v. 1. De Harvard à la Guerre de l'indépendance américaine (1756-1782) -- v. 2. De la Constitution fédérale à la retraite (1786-1816).

Adam Smith and the philosophy of anti-history, by J. Weiss.--Towards a dissolution of the ontological argument, by A. C. Danto.--Romanticism, historicism, realism: toward a period concept for early 19th century intellectual history, by H. V. White.--History and humanity: the Proudhonian vision, by A. Noland.--Hintze and the legacy of Ranke, by M. Covensky.--Objections to metaphysics, by J. Cobitz.--The term expressionism in the visual arts, by V. H. Miesel.--Karl Löwith's anti-historicism, by B. Riesterer.--Antonio Gramsci; Marxism and the Italian intellectual tradition, by J. (...) Cammett.--Traditional Chinese historiography and local histories, by E. H. Pritchard.--From principle to principal: restoration and emperorship in Japan, by H. D. Harootunian.--National development and the evolution of the legal-rational bureaucracy: the prefectural governor in Japan, 1868-1945, by B. Silberman. (shrink)

In this brief, we argue that there is a diversity of ways in which humans (Homo sapiens) are ‘persons’ and there are no non-arbitrary conceptions of ‘personhood’ that can include all humans and exclude all nonhuman animals. To do so we describe and assess the four most prominent conceptions of ‘personhood’ that can be found in the rulings concerning Kiko and Tommy, with particular focus on the most recent decision, Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc v Lavery.

Imposing pure risks—risks that do not materialise into harm—is sometimes wrong. The Harm Account explains this wrongness by claiming that pure risks are harms. By contrast, The Autonomy Account claims that pure risks impede autonomy. We develop two objections to these influential accounts. The Separation Objection proceeds from the observation that, if it is wrong to v then it is sometimes wrong to risk v‐ing. The intuitive plausibility of this claim does not depend on any account of the facts that (...) ground moral wrongness. This suggests a close relationship between the factors that make an act wrong and the factors that make risking that act wrong, which both accounts fail to recognise. The Determinism Objection holds that both accounts fail to explain the wrongness of pure risks in a deterministic world. We then develop an alternative—The Buck‐Passing Account—that withstands both objections. (shrink)

Part I Philosophic Traditions Introduction to Part I 3 1 Philosophy and the Afro-American Experience 7 CORNEL WEST 2 African-American Existential Philosophy 33 LEWIS R. GORDON 3 African-American Philosophy: A Caribbean Perspective 48 PAGET HENRY 4 Modernisms in Black 67 FRANK M. KIRKLAND 5 The Crisis of the Black Intellectual 87 HORTENSE J. SPILLERS Part II The Moral and Political Legacy of Slavery Introduction to Part II 107 6 Kant and Knowledge of Disappearing Expression 110 RONALD A. T. JUDY 7 (...) Social Contract Theory, Slavery, and the Antebellum Courts 125 ANITA L. ALLEN AND THADDEUS POPE 8 The Morality of Reparations II 134 BERNARD R. BOXILL Part III Africa and Diaspora Thought Introduction to Part III 151 9 “Afrocentricity‘: Critical Considerations 155 LUCIUS T. OUTLAW, JR. 10 African Retentions 168 TOMMY L. LOTT 11 African Philosophy at the Turn of the Century 190 ALBERT G. MOSLEY Part IV Gender, Race, and Racism Introduction to Part IV 199 12 Some Group Matters: Intersectionality, Situated Standpoints, and Black Feminist Thought 205 PATRICIA HILL COLLINS 13 Radicalizing Feminisms from “The Movement Era‘ 230 JOY A. JAMES 14 Philosophy and Racial Paradigms 239 NAOMI ZACK 15 Racial Classification and Public Policy 255 DAVID THEO GOLDBERG 16 White Supremacy 269 CHARLES W. MILLS Part V Legal and Social Philosophy Introduction to Part V 285 17 Self-Respect, Fairness, and Living Morally 293 LAURENCE M. THOMAS 18 The Legacy of Plessy v. Ferguson 306 MICHELE MOODY-ADAMS 19 Some Reflections on the Brown Decision and Its Aftermath 313 HOWARD McGARY 20 Contesting the Ambivalence and Hostility to Affirmative Action within the Black Community 324 LUKE C. HARRIS 21 Subsistence Welfare Benefits as Property Interests: Legal Theories and Moral Considerations 333 RUDOLPH V. VANTERPOOL 22 Racism and Health Care: A Medical Ethics Issue 349 ANNETTE DULA 23 Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition 360 ANGELA Y. DAVIS Part VI Aesthetic and Cultural Values Introduction to Part VI 373 24 The Harlem Renaissance and Philosophy 381 LEONARD HARRIS 25 Critical Theory, Aesthetics, and Black Modernity 386 LORENZO C. SIMPSON 26 Black Cinema and Aesthetics 399 CLYDE R. TAYLOR 27 Thanatic Pornography, Interracial Rape, and the Ku Klux Klan 407 T. DENEAN SHARPLEY-WHITING 28 Lynching and Burning Rituals in African-American Literature 413 TRUDIER HARRIS-LOPEZ 29 Rap as Art and Philosophy 419 RICHARD SHUSTERMAN 30 Microphone Commandos: Rap Music and Political Ideology 429 BILL E. LAWSON 31 Sports, Political Philosophy, and the African American 436 GERALD EARLY. (shrink)

