This book applies Augustine's thought to current questions of teaching and learning. The essays are written in an accessible style and is not intended just for experts on Augustine or church history.

Recovering Reason: Essays in Honor of Thomas L. Pangle is a collection of essays composed by students and friends of Thomas L. Pangle to honor his seminal work and outstanding guidance in the study of political philosophy. These essays examine both Socrates' and modern political philosophers' attempts to answer the question of the right life for human beings, as those attempts are introduced and elaborated in the work of thinkers from Homer and Thucydides to Nietzsche and Charles Taylor.

New Atheists and Anti-Theists (such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hutchins) affirm that there is a strong connection between being a traditional theist and being a religious fundamentalist who advocates violence, terrorism, and war. They are especially critical of Islam. On the contrary, I argue that, when correctly understood, religious dogmatic belief, present in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, is progressive and open to internal and external criticism and revision. Moreover, acknowledging that human knowledge is finite and (...) that humans are fallible and have much to learn, dogmatic religious believers accept that they ought to value and seek to acquire moral and intellectual virtues, including the virtues of temperance and reasonability. (shrink)

Historically, for Black writers, literary fiction has been a site for transforming the discursive disciplinary spaces of political oppression. From 19th century “slave narratives” to the 20th century, Black novelists have created an impressive literary counter-canon in advancing liberatory struggles. W.E.B. Du Bois argued that “all art is political.” Many Black writers have used fiction to create spaces for political and social freedom—from the early work of Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859)—to (...) the enduring works of the Harlem Renaissance (Toomer, Hurston, and Schuyler)—to the great revolutionary Black literature after WWII (Wright, Baldwin, Williams)—to contemporary Black writers (Toni Morrison, Edward Jones, Samuel Delany)—Black fictive space continues to be a necessary site for resistance. Black literary fiction is a vast counter-canon to mainstream literature which unquestioningly reinforces global white supremacy, capitalistic political oppressions, and the dominance/subordinance relations upon which they depend. (shrink)

Mander's book is a welcomed addition to the recent interest in Francis Herbert Bradley's philosophy, especially his metaphysics. The formation of the new Bradleian Society and the soon to be published proceedings of papers written by contemporary philosophers like R. Wollheim, T. Sprigge, T. Baldwin, and S. Candlish and D. Holdcroft, among others, for the very successful F. H. Bradley Colloquium at Oxford attest to this renewed burst of scholarly energy in a thinker whom many believe had been disposed (...) of by Russell and Moore. However, it is not easy to eliminate the thought of a great philosopher, and especially one who made epoch-making contributions to logic, metaphysics, and ethics in our century and who has profoundly influenced philosophers like Whitehead and Russell, James and Dewey, Eliot and Blanshard. Caricatures and misrepresentations are the lot of every metaphysician from Parmenides to Whitehead; Bradley is no exception. A main objective of Mander's book is to expose these misunderstandings and to assess recent Bradleian scholarship with respect to several primal metaphysical notions developed principally in Bradley's Appearance and Reality and Essays on Truth and Reality. (shrink)

Richard Rorty does have something ‘to say to [Black Americans]’ and to their racially conscious nonblack allies in the sense that his understanding of liberalism, his prophecies about the future and his urgent appeals to the American Left all paint a picture of a white middle class fully prepared to make life increasingly miserable for Black Americans unless it is ‘protected from catastrophe’. Rorty hopes that this group will undergo a moral transformation that enables it to see past its (...) narrow group interests, but doubts that it will. He, nevertheless, prescribes a politics of hope and appeasement as a hedge against both despair and backsliding. In so doing, he fails to appreciate the availability and the suitability of an alternative ‘racial realist’ (and tragicomic) posture vis-à-vis American liberalism inspired by thinkers like Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Derrick Bell. This alternative enables racially conscious Americans to respond to the intransigence of (certain) white Americans with cunning rather than by escaping into fantasies of a ‘dream country’ unmarked by the damage caused by racism and its long-lingering effects. I uncover and explore this alternative through Rorty’s warnings regarding the white middle class, a somewhat surprising consistency between Rorty’s brand of class politics and Bell’s understanding of ‘racial fortuity’, and, finally, through a development of Bell’s ‘racial realist’ posture combined with Baldwin’s ‘uses of the blues’ resulting in a ‘hard-eyed’ tragicomic sensibility sufficient to effectively pair continued struggle with creative consolation and resilience. (shrink)

