The literature of comparative economics as well as economic history is replete with references to productivity differences as reflecting relative efficiency in production. In socialist economics, for example, the longevity of the relative-productivity/relative-efficiency theme is apparent from Abram Bergson's early survey where, commenting on a productivity debate that had already been going on for over twenty years, he identified “the only issue outstanding” as the question “which is more efficient, socialism or capitalism?” The issue has continued to be addressed vigorously (...) since then, and it is still outstanding. Again, in European economic history, John Nye recently pointed out that relative efficiency as reflected in relative productivity has been part and parcel of the postwar debate on French industrialization: the view that less productive and, therefore, “inefficient” family firms led to French “backwardness” in production. (shrink)

This essay reads Derrida's early work within the context of the history of philosophy as an academic field in France. Derrida was charged with instruction in the history of philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, and much of his own training focused on this aspect of philosophical study. The influence of French history of philosophy can be seen in Derrida's work before Of Grammatology, especially in his unpublished lectures for a 1964 course entitled “History and Truth,” in which he (...) analyzed the semantic richness of the word “history.” According to Derrida, “history” comprised both the ideas of change and of transmission, which allowed the writing of history at a later time. In the Western tradition, Derrida suggested, philosophers had consistently tried to reduce the idea of history as transmission, casting it simply as empirical development in order to preserve the idea that truth could be timeless. Derrida's account of the evolving opposition between history and truth within the history of philosophy led him to suggest a “history of truth” that transcended and structured the opposition. I argue that Derrida's strategies in these early lectures are critical for understanding his later and more famous deconstruction of speech and writing. Moreover, the impact of this early confrontation with the problem of history and truth helps explain the ambivalent response by historians to Derrida's analyses. (shrink)

This latest volume in the acclaimed Ruffin Series in Business Ethics brings together the contributions to the annual Ruffin Lecture series, in which some of the leading scholars in business ethics addressed the question: Can business, and business education, be considered one of the humanities, or is it in a class by itself? At a time when business is coming under attack for its apparent transgressions, this book iluminates the special values that inhere in the business world. Arguing all sides (...) of the issue, the distinguished contributors include Richard DeGeorge, Ronald Green, Thomas Dunfee, Robert Solomon, Edwin Hartman, Peter French, Patricia Werhane, Clarence Walton, W. Michael Hoffman, David Fedo, Kenneth Andrews, Joanne Ciulla, Manuel Velasquez, and George Brenkert. The editors contribute an informative Introduction and an Epilogue to set the debate in its proper context. (shrink)

This volume, an expanded edition of the philosophy of language issue of the journal Midwest Studies in Philosophy (1977), includes essays by some of the ...

The philosophy of language has emerged in the 20th century as a fundamental area of philosophic inquiry. It is unquestionably central to research in many other areas, and some have even suggested that it should now be seen as the foundation of philosophy.

This is Volume V in the series Midwest Studies in Philosophy In 1979 the University of Minnesota Press assumed publication of the annual Midwest Studies in ...

Rich with historical and cultural value, these works are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Contemporary Perspectives on the History of Philosophy was first published in 1983. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The authors of the 27 appears in Volume 8, Midwest Studies in Philosophy,have established reputations as historians of philosophy, but their vantage point, here, is from "contemporary perspectives" - they use contemporary analytic skills to examine problems and issues considered by past philosophers. The (...) papers, arranged in historical order, fall into six groups: ancient philosophy (the Pythagoreans, Plato, and Aristotle); the seventeenth-century rationalists (Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza); the empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, and Hume); Kant; the nineteenth century (Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Mill); and, in conclusion, an essay on Wittgenstein's Tractatus and two broad, retrospective papers entitled "Old Analyses of the Physical World and new Philosophies of Language" and "Moral Crisis and the History of Ethics.". (shrink)

This volume in the Midwest Studies in Philosophy series contains 18 essays which discuss the range of of religious traditions which inform the discussion of contemporary issues.

This addition to the Midwest Studies in Philosophy series comprises the most recent volume on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to date. Here 16 philosophers explore both the challenges Wittgenstein presented to philosophy as well as the responses to those challenges from such noted thinkers as Kripke. By addressing various questions raised by Wittgenstein's work, these original essays aim to illuminate in one way or another the impact Wittgenstein's legacy has had on 20th-century philosophy.

