The Third Reich conceived of life as a struggle (Kampf) between competing forces. This view of life was based on a growing emphasis in German philosophy and culture upon voluntarism, or the power of the will as the ultimate metaphysical reality. For these Germans, God was dead. There was no transcendent or universal standard to provide life with direction, no grand design or rationality to explain the succession of events, only the groundless and endless struggle of forces competing to assert (...) their power and extend their dominion. These Germans found early inspiration for this idea in the writings of Gottfried Leibniz, who spoke of life as possessing its own autonomous power in each of its individual members or monads. They saw this concept develop and become the one metaphysical truth in the works of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche with their emphasis upon the “will to live” and the “will to power.” The two philosophers exerted particular influence upon the Nazis, who saw them as early exponents of their ideology. This influence is important in understanding the fundamental mentality of the Nazis, even if the metaphysics of voluntarism contained other possible forms of interpretation beyond what the Nazis represented in word and deed. To understand the relationship between Nazism and voluntarism, the article develops the philosophical background from Leibniz to Nietzsche and relates this development to its Nazi expression in Adolf Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg, Alfred Bäumler, and Martin Heidegger. (shrink)

In Return to Reason, Stephen Toulmin argues that the potential for reason to improve our lives has been hampered by a serious imbalance in our pursuit of ...

Aboutness has been studied from any number of angles. Brentano made it the defining feature of the mental. Phenomenologists try to pin down the aboutness-features of particular mental states. Materialists sometimes claim to have grounded aboutness in natural regularities. Attempts have even been made, in library science and information theory, to operationalize the notion. But it has played no real role in philosophical semantics. This is surprising; sentences have aboutness-properties if anything does. Aboutness is the first book to examine through (...) a philosophical lens the role of subject matter in meaning. A long-standing tradition sees meaning as truth-conditions, to be specified by listing the scenarios in which a sentence is true. Nothing is said about the principle of selection--about what in a scenario gets it onto the list. Subject matter is the missing link here. A sentence is true because of how matters stand where its subject matter is concerned. Stephen Yablo maintains that this is not just a feature of subject matter, but its essence. One indicates what a sentence is about by mapping out logical space according to its changing ways of being true or false. The notion of content that results--directed content--is brought to bear on a range of philosophical topics, including ontology, verisimilitude, knowledge, loose talk, assertive content, and philosophical methodology. Written by one of today's leading philosophers, Aboutness represents a major advance in semantics and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

Provides guiding principles and values for practising responsible global media ethics.

Analytic semantics got its start when Frege pointed out differences in cognitive content between sentences that in some good sense “say the same.” Frege put cognitive content (in the form of sense) at the heart of semantic content. Most prefer nowadays to see cognitive contents as generated by semantic contents in context; a sentence's cognitive significance is an aspect rather of the information imparted by its use. I argue for a particular version of this idea. Semantic contents generate cognitive contents (...) by operating levers in a larger piece of machinery, involving also the presupposition P one is leaning on and the subject matter M under discussion. A sentence's cognitive content is what its literal-content-restricted-to-P-worlds says about M. It's by triggering different presuppositions and/or different subject matters that coreferential names make their distinctive mark on a sentence's felt information value. (shrink)

A philosophical miscellany, as diverting as it is instructive, centred on an eclectic sequence of themes, ranging from advice to ageing, from backbiting to bigotry, from freedom to friendship, and from work to walking. Stephen Trombley mines the canon of two and half millennia of Western thought for observations that reflect the seriousness, the joy and the strangeness of human existence, counterpointing these words of wisdom with episodes – sometimes humorous, sometimes poignant, sometimes plain odd – from the lives (...) of the great philosophers. WISE WORDS includes, on each of its themes, the thoughts of philosophers from the distant past to the present. The result is a multi-dimensional treatment of each theme that crosses temporal, national and ideological boundaries. (shrink)

