This book collects some 75 texts from the history of American thought, starting with the colonial religious background, and arranged into 6 historically oriented chapers. Each chapter has a general introduction and ends with suggestions for further readings; and each of the texts is prefaced by a short explanatory paragraph. Overall, the book provides an historical introduction to central ethical themes of American thought.

This book appears in the Indiana Series in the philosophy of technology, edited by Don Ihde. Hickman emphasizes Dewey as a philosopher of technology and aims to make Dewey's perspective and contributions available to specialists. Still, as claimed on the book jacket, Hickman aims at a "comprehensive yet accessible overview of Dewey's philosophical work." The link between the two projects is the interpretation of Dewey's instrumentalism as a "critique of technology" (p. xi).

Research has demonstrated that employee reactions to monitoring systems depend on both the characteristics of the monitoring system and how it is implemented. However, little is known about the role individual differences may play in this process. This study proposes that individuals have generalized attitudes toward organizational control and monitoring activities. We examined this argument by assessing the relationship between employees’ baseline attitudes toward a set of monitoring and control techniques that span the employment relationship. We further explore the effects (...) of employees’ generalized attitudes toward monitoring and their individual ethical orientations on their attitudinal reactions to an Internet monitoring system implemented in their workplace. Results of a longitudinal study indicate that as expected, prior beliefs and ethical orientation interact to affect employees’ reactions to monitoring systems. Implications for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

In this book G. W. Leibniz presents not only his reflections on predestination and election but also a more detailed account of the problem of evil than is found in any of his other works apart from the _Theodicy_. Surprisingly, his _Dissertation on Predestination and Grace_ has never before been published in any form. Michael J. Murray's project of translating, editing, and providing commentary for the volume will therefore attract great interest among scholars and students of Leibniz's philosophy and theology. (...) Leibniz addresses such topics as free will, moral responsibility, divine causation, justice, punishment, divine foreknowledge, and human freedom, revealing crucial aspects of the genesis of his mature metaphysics and the theological motivations behind it. (shrink)

Mill's feminism has been attacked as being logically incoherent. The general verdict has been that Mill can easily be defended from the charge. However, both sides in the debate have ignored the fact that his feminism is part of a broader theory of liberal empiricism. Placing The Subjection of Women in this context re–opens the question of its logical credentials and reveals a basic weakness in Millian feminism.

This volume contains papers that represent Leibniz’s early thoughts on the problem of evil, centering on a dialogue, the Confessio philosophi, in which he formulates a general account of God’s relation to sin and evil that becomes a fixture in his thinking. How can God be understood to be the ultimate cause, asks Leibniz, without God being considered as the author of sin, a conclusion incompatible with God’s holiness? Leibniz’s attempts to justify the way of God to humans lead him (...) to deep discussion of related topics: the nature of free choice, the problems of necessitarianism and fatalism, the nature of divine justice and holiness. All but one of the writings presented here are available in English for the first time. (shrink)

Saul Kripke is one of the most original and creative philosophers writing today. His work has had a tremendous impact on the direction that philosophy has taken in the last thirty years and continues to dominate some of its most fundamental aspects. Given Kripke's importance it is perhaps surprising that there is no introduction to his philosophy available to the general student. This book fills that gap. As much of Kripke's work is highly technical, the book's central aim is to (...) provide clear exposition of Kripke's ideas in a form that is understandable to a beginning readership as well as a commentary on them that more advanced students will find useful. The book begins with a discussion of Kripke's early work on modal logic, which provides the foundation for many of his later philosophical contributions, before examining in detail Kripke's central ideas and arguments contained in Naming and Necessity. In further chapters, Kripke's work on semantic paradoxes and his theory of truth are outlined as well as his controversial interpretation of Wittgenstein's famous private language argument. Kripke's ideas are situated alongside those of his precursors and some of the most important and interesting responses to them are explored. The reader is thus able to appreciate the path-breaking nature of Kripke's contributions, how they have challenged fundamentally traditional interpretations, and how they have sparked some of the most important philosophical debates of recent years. (shrink)

Essentially a collection of letters from Santayana strung together with narrative about the activities of Santayana, C. A. Strong and Cory himself. Other figures come and go: Walter Lippman, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound. Some of the flavor of Santayana's thought comes through and a good deal of his personality. The letters cover the years 1927-1952: a period of great productivity for Santayana, embracing the Realms of Being, The Last Puritan, Persons and Places and Dominions and Powers. As long as (...) Cory keeps Santayana the center of focus, the book is captivating and brilliantly effective—like Santayana at his best. Unfortunately, the latter half of the book covers a period when Cory was generally somewhat independent and at a distance from Santayana: there are not so many letters and the narrative becomes longer, more autobiographical and much less interesting. Only Santayana's death refocuses the book. But by then the work is irremediably flawed.—W. G. E. (shrink)

