The effectiveness of information retrieval technology in electronic discovery (E-discovery) has become the subject of judicial rulings and practitioner controversy. The scale and nature of E-discovery tasks, however, has pushed traditional information retrieval evaluation approaches to their limits. This paper reviews the legal and operational context of E-discovery and the approaches to evaluating search technology that have evolved in the research community. It then describes a multi-year effort carried out as part of the Text Retrieval Conference to develop evaluation methods (...) for responsive review tasks in E-discovery. This work has led to new approaches to measuring effectiveness in both batch and interactive frameworks, large data sets, and some surprising results for the recall and precision of Boolean and statistical information retrieval methods. The paper concludes by offering some thoughts about future research in both the legal and technical communities toward the goal of reliable, effective use of information retrieval in E-discovery. (shrink)

Over 115 000 people are waiting for life-saving organ transplants, of whom a small fraction will receive transplants and many others will die while waiting. Existing efforts to expand the number of available organs, including increasing the number of registered donors and procuring organs in uncontrolled environments, are crucial but unlikely to address the shortage in the near future and will not improve donor/recipient compatibility or organ quality. If successful, organ bioengineering can solve the shortage and improve functional outcomes. Studying (...) manufactured organs in animal models has produced valuable data, but is not sufficient to understand viability in humans. Before risking manufactured organ experimentation in living humans, study of bioengineered organs in recently deceased humans would facilitate evaluation of the function of engineered tissues and the complex interactions between the host and the transplanted tissue. Although such studies do not pose risk to human subjects, they pose unique ethical challenges concerning the previous wishes of the deceased, rights of surviving family members, effective operation and fair distribution of medical services, and public transparency. This article investigates the ethical, legal and social considerations in performing engineered organ research on the recently deceased. (shrink)

Plagiarism strikes at the heart of academe, eroding the fundamental value of academic research. Recent evidence suggests that acts of plagiarism and awareness of these acts are on the rise in academia. To address this issue, a vein of research has emerged in recent years exploring plagiarism as an area of academic inquiry. In this new academic subject, case studies and analysis have been one of the most influential methodologies employed. Case studies provide a venue where acts of plagiarism can (...) be discussed and analyzed in a constructive manner, and that is the primary purpose of this article. Unlike previous studies, however, we focus on the role of the publisher, a key player in dealing with acts of plagiarism, but one who has received little attention in the academic literature. Specifically, we examine how an academic publisher addressed allegations of plagiarism and how the publisher’s decision-making affected the outcome. We analyze the case by applying the guidelines from different frameworks and ethical theory and develop recommendations from the lessons evidenced, the second main objective of our article. This analysis advances the dialog on academic plagiarism by exploring the role of the publisher from a deontological perspective of ethical absolutism. (shrink)

Plagiarism strikes at the heart of academe, eroding the fundamental value of academic research. Recent evidence suggests that acts of plagiarism and awareness of these acts are on the rise in academia. To address this issue, a vein of research has emerged in recent years exploring plagiarism as an area of academic inquiry. In this new academic subject, case studies and analysis have been one of the most influential methodologies employed. Case studies provide a venue where acts of plagiarism can (...) be discussed and analyzed in a constructive manner, and that is the primary purpose of this article. Unlike previous studies, however, we focus on the role of the publisher, a key player in dealing with acts of plagiarism, but one who has received little attention in the academic literature. Specifically, we examine how an academic publisher addressed allegations of plagiarism and how the publisher’s decision-making affected the outcome. We analyze the case by applying the guidelines from different frameworks and ethical theory and develop recommendations from the lessons evidenced, the second main objective of our article. This analysis advances the dialog on academic plagiarism by exploring the role of the publisher from a deontological perspective of ethical absolutism. (shrink)

With growth in the quantity of business ethics journals in recent years, assessments of journal quality are helpful to ethics researchers and administrators, as researchers consider available publication venues, and administrators consider the value of faculty research. The few published evaluations of business ethics journals have predominantly utilized two methods of journal quality determination: citation analysis and surveys of active researchers. This study employs a novel method to assess business ethics journals: 83 Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business business (...) schools provided their internally developed journal lists that were used to evaluate faculty research, and the submitted lists were then analyzed for the presence and assessment of business ethics journals. This analysis yielded a ranking of 24 business-ethics-centric journals, and this ranking reflects the collective judgments of AACSB business school faculties. The results of this study are pragmatic in that the journal evaluation data employed metrics actually used by business schools to determine the quality of business ethics journals. These findings also provide additional impetus for the recognition of business ethics as a distinct business discipline and business ethics research as a unique field of scholarly endeavor. While studies of business ethics may be influential when they are published in non-BEC journals, such studies may be more powerfully impactful when published in BEC journals. (shrink)

