"--Maria DiBattista, Princeton University "This book provides a really original take on the literature of the fin de sicle and high modernism, suggesting how central the imaginative labor of literary works was to the social, philosophical, ...

Socrates.--Plato.--Aristotle.--Aquinas.--Descartes.--Spinoza.--Locke.--Voltaire.--Kant.--Hegel.--Dew ey.--Russell.

A brief account of the life and philosophy of the Greek Diogenes, who gave up all his wealth and power to find happiness.

In the period from January 1920 to December 1921 a cooperation between Jessie Fauset, Augustus Dill and W.E.B. Du Bois resulted in the publication of a periodical called “The Brownies’ Book” the first publication for North American black, and not white children and young people. The creation of “The Brownies' Book” was a pioneering event in African American literature in general and, more specifically, in the field of African American children's literature, as it was the first periodical composed and published (...) by African Americans for black children who, until then, searched in vain for material that included a perspective on their experience and history. This article argues that the TBBs were one of the harbingers of the movement called the Harlem Renaissance, constituting a children's literary materialization of the path towards the emergence of what the philosopher Alain Locke called the New Negro. What was being formulated was both the deconstruction of stereotypes associated with blacks and the active projection/creation of a positive identification with their local and ancestral community. This paper seeks to identify the post-WWI discursive strategies and practices of de-racialization proposed for “the children of the sun”, as W.E.B. Du Bois called them, in order to stop seeing themselves “through the eyes of others”. (shrink)

The main problem of this study is David Hume’s (1711-76) view on Metaphysical Realism (there are mind-independent, external, and continuous entities). This specific problem is part of two more general questions in Hume scholarship: his attitude to scepticism and the relation between naturalism and skepticism in his thinking. A novel interpretation of these problems is defended in this work. The chief thesis is that Hume is both a sceptic and a Metaphysical Realist. His philosophical attitude is to suspend his judgment (...) on Metaphysical Realism, whereas as a common man he firmly believes in the existence of mind-independent, external, and continuous entities. Therefore Hume does not have any one position; accordingly, a form of “no one Hume” interpretation (Richard Popkin, Robert J. Fogelin, Donald L.M. Baxter) is argued for in the book. The key point in this distinction is the temporal difference between Hume’s philosophical and everyday views. It is introduced in order to avoid attributing a conscious contradiction to him (a problem which has not attracted enough attention in the literature). The method of the work is modelled on Peter Millican’s work on Hume and induction. The approach to the main problem is to study the two “profound” arguments against the senses that Hume presents in the Section 12 of An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748). These arguments are first reconstructed in detail resulting in Millican-type diagrams of them and then Hume’s endorsement of them is established on the basis of the diagrams. The first profound argument concludes that Metaphysical Realism and thus any Realistic theory of perception is unjustified as well as the existence of God and the soul. The second argument goes further having first conceptual conclusion: the very notions of Real entitity, material substance, and bodies are completely out of the reach of the faculty of understanding. Therefore they ought to be rejected according to Hume. This is a consequence of the consistent use of the Humean faculty of reason: idea-analysis and inductive inference. The second profound argument thus concludes that believing in Metaphysical Realism is inconsistent with the rational attitude that is to refrain from this belief. Hence, if we attributed both of them to Hume, we would end up with a great philosopher who embraces a manifest contradiction. The study is finished by arguing that this sceptical and Metaphysically Realistic interpretation concurs well with (1) Hume’s professed Academical philosophy and (2) project of the science of human nature. (1) According to Hume, Academical philosophy is in the first place diffidence, modesty, and uncertainty including suspension on certain issues. Secondly, it is restriction of the range of topics for which experience can provide a standard of truth. This kind of empiricist epistemological realism is coherent with the sceptical attitude on Metaphysical Realism because the latter does not rule out inter-subjective consensus on what we experience. (2) Suspension of judgment on Metaphysical Realism coheres with the mind-dependency of the objects of Hume’s science of human nature: the understanding, passions, morals, aesthetics, politics, and the human culture in all of its manifestations. Although the study takes the first Enquiry to be Hume’s authorised word on the understanding, his juvenile work A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) is argued to support this “no one Hume” interpretation. Hume’s other works are also discussed when needed. (shrink)

Objective Apeiron was founded in 1966 and has developed into one of the oldest and most distinguished journals dedicated to the study of ancient philosophy, ancient science, and, in particular, of problems that concern both fields. Apeiron is committed to publishing high-quality research papers in these areas of ancient Greco-Roman intellectual history; it also welcomes submission of articles dealing with the reception of ancient philosophical and scientific ideas in the later western tradition. The journal appears quarterly. Articles are peer-reviewed on (...) a double-blind basis. Topics ancient philosophy ancient science reception of ancient philosophical and scientific ideas in the later western tradition Article formats Original Articles. (shrink)