This closing volume of Tillich's Systematic Theology is devoted to the domain of the Spirit, the domain of social reality, culture, history, and tradition. Tillich's existential, ex-static concept of faith, his qualitative concept of God, and his symbolic concept of the Christ lead him to see the ambiguity, fragmentariness and repeated failures of the church as an empirical reality. But they offer insufficient tools for an analysis of the positive nature and functions of the community of the Faithful. The Protestant (...) Principle becomes a principle of the ultimate inadequacy of all finite systems of thought and action, and is offered as the universally valid resolution of existential estrangement. As such, one wonders if it can also be a principle of faith for a community of believers. This ambiguity creates a number of difficulties throughout the book. Many of the themes of this volume are central to Tillich's thought and the general approach parallels and completes the earlier volumes. And for such a passionately committed theologian as Tillich, this last volume must be of first importance.—W. G. E. (shrink)

There are many reasons to rejoice at this revision of Owens' masterful work, although one might question the term "revision." There are no substantive revisions in the text. There is a very important addition, the Foreword to the Second Edition, in which Owens defends his views against critics and goes on to point out some conclusions about the nature of the Metaphysics which were not explicitly stated in the previous edition, notably that Aristotle's metaphysics was necessarily not a system and (...) was necessarily incomplete. New bibliographical information has been included in footnotes throughout and the Bibliography has been up-dated. The major improvement in the book is that it has now been printed with regular set type. An almost equal boon to the reader is the inclusion of the footnotes at the bottom of the appropriate pages, rather than as a separate section at the back of the book. That extensive revisions of a substantive nature were not necessary is only one more tribute to the excellence of Owens' original work.--W. G. E. (shrink)

This translation of the Fons Vitae, "specially abridged," is stiflingly verbal. There is no critical apparatus, no index, no attempt to lay bare the philosophic doctrine, no explanation of the "abridgment." The book is useless to a serious student and too clumsy to interest any but the most general reader.--W. G. E.

Weiss offers here what might be called a normative phenomenology of religion. The book clearly presupposes a body of descriptive detail and properly avoids metaphysical considerations of the existence and nature of God. The latter can be found in Modes of Being, the former have been the province of several disciplines. Weiss begins with an exploration of human experience to find those elements which give rise to religion and the common features which we should expect to qualify religious as well (...) as other human experience. The religious experience is described as a distinctive, episodic, qualitative immediacy involving the individual with God and detaching him from the world. Since the individual is public as well as private, the religious experience is both anticipatorily public and needs to be sustained within a religious community. We must be able to achieve a non-religious perspective in order to know what is involved in a religious experience. But the idea of God receives most of its content within a community which is distinctively religious though related in various ways to secular communities, and more or less antagonistic to competing religious communities. The most powerful chapters discuss these conflicts between religious communities and the phenomenon of "becoming religious." Combined with the section on the dedicated community, these provide one of the finest analyses of the religious life available in philosophic literature. The book is written with enviable style and grace, especially in the latter half.—W. G. E. (shrink)

"The intent of this book," according to the author, "is to document the existence in man of two major modes of consciousness: one is analytic, the other holistic." They are sometimes called, he observes, "the ‘rational’ and ‘intuitive’ sides of man." In this connection, he adduces Roger Bacon’s apposite dictum: "There are two modes of knowing, those of argument and experience." A notable recent finding on the brain correlates of reason and intuition is summarized in the present book as follows: (...) "The left hemisphere of the cortex, which subtends language and mathematics, seems to process information in a linear, sequential manner... The right side of the cortex processes its input more as a ‘patterned whole'." That is, science, for example, uses the left side of the brain, while nonrational meditation exercises, procedures for expansion and concentration of consciousness, and the mystic experience, for example, involve the right side. The author sympathetically describes and analyzes a large variety of meditation methods as illustrating the intuitive path to knowledge, reports pertinent findings on biofeedback phenomena and other scientific grapplings with awareness disciplines and nonattachment systems, and concludes with a plea to scientific psychologists to train themselves rigorously in esoteric techniques. He also suggests, à propos of the "unitive" character of the mystic experience: "A shift toward a consciousness of the interconnectedness of life... might enable us to take those ’selfless’ steps that could begin to solve our collective problems." For philosophers who are open-minded on other ways of studying or making contact with reality than controlled observation, analysis, induction, theory-making, verification, and revision, this book should prove useful, both because it provides a rich collection of data and because it suggests directions for achieving a synoptic view.—W. G. (shrink)