We give a general account of the goals of axiomatization, introducing a variant on Detlefsen’s notion of ‘complete descriptive axiomatization’. We describe how distinctions between the Greek and modern view of number, magnitude, and proportion impact the interpretation of Hilbert’s axiomatization of geometry. We argue, as did Hilbert, that Euclid’s propositions concerning polygons, area, and similar triangles are derivable from Hilbert’s first-order axioms. We argue that Hilbert’s axioms including continuity show much more than the geometrical propositions of Euclid’s theorems and (...) thus are an immodest complete descriptive axiomatization of that subject. (shrink)

This book offers a fresh perspective on Richard Rorty by situating his work in the arena of political theory. Reinterpreting Rorty's much-maligned antirepresentationalism as a Romantic affirmation of the power of imaginative writing, Voparil firmly grounds Rorty in an American tradition that includes not only James and Dewey, but Emerson, Whitman, and James Baldwin, and initiates an overdue reassessment of this important thinker's value to the political discourse of the 21st century.

This book brings together contributions from scholars from Europe and the United States to honor the theological work of Antje Jackelén, the first female Archbishop of the Church of Sweden. In Archbishop Antje Jackelén's installation homily, she identifies the strength of the Church as a "global network of prayer threads." This book is an honorary and celebratory volume providing a "global network of prayerful essays" by contributors from a variety of academic disciplines to creatively engage, reflect, and illuminate the theological (...) work of Archbishop Jackelén. Prior to her tenure in the Church of Sweden as Bishop of the Diocese of Lund and now the Archbishop of the Church of Sweden, Jackelén served as professor of Systematic Theology, Director of the Zygon Center and President of European Society for the Study of Science and Religion (ESSSAT). While each essay intentionally embraces the theological and ministerial work of Jackelén during her academic tenure, they also venture into areas as diverse as climate change, media studies, human uniqueness, hermeneutics, time, ethics, Christian theological tradition and history, traumatology, politics and society. As the first diverse explication of the theological thinking of Archbishop Jackelén by her theological colleagues, this text provides scholars with an expansion of the scope of Archbishop Jackelén's theological thinking and initiates laity into the impact of Jackelén thinking that combines with grace and precision the traditions of the Church, the challenges and gifts of the sciences, and the needs and longings of society and the world. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: The Good Life: Booze, Pills, Hot and Cold Running Interns? “Be the Best Machines (and Humans) the Universe Has Ever Seen” “Be Ready to Fight or You Dishonor the Reason Why We're Here” “Each of Us Plays a Role. Each Time a Different Role” Notes.

Psychology is the science of the mind. It aims to find out all about the mind--the whole story--just as the other sciences aim to find out all about the subjects of which they treat--astronomy, of the stars; geology, of the earth; physiology, of the body. And when we wish to trace out the story of the mind, as psychology has done it, we find that there are certain general truths with which we should first acquaint ourselves; truths which the science (...) has been a very long time finding out, but which we can now realize without a great deal of explanation. (shrink)

James Mark Baldwin left a legacy that has yet to be fully examined, one with profound implications for science and the humanities. In some sense it paralleled that of his friend Charles Sanders Peirce, whose semiotics became understood only a century later. Baldwin was trying to make sense of complex biological and social processes that only now have come into the limelight as biological sciences have re-emerged in psychology. Baldwin's focus on development, based on the observation of (...) his own children and extrapolated to his general theoretical scheme, is fully in line with where contemporary biological sciences are heading. This is exemplified by the bounded flexibility of the work of the genetic system. The general principle of persistent exploration of the environment with the result of creating novelty, which was the core of Baldwin's theoretical system, has since the 1960s become the guiding idea in genetics. Contemporary developmental science is rooted in Baldwin's thinking. In his new introduction, Jaan Valsiner shows that Baldwin's Genetic Theory of Reality demonstrates how human beings are in their nature social beings, establishes an alternative conceptualization of evolutionary theory, and formulates a system of developmental logic, all of which serve as the foundation for developmental psychology as a whole. This is a work of social science rediscovery long overdue. (shrink)

