"A work of major importance for the interpretation of Descartes's development and for the understanding of the function of the imagination in Descartes's early works. Descartes's Imagination will be a must in Descartes and imagination studies. It is long overdue."--Eva T. H. Brann, author of The World of Imagination: Sum and Substance "A significant contribution to our understanding of the development of Descartes's philosophy."--William R. Shea, author of The Magic of Numbers and Motion: The Scientific Career of Rene Descartes.

This book explains the background and rationale of the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's notorious attack on Isaac Newton's classic theory of white light and colors. Though the merits of Goethe's color science, as advanced in his massive Zur Farbenlehre, have often been acknowledged, it has been almost unanimously proclaimed invalid as physics. How could Goethe have been so mistaken? In his book, Dennis Sepper shows that the condemnation of Goethe's attacks on Newton has been based on erroneous (...) assumptions about the history of Newton's theory and the methods and goals of Goethe's color science. By illuminating the historical background and the experimental, methodological, and philosophical aspects of Goethe's work, the author shows that his color theory is in an important sense genuinely physical and that, as simultaneously poet, scientist, historian, and philosopher, Goethe managed to anticipate important twentieth-century research not only in the history and philosophy of science, but even in color science itself. (shrink)

I consider reasons for questioning ‘the laws of logic’, and suggest that these laws do not accord with everyday reality. Either they are rhetorical tools rather than absolute truths, or else Plato and his successors were right to think that they identify a reality distinct from the ordinary world of experience, and also from the ultimate source of reality.

The Treatment Escalation Plan (TEP) was introduced into our trust in an attempt to improve patient involvement and experience of their treatment in hospital and to embrace and clarify a wider remit of treatment options than the Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) order currently offers. Our experience suggests that the patient and family are rarely engaged in DNR discussions. This is acutely relevant considering that the Mental Capacity Act (MCA) now obliges these discussions to take place. The TEP is a form (...) that the doctor completes, ideally with the competent patient or close relative, documenting what treatment options would be appropriate if that patient were to become acutely unwell. Ventilation of the lungs, cardiac resuscitation, renal replacement therapy, intravenous fluids and antibiotics are all discussed. The study evaluated patient and relative experiences with the TEP. 55 patients or their relatives were interviewed regarding their experience of the TEP and thoughts regarding the process. 96% of patients and relatives evaluated thought that the TEP was a good idea. Free text comments were all positive and only 34% of patients claimed to feel anxious when completing the form. Following this study, the TEP has been expanded hospital wide and into the community within our trust. Discussions are currently taking place in hospitals within our region to introduce the TEP form into other local trusts. (shrink)

In January 1641 Marin Mersenne forwarded to René Descartes a set of objections to the latter’s Meditations that Mersenne had solicited from “an Englishman.” This, along with some optical papers that Descartes may not have known were from the same person, was apparently his first philosophical encounter with Thomas Hobbes. The surviving correspondence and the Meditations’s third set of “Objections and Replies” show that the antipathy between these two otherwise excellent minds was virtually instantaneous. The irony has often been remarked (...) that these men, who were both engaged in constructing a system of mechanical science and whose views were so similar on many major issues, should have become such bitter opponents. (shrink)

Biological, cognitive, and learning explanations of altruism, selfishness, and self-control can be integrated in terms of adaptive strategies. The key to understanding why humans and other animals sometimes resist temptation and sacrifice their immediate interests for the sake of others lies in mapping the design of the evolved mental mechanisms that give rise to the decisions in question.

McKay & Dennett (M&D) have done an admirable job of distinguishing among various forms of misbelief and evaluating the idea that they stem from evolved mental mechanisms. We argue that a complete account of misbeliefs must attend to the role that others play in creating and maintaining positive illusions.

1. Believing Enough to Think The Scottish system of university education requires most aspirants to an Ordinary Degree to study some philosophy. Philosophers in Scottish Universities must therefore contend with enormous first-year classes, stocked with youngsters who have little real desire to be philosophers, or even to philosophize. Some years ago, at Glasgow, a question in the final exam was as follows: ‘“Philosophy is of no use, and so should not be studied.” Discuss’. A couple of hundred students answered, more (...) or less fluently, that one should not assume that what was of no use should not be studied, since some things were worth studying in their own right, but that in any case the study of philosophy was useful since it helped one to question what authoritative figures said. No essayist, apparently, saw any paradox in this reply, which was, of course, taken word for word from the professor's lectures. (shrink)