A very useful collection of extensive selections from the Metaphysics, the Categories, On Interpretation, Posterior Analytics, the Physics, On the Soul, Ethics, Politics and Poetics. Entire works, or groups of related books within a work are given. The translations are popular. In the general introduction and the commentaries before each major section, the editor attempts to briefly state the issues in the context of present discussion and relate Aristotle's doctrine to current work in British and American analytic philosophy. The collection (...) is of some merit for introducing students to Aristotle, though it provides many causes for doubt in one at all familiar with Aristotle already.—W. G. E. (shrink)

Structuralism, in so far as its essence can be pinned down, seems to be the view that the surface aspects of social phenomena are best explained in terms of complex, elusive, below-the-surface "structures," patterns, or model systems. Examples of such underlying structures are the unconscious motivation schemes of individuals, a taken-for-granted economic order, customs of social strata, ingrained moral philosophies, and religious institutions. The De Georges’ pioneer sourcebook [[sic]] presents selections, infused with the structuralist viewpoint, from the writings of Marx, (...) Freud, and the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who are structuralism’s patriarchs; Claude Lévi-Strauss, its present high priest; Roman Jakobson, teacher of structural linguistics at Harvard and M.I.T.; Louis Althusser, who rejects affiliation with structuralism; and four others. Some of these selections include extremely difficult passages, in which the authors seem to be striving to squeeze a deep disclosure out of a surface act or function. Other selections are clearer, somewhat smoother, and more convincing. A well-made index concludes the volume.—W. G. (shrink)

An interpretative introduction to the major themes of classic American philosophy and five of its major figures: Peirce, James, Royce, Dewey and Whitehead. Smith shows sympathy and insight into these men and their ideas, making an excellent choice of basic themes for discussion. Running throughout the book is a sustained argument for a renewal of the breadth of philosophic interest and the sound empirical basis displayed by Pragmatism at its best. Smith is concerned that this "Spirit of American Philosophy" be (...) rescued from the neglect it has suffered over the past decades and be recalled to the attention of the philosophic community. His book is an admirable step in that direction.--W. G. E. (shrink)

An excellent translation of the seminal and highly influential section of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft entitled "Religionssoziologie." This section, really an extended monograph, is Weber's most profound systematic analysis and theoretical account of religious communities. His basic concepts and distinctions—priest and prophet, rationalization and breakthrough, ethical and exemplary prophecy—have long provided the basic framework for the best work in the Sociology of Religion in this country. His study of the relationship between religious breakthrough and social status is masterful. His discussion of (...) "salvation" and the various kinds of asceticism and mysticism is invaluable. Talcott Parsons' introduction is helpfully expository and judiciously critical. In short, a truly classic text is now available in a worthy English version.—W. G. E. (shrink)

Ferrater Mora's paper is devoted to the thesis that man makes his own life--a person constituting himself historically. Harris's lecture is a two-pronged attack on contemporary analytic philosophy. One part of the argument attempts to show that the enterprise is self-refuting, based on an epistemology of naive positivistic empiricism which most of its present proponents have themselves rejected. The other part of the argument is ad hominem, showing the urgent necessity for a synthetic and constructive philosophy which will be able (...) to develop a way of life and system of values capable of stemming the drift toward nuclear self-annihilation. Prior, starting with the MacTaggart-Broad time puzzle and digressing backward through St. Augustine, offers an adverbial analysis of time and tenses, based on the theory that there are only things, not events, and that things are present tense, when they are.--W. G. E. (shrink)

This volume is a critical edition of the eight-year correspondence between Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Burcher de Volder, professor of philosophy and mathematics at Leiden University. Containing the surviving correspondence between Leibniz and De Volder, the volume also presents a generous selection from the letters between Leibniz and his friend Johann Bernoulli, through whose intercession the correspondence began. Bernoulli acted as intermediary throughout, and the often candid discussions between Leibniz and Bernoulli provide illuminating background to the correspondence proper. Each of (...) the selections appears both in the original Latin and in English translation. (shrink)