SummaryAn account is given of one of the most heated controversies in nineteenth-century British geology—the battle between Archibald Geikie and John Judd concerning the interpretation of the Palaeogene igneous rocks of the Inner Hebrides, particularly those of the Cuillins and the Red Hills of Skye. The controversy erupted in the first instance over the question of the respective ‘territories’ of the two geologists, then developed into disagreement as to the origin of the plateau lavas of Skye: were they formed from (...) fissure eruptions (Geikie's view) or from the outpourings of great volcanoes (Judd's view)? Debate then focused on the question of the relative age of the gabbro of the Cuillins and the granite (granophyre) of the Red Hills. A certain locality at Druim Hain (Druim an Eihdne) at the junction between the two rock-types became crucial for the dispute. Following earlier observers, Judd held that the granite was older and had been intruded by the gabbro. Geikie took the opposite view. Geikie's work relied particularly on field observations, for which he was assisted by several other geologists. Judd, who worked by himself, rested his argument more on the evidence furnished by petrology, using thin sections. Both geologists were influenced by Ferdinand von Richthofen. Geikie's work appeared to be vindicated in his own lifetime by the map work of Alfred Harker, which effectively closed the controversy. But later commentators such as Walker hold that in a sense both were correct. There were indeed great volcanoes active in the Inner Hebrides in the Palaeogene, as well as fissure eruptions. Moreover, recent mapping does not support all the observations of Geikie and Harker. The controversy illustrates different styles in nineteenth-century geology, with petrological arguments, based on the examination of thin sections, pitted against field observations. It may also be seen as being linked with the ongoing rivalry in the nineteenth century between the members of the Geological Survey (particularly the Directors General) and the ‘amateur’ university geologists. Geikie prevailed in the debate in part because he was able to draw on more resources for its prosecution, being helped by various friends and members of the Geological Survey. The study draws on the newly discovered Geikie archive at Haslemere, which contains his complete outgoing official correspondence, and 27 of his field notebooks, previously missing. With the help of this material, it is possible to gain a clearer insight into the methods deployed by Geikie in his fieldwork, and his ways of working and thinking. (shrink)

This collection of seminal essays on Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics provides the student of philosophy with an invaluable overview of the issues and problems raised by Kant. Starting with the Carus translation of Kant's work, the edition offers a substantive introduction, six papers never before published together, and a comprehensive bibliography. Special attention is paid to the relationship between Kant and David Hume, whose philosophical investigations, according to Kant's famous quote, first interrupted Kant's "dogmatic slumber.".

The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Volume 15 assembles Russell's writings on his experiences of visiting and reflecting on Russia and China. Having emerged from the Great War determined to prevent another armed conflict, Russell became a champion of international socialism as the antidote to the destructive forces of nationalism and capitalism. His quest for international reconstruction led to two enduring experiences, his trip first to Bolshevik Russia in 1920 and then to divided China in 1920-21. These letters describe those (...) experiences which confirmed his emergence as a popular commentator on contemporary political issues. The volume includes two unpublished papers on Russell's trip to Russia. (shrink)

India has a long, rich, and diverse tradition of philosophical thought, spanning some two and a half millenia and encompassing several major religious traditions. Now, in this intriguing introduction to Indian philosophy, the diversity of Indian thought is emphasized. It is structured around six schools of thought that have received classic status. Sue Hamilton explores how the traditions have attempted to understand the nature of reality in terms of inner or spiritual quest and introduces distinctively Indian concepts, such as (...) karma and rebirth. She also explains how Indian thinkers have understood issues of reality and knowledge-issues that re also an important part of the Western philosophical tradition. (shrink)

In this paper, I will focus on two sections of otherwise extensively studied Humean texts that have received little or no attention in the scholarly literature. A substantial part of Part 12 of the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and Section XI of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding—also written in dialogue form—are concerned with similar doctrines: that the prospect of a future state, or afterlife, acts as the motivating influence on our earthly moral behaviour.