Presents essays (previously unpublished) by prominent philosophers on topics such as rationality and alien cultures, moral realism and social science, human sciences in the case of literature, Foucault's genealogical method, Vigotsky and artificial intelligence. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

In recent years naturalism has become a focal point in the discussions of many contemporary philosophers. Philosophical Naturalism in the series Midwest Studies in Philosophy offers a broad sampling of previously unpublished essays that represent the current status of discussions of naturalism.

The 21 essays collected in this volume of Midwest Studies in Philosophy question and debate the primary assumptions of science. These are its conception of an orderly universe; its ability to define; and its ability to explain. The contributors approach these topics from varying perspectives, including the historic development of our understanding of the scientific enterprise; the controversy of opposing paradigms; and the challenges raised by quantum mechanics.

This work presents 26 essays that address the issue of moral concepts. Many of the essays contain examples that should make this volume suitable for teaching moral concepts in a college or university.

The ArgumentI argue here that in its historical development, sexology developed differently in France than elsewhere in Europe. Though I concur that the modern notion of “sexuality” arose some time in the last half of the nineteenth century, the older notion of ”sex” persisted in French science and medicine for a far longer time than elsewhere because of a fear that nonreproductive sexual behavior would deepen the country's population crisis. I argue that the scientific and medical concepts of the (...) sexual perversions, particularly homosexuality, were considered by French sexologists to be abnormal deviations from heterosexuality, whereas some English, German, and Austrian sexologists — including Freud — viewed the perversions more tolerantly as natural variations of the norm. I also address here the inadequacies of historical accounts of these developments that favor discursive ruptures in the Foucauldian manner, and stress the advantages of social history and causal historical explanation. (shrink)

For thinkers such as Foucault and Deleuze, it is not possible to engage with metaphysical questions without simultaneously considering other, more political problems concerning the power relations...

In this powerful new study Edward Baring sheds fresh light on Jacques Derrida, one of the most influential yet controversial intellectuals of the twentieth century. Reading Derrida from a historical perspective and drawing on new archival sources, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy shows how Derrida's thought arose in the closely contested space of post-war French intellectual life, developing in response to Sartrian existentialism, religious philosophy and the structuralism that found its base at the École Normale Supe;rieure. (...) In a history of the philosophical movements and academic institutions of post-war France, Baring paints a portrait of a community caught between humanism and anti-humanism, providing a radically new interpretation of the genesis of deconstruction and of one of the most vibrant intellectual moments of modern times. (shrink)

This is a unique, groundbreaking study in the history of philosophy, combining leading men and women philosophers across 2600 years of Western philosophy, covering key foundational topics, including epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. Introductory essays, primary source readings, and commentaries comprise each chapter to offer a rich and accessible introduction to and evaluation of these vital philosophical contributions. A helpful appendix canvasses an extraordinary number of women philosophers throughout history for further discovery and study.

The influential French chemist Marcelin Berthelot spoke against the use of Dalton's atomic theory and Avogadro's hypothesis in the second half of the nineteenth century. This paper argues that Berthelot conceded that atomism might be acceptable as a system of conventions, but he feared the power of such conventions in constructing a realistic picture of atoms which was not warranted empirically. Equally, Berthelot's anti-atomism was a last-ditch effort to assert the place of chemistry within the tradition of natural history (...) and to deny the possible reduction of chemical science to the laws of nineteenth-century physics. (shrink)

Alan William Raitt, a Fellow of the British Academy, went up to Magdalen College at the University of Oxford from King Edward's Grammar School in Morpeth, in 1948. He progressed from being an undergraduate there to graduate student, Fellow by Examination, Fellow, Tutor, and Senior Tutor, as well as serving the college as a distinguished Vice-President from 1983 to 1985. Raitt had by then already been named in 1976 Special Lecturer in French Literature for the university and, (...) three years later, University Reader. In 1992 he received the accolade of an ad hominem Chair. Raitt had a gift for friendship; one of his greatest friends was Pierre Castex. His reputation as an international authority on nineteenth-century French literature is second to none. Unlike some British and American scholars, Raitt is widely read and admired by the French themselves, and his name figures prominently in all bibliographies devoted to Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Gustave Flaubert. Despite his many commitments, both in Oxford and in the sphere of French studies generally, he remained a consistently prolific scholar. (shrink)

This article reconsiders Sartre's seminal 1945 talk, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” and the stakes of the humanism debate in France by looking at the immediate political context that has been overlooked in previous discussions of the text. It analyses the political discussion of the term “humanism” during the French national elections of 1945 and the rumbling debate over Sartre's philosophy that culminated in his presentation to the Club Maintenant, just one week after France went to the polls. A consideration (...) of this context helps explain both the rise, and later the decline, of existentialism in France, when, in the changing political climate, humanism lost its centrality, setting the stage for new antihumanist criticisms of Sartre's work. (shrink)

This paper makes a comparison between Milan Kundera and Annie Saumont. I assume there is a message being sent by Saumont in her highly recommended short story “You Should Have Changed at Dol,” regarding history in Kundera, but what is the message? I offer two interpretations.

