In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In Memoriam: Meyer Schapiro (1904–1996)David RosandMeyer Schapiro, University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, died at home in New York City on Sunday 3 March, at the age of 91. With his death, the worlds of art and learning have lost a legendary figure.“The humanity of art lies in the artist and not simply in what he represents,” Schapiro had declared in his lectures on abstract art. “It is the (...) painter’s constructive activity, his power of impressing a work with feeling and the qualities of thought that gives humanity to art.” Informing his own life and work, these were the values that enabled him to give such expressive voice to so much of the art of the past and of the present, to articulate the passions of eighth-century Northumbrian manuscript illuminators and Romanesque stonecarvers as well as of the most creative painters of our own century. Schapiro’s range as an art historian was universal, for he believed in the universality of art.Meyer Schapiro was born 23 September 1904, in Siauliai, Lithuania, and emigrated to the United States with his family when he was three. He grew up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where he was first exposed to art in evening classes taught by John Sloan at the Hebrew Settlement House. He entered Columbia College in 1920 at the age of 16, having won both Pulitzer and New York State Regents Scholarships, and received his AB in 1924. Five years later he submitted his dissertation for the Ph.D., the first in fine arts and archaeology awarded by Columbia. “The Romanesque Sculpture of Moissac,” parts of which were published in The Art Bulletin of 1931, opened an entirely new critical perspective on Romanesque art; recognizing its creative and expressive imperatives, Schapiro’s study articulated the aesthetic quality of that art as well as situating it historically and culturally with new precision. Supported by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, he travelled widely in Europe and the Near East in 1926–27, leaving behind a trail of anecdotal legends that continued to be recounted long after by those who met the brilliant young graduate student—including Bernard Berenson, who compared the eloquence of the “very handsome youth” to Solomon himself.Schapiro began his teaching career at Columbia in 1928 as a lecturer and rose through the professorial ranks, becoming full professor in 1952; he was named University Professor in 1965 and became University Professor Emeritus in 1973. Throughout his career, he moved between the university campus on Morningside Heights and his home neighborhood in Greenwich Village. Lecturing as well at the New School for Social Research from 1936 to 1952, he reached the larger community of the New York art world, especially the artists, in the years when New York was becoming the most dynamic center of contemporary art. And he brought the artists uptown; auditing and participating in his classes at Columbia, their presence in his classroom seemed to validate his wisdom. At the other end of Schapiro’s range were the mathematicians, [End Page 547] scientists, and philosophers, in whose worlds he moved with equal confidence and, importantly, enthusiasm.During the ‘30s Schapiro’s was an important voice of moral balance in the cultural debates of the political left. Although he demonstrated with new insight and undogmatic focus the social bases of art, he insisted on recognizing “its own conditions which distinguish it from other activities.” Even as he avidly pursued knowledge—of history, culture, languages—Schapiro remained an artist. He talked about pictures as an artist. His criticism was an act of re-creation, as he lovingly reconstructed decisions made by the painter on the canvas; every stroke demanded attention. Choice was important, that freedom of the individual responding to the world around him and to the challenge of his own creation. In the anonymous art of the early Middle Ages Schapiro discovered the artist, the human maker; he intuited the feeling individual responsible for the invention of such expressive form. Distant art took on life and became accessible through his recognition of and insistence on its humanity.Schapiro’s learning was legendary, and yet, however intimidating it may have... (shrink)

A historical investigation of the exclusion of Africa and Asia from modern histories of philosophy.

This study explores child health care nurses’ pedagogical knowledge when supporting parents in their parenthood using various teaching practices, that is how to organise and process the content during parent education groups in primary health care. The aim is to identify teaching practices used by child health care nurses and to analyse such practices with regard to Aristotle's three forms of knowledge to comprehensively examine child health care nurses’ use of knowledge in practice. A qualitative methodological design alongside the analysis (...) of video‐recordings was used. The results showed that child health care nurses used four teaching practices: lecturing, demonstration, conversation and supervision. Their use of episteme was prominent, but they also seemed to master techne in combination with episteme during the first three teaching practices. During the conversation teaching practice, the child health nurses rarely succeeded. Consequently, they missed opportunities to identify mothers’ expressed concerns and to act in the best interests of both the mothers and their infants by the use of phronesis. In health care, however, theoretical episteme is superordinate to productive knowledge or phronesis, which also became evident in this study. Nevertheless, more interactive pedagogical practices are needed if more use of phronesis is to become a reality in parent education groups. (shrink)

How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" -- it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a (...) compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers. Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on. (shrink)

This chapter provides an introduction to higher-order metaphysics as well as to the contributions to this volume. We discuss five topics, corresponding to the five parts of this volume, and summarize the contributions to each part. First, we motivate the usefulness of higher-order quantification in metaphysics using a number of examples, and discuss the question of how such quantifiers should be interpreted. We provide a brief introduction to the most common forms of higher-order logics used in metaphysics, and indicate a (...) number of questions which can be raised in such systems using logical vocabulary alone. Using a further example, we return to applications of higher-order logics in metaphysics. We also mention key developments in the history of higher-order logic as it pertains to metaphysics. Finally, we mention certain arguments which have been raised against the use of higher-order logic, and some ways of responding to them. (shrink)