Human ethical practices and attitudes with respect to the other animals exhibit a curious instability. On the one hand, most people believe that it is wrong to inflict torment or death on a non-human animal for a trivial reason. Skinning a cat or setting it on fire by way of a juvenile prank is one of the standard examples of obvious wrongdoing in the philosophical literature. Like torturing infants, it is the kind of example that philosophers use when (...) we are looking for something ethically uncontroversial, so that disputes about the example won’t get in the way of the point we are trying to make.2 On the other hand, human beings have traditionally counted nearly any reason we might have for hurting or killing animals, short of malicious enjoyment, as non-trivial and sufficient. We kill non-human animals, and sometimes inflict pain on them, because we want to eat them, because we can make useful products out of them, because we can learn from experimenting on them, and.. (shrink)

Recent philosophical discussion about the relation between fiction and reality pays little attention to our moral involvement with literature. Frank Palmer's purpose is to investigate how our appreciation of literary works calls upon and develops our capacity for moral understanding. He explores a wide range of philosophical questions about the relation of art to morality, and challenges theories that he regards as incompatible with a humane view of literary art. Palmer considers, in particular, the extent to which the values and (...) moral concepts involved in our understanding of human beings can be said to enter into our understanding of, and response to, fictional characters. The scope of his discussion encompasses literary aesthetics, ethics, and epistemology, and he makes extensive reference to literary examples. (shrink)

This book examines the complex and varied ways in which fictions relate to the real world, and offers a precise account of how imaginative works of literature can use fictional content to explore matters of universal human interest. While rejecting the traditional view that literature is important for the truths that it imparts, the authors also reject attempts to cut literature off altogether from real human concerns. Their detailed account of fictionality, mimesis, and cognitive value, founded on the methods of (...) analytical philosophy, restores to literature its distinctive status among cultural practices. The authors also explore metaphysical and skeptical views, prevalent in modern thought, according to which the world itself is a kind of fiction, and truth no more than a social construct. They identify different conceptions of fiction in science, logic, epistemology, and make-believe, and thereby challenge the idea that discourse per se is fictional and that different modes of discourse are at root indistinguishable. They offer rigorous analyses of the roles of narrative, imagination, metaphor, and "making" in human thought processes. Both in their methods and in their conclusions, Lamarque and Olsen aim to restore rigor and clarity to debates about the values of literature, and to provide new, philosophically sound foundations for a genuine change of direction in literary theorizing. (shrink)

Surveying 2,500 years of philosophically oriented literary theory, Patrick Hogan provides students and teachers of literature with both explication and ...

Literature and Philosophical Play in Early Childhood Education explores the role of philosophy and the humanities as pedagogy in early childhood educational research and practice, arguing that research should attend to questions about education and growth that concern social structures, individual development and existential aspects of learning. It demonstrates how we can think of pedagogy and educational practices in early childhood as artistic, poetic and philosophical, and exemplifies a humanities-based approach by giving literature and artful play a place in shaping (...) the ground of practice and research. (shrink)

Considerable attention in bioethics has been devoted to moral expertise and its implications for handling applied moral problems. The existence and nature of moral expertise has been a contested topic, and particularly, whether philosophers are moral experts. In this study, we put the question of philosophers’ moral expertise in a wider context, utilizing a novel and global study among 4,087 philosophers from 96 countries. We find that despite the skepticism in recent literature, the vast majority of (...) class='Hi'>philosophers do believe in moral expertise and in the contribution of philosophical training and experience to its acquisition. Yet, they still differ on what philosophers’ moral expertise consists of. While they widely accept that philosophers possess superior analytic abilities regarding moral matters, they diverge on whether they also possess improved ability to judge moral problems. Nonetheless, most philosophers in our sample believe that philosophers possess an improved ability to both analyze and judge moral problems and that they commonly see these two capacities as going hand in hand. We also point at significant associations between personal and professional attributes and philosophers’ beliefs, such as age, working in the field of moral philosophy, public involvement, and association with the analytic tradition. We discuss the implications of these findings for the debate about moral expertise. -/- . (shrink)

