Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:This essay presents a critical examination and development of an exchange between Adam Smith and David Hume on the nature of sympathy. I identify four objections to Smith's account in a letter from Hume and then argue that Smith's system has the resources to reply to all of them. As such, this essay shows that Smith's system provides a more robust foundation for a sentiment-based system of ethics than has been traditionally recognized.

Michael Dummett, following an established line of reasoning, has interpreted Frege as a realist. But his claim that Frege was arguing against a dominant idealism is untenable. While there are passages in Frege's writings that seem to support a realistic interpretation, others are irreconcilable with it. The issue can be resolved only by examining the historical context. Frege's thought is, in fact, related to the philosophy of Hermann Lotze. Frege is best regarded as a transcendental idealist in the Lotze-Kant tradition. (...) His contextual principle is a linguistic version of Kant's principle of the transcendental unity of judgment. By ignoring the historical context Dummett has been led to misinterpret the precise role of the contextual principle in Frege's thought. (shrink)

Hans D. Sluga; II—On Sense, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 65, Issue 1, 1 June 1965, Pages 25–44, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/65.1.25.

Rethinking politics in a new vocabulary, Hans Sluga challenges the firmly held assumption that there exists a single common good which politics is meant to realize. He argues that politics is not a natural but a historical phenomenon, and not a single thing but a multiplicity of political forms and values only loosely related. He contrasts two traditions in political philosophy: a 'normative theorizing' that extends from Plato to John Rawls and a newer 'diagnostic practice' that emerged with Marx (...) and Nietzsche and has found its three most prominent twentieth-century practitioners in Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault. He then examines the sources of diagnostic political thinking, analyzes its achievements, and offers a critical assessment of its limitations. His important book will be of interest to a wide range of upper-level students and scholars in political philosophy, political theory, and the history of ideas. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein is one of the most important, influential, and often-cited philosophers of the twentieth century, yet he remains one of its most elusive and least accessible. The essays in this volume address central themes in Wittgenstein's writings on the philosophy of mind, language, logic, and mathematics. They chart the development of his work and clarify the connections between its different stages. The contributors illuminate the character of the whole body of work by keeping a tight focus on some key (...) topics: the style of the philosophy, the conception of grammar contained in it, rule-following, convention, logical necessity, the self, and what Wittgenstein called, in a famous phrase, 'forms of life'. (shrink)

Undersøgelser af sammenhængen mellem tysk filosofi og nazismens teorier med særlig vægt på Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).

Heidegger's Crisis shows not only how the Nazis exploited philosophical ideas and used philosophers to gain public acceptance, but also how German philosophers played into the hands of the Nazis. Hans Sluga describes the growth, from World War I onward, of a powerful right-wing movement in German philosophy, in which nationalistic, antisemitic, and antidemocratic ideas flourished.

The emergence of the 2009 H1N1 virus pandemic was unexpected, since it had been predicted that the next pandemic would be caused by subtype H5N1. We also had to learn that a pandemic does not necessarily require the introduction of a new virus subtype into the human population, but that it may result from antigenic shift within the same subtype. The new variant was derived from human and animal viruses by genetic reassortment in the pig, supporting the concept that this (...) animal is the mixing vessel for the generation of new human influenza viruses. Although it is generally believed that the 2009 outbreak was mild, there have been severe cases particularly among the young and the middle‐aged. Pathogenicity and host range are determined to a large extent by the polymerase, the haemagglutinin and the NS1 protein of influenza A viruses. There is evidence that mutations of these proteins may change the pathogenicity of the new virus. (shrink)

The four volumes of this collection bring together some of the major contributions to the literature on Gottlob Frege (1848-1925), one of the most formative influences on the course of philosophy during the last hundred years. The first volume provided general assessments of Frege's work and examined its historical context. The present volume deals with Frege's contributions to logic and the foundations of mathematics. The essays are arranged in order of their first publication, providing insight into the historical evolution of (...) the Frege literature. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

In light of the growing use of tablets for news reading and mobile news consumption behaviors, this study examined whether an innovative way of structuring news on the tablet that mimics mobile news behaviors reinforced attention for, and learning from, news. Specifically, it was theorized that the chronological and associative structuring of news articles into so-called developing news stories would lead to more attention for news, and better recall and comprehension of news, than the linear print newspaper structure that newspaper (...) publishers continue to copy from print to tablet. A multiple-day experiment was set up using the eye-tracking method to measure and control for attention. The results show that the developing news structure increased comprehension of news substantively, independently of attention effects; no effects were found on attention and factual recall. (shrink)

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

It is shown that both covariant harmonic oscillator formalism and quantum field theory are based on common physical principles which include Poincaré covariance, Heisenberg's space-momentum uncertainty relation, and Dirac's “C-number” time-energy uncertainty relation. It is shown in particular that the oscillator wave functions are derivable from the physical principles which are used in the derivation of the Klein-Nishina formula.

Hans D. Sluga; II—On Sense, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 65, Issue 1, 1 June 1965, Pages 25–44, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/65.1.25.

