The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

For me personally the year 1945 is significant because it marked the beginning of my own academic career. In that year I matriculated at Oxford as a candidate for the B.A. in Literae Humaniores. For Hegel studies it is significant for a different reason. It is the year in which Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies appeared. Popper’s book contributed nothing to the understanding of Hegel - M. B. Foster’s Political Philosophy of Plato and Hegel, which appeared ten years earlier, (...) is much more important in that respect - but it sealed in amber, so to speak, the image of Hegel which had become canonical for the liberal generation whose public conscience was Bertrand Russell. It marked the nadir of Hegel’s reputation in the Anglo-Saxon world.. (shrink)

To respond to Jay Bernstein and Terry Pinkard is both easy and difficult. It is easy because of the fundamental agreement between us about the general interpretation of Hegel as a post-Kantian philosopher; and it is difficult because there are no misunderstandings to complain of and to be clarified. I must begin by thanking them both for giving all my potential readers such careful, accurate, and insightful bird's-eye views of my "literal commentary." As Terry says, "it sometimes becomes difficult to (...) discern the overall argument Harris is making," but these two readers have certainly not "lost their way.". (shrink)

The beginnings of Hegel’s interest in “logic” as a branch of philosophy are somewhat obscure. In a lecture of 1830 Schelling claimed that Hegel first began to attend to the subject only because “his friends at the University” suggested that it was a good topic for his lectures because it was being neglected. Schelling’s object by then was evidently to suggest that Hegel’s “logic” had always been a superficial pretense. But Hegel was alive to contradict him. So I think his (...) statement of the facts must be right as far as it goes. I do not therefore believe that Hegel came to Jena with any “logical” manuscripts. In my view, it was Schelling himself—especially in his System of Transcendental Idealism —who sparked Hegel’s interest in the subject. (shrink)

I have spent more than thirty years struggling with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit; and I am absolutely weary of wrestling with the angel I found in it. So when I was pressed to contribute to the silver anniversary issue of The Owl I decided to take the easy way, and to send in an essay on the Phenomenology and the Logic that is literally the last word from the two-volume commentary that will be published as Hegel’s Ladder. Far from being (...) complete the “Hegel Renaissance” is still only in its adolescence. But my part in it is now over. Laus Deo. (shrink)

“I am now convinced” wrote Hegel in 1796, “that the highest act of Reason, the one through which it encompasses all Ideas, is an aesthetic act, and that truth and goodness only become sisters in beauty - the philosopher must possess just as much aesthetic power as the poet.” The essentially Kantian inspiration of this dictum is evident, for it is the architectonic pattern of the three Critiques that dictates the structure of this program for a new beginning of speculation (...) after Kant’s attack. The theory of “beauty” in the third Critique is to provide the bridge between “truth” in the first, and “goodness” in the second Critique. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:19. HUME AND BARKER ON THE LOGIC OF DESIGN I find myself in complete agreement with what I take to be the main thesis of Stephen Barker's paper. It is certainly a mistake to concentrate our attention on the negative critique which Hume directed at the modes of argument of his rationalist predecessors and contemporaries and directed even more at the mode of certain conviction with which they presented (...) conclusions arrived at by arguments that did not have a logically compelling force. Hume was very much concerned with the problem of just what kind of force an argument that was not logically compelling could have; and he was even more concerned (perhaps) with the problem of how the logical structure of non-compelling argument could best be exhibited so that the logic of the argument would not be confused with its force. He made significant contributions to both of these problems; and I think he knew what he was doing well enough not to deserve the charge of inconsistency which Barker seems inclined to bring against him. There are some questions which he did not address, for the very good reason that they could only arise, or at least they could only be formulated clearly, as a result of the clarification of our ideas and our situation that Hume himself achieved. His distinction between "relations of ideas" and "matters of fact" may be overly simplistic. But in all its simplicity this distinction is powerful enough to enable Hume to deal quite shortly with any claim that it is inconsistent to want to achieve this goal of knowing and saying what is true, just because we have shown that we have no logical guarantee that we shall achieve it. Christian orthodoxy has always maintained that we are all of us equally "sinners"; but no orthodox Christian moralist has ever maintained the Stoic paradox that all sins are equal. It is precisely because we know that we cannot achieve Stoic wisdom that we cannot possibly be tempted to 20. accept that paradox. Hume's achievement was to show that (in spite of the serpent's false promise) our situation with respect to knowledge has always been just as parlous as our situation with respect to action. But even in these unhappy circumstances it is not inconsistent to strive for whatever measure of truth we can achieve; and to strive at the same time for absolute logical clarity about the limits of our insight and about the comparative merits of all proposed approaches to the goal. But I must not devote my time to an issue that Barker wisely asks us to keep an open mind about. I want to discuss the form and substance of the arguments with which Barker supports the thesis that I do agree with, rather than take up an aside of his that I happen not to agree with. So then, first, let us consider the fault that he finds in the "fifth way" of Thomas. He says that it "begs the question". It "obscures the nexus of controversy" because the first premiss of the syllogism makes a crucial assumption that needs to be proved. Now I deny that the "fifth way" obscures the nexus of controversy in that way. Thomas (and all of his competent hearers) knew perfectly well that his first premiss had not been universally accepted. He was stating the view of Aristotle about the generally purposive character of nature, and he knew that it had been doubted. But he did not think that a rational believer could hesitate about the choice between Aristotle's position and that of the atheist defenders of chance. Anyone who did hesitate was a fool, and arguments could not touch him. That some men were fools, and could "say in their heart, 'There is no God'", was part of the "problem of evil" which we must consign trustfully to the inscrutable wisdom of God (save in so far as Scripture reveals to us the origin of and reason for our fallen condition). In Hume's world, Aristotle's conception of the orderliness of Nature had been supplanted by Newton's. Newton accepted the atomist view that "natural bodies... (shrink)

