A bold and all-embracing exploration of the nature and progress of knowledge from one of today's great thinkers. Throughout history, mankind has struggled to understand life's mysteries, from the mundane to the seemingly miraculous. In this important new book, David Deutsch, an award-winning pioneer in the field of quantum computation, argues that explanations have a fundamental place in the universe. They have unlimited scope and power to cause change, and the quest to improve them is the basic regulating (...) principle not only of science but of all successful human endeavor. This stream of ever improving explanations has infinite reach, according to Deutsch: we are subject only to the laws of physics, and they impose no upper boundary to what we can eventually understand, control, and achieve. In his previous book, The Fabric of Reality, Deutsch describe the four deepest strands of existing knowledge-the theories of evolution, quantum physics, knowledge, and computation-arguing jointly they reveal a unified fabric of reality. In this new book, he applies that worldview to a wide range of issues and unsolved problems, from creativity and free will to the origin and future of the human species. Filled with startling new conclusions about human choice, optimism, scientific explanation, and the evolution of culture, The Beginning of Infinity is a groundbreaking book that will become a classic of its kind. (shrink)

David Hume's writings on history, politics and philosophy have shaped thought to this day. His bold scepticism ranged from common notions of the 'self' to criticism of standard theistic proofs. He insisted on grounding understandings of popular religious beliefs in human psychology rather than divine revelation, and he aimed to disentangle philosophy from religion in order to allow the former to pursue its own ends. In this book, Professors David W Purdie and Peter S Fosl decipher some (...) of Hume's most challenging texts for the modern reader, while preserving the sharp intellect and undaunted nerve for which Hume is famous. Hume's spirit is brought alive for contemporary times and his writing is made accessible for its intended audience: the general public."-- Back cover. (shrink)

In this collection, Stations on the Journey of Inquiry, David Burrell launches a revolutionary reinterpretation of how any inquiry proceeds, boldly critiquing presumptuous theories of knowledge, language, and ethics. While his later publications, Analogy and Philosophical Language (1973) and Aquinas: God and Action (1979), elucidate Aquinas's linguistic theology, these early writings show what often escapes articulation: how one comes to understanding and "takes" a judgment. Although Aquinas serves as an axial figure for Burrell's expansive corpus of scholarship spanning more (...) than fifty years, this selection of essays presents other positions and counterpositions to whom his own philosophical theology is beholden: Plato, Aristotle, Cajetan, Kant, Peirce, Moore, Wittgenstein, Sellars, Weiss, Ross, McInerny, and Lonergan. With renewed interest in philosophy of language by postmodern thinkers as well as in the wake of Mulhall's Stanton Lectures on Wittgenstein and "Grammatical Thomism," the publication of these formative writings proves timely for the academy at large. Burrell invites us to reconsider not only the way in which we conduct an inquiry, but what it is we take language to be and how we take responsibility for what we say. (shrink)

Professor Imwinkelried has boldly attempted to justify the admissibility of normative ethical expertise in the face of a legal evidentiary rule requiring a scientific basis for expert testimony. Because ethical testimony is inherently unscientific, Professor Imwinkelried prudently focuses his analysis on circumstances where evidentiary requirements are less strict; those involving the legislative rather than adjudicative function of courts and those in which substantive law overrides normally rigorous evidentiary requirements. While both proposals may have merit and are thoughtful and creative, Professor (...) Imwinkelried ultimately fails to provide sufficient doctrinal support or persuasive rationale for his arguments.Professor Imwinkelrieds argument for the admissibility of “expert” normative ethical testimony has two parts. The major proposition is that, when courts are engaged in legislative functions, they should be permitted to consider all sources of information. The assumption that apparently underlies this proposition is that nothing limits courts’ exercise of legislative powers. (shrink)

Professor Imwinkelried has boldly attempted to justify the admissibility of normative ethical expertise in the face of a legal evidentiary rule requiring a scientific basis for expert testimony. Because ethical testimony is inherently unscientific, Professor Imwinkelried prudently focuses his analysis on circumstances where evidentiary requirements are less strict; those involving the legislative rather than adjudicative function of courts and those in which substantive law overrides normally rigorous evidentiary requirements. While both proposals may have merit and are thoughtful and creative, Professor (...) Imwinkelried ultimately fails to provide sufficient doctrinal support or persuasive rationale for his arguments.Professor Imwinkelrieds argument for the admissibility of “expert” normative ethical testimony has two parts. The major proposition is that, when courts are engaged in legislative functions, they should be permitted to consider all sources of information. The assumption that apparently underlies this proposition is that nothing limits courts’ exercise of legislative powers. (shrink)

This book introduces readers to the topic of explanation. The insights of Plato, Aristotle, J.S. Mill and Carl Hempel are examined, and are used to argue against the view that explanation is merely a problem for the philosophy of science. Having established its importance for understanding knowledge in general, the book concludes with a bold and original explanation of explanation.