Throughout his philosophical career, Eric Voegelin had much to say about literature in both his published work and his private letters. Many of his most trenchant comments regarding the analysis of literature appear in his correspondence with critic Robert Heilman, and, through his familiarity with that exchange, Charles Embry has gained extraordinary insight into Voegelin’s literary views. _The Philosopher and the Storyteller_ is the first book-length study of the literary dimensions of Voegelin’s philosophy—and the first to use his philosophy to (...) read specific novels. Bringing to bear a thorough familiarity with both Voegelin and great literature, Embry shows that novels—like myths, philosophy, and religious texts—participate in the human search for the truth of existence, and that reading literature within a Voegelinian framework exposes the existential and philosophical dimensions of those works. Embry focuses on two key elements of Voegelin’s philosophy as important for reading literature: metaxy, the in-between of human consciousness, and metalepsis, human participation in the community of being. He shows how Voegelin’s philosophy in general is rooted in literary-symbolic interpretation and, therefore, provides a foundation for the interpretation of literature. And finally he explores Voegelin’s insistence that the soundness of literary criticism lies in the consciousness of the reader. Embry then offers Voegelinian readings that vividly illustrate the principles of this approach. First he considers Graham Swift’s _Waterland_ as an example of the human search for meaning in the modern world, then he explores the deformation and recovery of reality in Heimito von Doderer’s long and complex novel _The Demons,_ and finally he examines how Flannery O’Connor’s _The Violent Bear It Away_ mythically expresses the flux of divine presence in what Voegelin calls the Time of the Tale. _The Philosopher and the Storyteller_ unites fiction and philosophy in the common quest to understand our nature, our world, and our cosmos. A groundbreaking exploration of the connection between Voegelin and twentieth-century literature, this book opens a new window on the philosopher’s thought and will motivate readers to study other novels in light of this approach. (shrink)

Of her two granddaughters, Grandma Yvette clearly prefers Ruby Taylor's perfect--and perfectly Jewish--cousin, Sarah. They do everything together, including bake cookies and have secret sleep overs that Ruby isn't invited to. Twelve-year-old Ruby suspects Grandma Yvette doesn't think she's Jewish enough. The Jewish religion is matrilineal, which means it's passed down from mother to child, and unlike Sarah, Ruby's mother isn't Jewish. But when Sarah starts acting out--trading in her skirts and cardigans for ripped jeans and stained t-shirts, getting in (...) trouble at school--Ruby can't help but be somewhat pleased. Then Sarah suddenly takes things too far, and Ruby is convinced Sarah is possessed by a dybbuk, an evil spirit... that Ruby may or may not have accidentally released from Grandma Yvette's basement. Ruby is determined to save her cousin, but a dybbuk can only be expelled by a "pious Jew." If Ruby isn't Jewish enough for her own grandmother, how can she possibly be Jewish enough to fight a dybbuk? (shrink)