_In this critical edition, Leibniz submits his metaphysics of substance and form, concomitance and expression, freedom and necessity to the searching Socratic interrogation of Arnauld_ In this critical edition, Stephen Voss establishes the text of the magnificent Socratic correspondence between Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Antoine Arnauld, provides an accurate English translation of the French text, and includes full apparatus helpful to student and scholar alike. The philosopher, physicist, and mathematician Leibniz presents the philosopher and theologian Arnauld with a unique (...) new metaphysics and hones his ongoing thinking on the critical responses he receives. The result is a dialogue capable of illuminating metaphysical thought even now. (shrink)

Tracks the sublime art movement from Kant to the 21st century and onwards to a new future Stephen Zepke tracks the sublime art movement from its beginnings in Kant to its flowering in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He shows that the idea of sublime art waxes and wanes in the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Ranciere and the recent Speculative Realism movement. With it, a visionary politics of art seeks (...) to give it the most creative power possible: the power to overcome our conditions and embrace the unknown. (shrink)

Tracing the history of American sociology since the Civil War, the authors of this important volume explain the field′s diversity, its lack of unifying paradigms, its broad, eclectic research agenda and its general weakness as an institutional force in either academia or the policy arena. They highlight the equivocal and often contradictory missions that sociologists prescribe for themselves and the variable nature of human, financial and intellectual resources available to the profession.

Sociology, as conceived by Comte, was to put an end to the anarchy of opinions characteristic of liberal democracy by replacing opinion with the truths of sociology, imposed through indoctrination. Later sociologists backed away from this, making sociology acceptable to liberal democracy by being politically neutral. The critics of this solution asked 'whose side are we on?' Burawoy provides a novel justification for advocacy scholarship in sociology. Public sociology is intended to have political effects, but also to be funded by (...) the politically neutral state. He argues that public sociology is institutionally neutral, but that committing to an organic relation with a social movement is legitimate as a matter of the sociologist's personal value choice. Although this produces side-taking sociology, by improving the case for particular standpoints it serves to improve democratic discussion generally, which is an appropriately neutral public aim. (shrink)

Invocations of Merleau-Ponty’s claim concerning the incompleteness that accompanies the phenomenological reduction have had a long and somewhat contentious history. In this paper I will further explore the implications of Merleau-Ponty’s claim and the itinerary from which it emerges. From the Structure of Behaviour onward, he argued that consciousness is not a transcendental presupposition but an achievement that emerges from and transforms the labor of our rational practices. Phenomenological theory rightly argued for the centrality of the experience of the reduction, (...) albeit too often by mistakenly bestowing immanence upon it. Statically regarded, the reduction may involve an ‘act’ but it is also a Stiftung, and thus a performative, one that Merleau-Ponty claims involves an institution and an acquisition: as he puts it quite simply, it is learned. The reduction involves intuition but it is also a conceptual practice involving “a multitude of operations”, a symbolic matrix always articulated through internal transformations. Finally the reduction is an experience but it is always a sequence “gradually effected” and thus an embodied history. It results then not in the Spinozist Habemus ideam verum, but as “The Philosopher and His Shadow” rightly concludes, an “artifact”. For Merleau-Ponty, all this forced the recognition of the “internal difficulty” in the reduction theorized through the concept of a constituting consciousness. Moreover, this not an anthropological claim about a faculty or finitude, but a claim about the rationality, the “metamorphosis” and “coherent deformation” of its experience, an “ordered sequence of steps” that “could not possibly reach completion in the intellectual possession of a noema”. It is not simply en presence, in the static relation of presence that phenomenology achieves justification. For Merleau-Ponty, its experience is not unrevisable, nor immanently completable: instead it is only through the ordered steps of its history that it acquires sufficiency. (shrink)

A reply to Fine’s critique of Aboutness. Fine contrasts two notions of truthmaker, and more generally two notions of “state.” One is algebraic; states are sui generis entities grasped primarily through the conditions they satisfy. The other uses set theory; states are sets of worlds, or, perhaps, collections of such sets. I try to defend the second notion and question some seeming advantages of the first.