Martin Luther King Jr. said and wrote as much or more about the meaning, nature, and power of truth as any other prominent figure in the 1950s and '60s. King was not only vastly influential as an advocate for and defender of truth; he also did more than anyone in his time to organize truth into a movement for the liberation, uplift, and empowerment of humanity, efforts that ultimately resulted in the loss of his life. Drawing on King's published and (...) unpublished sermons, speeches, and writings, The Arc of Truth explores King's lifelong pilgrimage in pursuit of truth. Lewis Baldwin explores King's quest for truth from his inquisitive childhood to the influence of family and church, to Morehouse College, Crozer Theological Seminary, Boston University, and other academic institutions in the Northeast. Continuing on, the book follows King's sense that he was involved in experiments of truth within the context of the struggle to liberate and empower humanity, to his understanding of the civil rights movement as unfolding truth, to his persistent challenge to America around its need to engage in a serious reckoning with truth regarding its history and heritage. Baldwin investigates King's determination to speak truth to power, and his untiring efforts to actualize what he envisioned as the truthful ends of the beloved community through the truthful means of nonviolent direct action. King believed, taught, and demonstrated by example that truth derives from a revolution in the heart, mind, and soul before it can be translated into institutions and structures that guarantee freedom, justice, human dignity, equality of opportunity, and peace. Ultimately, King's significance for humanity cannot be considered only his contributions as a preacher, pastor, civil rights leader, and world figure--he was and remains equally impactful as a theologian, philosopher, and ethicist whose life and thought evince an enduring search for and commitment to truth. (shrink)

Philosophy: its relation to life and education.--The ideslism of Spinoza.--Recent discussion in materialism.--Professor Watson on reality and time.--The cosmic and the moral.--Psychology past and present.--The postulates of physiological psychology.--The origin of volition in childhood.--Imitation: a chapter in the natural history of consciousness.--The origin of emotional expression.--The perception of external reality.--Feeling, belief, and judgment.--Memory for square size.--The effect of size-contrast upon judgments of position in the retinal field.--An optical illusion.--New questions in mental chronometry. Types of reaction.--The "type-theory" of reaction.--The psychology of (...) religion.--Shorter philosophical papers.--Shorter literary papers. (shrink)

This classic, provocative introduction to classical metaphysical questions focuses on appreciating the problems, rather than attempting to proffer answers.

The Exchange of Words is a philosophical exploration of human testimony, specifically as a form of intersubjective understanding in which speakers communicate by making themselves accountable for the truth of what they say. This account weaves together themes from philosophy of language, moral psychology, action theory, and epistemology, for a new approach to this basic human phenomenon.

Offers readers an alternative way of conceptualising humanism in relation to global change, one that draws in particular from black studies as opposed to one located in the ontological fold of European humanism.

Grossberg and VanDieren have started a program to develop a stability theory for tame classes. We name some variants of tameness and prove the following. Let K be an AEC with Löwenheim-Skolem number ≤κ. Assume that K satisfies the amalgamation property and is κ-weakly tame and Galois-stable in κ. Then K is Galois-stable in κ⁺ⁿ for all n<ω. With one further hypothesis we get a very strong conclusion in the countable case. Let K be an AEC satisfying the amalgamation property (...) and with Löwenheim-Skolem number ℵ₀ that is ω-local and ℵ₀-tame. If K is ℵ₀-Galois-stable then K is Galois-stable in all cardinalities. (shrink)

The paper argues for the centrality of believing the speaker (as distinct from believing the statement) in the epistemology of testimony, and develops a line of thought from Angus Ross which claims that in telling someone something, the kind of reason for belief that a speaker presents is of an essentially different kind from ordinary evidence. Investigating the nature of the audience's dependence on the speaker's free assurance leads to a discussion of Grice's formulation of non-natural meaning in an epistemological (...) light, concentrating on just how the recognition of the speaker's self-reflexive intention is supposed to count for his audience as a reason to believe P. This is understood as the speaker's explicitly assuming responsibility for the truth of his statement, and thereby constituting his utterance as a reason to believe. (shrink)