Since its publication in 1959, Individuals has become a modern philosophical classic. Bold in scope and ambition, it continues to influence debates in metaphysics, philosophy of logic and language, and epistemology. Peter Strawson's most famous work, it sets out to describe nothing less than the basic subject matter of our thought. It contains Strawson's now famous argument for descriptive metaphysics and his repudiation of revisionary metaphysics, in which reality is something beyond the world of appearances. Throughout, Individuals advances some (...) highly influential and controversial ideas, such as 'non-solipsistic consciousness' and the concept of a person a 'primitive concept'. (shrink)

Each year a national day of commemoration of the war dead is celebrated on 11th November in the United Kingdom. Despite public controversy about the nature and purpose of remembrance, there has been no significant discussion of the role schools should play in this event. In this centenary year of the outbreak of the First World War, with the government planning to send groups from every secondary school in Britain to tour the battlefields of the western front over the next (...) four years, the question of how war should be remembered in schools is more pressing than ever. In this bold and rigorous pamphlet, David Aldridge takes a hard look at the reasons usually advanced for involving children and young people in commemorating the war dead, and finds many of them wanting. He critically examines the high profile in schools of charities, like the Royal British Legion, with vested interests in certain kinds of commemoration. And he argues forcefully for a justification of remembrance in schools that requires a major rethink of established rituals and practices. This is a compelling treatment of a topic high on the agenda of teachers and education policy-makers and will be an invaluable resource for anyone involved in planning centenary commemorative events for children and young people. (shrink)

In this collection of provocative essays, historians and literary theorists assess the influence of Michel Foucault, particularly his History of Sexuality, on the study of classics. Foucault's famous work presents a bold theory of sexuality for both ancient and modern times, and yet until now it has remained under-explored and insufficiently analyzed. By bringing together the historical knowledge, philological skills, and theoretical perspectives of a wide range of scholars, this collection enables the reader to explore Foucault's model of Greek (...) culture and see how well his interpretation accounts for the full range of evidence from Greece and Rome. Not only do the essays bring to light the assumptions, ideas, and practices that constituted the intimate lives of men and women in the ancient Mediterranean world, but they also demonstrate the importance of the History of Sexuality for fields as diverse as Greco-Roman antiquity, women's history, cultural studies, philosophy, and modern sexuality. The essays include "Situating The History of Sexuality" (the editors), "Taking the Sex Out of Sexuality: Foucault's Failed History" (Joel Black), "Incipit Philosophia" (Alain Vizier), "The Subject in Antiquity after Foucault" (Page duBois), "This Myth Which Is Not One: Construction of Discourse in Plato's Symposium" (Jeffrey S. Carnes), "Foucault's History of Sexuality: A Useful Theory for Women?" (Amy Richlin), "Catullan Consciousness, the 'Care of the Self,' and the Force of the Negative in History" (Paul Allen Miller), "Reversals of Platonic Love in Petronius' Satyricon" (Daniel B. McGlathery), and an essay from Dislocating Masculinity (Lin Foxhall). (shrink)

Arguably the most influential of all contemporary English-speaking philosophers, Richard Rorty has transformed the way many inside and outside philosophy think about the discipline and the traditional ways of practising it. Drawing on a wide range of thinkers from Darwin and James to Quine, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Derrida, Rorty has injected a bold anti-foundationalist vision into philosophical debate, into discussions in literary theory, communication studies, political theory and education, and, as public intellectual, into national debates about the responsibilities of (...) America in the modern world. The essays in this volume offer a balanced exposition and critique of Rorty's views on knowledge, language, truth, science, morality and politics. The editorial introduction presents a valuable overview of Rorty's philosophical vision. Written by a distinguished team of philosophers, this volume will have an unusual appeal outside philosophy to students in the social sciences, literary studies, cultural studies and political theory. (shrink)

Psychodynamic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis have had to defend themselves from a barrage of criticisms throughout their history. In this book David Jopling argues that the changes achieved through therapy are really just functions of placebos that rally the mind's native healing powers. It is a bold new work that delivers yet another blow to Freud and his followers.

According to Richard Gelwick, one of the fundamental implications of Polanyi’s epistemology is that all intellectual disciplines are inherently heuristic. This article draws out the implications of a heuristic vision of theology latent in Polanyi’s thought by placing contemporary theologian David Brown’s dynamic understanding of tradition, imagination, and revelation in the context of a Polanyian-inspired vision of reality. Consequently, such a theology will follow the example of science, reimagining its task as one of discovery rather than mere reflection on (...) a timeless body of divine revelation. The ongoing development of a theological tradition thus involves the attempt to bring one’s understanding of the question of God to bear on the whole of the human experience. The pursuit of theology as a heuristic endeavor is a bold attempt to construct an integrated vision of nothing less than the entirety of all that is, without absolutizing one’s vision, and without giving up on the question of truth. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Constructive Postmodernism: Toward Renewal in Cultural and Literary StudiesDavid CarrierConstructive Postmodernism: Toward Renewal in Cultural and Literary Studies, by Martin Schiralli. Westport, CT, and London: Bergin and Garvey, 1999, 165pp., $55 cloth.Concerned with the consequences of Jacques Derrida's philosophy of deconstruction for cultural and literary studies, Martin Schiralli's elegantly written book offers, first, a critique of these claims and, then, a constructive alternative analysis. He admires Derrida's brilliantly (...) innovative writing, which as he rightly notes is "serious and philosophical" even if "the most patient reader can easily become disoriented and confused" (24). But even if, as Derrida argues, Ferdinard de Saussure's theory of meaning is flawed, we need not—he urges—become deconstructionists. Looking to the work of Stephen Toulmin, John Dewey, and late Wittgenstein, Schiralli finds suggestive ways of identifying concerns with cognitive value in literary texts. It then is possible, he argues, to offer a more reasonable perspective on recent debates about culture and politics than the recent academic arguments between "postmodern revisionists... [and] often hostile and defensive traditionalists" (73).In the second part of his book Schiralli illustrates the value of this perspective by offering a great deal of productive positive discussion. He discusses how "theoretically pertinent knowledge" (95) may be found in the novels of Jane Austen, Barbara Pym, and Anita Brookner. Appealing to Michael Polanyi's conception of tacit knowledge, he argues that Austen's ability to intuit "the rules governing social meaning... represents the tacit emergence of insight, just as her ability to use those insights explicitly in her fiction marks the emergence of more focal knowledge" (123). In analyzing an emotional response, he claims, we can ask whether it is "warranted or unwarranted in a given circumstance" (31). Using E. M. Forster's Howards End as his model, he develops this claim in an analysis that is brief, clear, and convincing. Finally, in his concluding pages he looks at the studies of character provided by Henry James and Marcel Proust. A proper theory of literary intelligence, he argues, should "treat those forms of cognitive acuity involved imaginatively in miming and representing verbally the intricacies and particularities of all aspects of human sensibility" (150).This bold, far-reaching book avoids the fanaticism that, as Schiralli notes, has marred all too much recent debate in the humanities. At this time, when the influence of Derrida has faded, I think this argumentation about his philosophical position is of less value than the constructive parts of the analysis. Treating Derrida as a theorist whose arguments tell us how to analyze literature is an unpromising project, as Schiralli well shows. Once that point is acknowledged, then we are ready to look seriously at literature as a form of social knowledge. Humanists teaching literature will find much of value in this graceful volume—and along with their colleagues in philosophy, these scholars will benefit from study of this well-argued analysis. [End Page 122]David CarrierCase Western Reserve University and Cleveland Institute of ArtCopyright © 2008 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois... (shrink)

