An essay on the compatibility of Jewish and Muslim aspirations for the Land that argues that a vision of peaceful coexistence to provide a spur to the settling of grievances, but that this vision must respect the deeply felt aspirations of both communities, including in particular those underpinned by religious lore. Existing formulations of the aims of each community are blatantly inconsistent; it is time to attempt to characterise the just and religiously authentic goals of each community in ways that (...) are compatible. I argue that there religious and personal dimensions of the conflict that have been displaced by less deep-seated political goals, but which can be addressed more readily. I outline a tiered constitutional settlement that could address legitimate aspirations by avoiding the anathema of partition. (shrink)

This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

Presenting the cultural and neuronal forces that power our distinctively human modes of awareness, the author proposes that the human mind is a hybrid product of interweaving a super-complex form of matter (the brain) with an invisible symbolic web (culture) to form a cognitive network. Reprint. 11,500 first printing.

This volume in the series celebrates the philosophy of American Donald Davidson, whose process covers different types of philosophy. Admired for developing a system based on his theory of mind and language, he considers two of his most central interests to be the concepts of truth and objectivity.

The idea of a happy death is one that startles and disgusts modern man. However, although that phrase is not often used today, that is what the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Donald Coggan, is to some extent considering in his Edwin Stevens lecture given to the Royal Society of Medicine. We are publishing extracts from that lecture by kind permission of the President of the Royal Society of Medicine. We have chosen those passages in the lecture which discuss (...) the limits of the doctor's responsibility to keep a patient alive, the erroneous idea that Christians believe in the artificial prolongation of life in all circumstances, and the most delicate question of the choice of patients who shall receive the costly benefits of modern medical technology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.1 (2000) 153-156 [Access article in PDF] JHI 2000 Donald R. Kelley It was just sixty years ago that this Journal first made its appearance. Two hundred thirty-nine issues later it continues in a world transformed by war, overpopulation, cultural shocks, scientific and technological transformations, globalization, the avalanche of information produced by electronic exchange, and "the acceleration of just about everything." Yet (...) despite these factors and the strains of postmodernism and cultural alterity, 1 it has not entirely lost touch with its intellectual innocence, faith in humanistic learning, and reliance on enlightened reason. This continuity itself may seem something of a novelty in an age of distrust of history and "rage against reason," but for some of us it reflects the critical spirit and intellectual context out of which such ostensibly subversive attitudes emerge, and reemerge. To some extent, moreover, the diversity of opinions about intellectual traditions is the result of specializations, and special interests, which have changed the climate of opinion since the time of Arthur O. Lovejoy, principal founder of the JHI. Lovejoy's vision was super- as well as inter-disciplinary; that is, he intended to include in the agenda of "history of ideas" particular areas of history of philosophy, literature, art, science, social science, etc., as well as the larger intellectual and cultural areas into which these disciplinary histories extend. 2 These days, however, all these disciplinary traditions have their own more specialized journals and do not need to seek a vehicle in publications of more general interest. What remains then, for the most part, is the interdisciplinary arena in which larger questions of human experience should be posed--and for Lovejoy, as for so many epigones and critics, the main "larger question" is not only one of value but also of specifically historical inquiry. 3 [End Page 153]The first issue of the JHI appeared under the editorship of Lovejoy (with Philip Wiener, who did most of the editorial work, as "managing editor"), assisted by a committee that included two historians, three philosophers, four literary scholars, and one political theorist; namely, Crane Brinton, Gilbert Chinard, Morris Cohen, Francis Coker, Richard McKeon, Perry Miller, Marjory Nicolson, J. H. Randall, J. Salwyn Schapiro, and Louis Wright. The first volume featured contributions from each of these, including Wiener, except for Miller (vol. 2), Shapiro (vol. 3), McKeon (vol. 8), and Coker. 4 During the first five years there were also reviews of books by Dilthey (by Horace L. Friess), Croce (Schapiro), Mannheim (Randall), Perry Miller (Herbert W. Schneider), Van Wyck Brooks (Miller) and Alfred Kazin (F. O. Matthiessen). In this period the disciplinary distribution of articles was not markedly different from that of the past five years, nor was the ranking of fields by number of submissions. 5 Most important, the original interdisciplinary thrust of Lovejoy's agenda, if not his attachment to the spiritualist currency of "unit-ideas," has survived growing specialization.At first the history of ideas was pursued largely in the shadow of the history of philosophy; for in this field, according to Lovejoy, "is to be found the common seed-plot, the locus of initial manifestation in writing, of the greater number of the more fundamental and pervasive ideas, and especially of the ruling preconceptions, which manifest themselves in other regions of intellectual history." 6 Lovejoy's concern was always with concepts, especially "-isms," and yet in some ways he anticipated the "linguistic turn" of the later years of this century, pointing out in particular "the role of semantic shifts, ambiguities, and confusions, in the history of thought and taste," for "nearly all of the great catchwords have been equivocal--or rather, multivocal." 7 If ideas could be given stable definitions, they were nonetheless often, in the context of language, in conflict, even in the mind of a single thinker; for such was the "anomaly of knowledge." 8 So Lovejoy was at pains to distinguish the various meanings of [End Page 154] catch-words like "nature," "perfectibility," "romanticism," "progress," and "pragmatism," not to mention more inflammatory terms of wartime ideological debate.But... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Hermeneutical Turn in American Critical Theory, 1830–1860M. D. WalhoutLong considered an obscure province of biblical studies, hermeneutics is now familiar territory to American literary critics, along with phenomenology, structuralism, post-structuralism, and the other European theories that have redrawn the map of American criticism in the past twenty-five years. The gradual transformation of hermeneutics into a theory of criticism, and ultimately into a comprehensive theory of the human sciences, (...) was the work of a series of great German thinkers, including Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer. These figures were introduced (or reintroduced) to American critics by E. D. Hirsch, whose Validity in Interpretation (1967) “shattered,” in the words of Richard E. Palmer, “the splendid isolation of American literary criticism from hermeneutics.” Hailing Schleiermacher and Dilthey as the forefathers of “objective interpretation,” Hirsch dismissed Heidegger and Gadamer as prophets of subjectivism. For his part, Palmer strove to vindicate Heidegger and Gadamer as the true heirs of the hermeneutical tradition. Noting the difference between Hirsch’s understanding of hermeneutics and theirs, Palmer concluded,So the hermeneutical debate goes on. On the one side are the defenders of objectivity and validation, who look to hermeneutics as the theoretical source for norms of validation; on the other side are the phenomenologists of the event of understanding, who stress the historical character of this “event,” and consequently the limitations of all claims to “objective knowledge” and “validity.” 1Twenty-five years later this hermeneutical debate is still going on. [End Page 683]What Hirsch and Palmer did not realize is that they were reviving a debate over the nature of interpretation that dated from the late nineteenth century, when American literary criticism was undergoing professionalization. 2 As early as 1885, in the programmatic introduction to his book on Shakespeare as a dramatic artist, Richard G. Moulton had declared, “In the treatment of literature the proposition which seems to stand most in need of assertion at the present moment is, that there is an inductive science of literary criticism.” Moulton proceeded to lay down “a foundation axiom of inductive literary criticism: Interpretation in literature is of the nature of a scientific hypothesis, the truth of which is tested by the degree of completeness with which it explains the details of the literary work as they actually stand.” 3 Thirty years later Moulton repeated this axiom, insisting that “such inductive treatment constitutes the very alphabet of science.” 4 But Moulton’s determination to apply the logic of the natural sciences to the interpretation of literature was not without its critics. In 1900 the German-born philologist Julius Goebel began a valiant, if futile, effort to introduce the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher and Dilthey to his American colleagues. 5 Years later, in an article published in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Goebel drew on Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutik und Kritik (1838) to show “the possibility of attaining exact knowledge in the mental sciences without the aid of the scientific or laboratory methods.” 6 Later still, in an article on Dilthey published in the same journal, Goebel recalled how he had argued in an address to the Modern Language Association that criticism “had lost touch with the contemporary movements emphasizing the independence and importance of the mental sciences. What seemed to me needed above all was a reform of the method of interpretation for which Dilthey had set the example both in principle and practice.” 7 It was not until the late 1960s that Goebel’s project was finally revived.While Goebel may have been the first American literary scholar to use the word “hermeneutics,” the concept of interpretation had long been a part of American critical theory. In fact, what might be called the “hermeneutical turn” in American critical theory occurred well before the era of professionalization. [End Page 684] In order to trace this turn, we must recover the work of the amateur critical theorists of the antebellum era, including such forgotten figures as George Allen and Edwin Percy Whipple. Disciples of the Schlegels and Coleridge, these amateur theorists established the basic premises of the hermeneutical turn: that criticism is a science; that the critic must “reproduce” the author’s creative process; that... (shrink)