Practical deliberation often involves conditional judgements about what will (likely) happen if certain alternatives are pursued. It is widely assumed that the conditionals useful in deliberation are counterfactual or subjunctive conditionals. Against this, I argue that the conditionals of deliberation are indicatives. Key to the argument is an account of the relation between 'straightforward' future-directed conditionals like ' If the house is not painted, it will soon look quite shabby' and * "w e r e ' ' e d F (...) D C s like ' If the house were not to be painted, it would soon look quite shabby': an account on which both of these types of FDCs are grouped with the indicatives for semantic treatment and on which, while conditionals of both types are properly used in means/ends deliberations, those of the ' were'ed-up variety are especially well suited for that purpose. (shrink)

In the traditional form of canonical quantization, certain field components (not having “conjugate” momenta) must be regarded as noncanonical. This long-known distinction enters modern gauge theories, when they are canonically quantized as by Kugo and Ojima. We avoid that peculiarity by not using any conjugate “momenta” at all. In our formulation, canonical quantization can be related to Feynman's path integral.

Aggregating individuals’ consistent attitudes might produce inconsistent collective attitudes. Some groups therefore need the capacity to form attitudes that are irreducible to those of their members. Such groups, group-agent realists argue, are agents in control of their own attitude formation. In this paper, however, I show how group-agent realism overlooks the important fact that groups consist of strategically interacting agents. Only by eliminating group agency from our social explanations can we see how individuals vote strategically to gain control of their (...) groups and produce collective attitudes we cannot make sense of if we treat groups as agents. (shrink)

'Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science is a survey that attempts to describe a hypothetic philosophy--the avant-garde pseudo-science imagined by Alfred Jarry. 'Pataphysics is a supplement to metaphysics, accenting it, then replacing it, in order to create a philosophic alternative, whose discipline can study cases, not of conception, but of exception: variance , alliance , and deviance . 'Pataphysics synthesizes the romantic schism between a literal, scientized discourse and a figural, poeticized discourse, and my thesis suggests that this revision (...) of the signifier "science" by 'pataphysics is symptomatic of a postmodern transition in science from a paradigm of absolutism to a paralogy of relativism. Structured as a descriptive explication, which emphasizes a theoretical perspective, this survey is divided into five chapters: the first chapter recounts the history of the conflict between science and poetry ; the second chapter examines the avant-garde pseudo-science of 'pataphysics itself ; and finally, the last three chapters discuss the influence of 'pataphysics upon the poetics of its subsequent successors . While my thesis focuses upon theories of textual poetics rather than poetry itself , my thesis does nevertheless strive to be as conceptually encyclopedic as 'pataphysics itself: instead of normalizing 'pataphysics within one theoretical perspective, this survey alludes intermittently to 'pataphysical enterprises that constitute exceptions to such a genealogy of Jarryites. What is at stake is the status of poetry in a world of science. How might poetry reclaim its own viable truth? How might science benefit from its own poetic irony? For the postmodern condition, such questions have already opened up a novel space for speculative imagination; hence, this survey presents itself as a kind of primer for a future of possible research. (shrink)

In this short but meaty book, Peter Unger questions the objective answers that have been given to central problems in philosophy. As Unger hypothesizes, many of these problems are unanswerable, including the problems of knowledge and scepticism, the problems of free will, and problems of causation and explanation. In each case, he argues, we arrive at one answer only relative to an assumption about the meaning of key terms, terms like "know" and like "cause," even while we arrive at an (...) opposite answer relative to quite different assumptions, but equally arbitrary assumptions, about what the key terms mean. (shrink)

This article explores the enduring mysteries of consciousness and the afterlife, two enigmatic topics that have fascinated humanity for ages. Despite extensive scientific efforts, the existence of an afterlife remains unproven, and understanding consciousness remains a significant challenge. The research introduces innovative hypotheses through simple thought experiments with empirical evidence and robust theoretical foundations. It delves into the complexities of consciousness, its relationship with the brain, and the need for interdisciplinary approaches encompassing physics, psychology, and philosophy. Boldly contemplating the probability (...) of a continuous consciousness after death, the study argues that existing evidence strongly supports this idea. Beyond theoretical implications, it envisions practical outcomes, suggesting that insights into these mysteries could enhance human well-being and contribute to a more harmonious world. In summary, this article embarks on a quest to shed light on age-old questions about consciousness and the afterlife. Through fresh methodologies, it aims to provide new perspectives that could reshape our understanding of existence and inspire intellectuals to positive individual and societal advancements. -/- . (shrink)

Neoplatonic allegorical interpretation expounds how literary texts present philosophical ideas in an enigmatic and coded form, offering an alternative path to the divine truths. The Neoplatonist Porphyry’s _On the Cave of the Nymphs_ is one of the most significant allegorical interpretation handed down to us from Antiquity. This monograph, exclusively dedicated to the analysis of _On the Cave of Nymphs_, demonstrates that Porphyry interprets Homer’s verse from Odyssey 13.102-112 to convey his philosophical thoughts, particularly on the material world, relationship between (...) soul and body and the salvation of the soul through the doctrines of Plato and Plotinus. The Homeric cave of the nymphs with two gates is a station where the souls descend into genesis and ascend to the intelligible realm. Porphyry associates Odysseus’ long wanderings with the journey of the soul and its salvation from the irrational to rational through escape from all toils of the material world. (shrink)