E.J. Lowe has recently proposed a model of mental causation on which mental events are emergent, thus exerting a novel, downward causal influence on physical events. Yet on Lowe's model, mental causation is at the same time empirically undetectable, and in this sense is "invisible". Lowe's model is ingenious, but I don't think emergentists should welcome it, for it seems to me that a primary virtue of emergentism is its bold empirical prediction about the long-term results of human physiology. (...) Here I'll try to restore emergentism's empirical status, but my broader aim is to use Lowe's model to explore some central topics in the mental causation debate, including the "causal closure" of the physical world and the nature of causal powers. (shrink)

On its twenty-fifth anniversary, Fides et ratio remains relevant for its bold defense of reason and the complementarity of faith and reason. It describes a philosophy that is not the preserve of academics but the duty of every person. It asserts that philosophy is never contained in one system but is always open to new questions and further insights. St. John Paul defends a philosophy that welcomes pluralism based on the richness of being but rejects a pluralism based on (...) the impossibility of knowing the truth. Reflecting on Fides et ratio, this article describes six ways that theology uses philosophy and offers five lessons for philosophers, i.e., the universal character of philosophy, the complementarity of faith and reason, the necessity and limits of pluralism, the requirements for a philosophy to be consonant with theology, and the current reinvigoration of philosophy in seminaries. (shrink)

Our tmst in our own trustworthiness as evaluators of tmth plays a uniquely important role in Lehrer's recent work in epistemology. Lehrer has claimed that a person who trusts in her own trustworthiness has a reason for accepting everything she accepts, including that she is trustworthy. This claim is too bold, trust in our trustworthiness cannot play the epistemic role Lehrer assigns to it. Neither does a suitably revised version of the claim succeed in assigning any important epistemic role (...) to our own trustworthiness as evaluators of truth. (shrink)

Our tmst in our own trustworthiness as evaluators of tmth plays a uniquely important role in Lehrer's recent work in epistemology. Lehrer has claimed that a person who trusts in her own trustworthiness has a reason for accepting everything she accepts, including that she is trustworthy. This claim is too bold, trust in our trustworthiness cannot play the epistemic role Lehrer assigns to it. Neither does a suitably revised version of the claim succeed in assigning any important epistemic role (...) to our own trustworthiness as evaluators of truth. (shrink)

This paper presents BP’s approach to ethical corporate governance. The author suggests that corporate social responsibility is in the interests of both business and the people at large. In this context co‐operation between business, NGOs and activity is the best way to proceed, with each party focusing on their own field of engagement; doing business in a way that respects human rights for the companies, and campaigning and advocacy for the NGOs. Increasing transparency and risks to reputation require business to (...) take social responsibility seriously. It is also crucial, however, to examine the boundaries of business responsibility. The challenge is to address these issues and to co‐operate with other parties such as NGOs to provide clear guidelines within specific time frames. This requires bold leadership on all sides. (shrink)

This paper presents BP’s approach to ethical corporate governance. The author suggests that corporate social responsibility is in the interests of both business and the people at large. In this context co‐operation between business, NGOs and activity is the best way to proceed, with each party focusing on their own field of engagement; doing business in a way that respects human rights for the companies, and campaigning and advocacy for the NGOs. Increasing transparency and risks to reputation require business to (...) take social responsibility seriously. It is also crucial, however, to examine the boundaries of business responsibility. The challenge is to address these issues and to co‐operate with other parties such as NGOs to provide clear guidelines within specific time frames. This requires bold leadership on all sides. (shrink)

Contemporary Austrian‐school economists reject neoclassical welfare theory for being founded on the benchmark of a perfectly competitive general equilibrium, and instead favor a formal theory deemed consistent with the notions of radical subjectivism and disequilibrium analysis. Roy Cordato advances a bold free‐market benchmark by which to formally assess social welfare, economic efficiency, and externalities issues. Like all formalist, a priori theory, however, Cordato's reformulation cannot meet its own standards, being theoretically and empirically flawed, and perhaps ideologically suspect.

