It would therefore be reasonable to undertake a description and appreciation of this book precisely in its character as a dialectical dictionary or magazine of aesthetic issues and arguments. One could conduct a guided tour, stopping to admire the fullness of information, or fertility of invention, and the nicely graded series of the ideas collected in this locus or that, or in some area where one happened to be well enough informed, noting the omissions. One might even raise a theoretical (...) question about this whole aspect of the work, starting with the author's bald assertion: "What I have written is, simply and literally, a guide to aesthetics—a guide to the structure and problems of the subject, not to its literature." His "approach," he says, "is systematic, not historical." He "mentions names," but he says he is "not concerned much with who first said what," and his references are not always to the "earliest or best exponents of the views they illustrate". Much of the literature he says he has not read and does not mean to read. One who has himself not read all of the aesthetic literature can hardly object to this very strenuously. (shrink)

Let me attempt a drastic summary, or symbolic reduction, of Mr. Foss's adeptly metaphorical exposition. The use of the copula is, implicit in the appositive series, will do some violence to the complexity of the argument, but since causes and parts are frowned on by the same argument, the simpler arrangement cannot be altogether out of keeping. In logical and grammatical terms, we have on two sides of a profound ledger: "symbolic reduction," the divisive subject and predicate,--and "metaphoric process," the (...) underlying and unifying energy of the proposition, the subjectum. The negations of dialectic operate to show the insufficiency of symbolic concepts and are the "door to philosophic truth." And in ontological terms, we have on the one hand number, time, space, cause and effect, coincidence and contingency; and on the other the different, the naught, the apeiron, the potential, the tension of process, freedom and necessity in metaphoric lawful unity. There are two closely similar extremes of reduction between which one locates the transcendent philosophy of metaphor: that of sensationalism, the philosophy of the brute and atomic, and that of rationalism, the philosophy of expedient action. And in more or less theological terms, we have on the one hand the environment and its complement the ego, purposive and possessive; on the other, World, the I and the Thou, prayer, sin and grace in the metaphorical unity of consciousness, the widening power of personality in intercession or metaphorical representation. On the one hand, birth and death, past and future, and a present extending ad libitum into either; on the other, the eternal present of the integrated process stretching over past and future, expressed in its purest form in art. And so in aesthetic terms: on the one hand catharsis, a rationalized mixture of the ego's pleasure and pain, asceticism and hedonism, play; on the other, drama--especially tragedy, which par excellence action--Eudaimonia, purification, artistic distance, stylization, imagination, conscience, love. On the one hand, comedy in the sense of farce, environment symbolically reduced, actions and persons according to type, the mechanism of means and ends, rules, rituals, tricks, chance, the caricature of symbolic fixation--producing laughter: on the other hand, true and great comedy, the attempt to understand life in all its contradictions, producing the smile. (shrink)

Biologists, historians, lawyers, art historians, and literary critics all voice arguments in the critical dialogue about what constitutes evidence in research and scholarship. They examine not only the constitution and "blurring" of disciplinary boundaries, but also the configuration of the fact-evidence distinctions made in different disciplines and historical moments the relative function of such concepts as "self-evidence," "experience," "test," "testimony," and "textuality" in varied academic discourses and the way "rules of evidence" are themselves products of historical developments. The essays and (...) rejoinders are by Terry Castle, Lorraine Daston, Carlo Ginzburg, Ian Hacking, Mark Kelman, R. C. Lewontin, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Mary Poovey, Donald Preziosi, Simon Schaffer, Joan W. Scott, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Barbara Herrnstein Smith. The critical responses are by Lauren Berlant, James Chandler, Jean Comaroff, Arnold I. Davidson, Harry D. harootunian, Elizabeth Helsinger, Thomas C. Holt, Francoise Meltzer, Robert J. Richards, Lawrence Rothfield, Joel Snyder, Cass R. Sunstein, and William Wimsatt. (shrink)

The third volume of Professor Guthrie's great history of Greek thought, entitled The Fifth-Century Enlightenment, deals in two parts with the Sophists and Socrates, the key figures in the dramatic and fundamental shift of philosophical interest from the physical universe to man. Each of these parts is now available as a paperback with the text, bibliography and indexes amended where necessary so that each part is self-contained. The Sophists assesses the contribution of individuals like Protagoras, Gorgias and Hippias to the (...) extraordinary intellectual and moral fermant in fifth-century Athens. They questioned the bases of morality, religion and organized society itself and the nature of knowledge and language; they initiated a whole series of important and continuing debates, and they provoked Socrates and Plato to a major restatement and defence of traditional values. (shrink)

The third volume of Professor Guthrie's great history of Greek thought, entitled The Fifth-Century Enlightenment, deals in two parts with the Sophists and Socrates, the key figures in the dramatic and fundamental shift of philosophical interest from the physical universe to man. Each of the two parts is available as a paperback with the text, bibliography and indexes amended where necessary so that each part is self-contained. Socrates dominated the controversies of this period, as he has dominated the subsequent history (...) of western philosophy. He was the first to identify and grapple with some of the most intractable and persistent logical and philosophical problems; but he was also and has remained a highly controversial figure because of his extraordinary personal qualities and his remarkable career. Professor Guthrie offers a balanced and comprehensive picture of the man, his life, and his thought. (shrink)

This book critically examines the case for and against the belief in personal survival of bodily death. It discusses key philosophical questions. How could a discarnate individual be identified as a person who was once alive? What is the relationship between minds and their brains? Is a 'next world' conceivable? The book also examines classic arguments for the immortality of the soul, and focuses on types of prima facie evidence of survival: near-death experiences, apparitions, mediumistic communications, and ostensible reincarnation cases.

Originally published 1978.This volume examines the purpose and the functioning of the present education system inthe UK and when it was originally published it was the first overall review of developments in British education since the 1944 Education Act. It discusses some of the most significant reforms which have stemmed from developments in the primary schools, in particular from the adoption of child-centred and progressive methods of teaching.

Austin argued that ‘if’ has sometimes a non-conditional function, his reason being that some types of if-statement are deviant by two criteria which establish a norm. Following Pears more or less closely, I shall refer to applications of these criteria as the contrapositive and nondetachment tests, and to any if-statement which fails at least one test as a pseudoconditional, or more briefly as a pseudo. Thus, to turn directly to the narrower subject of this paper- the singularity Austin exposed in (...) a thesis of Moore's - ‘He can, if he chooses’ fails either test. It does not entail ‘lf he cannot, he does not choose to’. Nor does it entail ‘He can’. Hence, it is doubly pseudo - and the same applies after systematic variation in grammatical person, tense and mood. (shrink)