First published in 1931, this book provides a brief overview of the essentials of philosophy. It aims to combat the notion of the inaccessibility of philosophy by providing an introduction to its history and what the author believes to a ‘minimum dose…of incontrovertible philosophical truth’. The book merely assumes an ordinary level of adult education and offers an outline of the key areas of philosophy — consciousness, reality, experience, Life, God, love, aesthetics, conduct, logic — and as such will be (...) of interest as a very useful starting point for anyone wishing to undertake further studies. (shrink)

First published in 1931, this book provides a brief overview of the essentials of philosophy. It aims to combat the notion of the inaccessibility of philosophy by providing an introduction to its history and what the author believes to a ‘minimum dose…of incontrovertible philosophical truth’. The book merely assumes an ordinary level of adult education and offers an outline of the key areas of philosophy — consciousness, reality, experience, Life, God, love, aesthetics, conduct, logic — and as such will be (...) of interest as a very useful starting point for anyone wishing to undertake further studies. (shrink)

David E. Cooper Early in, while I was teaching in the United States, I received news of my appointment as a lecturer in the philosophy of education at the ...

This topically organized, interdisciplinary anthology provides competing perspective on the claim that western culture faces a moral crisis. Using clearly written, accessible essays by well-known authors in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities, the book introduces students to a variety of perspectives on the current cultural debate about values that percolates beneath the surface of most of our social and political controversies.

Stanley Cavell and English Romanticism serves as both introduction to Cavell for Romanticists, and to the larger question of what philosophy means for the reading of literature, as well as to the importance and relevance of Romantic literature to Cavell's thought. Illustrated through close readings of Wordsworth and Shelley, and extended discussions of Emerson and Thoreau as well as Cavell, Duffy proposes a Romanticism of persisting cultural relevance and truly trans-Atlantic scope. The turn to romanticism of America's most distinguished (...) "ordinary-language" philosopher is shown to be tied to the neo-Romantic claim that far from being merely an illustrator of the truths discovered by philosophy, poetry is its equal partner in the instituting of knowledge. This book will be vital reading for anyone interested in Romanticism, Stanley Cavell and the ever-deepening connections between literature and philosophy. (shrink)

At one point Fish says that a profession produces no “real” commodity but offers only a service. But surely the increasing reification of services and even of knowledge has made them a commodity as well. And indeed the logical extension of Fish’s position on professionalism is not that it is something done or lived but something produced and reproduced, albeit with redistributed and redeployed values. What those are, Fish doesn’t say. Then again he makes the rather telling remarks that he (...) is “turning everything into professionalism” —an instance of overstating and overinsisting at a moment when what he is really arguing for can neither be formulated nor defended clearly. To turn “everything” into professionalism is to strip professionalism of any meaning at all. For until one can define professionalism—and the particular values associated with it—there is very little value in going on about the incoherencies of antiprofessionalism. Fish resorts to the reductionist attitude of telling us that professionalism is what is, and whatever is, is more or less therefore right, which by only the slightest extension of its logic is a view no less applicable to antiprofessionalism.On the other hand, Fish does say that the profession has changed, that new ways of doing things have emerged, that values are contested within and without the profession. Those kinds of observations, however, have to be pursued, made me more concrete, put in specific historical contexts, one of which is the fact that professions are not natural objects but concrete, political, economic, and social formations playing very defined, although sometimes barely visible, roles. Unfortunately, Fish commits the lobbyist-s error by obscuring and being blind to the sociopolitical actualities of what he lobbies for even as he defends its existence. Thus when Fish alleges that the reason most literary professionals “exist in a shamefaced relationship with the machinery that enables their labors” is because of their damaging antiprofessionalism , he is making an observation whose form is assertive but whose sense is tautological since he neither defines the professional and professionalism nor specifies “machinery” and “labors” with any precision at all. For if you take the extraordinary step of reducing everything to professionalism and institutionalism as Fish does, then the very possibility of talking about the profession with any intelligibility is negated. Few would dispute Fish’s important point, that all interpretive and social situations are in fact already grounded in a context, in institutions, communities, and so forth. But there is a very great difference between making that claim and going on to say that so far as the literary profession is concerned, “the profession” is the context to which “everything” can be related. Edward W. Said’s most recent work is The World, the Text, and the Critic. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “The Problem of Textuality: Two Exemplary Positions” and “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community”. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 5, Page 711-712, August 2012.

Erratum to: Stanley Peters and Dag Westerståhl: Quantifiers in language and logic Content Type Journal Article Category Erratum Pages 1-1 DOI 10.1007/s10988-011-9094-5 Authors Edward L. Keenan, Department of Linguistics, University of California at Los Angeles, 3125 Campbell Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543, USA Denis Paperno, Department of Linguistics, University of California at Los Angeles, 3125 Campbell Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543, USA Journal Linguistics and Philosophy Online ISSN 1573-0549 Print ISSN 0165-0157.