This book discusses that imagination is as important to thinking and reasoning as it is to making and acting. By reexamining our philosophical and psychological heritage, it traces a framework, a conceptual topology, that underlies the most disparate theories: a framework that presents imagination as founded in the placement of appearances. It shows how this framework was progressively developed by thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant, and how it is reflected in more recent developments in theorists as different as (...) Peirce, Saussure, Wittgenstein, Benjamin, and Bachelard. The conceptual topology of imagination incorporates logic, mathematics, and science as well as production, play, and art. Recognizing this topology can move us past the confusions to a unifying view of imagination for the future. (shrink)

This article offers a detailed review of Filosofi italiani contemporanei, a book that presents overviews of seven contemporary Italian philosophers and philosopher/theologians—Luigi Pareyson, Emanuele Severino, Italo Mancini, Gianni Vattimo, Vincenzo Vitiello, Massimo Cacciari, and theologian Bruno Forte. Not intended as a comprehensive survey of the contemporary Italian philosophical scene, the book presents thinkers influential during the last three decades who have focused on tradition, post-metaphysical conceptions of being, origin, and principle, and the openness of philosophy to religion. Although eccentric by (...) Anglo-American standards, the selection does not misrepresent recent Italian philosophizing, which has been more thoroughgoingly shaped by neo-scholasticism, idealism, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and nihilism than most English-language work. Open to international philosophy as well as to its own traditions, Italian thinkers work within a complex ethos that has produced significant recent philosophizing and holds great promise for the future. (shrink)

This article offers a detailed review of Filosofi italiani contemporanei, a book that presents overviews of seven contemporary Italian philosophers and philosopher/theologians—Luigi Pareyson, Emanuele Severino, Italo Mancini, Gianni Vattimo, Vincenzo Vitiello, Massimo Cacciari, and theologian Bruno Forte. Not intended as a comprehensive survey of the contemporary Italian philosophical scene, the book presents thinkers influential during the last three decades who have focused on tradition, post-metaphysical conceptions of being, origin, and principle, and the openness of philosophy to religion. Although eccentric by (...) Anglo-American standards, the selection does not misrepresent recent Italian philosophizing, which has been more thoroughgoingly shaped by neo-scholasticism, idealism, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and nihilism than most English-language work. Open to international philosophy as well as to its own traditions, Italian thinkers work within a complex ethos that has produced significant recent philosophizing and holds great promise for the future. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Status of the Rationalist Image The Deeper Background Descartes: The Directed Imagination of Mathematics, and Passions as Nascent Images Malebranche Conclusion.

In Representative Men, Ralph Waldo Emerson presented Goethe as the prototype of the writer elected by nature, and he identified Goethe's specific genius as "putting ever a thing for a word." But Goethe's talents as writer and poet have long seemed to scientific readers to undermine his efforts to be a scientist, and to talk of his, or any, poetics of science would involve a category mistake. But putting things to words—that is, filling and structuring what we say about the (...) world with the content of experience—is what Goethe's investigations of nature aimed at. Considered as a philosophy of science, his method gives robust meaning and contemporary relevance to the term "poetics of science.". (shrink)

Using the example of Newton's Opticks, the author develops the concept of 'classic' as applied to landmark works in the history of the sciences. A discussion of themes drawn from H.-G. Gadamer and T. Kuhn is followed by an introduction of the notions of the texture and contexture of scientific works, conceived as the result of an author's weaving together foreground and background concerns. These notions assist in understanding how certain works can exercise a continuing appeal to both specialists and (...) nonspecialists. The essay concludes with reflections on the pedagogical purpose of using classic scientific texts in university education. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Spinoza and the Passionate Imagination Leibniz and the Logic of Imagination Wolff and the Scholasticism of Imagination Conclusion.

What is missing from most analyses of the gun crisis in America is an archetypal perspective. Archetypically, the Constitution is in the domain of the Bible in terms of it being the equivalent of a sacred text for Americans, making the Second Amendment a revered text for gun enthusiasts. It enshrines the insidious concept that people can rise up in armed resistance to an oppressive force, including the US government. The Minuteman is an archetypal mythic image in the American collective (...) unconscious for the Second Amendment. A gun confers wakan (Sioux), sacred power, upon its possessor, allowing them to wield in an instant the archetype of death. This moves conflicts into the archetypal categories of good‐vs‐evil and black‐and‐white, circumventing the system of laws upon which our country is based and averting the dialogue upon which a democracy depends. The cowboy is another mythic image, the lonely gun‐toting individual who fought off beasts and savages to tame the Wild West. The very concept of America as “a shining city on the hill” that inspired our Puritan (archetypal image) ancestors is from the Book of Revelation in the Bible. They were not averse to using guns to exterminate the “heathen savages” they encountered. The arsenal of guns in America amplifies growing tensions around income inequality, increasing corporate power and deteriorating racial relations and inner city conditions. (shrink)

Cette étude de l’histoire des femmes européennes qui ont eu une vie professionnelle du milieu du XIXe siècle à nos jours est une précieuse synthèse et une belle introduction à l’historiographie récente. Sylvie Schweitzer s’intéresse surtout aux femmes françaises, mais elle apporte de nombreux éléments qui permettent de les comparer à leurs collègues d’autres pays en Europe occidentale, voire de quelques pays de l’Europe de l’Est. Un thème central du livre est l’histoire de la résistance à l’é...

