Stanley Cavell and English Romanticism serves as both introduction to Cavell for Romanticists, and to the larger question of what philosophy means for the reading of literature, as well as to the importance and relevance of Romantic literature to Cavell's thought. Illustrated through close readings of Wordsworth and Shelley, and extended discussions of Emerson and Thoreau as well as Cavell, Duffy proposes a Romanticism of persisting cultural relevance and truly trans-Atlantic scope. The turn to romanticism of America's most distinguished (...) "ordinary-language" philosopher is shown to be tied to the neo-Romantic claim that far from being merely an illustrator of the truths discovered by philosophy, poetry is its equal partner in the instituting of knowledge. This book will be vital reading for anyone interested in Romanticism, Stanley Cavell and the ever-deepening connections between literature and philosophy. (shrink)

Michael Hunter, The Boyle Papers: Understanding the Manuscripts of Robert Boyle. With contributions by Edward B. Davis, Harriet Knight, Charles Littleton and Lawrence M. Principe. Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. Pp. xiii + 674. US$139.95/£70.00 HB. -/- The publication by Michael Hunter of this revised edition of the catalogue of the Boyle Papers contributes admirably to the renaissance in Boyle studies which has taken place over the past decade and a half. Robert Boyle (1627–91), arguably the most influential (...) British scientist of the late seventeenth century, was a pioneering experimenter, profound thinker, and figure-head of the new science in its early years of development. This volume brings together the materials necessary for understanding the Boyle archive, one of the most important archives from this period, which has been at the Royal Society since 1769. (shrink)

The formulation of propositional modal logic is revised by interposing a domain of structured propositions between the modal language and the models. Interpretations of the language (i.e., ways of mapping the language into the domain of propositions) are distinguished from models of the domain of propositions (i.e., ways of assigning truth values to propositions at each world), and this contrasts with the traditional formulation. Truth and logical consequence are defined, in the first instance, as properties of, and relations among, propositions. (...) -/- These definitions have certain interesting consequences. One is that they resolve a question that cannot be answered by the traditional analysis, in which Kripke models directly interpret modal language. The question is, is the reason a modal sentence has a different truth value at other possible worlds due to the fact that the sentence has a different meaning at that world or due to a change in the world? The philosophical conception elaborates the second answer. Another interesting consequence is that modal language, properly speaking, is not intensional, at least according to the classic tests for, and definitions of, intensionality. (shrink)

Edward S. Casey provides a thorough description of the varieties of human memory, including recognizing and reminding, reminiscing and commemorating, body memory and place memory. The preface to the new edition extends the scope of the original text to include issues of collective memory, forgetting, and traumatic memory, and aligns this book with Casey's newest work on place and space. This ambitious study demonstrates that nothing in our lives is unaffected by remembering.

Given Heidegger’s inflammatory remarks about the intellectual poverty of modern logic, it may come as a surprise to be told that he has something to contribute to the philosophy of logic. One of the rewards of Daniel Dahlstrom’s Heidegger’s Concept of Truth is its argument that Heidegger can illuminate such issues in the philosophy of logic as the character of propositions, the nature of bivalence, and the concept of truth. Dahlstrom focuses on Heidegger’s work in the years immediately before and (...) after the publication of Being and Time, with particular emphasis on the lecture courses from this period, especially the one published as Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit. (shrink)

Drawing on his own experiences of imagining, Edward S. Casey describes the essential forms that imagination assumes in everyday life. In a detailed analysis of the fundamental features of all imaginative experience, Casey shows imagining to be eidetically distinct from perceiving and defines it as a radically autonomous act, involving a characteristic freedom of mind. A new preface places Imagining within the context of current issues in philosophy and psychology.

Are humans rational? Various experiments performed over the last several decades have been interpreted as showing that humans are irrational we make significant and consistent errors in logical reasoning, probabilistic reasoning, similarity judgements, and risk-assessment, to name a few areas. But can these experiments establish human irrationality, or is it a conceptual truth that humans must be rational, as various philosophers have argued? In this book, Edward Stein offers a clear critical account of this debate about rationality in philosophy (...) and cognitive science. He discusses concepts of rationality - the pictures of rationality that the debate centres on - and assesses the empirical evidence used to argue that humans are irrational. He concludes that the question of human rationality must be answered not conceptually but empirically, using the full resources of an advanced cognitive science. Furthermore, he extends this conclusion to argue that empirical considerations are also relevant to the theory of knowedge - in other words, that epistemology should be naturalized. from the reviews: 'Stein has done a great service in bringing together all of the important arguments in the human rationality debate and providing a measured critical assessment of them.... This will be an important book and is essential reading for epistemologists, philosophers of mind, and cognitive and evolutionary psychologists.' Choice 'very considerable value... for professionals' Times Higher Education Supplement. (shrink)

