour in mathematics is that nontrivial inferences be provable in greater detail. This account is contrasted with a recent perspective put forward by De Toffoli and Giardino, who base their claims on a case study of an argument from knot theory. I argue that De Toffoli and Giardino’s conclusions are not supported by the case study they present, which instead is a very (...) good illustration of the kind of view of proof defended here. (shrink)

Although Peano arithmetic is necessarily incomplete, Isaacson argued that it is in a sense conceptually complete: proving a statement of the language of PA that is independent of PA will require conceptual resources beyond those needed to understand PA. This paper gives a test of Isaacon’s thesis. Understanding PA requires understanding the functions of addition and multiplication. It is argued that grasping these primitive recursive functions involves grasping the double ancestral, a generalized version of the ancestral operator. Thus, we can (...) test Isaacon’s thesis by seeing whether when we phrase arithmetic in a context with the double ancestral operator, the result is conservative over PA. This is a stronger version of the test given by Smith, who argued that understanding the predicate “natural number” requires understanding the ancestral operator, but did not investigate what is required to understand the arithmetic functions. (shrink)

It is argued that Minkowski space-time cannot serve as the deep structure within a ``constructive'' version of the special theory of relativity, contrary to widespread opinion in the philosophical community.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the `Lorentzian Pedagogy' defended by J.S. Bell in his essay ``How to teach special relativity'', and to explore its consistency with Einstein's thinking from 1905 to 1952. Some remarks are also made in this context on Weyl's philosophy of relativity and his 1918 gauge theory. Finally, it is argued that the Lorentzian pedagogy---which stresses the important connection between kinematics and dynamics---clarifies the role of rods and clocks in general relativity.

The initial motivating question for this thesis is what the standard of rigour in modern mathematics amounts to: what makes a proof rigorous, or fail to be rigorous? How is this judged? A new account of rigour is put forward, aiming to go some way to answering these questions. Some benefits of the norm of rigour on this account are discussed. The account is contrasted with other remarks that have been made about mathematical proof and its workings, and is tested (...) and illustrated by considering a case study discussed in the literature. On the view put forward here one can obtain a manner of informal, rigorous mathematics founded on any of a variety of proof systems. The latter part of the thesis is concerned with the question of how we should decide which of these competing proof systems we should base our mathematics on: i.e., the question of which proof system we should take as a foundation for our mathematics. A novel answer to this question is proposed, in which the key property we should require of a proof system is that for as many different kinds of structures as possible, when the proof system allows a generalization about that kind of structure to be proved, the generalization actually holds of all real examples of that kind of structure which exist. This is the requirement of soundness of the proof system. It is argued that the best way to establish the soundness of a proof system may be by giving an interpretation of its axioms on which they are established as true. As preparation for this discussion, the thesis first investigates the logical and conceptual basis of various arithmetic concepts, with the results obtained used in the final discussion of soundness. (shrink)

This paper gives a semantics for schematic logic, proving soundness and completeness. The argument for soundness is carried out in ontologically innocent fashion, relying only on the existence of formulae which are actually written down in the course of a derivation in the logic. This makes the logic available to a nominalist, even a nominalist who does not wish to rely on modal notions, and who accepts the possibility that the universe may in fact be finite.

In what sense can we not help thinking that every event has a cause? One answer is, that this begs the question: we can think of events as uncaused. Well, we can think of events in isolation from causes, and we can formulate the proposition that some events have no cause, or that no event needs a cause. But the first of these does not constitute thinking of an event as not caused, but thinking of an event not-as-caused ; while (...) the implications of the second, forming anti-causal propositions, are obscure. I can verbally formulate the proposition ‘some events are uncaused’; the question is, whether it makes sense to affirm it. Now I can verbally formulate the proposition ‘some triangles are quadrilateral’, and we must not say that this does not make sense; for I know the criteria for being a triangle, and I know the criteria for being quadrilateral; and the proposition simply asserts that there are some figures which satisfy both sets of criteria. That this is logically impossible is true, but it is not unintelligible. It does not, however, make sense to affirm a logical impossibility, simply because I cannot meaningfully affirm what I do not understand and believe to be possible, and if I understand what it means to be both triangular and quadrilateral, I cannot also believe it to be possible, since to understand what it means for a plane figure to have three sides is to understand that this excludes its having any other number of sides, e.g. four. But ‘some events are not caused’ is not logically incoherent in this way, or not apparently so; for in thinking of an event I am by definition thinking of a happening in isolation from any cause; I am thinking of it not as caused. Thus ‘some events are uncaused’ is not incoherent ex vi terminorum. (shrink)

In what sense can we not help thinking that every event has a cause? One answer is, that this begs the question: we can think of events as uncaused. Well, we can think of events in isolation from causes, and we can formulate the proposition that some events have no cause, or that no event needs a cause. But the first of these does not constitute thinking of an event as not caused, but thinking of an event not-as-caused ; while (...) the implications of the second, forming anti-causal propositions, are obscure. I can verbally formulate the proposition ‘some events are uncaused’; the question is, whether it makes sense to affirm it. Now I can verbally formulate the proposition ‘some triangles are quadrilateral’, and we must not say that this does not make sense; for I know the criteria for being a triangle, and I know the criteria for being quadrilateral; and the proposition simply asserts that there are some figures which satisfy both sets of criteria. That this is logically impossible is true, but it is not unintelligible. It does not, however, make sense to affirm a logical impossibility, simply because I cannot meaningfully affirm what I do not understand and believe to be possible, and if I understand what it means to be both triangular and quadrilateral, I cannot also believe it to be possible, since to understand what it means for a plane figure to have three sides is to understand that this excludes its having any other number of sides, e.g. four. But ‘some events are not caused’ is not logically incoherent in this way, or not apparently so; for in thinking of an event I am by definition thinking of a happening in isolation from any cause; I am thinking of it not as caused. Thus ‘some events are uncaused’ is not incoherent ex vi terminorum. (shrink)

Psychological egoism is, I suppose, regarded by most philosophers as one of the more simple-minded fallacies in the history of philosophy, and dangerous and seductive too, contriving as it does to combine cynicism about human ideals and a vague sense of scientific method, both of which make the ordinary reader feel sophisticated, with conceptual confusion, which he cannot resist. For all of these reasons it springs eternal, in one form or another, in the breasts of first-year students, and offers excellent (...) material for their philosophy instructors, who like nothing better than an edifice of sturdy appearance but with rotten foundations on which to display their skill as demolition experts. (shrink)