In this volume Rorty offers a Deweyan account of objectivity as intersubjectivity, one that drops claims about universal validity and instead focuses on utility for the purposes of a community. The sense in which the natural sciences are exemplary for inquiry is explicated in terms of the moral virtues of scientific communities rather than in terms of a special scientific method. The volume concludes with reflections on the relation of social democratic politics to philosophy.

Political liberals assume an accessibility requirement, which means that, for ensuring civic respect and non-manipulation, public officials should offer accessible reasons during political advocacy. Recently, critics have offered two arguments to show that the accessibility requirement is unnecessary. The first is the pluralism argument: Given the pluralism in evaluative standards, when officials offer non-accessible reasons, they are not disrespectful because they may merely try to reveal their strongest reason. The second is the honesty argument: As long as officials honestly confess (...) their beliefs after offering non-accessible reasons, disrespect and non-manipulation do not occur. This paper defends the accessibility requirement and asserts that these two arguments overlook a unique feature of the political domain. While all citizens collectively own political power as a corporate body, an official does not privately own her political power. Instead, she is a trustee who has a duty to act on behalf of the corporate body, that is, she has to make decisions on grounds that are accessible to others. This duty explains why, despite pluralism, the accessibility requirement is necessary. Moreover, given that political decisions are profoundly influential to each person, requiring people to be honest is ineffective in discouraging disrespectful and manipulative acts. (shrink)

Clayton and Stevens argue that political liberals should engage with the religiously unreasonable by offering religious responses and showing that their religious views are mistaken, instead of refusing to engage with them. Yet they recognize that political liberals will face a dilemma due to such religious responses: either their responses will alienate certain reasonable citizens, or their engagements will appear disingenuous. Thus, there should be a division of justificatory labour. The duty of engagement should be delegated to religious citizens. In (...) this comment, I will argue that the division of justificatory labour is indefensible. This dilemma can be avoided if politicians and political philosophers correctly use conjecture, a form of discourse that involves non-public reason. As a conditional response, conjecture avoids alienating any reasonable citizens. Also, if conjecture is given in a sincere and open-minded manner, then the problem of disingenuousness can be overcome. My comment concludes that while the engagement of politicians and political philosophers does not necessarily jeopardize overlapping consensus, they should be permitted, or perhaps even required, to engage with the religiously unreasonable due to the natural duty of justice. (shrink)

Political liberals usually assume the coercion account, which argues that state actions should be publicly justified because they coerce citizens. Recently some critics object this account for it overlooks that some policies are non-coercive but still require public justification. My article argues that, instead of understanding coercion as particular laws or policies, it should be understood as the exercise of collective political power that shapes the basic structure. This revised coercion account explains why those ostensibly non-coercive policies are in fact (...) coercive. Moreover, I argue that the alternative accounts suggested by critics fail, unless they assume the revised coercion account. (shrink)

This article argues that ideas about reason of state shaped English political debate in the first half of the seventeenth century, especially how the Crown attempted to justify its actions, and how those who attempted to oppose it did so. An understanding of this can lead us to correct some of the problems both with a 'revisionist' account of the early seventeenth century, and with accounts given by historians of political thought. The article also demonstrates that reason of state was (...) a fluid and volatile argument, available not only to those in power, but to those who wished to demonstrate that such power was illegitimate, and establish something different in its place. It is therefore a vital component of any understanding of early modern politics. (shrink)

