R.G. Collingwood defined historical knowledge as essentially ‘scientific’, and saw the historian's task as the ‘re-enactment of past thoughts’. The author argues the need to go beyond Collingwood, first by demonstrating the authenticity of available evidence, and secondly, using Namier as an example, by considering methodology as well as epistemology, and the need to relate past thoughts to their present context. The ‘law of the consumption of time’ encourages historians to focus on landmark events, theories and generalisations, thus breaking from (...) Collingwood's emphasis on fidelity to past ideas and interpreting the past from the concepts of the present. This conflict can only be reconciled by the study of historiography. (shrink)

R.G. Collingwood defined historical knowledge as essentially ‘scientific’, and saw the historian's task as the ‘re-enactment of past thoughts’. The author argues the need to go beyond Collingwood, first by demonstrating the authenticity of available evidence, and secondly, using Namier as an example, by considering methodology as well as epistemology, and the need to relate past thoughts to their present context. The ‘law of the consumption of time’ encourages historians to focus on landmark events, theories and generalisations, thus breaking from (...) Collingwood's emphasis on fidelity to past ideas and interpreting the past from the concepts of the present. This conflict can only be reconciled by the study of historiography. (shrink)

This volume is a collection of original essays by eminent philosophers written for R. B. Braithwaite's eightieth birthday to celebrate his work and teaching. In one way or another, all the essays reflect his central concern with the impact of science on our beliefs about the world and the responses appropriate to that. Together they testify to the signal importance of his contributions in areas of philosophy bearing on this concern: the philosophy of science, especially of the statistical sciences, theories (...) of belief and of probability, decision theory and games theory. This book, which includes a full bibliography of Professor Braithwaite's work, will interest advanced students and professionals in the fields of philosophy and psychology. (shrink)

La característica central del pensamiento filosófico del siglo XX (si más no, de la llamada a día de hoy 'filosofía analítica') ha sido el interés por el estudio del lenguaje. El lenguaje religioso no ha sido una excepción a este interés. Uno de los ejemplos más tempranos de esta preocupación por el estudio del lenguaje religioso es el análisis propuesto por R. B. Braithwaite en su "An Empiricist's View of the Nature of Religious Belief" (1955). Dicho muy brevemente, la idea (...) básica de Braithwaite es que el lenguaje religioso no describe el mundo: aquellos que realizan una afirmación de índole religiosa no están aceptando la verdad de una proposición sino que están simplemente expresando su compromiso con un determinado código de conducta. Es por ello, dice Braithwaite, que adoptar una creencia religiosa no consiste en aceptar que el mundo se corresponde con una descripción de hechos determinada, sino en comprometerse a actuar de acuerdo con un código de conducta. El objetivo de este artículo es ofrecer un análisis crítico de la propuesta de Braithwaite. (shrink)

In an attempt to determine Ward's place in American thought, the author concludes that his subject is a minor intellectual figure, and that his contribution to sociology is insignificant.--R. B.

An imaginative and provocative attempt to provide a fresh analysis of man as knower, doer, and maker., At the heart of Buchler's analysis is a theory of judgment which encompasses not only assertive judgment, but also "active" and "exhibitive" judgment: The theory is explicated and elaborated by an examination of query, experience and meaning.--R. B.

Six essays on such topics as the phenomena of mystical experience, the history of the word "mysticism," an analysis of St. Paul's mysticism, and, most prominently, the meaning of mysticism in the early Church. The essays follow no general plan; consequently the various subjects are treated unequally, and there are repetitions and occasional inconsistencies. --R. B.

An unorganized but interesting collection of ten papers describing and evaluating the use of computers in legal research and the use of modern behavioral science in analyzing and predicting judicial decisions. The authors are professors of law, lawyers, and social scientists, and include a Soviet scholar writing on cybernetics and Soviet law. Technical descriptions of data recovery systems and technical methods of analyzing judicial decisions alternate with arguments for and against the actual use of such methods and systems by practicing (...) lawyers. All of the technical discussion is within the grasp of the interested lay reader; but the evaluation of these techniques becomes unspecific and polemical at times. The footnotes of many of the papers provide an excellent bibliography.—R. B. P. (shrink)

A welcome republication of Guignebert's impressive scholarly study of the life, teaching, and death of Jesus. Guignebert's conclusion, on the basis of a careful examination of sources, is that nothing or very little of Jesus' work remained and that, from an historical point of view, he cannot be considered the founder of Christianity. -- R. B.