Consciousness is widely perceived as one of the most fundamental, interesting and difficult problems of our time. However, we still know next to nothing about the relationship between consciousness and the brain and we can only speculate about the consciousness of animals and machines. Human and Machine Consciousness presents a new foundation for the scientific study of consciousness. It sets out a bold interpretation of consciousness that neutralizes the philosophical problems and explains how we can make scientific predictions about (...) the consciousness of animals, brain-damaged patients and machines. Gamez interprets the scientific study of consciousness as a search for mathematical theories that map between measurements of consciousness and measurements of the physical world. We can use artificial intelligence to discover these theories and they could make accurate predictions about the consciousness of humans, animals and artificial systems. Human and Machine Consciousness also provides original insights into unusual conscious experiences, such as hallucinations, religious experiences and out-of-body states, and demonstrates how 'designer' states of consciousness could be created in the future. Gamez explains difficult concepts in a clear way that closely engages with scientific research. His punchy, concise prose is packed with vivid examples, making it suitable for the educated general reader as well as philosophers and scientists. Problems are brought to life in colourful illustrations and a helpful summary is given at the end of each chapter. The endnotes provide detailed discussions of individual points and full references to the scientific and philosophical literature."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

This book discusses how Plato, one the fiercest legal critics in ancient Greece, became – in the longue durée – its most influential legislator. Making use of a vast scholarly literature, and offering original readings of a number of dialogues, it argues that the need for legal critique and the desire for legal permanence set the long arc of Plato’s corpus—from the Apology to the Laws. Modern philosophers and legal historians have tended to overlook the fact that Plato was the (...) most prolific legislator in ancient Greece. In the pages of his Republic and Laws, he drafted more than 700 statutes. This is more legal material than can be credited to the archetypal Greek legislators—Lycurgus, Draco, and Solon. The status of Plato’s laws is unique, since he composed them for purely hypothetical cities. And remarkably, he introduced this new genre by writing hard-hitting critiques of the Greek ideal of the sovereignty of law. Writing in the milieu in which immutable divine law vied for the first time with volatile democratic law, Plato rejected both sources of law, and sought to derive his laws from what he called ‘political technique’. At the core of this technique is the question of how the idea of justice relates to legal and institutional change. Filled with sharp observations and bold claims, Platonic Legislations shows that it is possible to see Plato—and our own legal culture—in a new light “In this provocative, intelligent, and elegant work D. L. Dusenbury has posed crucial questions not only as regards Plato’s thought in the making, but also as regards our contemporaneity.”—Giorgio Camassa, University of Udine “There is a tension in Greek law, and in Greek legal thinking, between an understanding of law as unchangeable and authoritative, and a recognition that formal rules are often insufficient for the interpretation of reality, and need to be constantly revised to match it. Dusenbury’s book illuminates the sophistication of Plato’s legal thought in its engagement with this tension, and explores the potential of Plato’s reflection for modern legal theory.”—Mirko Canevaro, The University of Edinburgh. (shrink)

ArgumentEinstein's initial fame came in late 1919 with a dramatic breakthrough in his general theory of relativity. Through a remarkable confluence of events and circumstances, the mass media soon projected an image of the photogenic physicist as a bold new revolutionary thinker. With his theory of relativity Einstein had overthrown outworn ideas about space and time dating back to Newton's day, no small feat. While downplaying his reputation as a revolutionary, Einstein proved he was well cast for the role (...) of mild-mannered scientific genius. Yet fame demanded its price. Surrounded by social and economic unrest in Berlin, he was caught between two worlds, one struggling to be born, another refusing to die. Far from withdrawing, he threw himself into the political fray to become a symbol for international reconciliation during the early Weimar Republic. A decade later, his public image acquired another layer when he re-emerged as a Stoic sage and selfless humanitarian, a quasi-religious figure who saw himself as a modern-day Spinoza. Focusing on events of this period and the role of the German media in portraying them, this essay highlights the scientific and political undercurrents that drew Einstein into the public eye at a critical juncture in European history. Its broader aim is to show the import of these themes within the context of the vast literature on Einstein as well as the larger historiography of science. (shrink)

A comprehensive account of English legal thought in the age of Blackstone and Bentham for nearly a century, The Province of Legislation Determined advances an ambitious reinterpretation of eighteenth-century attitudes to social change and law reform. Professor Lieberman's bold synthesis rests on a wide survey of legal materials and on a detailed discussion of Blackstone's Commentaries, the jurisprudence of Lord Kames and the Scottish Enlightenment, the chief justiceship of Lord Mansfield, the penal theories of Eden and Romilly, and the (...) legislative science of Jeremy Bentham. The study relates legal developments to the broader fabric of eighteenth-century social and political theory, and offers a novel assessment of the character of the common law tradition and of Bentham's contribution to the ideology of reform. (shrink)

In Paradise Wild, David Oates addresses this and many other provocative questions as he explores the persistent myth of Eden from several different angles. As a lifelong mountaineer and reader of nature literature, as a scholar, as a descendant of naturalist William Bartram, and as a gay ex-Baptist who took to the mountains to test his masculinity, Oates has thought deeply about how nature and culture interact in our lives and about the contemporary debate over wilderness and environment. Paradise (...) Wild brings all these elements together in a lively, genre-hopping book that will move readers emotionally and intellectually, at the same time that it contributes to the ongoing debate in scholarly and environmental circles over the meaning of "nature" and "wilderness." Paradise Wild tells stories, explores major scholarship and literature of nature, and analyzes how the misapplied myth of Eden has mired Americans in a hopeless "Paradise Lost" mentality that belies the true, ever-present wildness in our lives. Oates argues that mourning for a lost paradise is a dead end that cannot help us combat the real damage we're doing to ourselves and the rest of the world. He proposes a healthy re-mythologizing of the Eden story as a way of celebrating "wildness" -- the Eden in each moment and in each cell, that cannot be lost. His book is about welcoming that wildness into the midst of daily life. This bold and original work will appeal to general readers as well as to scholars and students with an interest in environmental literature and philosophy, nature writing, cultural studies, and queer studies. (shrink)