The nature of representation is a central topic in philosophy. This is the first book to connect problems with understanding representational artifacts, like pictures, diagrams, and inscriptions, to the philosophies of science, mind, and art. Can images be a source of knowledge? Are images merely conventional signs, like words? What is the relationship between the observer and the observed? In this clear and stimulating introduction to the problem John V. Kulvicki explores these questions and more. He discusses: the nature (...) of pictorial experience and "seeing in" recognition, resemblance, pretense, and structural theories of depiction images as aids to scientific discovery and understanding mental imagery and the nature of perceptual content photographs as visual prostheses. In so doing he assesses central problems in the philosophy of images, such as how objects we make come to represent other things, and how we distinguish kinds of representation - pictures, diagrams, graphs - from one another. Essential reading for students and professional philosophers alike, the book also contains chapter summaries, annotated further reading, and a glossary. (shrink)

While historians of scientific method have recently called attention to the views of many of John Stuart Mill's contemporaries on the relation between probability and inductive inference, little if any note has been taken of Mill's own vigorous attack on the received "Laplacean" interpretation of probability in the first edition of the System of Logic. This paper examines the place of Mill's critique, both in the overall framework of his philosophy, and in the tradition of assessing the so-called "probability (...) of causes". It also offers an account of why, in later editions of the work, Mill appears to adopt a much more sympathetic stance toward the received view. (shrink)

This book is a philosophical examination of the main stages in our journey from hominid to human. It deals with the nature and origin of language, the self, self-consciousness, and the religious ideal of a return to Eden. It approaches these topics through a philosophical anthropology derived from the later writings of Wittgenstein. The result is an account of our place in nature consistent with both a hard-headed empiricism and a this-worldy but religiously significant mysticism.

John Kulvicki explores the many ways in which pictures can be meaningful, taking inspiration from the philosophy of language. Pictures are important parts of communicative acts. They express a variety of thoughts, and they are also representations. Kulvicki shows how the meanings of pictures let us put them to a wide range of communicative uses.

1. The early philosophy--language as picture -- 2. Logic and ontology -- 3. "My world and its value" -- 4. The later philosophy--views and reviews -- 5. Method and essense -- 6. Meaning -- 7. Criteria -- 8. Knowing, naming, certainty, and idealism -- 9. The private language argument -- 10. Logical necessity and rules -- 11. Philosophy of mathematics -- 12. Persons -- 13. Psychology and conceptual relativity -- 14. Aesthetics, ethics, and religion -- 15. Elective affinities.

A follow up to 'The Easter God'. John V. Taylor sets out God's incarnation in Jesus and his interaction with the world.

1. The early philosophy--language as picture -- 2. Logic and ontology -- 3. "My world and its value" -- 4. The later philosophy--views and reviews -- 5. Method and essense -- 6. Meaning -- 7. Criteria -- 8. Knowing, naming, certainty, and idealism -- 9. The private language argument -- 10. Logical necessity and rules -- 11. Philosophy of mathematics -- 12. Persons -- 13. Psychology and conceptual relativity -- 14. Aesthetics, ethics, and religion -- 15. Elective affinities.

The project of constructing a logic of scientific inference on the basis of mathematical probability theory was first undertaken in a systematic way by the mid-nineteenth-century British logicians Augustus De Morgan, George Boole and William Stanley Jevons. This paper sketches the origins and motivation of that effort, the emergence of the inverse probability (IP) model of theory assessment, and the vicissitudes which that model suffered at the hands of its critics. Particular emphasis is given to the influence which competing interpretations (...) of probability had on the project, and to the role of the 'lottery' or 'ballot box' metaphor in the philosophical imagination of the proponents of the IP model. (shrink)

Saul Kripke, among others, reads Wittgenstein’s private-language argument as an inference from the idea of rule following: The concept of a private language is inconsistent, because using language entails following rules, and following rules entails being a member of a community. Kripke expresses the key exegetical claim underlying that reading as follows.

This paper seeks to highlight the importance of spatial cognition in Bergson’s Données immédiates by engaging with Robert Watt’s reconstruction of Bergson’s argument that every idea of number involves the idea of space. We focus on the second stage of Watt’s reconstruction, where Bergson argues that only space can provide the distinction required for our counting of otherwise identical items. Watt bases his reconstruction on a premise regarding the possibility that identical objects, in the absence of spatial distinction, might remain (...) identical across different “temporal locations”. Our paper raises the prospect that Bergson is committed to a stronger thesis, namely one implying that identical objects would necessarily remain indistinguishable without the intervention of space. The paper thus concludes by emphasizing the indispensability of space for knowledge according to Bergson. (shrink)

I can’t help but like a book that calls Wittgenstein the greatest philosopher since Kant and then proceeds to show how On Certainty, a manifestly brilliant but understudied book, sheds light on matters under current debate. It is pleasant to see a highly skilled contemporary put texts from the later philosophy under close scrutiny and mine them for insight, and that outside the bounds of familiar Wittgenstein scholarship.

