A linear order is -decidable if its universe is and the relations defined by formulas are uniformly computable. This means that there is a computable procedure which, when applied to a formula and a sequence of elements of the linear order, will determine whether or not is true in the structure. A linear order is decidable if the relations defined by all formulas are uniformly computable. These definitions suggest two questions. Are there, for each , -decidable linear orders that are (...) not -decidable? Are there linear orders that are -decidable for all but not decidable? The former was answered in the positive by Moses in 1993. Here we answer the latter, also positively. (shrink)

Afro-cultural research ethics is in a nascent phase within the field of research ethics as a whole and requires more attention and in-depth articulation. With specific case studies, this vital volume provides unique perspectives on topics such as social autonomy vis-a-vis interests of individuals.

Clinical ethics consultation service remains undeveloped in developing countries. It is recognised that its introduction poses challenges. Malaysia, a multicultural society with diverse religions, values and perceptions further complicate the introduction of formal clinical ethics consultation service. Clinicians attending a national congress workshop completed a Strengths–Weaknesses–Opportunities–Threats analysis. The aim was to gain insight into clinician’s expectations and promote initiatives leading to the introduction of clinical ethics consultation service. Clinicians agree that clinical ethics consultation service can improve quality of care, reduce (...) healthcare costs and advocate for patients and providers. The analysis highlighted constraints in sufficient critical mass of relevant expertise and restricted opportunities for training. The opportunities lie in education, curriculum development and availability of dedicated proponents. Cultural barriers, limited resources, lack of awareness, differenc... (shrink)

ABSTRACT A commitment to receive input from stakeholders is often obligatory in the crafting of environmental policies. This requirement is presumed to satisfy certain conditions of democracy. In this article, by drawing from pragmatism, we examine the logic of participation and prerequisites of the meaningful game of asking for and giving reasons. We elaborate the nature and significance of three components—the game, the pleadings, and the reasons. We conclude by offering the conditions under which the stakeholder game might be considered (...) legitimate. (shrink)

Procedures were designed to test for the effects of working-memory training on children at risk of fluency difficulty that apply to English and to many of the languages spoken by children with English as an Additional Language (EAL) in UK schools. Working-memory training should: (1) improve speech fluency in high-risk children; (2) enhance non-word repetition (NWR) (phonological) skills for all children; (3) not affect word-finding abilities. Children starting general education (N = 232) were screened to identify those at risk of (...) fluency difficulty. Children were selected who were at high-risk (12), or low-risk (27) of fluency difficulty. For the low-risk children 10 received, and 17 did not receive, the working-memory training. All children in the treatment groups received working-memory training over a 2-week period. For the high-risk group, fluency improved and lasted for at least a week after the end of the study. Phonological skills improved in this group and in the low-risk group who received the training and the improvements continued for at least a week. The low-risk group who did not receive working-memory training showed no improvements, and no group improved word-finding ability. (shrink)

White on White/Black on Black is a unique contribution to the philosophy of race. The text explores how 14 philosophers, 7 white and 7 black, philosophically understand the dynamics of the process of racialization.

Edible insects are a potentially less burdensome source of proteins on the environment than livestock for a majority of rural consumers. Hence, edible insects are a timely idea to address the challenges of the supply side to sustainably meet an increasing demand for food. The objective of this paper is twofold. The first is to identify and compare rural-households’ intentions to consume insect-based foods among households drawn from two regions in Kenya—one where consumption of insects is common and the other (...) where the practice is uncommon. The second is to explore consumers’ trust in sources of information regarding quality and appropriateness of food items. The study employed an extended theory of planned behaviour and involved 432 participants. Results indicate that rural households have positive intentions to consume insect-based foods and those intentions are higher for individuals who are more familiar with the practice. Results also show that information sources from industry are more trusted than those from the media. Further, the study revealed that control variables such as perceived availability of insect-based foods and their level of fit with the culinary practices have a higher influence on consumption intentions than general attitudes. In addition, age of the respondent, gender, household size and level of formal education, significantly influence the consumption intentions. The study discusses the implications of these findings in the development of sustainable agri-food systems. (shrink)

Religious and Ethical Perspectives on Global Migration examines the complicated social ethics of migration in today's world. Editors Elizabeth W. Collier and Charles R. Strain bring the perspectives of an international group of scholars toward a theory of justice and ethical understanding for the nearly two hundred million migrants who have left their homes seeking asylum from political persecution, greater freedom and safety, economic opportunity, or reunion with family members.