Art works provide a unique and influential way to teach human virtues because they can place individuals (or particular artistic expressions) within the ambiguities, complexities, and forces of the human experience. I use four art works to teach about the virtue of kindness: Giotto di Bondonie's Scene 2: St. Francis Giving His Mantle to a Poor Man; Bishop Charles Francois in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables; Adam in William Shakespeare's As You Like It; and Sonya in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. (...) In these four examples, we see necessary characteristics of being a kind person: supererogatory behavior, altruistic behavior, a display of the way the world ought to be, and the presence of a kind soul. (shrink)

I have two aims. I want to show first that a proper understanding and use of irony can enrich the aesthetic imagination and, second, that Søren Kierkegaard's description of irony rather than Richard Rorty's better explains how irony enriches the aesthetic imagination. The paper's central claim is that aesthetic imagination springs from experiencing the necessary tension between appearances and reality and that irony, correctly employed, accentuates in our thinking the imagination required to keep this tension in our representations, thereby enabling (...) the aesthetic imagination to grow.Immanuel Kant claims that the aesthetic judgment is an act of the imagination, not of the understanding: In order to distinguish... (shrink)

If one of the purposes of an ethic is to help order our lives in a way we would think is fulfilling and purposeful, then with it, we should be able to learn about the significance of life in the experience of death. Not all well-known ethical theories can deliver this. Though preferential utilitarianism and duty-based deontological ethics are attractive as theoretical ways to order our lives, they fall short as useful ethical approaches before the humbling effects of death. Can (...) the experience of death teach us something about the importance of life and how to formulate an ethic to live meaningfully while alive? I think it can, and we can learn from art to do this. To make this case, I examine three ways in .. (shrink)

Gerard Manley Hopkins once said, “What you look hard at seems to look hard at you.” This phrase not only encapsulates the central emphasis of Hopkins’s poetry but also suggests a proper relationship between philosophy and art. The aesthetic experience of artworks can provide pivotal experiences for metaphysical interpretations, and I attempt to show that Hopkins’s poetry gives such a foundational and informative experience for philosophical investigations. Hopkins develops his poetic expressions based on what he calls the ability of language (...) to inscape and ingress profound experiences of reality. The metaphysics of Duns Scotus in which the particular embodies or transubstantiates the universal underlies these ideas and inspires Hopkins to write poetry. My point is not to say that a philosopher can offer the true meaning of Hopkins’s poetry and that, once we get the philosophical meaning, we can dismiss the poems. Rather, Hopkins’s poetry presents the kind of experiences that a philosopher can use to make meaningful metaphysical interpretations of the world. (shrink)

We propose a framework for analyzing the development, operation and failure to survive of all things, living, non-living or organized groupings. This framework is a sequence of developments that improve survival capability. Framework processes range from origination of any entity/system, to the development of increased survival capability and development of life-forms and organizations that use intelligence. This work deals with a series of developmental changes that arise from the uncovering of emergent properties. The framework is intended to be general, but (...) we see a potential to apply it to scientific topics such as the exploration of the origin of life or the search for life beyond Earth, and to understand some biological issues in evolution and symbiosis, and also to apply to social systems that do not seem to be operating well, to determine their problems and correct them. (shrink)

Images of the human is the collective effort of thirteen philosophy professors to address the questions human beings have been asking for centuries. The book presents selections from the major works of eighteen of the best-known philosophers from ancient to modern times. Each chapter focuses on the writings of a different philosopher - from Plato to Nietzsche, Augustine to Sartre - and includes an introduction and critical comentary.

Popular press headlines frequently reveal unethical or illegal activity in business and sports. Given these parallel ethical lapses in business and sport, our study examines potential relationships between student sport involvement (active and passive) and ethical judgments regarding issues in sport and business. Our results, based on a sample of 202 undergraduates in an upper-division management class, indicate a significant negative relationship between high passive sport involvement and ethical judgments about sport issues as well as a consistent significant positive relationship (...) between female gender and ethical judgments about sport and business issues. (shrink)