In his 1993 book, Hare asks “What Makes a Good Teacher?” In this paper we ask, “What makes a good education researcher?” We begin our discussion with Richard Rudner's classic 1953 essay, The Scientist Qua Scientist Makes Value Judgments, which confronted science with the internal subjectivity it had long ignored. Rudner's bold claim that scientists do make value judgments as scientists called attention to the very foundations of scientific conduct. In an era of institutional research ethics, like the Tri-Council’s (...) ethics policy, Rudner's call for an approach to these value judgments is even more relevant. The contemporary education researcher primarily engages with ethics procedurally, which provides a certain level of consistency and objectivity. This approach has its roots in principle-based theories of ethics that have long been dominant in Western universities. We argue that calls, like Rudner's, for an objective science of ethics, are at the root of this dominant institutional approach. This paper critiques the suitability of such principle-based ethics for solving Rudner's concerns, and posits that educational research ethics is better understood as a matter of character and virtue. We argue that, much like the ethical teacher, the ethical education researcher is a certain kind of person. (shrink)

Can nature be restored to a pristine state through deliberate action? Must the preservation of wilderness always subordinate the interests of humans to those of other species? Can indigenous peoples be entrusted with the guardianship of their own wild resources? This collection of international writings tackles tough questions like these as it expands wilderness conservation beyond its American roots. One of the first anthologies to consider wilderness as a global issue, it takes a stand against the notion that wilderness is (...) a northern colonialist conceit and is irrelevant to the plans of third world countries. Contributions from all over the planetÑ Nepal, Borneo, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Kenya, South Africa, India, and the United StatesÑ show instead that wilderness has an important place in the environmental thought and policy of any nation, industrial or developing. The World and the Wild boldly advances the idea that our concept of wilderness must expand to take in new vistas. It breaks fresh ground in global environmentalism and is essential reading for anyone concerned with development issues related to conservation. Contents Foreword: Whither World Wilderness? / Vance G. Martin Introduction: Wilderness in the Rest of the World / David Rothenberg How Can Four Trees Make a Jungle? / Pramod Parajuli The Unpaintable West / Zeese Papanikolas Restoring Wilderness or Reclaiming Forests? / Sahotra Sarkar For Indian Wilderness / Philip Cafaro and Monish Verma In the Dust of Kilimanjaro / David Western Why Conservation in the Tropics Is Failing / John Terborgh "Trouble in Paradise": An Exchange / David Western and John Terborgh Zulu History / Ian Player Bruno Manser and the Penan / William W. Bevis Roads Where There Have Long Been Trails / Kathleen Harrison Volcano Dreams / Tom Vanderbilt Recycled Rain Forest Myths / Antonio Carlos Diegues The Park of Ten Thousand Waterfalls / Dan Imhoff Mapping the Wild / Edward A. Whitesell Earth Jazz / Evan Eisenberg They Trampled on Our Taboos / Damien Arabagali. (shrink)

When the Johnson Publishing Company, best known for Jet and Ebony, moved into its iconic building on Michigan Avenue, the structure symbolized a bold entry into both the Chicago skyline and the city's cultural environment. This emblematic building was the first in Chicago designed and owned by African Americans, a modernist masterpiece that in 1980 theWashington Post called, "practically a monument--sometimes an ostentatious one--to black success." David Hartt was given unprecedented access to the building, much of which retains (...) its '70s design, from bright gold accents to vintage see-through furniture. His resulting photographs take viewers on a rich and revealing tour. They capture the distinct physical characteristics while also illuminating the power structures and ideological purposes they once represented. Hartt's collection also serves as an unexpected final documentation. Not long after Hartt captured these images, the Johnson Publishing Company announced it was selling its building and moving north. Stray Light is a time capsule of a historic building that once symbolized a bright future. (shrink)

What makes Carlo Michelstaedter’s life and work worthy of a reflection on Italian aesthetics is his erratic attitude when taking a stance in the ancient discord between Philosophy and Poetry. This, since Plato’s times, as an original item, expects and transcends each historical chapter of the literary critique and each kind of philosophy of history. Michelstaedter justapoxes names such as Parmenides, Sophocles, Socrates, Christ and the Ecclesiastes in an anti-genealogical manner, that is against fathers and masters as well as sons (...) and disciples. Everything that, in his short life, he could read and study in Latin, Greek, German and Italian, was bound to death against institutions and codes, against the family and the University, against the audience and every literary genre attended by the world in which he was born. Michelstaedter reads Parmenides’ Carminum reliquiae as a poetic emergency and sees in Socrates the one who becomes this poetry. The bold link between Parmenides’ ontology and Socrates’ dialectics constitutes the climax of an iconoclastic and anti-mimetic poiesis. Rhadamanthus’ justice, results bitter to Michelstaedter. It discerns, that is, the original relationship of Socrates with death from that which was superimposed by Plato ; he distinguishes Socrates’ beautiful death from that which was enticed by Hegesias, the death-persuader, in the naive; he places Socrates next to Sophocles and the Ecclesiastes, against the mortal event of the birth. Socrates, in case, did not die because of the “cicuta” which parted him from the pain of living, nor because of the eternal idea that he’s been contemplating ever since with his immortal soul. He died, instead, after having become something divine and devilish, something that distracts him since his childhood from everything he is about to do, every time, and eventually leads him nowhere. From this anti-contemplative perspective, Michelstaedter acknowledges in every philosophy intended to reconcile the absolute and relative, the rhetoric artifice aimed at concealing an original aporia which can only be dishonestly swayed, rather than overcome. (shrink)

