Summary Popular science journalism flourished in the 1860s in England, with many new journals being projected. The time was ripe, Victorian men of science believed, for an ?organ of science? to provide a means of communication between specialties, and between men of science and the public. New formats were tried as new purposes emerged. Popular science journalism became less recreational and educational. Editorial commentary and reviewing the progress of science became more important. The analysis here emphasizes those aspects of popular (...) science which have been identified by Frank Turner as ?public science? and by Thomas Gieryn as ?boundary-work?. The religious, intellectual, and utilitarian values claimed for science by editors and contributors in their tasks of persuading the public to support science and of distinguishing science from what they often called ?applied science? are discussed. These values are shown to vary among editors and, for the editors examined here, Shirley Hibberd, Henry Slack, James Samuelson, William Crookes, and Henry Lawson, to differ significantly from those of T. H. Huxley, John Tyndall, and Norman Lockyer, on whom much study of the popularization of science in the 1860s has focused. (shrink)

A book that pulls together the results of research by several scholars to provide a fresh look at the rich heritage of ideas that Wright contributed to the theory and practice of architecture, with special emphasis on the ordering of structuring of architectural experience. An attempt is made to convey an understanding of Wright's contributions through a direct analysis of his designs as they exist or existed in reality. The authors take a different look at Wright's work in a search (...) for clarity and understanding. (shrink)

At the most general level I am interested in how we come to make sense of the world around us. Much of this research involves asking how intuitive explanations and understandings emerge in development and how they are related to notions of cause, mechanism and agency. These relations are linked to broader questions of what concepts are, how they change with development and increasing expertise and how they are structured in adults.

Prescriptive political and moral theories contain ideas about what human beings are like and about what, correspondingly, is good for them. Conceptions of human “nature” and corresponding human good enter into normative argument by way of support and justification. Of course, it is logically open for the ratiocinative traffic to run the other way. Strongly held convictions about the rightness or wrongness, goodness or badness, of certain social institutions or practices may help condition and shape one's responses to one or (...) another set of propositions about what people are like and what, in consequence, they have reason to value. (shrink)

I'm pleased to have been offered the chance of replying to Joseph Frank's criticisms . He is a courteous opponent, though capable of a certain asperity. . . . Frank complains that his critics appear incapable of attending to what he really said in his original essay. It is the blight critics are born for; and it is undoubtedly sometimes caused by the venal haste of reviewers, and sometimes by native dullness, and sometimes by malice. But there are (...) other reasons why an author may sometimes feel himself to be misrepresented. One is that a genuinely patient and intelligent reader may be more interested in what the piece under consideration does not quite say than in what is expressly stated. Another is the consequence of fame. Frank's original article is over thirty years old; it crystallised what had been for the most part vague notions, ideas that were in the air, and gave them a memorable name. "Spatial form" entered the jargon of the graduate school and began an almost independent existence. The term might well be used by people who had never read the essay at all; or they might casually attribute to him loose inferences made by others from the general proposition—inferences he had already disallowed and now once more contests. It must be difficult, particularly for an exasperated author, to distinguish between these causes of apparent misrepresentation. But sometimes it can be done; and then it will appear that the effect of the first is far more interesting than that of the second cause. For the suggestion then must be that the author has repressed a desire to take a position which, in his manifest argument, he differentiates from his own. This, as it happens, is what he advances as an explanation of certain ambiguities in my Sense of an Ending; the least one can say is that it is perfectly possible. Frank Kermode is the author of The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, Continuities, and Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays; his works also include The Classic and The Genesis of Secrecy. His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Novels: Recognition and Deception" , "A Reply to Denis Donoghue" , and "Secrets and Narrative Sequence". (shrink)

Wind, water, and molten rock constantly tear apart and resculpt the natural world we live in, and people have always struggled to create structures that will permanently establish their existence on the land. Frank Golhke has committed his camera lens to documenting that fraught relationship between people and place, and this retrospective collection of his work by John Rohrbach reveals how people carve out their living spaces in the face of constant natural disruption. An acclaimed master of landscape photography, (...) Golhke explores in Accommodating Nature how people configure the places where they live, work, and commune, both on an everyday level and in the aftermath of catastrophic destruction. Whether a ranch house anchored fast on an endless Texas plain, the shattered buildings and whipped trees left by a category 5 tornado, or the jagged cliffs of ash and rock created by the volcanic eruption of Mount St. Helens, the photographs unearth the ways in which new homes and lives emerge from the fragments of the old. Thought-provoking essays by Rebecca Solnit, Frank Gohlke, and John Rohrbach expand upon the issues raised by the images, contemplating the complexities of human and cultural geography and the relationships we have with our respective place. An arresting and vibrant visual essay combining magnificent vistas with intimate emotional detail, Accommodating Nature exposes the intricate threads that bind our lives to the land surrounding us. (shrink)