This paper examines three popular and important books on spirituality in business: Mitroff and Denton's A Spiritual Audit of Corporte America, Nash and McLennan's Church on Sunday, Work on Monday, and Lerner's Spirit Matters. Interestingly, none of these books can find satisfactory examples of legitimate spirituality in business. This paper suggests that one reason these authors can not find acceptable models of spirituality in business is that they are all employing an unnecessarily restrictive definition of spirituality. The paper concludes by (...) suggesting that a definition of spirituality based on John Dewey's pragmatist philosophy is more appropriate for today's businesses. (shrink)

This review is focused on recent advances in our understanding of the development of coordinated cell polarity, through experiments on the Drosophila compound eye. Each eye facet (or “ommatidium”) contains a set of eight photoreceptor cells, placed so that their rhabdomeres form an asymmetric trapezoid. The array of ommatidia is organized so that these trapezoids are aligned in two mirror-image fields, dorsal and ventral to the eye midline (or “equator”). The development of this pattern depends on two systems of positional (...) information that inform the cluster of cells that will form an ommatidium of anterior/posterior (a/p) and dorsal/ventral (d/v) direction. The former (a/p) is encoded by a progressive wave of development (the morphogenetic furrow). The latter (d/v) involves molecules known to act in tissue polarity in other organs and organisms. Our understanding of the function of these molecules rests not only on their mutant phenotypes, biochemistry, and expression patterns, but also on the spatial effects when mutant patches of cells are made (genetic mosaics). BioEssays 21:275–285, 1999. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

In this essay, Russell G. Moses argues that Charles S. Peirce’s article “Evolutionary Love” establishes a general normative framework for a logic of evolutionary, progressive imagination that can be used to elucidate an evolutionary continuity between the normative works of Jane Addams, John Dewey, and Alain Locke. This exercise contributes to an understanding of pragmatism as a philosophy that seizes insights from evolution in order to normatively reconstruct dynamic meanings of truth, reality, ethics, politics, and art. In a (...) dynamic model of progressive evolution — one homologous to the Golden Rule of “love your neighbor” — we find a normative cosmology that animates the moral imagination of philosophy toward what Addams called “democracy and social ethics.” Moses concludes that in the Peircean model, together with subsequent developments, we may ultimately apprehend that evolution suggests a general form of development that may be hypothesized as a worthy normative guide for universal progressive education. (shrink)

Alain Locke makes epochal contributions to a philosophy of progressive democracy when he presents the human community as irreducibly arranged in "psychological tribes" or groups, which, in turn, require principles of intergroup relations. Thus, Locke develops a concept of functional reciprocity that allows us to evaluate group dynamics as more or less democratic. This is an advance on classic liberal theory of democracy found in the work of John Locke, for whom democracy is an arrangement between individuals who may (...) establish democracy through a principle of toleration. (shrink)