It would be misleading to make any reference to Marx's “theory” of truth-for nowhere in the corpus of Marx's writings will one find an essay dealing with truth in a thematic way. Marx's scattered remarks on truth occur within the context of discussions of social questions. What one can pull together on the topic of truth amounts at most to the sketch of a concept which applies to social knowledge and not knowledge in general. My aim will be to reconstruct (...) Marx's concept of social truth on the basis of his writings on society and social theory.Those who want a systematic essay developing a general Marxist theory of knowledge have, of course, Lenin's classical formulation of Marxist epistemology in Materialism and Empiriocriticism. We also have Leszek Kolakowski's bold and heretical attack on Lenin's interpretation in “Marx and the Classical Definition of Truth” where we find the astounding claim that Marx's view of truth is closer to that of William James than to that of Lenin.Kolakowski's essay has been the subject of numerous attacks both by predictably indignant true believers and by independent, creative Marxists. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:David Michael Levin ROUSSEAU'S CURSE Pretext Rousseau is the author of a text he called his Confessions. ' But neither a text nor a confession can exist without a reader, or an other. Like it or not, we readers are participants in the rite of Rousseau's confessions. Do we have anything to confess? When the reading of a confession uncovers the spelling of a curse, so that the (...) self-accused author appears to accuse his readers, the discoverers of the curse can no longer pretend their neutrality and innocence. In fact, the detectives must assume the identity of the accused. In such a special case, then, the inevitable work of textual interpretation magically doubles as the story of a mysteriously elusive "crime" and its final, or anyway presumed detection. But, as in the very best of such stories, neither the skillfully executed crime nor its invisible author—if indeed these terms denote anything at all—need be what they seem. So perhaps the only thing we can say for sure here is that the spelling of the curse is the curse of spelling. And this puts us on the track of a mystery as ancient as the art of writing itself—a mystery whose story the scholars of hermeneutics have thus far preferred to ignore. The mystery I have in mind is the secret affinity between writing and death. A careful hermeneutic approach to Plato's critique of writing, however, may give us a crucial clue. For what binds written language to the power of death is its role in mourning, its incarnation in the form of shadows: black configurations of shadows placed for visibility against the white of the paper. In Plato's Myth of the Cave, the crime of writing is dimly adumbrated. Writing is idolatry, worship of false images, shadows. Rousseau's Confessions, written near the end of his life in the shadow of death, does not escape the shadows of doubt and suspicion which we, his readers, having discovered our own selves inscribed into the darkness of the text, cannot easily refrain from casting. But as soon as we recognize in the shapes of these shadows a suspicion for which 76 David Michael Levin77 we are responsible, we must confess our fatal complicity in the closing of the hermeneutical circle. Commentary on the Text If Rousseau's Confessions does not read like the typical memoir, neither does it read like the typical confession. A final twist awaits us. We read with a certain innocence, or faith, not prepared for the transitive conclusion: the text, as it happens, will bequeath a monstrous and impossible burden. What is the reader to do? How could it be that this man, who seemed to honor us, and won our trust with the candor of his revelations, should so boldly, by one cross conceit, vanish, only to leave us double-crossed and within a labyrinth which, as he would have us believe, we ourselves have wrought? What are we to make of his work? At first, the Confessions appears to be a work of light: with dazzling clarity of mind and courage no less prismatic, Rousseau proposes to take his readers into the gloomy chasms of his soul. "My purpose," he declares, "is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray is myself" (p. 17). That this, however, is not the whole of his intention, we learn through a neighboring sentence. For he says: "Let the last trumpet sound when it will, I shall come forward with this work in my hand, to present myself before my Sovereign Judge, and proclaim aloud: 'Here is what I have done'..." (p. 17). And yet, even this does not fully disclose his design, since he concedes, somewhat later, that "it is as if, feeling my life escaping from me, I were trying to recapture it at its beginnings" (p. 31). But in the end, as in the beginning, darkness and light are one. And indeed, deep into the Seventh Book, we see that the author's light does begin to dim, and that he no longer speaks with much assurance. Nor is... (shrink)

The complex interaction between colonizer and colonized has attracted increasing attention among historians in the post-colonial period of the last fifty years. This perspective is also adopted by Maria Georgopoulou (hereafter: M. G.) in her treatment of the encounter between Venice and the Byzantine heritage of the territories the latter occupied shortly after the Fourth Crusade. M. G's. main thesis may be summarized as follows. Venice manipulated Crete's Byzantine heritage and assimilated it into her own rhetoric in order to undermine (...) the Byzantine presence in the island and to support and legitimize her own colonial rule. This was achieved mainly by the appropriation of Byzantine traditions in civic and religious ceremonies and the symbolic colonization of urban space, expressed in architectural designs, the use of buildings and spatial patterns. All these served as bold statements of control over the local Greek population and the Jewish communities. The same strategy of urban planning was implemented in the other main cities of the colonial empire (26). In addition, M. G. argues that there was yet another channel of appropriation of Byzantine culture, art and imperial heritage by Venice, resulting from the Byzantine impact of the Venetian colonial territories on the political and cultural identity of the Adriatic city. Until now this issue has been examined in numerous studies primarily focused on the relationship between Constantinople and Venice. (shrink)

The present article is an attempt to update the author's article "Being Bold: Anticipating a Whiteheadian Century," which appeared in Process Studies 31 : 3-15. The earlier article was originally delivered at an International Whitehead Conference in 1998, whereas the present article was originally delivered as the banquet address at the International Whitehead Conference devoted to "Seizing an Altemative: Toward an Ecological Civilization" in 2015.