Can literature help us in a time of crisis? Yes, in many and unexpected ways, as Simone Weil’s literary work shows. Reading Weil’s unfinished tragedy Venice Saved in the context of her poetry, philosophy and politics, we argue that it is an example of literary work that can engender transformation, for three reasons: its presentation and encouragement of attention to beauty; its tragic tension, forcing a deeper vision of the world; and its use of the poetic word. These elements, we (...) conclude, make literature a prime tool for inner and outer transformation, especially when everything seems to be lost. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of how literary and philosophical thinking can converge in experience of a literary work. Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, in Truth, Fiction, and Literature, dispute this possibility. I respond to their view with particular attention to their account of thematic interpretation. Thematic interpretation is presented here as involving thought about the reasons behind a work’s use of its content and other features. Those reasons have an implicit generality that allows us to move from literary (...) specificity to general, philosophically significant understanding. Philosophy’s need for the kind of thinking supported by literature, exploring patterns, priorities and less than universal claims, is defended. George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch and Lydia Davis’s story ‘Ethics’ provide illustrations of the issues. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century, and: Anne Conway: A Woman PhilosopherJane DuranWomen Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century, by Jacqueline Broad; 204 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. $65.00. Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, by Sarah Hutton; 280 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. $75.00.Recent work on women philosophers has, in general, approached the topic from two vantage points: on the one hand, a number (...) of anthologies have been published, wherein commentators present a small portion of the woman thinker's work, often without the background necessary for a fuller understanding. On the other hand, some few women philosophers have been the subject of full-length works, but these have tended, by and large, to be women thinkers of the twentieth century, with whose work we are already familiar. Two recent books, one by Jacqueline Broad and the other by Sarah Hutton, go a long way toward improving the situation.Work by Eileen O'Neill, Sarah Hutton and Margaret Atherton, among others, has helped familiarize us with the notion that the seventeenth century—that era so commonly associated with Descartes and the rise of modern philosophy—was also a time of rich theorizing by women philosophers. Jacqueline Broad's book possesses many virtues: it has the finely-tuned style of the careful historian, while at the same time not failing to demonstrate acquaintance with a range of contemporary feminist commentary. Part of the problem in addressing women thinkers of the past is another version of what we are now tempted to call the essentialism problem: does it make sense to think that there is a style that might be demarcated as "feminine," or that might, in some way, pertain uniquely to women theorists? These are difficult issues, but a partial response to the question is to try to remember that it is not for no reason that women thinkers have, indeed, been left out of the canon. As Broad herself says, women philosophers "are now mere footnotes to the standard historical-intellectual accounts of the early modern period" (p. 1).Broad does a superb job of navigating between the need to set out the plain tenets of the thinker's philosophy, and the desire to try to tie it into these larger questions. In six chapters, she addresses the work of Elizabeth of Bohemia, [End Page 200] Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Mary Astell, Damaris Masham and Catharine Trotter Cockburn The chapters on Elizabeth, Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell are particularly strong—here part of the difficulty is that we do have familiar commentaries addressing the work of these women, and it is hard to try to see them in a new light. We are accustomed, for example, to think of Elizabeth merely as Descartes's correspondent. As is the case with information that is currently coming to bear on the question of Harriet Taylor Mill's input into the work of John Stuart Mill, it is difficult for us to see Elizabeth as a thinker in her own right, or, indeed, to give her the credit that Descartes himself gave her; as Broad notes, he had described her as "the only person I have so far found who has completely understood all my previous works" (p. 13). Margaret Cavendish's reputation has suffered from the somewhat scattered approach of her writings, and Broad cites her "reputation for eccentricity" (p. 38). Nevertheless, the sheer volume of her work and its allusion to the problems addressed by the Cambridge Platonists (areas also worked on by Anne Conway) demands that she be taken far more seriously than she has in the past. Astell has become known largely for her more overtly feminist works, such as A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, but she was also the author of several other pieces addressing issues in metaphysics, and again the amount of her work and its citation during her own time would militate against the notion that it should not receive thorough examination.Broad does a wonderful job of setting out the main philosophical questions found in these theorists' works, and she excels at pitting their views against those of the various male philosophers whose work—according to... (shrink)

Through discussions of Locke, Behn, Shaftesbury, Hume, and Richardson, this book traces the idea of romance as, in the process of engendering resistance, it comes nonetheless to define the empiricist mind as the reading mind.

Introduction "Think only what concerns thee and thy being" — so Raphael admonishes Adam shortly before the fall in Paradise Lost (8.174). ...

The book is about three things. First, how Ancient thinkers perceived humans as like or unlike other animals; second about the justification for taking a humane attitude towards natural things; and third about how moral claims count as true, and how they can be discovered or acquired. Was Aristotle was right to see continuity in the psychological functions of animal and human souls? The question cannot be settled without taking a moral stance. As we can either focus on continuity or (...) on discontinuities, how should natural science draw the boundaries? Moral agents act and react in a world that they see under a certain description, and there is no value free science that can settle what is the correct description. This book asks us to think about where moral justification could come from, and suggests that the supposed ‘moral status’ of the object cannot provide the answer. For the moral status of the object is a product of our own imagination, and once we see that, we also see that there remains the question where we ought to have the will to see it. Furthermore, since the perception of moral truth involves the development of imagination and will, the means to attain it will be better served by engagement with poetry and literature than with enquiries that seek to exclude the engagement of the imagination, or any appeal to the beauty of nature or the love of one's fellow creatures. (shrink)

Here a distinguished American historian challenges the belief that the eighteenth century was essentially modern in its temper. In crystalline prose Carl Becker demonstrates that the period commonly described as the Age of Reason was, in fact, very far from that; that Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, and Locke were living in a medieval world, and that these philosophers “demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials.” In a new foreword, Johnson Kent Wright looks (...) at the book’s continuing relevance within the context of current discussion about the Enlightenment. “Will remain a classic—a beautifully finished literary product.”—Charles A. Beard, _American Historical Review_ “_The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers _remains_ _one of the most distinctive American contributions to the historical literature on the Enlightenment.... [It] is likely to beguile and provoke readers for a long time to come.”—Johnson Kent Wright, from the foreword. (shrink)

