CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: A NEW UNIVERSITY AND THE CHALLENGE OF THE NEW SCIENCE Despite the recent and continuing controversy concerning the proper role of ...

Aesthetics, fledgling of the philosophic brood, is the most suspect of that family. It is suspected of all the philosophical sins: vagueness, disorder, dogmatism, emotionalism, reductionism, compartmentalization. Sometimes its youth is thought to be a sufficient excuse for these divagations. Sometimes the very nature of its content, involving the waywardness of genius, the remoteness of feeling from intellect, the surd of inspiration in even the mildest appreciation, are believed to condemn aes thetics irrevocably to the underside of the civilized man's (...) domain. Some philosophers have gloried in this apparently mystical and a-rational quality and have seen in it the very nature of the beautiful; others have come to regard it, rather, as evidence of the unskillfulness of our minds and have turned away from aesthetic problems to the task of sharpening the aesthetician's language and logic. The laughter of the gods is not difficult to discern through the poetry of the more mystical aesthetician or through the prose of the analysts. Meanwhile the manifold complexities and problems of aesthetic experience invite our understanding. For aesthetic experience is a present fact of human life and may, perhaps, be understood by men. Such, at least, will be the present assumption. This is the reason why the title of this book mentions art together with analysis; for if art is intelligible, the work of art and the experience of it may be analyzed into its functional parts. (shrink)

What Science Offers the Humanities examines some of the deep problems facing the study of culture. It focuses on the excesses of postmodernism, but also acknowledges serious problems with postmodernism's harshest critics. In short, Edward Slingerland argues that in order for the humanities to progress, its scholars need to take seriously contributions from the natural sciences - and particular research on human cognition - which demonstrate that any separation of the mind and the body is entirely untenable. The author (...) provides suggestions for how humanists might begin to utilize these scientific discoveries without conceding that science has the last word on morality, religion, art, and literature. Calling into question such deeply entrenched dogmas as the 'blank slate' theory of nature, strong social constructivism, and the ideal of disembodied reason, What Science Offers the Humanities replaces the human-sciences divide with a more integrated approach to the study of culture. (shrink)

When Heidegger's influence was at its zenith in Germany from the early fifties to the early sixties, most serious students of philosophy in that country were deeply steeped in his thought. His students or students of his students filled many if not most of the major chairs in philosophy. A cloud of reputedly Black Forest mysticism veiled the perspective of many of his critics and admirers at home and abroad. Droves of people flocked to hear lectures by him that most (...) could not understand, even on careful reading, much less on one hearing. He loomed so large that Being and Time frequently could not be seen as a highly imaginative, initial approach to a strictly limited set of questions, but was viewed either as an all-embracing first order catastrophy incorporating at once the most feared consequences of Boehme, Kierkegaard, Rilke, and Nietzsche, or as THE ANSWER. But most of that has past. Heidegger's dominance of German philosophy has ceased. One can now brush aside the larger-than-life images of Heidegger, the fears that his language was creating a cult phenomenon, the convictions that only those can understand him who give their lives to his thought. His language is at times unusually difficult, at times simple and beautiful. Some of his insights are obscure and not helpful, others are exciting and clarifying. One no longer expects Heidegger to interpret literature like a literary critic or an academic philologist. (shrink)

The dual responsibility of maintaining our copies of ancient writings in a state in which they reflect their originals intelligibly and authentically and of reinterpreting these writings in a manner which is both faithful and useful to later generations and their problems is so demanding that it has very frequently seemed justly to call forth a division of labor. But the divorce between the scholar and the philosophical interpreter has not always been fertile, as the more pedantic and frantic interpretations (...) of Plato demonstrate. Professor Brumbaugh seeks to avoid the specialist's isolation by uniting the two functions in his Plato on the One. The result is the unusual combination of the soundest and most elaborate work on the text of the second part of the Parmenides, so far as I can determine, yet done in this country, and in addition some very imaginative and varied philosophical interpretations. (shrink)

This book provides practical and research-based chapters that offer greater clarity about the particular kinds of teacher reflection that matter and avoids talking about teacher reflection generically, which implies that all kinds of reflection are of equal value.

This article exposes the sophistry inherent in the construction of the "number line," as this continuum is named by mathematicians, and shows how another continuum, one which preserves the properties of the old "number line" but which is based on rational foundations, namely the relations to one another of the ratios that continuous magnitudes have to one another, can be generated to replace it.

Mind and Body in Early China critiques Orientalist accounts of early China as a radical "holistic" other, which saw no qualitative difference between mind and body. Drawing on knowledge and techniques from the sciences and digital humanities, Edward Slingerland demonstrates that seeing a difference between mind and body is a psychological universal, and that human sociality would be fundamentally impossible without it. This book has implications for anyone interested in comparative religion, early China, cultural studies, digital humanities, or science-humanities (...) integration. (shrink)

THERE IS MUCH TALK THESE DAYS OF RIGHTS: Civil rights, legal rights, natural rights, human rights, women's rights, reproductive rights, children's rights. A great deal of it--if not all of it--is confused and confusing. Indeed, it is safe to say that no politically relevant concept more needs clarification than this one. Furthermore, because we are lavishly spending our political capital, it will soon happen that neither the incantation of familiar phrases nor the public expression of sentimental pieties will keep us (...) from destroying our community. The conflict between property rights and civil rights, so prominent in the 1960s, is only one example of the sort of tensions which we will undergo in the future. Unless adequate categories through which these conflicts may be resolved are accepted, any one solution can only prefigure larger conflicts whose features are ominous indeed. (shrink)

Reflectivity and Cultivating Student Learning includes theory, research, and practice appropriate for teacher educators, teacher candidates, classroom teachers, school administrators, and educational researchers.