National Book Award Finalist. How did humanity originate and why does a species like ours exist on this planet? Do we have a special place, even a destiny in the universe? Where are we going, and perhaps, the most difficult question of all, "Why?" In The Meaning of Human Existence, his most philosophical work to date, Pulitzer Prize–winning biologist Edward O. Wilson grapples with these and other existential questions, examining what makes human beings supremely different from all other species. (...) Searching for meaning in what Nietzsche once called "the rainbow colors" around the outer edges of knowledge and imagination, Wilson takes his readers on a journey, in the process bridging science and philosophy to create a twenty-first-century treatise on human existence—from our earliest inception to a provocative look at what the future of mankind portends. Continuing his groundbreaking examination of our "Anthropocene Epoch," which he began with The Social Conquest of Earth, described by the New York Times as "a sweeping account of the human rise to domination of the biosphere," here Wilson posits that we, as a species, now know enough about the universe and ourselves that we can begin to approach questions about our place in the cosmos and the meaning of intelligent life in a systematic, indeed, in a testable way. Once criticized for a purely mechanistic view of human life and an overreliance on genetic predetermination, Wilson presents in The Meaning of Human Existence his most expansive and advanced theories on the sovereignty of human life, recognizing that, even though the human and the spider evolved similarly, the poet's sonnet is wholly different from the spider's web. Whether attempting to explicate "The Riddle of the Human Species," "Free Will," or "Religion"; warning of "The Collapse of Biodiversity"; or even creating a plausible "Portrait of E.T.," Wilson does indeed believe that humanity holds a special position in the known universe. The human epoch that began in biological evolution and passed into pre-, then recorded, history is now more than ever before in our hands. Yet alarmed that we are about to abandon natural selection by redesigning biology and human nature as we wish them, Wilson soberly concludes that advances in science and technology bring us our greatest moral dilemma since God stayed the hand of Abraham. (shrink)

HISTORIANS of psychology are almost unanimously agreed on one point: that psychology is a relatively new science. There may be some disagreement as to when it started--with Weber, or Fechner, or Wundt, or James--but there is almost no dissent from the proposition that psychology as a scientific discipline is less than one and one-half centuries old. Many earlier writers are often discussed in histories of psychology, but invariably they are called speculators, or philosophers, as opposed to scientists. We believe that (...) this is an incorrect appraisal of the career of psychological research. To demonstrate our point, we propose to show how one key psychological idea from Descartes' work has had an extensive and robust scientific history. If it is true that this Cartesian idea has had great influence in science, then many claims concerning the history of psychology will need to be reconsidered. Not everything which happened in psychology prior to the nineteenth century was speculative, nor is everything which happened later scientific. Even more importantly, if Descartes' idea has been of such central concern to several hundred years of research, it must be treated as an important claim about the way the world is, as a law of nature. (shrink)

By formalizing recent syntactic theories for natural languages Stabler shows how their complexity can be handled without guesswork or oversimplification. By formalizing recent syntactic theories for natural languages in the tradition of Chomsky's Barriers, Stabler shows how their complexity can be handled without guesswork or oversimplification. He introduces logical representations of these theories together with special deductive techniques for exploring their consequences that will provide linguists with a valuable tool for deriving and testing theoretical predictions and for experimenting with alternative (...) formulations of grammatical principles. Stabler's novel approach allows results to be deduced with straightforward calculations and provides a systematic framework for tackling the problem of how speakers can infer the properties of an utterance from principles of the grammar. The special treatment of equality, induction principles, and inclusion of a general method for collecting structures from proofs means that sophisticated linguistic arguments can be carried out in detail, giving a rich perspective to issues in linguistic theory and parsing. (shrink)

