The popular belief that religion is the same everywhere or that all religions are ‘at bottom’ identical in essentials is a widespread falsehood that is saved from being completely worthless by the fact that religion does exhibit a universal or common structure wherever it appears. This structure is intimately related to the structure of human life in the world. The enduring pattern that enables us to understand religions widely separated in both time and space depends largely on the fact that (...) man and the process of human life in the world have their own structures which remain, despite the undeniable variety introduced by vast differences of culture, ethnic features, geographical location, climate etc. Structure means pattern or form; it is reality significantly organised. It can be grasped as that which endures above and beyond changing historical details. Because human life has a structure, we are able to understand the wrath of Achilles or sympathise with the love of Abélard for Héloïse although we are separated from both by centuries of time. (shrink)

Despite the title, I do not intend to launch another expedition into the domain of epistemology. I wish instead to call attention to some problems which have arisen for philosophical theologians and philosophers of religion, as a result of two facts about the development of modern philosophy and its bearing on the analysis and interpretation of religious insight. Following these considerations, I shall propose in brief compass a programme for the future which I believe will prove fruitful for the philosophical (...) treatment of religious concerns. (shrink)

In these previously uncollected essays, Smith argues that American philosophers like Peirce, James, Royce, and Dewey have forged a unique philosophical tradition—one that is rich and complex enough to represent a genuine alternative to the analytic, phenomenological, and hermeneutical traditions which have originated in Britain or Europe. "In my judgment, John Smith has no equal today in combining two scholarly qualities: the analysis of philosophical texts with penetration and rigor, and the discernment of what it is in these texts (...) that matters. These qualities are in evidence throughout the essays in _America's Philosophical Vision._ Whether he is evaluating Rorty's view of Dewey; the pragmatic theory of experience and truth; theories of freedom, creativity, and the self; Royce's conception of community; or synoptic philosophic visions, Smith always succeeds in uniting a comprehensive understanding of philosophic writings with a sure grasp of their import for human culture and aspiration. It is a great benefit to students of American thought that these papers have now been collected into one volume."—James Gouinlock, Emory University. (shrink)

John E. Smith; XI—Radical Empiricism, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 65, Issue 1, 1 June 1965, Pages 205–218, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotel.

This review of Martin Jay’s recent published collection of essays examines his ongoing rethinking, supplementation, and revision of central themes—the negative and positive dialectics of historical totalization, the varieties and uses of conceptions of experience, the nature of visual cultures and scopic regimes, and the ambiguities of truth-construction in the public realm—that have been the focus of his major works since the 1970s. It argues that his more recent work indicates a gradual shift toward an affirmation of the kinds of (...) paratactic and deconstructive thinking of Adorno and Derrida as models for producing appropriate forms of historical consciousness and historical critique in the present, and it raises the question of how the issues of historical truth-telling, consensual collective identity, ethical action, and the cultural role of the critical intellectual are reformulated in this process. (shrink)

In this article, both Anaxagoras' theory of multiple worlds and the principles of his theory of matter are examined. It is argued that the five principles, which are set out explicitly in the extant fragments, (No Becoming, Indefinite Types, Universal Mixture, Predominance, and Infinite Divisibility) form a consistent set. Further, it is argued that the principle of Homoeomereity, which Anaxagoras attributes to Anaxagoras, is consistent with Anaxagoras' other principles and is likely to be a genuine principle of Anaxagoras' physics.

Aristotle thinks that in order to remember, one must be cognizant of aphantasmaused as a copy of that of which it is a phantasma,and one must be cognizant of the time at which the original experience occurred. In De Memoria1, he uses the first half,, of this schematic account in order to explain certain kinds of mis-rememberings. For instance, he says that mad people sometimes conjure up fantastic images and take them to be memories of past experience; such episodes are (...) mis-remembering, because these people use that which is not a copy as if it were a copy. In De Memoria2, Aristotle returns to the topic of mis-remembering and here he uses the second half,, of his schematic account, together with the first, in order to explain additional sorts of mistakes. He claims that we sometimes recall the image of an event and properly use it as a copy, but we get the time wrong, and thus we fail to remember; further, he claims that we sometimes get the time right, but fail to use an image as a copy of the events which occurred during that time. In each case we fail to remember; for in order to remember we must both use an appropriate copy as a copy and accurately cognize the time. (shrink)

This book, first published in 1990, takes a critical look at the major assumptions which support critical thinking programs and discovers many unresolved questions which threaten their viability. John McPeck argues that some of these assumptions are incoherent or run counter to common sense, while others are unsupported by the available empirical evidence. This title will be of interest to students of the philosophy of education.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.