After Enlightenment: Hamann as Post-Secular Visionary is a comprehensive introduction to the life and works of eighteenth-century German philosopher, J. G. Hamann, the founding father of what has come to be known as Radical Orthodoxy. Provides a long-overdue, comprehensive introduction to Haman's fascinating life and controversial works, including his role as a friend and critic of Kant and some of the most renowned German intellectuals of the age Features substantial new translations of the most important passages from across Hamann's writings, (...) some of which have never been translated into English Examines Hamann's highly original views on a range of topics, including faith, reason, revelation, Christianity, biblical exegesis, Socrates, theological aesthetics, language, sexuality, religion, politics, and the relationship between Judaism and Christianity Presents Hamann as the 'founding father' of a distinctly post-modern, post-secular theology and, as such, as an alternative to the 'postmodern triumvirate' of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida Considers Hamann's work as a touchtone of modern Jewish-Christian dialogue, in view of debates with his friend Moses Mendelssohn Explores Hamann's role as the visionary founder of a 'metacritical' movement that radically calls into question the basic principles of modern secular reason, and thus reprises the debate between those defending Hamann's views and those labeling him the bête noir of the Enlightenment. (shrink)

Epistemic logic has grown from its philosophical beginnings to find diverse applications in computer science, and as a means of reasoning about the knowledge and belief of agents. This book provides a broad introduction to the subject, along with many exercises and their solutions. The authors begin by presenting the necessary apparatus from mathematics and logic, including Kripke semantics and the well-known modal logics K, T, S4 and S5. Then they turn to applications in the context of distributed systems and (...) artificial intelligence. These include the notions of common knowledge, distributed knowledge, explicit and implicit belief, the interplays between knowledge and time, and knowledge and action, as well as a graded (or numerical) variant of the epistemic operators. The authors also discuss extensively the problem of logical omniscience. They cover Halpern & Moses' theory of honest formulas, and they make a digression into the realm of nonmonotonic reasoning and preferential entailment. They discuss Moore's autoepistemic logic, together with Levesque's related logic of "all I know". Furthermore, they show how one can base default and counterfactual reasoning on epistemic logic. Graduate students in philosophy or in computer science, especially those with an interest in AI, will find this book useful. (shrink)