Alvin Plantinga’s externalist religious epistemology, which incorporates a proper function account of warrant, forms the basis for his standard and extended Aquinas/Calvin models. Respectively, these models show how it could be that Theistic Belief and Christian Belief could be warranted for believers in a properly basic manner. Christianity and Islam share fundamental theses that underlie the plausibility of Plantinga’s models: the Dependency Thesis, the Design Thesis, and the Immediacy Thesis. Accordingly, an Islamic worldview can endorse the truth of the standard (...) A/C model but recommend a uniquely Islamic extension. Thus, there are multiple viable extensions of the standard A/C model. That there are Multiple Viable Extensions of the standard A/C model grounds the Multiple Viable Extensions Objection (MVE): given the truth of the standard A/C model, it is more likely than not that a given extension of it is probably incorrect, thus those who accept some extension of the standard A/C model have a reason to think that model they affirm is incorrect. After considering the plausibility of second-order knowledge states and responding to objections, I conclude that because a uniquely Islamic extension of the standard A/C model advocates a limited second-order awareness condition on knowledge, it is plausible to think that an Islamic model of warrant (and its corresponding Islamic extension) suggests ways in which a satisfactory response to the MVE objection might be formulated. (shrink)

In Public Reason Confucianism, Kim Sungmoon presents a perfectionist theory that is based on a partially comprehensive Confucian doctrine but is non-sectarian, since the doctrine is widely shared in East Asian societies. Despite its attractiveness, I argue that this project, unfortunately, fails because it is still vulnerable to the sectarian critique. The blurred distinction between partially and fully comprehensive doctrines will create a loophole problem. Sectarian laws and policies may gain legitimacy that they do not deserve. I further defend political (...) Confucianism, which is regarded by Kim as an inadequately intelligible form of Confucianism. Kim assumes a too narrow understanding of intelligibility. Although political Confucianism may not be politically intelligible, it is civically intelligible, i.e. it is culturally intelligibly different from other political theories in terms of its implications in citizens’ actions in civil society. In light of civic intelligibility, the distinctiveness of political Confucianism should not be underestimated. (shrink)

Richard Swinburne offers an original treatment of a question at the heart of epistemology: what makes a belief rational, or justified in holding? He maps the rival accounts of philosophers on epistemic justification ("internalist" and "externalist"), arguing that they are really accounts of different concepts. He distinguishes between synchronic justification (justification at a time) and diachronic justification (synchronic justification resulting from adequate investigation)--both internalist and externalist. He also argues that most kinds of justification are worth having because they are (...) indicative of truth; however, it is only justification of internalist kinds that can guide a believer's actions. Swinburne goes on to show the usefulness of the probability calculus in elucidating how empirical evidence makes beliefs probably true. (shrink)

This is the first comprehensive overview of the influence of Platonism on the English literary tradition, showing how English writers, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Yeats, Pound and Iris Murdoch, used Platonic themes and images within their own imaginative work.

We introduce the notion T does not omit obstructions. If a stable theory does not admit obstructions then it does not have the finite cover property . For any theory T, form a new theory $T_{\rm Aut}$ by adding a new unary function symbol and axioms asserting it is an automorphism. The main result of the paper asserts the following: If T is a stable theory, T does not admit obstructions if and only if $T_{\rm Aut}$ has a model companion. (...) The proof involves some interesting new consequences of the nfcp. (shrink)

We emphasize the role of the choice of vocabulary in formalization of a mathematical area and remark that this is a particular preoccupation of logicians. We use this framework to discuss Kennedy’s notion of ‘formalism freeness’ in the context of various schools in model theory. Then we clarify some of the mathematical issues in recent discussions of purity in the proof of the Desargues proposition. We note that the conclusion of ‘spatial content’ from the Desargues proposition involves arguments which are (...) algebraic and even metamathematical. Hilbert showed that the Desargues proposition implies the coordinatizing ring is associative, which in turn implies the existence of a three-dimensional geometry in which the given plane can be embedded. With W. Howard we give a new proof, removing Hilbert’s ‘detour’ through algebra, of the ‘geometric’ embedding theorem. Finally, our investigation of purity leads to the conclusion that even the introduction of explicit definitions in a proof can violate purity. We argue that although both involve explicit definition, our proof of the embedding theorem is pure while Hilbert’s is not. Thus the determination of whether an argument is pure turns on the content of the particular proof. Moreover, formalizing the situation does not provide a tool for characterizing purity. (shrink)