The purpose of the present paper is to formulate and resolve a certain puzzle surrounding God's existence and the standard attributes traditionally assigned to God.

In a recent symposium on Descartes' ontological argument, Norman Malcolm has restated a rather ingenious version of St Anse1m's ontological argument. 1 The purpose of the present paper is to assess the merits of this particular version of the ontological argument.

Darrel E. Christensen presented the following paper to the Charles Sanders Peirce Society meeting held on October 5–7, 1978, at Bloomington, Indiana.

The Alexandrian emphasis on smallness, elegance, and slightness at the expense of grand themes in major poetic genres was not preciosity for its own sake: although the poetry was written by and for scholars, it had much larger sources than the bibliothecal context in which it was composed. Since the time of the classical poets, much had changed. Earlier Greek poetry was an intimate part of the life of the city-state, written for its religious occasions and performed by its citizens. (...) But eh conquests of Alexander had altered the structure and the boundaries of the Greek world to an astonishing degree. Alexandria, the center of the poetic culture of the new age, was a city that had not even existed at the time of Euripides; it was in Egypt, not in Greece, and was a huge, polyglot community. As immigrants immersed in a new, impersonal, and bureaucratic society, the poets not unreasonably sought out what was small, intimate, and personal in their verses. The heroes of early Greek poetry are larger than life; those of Alexandrian poetry are life-size. They are human, like us; they have a childhood and an old age; they are afraid or in love or caught in a rainstorm. It was simply one way of reducing the world to more manageable dimensions. At the same time, the new world of Alexandria needed a new poetry. To continue writing epics about a mythology that seemed very far away was senseless; it was impossible to recapture either the style or the immediacy of Homer, lyric poetry, or Attic tragedy. The scholar-poets of Alexandria admired the literature of classical Greece; for them Homer was incomparable and inimitable, to be studied—but not to be copied. Far better, then, to find a new voice on a more manageable scale: instead of oral epic, erudite epyllion; instead of lyric, epigram; instead of tragedy, mime. The poets of an urban and unheroic world might long for but could never re-create the grandeur of the past. James E. G. Zetzel is associate professor of classics at Princeton University and editor of the Transactions of the American Philological Association. He is the author of Latin Textual Criticism in Antiquity and, with Anthony T. Grafton and Glenn W. Most, has translated Friedrich August Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum. (shrink)

Although the above listed works are quite different in character on other accounts, each may fairly be said to be dominated by the conceptuality of Immanuel Kant and, at the same time, to go some way toward exhibiting the line between Kant and Hegel less as one that calls for a choice between members of an either-or dichotomy than as one between conceptualities that are in important ways compatible, and over which a traffic of ideas may be seen to move (...) with some freedom in both directions. Having said that each goes some way toward doing this, I hasten to add two qualifications: Werkmeister, although, like Yovel, he presents us with a Kant interpretation that can have the effect of going very far toward preparing the reader for an easy transition to Hegel, unlike Yovel, he does not concern himself directly with Hegel; if the subsumption of Prauss' work under the foregoing characterization may perhaps give rise to protest either from, or on behalf of, the author, I shall nonetheless show grounds for doing so. With the foregoing qualifications in view, in pointing to the distinctive manner in which each author, in turn, contributes to this common character, I shall be presenting what I believe may be regarded as a trend in contemporary Kant scholarship that is deserving of attention. (shrink)

Following the Introduction, the essays to be listed, each with a reply by Errol E. Harris, comprise the principal content. B. Blanshard, “Harris on Internal Relations”; G.R. Lucas, Jr., “Science and Teleological Explanations”; J.E. Smith, “Harris’ Commentary on Hegel’s Logic”; G. Rinaldi, “The Identity of Thought and Being in Harris’ Interpretation of Hegel’s Logic”: T. Rockmore, “System and History: Harris on Hegel’s Logic”; R. Hepburn, “The Problem of Evil”; W. H. Walsh, “Hegel on Morality”; W.N.A. Klever, “The Properties of the (...) Intellect”; P. Muller, “The pons asinorum in Philosophy”; Wm. Earle, “The Evanescent Authority of Philosophy.”. (shrink)

A tendency has been discernible in recent decades, more marked within the Anglo-American philosophical tradition, to regard a turn or a return to Hegel as a reverie for rumination following a flight from “critical principles” which had been thought secure but which have failed. A result has been that the critical dimensions of his thought, resting upon its hard logical core, the principle of the spekulativen Satz, has very frequently been deemphasized or entirely overlooked.

A critique of Whitehead’s conccpt of God from the standpoint of absolute idealism in general and of Hegel and Whitehead’s relation to Hegel in particular.

The contemporary crisis of authority is in part to be understood as a reflection of certain philosophical doctrines of the recent past. The emotivist and the existentialist theories of value language, which remain most prevalent today, have contributed to a disposition to regard only the informed decision of the individual as authentic, and to construe moral judgments as without fault except when not fully informed or not one’s own. Where an individual differs from constituted authority, following either of these views, (...) there is no way in which it can be said that either is in error. The philosophical solution to the present crisis must lie in a realistic theory of empirical value knowledge. (shrink)

Ivor Leclerc, citing the following passage from Adventures of Ideas, interprets Whitehead’s metaphysics as an explication of the concept of an actual entity construed as a “complete fact”.

This is volume 14 of Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, edited by Jude P. Dougherty. The Preface begins.

A collaboration has been arranged for the preparation and publication in three dual-language volumes within the Hegel series presently in preparation by Fr. Frommanns Verlag of new critical editions of Hegel’s 1821 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, to be included in one volume with the up to now unpublished first form of his Encyclopedia, and Hegel’s 1824 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, in two volumes. The new German editions are to be prepared by Professor Dr. K.-H. Ilting. The (...) English translations are to be prepared by Professor Darrel E. Christensen. The anticipation is that the first of these editions will appear some time in 1973. (shrink)