‘Quantum Gravity’ does not denote any existing theory: the field of quantum gravity is very much a ‘work in progress’. As you will see in this chapter, there are multiple lines of attack each with the same core goal: to find a theory that unifies, in some sense, general relativity (Einstein’s classical field theory of gravitation) and quantum field theory (the theoretical framework through which we understand the behaviour of particles in non-gravitational fields). Quantum field theory and general relativity seem (...) to be like oil and water, they don’t like to mix—it is fair to say that combining them to produce a theory of quantum gravity constitutes the greatest unresolved puzzle in physics. Our goal in this chapter is to give the reader an impression of what the problem of quantum gravity is; why it is an important problem; the ways that have been suggested to resolve it; and what philosophical issues these approaches, and the problem itself, generate. This review is extremely selective, as it has to be to remain a manageable size: generally, rather than going into great detail in some area, we highlight the key features and the options, in the hope that readers may take up the problem for themselves—however, some of the basic formalism will be introduced so that the reader is able to enter the physics and (what little there is of) the philosophy of physics literature prepared. I have also supplied references for those cases where I have omitted some important facts. Hence, this chapter is intended primarily as a catalyst for future research projects by philosophers of physics, both budding and well-matured. (shrink)

Disturbed by these acrimonious arguments, the authors - former colleagues and university-press board members - embarked on an ambitious project to reexamine a number of major literary and philosophical works dealing with the liberal arts and education. With their discussions ranging from Plato to Rousseau, from Cicero to Vico, from Erasmus to Matthew Arnold, Sousa and Weinsheimer offer not a history of education philosophy but an examination of the present.

Offers students introductory discussions of ten widely read works of philosophical literature by such authors as Plato, Dante, Goethe, Voltaire, and Nietzsche.

Nursing claims a significant history of engaging philosophical inquiry. To better understand the rationale for this engagement, and what nursing understands itself to achieve through philosophical inquiry, we conducted an interpretive synthesis of the recent nursing literature to identify what nurses are doing when they say they are doing philosophy. The overarching finding was that while vanishingly few articles articulated any definition of philosophy, the synthesis showed how nursing considers philosophical engagement a generative mode for asking and answering questions in/for (...) nursing. Whatever aspects of nursing were focused on in these articles, and they were myriad, philosophy was invoked as an appropriate modality to work through that aspect rigorously, critically, and with an expectation that something “knowledgeable” would result from the effort. Based on the synthesis, we conclude that nursing philosophy could be considered a specific modality of nursing practice by which nursing is both done and delineated, a discursive practice in which we continually assess and explore and adapt and advance our understanding of the discipline in service to advancing our unique efficacy. This definition of “nursing philosophy” provides an opening for further inquiry helping to illuminate its functionalities and potentialities for outputs that can facilitate rigorous practice, education, and scholarship. (shrink)

An idea of the philosophy of archaeology can best be gained by showing what it is, what the issues are, who is working in the field, and how they proceed. Reading Lester Embree's Metaarchaeology provides the best possible introduction to the field, since in it several leading archaeologists show how accessible and interesting the current archeological literature is, and currently active philosophers of archaeology reveal something of the current state of discussion on the subject. Bibliographies have also been developed (...) of the philosophy of archaeology as well as of selected parts of the component that can be called metaarchaeology. Finally, an historical introduction has been included to show the variety of metascientific as well as orientational standpoints that philosophers of archaeology have had recourse to for over two decades, followed by speculation about the future of the discipline within the philosophy of science. (shrink)

In this splendidly preposterous volume, John Tyerman Williams sets out to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that the whole of Western philosophy - from the ancient Greeks to the existentialists of this century - may be found in the works of A. A. Milne. Williams shows how Pooh - referred to here as "the Great Bear" - explains and illuminates the most profound ideas of the great thinkers, from Aristotle and Plato to Sartre and Camus.

This article will examine Jean Paul Sartre's Nausea from the perspectives of philosophical fiction and world literature. Philosophical fiction is a specific kind of literature that insists on its absolute modernity. However, the literary aspects of philosophical fiction place it within its political and historical context, thus threatening this pretense to universality. Our examination of Nausea will show the internal tension between philosophy and fiction and how the interplay of both of those elements informed the structure of the novel. The (...) formal, literary aspects help further the actual philosophical content that purports to be the central focus. The implications of that interplay will lead us to a new understanding of the inner logic of world literature. (shrink)

This book provides strong guidance to teachers and students of literature that gives them a greater understanding of the philosophical influences on more than 100 major literary figures. The text describes philosophical influences reflected in their writings as well as references to philosophical works that are known to have played a part in their intellectual and aesthetic development.