Here at last is an American counterpart to Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy. The eminent historian Bruce Kuklick tells the fascinating story of the growth of philosophical thinking in the USA, in the context of the intellectual and social changes of the times. Kuklick sketches the genesis of these intellectual practices in New England Calvinism and the writing of Jonathan Edwards. He discusses theology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the origins of collegiate philosophy in the early (...) part of the nineteenth century. We see the development of secular preconceptions and the emergence, after Darwin's writings of the mid-late nineteenth century, of forms of thought hostile to religion. Philosophy is situated in a variety of cultural contexts - the ministry, the growing system of higher learning, the conflict between philosophers and theologians and between amateur and professional thinkers, the suspicion of European ideas, and worries about the relevance of philosophy to public and political life. Kuklick's narrative portrays such great thinkers as Charles Peirce, William James, John Dewey, C. I. Lewis, Wilfrid Sellars, W. V. Quine, and Richard Rorty, and assesses their contributions to philosophy. He brings us right up to date with the first historical treatment of the period after pragmatism, and the fragmentation of philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century. Kuklick steers a controversial course between the divergent views that historians and philosophers take of the significance of philosophy in recent years. Anyone interested in American intellectual history, or in how philosophy got where it is today, will enjoy this book. (shrink)

This book taps the best American thinkers to answer the essential American question: How do we sustain our experiment in government of, by, and for the people? Authored by an extraordinary and politically diverse roster of public officials, scholars, and educators, these chapters describe our nation's civic education problem, assess its causes, offer an agenda for reform, and explain the high stakes at risk if we fail.

I hear the patter of little feet around the house, I expect Bruce. What I expect is a cat, a particular cat. If I heard such a patter in another house, I might expect a cat but no particular cat. What I expect then seems to be a Meinongian incomplete cat. I expect winter, expect stormy weather, expect to shovel snow, expect fatigue---a season, a phenomenon, an activity, a state. I expect that someday mankind will inhabit at least five (...) planets. This time what I expect is a state of affairs. If we let surface grammar be our guide, the objects of expectation seem quite a miscellany. The same goes for belief, since expectation is one kind of belief. The same goes for desire: I could want Bruce, want a cat but no particular cat, want winter, want stormy weather, want to shovel snow, want fatigue, or want that someday mankind will inhabit at least five planets. The same goes for other attitudes to the extent that they consist partly of beliefs or desires or lacks thereof. But the seeming diversity of objects might be an illusion. Perhaps the objects of attitudes are uniform in category, and it is our ways of speaking elliptically about these uniform objects that are diverse. That indeed is our consensus. We mostly think that the attitudes uniformly have propositions as their objects. That is why we speak habitually of "propositional attitudes.". (shrink)