The first part of this essay was read at a Symposium on “Hegel and Schelling” at the Conference of the Canadian Philosophical Association at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba in June 1985. The text was then discussed as a whole by George di Giovanni and Michael Vater. Since their commentaries are here published with it, I have allowed the mistakes which they identified to remain clearly visible. The few revisions of substance that I have made are clearly indicated in (...) the footnotes; and the justification of my final position is given in this Postscript. (shrink)

Hegel was a Christian in his own way; and I try to be a Christian in that way also. I don’t know quite what “confessing to Christian faith” is; but I think that the Founder certainly preached “the universal brotherhood of man.” I don’t care what Paul preached; and it is just a rather unfortunate fact that he is indubitably historical, whereas the Founder may be a fiction. Burbidge is quite mistaken if he thinks “Paul is too essential” to me.

Hegel was a Christian in his own way; and I try to be a Christian in that way also. I don’t know quite what “confessing to Christian faith” is; but I think that the Founder certainly preached “the universal brotherhood of man.” I don’t care what Paul preached; and it is just a rather unfortunate fact that he is indubitably historical, whereas the Founder may be a fiction. Burbidge is quite mistaken if he thinks “Paul is too essential” to me.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE 'NATURALNESS' OF NATURAL RELIGION Among Hume's philosophical works the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is unquestionably the easiest to read. One can easily imagine a precocious fifteen-year-old like Miss Jane Austen — who set herself to write her own History of England only a decade or so after Hume's death — coming upon the little volume that nephew David published, reading it with great excitement (and a steadily rising (...) intellectual fury), and recording the same verdict that Pamphilus offers us, but in much more 2 trenchant terms. we can also imagine her reading it again twenty years later, armed with an explanatory commentary like the one that Stanley Tweyman has now given us, and maintaining her position (this time in the more temperate terms of Pamphilus himself). For Miss Jane Austen at thirty-five had one of the most critically commonsensical minds of her time; and she was also a person of deep religious feeling. It is in defence of her feelings, rather than of my own, that this essay is written. For she was close enough to what I take to have been Hume's position to have agreed with it once she had understood it; I, on the other hand, am not. To claim that a meeting of minds between the Rector of Steventon' s daughter and the Scottish apostle of infidelity is even conceivable may seem ridiculous. Hume himself would never have thought it likely. But even if my estimate is unduly optimistic, it serves at least to underline the importance of Tweyman' s constructive commentary. For without Tweyman 's commentary, Jane Austen's reaction to the Dialogues would have been one of morally indignant, and quite categorical rejection at any age. With it to guide her, she would have been appreciative and sympathetic, even if she was still ultimately dissatisfied. (I hope to persuade those who admire them both, as I do, that David Hume and Jane Austen belonged to the same 'invisible Church'). To read the Dialogues is still relatively easy. We only have to know that we are listening to a conversation between educated men in a society where everyone professes (at least) to believe that the world they were born into was created by a God who is all-knowing and all-powerful, infinitely wise, infinitely just and good, and, above all, infinitely loving towards the only creatures in his world who are capable of recognizing what he has done for them. The Rector of Steventon's daughter would have had difficulty in appreciating the discussion properly, because she had some further, more specific, beliefs about God's relations with his beloved children. We have some (smaller) difficulties now, because we are far from believing so much (and many of us believe nothing of the sort at all). But to grasp what we are supposed to believe is not difficult; and once we know that, the conversation itself is easy to follow. Only once does it seem to get out of hand to the point of actual implausibility; and there are only three things about it that are genuinely puzzling. The conversation does not reach any conclusion — at least none that convinces us. We are not convinced because the obvious solution for the most pervasive of our three puzzles is the assumption that Philo, the speaker who appears to state an agreed conclusion, is only pretending. That he should pretend is quite right and proper for a modern philosophical dialogue. Augustine may have written straightforward expository (or 'dogmatic') dialogues; and Berkeley, following in the wake of some of Augustine's medieval imitators, may have managed to raise this form into the best imitation of a live discussion that has been achieved for the dogmatic dialogue in English. But the religious doctrine of these 'dogmatists' was orthodox. One glance at the fortunes of the great Italian dialogue writers — Bruno, Galileo, Campanella — is enough to teach us that it was not prudent to let one's own doctrine win openly when one was teaching against the Church. Jane Austen would certainly have adopted the hypothesis that Philo's professions of religious feeling are hypocritical throughout the discussion. She would have assumed that Cleanthes... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE 'NATURALNESS' OF NATURAL RELIGION Among Hume's philosophical works the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is unquestionably the easiest to read. One can easily imagine a precocious fifteen-year-old like Miss Jane Austen — who set herself to write her own History of England only a decade or so after Hume's death — coming upon the little volume that nephew David published, reading it with great excitement (and a steadily rising (...) intellectual fury), and recording the same verdict that Pamphilus offers us, but in much more 2 trenchant terms. we can also imagine her reading it again twenty years later, armed with an explanatory commentary like the one that Stanley Tweyman has now given us, and maintaining her position (this time in the more temperate terms of Pamphilus himself). For Miss Jane Austen at thirty-five had one of the most critically commonsensical minds of her time; and she was also a person of deep religious feeling. It is in defence of her feelings, rather than of my own, that this essay is written. For she was close enough to what I take to have been Hume's position to have agreed with it once she had understood it; I, on the other hand, am not. To claim that a meeting of minds between the Rector of Steventon' s daughter and the Scottish apostle of infidelity is even conceivable may seem ridiculous. Hume himself would never have thought it likely. But even if my estimate is unduly optimistic, it serves at least to underline the importance of Tweyman' s constructive commentary. For without Tweyman 's commentary, Jane Austen's reaction to the Dialogues would have been one of morally indignant, and quite categorical rejection at any age. With it to guide her, she would have been appreciative and sympathetic, even if she was still ultimately dissatisfied. (I hope to persuade those who admire them both, as I do, that David Hume and Jane Austen belonged to the same 'invisible Church'). To read the Dialogues is still relatively easy. We only have to know that we are listening to a conversation between educated men in a society where everyone professes (at least) to believe that the world they were born into was created by a God who is all-knowing and all-powerful, infinitely wise, infinitely just and good, and, above all, infinitely loving towards the only creatures in his world who are capable of recognizing what he has done for them. The Rector of Steventon's daughter would have had difficulty in appreciating the discussion properly, because she had some further, more specific, beliefs about God's relations with his beloved children. We have some (smaller) difficulties now, because we are far from believing so much (and many of us believe nothing of the sort at all). But to grasp what we are supposed to believe is not difficult; and once we know that, the conversation itself is easy to follow. Only once does it seem to get out of hand to the point of actual implausibility; and there are only three things about it that are genuinely puzzling. The conversation does not reach any conclusion — at least none that convinces us. We are not convinced because the obvious solution for the most pervasive of our three puzzles is the assumption that Philo, the speaker who appears to state an agreed conclusion, is only pretending. That he should pretend is quite right and proper for a modern philosophical dialogue. Augustine may have written straightforward expository (or 'dogmatic') dialogues; and Berkeley, following in the wake of some of Augustine's medieval imitators, may have managed to raise this form into the best imitation of a live discussion that has been achieved for the dogmatic dialogue in English. But the religious doctrine of these 'dogmatists' was orthodox. One glance at the fortunes of the great Italian dialogue writers — Bruno, Galileo, Campanella — is enough to teach us that it was not prudent to let one's own doctrine win openly when one was teaching against the Church. Jane Austen would certainly have adopted the hypothesis that Philo's professions of religious feeling are hypocritical throughout the discussion. She would have assumed that Cleanthes... (shrink)