The sciences may be conceptualized as a hierarchy ranked by level of organization (e.g., many‐body physics ranks above particle physics). Each science serves as an antidiscipline for the science above it; that is, between each pair, tense but creative interplay is inevitable. Biology has advanced through such tension between its subdisciplines and now can serve as an antidiscipline for the social sciences—for anthropology, for example, by examining the connection between cultural and biological evolution; for psychology, by addressing the nature of (...) learning and the structure of the unconscious; for economics, by examining economically irrational behavior and by comparing economic activity in humans and other species. Sociology, concerned mainly with advanced literate societies, is relatively remote from the genetic basis of human social behavior. However, moving between biological and social levels of organization generates richness and points to new and unexpected principles. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Divine Emptiness and Historical Fullness: A Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation with Masao AbeEdward L. ShirleyDivine Emptiness and Historical Fullness: A Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation with Masao Abe. Edited by Christopher Ives. Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1995. 272 pp.This book is a continuation of a discussion begun by Masao Abe in 1984, previous incarnations of which have been published elsewhere. In the present volume, Abe’s expanded essay serves as the first part (...) of a four-part book. The second part includes responses by six Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist thinkers. The third part is Abe’s responses to questions and criticisms raised in Part Two. The fourth part consists of critiques by Hans Küng and Wolfhart Pannenberg and Abe’s separate responses to each.Part One consists of Abe’s well-known essay, “Kenotic God and Dynamic Sunyata.” There are many issues that Abe raises in this essay, of which only two—his understanding of a self-emptying God and his interpretation of the Holocaust—raise any serious concerns among his responders. Abe begins his theological reflection on the self-emptying of God by focusing on the kenosis hymn of Philippians 2:5–11. Abe raises the issue of the kenosis of Christ from a moral to ontological level, asking whether the self-emptying of Christ in either the Incarnation or the Crucifixion can be understood apart from the self-emptying “nature” of the Logos itself. And then, upping the ante, he asks whether one can speak of the kenosis of Christ without also speaking of the kenosis of the God whom Christ reveals.Abe then turns his attention to the Buddhist idea of Sunyata and proposes that Sunyata, far from being either a static or merely negative term, is dynamic and positive. This, he believes, will help to distinguish the Buddhist notion of Sunyata from Nietzschean nihilism. Abe also writes of the place of human reason, free will, the concept of evil, and time and history in Buddhism. It is in this context that he addresses the question of the Holocaust, speaking of his own responsibility not in the sense of having been directly involved, but in light of “collective karma.” At the same time, he does not want to suggest joint responsibility of the victims in the ethical dimension, but rather that such solidarity is realized in what he terms “the most fundamental religious dimension,” this dimension being identical with dynamic Sunyata. [End Page 207]The second part of the book consists of responses by six religious scholars. The first two respondents write from a Jewish perspective. Richard Rubenstein begins by asserting that the Philippians hymn can be understood only in light of Paul’s Jewish-Christian experience of the Covenant. Next, Rubenstein turns to his primary concern, which is Abe’s treatment of the Holocaust. He begins by outlining various Jewish responses to the Holocaust and rejecting each of them. Like Abe, Rubenstein denies the continuity of the ethical and ultimate dimensions, and accepts ultimate reality as ultimate nothingness.Sandra B. Lubarsky also appreciates Abe’s concept of Sunyata, but for different reasons than Rubenstein. Lubarsky sees it as a healthy antidote to Jewish tendencies to absolutize the Jewish community, which has led to an idolization of the community. On the other hand, she questions the Zen assumptions that lie behind Abe’s treatment of history and justice. While there is a higher vantage point than the level of human understanding from which to understand historical events, this level is reserved for God alone and to pretend to that level is arrogant. Likewise, from a Jewish perspective, it is impossible to remove God from ethical considerations.Christian responses begin with those of Heinrich Ott, who argues that the proper locus of interreligious dialogue lies not in the discussion of doctrinal or philosophical similarities, but rather in similar psychological experiences. Ott finds something in Christian experience similar to Sunyata. From this starting point, he proposes a Christian understanding of Nothingness that encompasses both human interconnectedness as well as the interconnectedness of humans with nonhuman reality.Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki maintains that speaking of the self-emptying God revealed in the self-emptying Christ has... (shrink)

Michael Polanyi made an original contribution in his reflections on tradition within the scientific community. Starting with his Riddell Lectures (Science, Faith and Society), he considered the role of authority and the transmission of tacit knowledge within the scientific community, an analysis that can be extended to other, often contrasting, realms of intellectual life.