The aesthetics of imperfection emphasises spontaneity, disruption, process and energy over formal perfection and is often ignored by many commentators or seen only in improvisation. This comprehensive collection is the first time imperfection has been explored across all kinds of musical performance, whether improvisation or interpretation of compositions. Covering music, visual art, dance, comedy, architecture and design, it addresses the meaning, experience, and value of improvisation and spontaneous creation across different artistic media. A distinctive feature of the volume is that (...) it brings together contributions from theoreticians and practitioners, presenting a wider range of perspectives on the issues involved. Contributors look at performance and practice across Western and non-Western musical, artistic and craft forms. Composers and non-performing artists offer a perspective on what is 'imperfect' or improvisatory within their work, contributing further dimensions to the discourse. The Aesthetics of Imperfection in Music and the Arts features 39 chapters organised into eight sections and written by a diverse group of scholars and performers. They consider divergent definitions of aesthetics, employing both 18th-century philosophy and more recent socially and historically situated conceptions making this an essential, up-to-date resource for anyone working on either side of the perfection-imperfection debate. (shrink)

Ferruccio Busoni's Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music appeared in 1910. Schoenberg, in his copy of the little book, wrote critical marginal comments which crystallize two opposed outlooks in musical aesthetics. Busoni writes: Notation, the writing out of compositions, is primarily an ingenious expedient for catching an inspiration, with the purpose of exploiting it later. But notation is to improvisation as the portrait is to the living model… …What the composer's inspiration necessarily loses through notation, his interpreter should restore (...) by his own…. (shrink)

A complete translation of Aristotle's classic that is both faithful and readable, along with an introduction that provides the modern reader with a means of understanding this seminal work and its impact on our culture. In this volume, Joe Sachs (translator of Aristotle's _Physics, Metaphysics,_ and the _Nicomachean Ethics _)also supplements his excellent translation with well-chosen notes and glossary of important terms. Focus Philosophical Library translations are close to and are non-interpretative of the original text, with the notes and a (...) glossary intending to provide the reader with some sense of the terms and the concepts as they were understood by Aristotle’s immediate audience. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music.

Within capitalist modernity, `children' and `culture' were ideologically positioned as `sacred' in opposition to the `profane' sphere of commerce and industry. In the last quarter of the 20th century, this romantic construction of childhood as a time of enchantment was appropriated by the `children's culture industry' and re-inscribed as a marketing strategy. Capitalist childhood was reconstituted as a time of consumption. In invoking the myth of the `sacred child', however, capital also elicits ambivalence about the `profanity' of commercial intrusion into (...) the domain of childhood. Similarly, the narratives of `good' versus `evil' through which children's culture is organized can be deployed in opposition to the conditions under which global capital produces children's consumer goods. While the cultural tension surrounding the commercialization of childhood has diminished as money itself takes on the aura of the `sacred', the residual power of romantic mythology creates potential for critical engagement on the terrain of capitalist childhood. (shrink)

Written across the disciplines of art history, literature, philosophy, sociology, and theology, the ten essays comprising the collection all insist on multidimensional definitions of evil. Taking its title from a moment in Shakespeare's Tempest when Prospero acknowledges his responsibility for Caliban, this collection explores the necessarily ambivalent relationship between humanity and evil. To what extent are a given society's definitions of evil self-serving? Which figures are marginalized in the process of identifying evil? How is humanity itself implicated in the production (...) of evil? Is evil itself something fundamentally human? These questions, indicative of the kinds of issues raised in this collection, seem all the more pressing in light of recent world events. The ten essays were originally presented at the First Global Conference on Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness, held in March 2000 in Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University. (shrink)