This slim volume provides a bird’s eye view, in admirably clear Italian, of the philosophy, scientific and humane, of Errol Harris. It seems probable that Rinaldi’s attention was drawn to Harris when he found that the criticism of Husserl in his own Critica della gnoseologia fenomenologica had been largely anticipated in Harris’s articles of 1976 and 1977 in the Review of Metaphysics and Idealistic Studies. He has certainly studied the Harris corpus carefully and thoroughly—from the article (...) on “The Philosophy of Nature in Hegel’s System” down to the Idealistic Studies article. He speaks of the Interpretation of the Logic of Hegel as “presently in course of completion.” My own acquaintance with Harris’s works is less encyclopaedic, but I was sorry not to find any reference to Revelation Through Reason which is one of my own favorites. That, however, is the only missed bet that I can find. (shrink)

F. H. Bradley’s work was for a long time neglected by English speaking philosophers. He had virtually ceased to have any readers by the time of his death in 1924. But in the last few years there has been a small resurgence of interest in his work. Richard Wollheim produced a significant monograph for the Penguin Philosophers series in 1959; and Barnes and Noble published Anthony Manser’s sympathetic study of Bradley’s logic in 1983. But MacNiven has now returned to his (...) first book, Ethical Studies, and in so doing has enabled us to put the later metaphysical and logical work in what I believe is the right perspective. (shrink)

F. H. Bradley’s work was for a long time neglected by English speaking philosophers. He had virtually ceased to have any readers by the time of his death in 1924. But in the last few years there has been a small resurgence of interest in his work. Richard Wollheim produced a significant monograph for the Penguin Philosophers series in 1959; and Barnes and Noble published Anthony Manser’s sympathetic study of Bradley’s logic in 1983. But MacNiven has now returned to his (...) first book, Ethical Studies, and in so doing has enabled us to put the later metaphysical and logical work in what I believe is the right perspective. (shrink)