Edited in hypertext by Andrew Chrucky. Reprinted with the permission of Professor David Rosenthal. Editor's Note: Due to the limitation of current hypertext, the following conventions have been used. In general, if an expression has some mark over it, that mark is placed as a prefix to the expression. All Greek characters are rendered by their names. Subscripts are placed in parentheses as concatenated suffixes: thus, e.g., HO is the chemical formula for water. Sellars' dot quotes are expressed by (...) bold periods. (shrink)

In Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision, theologian David Wells argues that the Church is in danger of losing its moral authority to speak to a culture whose moral fabric is torn. Although much of the Church has enjoyed success and growth over the past years, Wells laments a "hollowing out of evangelical conviction, a loss of the biblical word in its authoritative function, and an erosion of character to the point that today, no (...) discernible ethical differences are evident in behavior when those claiming to have been reborn and secularists are compared." The assurance of the Good News of the gospel has been traded for mere good feelings, truth has given way to perception, and morality has slid into personal preference. Losing Our Virtue is about the disintegrating moral culture that is contemporary society and what this disturbing loss means for the church. Wells covers the following in this bold critique: how the theologically emptied spirituality of the church is causing it to lose its moral bearings; an exploration of the wider dynamic at work in contemporary society between license and law; an exposition of the secular notion of salvation as heralded by our most trusted gurus -- advertisers and psychotherapists; a discussion of the contemporary view of the self; how guilt and sin have been replaced by empty psychological shame; an examination of the contradiction between the way we view ourselves in the midst of our own culture and the biblical view of persons as created, moral beings. Can the church still speak effectively to a culture that has become morally unraveled? Wells believes it can. In fact, says Wells, no time in this century has been more opportune for the Christian faith -- if the church can muster the courage to regain its moral weight and become a missionary of truth once more to a foundering world. - Publisher. (shrink)

Economic inequality is one of the most daunting challenges of our time, with public debate often turning to questions of whether it is an inevitable outcome of economic systems and what, if anything, can be done about it. But why, exactly, should inequality worry us? The Greatest of All Plagues demonstrates that this underlying question has been a central preoccupation of some of the most eminent political thinkers of the Western intellectual tradition. David Lay Williams shares bold new (...) perspectives on the writings and ideas of Plato, Jesus, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx. He shows how they describe economic inequality as a source of political instability and a corrupter of character and soul, and how they view unchecked inequality as a threat to their most cherished values, such as justice, faith, civic harmony, peace, democracy, and freedom. Williams draws invaluable insights into the societal problems generated by what Plato called "the greatest of all plagues," and examines the solutions employed through the centuries. An eye-opening work of intellectual history, The Greatest of All Plagues recovers a forgotten past for some of the most timeless books in the Western canon, revealing how economic inequality has been a paramount problem throughout the history of political thought. (shrink)

I find Joseph Chan’s Confucian Perfectionism: A Political Philosophy for Modern Times to be bold and illuminating, and, as always with his work, lucid in an exemplary fashion. I find much more to agree with than to differ with, but in the spirit of a conception of he 和 or harmony that places importance on the need for difference as well as agreement, I will point out some complications or reservations that can be raised about Chan’s proposals and put (...) forward some more friendly amendments and suggested amplifications of some of his lines of thought. The focus in my commentary is Joseph Chan’s discussion of one of the central problems for his version of the Confucian political ideal—“the ruler is committed to... (shrink)

Disability raises profound and fundamental issues: questions about human embodiment and well-being; dignity, respect, justice and equality; personal and social identity. It raises pressing questions for educational, health, reproductive, and technology policy, and confronts the scope and direction of the human and civil rights movements. Yet it is only recently that disability has become the subject of the sustained and rigorous philosophical inquiry that it deserves. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Disability is the first comprehensive volume on the subject. (...) The volume's contents range from debates over the definition of disability to the challenges posed by disability for justice and dignity; from the relevance of disability for respect, other interpersonal attitudes, and intimate relationships to its significance for health policy, biotechnology, and human enhancement; from the ways that disability scholarship can enrich moral and political philosophy, to the importance of physical and intellectual disabilities for the philosophy of mind and action. The contributions reflect the variety of areas of expertise, intellectual orientations, and personal backgrounds of their authors. Some are founding philosophers of disability; others are promising new scholars; still others are leading philosophers from other areas writing on disability for the first time. Many have disabilities themselves. This volume boldly explores neglected issues, offers fresh perspectives on familiar ones, and ultimately expands philosophy's boundaries. More than merely presenting an overview of existing work, this Handbook will chart the growth and direction of a vital and burgeoning field for years to come. (shrink)

This work offers a bold and illuminating exercise in philosophy as narrative, and in doing so presents itself quite consciously as an alternative mode of explanation to the "rationalist paradigm" which dominated Greek philosophy. Yet while acknowledging the inspiration of Hegel, the work hews far more closely than the author of Phänomenologie des Geistes to the actual dialectic of explanation as it worked itself out from Aristotle through Plotinus to Aquinas--to mention only the most prominent milestones. In that respect, (...) the book offers an apparently independent and certainly more lyrical orchestration of the themes elaborated in such careful counterpoint by Edward Booth in his Aristotelian Aporetic Ontology in Islamic and Christian Writers. Indeed, for each author, it is a stubborn aporia inherent in Aristotle's project, yet resistant to resolution in terms of that same project, which fuels the resultant "historical dialectic." Booth's formulation focuses on the metaphysical clash between Aristotle's assertion that existing individuals bear ontological primacy and his insistence that form alone is intelligible, however, while Madigan pinpoints the explanatory lacuna in the project of Aristotle's Metaphysics as he intended it to complete the Physics. Yet I would suggest that these two formulations manifest a single metaphysical impasse for Aristotle; in fact, the very one which was to come to the fore in the debate which emerged within Islamic, Jewish, and Christian philosophical theology regarding the origins of the universe. As Madigan summarizes it: "a theory of creation or the production of the world through efficient causality is necessary to explain the world, or to render Aristotle's system complete. This is what Plotinus' philosophy lacked. But given creation or the free production of an independent world, a theory of salvation is necessary to make creation itself for the first time rational". (shrink)

