This book provides an elegant account of the nature of the individual, without reducing it to a cluster of universals or claiming that it is a bare particular that must be acknowledged but never articulated.

Continuing the investigation in his earlier Individuals and individuality, Martine (philosophy, U. of Alabama) demonstrates that indeterminacy in our experience is logically bound to the determinate dimensions of thought and practice.

Is there a place for the tragic vision in an orderly scheme of things? This is the question that Patrick Madigan asks in an interesting essay that explores not only the place of tragedy and comedy in human experience, but also the place of the opening that tragedy represents in the Aristotelian system. He argues that Aristotle's view of being, if rightly understood, can accept and even embrace the tragic vision, and moreover that the perspective on human experience laid open (...) by tragedy can lead to a more complete understanding of ourselves and the world we try to come to terms with. He argues that it is only in the dreadful character of tragic experience that we can be shocked out of a complacent "doxalogical slumber" into the genuinely self-critical examination required for the attainment of theoretical knowledge. (shrink)