In the romantic tradition, music is consistently associated with madness, either as cause or cure. Writers as diverse as Kleist, Hoffmann, and Nietzsche articulated this theme, which in fact reaches back to classical antiquity and continues to resonate in the modern imagination. What John Hamilton investigates in this study is the way literary, philosophical, and psychological treatments of music and madness challenge the limits of representation and thereby create a crisis of language. Special focus is given to the decidedly (...) autobiographical impulse of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, where musical experience and mental disturbance disrupt the expression of referential thought, illuminating the irreducible aspects of the self before language can work them back into a discursive system. The study begins in the 1750s with Diderot's _Neveu de Rameau_, and situates that text in relation to Rousseau's reflections on the voice and the burgeoning discipline of musical aesthetics. Upon tracing the linkage of music and madness that courses through the work of Herder, Hegel, Wackenroder, and Kleist, Hamilton turns his attention to E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose writings of the first decades of the nineteenth century accumulate and qualify the preceding tradition. Throughout, Hamilton considers the particular representations that link music and madness, investigating the underlying motives, preconceptions, and ideological premises that facilitate the association of these two experiences. The gap between sensation and its verbal representation proved especially problematic for romantic writers concerned with the ineffability of selfhood. The author who chose to represent himself necessarily faced problems of language, which invariably compromised the uniqueness that the author wished to express. Music and madness, therefore, unworked the generalizing functions of language and marked a critical limit to linguistic capabilities. While the various conflicts among music, madness, and language questioned the viability of signification, they also raised the possibility of producing meaning beyond significance. (shrink)

In the romantic tradition, music is consistently associated with madness, either as cause or cure. Writers as diverse as Kleist, Hoffmann, and Nietzsche articulated this theme, which in fact reaches back to classical antiquity and continues to resonate in the modern imagination. What John Hamilton investigates in this study is the way literary, philosophical, and psychological treatments of music and madness challenge the limits of representation and thereby create a crisis of language. Special focus is given to the decidedly (...) autobiographical impulse of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, where musical experience and mental disturbance disrupt the expression of referential thought, illuminating the irreducible aspects of the self before language can work them back into a discursive system. The study begins in the 1750s with Diderot's _Neveu de Rameau_, and situates that text in relation to Rousseau's reflections on the voice and the burgeoning discipline of musical aesthetics. Upon tracing the linkage of music and madness that courses through the work of Herder, Hegel, Wackenroder, and Kleist, Hamilton turns his attention to E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose writings of the first decades of the nineteenth century accumulate and qualify the preceding tradition. Throughout, Hamilton considers the particular representations that link music and madness, investigating the underlying motives, preconceptions, and ideological premises that facilitate the association of these two experiences. The gap between sensation and its verbal representation proved especially problematic for romantic writers concerned with the ineffability of selfhood. The author who chose to represent himself necessarily faced problems of language, which invariably compromised the uniqueness that the author wished to express. Music and madness, therefore, unworked the generalizing functions of language and marked a critical limit to linguistic capabilities. While the various conflicts among music, madness, and language questioned the viability of signification, they also raised the possibility of producing meaning beyond significance. (shrink)

In this important new study, Hamilton establishes and develops innovative links between the sites of postcolonial literary theory, the fiction of the South African/Australian academic and Nobel Prize-winning writer J.M. Coetzee, and the work of the French poststructuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Centering on the key postcolonial problematic of representation, Hamilton argues that if one approaches the colonial subject through Gilles Deleuze’s rewriting of subjectivity, then a transcendent configuration of the colonial subject is revealed. Importantly, it is this rendition (...) of the colonial subject that accounts best for the way in which the colonial subject is able to propose and offer instances of resistance to colonial structures of subjectification. In elucidating this claim, the study turns to the fiction of Coetzee. Offering unique Deleuzean readings of three of Coetzee’s most theoretically beguiling novels – Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, and Foe – On Representation will prove to be essential reading to those interested in Coetzee studies, the literary terrain of Deleuze’s philosophy, and those engaging with contemporary debates in postcolonial literature and theory. (shrink)