As organizational leaders worry about the appalling low percentage of people who feel engaged in their work, academics are trying to understand what causes an increase in engagement. We collected survey data from 231 team members from two organizations. We examined the impact of team members’ emotional intelligence (EI) and their perception of shared personal vision, shared positive mood, and perceived organizational support (POS) on the members’ degree of organizational engagement. We found shared vision, shared mood, and POS have a (...) direct, positive association with engagement. In addition, shared vision and POS interact with EI to positively influence engagement. Besides highlighting the importance of shared personal vision, positive mood, and POS, our study contributes to the emergent understanding of EI by revealing EI’s amplifying effect on shared vision and POS in relation to engagement. We conclude by discussing the research and practical implications of this study. (shrink)

In Book 3 of 'On Abstinence from Animal Food', Porphyry is traditionally taken to be arguing in favour of the belief that animals are rational. However, elsewhere in his corpus, he endorses the opposite view, declaring that man differs from other mortal animals because he is rational and they are irrational. Jonathan Barnes offers a way of understanding Porphyry’s logical theory which is intended to make it consistent with the traditional interpretation of 'On Abstinence'. He suggests that the same predicate (...) can be related to different subjects in different ways. Porphyry’s claim that man differs from other mortal animals with respect to the predicate ‘rational’, is best understood to mean that whereas ‘rational’ is specifically predicated of man, it is non-specifically predicated of animals. This explains how they differ from man with respect to this predicate, without failing to be rational. This paper argues that there are reasons for rejecting Barnes’ interpretation. Barnes must maintain, for example, that animals possess the apparently incompatible properties of being specifically irrational and non-specifically rational simultaneously. Since Barnes fails to resolve the conflict, Porphyry’s claims that animals are irrational in his logical works pose a significant problem for the traditional interpretation of 'On Abstinence'. (shrink)

Introduction §1. 1s PHILOSOPHY FINISHED? Has philosophy now nearly completed its twenty-five hundred years of service to humanity? Has it only a few last remaining tasks of analysis and clarification to perform before its career is ...

The little-known story of the architectural project that lay at the heart of Paine's grand political vision for the United States. Thomas Jefferson praised Tom Paine as the greatest political writer of the age. The author of 'Common Sense' and Rights of Man, Paine helped make revolutions in America and France. But beyond his inspiring calls to action, Paine harbored a deeper political vision for his adopted country. It was embodied in an architectural project that he spent decades planning: an (...) iron bridge to span the Schuylkill River at Philadelphia. The bridge was Paine's answer to the political puzzle of the new nation: how to sustain a republic as large and geographically fragmented as the United States. Among its patrons were other giants of the time, including Benjamin Franklin and Edmund Burke, Paine's ideological opponent. Set against the background of the American Revolution, the story of his iron bridge reveals a new Tom Paine and connects this revolutionary to the vast program of internal improvements that soon transformed America"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur was one of the foremost interpreters and translators of Edmund Husserl's philosophy. These nine essays present Ricoeur's interpretation of the most important of Husserl's writings, with emphasis on his philosophy of consciousness rather than his work in logic. In Ricoeur's philosophy, phenomenology and existentialism came of age and these essays provide an introduction to the Husserlian elements which most heavily influenced his own philosophical position.

It was certainly Kant’s purpose in the Critique of Pure Reason to find a middle ground between Cartesian rationalism and empirical idealism. One of the difficulties in reading the Critique is trying to follow how Kant can maintain his dual argument—that of transcendental idealism and that of empirical realism—at every point. Perhaps there is no better example of this than the crucial argument refuting idealism. The second edition Refutation is drastically reduced from the first edition and as densely packed as (...) any Kantian argument. Our purpose here is to unpack the argument, trying to show Kant’s grounds and his difficulties in attempting a deduction of the empirically real. (shrink)

This early essay by Albert Camus presents an eloquent picture of his understanding of what it means to know. But in order for us to assimilate it, we must recognize that Camus is not celebrating a hedonic naturalism, nor engaging in an existential anti-intellectualism. Rather, his articulation of lucidity and the exemplification of it in the artistry of the essay itself presents us with a challenging concept of knowledge. I attempt to explicate this concept with the help of two images, (...) one from the musical Hair and one from the movie The Pawnbroker, thus seeking to reinforce Camus' reliance upon image as the equivalent of idea. (shrink)

The question of whether literature can be read as philosophy depends perhaps more upon our conception of philosophy than upon our conception of literature. The more logical, argumentative and systematic we take philosophy to be, the less likely we will take literature as serious philosophy. The more intuitive, evidentiary, fluid and visionary we take philosophy to be, the more likely we will take literature as serious philosophy. I think it unlikely that we will get wide agreement about the validity of (...) literature as philosophy through the use of transcendental deductions or through the place of such a claim in a grand metaphysical scheme. Those who believe that literature has important philosophical relevance are better off trying to cite specific examples of how this relevance can be cashed in with the hope that enough examples will win others to this belief. (shrink)

This paper criticizes the understanding of philosophy as entirely made up of argument. It gives some characterization of argument as a rhetorical form and conversation as a motivating attitude. It explicates the understanding of this distinction in Book 1 of Plato’s Republic, and emphasizes the contemporary relevance of the distinction by appeal to the work of Richard Rorty. While respectful of Rorty’s insights, it sides more with the Platonic understanding of philosophical conersation, which does not abandon the pursuit of truth.