The eight books of The Letters of George Santayana bring together over 3,000 letters, many of which have been discovered in the fifty years since Santayana's death. This sixth book covers four years of Santayana's life in Rome, his permanent residence since the late 1920s. During these years, Santayana, in his seventies, saw the publication of the remaining nine volumes of the Triton Edition of his work as well as the last two books of his Realms of Being: The Realm (...) of Truth and The Realm of Spirit. In 1938 the first book-length biography of Santayana was published, and in 1940 The Philosophy of George Santayana--a collection of critical essays that included Santayana's rejoinder, "Apologia pro Mente Sua"--was published as volume two of Northwestern University Press?s Library of Living Philosophers. In 1939, when war broke out in Europe and Swiss authorities denied him a long-term visa, Santayana decided to stay in Italy, where he was to remain for the rest of his life.The letters in this book are written to such correspondents as Van Meter Ames, Curt John Ducasse, Max Forrester Eastman, Max Fisch, Sidney Hook, Horace Meyer Kallen, Christopher Janus, Milton Munitz, William Lyon Phelps, and Ezra Pound, and include discussions of the work of Henri Bergson, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Ezra Pound, among others. (shrink)

First published in 1941, Marxism: Is it Science? was written to present the author's criticisms of Marxism and, in doing so, to further exemplify his 'Method of Instruction' first proposed in an earlier work. The book is divided into six parts to provide six complete presentations of Marxism and why the author considers it unscientific. The six different approaches, varying in focus and complexity, work together to give the reader a detailed overview of Marxism and the authors critique of it.

The result of 10 years' worth of painstaking research, this volume, originally published in 1926 is a sympathetic critique of certain phases of revolutionary dictatorship in Russia. Among other things it focusses on the philosophy and psychology of Marxism, Marxian economics, Bolshevism, the philosophy of Lenin and his role as an engineer of revolution, the Mensheviks, and the anarchist contribution.

Many people who were Saturday Night Live fans in the 1990s recall the firing of Norm Macdonald as a watershed moment. In exploring theories about why people employ humor, they just might be able to discover the motivations behind Macdonald's firing. Macdonald offered a different assessment of his firing in an oral history of Saturday Night Live, saying that it came down to a philosophical disagreement between NBC management and himself about the goal of “Weekend Update.” Macdonald's requirement that laughter (...) be involuntary tracks well with Max Eastman's philosophical theory of humor known as play theory. Sigmund Freud's Relief Theory suggests that the main goal of humor and laughter is to relieve pent up stresses and mental strain that people carry around with them. The most important difference between humor‐as‐relief and play theory is that in play theory the release is a positive consequence, but not the intended goal. (shrink)

Oxford Studies in Metaphysics is the forum for the best new work in this flourishing field. Much of the most interesting work in philosophy today is metaphysical in character: this new series is a much-needed focus for it. OSM offers a broad view of the subject, featuring not only the traditionally central topics such as existence, identity, modality, time, and causation, but also the rich clusters of metaphysical questions in neighbouring fields, such as philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. (...) Besides independent essays, volumes will often contain a critical essay on a recent book, or a symposium that allows participants to respond to one another's criticisms and questions. Anyone who wants to know what's happening in metaphysics can start here. Volume Two begins with a major paper on consciousness by Ned Block. Block examines 'Max Black's Objection to Mind-Body Identity', an argument for a dualism of physical and phenomenal properties, closely related to Jackson's 'knowledge argument'. His extensive exploration of this family of arguments for property dualism includes considerable discussion of John Perry and Stephen White; their responses to Block's paper complete the section on the metaphysics of consciousness.Three papers consider the thesis that the future is, in some sense, 'open'. Eli Hirsch elaborates a view according to which contingent statements about the future can be indeterminate in truth-value, while preserving 'straight logic', including a principle of bivalence. Peter Forrest defends a sort of 'growing block' theory of the passage of time, emphasizing the way such a metaphysics, combined with a truth-maker principle, can provide an analysis of natural necessity. Trenton Merricks presents a trenchant and original criticism of the 'growing block' theory of time.The volume continues with a group of papers on problems of ontology. Thomas Hofweber's paper, defending nominalism from the objection that there are 'inexpressible' properties and propositions, won the first annual Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Younger Scholar Prize. The papers by Phillip Bricker and Michael Loux examine a couple of deep divides within ontology. John Hawthorne's paper raises some extremely puzzling questions about the nature of persons, given the ontology needed for Timothy Williamson's theory of vagueness. Hawthorne uses these problems to motivate an alternative style of epistemicism. The final three papers take up several issues in the metaphysics of traditional theism. Michael Bergmann and Jeffrey Brower raise objections to combining a Platonic conception of universals with the doctrine of divine aseity; while Brian Leftow defends a non-Platonic theory of universals - a kind of divine-concept nominalism. Hud Hudson suggests that contemplation of the possibility of higher dimensions opens up new avenues in theodicy. (shrink)

In this first-ever history of contemporary liberal theory, Forrester shows how liberal egalitarianism--a set of ideas about justice, equality, obligation, and the state--became dominant, and traces its emergence from the political and ideological context of the postwar United States and Britain.d Britain.

Sidney Hook is considered by many to be America's most influential philosopher today. An earlier defender of Marxism, he became its most persistent critic, especially of its totalitarian and revolutionary manifestations. A student of John Dewey's pragmatism, Sidney Hook has written extensively about most of the live moral, social and political issues of the day. He has known and debated many of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century, such as Max Eastman, Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, Jacques Maritain, Mortimer (...) Adler, Robert Hutchins, Paul Tillich, Noam Chomsky, and John Kenneth Galbraith. Throughout his career, which spans a half a century, Sidney Hook has been a stalwart defender of the social democratic philosophy of freedom. At a time when secular humanism has been under heavy criticism from the New Right, he stands out as the leading philosophical representative of the position. Virtually all of the essays in this volume were written especially for it. The list of contributors includes Irving Kristol, Antony Flew, Nathan Glazer, Lewis Feuer, Daniel Bell, Richard Rorty, Ernest Nagel, Edward Shils, Seymour Martin Lipset, Ernest van den Haag, and others, all of whom testified that their thinking has been profoundly influenced by Sidney Hook's wisdom and insight. These original essays are wide-ranging in scope, but all are focused on Hook's philosophy or on subjects in which he has shown an abiding interest: socialism, democracy, equality, quotas, higher education, academic freedom, humanism, liberal education, natural and human rights, and pragmatism. The book also contains a complete up-to-date bibliography of the writings of Sidney Hook. (shrink)

Freud may never have set foot in Cambridge - that hub for the twentieth century's most influential thinkers and scientists - but his intellectual impact there in the years between the two World Wars was immense. This is a story that has long languished untold, buried under different accounts of the dissemination of psychoanalysis. John Forrester and Laura Cameron present a fascinating and deeply textured history of the ways in which a set of Freudian ideas about the workings of (...) the human mind, sexuality and the unconscious affected Cambridge men and women - from A. G. Tansley and W. H. R. Rivers to Bertrand Russell, Bernal, Strachey and Wittgenstein - shaping their thinking across a range of disciplines, from biology to anthropology, and from philosophy to psychology, education and literature. Freud in Cambridge will be welcomed as a major intervention by literary scholars, historians and all readers interested in twentieth-century intellectual and scientific life. (shrink)