Thirty three years lie between Geoffrey Mure’s beginning upon the study of Literae Humaniores at Oxford before the First World War, and my own arrival there for the same purpose at the end of the Second. To read this book is to be made vividly aware how far the world moved in the single human generation. That I shared so many of Mure’s ideals and enthusiasms made me something of a freak in the Oxford of my own time; yet I (...) remember vividly my feeling, when I first read his Study of Hegel’s Logic, that here was someone talking to himself in an empty room. I was a student reading Hegel’s Logic while everyone else was discussing The Concept of the Mind. No one was ever more consciously out of step than I. Yet I felt no urge to seek out the Warden of Merton; and with this small testament of a philosopher’s life before me, I can see that this was because I belonged as firmly to my generation as he did to his. He was a pupil of H.H. Joachim and I of H.H. Price. Price was not my “tutor”, but it was from his living example, more than any other, that I learned that philosophy is a perennial activity in which many discordant voices can have their place - and perhaps be brought to concord. I was lucky, I think, to learn this from one whose principal concerns were so far removed from mine, and not - like Mure - to take the impress of philosophy as a perpetual concordia discors from someone with whom I was in perfect sympathy. To comprehend discordia concors as a young rebel is better than to find that one’s concordia has become discordant in later years. (shrink)

I began my review of volume 6 of the new critical edition by saying that from the three volumes published we could see how the editors planned to deal with almost all the problems that they faced. I shall not be tempted into any rash statement of this kind again; for it is clear that every volume brings its own special problems with it. The present volume contains the manuscript that Hegel wrote for a course on “Realphilosophie” which he probably (...) gave for the first time at Jena in the Winter Semester of 1805/6, and again in Summer 1806. This manuscript was first utilized by K. Michelet, who inserted copious quotations from the “Naturphilosophie” into the Zusätze for his edition of the Encyclopedia “Philosophy of Nature”. Michelet already knew fairly accurately what the provenance and date of the manuscript were. Modern studies have only made the dating a little more precise and altogether more secure. The whole manuscript was finally published by J. Hoffmeister in 1931. It has been known to us for the last forty-five years as Jenenser Realphilosophie II. (shrink)

I must choose between reviewing this book briefly and carrying on at great length. For as soon as I begin to discuss Westphal’s central thesis in any detail I should not know where to stop. This is a book that calls for another book if it is to be discussed adequately. For my own sake, for my editor’s sake, and for the sake of the reader, I shall therefore be as brief as I can.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:148 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:1 JANUARY 199o David D. Roberts. BenedettoCroceand the Usesof Historicism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, a987. Pp. xii + 449- NP. This book is a remarkably good survey of Croce's enormous output on the general topics of philosophy, politics, and history. Roberts shows an outstanding mastery not only of Croce's voluminous writings, but of the whole secondary literature about (...) him since the first rebellion of his Italian "followers" in the early years of this century. Roberts's aim is to restore Croce to his proper place in the continuing dialogues and debates about historicism and hermeneutics. So far as one writer can achieve such a goal with one book, he has achieved it; if there are reasons to fear (nevertheless) that his achievement may not have the full effect that he hopes for, they are rooted in Croce's own personality and background, not in any failure on the part of Roberts. "[I]f we are to grasp the dominant concerns of Croce's intellectual life, we must approach him primarily as a Western intellectual who was seeking to address the central challenges facing our culture, not confine him to... his particular Italian, or Neapolitan context.... [O]n the deepest level he would have faced the same challenges had he been reared in The Hague or Philadelphia" (24). The final rhetorical flourish here is one of Roberts's rare tumbles into outright absurdity, for what is (perhaps) true in 1987 was not true in 1887. So we should be glad that the Italian background is never really lost sight of. Roberts's treatment of Croce's intellectual formation is rather impressionistic, but we do always have a vivid image of the mature Don Benedetto, the bourgeois Neapolitan worthy who was made a Senator of the Realm in 191o (a biographical fact that is not mentioned). The one serious fault in Roberts's account of Croce's formation--which is excellent on the influence of Vico and Marx--is his failure to take a properly European view of Hegel. He remains a prisoner of Croce's critique of Hegel, so that he is never able to see clearly how deeply Hegelian Croce was. He sees only the differences, and, as far as "historicism" is concerned, they are largely differences from a straw man. Having said that, almost nothing remains but praise. Croce maintained that philosophy was only the tool-bag of the historian. Roberts, who is an intellectual historian rather than a philosopher, takes Croce at his word, with the results that his book is the first (in English at least) to present Croce's thought in the way that Croce himself saw it. He gives us an insightful review of the "philosophy of the spirit" in about sixty pages, including the development of the concept of"utility" into "vitality" in Croce's last years. Then he embarks on a study of how Croce used his philosophical instruments in the theory and practice of historical and political interpretation. The theory of "absolute historicism" (and of how it can be "absolutely" true) is followed by "the religion of history." This was a kind of historicized Buddhism, in my view, until Croce startled everyone, in a942, by announcing that "we cannot but call ourselves Christians"; but it is only the comparison of Croce's historicism with Buddhism that enables us to see it as a "religion" at all. Roberts does not say this, but he does show clearly how far removed from any faith-religion Croce was. After this comes a long chapter on "Historicist Politics." I think this is the best thing in the book, because Roberts not only clearly displays the near-bankruptcy of Croce's BOOK REVIEWS ~49 actual politics as President of the Italian Liberal Party from 1944 to i947, but demonstrates through a study of Piero Gobetti that neither Croce's own conservatism nor his doctrinal rigidity was a necessary corollary of "absolute historicism" in politics. As the main intellectual beacon of opposition to Fascism during its twenty years of power, Croce enjoyed enormous prestige in 1944; but as Don Benedetto, with his great family estates... (shrink)