Immanuel Kant might have stated the central and urgent problem facing contemporary literary theory as the need to seek a path between dogmatism and skepticism. We confront today a multiplicity of critical methods, each filling books and journals with no doubt convincing arguments for its correctness. If we cling to one, denying others possess truth, we are dogmatists; if, however, we grant that two or three or all are equally true, we admit that each is at the same time false (...) in relation to the others’ truth, and so we are skeptics. The “dogmatic employment” of reason, Kant noted, “lands us in dogmatic assertions to which other assertions, equally specious, can always be opposed-that is, in scepticism.”1Into this professional breach steps “pluralism” , claiming it can vindicate sharply limited patterns of reading which nonetheless allow for diversity in the relation of word to idea and, so, of interpreting reader to text. This would make it possible to encompass within a single theory the insights which both camps find in their positions. Clearly, this entices.But do we really understand what pluralism is, if it is at all? Its critical practice already exists—this essay grew from a 1984 conference which sought possible intellectual “foundations” of that practice—but how are these practitioners to understand what they do? Pluralism’s philosophic pedigree may have been neatly sketched by Nelson Goodman as the traditionThat began when Kant exchanged the structure of the world for the structure of the mind, continued when C. I. Lewis exchanged the structure of the mind for the structure of concepts, and that now proceeds to exchange the structure of concepts for the structure of the several symbols systems of the sciences, philosophy, the arts, perception, and everyday discourse. The movement is from unique truth and a world fixed and found to a diversity of right and even conflicting versions of world in the making.2 1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith , p. 57; all further references to this work, abbreviated CPR, will be included in the text.2. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking , p. x. Since Lewis is not often classified among pluralists, I support Goodman by calling attention to Pepper having been Lewis’ student and to Lewis’ observation that he and Pepper “have been, so to say, continuously aware of each other, and of a common background of thought…. I should like to think that our respective views, both in theory of value and in ethics, are mutually supplementary rather than rival theories” . Numerous essays from this volume are useful for situating Lewis. Bruch Erlich is associate professor of English and modern languages at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln where he teaches comparative literature and literary theory. He has published on Shakespeare, Walter Benjamin, and intellectual history and is preparing a book on cognitive universals in tension with the experience of historical change, Unintelligible Limits: Time, meaning, and a Hermeneutic of Suffering. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dogma and Ecumenism: Vatican II and Karl Barth's Ad Limina Apostolorum ed. by Matthew Levering, Bruce L. McCormack, and Thomas Joseph White, O.P.Gavin D'CostaDogma and Ecumenism: Vatican II and Karl Barth's Ad Limina Apostolorum edited by Matthew Levering, Bruce L. McCormack, and Thomas Joseph White, O.P. (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America Press, 2020), ix + 369 pp.In May 1966 Karl Barth visited Rome. He (...) was invited to reflect on the Second Vatican Council, to ask questions to leading curial figures, and peritus theologians, as well as Pope Paul VI. Barth's book Ad Limina Apostolorum: An Appraisal of Vatican II contains his questions and an account from Barth of his visit, along with some other important essays. It is still deeply challenging in its incisiveness, despite its brevity. I have always been struck by Barth's Marian criticisms that are so central to his viewpoint about divine agency and human cooperation. These give us an excellent insight into his ecclesiology. They represent the reasons for much of his questioning of various Roman Catholic positions on all sorts of matters. Eberhard Busch's diaries, while Barth's assistant during this period, form a fascinating complimentary account of the visit. These tell of the not-so-fruitful visit to Augustin Cardinal Bea and the great highpoint (for Barth) of his one-hour audience with Pope Paul VI. Barth was impressed by the Jesuits during his visit, but not so much by the Dominicans. He thought the latter had absorbed too many streams of liberal modernity. The two Dominicans participating in this book turn those tides. Indeed, all the authors could be located within the conserving wings of their ecclesial membership, which makes the volume all the stronger in raising serious unresolved disagreements and noting important common ground. It is testimony to Barth's enduring value that this volume seems so timely. The Barth Centre at Princeton and the Pontifical Faculty of the Dominican House in Washington were the sponsors of this collection.The volume is structured around five of the key documents commented on by Barth, with a Catholic and Reformed voice reflecting on both the particular document and Barth's input (with the exception of Francesca Aran Murphy, who deals with George Lindbeck rather than Barth), thereby simultaneously pushing forward the Catholic–Reformed engagement with the Council and with Barth. There is a preface with a penetrating introduction by Thomas Joseph White, O.P., and an irenic opening chapter by Matthew Levering on biblical renewal at Vatican II. Then follow the twin reflections on the five documents.First (and rightly so) comes the Dogmatic Constitution on Revelation, Dei Verbum. Katherine Sonderegger develops a nuanced reflection on the metaphor of Scripture as mirror of God (found in Dei Verbum), showing [End Page 971] a deep appreciation of currents within Dei Verbum that Barth had not detected, but which are more connective with his concerns and preoccupations. Lewis Ayres rather impishly takes what Barth saw as the main weakness of the text (its chapter 2: "Handing on Divine Revelation") and makes it the greatest strength. Ayers provides a deeply learned and original exploration of the concept of "tradition" as sacramental. In this duet, Barth comes out looking like he may have missed hearing the melodies while too closely studying the score.Then follow two profound essays on Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. Christoph Schwöbel builds up a strong Protestant case for the necessary visible ecclesial identity of the Church, thus showing a deep convergence without denying differences that remain. White, in a deeply insightful and probing essay, goes to the heart of the ecclesiological difference between Barth and Yves Congar (and some other key Catholics at the time): the relationship between uncreated divine agency and created human agency, especially within the context of the post-apostolic Church. White suggests that, without some stable ecclesial mediations, there can be no proper relationship envisaged between the transcendent causality of God operating in Christ and the created, active cooperative acts with this grace. While building up both a metaphysical and a theological case against Barth's criticisms... (shrink)