This book introduces the reader to relevant logic and provides the subject with a philosophical interpretation. The defining feature of relevant logic is that it forces the premises of an argument to be really used in deriving its conclusion. The logic is placed in the context of possible world semantics and situation semantics, which are then applied to provide an understanding of the various logical particles and natural language conditionals. The book ends by examining various applications of relevant logic and (...) presenting some interesting open problems. It will be of interest to a range of readers including advanced students of logic, philosophical and mathematical logicians, and computer scientists. (shrink)

What is the relation between a reason and an action when the reason explains the action by giving the agent's reason for doing what he did? We may call such explanations rationalizations, and say that the reason rationalizes the action. In this paper I want to defend the ancient - and common-sense - position that rationalization is a species of ordinary causal explanation. The defense no doubt requires some redeployment, but not more or less complete abandonment of the position, as (...) urged by many recent writers. (shrink)

This Element looks at two projects that relate logic and information: the project of using logic to integrate, manipulate and interpret information and the proect of using the notion of information to provide interpretations of logical systems. The Element defines 'information' in a manner that includes misinformation and disinformation and uses this general concept of information to provide an interpretation of various paraconsistent and relevant logics. It also integrates these logics into contemporary theories of informational updating, probability theory and (rather (...) informally) some ideas from the theory of the complexity of proofs. The Element assumes some prior knowledge of modal logic and its possible world semantics, but all the other necessary background is provided. (shrink)

Hutchins examines a set of phenomena that have fallen between the established disciplines of psychology and anthropology, bringing to light a new set of relationships between culture and cognition.