The smallest ambition of this essay is to demonstrate that Rider, the central character in William Faulkner’s short story “Pantaloon in Black,” cannot be understood. This may be of some interest to Faulkner specialists. But the fact that he cannot be understood has ramifications, because “Pantaloon in Black,” seems to be the anomaly of the book Go Down, Moses, which is either a collection of stories or a novel, depending on the success one has in integrating “Pantaloon in Black” (...) into it. If Rider cannot be understood, then Go Down, Moses has an enigma at the center of its mysteries, around which it cannot be made to cohere.More important to nonspecialists is the question of why Rider cannot be understood, and, consequently, why Go Down, Moses disintegrates. To answer this I want to perform the logical operation modus tollens on Stanley Fish’s idea that interpretations are produced by interpretive communities: if interpretations fail, then it must be because interpretive communities fail. Of course, Fish everywhere argues that interpretations must always, on the contrary, succeed; the lesson of Is There a Text in This Class? is that interpretive communities produce texts inexorably and inevitably in their own image. But Fish’s idea of an interpretive community is something like the Modern Language Association, or the set of all English professors, or the Yale school—bigger or smaller machines perfectly programmed for producing texts out of theoretical presuppositions. What is, however, even English professors are members of communities that fit the definition of an interpretive community, by virtue of the fact that they speak through our readings, but which are not chiefly engaged in the manufacture of masterful criticism? Worse: what if these communities speak a different language from those to which we professionally belong? Worse yet: what is they are disintegrating even as the MLA, or the Yale school, endures, or prevails?The point is not that Fish is wrong; it is that he has oversimplified his sense of a text by reducing it to the instrument of communication used by professor speaking to other professors. But in “Pantaloon in Black,” Faulkner has formed a text in the image of a Southern Negro and invited us to join an interpretive community on the model of Yoknapatawpha County. Insofar as we take up that invitation, we fail to understand his story; insofar as we reject it, we also fail to understand his story. The paradox is the result of our being forced to join a community which does not cohere; to the degree that that community fails to cohere, so does our reading. What Faulkner says to Fish is that the American belief in the power of interpretive communities is akin to an idealist’s dream of an integrated South. John Limon is assistant professor of English at Williams College. He is currently working on a book, Half-Sight of Science, on the history of the American novel in relation to the history of science and science philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Machiavelli’s Moses and Renaissance PoliticsJohn H. GeerkenWithin the almost Dantesque array of humanity that populates the pages of Machiavelli’s canon, Moses occupies a special place. He first appears in chapter six of The Prince concerning those who acquire new princedoms by dint of their own virtù and military self-sufficiency. He last appears in the Discourses as one who was forced to kill a host of envious opponents. (...) There is some irony in these representations: in The Prince, with its tyrannical overtones, Moses appears as God’s friend; but in the Discourses, with its republican associations, Moses is an executioner. Machiavelli captures some of the ambiguity that attends on Moses when he declares that “Moses should not be discussed, since he was a mere executor of things laid down for him by God, nevertheless he ought to be exalted, if only for the grace that made him worthy to speak with God.” 1 Are we to exalt Moses, but not discuss him? Then, too, why bother with either God or Moses? Why complicate the search for the effectual truth of things by invoking metaphysical elements or inimitable biblical figures? How are we to understand these references? Are these ironic as sometimes asserted?But what are the heuristic possibilities in a non-ironic approach? If Moses had so great a teacher, what was his curriculum? Since no other figure in the Machiavellian census is so associated with slavery, was Moses a vehicle for making an assertion about slavery and liberation, or about politics and religion, or about the morality of politics? Then, too, how did Machiavelli’s Moses compare to the Moses who was so prominent in Renaissance iconology? These are the questions which this study addresses.I. Of the several references to Moses, the most telling is the last one in the Discourses. Machiavelli writes: “He who reads the Bible intelligently [sensata-mente] [End Page 579] sees that if Moses was to put his laws and regulations into effect, he was forced to kill countless men who, moved by nothing else than envy, were opposed to his plans.” 2A great deal is compressed into this passage: the confrontation of Moses’ virtù with the necessity imposed by his opposition, the need to use violent means to achieve lawful ends, and the implied sanction of sacred Scripture. But the Bible, Machiavelli asserts pointedly, must be read intelligently—presumably not in a devotional, liturgical, or exegetical manner, but in effect politically. Machiavelli wrote that he himself read in order to learn the reasons for human actions. 3 Indeed, one of his reasons for writing history was to convey his conviction that “[i]f any reading is useful to citizens who govern republics, it is that which shows the causes of the hatreds and factional struggles within the city, in order that such citizens having grown wise through the sufferings of others, can keep themselves united.” 