The author uses the Scriptures as the basis for constructing a moral philosophy. Besides describing the Biblical morality, he examines the nature of moral principle and of moral judgment in general. There is a suggestive supplementary essay, "The Logic of an Empirical Moral Philosophy and its Parallel in the Logic of Empirical Science."--R. B.

The paper illustrates how organic chemists dramatically altered their practices in the middle part of the twentieth century through the adoption of analytical instrumentation - such as ultraviolet and infrared absorption spectroscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy - through which the difficult process of structure determination for small molecules became routine. Changes in practice were manifested in two ways: in the use of these instruments in the development of 'rule-based' theories; and in an increased focus on synthesis, at the expense (...) of chemical analysis. These rule-based theories took the form of generalizations relating structure to chemical and physical properties, as measured by instrumentation. This 'Instrumental Revolution' in organic chemistry was two-fold: encompassing an embrace of new tools that provided unprecedented access to structures, and a new way of thinking about molecules and their reactivity in terms of shape and structure. These practices suggest the possibility of a change in the ontological status of chemical structures, brought about by the regular use of instruments. The career of Robert Burns Woodward (1917-1979) provides the central historical examples for the paper. Woodward was an organic chemist at Harvard from 1937 until the time of his death. In 1965, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. (shrink)

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It is a common complaint against moral philosophers that their abstract theorising bears little relation to the practical problems of everyday life. Professor Braithwaite believes that this criticism need not be inevitable. With the help of the Theory of Games he shows how arbitration is possible between two neighbours, a jazz trumpeter and a classical pianist, whose performances are a source of mutual discord. The solution of the problem in the lecture is geometrical, and is based on the formal analogy (...) between the logic of the situation and the geometry of a parabola. But an appendix provides the alternative algebraic treatment of a general two-person collaboration situation. (shrink)

This book is not a study of Plato's philosophy, but a contribution to the literary interpretation of the dialogues, through analysis of their formal structure, ...

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and (...) made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

E.R. Dodds’ 1959 edition of Plato’s Gorgias is a conventional treatment of this dialogue, aimed at audiences interested in close study of the text. Dodds himself regretted this outcome. He felt he had lost sight of an earlier goal, formulated at a time of political turmoil on the eve of WorldWar II, of using the Gorgias to bring out ‘both the resemblance and the difference between Plato’s situation and that of the intellectual today’. The present paper attempts to reconstruct that (...) goal, as it survives residually in his edition, surfaces in his The Greeks and the Irrational, and appears in some writings from the 1930s, particularly in unpublished lectures. Dodds did frequently juxtapose ancient and modern conceptions of the intellectual, and in a way that cast Plato in a positive light, as someone politically engaged and self-critical, and acutely sensitive, as Dodds himself was, to the political implications of social psychology. (shrink)

There is a central issue which runs through most of the details of Walker’s interpretation—the relationship between what he calls, taking his cue from Strawson, "transcendental idealism" and "transcendental arguments." He argues often and, I think, correctly, that the contemporary attempt to reconstruct Kant "austerely" in terms of transcendental arguments alone is misguided, that transcendental arguments about "what must be the case in order for there to be experience at all" cannot accomplish their task, and that we should rest content (...) with the more modest goal of discussing those aspects of our nonempirical "thoughts" or "beliefs" about the world which seem indispensably involved in our experience. Of course, we would still need something like a "transcendental argument" to establish these subjective conditions, but Walker uses that term to refer exclusively to Strawson’s austere reconstruction, and to argue that only Kant’s idealistic use of such arguments comes close to philosophic success. (shrink)

Sympathetic interpretations of Kant’s frequently stressed characterizations of his "architectonic" approach to philosophy are rare. As much as such an approach seemed to gratify Kant, it has embarrassed commentators, who have complained for generations about the "Procrustean bed" or ad hoc quality of Kant’s meta-philosophical principles. The author of this book proposes to take quite seriously the idea of a "unity in Kant’s thinking," but his approach to such an issue is historical and, for the most part, unsystematic. That is, (...) rather than discuss the philosophical importance of a claim for architectonic unity, he instead announces that he will demonstrate that the "unity" of Kant’s entire corpus is the "unity of a problem-determined development in his thinking, not that of a pre-conceived or static system." The result of this approach is a well-informed, but only incidentally thematic summary of Kant’s occasionally continuous, occasionally radically altered views of various Hauptprobleme. (shrink)