Global Media Ethics is the first comprehensive cross-cultural exploration of the conceptual and practical issues facing media ethics in a global world. A team of leading journalism experts investigate the impact of major global trends on responsible journalism. The first full-length, truly global textbook on media ethics; Explores how current global changes in media promote and inhibit responsible journalism; Includes relevant and timely ethical discussions based on major trends in journalism and global media; Questions existing frameworks in media ethics in (...) light of the impact of global media; Contributors are leading experts in global journalism and communication. (shrink)

Historical introduction -- Human being -- Identity and human incompletion in Sartre -- Identity and human incompletion in Aquinas -- Human understanding -- The subjective nature of objective understanding in Sartre -- The subjective nature of objective understanding in Aquinas -- Human freedom -- Freedom, choice, and the indetermination of reason in Sartre -- Freedom, choice, and the indetermination of reason in Aquinas -- Human fulfillment -- The possibility of human happiness in Sartre -- The possibility of human happiness in (...) Aquinas. (shrink)

The Liberal Theory of Science, best articulated by Michael Polanyi, held that science advanced when autonomous scientists followed their best hunches and spontaneously coordinated their efforts as a result of their mutual dependence, in a setting devoted to scientific truth with a tradition supporting it, in a quest for a comprehensive understanding of reality. Pure science was for him an international community with the characteristics of the Republic of Letters of the past. This image of science was an idealization at (...) the time he wrote, and became less applicable as science grew and became more dependent on funding decisions, and therefore also on peer review, which compromised autonomy. From the painful attempts to make sense of these changes, particularly in the writings of John Ziman, we can reconstruct the effects of these changes: initially from a focus on discovery to the production of “reliable knowledge” for sponsors. This change made science more useful, but at a price, and made the Liberal Theory of Science increasingly irrelevant to actual science, but still useful as a basis for critique. (shrink)

"What is mathematics?" is a question that has been debated since antiquity. This book presents a groundbreaking and surprising answer to the question-showing through the concept of the physicalization of metamathematics how both mathematics and physics as experienced by humans can be seen to emerge from the unique underlying computational structure of the recently formulated ruliad. Written with Stephen Wolfram's characteristic expositional flair and richly illustrated with remarkable algorithmic diagrams, the book takes the reader on a unprecedented intellectual journey (...) to the center of some of the deepest questions about mathematics and its nature-and points the way to a new understanding of the foundations and future of mathematics, taking a major step beyond ideas from Plato, Kant, Hilbert, Gödel and others. (shrink)

This entry examines a set of ancient Chinese texts – with their associated literary and ideological tendencies – that had come to be seen as distinctive by the early Han period. This set constitutes one of the standard referents of “Daoism,” a word whose difficulties command attention in their own right. The ancient writers we could label “Daoists” were united by no single text, founder, agenda, or concept; grouped together, they show tendencies towards dissidence, paradox, and humor that distinguish them (...) from moralistic and technocratic rivals. These writers engaged a variety of themes and practices familiar from the early Chinese religious environment; alongside the eccentricities of Daoist writers themselves, the distinctiveness of this environment makes it challenging to put them in philosophical dialogue with other religious traditions. Buddhist uses of the Daoist heritage illustrate its potential relevance to a range of other religious perspectives. (shrink)

What Is Political Theory? provides students with a comprehensive overview of the current state of the discipline. Ten substantive chapters address the most pressing topics in political theory today, including: - what resources do the classic texts still provide for political theorists? - what areas will political theorists focus on in the future? - can western political theory alone continue to provide a framework for responding to the challenges of modern political life? The authors assess the intellectual challenges to conventional (...) political theory, such as post-structuralism and the scientific study of politics that have revitalized the field in the last 30 years. They also broaden the perspective to take in non-western ideas and to reconceptualize political theory in the light of specifically global challenges. Students and teachers of political theory and political philosophy will find this book invaluable in understanding the factors that have shaped current political theory and which will guide its future development. (shrink)

This chapter examines the relevance of the thoughts of Gilles Deleuze to the works of Allan Kaprow and Adrian Piper. It argues that Kaprow had made a shift akin to Deleuze's move from expressionism to constructivism and addresses the politics of Kaprow's practice in relation to Deleuze's concept of counter-actualisation. It describes the alternative of Piper's practice as one that creates performance events capable of catalysing new social territories in and as life.