4In a word reading can be political. References to biblical figures in his works indicate that for Machiavelli the Bible was not exempt from a political reading; it, too, could yield the reasons for human actions and the causes of hatred and factionalism. 5 We can assume, therefore, that he read the Book of Exodus with these concerns in mind even as he invited his own readers to read the Bible. What, therefore, can the Book of Exodus show us?II. The Book of Exodus records at least forty-three conversations between God and Moses, thirty-three of which were initiated by God in order to instruct, command, announce, predict, threaten, remind, warn, and legislate. It records God’s determination to rescue his convenanted people despite pharaoh’s sustained resistance. 6 It records as well the instructional conversations dealing with the plagues, the sacrifices, the Passover, the plundering of Egypt, the escape routes and the encampments. 7 And of course there is the account of the crossing of the Red Sea which no Egyptian pursuer survived. 8Noteworthy, too, is the fact that, for his part, Moses initiated ten conversations with God, declaring his personal doubts and inadequacies, offering his excuses, complaining about the hardships of his mission, reporting on the grumbling... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Papirius and the Chickens, or Machiavelli on the Necessity of Interpreting ReligionJohn M. Najemy*No aspect of Machiavelli’s thought elicits a wider range of interpretations than religion, and one may wonder why his utterances on this subject appear to move in so many different directions and cause his readers to see such different things. One reason is of course his famous challenge to conventional piety in the advice to princes (...) (in chapter 18 of The Prince) that, while it is important to appear to be “all compassion, faith, integrity, humanity, and religione, and there is nothing more necessary for a prince than to appear to have the last of these,” these “qualities” can actually be “damaging” if a prince insists on observing them at all times. For it is sometimes necessary to act “against faith, against charity, against humanity, and against religione.” 1 Machiavelli probably never wrote more famous or infamous words than these, even though they express an obvious, and hardly original, truth about all politics. But the world of the later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century reformations and religious absolutisms could not tolerate such honesty, and Machiavelli’s reputation was quickly tarred with accusations of devilish immorality by the very societies that thought it was godly to burn heretics. On the issue of religion Machiavelli became, and to some extent remains, a convenient scapegoat often blamed for the decline of religion in the modern world, all of which has no doubt intensified the polemical and ideological nature of the debates surrounding his views of religion in general and Christianity in particular. [End Page 659]The polar positions in the interpretation of Machiavelli’s ideas about religion are represented by Leo Strauss and Sebastian de Grazia. For Strauss, Machiavelli was a “teacher of evil,” a “blasphemer,” and a purveyor of lessons of a “diabolical” and “soulless character” whose purpose was to sabotage the heritage of thought and morality inherited from both Christianity and Greek philosophy. 2 De Grazia, by contrast, has recently given us a Machiavelli who “discourses about God always in the conventional reverent attitude,” who “never questions that there is good and evil,” and who, “by associating virtuous political action with grace and glory... argues that through this kind of active and political virtue men conform to God’s desire.” “Behind Niccolò’s insistence on political action,” says de Grazia, “stands God. He grants His grace when it is earned—in political coin.” 3 Part of the fascination of Machiavelli scholarship is the mystery of how this most outspoken and direct of political thinkers—a writer who pulled no punches and minced no words—could be the common referent of such wildly different readings. But it is equally curious to observe how uncannily these extreme positions mirror each other. Both give us true believers, one in the Word, the other in the subversion of the Word; and in both cases a believer who is always of a piece, true to himself, and possessed of an unshakeable commitment—whether positive or negative—toward the transcendent truth of Christianity. In short, for all the obvious differences, the similarities between Strauss’s “diabolical” Machiavelli and de Grazia’s reverent “friend of God” remind one of the old myth that devils are after all only fallen angels.The papers in this forum should certainly remove any doubt about the importance of religion in Machiavelli’s thought. They remind us of the prominence of religious language and examples in Machiavelli’s texts: his call for the “redemption” of Italy in the last chapter of The Prince; the esteem in which he holds the heads and founders of religions, whom he declares, in Discourses 1.10, to be the most praised of all famous men; the crucial appeal to the figure of Moses as the prototype of both founders of states and liberators of enslaved peoples; the central role that Machiavelli attributes to religion among the factors responsible for Rome’s power, unity, and political success; and his provocative critique of Christianity, which leads him, in a number of places, to blame the Christian faith for the relative weakness of both modern states and the modern ethic of citizenship. 4 The authors... (shrink)