This article reports on Flemish college students’ news orientations and their uses of traditional and new media for news within a public service media environment. We used five homogeneous focus groups that covered variation in news media use. The analysis of the focus groups revealed major differences in news behaviors and attitudes between participants who mainly depended on traditional media for news, and those who also went online for news. While a growing body of research reports on young people’s increasing (...) use of online media for news, particularly among those that are most disengaged with traditional news media, our findings indicated that only the most eager news-users were motivated to gather information online. Additionally, we found that traditional media, in particular national quality papers and the Flemish public service newscast, were still the main reference points for public affairs information among our participants. (shrink)

First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

One of the most pervasive and persistent questions in philosophy is the relationship between the natural sciences and traditional philosophical categories such as metaphysics, epistemology and the mind. _Contemporary Philosophical Naturalism and Its Implications _is a unique and valuable contribution to the literature on this issue. It brings together a remarkable collection of highly regarded experts in the field along with some young theorists providing a fresh perspective. This book is noteworthy for bringing together committed philosophical naturalists, thus diverging from (...) the growing trend towards anti-naturalism. The book consists of four sections: the first deals with the metaphysical implications of naturalism, in which two contributors present radically different perspectives. The second attempts to reconcile reasons and forward-looking goals with blind Darwinian natural selection. The third tackles various problems in epistemology, ranging from meaning to natural kinds to concept learning. The final section includes three papers each addressing a specific feature of the human mind: its uniqueness, its representational capacity, and its morality. In this way the book explores the important implications of the post-Darwinian scientific world-view. (shrink)

Once upon a time, Aristotelean teleologists studied the natural world, both organic and inorganic, with the goal of revealing the divinely imposed ul- timate purpose of things. Things have changed. Galileo’s mathematization of physics removed Aristotelean final causes from the inorganic part of the natural world: that is a settled matter. Darwin then completed this revolu- tion in the sciences by extending it to the organic part of the natural world. But there is considerable room for disagreement, even among naturalists, (...) about just what the terms of the cease-fire were at the cessation of that revo- lutionary conflict. What is the relationship between Darwin’s contributions to natural science and the prospects for purposes or reasons in the organic sphere? Some twenty-first-century naturalists believe that Darwin removed final causes from the organic part of the natural world. For these thinkers, quite literally, there really is no purpose to life. But some post-Darwinian naturalists think Darwin actually made biology a kind of safe haven for teleological theorizing. These thinkers tend to cast such claims in episte- mological as opposed to metaphysical terms, so there are by no means neo- Aristoteleans; but by the same token, they certainly do think that the study of living things is different in kind, and not just degree from the study of nonliving things. This collection of essays explores the possibilities for novel approaches to the study of metaphysics, epistemology, rationality, and the human mind in a post-Darwinian intellectual landscape. (shrink)

What is history? From Thucydides to Toynbee historians and nonhistorians alike have wondered how to answer this question. A New Philosophy of History reflects on developments over the last two decades in historical writing, not least the renewed interest in the status of narrative itself and the presence of the authorial "voice." Subjects include the problems of Grand Narrative, multiple voices and the personal presence of the historian in his text, the ambitions of the French Annales school and the so-called (...) "Grand Chronicler," and the relevance of non-literary models--museum presentations and picturings--regarding historical discourse. The range of approaches found in A New Philosophy of History ensures that this book will establish itself as required reading not only for historians, but for everyone interested in literary theory, philosophy, or cultural studies. This volume presents essays by Hans Kellner, Nancy F. Partner, Richard T. Vann, Arthur C. Danto, Linda Orr, Philippe Carrard, Ann Rigney, Allan Megill, Robert Berkhofer, Stephen Bann, and Frank Ankersmit. (shrink)

The Holocaust puts ethical constraints upon representation because the elements of the representation are inadequate to what is represented. Yet, because we are a historical society, the Holocaust must become historical for its memory to survive. Berel Lang and Hayden White have separately suggested that a special kind of representation may suit the special nature of this event. They see the key to preserving the "responsible," "proper" representations of the Holocaust in maintaining a restricted discourse before it. Something must be (...) silenced, and each of them conceives of that something as a form of language use.Martin Jay and others believe that the methods of critical history will protect the memory of the Holocaust. The critical dynamism of the profession, however, is driven by professionalism itself. Proximate truth results from constant historical revision. Rewards exist to keep the structure moving. It is the dynamism of the structure, its strength, however, that should undermine any confidence one might place in it of maintaining the memory of any event whatever.It is not that the system of modern research and institutional verification does not work. It works all too well, producing an endless supply of competing, verifiable accounts, the significance of which is always in question. If the modern historical profession cannot well serve any memorializing function, nor sustain a stable referent, and if there is no particular form of writing that naturally suits the sort of event exemplified by the Holocaust, then we must conclude that there is no escape from the risks of representation, no limit that will guarantee any witness. The work must be recommenced within a changing discourse, always differently. And so, with all its paradoxes, "'Never Again' is Now.". (shrink)

Produced in honor of White's eightieth birthday, _Re-Figuring Hayden White_ testifies to the lasting importance of White's innovative work, which firmly reintegrates historical studies with literature and the humanities. The book is a major reconsideration of the historian's contributions and influence by an international group of leading scholars from a variety of disciplines. Individual essays address the key concepts of White's intellectual career, including tropes, narrative, figuralism, and the historical sublime while exploring the place of White's work in the philosophy (...) of history, postmodernism, and ethics. They also discuss his role as historian and teacher and apply his ideas to specific historical events. (shrink)