Wind, water, and molten rock constantly tear apart and resculpt the natural world we live in, and people have always struggled to create structures that will permanently establish their existence on the land. Frank Golhke has committed his camera lens to documenting that fraught relationship between people and place, and this retrospective collection of his work by John Rohrbach reveals how people carve out their living spaces in the face of constant natural disruption. An acclaimed master of landscape photography, (...) Golhke explores in _Accommodating Nature_ how people configure the places where they live, work, and commune, both on an everyday level and in the aftermath of catastrophic destruction. Whether a ranch house anchored fast on an endless Texas plain, the shattered buildings and whipped trees left by a category 5 tornado, or the jagged cliffs of ash and rock created by the volcanic eruption of Mount St. Helens, the photographs unearth the ways in which new homes and lives emerge from the fragments of the old. Thought-provoking essays by Rebecca Solnit, Frank Gohlke, and John Rohrbach expand upon the issues raised by the images, contemplating the complexities of human and cultural geography and the relationships we have with our respective place. An arresting and vibrant visual essay combining magnificent vistas with intimate emotional detail, _Accommodating Nature_ exposes the intricate threads that bind our lives to the land surrounding us. (shrink)

In what follows I argue for two interrelated theses: that early Buddhism is not a form of empiricism, and that consequently there is no basis for an early Buddhist apologetic which contrasts an empirical early Buddhism with either a metaphysical Hinduism on the one hand, or with a baseless Christianity on the other.

This paper argues that God may create and exist in any possible world, no matter how much suffering of any sort that world includes. It combines the traditional free will defence with the notion of an ‘occasion’ for good or evil action and limits God's responsibility to the creation of these occasions. Since no possible world contains occasions for more evil than good action, God is morally permitted to create any possible world. With regard to suffering that is not due (...) to free will, namely the suffering of beings who are not moral agents, the paper questions the idea that the relief of such suffering is a moral perfection. (shrink)

We make a huge variety of claims framed in vocabularies drawn from physics and chemistry, everyday talk, neuroscience, ethics, mathematics, semantics, folk and professional psychology, and so on and so forth. We say, for example, that Jones feels cold, that Carlton might win, that there are quarks, that murder is wrong, that there are four fundamental forces, and that a certain level of neurological activity is necessary for thought. If we follow Huw Price's Carnapian lead, we can put this by (...) saying that we make many claims in many different frameworks. (shrink)

Frank Jackson champions the cause of conceptual analysis as central to philosophical inquiry. In recent years conceptual analysis has been undervalued and widely misunderstood, suggests Jackson. He argues that such analysis is mistakenly clouded in mystery, preventing a whole range of important questions from being productively addressed. He anchors his argument in discussions of specific philosophical issues, starting with the metaphysical doctrine of physicalism and moving on, via free will, meaning, personal identity, motion, and change, to ethics and the (...) philosophy of color. In this way the book not only offers a methodological program for philosophy, but also casts new light on some much-debated problems and their interrelations. (shrink)

Recently Steven E. Boër gave another turn to the discussion of the free will defence by claiming that the free will defence is irrelevant to the justification of moral evil. Conceding that free will may be of real value, Boër claims that free will could have been allowed creatures without that leading to any moral evil at all. What I shall hereafter refer to as the ‘Boër reform’ is the suggestion that God could have allowed creatures to exercise free choices (...) but have intervened with ‘coincidence miracles’ to prevent all the intended evil from actually occurring. What is important to the free will defence, according to Boër, is the ability to choose freely and not the ability to succeed in effecting what we have intended to accomplish. It is no intrusion on the freedom of our wills for God to prevent us from accomplishing what we tried to do with our free wills as long as we were free to try. (shrink)

uniquely human ability. We are thus left with a fascinating question: if not imitation, what are mirror neurons for? Recent..

I submit as a good rule of thumb that if a discussion of any major philosophical position or proposition ends with the conclusion that that position or proposition is ‘absurd’ or ‘meaningless’ then a mistake has been made in the discussion. The mistake often turns out to be the accuser's failure to appreciate precisely what the position being attacked really is.

Resurrection has been used as the conceptual basis for attempted solutions to two problems that occur in the context of western theism, the problem of cognitive meaning and the problem of theodicy. Because John Hick has proposed resurrection as a solution to both problems so extensively, and because Antony Flew and Terence Penelhum have examined those solutions so strenuously, I will use their writings to lay out the problem. My aim is to improve upon Hick by overcoming a weakness in (...) his defence of resurrection. My narrower focus will be on resurrection and the ‘replica objection’, rather than the wider use of resurrection to solve problems of evil or the meaningfulness of theistic discourse, but some brief remarks on the wider problems will be necessary to set the stage. (shrink)

In this volume, fourteen scholars, many of them contemporaries of Professor Frank, engage with his legacy with important and seminal works which take some of ...

In this memorial essay on Sir Frank Kermode (1919–2010), the author focuses on his own exchange of views with Kermode during the 1970s. In Kermode's book The Sense of an Ending (1966), he had criticized Frank's essay “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” (1945) as part of a larger critique of what the Romantic-Symbolist tradition of English poetry had become in the twentieth century. Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and other late Symbolists had turned artists into advocates of an irrational wisdom (...) superior to reason and common sense, thus isolating—so Kermode argued—the world of art from that of ordinary human concerns. Rejecting their view of art, he turned instead to a pre-Romantic tradition (including Spenser and Milton) that the Symbolists had rejected. Among modern writers, Kermode turned to Wallace Stevens, who became his foil for Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, as well as the most important influence on his own later thinking. Joseph Frank, in this essay, recalls the combination of acerbic intelligence, social concern, gentility, and finally friendship that characterized his debate over these questions with Kermode. Frank recalls as an indication of his respect and admiration for Kermode that he wrote, in 1977, that, even if his own theory of spatial form were to be shown worthless, it would still have value in having provided some of the stimulus for Kermode to write The Sense of an Ending. (shrink)