Alexander’s call for a cultural sociology that goes beyond hermeneutic reading to an understanding of how cultural texts are instantiated in action is considered in relation to earlier attempts to establish a tradition of symbolic analysis in American sociology. The sociological provenance of the dramaturgical model that Alexander appropriates from performance studies serves to underline the precariousness of cultural sociology as a project within the American academy. Alexander’s thesis on the critical importance of ‘refusion’ to the life of societies is (...) endorsed, as is his argument that the specificity of ‘post-traditional’ societies cannot be elided by drawing directly on conceptual tools developed in analysis of ritual in ‘traditional’ societies. His argument for sociological agnosticism in relation to the moral qualities of symbolic action, on the other hand, is called into question. (shrink)

Writing Gender History. By Laura Lee Downs.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume XXII, Number 1, April 1996, pp. 193-202 Why Hume Wasn't an Atheist: A Reply to Andre BERYL LOGAN In a recent issue of Hume Studies,1 Shane Andre argues that, as Hume's position on theism can be read primarily from Philo's position in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and since Philo's position in the Dialogues is one of "limited theism," Hume was also a "limited theist" (...) and therefore not an atheist. According to Andre, a "limited theist" is one like Epicurus, "who denied, not that the Gods exist, but that they intervene in human affairs" and, he continues, "...at least in philosophical circles, the term 'atheist' is generally restricted to people who disbelieve any form of theism, and this is the sense in which I propose to enquire whether Hume was an atheist" (142). Andre's claim then is that Hume is not an atheist in this latter sense, but is a limited theist in the former sense. This is shown in "three major objections to standard theism" in the Dialogues: those addressing the Argument from Design and the problem of evil, as well as the lack of debate on whether or not God exists. Philo's criticisms of the Argument from Design amount to the claim that, "not that there is no God, but that, if there is a God," empirical evidence cannot show that God has any of the traditional characteristics of wisdom, power or goodness. The "proper conclusion" of Philo's argument from evil does not concern God's existence, but establishes that God is "limited in some important respect." Philo's "limited theism" is expressed in his ambivalent attitude toward Cleanthes' Argument from Design in Part 12 ("that the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human Beryl Logan is at the Department of Philosophy, Scarborough College, University of Toronto, 1265 Military Trail, Scarborough, Ontario MlC 1A4, Canada, email: logan@lake.'scar.utoronto.ca 194 Beryl Logan intelligence"). In sum, Philo and Cleanthes never debate God's existence, and they accept a limited Deity, therefore they hold positions of limited theism, therefore Philo is not an atheist. While I agree with Andre's conclusion that Hume is not an atheist, I will show in this paper first, that the interpretation which provides his means for arriving at this conclusion is not consistent with the text and faces a number of difficulties, and second, that the sense in which Hume is a limited theist has to do with the limitations of human reason and experience, and not with God's limited nature. My criticisms of Andre's position will be directed at three points in his argument: (1) his claim for Philo's theism based on Philo's lack of scepticism about God's existence; (2) what he regards to be the "proper conclusion" (153) to the problem of evil, as this directly influences his view of Philo's scepticism and the nature of the Deity; and (3) his view that Philo's theism is to be found in his acceptance of the Argument from Design (Philo's limited theism). My arguments will centre upon the "suspense of judgement," and where and how this.mental stance is used by Hume in the arguments of the Dialogues.2 Scepticism about God's Existence Andre claims that the arguments in the Dialogues are directed only to God's nature and do not address God's existence in spite of the fact that Cleanthes concludes his Argument from Design by claiming that the data in the world provide conclusive analogical support for the existence and (human-like) intelligence of the (traditional) Deity.3 Cleanthes' anthropomorphic Argument from Design purports to "prove" that the world has an intelligent divine designer just like machines have intelligent human designers and the only difference between the causes based on the effects is one of degree and not one of kind: the designer of the world is far grander than the designer of a computer because the world is more complex than a computer. I would urge, though, that Philo's scepticism is directed at both aspects of the Argument... (shrink)