The two works reprinted in this volume are a unique fusion of logical thought and inimitable whimsy. Written by the 19th-century mathematician who also gave us "Alive in Wonderland", they are among the most entertaining logical works ever written, and contain some of the most thought-provoking puzzles ever devised.

Continuing his quest to bring American philosophy back to its roots, Bruce Wilshire connects the work of such thinkers as Thoreau, Emerson, Dewey, and James with Native American beliefs and practices. His search is not for exact parallels, but rather for fundamental affinities between the equally "organismic" thought systems of indigenous peoples and classic American philosophers. Wilshire gives particular emphasis to the affinities between Black Elk’s view of the hoop of the world and Emerson’s notion of horizon, and also (...) between a shaman’s healing practices and James’s ideas of pure experience, willingness to believe, and a pluralistic universe. As these connections come into focus, the book shows how European phenomenology was inspired and influenced by the classic American philosophers, whose own work reveals the inspiration and influence of indigenous thought. Wilshire’s book also reveals how artificial are the walls that separate the sciences and the humanities in academia, and that separate Continental from Anglo-American thought within the single discipline of philosophy. (shrink)

Written for the general reader and the student of moral philosophy, this book provides a clear and unified treatment of Kant's theory of morals. Bruce Aune takes into account all of Kant's principal writings on morality and presents them in a contemporary idiom. Originally published in 1980. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important (...) books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

It has been about fifty years since the topic of divine impassibility was the subject of book-length philosophical treatments in English. In recent years process and analytic philosophers have returned this issue to the forefront of professional attention. Divine Impassibility traces the issue of classical sources, relates the positions of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century books, and surveys the writings of contemporary British analytic philosophers such as Peter Geach, Anthony Kenny, Richard Swinburne, John Hick, and H. P. Owen, American analytic philosophers (...) such as Norman Kretzmann, Eleonore Stump, Nelson Pike, Robert Adams, and Bruce Reichenbach, and process philosophers such as Charles Hartshorne and Lewis Ford. The author shows that clear, adequate analysis of the issue must distinguish four respects in which God might be passible or impassible: nature, will, knowledge, and feeling. He shows also how decisions on this topic bear on numerous others in philosophical theology such as creation, eternality, evil, and human freedom. His creative proposals on these and other topics attempt to go beyond the difficulties of both classical and process conceptions of God. (shrink)

Elegant, suggestive, and clarifying, Lewis Thomas's profoundly humane vision explores the world around us and examines the complex interdependence of all things. Extending beyond the usual limitations of biological science and into a vast and wondrous world of hidden relationships, this provocative book explores in personal, poetic essays to topics such as computers, germs, language, music, death, insects, and medicine. Lewis Thomas writes, "Once you have become permanently startled, as I am, by the realization that we are a (...) social species, you tend to keep an eye out for the pieces of evidence that this is, by and large, good for us.". (shrink)

Arguments that claim opponents of abortion are inconsistent in some manner are becoming increasingly prevalent both in academic and public discourse. For example, it is common to claim that they spend considerable time and resources to oppose induced abortion, but show little concern regarding the far greater numbers of naturally occurring intrauterine deaths (miscarriages). Critics argue that if abortion opponents took their beliefs about the value of embryos and fetuses seriously, they would invest more time and resources combating these naturally (...) occurring deaths than those caused by induced abortion. The implication is that abortion opponents do not take their beliefs about embryos and fetuses seriously—and so why should anyone else? These “inconsistency arguments”, as we have called them, have considerable intuitive appeal: showing that someone is living inconsistently or holding beliefs that seem prima facie inconsistent seems to many to undermine those beliefs. However, upon closer examination, these arguments become less convincing. In short, we show that the inconsistency arguments we are aware of are severely flawed, and so, if critics wish to continue their criticism, they should abandon inconsistency arguments in favor of other styles of argument. We will proceed in four stages. First, we describe the basic form of inconsistency arguments against abortion opponents. Second, we outline specific instances of the inconsistency argument that have been advanced. Third, we outline specific responses to these arguments, noting ways in which responses also conform to set patterns. Finally, we assess the debate and suggest how it might progress in productive ways. (shrink)