Republicanism and imperialism are typically understood to be located at opposite ends of the political spectrum. In Imperial Republics, Edward G. Andrew challenges the supposed incompatibility of these theories with regard to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century revolutions in England, the United States, and France. Many scholars have noted the influence of the Roman state on the ideology of republican revolutionaries, especially in the model it provided for transforming subordinate subjects into autonomous citizens. Andrew finds an equally important parallel between Rome's (...) expansionary dynamic — in contrast to that of Athens, Sparta, or Carthage — and the imperial rivalries that emerged between the United States, France, and England in the age of revolutions. Imperial Republics is a sophisticated, wide-ranging examination of the intellectual origins of republican movements, and explains why revolutionaries felt the need to 'don the toga' in laying the foundation for their own uprisings. (shrink)

SummaryThe convening of the first three Solvay Chemistry Conferences in Brussels from 1922–1928 marked an important turning point for the discipline of chemistry. Whereas much of nineteenth-century chemical endeavour had focused on compositional and functional analysis of chemical compounds, many leaders in chemistry were turning to questions of molecular dynamics by the early twentieth century. Two competing schools of chemical dynamics, which were represented at the Solvay Conferences, were a predominantly English group (Lowry, Lapworth, Robinson, Ingold) who worked out electron (...) and ionic interpretations of organic reaction mechanisms, and a French group (Perrin, Job) who developed a generalized radiation hypothesis of reaction activation. While differences in conceptual and stylistic approach separated the two schools, they agreed on the need to apply contemporary physical theory to old chemical problems, and to develop a theoretical chemistry complementary to theoretical physics. (shrink)

In the late spring of 1947, the experimental physicist P. M. S. Blackett succumbed to the temptations of theory. At this time, Blackett was fifty years old. He was a veteran of the Cavendish tradition in particle physics and he was on his way to an unshared award of the 1948 Nobel Prize for his experimental researches in nuclear physics and cosmic-ray physics. His photographs of cloud-chamber tracks of alpha particles, protons, electrons and positrons were well known to practitioners of (...) particle physics, even as they now grace the pages of physics textbooks.Blackett's turn toward theory in 1947 involved some risk for a well-established experimental physicist. The 3 May 1947 issue of Nature carried an announcement of his forthcoming lecture at the Royal Society:Professor P. M. S. Blackett, Langworthy Professor of Physics in the University of Manchester, will deliver a lecture on ‘The Magnetic Field of Massive Rotating Bodies’ at a meeting of the Royal Society on May 15, at 4:30 p.m.Blackett circulated a preliminary draft of his paper among colleagues in several different fields, including the geophysicist Sydney Chapman and the astrophysicist Harry Plaskett. (shrink)

These lecture notes were composed while teaching a class at Stanford and studying the work of Brian Chellas (Modal Logic: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), Robert Goldblatt (Logics of Time and Computation, Stanford: CSLI, 1987), George Hughes and Max Cresswell (An Introduction to Modal Logic, London: Methuen, 1968; A Companion to Modal Logic, London: Methuen, 1984), and E. J. Lemmon (An Introduction to Modal Logic, Oxford: Blackwell, 1977). The Chellas text influenced me the most, though the order of (...) presentation is inspired more by Goldblatt.2 My goal was to write a text for dedicated undergraduates with no previous experience in modal logic. The text had to meet the following desiderata: (1) the level of difficulty should depend on how much the student tries to prove on his or her own—it should be an easy text for those who look up all the proofs in the appendix, yet more difficult for those who try to prove everything themselves; (2) philosophers (i.e., colleagues) with a basic training in logic should be able to work through the text on their own; (3) graduate students should find it useful in preparing for a graduate course in modal logic; (4) the text should prepare people for reading advanced texts in modal logic, such as Goldblatt, Chellas, Hughes and Cresswell, and van Benthem, and in particular, it should help the student to see what motivated the choices in these texts; (5) it should link the two conceptions of logic, namely, the conception of a logic as an axiom system (in which the set of theorems is constructed from the bottom up through proof sequences) and the conception of a logic as a set containing initial ‘axioms’ and closed under ‘rules of inference’ (in which the set of theorems is constructed from the top down, by carving out the logic from the set of all formulas as the smallest set closed under the rules); finally, (6) the pace for the presentation of the completeness theorems should be moderate—the text should be intermediate between Goldblatt and Chellas in this regard (in Goldblatt, the completeness proofs come too quickly for the undergraduate, whereas in Chellas, too many unrelated.... (shrink)

We examine the compromises that are actually made in modern scientific discourse concerning atoms. We conclude that even the ideals of clarity and consistency can be legitimately compromised in order to obtain other advantages.