As the interesting title of this work indicates, its author is concerned less with Kant’s theory of morality, with its account of freedom, the possibility of pure reason being practical, and the deduction of the moral law, than he is with Kant’s Sittenlehre, or the account of the moral law as applied, moral judgment, and the substantive, derived duties of justice and virtue. Accordingly, he concentrates almost exclusively on two texts. The first four chapters are a commentary on and assessment (...) of the three chapters of the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, and his last two chapters deal with the two main sections of the Metaphysics of Morals. Other important texts of Kant’s moral theory are dealt with, as he says, en passant, and some are not dealt with at all. This approach has the virtue of focusing attention on perhaps the central Kantian moral problem: the nature of the transition from pure moral principles to "morals." It has the defect of being bound in too restrictive a way to the Groundwork as an expression of Kant’s general moral theory. There is no discussion of the synthetic or "regressive" methodology of that work, an approach which Kant realized aided its popular appeal, but greatly limited its theoretical adequacy, nor of the well known revisions Kant made in his moral theory, especially his account of freedom, by 1788. However, the author admits that he did not intend to write a book "directed specifically to Kant scholars." Instead, he tries to keep his discussion of textual interpretation minimal, always tries to present Kant’s arguments in a "contemporary idiom," refers only to English translations, infrequently to the Kant literature, and then only to English language literature. (shrink)

The author of this polemical book directs his attack more against what he sees as the overwhelmingly dominant "Kantianism" of "contemporary scientific thinking" than against the "Kant" of his title. This is, his book is much more a very general indictment of the "spirit" of this modern mode of knowing, than anything approaching an examination of Kant’s views.

This article is in a larger textbook of articles on Medical Ethics. It identifies a number of values that underlie professional commitments to confidentiality that are involved in protecting or promoting the client's (1) privacy, (2)social status, (3) economic advantages, (4) openness of communications, (5) seeking professional help, (6) trust in professionals, (7) autonomous control over personal information. The problem of making exceptions to confidentiality commitments is also examined.

A re-issue of Darwin's pioneer work on expression. In addition to the text, this edition includes a brief preface by Margaret Mead and added illustrations meant to show the results of some recent work in the field established by Darwin's inquiry.---R. B.

Kolakowski describes his massive and comprehensive study of Marxism as a "handbook." Following a classic pattern, he divides his study into three volumes, "The Founders," "The Golden Age," and "The Breakdown." Kolakowski does not claim to present a non-controversial account of the history of Marxism, however, his aim is "to include the principal facts that are likely to be of use to anyone seeking an introduction to the subject". The main organizing principle is chronological, although Kolakowski frequently departs from strict (...) chronology in order to deal with thinkers who share affinities in their approach to Marxism or to present background information about the historical context and alternatives to Marxism. The first volume begins with a discussion of the origins of dialectic that reaches back to the pre-Socratics carrying us through the neo-Platonic tradition to Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. This is followed by an analysis of the views of the left Hegelians and a detailed exposition of Marx, from his early to his mature writings. The volume concludes with a discussion of Engels’s understanding of the dialectics of nature. Volume 2 begins with an analysis of Marxism and the Second International. There are separate chapters on Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Eduard Bernstein, Jean Jaurès, Paul Lafargue, Georges Sorel, Antonio Labriola, Ludwik Krzywicki, Kasimierz Kelles-Krauz, Stanislaw Brzozowski, and the Austro-Marxists. Kolakowski then treats in detail the origins of Russian Marxism culminating in a discussion of Leninism and its fortunes. The final volume follows the bleak story of Soviet Marxism, but also treats the alternatives to Soviet ideology with chapters on Antonio Gramsci, György Lukács, Karl Korsch, Lucien Goldmann, the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse, and Ernst Bloch. There is a final chapter that surveys developments in Marxism since Stalin’s death. The main emphasis is on European Marxism although there is a brief discussion of the peasant Marxism of Mao-Tse-tung. The erudition, the mastery of detail, and the scope exhibited is remarkable. There is nothing comparable to this work in English. The style is so lucid and the translation so good that it is difficult to believe that the study was not originally written in English. Both the novice and the advanced scholar can learn from these volumes. But the study is not really an introduction. Kolakowski’s expositions, interpretations, and criticisms are at once highly sophisticated and highly controversial. It is a handbook that needs to be used with caution despite Kolakowski’s claim that he had done his best "not to merge comment with exposition, but to present my own views in separate, clearly defined sections". (shrink)