I respond to Selinger and Mix (Selinger, E. and Mix, J. 2004. On interactional expertise: Pragmatic and ontological considerations. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 3: 145–163), concentrating on their charges that Collins (Collins, H. M. 2004a. Interactional expertise as a third form of knowledge. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 3: 125–143) underrates the importance of interactional expertise as an expertise sui generis and that the paper fails to analyse the idea of embodiment sufficiently holistically, misleading treating the ‘body’ as no (...) more than the linear sum of its parts. (shrink)

Broad, C. D. Leibniz's predicate-in-notion principle and some of its alleged consequences.--Couturat, L. On Leibniz's metaphysics.--Friedrich, C. J. Philosophical reflections of Leibniz on law, politics, and the state.--Curley, E. M. The root of contingency. Furth, M. Monadology.--Hacking, I. Individual substance.--Hintikka, J. Leibniz on plenitude, relations, and the "reign of law."--Ishiguro, H. Leibniz's theory of the ideality of relations.--Kneale, M. Leibniz and Spinoza on activity.--Koyré, A. Leibniz and Newton.--Lovejoy, A. O. Plenitude and sufficient reason in Leibniz and Spinoza.--Mates, B. Leibniz on (...) possible worlds.--Russell, B. Recent work on the philosophy of Leibniz.--Wilson, M. D. On Leibniz's explication of "necessary truth.". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:HUME ON THE 'DISTINCTION OF REASON1* In a 1959 paper, Richard H. Popkin1 propounded what was then taken to be a most extraordinary thesis: Hume may never have read Berkeley. Popkin's paper marks the end of one of the stranger stories in the history of philosophy, the relationship of the British Empiricists — Locke, Berkeley, Hume — to one another. The thesis was hardly news either to Berkeley or (...) Hume scholars because for several decades in careful studies of the historical contexts and sources they had relied less and less on any theory about significant common themes. In this paper I rehearse the arguments against the "partnership" doctrine and then turn to some ways in which Berkeley and Hume differ over abstractionism and the 'distinction of reason'. Finally, I discuss George Davie's suggestion that this 'distinction' may belong to a very different side of Hume's thought. The linking of Locke with Berkeley is not a feature of early commentary on Berkeley. Berkeley was seen by his contemporaries as a product of Pierre Bayle's scepticism or of Malebranche's immaterialism.2 The work of A.A. Luce, and to a lesser extent, of T. E. Jessop, seeks to restore Berkeley to a place in those traditions and to reduce his indebtedness to Locke. The work of Hume scholars from Kemp Smith to Ardal, Davie, Norton, and Popkin all places Hume outside the direct Berkeley line. So far as the traditional epistemological picture was concerned, there was not enough internal evidence to support a Hume-Berkeley connection. The argument took a different turn when a new Hume letter came to light. Hume's letter to Michael Ramsay from Orleans is dated August 31, 1737. I desire of you, if you have Leizure, to read over La Recherche de la Vérité of Pere Malebranche, the Principles of 90 Human Knowledge by Dr Berkeley, some of the more metaphysical Articles of Bailes Dictionary; such as those /...of/ Zeno, & Spinoza. Des-Cartes Meditations wou'd also be useful....5 In 1973, Michael Morrisroe, Jr., surveyed the contributions of Wiener, Popkin, Mossner, Hall, Flew, and Conroy to the debate. Morrisroe takes the several Hume references to Berkeley as internal evidence that Hume read Berkeley. He then prints a new Hume letter to Michael Ramsay, dated "Rheims. Sepfc. 29 1734. N. S." A ten sentence letter, the eighth reads: "It is my Pleasure to read over again today Locke's Essays and the Principles of Human Knowledge by Dr. Berkeley which are printed in their original state and in French copy." Morrisroe explains in a footnote that he was granted permission to make a typescript of the letter, that it was sold at auction, and that its "present location... is unknown." In addition, he thanks six graduate students: "without their attention to bibliogaphical detail this letter might not have been made ready for publication until much later." But the bibliographical detail does not include telling us whether he saw the original or how the Hume authorship was established; nor does it include speculation on what Hume means in that eighth sentence. Did Hume find one book containing Locke and Berkeley in French and in English which he then read in one day? A bilingual Locke plus a bilingual Berkeley? Or can he mean an edition of Locke's Essay in French and an edition of Berkeley's Principles in English? That seems to be the least likely interpretation, unless the reference to Berkeley is a mere parenthetical afterthought, and Hume had his hands on Locke in English and French plus an English edition of Berkeley. Whatever this letter means, we know that Locke's Essay was available in Pierre Coste's translation. Berkeley is another story. The "Principles appeared in 1710. A revised edition, together with the Three Dialogues (also revised) was published in 1734. The first French edition appears to have been in 1889. The Three Dialogues first appeared in 1713 and the first French translation in 1750. The New Theory of Vision, first published in 1709, appeared together with the first edition of Alciphron in 1732. French translations appeared together in 1734. In any case, it can be granted, if only on... (shrink)