In two recent papers, Christian List and Philip Pettit have argued that there is a problem in the aggregation of reasoned judgements that is akin to the aggregation of the preference problem in social choice theory. 1 Indeed, List and Pettit prove a new general impossibility theorem for the aggregation of judgements, and provide a propositional interpretation of the social choice problem that suggests it is a special case of their impossibility result. 2 Specifically, they show that no judgement aggregation (...) function for a group is possible if the group seeks to satisfy certain `minimal conditions' designed to ensure that the function is both responsive to the individually rational views of its members and collectively rational in the set of judgements it holds. In this article, I resist the List and Pettit claim that there is the same propensity for collective irrationality or incoherence in the aggregation of reasoned judgements as there is in the aggregation of preference. I argue that reason, because it has a logical structure that is lacking in mere preference, has the effect of giving priority to some aggregations over others, a priority that is not permitted by one of the conditions imposed by List and Pettit. This avoids the incoherence that would otherwise exist if these different aggregations, not consistent with one another, were to compete at the same level of priority. The priority of some aggregations is particularly apparent, I shall argue, if one views the aggregation of judgements through the lens of common law decision-making. Key Words: social choice • judgement • Condorcet jury theorem • collective rationality • public reason • doctrinal paradox • discursive dilemma. (shrink)

The intellectual history of the last quarter of this century has been marked by the growing influence of Africana thought--an area of philosophy that focuses on issues raised by the struggle over ideas in African cultures and their hybrid forms in Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean. Existentia Africana is an engaging and highly readable introduction to the field of Africana philosophy and will help to define this rapidly growing field. Lewis R. Gordon clearly explains Africana existential thought to (...) a general audience, covering a wide range of both classic and contemporary thinkers--from Douglass and DuBois to Fanon, Davis and Zack. (shrink)

Philosophers writing on the subject of human action have found it tempting to introduce their subject by raising Wittgenstein's question, 'What is left over if you subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?' The presumption is that something of particular interest is involved in an action of raising an arm that is not present in a mere bodily movement, and the philosopher's task is to specify just what this is. Unfortunately, such (...) an approach does not take us very far, since a person could properly be said to raise his (or her) arm while asleep or hypnotized even though he (or she) would not be performing an action in the sense of 'action' with which philosophers are particularly concerned. To avoid this kind of difficulty I shall approach the subject of human action is a more academic way: I shall expound some important rival theories of human action, and introduce the relevant issues by commenting critically on those theories. One of the issues I eventually introduce is a metaphysical one. A theory of action makes sense, I contend, only on the assumption that there are such 'things' as actions (or events). After considering some key arguments bearing on the issue I conclude that, as matters currently stand in philosophy, a metaphysically noncommittal attitude toward actions and events seems justified. (shrink)

Legal decision-making emphasizes, in a very self-conscious way, the justificatory significance of reasons. This paper argues that the obligation to provide reasons for choices, which must be articulated and structured around a set of generally shared and publicly comprehensible categories of thought, can serve to make the space of possible choices ‘concept sensitive’ in a very useful way. In particular, concept sensitivity has the effect of restricting certain movements within the choice space so that some of the systematic difficulties in (...) achieving an equilibrium in social choice which arise out of an excess of rational doing are avoided. The resulting equilibrium is path dependent. But because it is dependent on a choice path which ‘makes sense’ (or is ordered by thought precisely because it is concept sensitive), it is not the sort of arbitary path-dependent social choice which originally concerned Kenneth Arrow. This paper illustrates these points with examples from criminal law procedure, contract law and constitutional law. (shrink)