Malcolm David Eckel takes us on a contemporary quest to discover the essential meaning behind the Buddha's many representations. Eckel's bold thesis proposes that the proper understanding of Buddhist philosophy must be thoroughly religious--an understanding revealed in Eckel's new translation of the philospher Bhavaviveka's major work, The Flame of Reason. Eckel shows that the dimensions of early Indian Buddhism--popular art, conventional piety, and critical philosophy--all work together to express the same religious yearning for the fullness of emptiness that (...) Buddha conveys. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida offers his recent commentary on the early career of Paul de Man as an urgent intervention in a discussion he fears is going awry. The most pressing danger he sees in the recent revelations is that they have played into the hands of de Man’s antagonists, who are now ready to denounce the whole of his career and even deconstruction itself. Against such indiscriminate critiques Derrida hurls the epithet: totalitarian. He is attempting to reseize the initiative in the (...) discussion and to reset the terms of the debate. His agenda extends across historical, theoretical, and political questions.He wants to affirm that a radical, indeed absolute break separates the later from the earlier de Man. He also wants to show that the young de man, however firmly committed to fascist ideology and however much an accomplice of the Nazis occupying Belgium, at the same time regularly distanced himself from that ideology and even undermined its meanings. Moreover, Derrida boldly takes up the challenge that these revelations have cast on the intellectual movement he and de Man have shaped. Can deconstruction come to grips with the political and intellectual history of its own leading American proponent? And can deconstruction in the process make a distinctive contribution to the understanding of fascism and intellectuals’ participation in it? John Brenkman is associate professor of English at Northwestern University. He is the author of Culture and Domination . Jules David Law is assistant professor of English at Northwestern University. He is currently working on a book-length study of the metaphors of surface, depth, and reflection in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British prose. (shrink)

Disability raises profound and fundamental issues: questions about human embodiment and well-being; dignity, respect, justice and equality; personal and social identity. It raises pressing questions for educational, health, reproductive, and technology policy, and confronts the scope and direction of the human and civil rights movements. Yet it is only recently that disability has become the subject of the sustained and rigorous philosophical inquiry that it deserves. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Disability is the first comprehensive volume on the subject. (...) The volume's contents range from debates over the definition of disability to the challenges posed by disability for justice and dignity; from the relevance of disability for respect, other interpersonal attitudes, and intimate relationships to its significance for health policy, biotechnology, and human enhancement; from the ways that disability scholarship can enrich moral and political philosophy, to the importance of physical and intellectual disabilities for the philosophy of mind and action. The contributions reflect the variety of areas of expertise, intellectual orientations, and personal backgrounds of their authors. Some are founding philosophers of disability; others are promising new scholars; still others are leading philosophers from other areas writing on disability for the first time. Many have disabilities themselves. This volume boldly explores neglected issues, offers fresh perspectives on familiar ones, and ultimately expands philosophy's boundaries. More than merely presenting an overview of existing work, this Handbook will chart the growth and direction of a vital and burgeoning field for years to come. (shrink)

Christopher Morris’s book is a product of years of reflection, scholarship, and worldly experience. I have read books that were too long in the making, such that the young author who began and the older author who finished did not even use basic terms in the same way. In Morris’s case, however, the years of reflection were altogether salutary. Morris’s book started out clever and ended up wise. Any reader interested in political philosophy is bound to find it richly rewarding. (...) Morris makes bold claims, but his arguments are unfailingly moderate, measured, and circumspect. This review largely will let Morris speak for himself. (shrink)

Despite concerns of consumer protection andenvironmental groups that the use of geneticallyproduced growth hormone in milk-producing cows mayadversely impact the safety of the milk supply,scientific evidence and governmental findings from theUSA appear to indicate that milk fromtreated cows is identical in quality, taste, andnutritional value to milk from untreated cows. Limitedexperience to date in the USA demonstrateslittle consumer resistance to milk from cows that havereceived the growth hormone, which can lead to a 15%increase in milk production. In fact, if there (...) is noperceived differentiation between the two forms ofmilk, the issue offers little choice to consumers atlarge, and may result in economic benefit only toselected dairy farmers, as well as the producers ofthe genetically produced growth hormone. Thissituation in the USA may be an example ofdysfunctional technology transfer, with desirablebenefits to a few, and as yet unknown benefits to thesociety. The USA has taken a bold move inapproving the use of bovine growth hormone in milk-producing cows, while the European Union has takena divergent approach by enacting lengthy moratoriumsagainst its use. The basic lesson to be learned fromthe bST case is that lack of awareness amonggovernment officials and the public at large serves asa significant impediment to the adoption of newtechnologies. Accordingly, delays may occur indelivery of significant social benefits to thepopulation as a whole. Obviously, the issue extendsbeyond bST. (shrink)

Diskin Clay’s Platonic Questions is a bold attempt to represent the essential trajectory of Plato’s unique way of philosophical writing in order to induce the reader to imitate Plato. Nevertheless, the question Clay’s readers need to ask him is whether we can read Plato, at this point in history, having enough in common with his vital philosophical concerns to be able to imitate the way he philosophized in his dialogues? Clay’s bold project calls for such a bold (...) question. (shrink)

Each year, solutions to the problem "How can we all get along?" prove more vexing and remote. Are we stymied by cultural or economic differences? Is deliberation impoverished by the double-whammy of consumerism and its conduit, a 24/7, entertainment-oriented media system? In A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy (PPD) Robert B. Talisse rules out none of these factors while pushing a boldly original democratic theory appealing not only to pragmatists but to anyone who cares more about solving real problems than protecting (...) philosophical turf. With clarity and force, Talisse's immensely readable book briskly acquaints readers with the complex theories necessary to grappling with issues worth caring about. While meticulously attentive to pertinent scholarship, Talisse is never pedantic or jargonistic. He educates the reader by reiterating exactly the premises necessary to move his theses ahead. (shrink)