Common names, for Mill, have both connotation and denotation. Thus ‘horse’ connotes certain properties, and the name ‘horse’ denotes the things that have those properties. By contrast, proper names have no connotations; they do not denote in virtue of the possession of certain properties by their denotations, but so to speak, directly. Thus Socrates received his name by being dubbed ‘Socrates’; and he might just as well have been given any other name. This contrast is misleading. After all, we might (...) have named horses by another name, too; e.g., ‘cow’ or ‘Pferd’. However, once the convention by which they are called ‘horses’ is established, it is not correct to call them ‘cows’. A horse is not a cow. Just so Socrates could have been named ‘Plato’ or ‘Moses’, but once he has been named ‘Socrates’, it is just as wrong to call him ‘Plato’ as it is to call a horse a ‘cow’. What is correctly called a ‘horse’ is so called in virtue of its possession of certain properties, just as what is called ‘Socrates’ is so called in virtue of his possession of the requisite properties. From this point of view, proper names are words like any others. (Leonard Linsky, Oblique Contexts, University of Chicago Press 1983, pp. 16f.). (shrink)

Common names, for Mill, have both connotation and denotation. Thus ‘horse’ connotes certain properties, and the name ‘horse’ denotes the things that have those properties. By contrast, proper names have no connotations; they do not denote in virtue of the possession of certain properties by their denotations, but so to speak, directly. Thus Socrates received his name by being dubbed ‘Socrates’; and he might just as well have been given any other name.This contrast is misleading. After all, we might have (...) named horses by another name, too; e.g., ‘cow’ or ‘Pferd’. However, once the convention by which they are called ‘horses’ is established, it is not correct to call them ‘cows’. A horse is not a cow. Just so Socrates could have been named ‘Plato’ or ‘Moses’, but once he has been named ‘Socrates’, it is just as wrong to call him ‘Plato’ as it is to call a horse a ‘cow’. What is correctly called a ‘horse’ is so called in virtue of its possession of certain properties, just as what is called ‘Socrates’ is so called in virtue of his possession of the requisite properties. From this point of view, proper names are words like any others. (shrink)

Philo's attitude to the mythologizing activities of the Greeks is well known. In many passages he contrasts the practices of Greek writers unfavourably with that of Moses. In one passage , for example, he condemns those who see the Tower of Babel story asa reflection of that of Otus and Ephialtes' assault on Olympus; the truth, he asserts, is quite the contrary — the Greeks have borrowed the story from Moses. On the other hand, Philo is himself prepared (...) on occasion to allegorize figures of Greek mythology, though never explicitly on a subject of central doctrinal importance. For instance, he appears to be acquainted with the allegorization of various parts of the Odyssey. In his treatise On Mating with the Preliminary Studies , he makes use of the allegorization of the Suitors' mating with the handmaidens because they cannot gain Penelope, first employed, it seems, by the Cynic Bion of Borysthenes, but no doubt of wide currency by Philo's time, as a figure of those who cannot attain to Philosophy consoling themselves with ta enkyklia . Again, the use here and there in his writings of compounds of the verb νήχω, ‘swim’, particularly νανήχομαι in connection with descriptions of our struggle through the storms and shipwreck of material existence, suggests his acquaintance with the allegorizing of Odysseus' shipwreck off Phaeacia in Odyssey V, where Homer employs this verb repeatedly. Other, more specificallegories include Scylla as ροσύνη a ‘deathless evil’ , at Det. 178; Odysseus' escape from Charybdis at Somn. 2. 70, to symbolize our escape from the cares of mortal existence; and Castor and Pollux at Somn. 1.150, as an image of the life of the askêtês or prokoptôn. (shrink)

Philo's attitude to the mythologizing activities of the Greeks is well known. In many passages he contrasts the practices of Greek writers unfavourably with that of Moses. In one passage, for example, he condemns those who see the Tower of Babel story asa reflection of that of Otus and Ephialtes' assault on Olympus; the truth, he asserts, is quite the contrary — the Greeks have borrowed the story from Moses. On the other hand, Philo is himself prepared on (...) occasion to allegorize figures of Greek mythology, though never explicitly on a subject of central doctrinal importance. For instance, he appears to be acquainted with the allegorization of various parts of the Odyssey. In his treatise On Mating with the Preliminary Studies, he makes use of the allegorization of the Suitors' mating with the handmaidens because they cannot gain Penelope, first employed, it seems, by the Cynic Bion of Borysthenes, but no doubt of wide currency by Philo's time, as a figure of those who cannot attain to Philosophy consoling themselves with ta enkyklia. Again, the use here and there in his writings of compounds of the verb νήχω, ‘swim’, particularly νανήχομαι in connection with descriptions of our struggle through the storms and shipwreck of material existence, suggests his acquaintance with the allegorizing of Odysseus' shipwreck off Phaeacia in Odyssey V, where Homer employs this verb repeatedly. Other, more specificallegories include Scylla as ροσύνη a ‘deathless evil’, at Det. 178; Odysseus' escape from Charybdis at Somn. 2. 70, to symbolize our escape from the cares of mortal existence; and Castor and Pollux at Somn. 1.150, as an image of the life of the askêtês or prokoptôn. (shrink)