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION (A) Historical Problem Suggested by the Nature of Modern Thought How curious, after all, is the way in which we moderns think about ...

Collaboration on the First Edition of Spacetime Physics began in the mid-1960s when Edwin Taylor took a junior faculty sabbatical at Princeton University where John Wheeler was a professor. The resulting text emphasized the unity of spacetime and those quantities (such as proper time, proper distance, mass) that are invariant, the same for all observers, rather than those quantities (such as space and time separations) that are relative, different for different observers. The book has become a standard introduction to (...) relativity. The Second Edition of Spacetime Physics embodies what the authors have learned during an additional quarter century of teaching and research. They have updated the text to reflect the immense strides in physics during the same period and modernized and increased the number of exercises, for which the First Edition was famous. Enrichment boxes provide expanded coverage of intriguing topics. An enlarged final chapter on general relativity includes new material on gravity waves, black holes, and cosmology. The Second Edition of Spacetime Physics provides a new generation of readers with a deep and simple overview of the principles of relativity. (shrink)

In the Treatise of Human Nature , Hume argues that, because we have adequate ideas of the smallest parts of space, we can infer that space itself must conform to our representations of it. The paper examines two challenges to this argument based on Descartes's and Locke's treatments of adequate ideas, ideas that fully capture the objects they represent. The first challenge, posed by Arnauld in his Objections to the Meditations , asks how we can know that an idea is (...) adequate. The second challenge, implicit in Locke's Essay , asks how an empiricist can characterize an idea as inadequate, as both picking out an object and yet failing to capture it fully. In showing how Hume responds to these challenges, his theory of perceptual representation is explained and his treatment of space is related to his scepticism. His conclusion is shown not to be a characterization of space as it exists wholly apart from our powers of conception. Instead, in an adumbration of Kant, his claim is restricted to space as it appears to us. (shrink)

There is more than one way to say that composition is identity. Yi has distinguished the Weak Composition thesis from the Strong Composition thesis and attributed the former to David Lewis while noting that Lewis associates something like the latter with me. Weak Composition is the thesis that the relation between the parts collectively and their whole is closely analogous to identity. Strong Composition is the thesis that the relation between the parts collectively and their whole is identity. Yi is (...) right that Strong Composition does not fully reflect my view. We must recognize further what, borrowing Lewis's characterization, could be called the "stronger, and stranger" Composition thesis, or what I'll call the Stronger Composition thesis for short. On Strong Composition, it is only collectively that the parts are identical with the whole. On Stronger Composition, they are individually identical with it as well. I will explain and motivate this thesis. (shrink)

This book is the fruit of twenty-five years of study of Spinoza by the editor and translator of a new and widely acclaimed edition of Spinoza's collected works. Based on three lectures delivered at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1984, the work provides a useful focal point for continued discussion of the relationship between Descartes and Spinoza, while also serving as a readable and relatively brief but substantial introduction to the Ethics for students. Behind the Geometrical Method is actually (...) two books in one. The first is Edwin Curley's text, which explains Spinoza's masterwork to readers who have little background in philosophy. This text will prove a boon to those who have tried to read the Ethics, but have been baffled by the geometrical style in which it is written. Here Professor Curley undertakes to show how the central claims of the Ethics arose out of critical reflection on the philosophies of Spinoza's two great predecessors, Descartes and Hobbes. The second book, whose argument is conducted in the notes to the text, attempts to support further the often controversial interpretations offered in the text and to carry on a dialogue with recent commentators on Spinoza. The author aligns himself with those who interpret Spinoza naturalistically and materialistically. (shrink)

How is it possible for David Hume to be both withering skeptic and constructive theorist? I recommend an answer like the Pyrrhonian answer to the question how it is possible to suspend all judgment yet engage in active daily life. Sextus Empiricus distinguishes two kinds of assent: one suspended across the board and one involved with daily living. The first is an act of will based on appreciation of reasons; the second is a causal effect of appearances. Hume makes the (...) same distinction, only he extends the sort of assent involved in daily life to theoretical matters as well. He is a skeptic both in finding no reason to grant the first sort of assent and in being subject to the second. (shrink)

In this article, we offer an approach of how participative stakeholder innovation can be evaluated in complex multistakeholder settings that address wicked issues. Based on the principle of mutual value creation, we present an evaluation framework that accounts for the social interaction process during which stakeholders integrate their resources and capabilities to develop innovative products and services. To assess this evaluation framework, we collected multiple data from the case study of the Swiss Cardiovascular Network, which represents a multistakeholder setting related (...) to the prevention of cardiovascular disease. Our findings indicate that the evaluation dimensions of the stakeholders’ mindsets, the process and context of the stakeholder interactions, as well as the outcomes are useful concepts to account for a cooperative process of innovation in a multistakeholder setting. We discuss both the theoretical and practical insights of our analysis for participative stakeholder innovation. (shrink)