Leibniz's predicate-in-notion principle and some of its alleged consequences, by C. D. Broad.--On Leibniz's metaphysics, by L. Couturat.--Philosophical reflections of Leibniz on law, politics, and the state, by C. J. Friedrich.--The root of contingency, by E. M. Curley.--Monadology, by M. Furth.--Individual substance, by I. Hacking.--Leibniz on plenitude, relations, and the "reign of the law," by J. Hintikka.--Leibniz's theory of the ideality of relations, by H. Ishiguro.--Leibniz and Spinoza on activity, by M. Kneale.--Leibniz and Newton, by A. Koyré.--Plenitude and sufficient reason (...) in Leibniz and Spinoza, by A. O. Lovejoy.--Leibniz on possible worlds, by B. Mates.--Recent work on the philosophy of Leibniz, by B. Russell.--On Leibniz's explication of "necessary truth," by M. D. Wilson.--Bibliography (p. [421]-425). (shrink)

This study argues that the early philosophy of Semyon Liudvigovich Frank (1877–1950) exhibits significant intellectual correlations with nineteenth century German Idealist philosophy. The idealists in question are Immanuel Hermann Fichte (1796–1879), G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831) and F.W.J. Schelling (1775–1854). It will be suggested that the critical tension of Frank’s early philosophy is precisely a tension between his Hegelian and Schellingian tendencies. The paper will first introduce Frank’s theory of a “personal absolute”, exploring its surprising parallels with the religious philosophy of I. (...) H. Fichte. The analysis then addresses the self-dispersal of Hegel’s absolute, before finally turning to Schelling’s immediate intuition of subject-object identity. (shrink)

F. H. Bradley was a self-confessed idealist, but as there is no clear consensus concerning just what idealism is, the term has been applied to a wide variety of doctrines, many of which Bradley repudiated. Solipsism, the view that all and the only reality consists of the content of my consciousness, is rejected by the vast majority of idealists, and by Bradley in particular on the grounds that direct experience affords no clear conception of a self, and so far as (...) it gives any at all it is already in correlation with a not-self. If direct experience is to be transcended we may as legitimately conclude to materialism as to “idealism”; and nothing in experience, whether direct or indirect, proves that immediate feeling is confined to my self. In Ethical Studies he refers to the view that material things and other people are merely ideas in the mind of the thinker as “a silly doctrine,” and asks how the solipsist would answer the questions: Is my consciousness something that goes beyond myself; and if so in what sense? and Had I a father? What do I mean by that, and how do I reconcile my assertion of it with my answer to question? Whatever our reaction to these criticisms, they give clear evidence that Bradley rejected what he took to be solipsism, the argument of which he states as follows: “I cannot transcend experience and experience must be my experience. From this it follows that nothing beyond myself exists; for what is experience is its states.” Solipsism is the most extreme version of idealism, but for all idealists the crucial question remains whether their theories do not in the end reduce to something very like it; and if they do, they cannot be accepted, because solipsism is a patent self-contradiction, in that it reduces to the self what the very conception of a self must exclude from it. To this issue we shall have to return; let us meanwhile consider further what idealism meant for Bradley. (shrink)

Although there has been a resurgence of interest in virtue ethics, there has been little work done on how this translates into the political sphere. This essay demonstrates that the Confucian thinker Xunzi offers a model of virtue politics that is both interesting in its own right and potentially useful for scholars attempting to develop virtue ethics into virtue politics more generally. I present Xunzi’s version of virtue politics and discuss challenges to this version of virtue politics that are raised (...) by the Legalist thinker H an Fei. I show that not only is Xunzi’s virtue politics capable of surviving the challenges raised by his contemporary, he offers an account that is in many ways both attractive and plausible, one that may usefully be brought into conversation with contemporary visions of virtue politics. (shrink)