In 1924 W. W. Tarn published an article in which he attempted to prove that the mother of Philip V of Macedon was the Epirot princess Phthia. Previously all historians had accepted the statement of Eusebius that Philip was the son of Demetrius II and Chryseis, whom, after the death of her husband, the Macedonians gave in marriage to Antigonus Doson. Despite the cogency of Tarn's arguments, his theory has been rejected by both Beloch and Dinsmoor, who adhere to the (...) traditional view. This problem of the identity of Philip's mother is one of considerable importance, and consequently in this paper I intend to collect the evidence once again and subject it to a careful analysis. The results will be found strongly to corroborate Tarn's contention. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Historians of science, inasmuch as they are concerned with knowledges and practices rather than institutions, have tended of late to focus on case studies of common processes such as experiment and publication. In so doing, they tend to treat science as a single category, with various local instantiations. Or, alternatively, they relate cases to their specific local contexts. In neither approach do the cases or their contexts build easily into broader histories, reconstructing changing knowledge practices across time and space. (...) This essay argues that by systematically deconstructing the practices of science and technology and medicine (STM) into common, recurrent elements, we can gain usefully “configurational” views, not just of particular cases and contexts but of synchronic variety and diachronic changes, both short term and long. To this end, we can begin with the customary actors’ disciplines of early modern knowledge (natural philosophy, natural history, mixed mathematics, and experimental philosophy), which can be understood as elemental “ways of knowing and working,” variously combined and disputed. I argue that these same working knowledges, together with a later mode—synthetic experimentation and systematic invention—may also serve for the analysis of STM from the late eighteenth century to the present. The old divisions continued explicitly and importantly after circa 1800, but they were also “built into” an array of new sciences. This historiographic analysis can help clarify a number of common problems: about the multiplicity of the sciences, the importance of various styles in science, and the relations between science and technology and medicine. It suggests new readings of major changes in STM, including the first and second scientific revolutions and the transformations of biomedicine from the later twentieth century. It offers ways of recasting both microhistories and macrohistories, so reducing the apparent distance between them. And it may thus facilitate both more constructive uses of case studies and more innovative and acceptable longer histories. (shrink)

In his commentary on Euclid, Proclus develops what he takes to be an important Platonic critique of the epistemology of abstraction. As I argue, his argument closely reflects terminology and concepts from Plato’s Philebus. Both emphasize the priority—in reality and in our awareness—of the precise over the imprecise. Specifically, Proclus’s famous notion of the psychical “projection” of intermediate mathematical entities, while having no technically exact precedent in Plato, finds a conceptual neighbor in the Philebus’s suggestion that philosophical arithmeticians “posit” pure (...) units for counting. Likewise, for both our self-engagement in mathematical thinking serves to clarify the independence of the precise sciences—both in their content and in their practice—from perception. Thus, as I argue, Plato and Proclus, with their different terms and nuances, develop a shared conception scientific inquiry in which an activity of “creative discovery” plays a central role. (shrink)

Saul Kripke, among others, reads Wittgenstein’s private-language argument as an inference from the idea of rule following: The concept of a private language is inconsistent, because using language entails following rules, and following rules entails being a member of a community. Kripke expresses the key exegetical claim underlying that reading as follows.

In the 'Hippias Major' Socrates uses a counter-example to oppose Hippias‘s view that parts and wholes always have a "continuous" nature. Socrates argues, for example, that even-numbered groups might be made of parts with the opposite character, i.e. odd. As Gadamer has shown, Socrates often uses such examples as a model for understanding language and definitions: numbers and definitions both draw disparate elements into a sum-whole differing from the parts. In this paper I follow Gadamer‘s suggestion that we should focus (...) on the parallel between numbers and definitions in Platonic thought. However, I offer a different interpretation of the lesson implicit in Socrates‘s opposition to Hippias. I argue that, according to Socrates, parts and sum-wholes may share in essential attributes; yet this unity or continuity is neither necessary, as Hippias suggests, nor is it impossible, as Gadamer implies. In closing, I suggest that this seemingly minor difference in logical interpretation has important implications for how we should understand the structure of human communities in a Platonic context. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's later philosophy and the doctrines of Mahayana Buddhism integral to Zen coincide in a fundamental aspect: for Wittgenstein language has, one might say, a mystical base; and this base is exactly the Buddhist ideal of acting with a mind empty of thought. My aim is to establish and explore this phenomenon. The result should be both a deeper understanding of Wittgenstein and the removal of a philosophical objection to Zen that has troubled some people.