Recent documents from the Jewish-Catholic dialogue have raised the question about the relation of the two covenants, their salvific efficacy, and their continuing validity. II Cor. 3, a text renowned for its difficulties, proposes an analogy of glory which allows the old covenant to be subsumed into the new. The new covenant's transcendence grounds the demand made upon Jews to remove the veil and turn with Moses to Christ. Yet the process of inoperancy attendant upon the old covenant, the (...) reason for Moses' veiling, does not abolish it immediately; its operativeness remains within the new. Thus the Mosaic covenant, understood from the plenitude of Christ, serves to point prophetically to the new covenant and furnishes rules of conduct for Christians. Glory does not just characterize the new covenant externally; instead, because the new covenant is written on the hearts of believers, it effects a transformation of believers into Christ that is mediated by His historical appearance and the Eucharist. (shrink)

Other Voices: Readings in Spanish Philosophy represents high points of nearly two millennia of Spanish philosophy, from first-century thinkers in Roman Hispania to those of the twentieth century. John R. Welch has selected, and in several cases translated, excerpts from the works of thirteen philosophers: Seneca, Quintilian, Isidore of Seville, Ibn Rushd (Averroës), Moses Maimonides, Ramón Llull, Juan Luis Vives, Francisco de Vitoria, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Francisco Suárez, Benito Jerónimo Feijóo, Miguel de Unamuno, and José Ortega y (...) Gasset. Welch provides a brief introduction to each historical period or philosophical movement represented and a biographical introduction to each philosopher. Of special interest are the selection from Feijóo’s “A Defense of Women” (an attack on misogyny), which has not been translated into English since the eighteenth century; the arguments on the justification of war by Vitoria and Las Casas (in the context of the Spanish conquest); and Ortega's defense of a specific form of reason: historical reason. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Arthur O. Lovejoy and the Challenge of Intellectual HistoryJohn Patrick DigginsMen and ideas advance by parricide, by which the children kill, if not their fathers, at least the beliefs of their fathers, and arrive at new beliefs.Sir Isaiah Berlin1I was supposed to wind up the study of mine, and become the Lovejoy of my generation—that's the silly talk of scholarly people.Saul Bellow2To become "the Lovejoy," with the implication that (...) each generation could only have one, was the ambition of Moses Herzog in Saul Bellow's novel, written a few years after he had won the Nobel Award for literature. Herzog presents the life of a professor who has as many sexual escapades and as much personal angst as he has scholarly interests, too unfocused to be another Lovejoy. Bellow's novel is full of letters to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and other modernist minds who brought Western intellectual life to a standstill, posing a lasting question mark about the possibilities of knowledge. Bellow taught in the program of the Committee on Social Thought at [End Page 181] the University of Chicago. His colleague and close friend Allan Bloom also taught in that program. But when Bloom wrote the best seller, The Closing of the American Mind, he cited Nietzsche and Heidegger as part of the "German disease" that did so much to subvert academic thought, supposedly turning students into zombies, walking air heads responding only to vacuous visual stimuli and mind-numbing music, with Rock n' Roll blasting through a Walkman and having the effect of a "masturbational fantasy."3While Bellow's epistolary novel interrogated modernist thinkers, Bloom's popular tract of the times cited many classical thinkers as a countervoice to the modernists—Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Hobbes, Kant, Lessing, Schiller, Locke, and Rousseau. Such minds also figured prominently in the works of Arthur O. Lovejoy. But the recitation of such names leaves the impression that Lovejoy concerned himself only with the main currents of European intellectual history. On the contrary, two of his most important and often neglected books are The Thirteen Pragmatisms and Reflections on Human Nature.4 There one finds profound meditations on two vital episodes in the history of ideas in America: the Enlightenment and the philosophy of pragmatism. Perry Miller, arguably America's greatest intellectual historian, skipped over the Enlightenment as he proceeded to study the Puritans and then the transcendentalists, and he never seemed to have much interest in the pragmatists.5 But what Lovejoy had to write on the Enlightenment and pragmatism is richly ironic.The pragmatists claimed to have liberated modern thought from the easy assumptions of the "Age of Reason," and today's poststructuralists charge that eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers deceived themselves in looking to the advent of knowledge as an answer to the presence of power. Lovejoy's books offer a different take entirely, making us aware that it is the modernist thinkers who may be deceiving themselves with the dubious promises of pragmatism and the arrogant conceits of poststructuralism and deconstruction, whose proponents claim to be the first "masters [End Page 182] of suspicion." In many of Lovejoy's works, nothing is resolved and everything is left suspended in a state of honest suspicion.Lovejoy was comfortable with contradiction, and hence more in tune with Augustine, who looked to the depths of human consciousness for spiritual knowledge, than with Aquinas, who believed evidence for God and human freedom could be found in reason alone. Nowhere is Lovejoy's affinity for the emotions of consciousness better seen than in his several essays on romanticism, both English, French, German, and even its origins in Chinese aesthetics and Confucian ethics. It was not reason and the notion of order and regulation that appealed to Lovejoy but the spontaneous promptings of nature springing forth without reflection or design. He delighted in quoting Voltaire against classicists and scholastics. "Worship God and practice justice—this is the sole religion of the Chinese literati.... O Thomas Aquinas, Scotus, Bonaventure, Francis, Dominic, Luther, Calvin, canons of Westminister, have you anything better? For four thousand years this religion, so simple and so noble, has endured in... (shrink)