Carolina Sartorio has criticized the reasons-responsiveness theory of freedom for being inconsistent with the actual-sequence view motivated by the Frankfurt-style cases. Specifically, reasons-responsiveness conceived as a modal property does not pertain to the actual sequence of the agent's action and thereby it is irrelevant to the agent's freedom and moral responsibility. Call this the challenge of irrelevance. In this article, I present this challenge in a new way that overcomes certain limitations of Sartorio's argument. I argue that the root of (...) the challenge is that reasons-responsiveness as an unmanifested modal property seems to be nonexplanatory for the agent's action. I show that reasons-responsiveness theorists will confront this challenge even if they do not endorse the actual-sequence view. Finally, I deflate this challenge with David Lewis's model of causal explanation, showing that reasons-responsiveness is explanatory in virtue of providing information about the causal history of the agent's action. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:702 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:4 OCTOBER t99 5 appears more as an anomalous figure in the spirit of Kierkegaard than a thinker of the mainstream. For Jaspers, philosophy is a vehicle to provoke a spiritual sense of the wonder of existence rather than an autonomous vocation which strives to recast its questions in increasingly radical ways. Most typically, Jaspers's emphasis on darker aspects of the human (...) predicament--guilt, anxiety, and death as the seminal existential motifs--does not exclude a more positive vision of Existenz as revealed through transcendence. The limits do not provoke a discourse of radical finitude which skirts the edges of presence, but instead indirectly point toward a transcendent mystery, or the "encompassing" (19-2o). If there is an aspect of Jaspers's philosophy that remains inadequately addressed in either volume, it is his preoccupation with the role of tragedy in the post-war era? In light of the premier importance that Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger all grant to tragedy, Jaspers's passionate treatment of this topic in the context of the catastrophe of Western Europe merits far closer attention. Does not the issue of tragedy provide indispensable dues to chart the landscape of twentieth-century thought, and to amplify the differences which prevail in the portrait of politics as displayed by such diverse philosophers as Jaspers and Heidegger, Derrida and Levinas? FRANK SCHALOW DiUard University Norman Malcolm. Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View? Edited with a response by Peter Winch. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, a994. Pp. xi + 14o. Norman Malcolm at the outset of this, his posthumously published last book, focuses on the question: What did Wittgenstein mean when he said to his friend M. O'C. Drury, "I am not a religious man, but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view"? It was the right question. But Malcolm then--again on the first page of his book-proceeded to place restrictions on it, which were quite foreign to the spirit of Wittgenstein 's remark and which virtually crippled it. (1) He took Wittgenstein to be speaking of not social, psychological, or presumably even personal problems, but only of philosophical ones. (2) He chose to say that in Wittgenstein's later philosophy "there is not strictly a religious point of view, but something analogous to a religious point of view" (1, Malcolm's emphases). There is no reason to think that Wittgenstein would have accepted either of these restrictions on his remark. Nor does Peter Winch accept them in his forty-page discussion, which follows Malcolm's text in this book. In the upshot Malcolm finds "four analogies between Wittgenstein's conception of the grammar of language and his view of what is paramount in a religious life" (92). In both, he says, Wittgenstein emphasizes "an end to explanation," a sense of an "illness" pervading the human situation, "an inclination to be amazed at the existence of some ' Karl Jaspers, TragedyIs Not Enough, trans. Harald A. T. Reiche, Harry T. Moore, and Karl W. Deutsch (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952), 31-4O,93- io5_ BOOK REVIEWS 703 thing," and "doing, acting [having.] priority over intellectual understanding and reasoning " (92). But are such "analogies" really the crux of the "religious point of view" in terms of which Wittgenstein said that he could "not help seeing every problem"? When we recall that Wittgenstein's later philosophy was a proibund attack upon what he regarded as the idolatry of science, logic, and mathematics (an idolatry of which he himself, in the Tractatt~,, was partly guilty), and that he was also bent on undermining the accompanying subjectivized and privatized view of the human mind, as well as the scientistic reading of religious beliefs and primitive religions, we may be inclined to see his philosophy as clearing the way for the simple noninstitutionalized Tolstoian faith which he himself accepted. Philosophy and religion were on the same track in his mind (and not merely related by "analogies") when he wrote: "All that philosophy can do is to destroy idols. And that means not creating a new one--for instance, as in the 'absence of an idol' " (MS 213, 89). Peter Winch... (shrink)

F. H. Bradley was a self-confessed idealist, but as there is no clear consensus concerning just what idealism is, the term has been applied to a wide variety of doctrines, many of which Bradley repudiated. Solipsism, the view that all and the only reality consists of the content of my consciousness, is rejected by the vast majority of idealists, and by Bradley in particular on the grounds that direct experience affords no clear conception of a self, and so far as (...) it gives any at all it is already in correlation with a not-self. If direct experience is to be transcended we may as legitimately conclude to materialism as to “idealism”; and nothing in experience, whether direct or indirect, proves that immediate feeling is confined to my self. In Ethical Studies he refers to the view that material things and other people are merely ideas in the mind of the thinker as “a silly doctrine,” and asks how the solipsist would answer the questions: Is my consciousness something that goes beyond myself; and if so in what sense? and Had I a father? What do I mean by that, and how do I reconcile my assertion of it with my answer to question? Whatever our reaction to these criticisms, they give clear evidence that Bradley rejected what he took to be solipsism, the argument of which he states as follows: “I cannot transcend experience and experience must be my experience. From this it follows that nothing beyond myself exists; for what is experience is its states.” Solipsism is the most extreme version of idealism, but for all idealists the crucial question remains whether their theories do not in the end reduce to something very like it; and if they do, they cannot be accepted, because solipsism is a patent self-contradiction, in that it reduces to the self what the very conception of a self must exclude from it. To this issue we shall have to return; let us meanwhile consider further what idealism meant for Bradley. (shrink)

In the prologue to the Parson's Tale, the discourse that is to follow is twice referred to as a “meditacioun.” The Parson states that he will put “this meditacioun” under the correction of clerks , and at the end of the prologue Harry Bailly instructs the Parson: “Telleth … youre meditacioun” . Despite the oddly persistent uncertainty about what the Parson's tale is , few critics have attended to the fact that both Harry Bailly and the Parson call it a (...) “meditacioun,” other than to remark that it seems a curious appellation. I will argue here that the characterization of the tale as a “meditacioun” is careful and deliberate, and I will be concerned to explore the extent to which the tale can be seen as belonging to the late-medieval tradition of meditatio, especially as it developed in Latin from the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries. (shrink)