In this series of lectures on the painters Hsia Kuei (twelfth-thirteenth centuries), Shen Chou (fifteenth-sixteenth centuries), and Shih-t'ao (seventeenth-eighteenth centuries), Richard Edwards explores the special relationship between the self and landscape in Chinese art. These three painters, each important in his own time and deemed a master by later critics, were all concerned with the subjective in the objective world. In Chinese painting there is no clear desire to separate these two realms; rather, there is a constant, conscious play between (...) the physical reality of the world and the subjective vision of the artist. The artist is continually imitating the world--sometimes more, sometimes less--but he never denies its appearance to the point of total abstraction; nor, in the other extreme, does he claim for the physical world an existence independent of his own involvement. Richard Edwards is Professor Emeritus of East Asian Art and Art History, University of Michigan. (shrink)

In his renowned courses at the Collège de France from 1982 to 1984, Michel Foucault devoted his lectures to meticulous readings and interpretations of the works of Plato, Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, among others. In this his aim was not, Edward F. McGushin contends, to develop a new knowledge of the history of philosophy; rather, it was to let himself be transformed by the very activity of thinking. Thus, this work shows us Foucault in the last phase of (...) his life in the act of becoming a philosopher. Here we see how his encounter with ancient philosophy allowed him to experience the practice of philosophy as, to paraphrase Nietzsche, a way of becoming who one is: the work of self-formation that the Greeks called _askésis_. Through a detailed study of Foucault's last courses, McGushin demonstrates that this new way of practicing philosophical _askésis_ evokes Foucault's ethical resistance to modern relations of power and knowledge. In order to understand Foucault's later project, then, it is necessary to see it within the context of his earlier work. If his earlier projects represented an attempt to bring to light the relations of power and knowledge that narrowed and limited freedom, then this last project represents his effort to take back that freedom by redefining it in terms of care of the self. Foucault always stressed that modern power functions by producing individual subjects. This book shows how his excavation of ancient philosophical practices gave him the tools to counter this function-with a practice of self-formation, an _askésis. _. (shrink)

When Heidegger's influence was at its zenith in Germany from the early fifties to the early sixties, most serious students of philosophy in that country were deeply steeped in his thought. His students or students of his students filled many if not most of the major chairs in philosophy. A cloud of reputedly Black Forest mysticism veiled the perspective of many of his critics and admirers at home and abroad. Droves of people flocked to hear lectures by him that most (...) could not understand, even on careful reading, much less on one hearing. He loomed so large that Being and Time frequently could not be seen as a highly imaginative, initial approach to a strictly limited set of questions, but was viewed either as an all-embracing first order catastrophy incorporating at once the most feared consequences of Boehme, Kierkegaard, Rilke, and Nietzsche, or as THE ANSWER. But most of that has past. Heidegger's dominance of German philosophy has ceased. One can now brush aside the larger-than-life images of Heidegger, the fears that his language was creating a cult phenomenon, the convictions that only those can understand him who give their lives to his thought. His language is at times unusually difficult, at times simple and beautiful. Some of his insights are obscure and not helpful, others are exciting and clarifying. One no longer expects Heidegger to interpret literature like a literary critic or an academic philologist. (shrink)

Rylands English MS 60, compiled for the Spencer family in the eighteenth century, contains 130 printed portraits of early modern artists gathered from diverse sources and mounted in two albums: 76 portraits in the first volume, which is devoted to northern European artists, and 54 in the second volume, containing Italian and French painters. Both albums of this ‘Collection of Engravings of Portraits of Painters’ were initially planned to include a written biography of each artist copied from the few (...) sources available in English at the time, but that part of the project was abandoned. This article relates English MS 60 to shifting practices of picturing art history. It examines the rise of printed artists’ portraits, tracing the divergent histories of the genre south and north of the Alps, and explores how biographical approaches to the history of art were being replaced, in the eighteenth century, by the development of illustrated texts about art. (shrink)