We must agree, I think, with Frank Ebersole that there is something preposterous in supposing that the God of religious belief, the God who handed down tablets to Moses on Mt. Sinai, etc., should be proven to exist by the ontological argument. Indeed, when we place the one, the ontological argument, by the side of the other, the God of religious belief, there seems hardly to be any connection between them. But if we agree to this perception of things, (...) what sense can we make of the ontological argument, for example, the “pull” that it sometimes exerts on us? (shrink)

We present interpretation‐based processing—a theory of sentence processing that builds a syntactic and a semantic representation for a sentence and assigns an interpretation to the sentence as soon as possible. That interpretation can further participate in comprehension and in lexical processing and is vital for relating the sentence to the prior discourse. Our theory offers a unified account of the processing of literal sentences, metaphoric sentences, and sentences containing semantic illusions. It also explains how text can prime lexical access. We (...) show that word literality is a matter of degree and that the speed and quality of comprehension depend both on how similar words are to their antecedents in the preceding text and how salient the sentence is with respect to the preceding text. Interpretation‐based processing also reconciles superficially contradictory findings about the difference in processing times for metaphors and literals. The theory has been implemented in ACT‐R [Anderson and Lebiere, The Atomic Components of Thought, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, Mahwah, NJ, 1998]. (shrink)

Reading Vaught’s book is rather like being captivated on a train with a detective novel left by a previous passenger: one reads along with delight, juggling clues and suspicions, only to find that the last forty-seven pages are missing. The four chapters cover Moby Dick; Old Testament patriarchs from Abraham to Moses; Plato’s Euthyphro; critique of Hegel’s attempts to accommodate Wholeness under a Complete System, transcending openness and pictorial language. The first three chapters offer much delightful and evocative reading. (...) But the book’s most crucial terms—fragmentation, wholeness, completeness, and directionality—are initially unclear and not duly demystified by the end. The effect is occasionally reminiscent of some easier passages in Joyce’s Ulysses, where the reader or rider jogs happily along, only to be thrown by a word from a seemingly private language. (shrink)