What has compelled Jews in the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, and abroad to promote a positive image of Ottomans and Turks while they deny the Armenian genocide and the existence of anti-Semitism in Turkey? The dominant historical narrative is that Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 were embraced by the Ottoman Empire, and then later, protected from the Nazis during WWII. If we believe that Turks and Jews have lived in harmony for so long, then it is hard for us to (...) accept that the Turks could have committed genocide against the Armenians. In this article, the author confronts these convictions and circumstances to reflect on what moral responsibility the descendants of the victims of one genocide have to the descendants of victims of another. Baer delves into the history of Muslim-Jewish relations in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey to tease out the origin of these many tangled truths. He aims to bring about reconciliation between Jews, Muslims, and Christians, not only to face inconvenient historical facts, but to confront it and come to terms with it. By looking at the complexities of interreligious relations, Holocaust denial, genocide and ethnic cleansing, and confronting some long-standing historical stereotypes, the author sets out to tell a new history that goes against Turkish antisemitism and admits to the Armenian genocide. (shrink)

In this critical edition of An Inquiry Into the Human Mind, Reid’s classic eighteenth-century treatise in the philosophy of mind appears with supplementary manuscripts and correspondence which, along with a crack editing job, provide the context for a rich understanding of this work. Reid’s central concern in the Inquiry was to provide an alternative to the account of the mind handed down by the Cartesian tradition. Thus the book contains a considerable amount of polemical material. A main target is the (...) representational theory of perception, which he took to be the essential though unproved foundation of Berkeley’s idealism and Hume’s skepticism. Also singled out for criticism are Locke’s view of truth and formulation of the primary/secondary quality distinction, Hume’s reduction of all mental content to impressions and ideas, and the inability of prior philosophers to distinguish sensations properly from the objects they signify. This last is where Reid believes that he has made an important advance. The inability to distinguish between sensation and body has been, according to Reid, a main source of philosophical confusion. The Aristotelian tradition missed the distinction entirely, but the moderns have only partially grasped it. Locke, for example, believed that some of our sensations, though not all, resemble objects. Reid’s contribution to the discussion is to make the distinction clearly and to recognize that none of our sensations do or could resemble bodies insofar as they are entirely different things. Here he agrees with Berkeley. Reid, however, retains material objects as a first principle. This, in conjunction with his rejection of the “theory of ideas” animating representationalism, leads Reid to formulate a realism which is neither naive nor which has any tendency to degenerate into the idealism of Berkeley or skepticism of Hume. (shrink)

We are told by the author that this work is intended mainly as a study of Reid's moral philosophy and his aesthetics, partly by way of an exposition of Reid's anatomy of the self. What he serves up, however, is nearly half a book on the anatomy of the self, that is, Reid's account of perception and sensation, agent and physical causation, motivation and free action, language and representation, and the nature of personal identity.

This volume features Reid’s previously unpublished manuscripts on natural history, physiology, and materialism. The manuscripts, over 150 pages of new material, follow a lengthy introduction in which Reid’s philosophical orientation and opponents are nicely laid out. What would otherwise be a narrowly informative reading of the Natural History manuscripts, that is, Reid’s notes to himself on Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle and Bonnet’s Contemplation de la Nature, is instead illuminated by Wood’s tour of the relevant eighteenth-century debates. Wood achieves this by indicating (...) that Reid’s interest in botany derived from his goal of showing that the vital functions of plants depended on immaterial causes. Also informative are selections from Reid’s correspondence with Lord Kames on the issue of whether unthinking matter could be self-organizing, and the chronicling of Reid’s development on the subject of generation, which paralleled Bonnet. (shrink)