Platonism has played a central role in Christianity and is essential to a deep understanding of the Christian theological tradition. At times, Platonism has constituted an essential philosophical and theological resource, furnishing Christianity with an intellectual framework that has played a key role in its early development, and in subsequent periods of renewal. Alternatively, it has been considered a compromising influence, conflicting with the faith's revelatory foundations and distorting its inherent message. In both cases the fundamental importance of Platonism, as (...) a force which Christianity defined itself by and against, is clear. Written by an international team of scholars, this landmark volume examines the history of Christian Platonism from antiquity to the present day, covers key concepts, and engages issues such as the environment, natural science and materialism. (shrink)

A splendid edition. Schneewind's illuminating introduction succinctly situates the _Enquiry_ in its historical context, clarifying its relationship to Calvinism, to Newtonian science, and to earlier moral philosophers, and providing a persuasive account of Hume's ethical naturalism. --Martha C. Nussbaum, Brown University.

How does talk work, and can we engage the public in a dialogue about the scientific study of talk? This article presents a history, critical evaluation and empirical illustration of the public science of talk. We chart the public ethos of conversation analysis that treats talk as an inherently public phenomenon and its transcribed recordings as public data. We examine the inherent contradictions that conversation analysis is simultaneously obscure yet highly cited; it studies an object that people understand intuitively, yet (...) routinely produces counter-intuitive findings about talk. We describe a novel methodology for engaging the public in a science exhibition event and show how our ‘conversational rollercoaster’ used live recording, transcription and public-led analysis to address the challenge of demonstrating how talk can become an informative object of scientific research. We conclude by encouraging researchers not only to engage in a public dialogue but also to find ways to actively engage people in taking a scientific approach to talk as a pervasive, structural feature of their everyday lives. (shrink)

Prior thinks that Edwards' argument depends on a metaphysical turn of phrase. Edwards, he says, subsumes "all happenings, or anyhow... all changes, under the idea of the 'beginning to be' either of concrete objects or of abstract ones". We are not to say, "My head began to ache," we are to say, "My headache began to exist." The shift may seem trivial, but actually it is "of the very first importance": Edwards' argument "depends on it." The reason is the following. (...) Edwards says that objects or substances cannot begin to be without a cause; that if they could, it would be prima facie implausible to hold that substances of only one kind, of all the millions of kinds of substance, should causelessly come to be; and that the implausibility cannot be removed by appealing to the nature of what thus comes to be, because until it actually exists there is nothing there to explain anything. Prior agrees with all that. But he holds that it is not impossible that some already existing substances should have a special kind of property which would make it possible for them to change or act causelessly. Of course, if we have to say that a change or an act is just another kind of coming to be of a substance, this too is impossible. Hence Prior thinks that by showing that changes and acts need not be construed as Edwards construes them, he will have made room for the possibility of limited indeterminism. (shrink)

The first volumes of the great University of Toronto Press edition of the works of John Stuart Mill, edited by John M. Robson, appeared in 1963, and the edition was completed in 1991. Not surprisingly, it has generated a great deal of discussion of Mill's thought. The bibliography in John Skorupski's Companion to Mill lists some 350 items pertinent to Mill published since 1963, although it makes no attempt at comprehensive coverage of English-language studies and has nothing in any foreign (...) language. No one can keep up with all of this secondary material. It is not the least of the virtues of the Companion that it gives us a broad survey of much of the recent research and thought about Mill. I suspect that some of the articles will not be very helpful to bewildered undergraduates hoping for a boost on an assignment. But all of them will be useful to advanced students and scholars who want to know where we are on Mill these days. (shrink)

The doctrine of scientific realism has once again come into the center of attention for many philosophers of science, although of course the approaches, arguments, and emphases have somewhat changed. This book is an excellent entree to the current debates on this topic, as seen by van Fraassen who is probably the most direct and severe opponent of scientific realism. What is at stake is nothing less than the ultimate goal of science and the significance of its theories.