Augustine of Hippo strongly influenced western theology, but he has often been accused of over-emphasizing the unity of God to the detriment of the Trinity. In Augustine and the Trinity, Lewis Ayres offers a new treatment of this important figure, demonstrating how Augustine's writings offer one of the most sophisticated early theologies of the Trinity developed after the Council of Nicaea. Building on recent research, Ayres argues that Augustine was influenced by a wide variety of earlier Latin Christian traditions (...) which stressed the irreducibility of Father, Son and Spirit. Augustine combines these traditions with material from non-Christian Neoplatonists in a very personal synthesis. Ayres also argues that Augustine shaped a powerful account of Christian ascent toward understanding of, as well as participation in the divine life, one that begins in faith and models itself on Christ's humility. (shrink)

I begin by distinguishing four different versions of the argument from evil that start from four different moral premises that in various ways link the existence of God to the absence of suffering. The version of the argument from evil that I defend starts from the premise that if God exists, he would not allow excessive, unnecessary suffering. The argument continues by denying the consequent of this conditional to conclude that God does not exist. I defend the argument against Skeptical (...) Theists who say we are in no position to judge that there is excessive, unnecessary suffering by arguing that this defense has absurd consequences. It allows Young Earthers to construct a parallel argument that concludes that we are in no position to judge that God did not create the earth recently. In the last section I consider whether theists can turn the argument from evil on its head by arguing that God exists. I first criticize Alvin Plantinga’s theory of warrant that one might try to use to argue for God’s existence. I then criticize Richard Swinburne’s Bayesian argument to the same conclusion. I conclude that my version of the argument from evil is a strong argument against the existence of God and that several important responses to it do not defeat it. (shrink)

In this paper I consider several versions of the argument from evil against the existence of a God who is omniscient, omnipotent and wholly good and raise some objections to them. Then I offer my own version of the argument from evil that says that if God exists, nothing happens that he should have prevented from happening and that he should have prevented the brutal rape and murder of a certain little girl if he exists. Since it was not prevented, (...) God does not exist. My conclusion rests on the claim that no outweighing good was served by allowing that murder, or any other instance of comparable evil, to occur. I take up the objection that my argument moves illicitly from apparently pointless suffering to the claim that there is reason to believe that there is pointless suffering. I offer an example to show that the existence of apparently pointless suffering counts to some extent against the existence of God and to show that no basic belief that God exists that rests on certain sorts of grounds can remain justified in the face of apparently pointless suffering. (shrink)

A comprehensive introductory study of the key concepts and problems in traditional and contemporary metaphysics. Aune presents and defends a point of view that is naturalistic, nominalistic and pragmatic-an approach that has the overall advantage of providing a coherent, structured view of the topics he discusses.

This anthology is a thorough introduction to classic literature for those who have not yet experienced these literary masterworks. For those who have known and loved these works in the past, this is an invitation to reunite with old friends in a fresh new format. From Shakespeare's finesse to Oscar Wilde's wit, this unique collection brings together works as diverse and influential as The Pilgrim's Progress and Othello. As an anthology that invites readers to immerse themselves in the masterpieces of (...) the literary giants, it is must-have addition to any library. (shrink)

Lewis Richard Farnell's five-volume The Cults of the Greek States, first published between 1896 and 1909, disentangles classical Greek mythology and religion, since the latter had often been overlooked by nineteenth-century English scholars. Farnell describes the cults of the most significant Greek gods in order to establish their zones of influence, and outlines the personality, monuments, and ideal types associated with each deity. He also resolutely avoids the question of divine origins and focuses instead on the culture surrounding each (...) cult, a position which initially drew some criticism, but which allowed him more space to analyse the religious practices themselves. Written to facilitate a comparative approach to Greek gods, his work is still regularly cited today for its impressive collection of data about the worship of the most popular deities. Volume 5 focuses on the cults of Hermes, Dionysos, Hestia, Hephaistos, Ares and several minor figures. (shrink)

The importance of this collection of writings of William James lies in the fact that it has been arranged to provide a systematic introduction to his major philosophical discoveries, and precisely to those doctrines and theories that are of most burning current interest. William James: The Essential Writings is a series of philosophical arguments on some of the most “obscure and head-cracking problems” in contemporary philosophy; the relation of thought to its object; the interrelationships between meaning and truth; the levels (...) and structures of experience; the degrees of reality; the nature of the embodied self; the relation of ethics, aesthetics, and religious experience to man’s strenuously and “heroically” active nature; and, above all, the structurization of the experienced life-world as the validating ground and origin of all theory; Bruce Wilshire has provided an introduction to William James’s thought on these and other related points which is at once both substantial and subtle. (shrink)