My interest here is in the way Leo Strauss and his followers, the Straussians, have dealt with race and rights, race and slavery in the history of the United States. I want, first, to assess Leo Strauss's rather ambivalent attitude toward America and explore the various ways that his followers have in turn analyzed the Lockean underpinnings of the American “regime,” sometimes in contradistinction to Strauss's views on the topic. With that established, I turn to the account, particularly that offered (...) by Harry Jaffa, of how slavery and race comported—or did not—with the Straussian account of the political foundations of the new nation and how latter-day followers of Strauss have dealt with the persisting topic of race and racism in America. Overall, I want to make two large points. First, the Straussian commitment to superhistorical standards provides the Straussians with a moral perspective on slavery, race, and racism. Second, though race and slavery have been less than central among the concerns of most followers of Strauss, the contributions of Jaffa and others have significantly shaped the present American conservative position on race, including the idea of color-blindness. (shrink)

Wall, G. Locke's attack on innate knowledge.--Harris, J. Leibniz and Locke on innate ideas.--Greenlee, D. Locke's idea of idea.--Aspelin, G. Idea and perception in Locke's essay.--Greenlee, D. Idea and object in the essay.--Mathews, H. E. Locke, Malebranche and the representative theory.--Alexander, P. Boyle and Locke on primary and secondary qualities.--Ayers, M. R. The ideas of power and substance in Locke's philosophy.--Allison, H. E. Locke's theory of personal identity.--Kretzmann, N. The main thesis of Locke's semantic theory.--Woozley, A. D. Some remarks (...) on Locke's account of knowledge.--Laudan, L. The nature and sources of Locke's views on hypotheses. (shrink)

This book consists of a series of papers "read and discussed at the first Symposium of Exact Philosophy" at Montreal in 1971. "Exact philosophy," the editor says, means "mathematical philosophy, i.e., philosophy done with the explicit help of mathematical logic and mathematics." Judging from the contents, a more accurate statement would be that "exact philosophy" means formal semantics and modal logic. Two thirds of the papers are on these topics. The others include an essay on "Concepts of Randomness" by Peter (...) Kirschenmann; a characteristically difficult paper on "Plato’s Phaedo Theory of Relations" by Hector Castañeda; a somewhat inexact discursus on "Foundations as a Branch of Mathematics" by William Hatcher with a reply by Charles Castonguay; and a paper by Raimo Tuomela on "Deductive Explanation of Scientific Laws", or, more exactly, on Ohmer’s discussion of that topic. The subject’s are highly specialized and their treatment is complex. In addition to those mentioned, other essays are "Matters of Relevance" by Hugues Leblanc, with an answer by Brian Chellas; "Translation and Reduction" by Lars Svenonius; "A Program for the Semantics of Science" by Mario Bunge; "S-P Interrogatives" by Nuel Belnap; "The Logic of Conditional Obligation" by Bas C. Van Frassen with commentary by Harry Beaty; and "The Intuitive Background of Normative Legal Discourse and Its Formalization" by Carlos E. Alchourron.—M.H. (shrink)

Hegel’s treatment of Sophocles’s Antigone exposes a tension in our own landscape between religious and civil autonomy. This tension reflects a deeper tension between unreflective, implicit norms and reflective, explicit norms that can be autonomously endorsed. The tension is, as Hegel recognizes, of particular importance to women. Hegel’s characterization of this tension in light of Antigone is, as H.S. Harris argues, both a more developed and a more fundamental moment in the Phenomenology of Spirit than the moment of Enlightenment (...) autonomy (with its powers of reflective self-critique). Indeed, George Steiner has remarked that, for the German idealists, Antigone exemplifies the very “pivot of consciousness,” so fundamental is the tension that it expresses. I argue that, while Hegel demonstrates the necessity of the modern transition to explicit norms that can be autonomously endorsed, explicit norms nevertheless depend on a background of unreflective norms for their force. Moreover, Hegel uses the conflict between Antigone and Creon to illustrate the tension and mutual dependence between these two types of norms. (shrink)

Chance or Dance is ideal for students and general readers interested in understanding how modern science gives evidence for the creation of nature by the God of the Bible.

Philosophy of Medicine has for a long time been preoccupied with analyzing the concepts of health, disease and illness. Relatively speaking, the concept of medicine itself has received very little attention. This paper is a contribution to the relatively neglected debate about the nature of medicine. Building on the work of Alex Broadbent (Broadbent, 2018a, b), Chadwin Harris (Harris, 2018) and Thaddeus Metz (Metz, 2018), in this paper I question the persuasiveness of Broadbent’s account of the “core business” (...) of medicine, The Inquiry Thesis, and propose an alternative: a revised version of The Curative Thesis, which I coin The Best Available Intervention Thesis. Crudely, this suggests that Medicine is the sustained and organised effort to determine and prescribe the best available treatment (curative or preventative) for patients. (shrink)