Quantifiers in Language and Logic (QLL) is a major contribution to natural language semantics, specifically to quantification. It integrates the extensive recent work on quantifiers in logic and linguistics. It also presents new observations and results. QLL should help linguists understand the mathematical generalizations we can make about natural language quantification, and it should interest logicians by presenting an extensive array of quantifiers that lie beyond the pale of classical logic. Here we focus on those aspects of QLL we judge (...) to be of specific interest to linguists, and we contribute a few musings of our own, as one mark of a worthy publication is whether it stimulates the reader to seek out new observations, and QLL does. QLL is long and fairly dense, so we make no attempt to cover all the points it makes. But QLL has a topic index, a special symbols index and two tables of contents, a detailed one and an overview one, all of which help make it user friendly. QLL is presented in four parts: I, The Logical Conception of Quantifiers and Quantification with an introductory section Quantification . II, Quantifiers of Natural Language , the most extensive section in the book and of the most direct interest to linguists. III, Beginnings of a Theory of Expressiveness, Translation, and Formalization introduces notions of expressive power and definability, and IV, presents recent work and techniques concerning quantifier definability over finite domains, making accessible to linguists recent work in finite model theory. (shrink)

Quantifiers in Language and Logic (QLL) is a major contribution to natural language semantics, specifically to quantification. It integrates the extensive recent work on quantifiers in logic and linguistics. It also presents new observations and results. QLL should help linguists understand the mathematical generalizations we can make about natural language quantification, and it should interest logicians by presenting an extensive array of quantifiers that lie beyond the pale of classical logic. Here we focus on those aspects of QLL we judge (...) to be of specific interest to linguists, and we contribute a few musings of our own, as one mark of a worthy publication is whether it stimulates the reader to seek out new observations, and QLL does. QLL is long and fairly dense, so we make no attempt to cover all the points it makes. But QLL has a topic index, a special symbols index and two tables of contents, a detailed one and an overview one, all of which help make it user friendly. QLL is presented in four parts: I, "The Logical Conception of Quantifiers and Quantification" with an introductory section "Quantification". II, "Quantifiers of Natural Language", the most extensive section in the book and of the most direct interest to linguists. III, "Beginnings of a Theory of Expressiveness, Translation, and Formalization" introduces notions of expressive power and definability, and IV, presents recent work and techniques concerning quantifier definability over finite domains, making accessible to linguists recent work in finite model theory. (shrink)

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 seems to have broken, for the first time, the immunity from sustained criticism previously enjoyed by Israel and its American supporters. For a variety of reasons, Israel’s status in European and American public life and discourse has always been special, just as the position of Jews in the West has always been special, sometimes for its tragedy and horrendous suffering, at other times for its uniquely impressive intellectual and aesthetic triumphs. On behalf of (...) Israel, anomalous norms, exceptional arguments, eccentric claims were made, all of them forcibly conveying the notion that Israel does not entirely belong to the world of normal politics. Nevertheless, Israel—and with it, Zionism—had gained this unusual status politically, not miraculously: it merged with a variety of currents in the West whose power and attractiveness for supporters of Israel effaced anything as concrete as, for example, an Israeli policy of rigid separation between Jew and non-Jew, or a military rule over hundreds of thousands of Arabs that was as repressive as any tyranny in Latin America or Eastern Europe. There are any number of credible accounts of this, from daily fare in the Israeli press to studies by Amnesty International, to reports by various U.N. bodies, Western journalists, church groups, and, not least, dissenting supporters of Israel. In other words, even though Israel was a Jewish state established by force on territory already inhabited by a native population largely of Muslim Arabs, in a part of the world overwhelmingly Muslim and Arab, it appeared to most of Israel’s supporters in the West that the Palestinian Arabs who paid a large part of the price for Israel’s establishment were neither relevant nor necessarily even real. What changed in 1982 was that the distance between Arab and Jew was for the first time perceived more or less universally as not so great and, indeed, that any consideration of Israel, and any perception of Israel at all, would have to include some consideration of the Palestinian Arabs, their travail, their claims, their humanity.Changes of this sort seem to occur dramatically, although it is more accurate to comprehend them as complex, cumulative, often contradictory processes occurring over a long period of time. Above all else, however, no such process can be viewed neutrally, since for better or for worse there are many interests at work in it and, therefore, many interests also at work whenever it is interpreted or reported. Moreover, while it is worthwhile and even possible to reduce and curtail the gross pressure of those interests for the purpose of analysis or reflection, it is useless to deny that any such analysis is inevitably grounded in, or inevitably affiliated to, a particular historical moment and a specific political situation. Edward Said, Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, is the author of, among other works, The Question of Palestine , The World, the Text, and the Critic , and After the Last Sky . He will give the 1985 T. S. Eliot Lectures, on Culture and Imperialism, at the University of Kent later this year. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry include “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community” and “On Professionalism: Response to Stanley Fish”. (shrink)

This slender volume is the twentieth member of a series entitled “Toward Ecological Civilization,” organized under the leadership of distinguished process philosopher and process theologian John B. Cobb, Jr. It grew directly from the 10th Whitehead International Conference, held in Claremont, California, in June 2015, and more particularly from a single conference track (out of the more than 80 making up the program) devoted specifically to various kinds of “extraordinary experiences” (especially, parapsychological and transpersonal experiences) that directly challenge the materialist/physicalist (...) worldview which arose in the 17th century and still dominates the contemporary scientific, educational, and cultural mainstream. The central premises of the series as a whole, the 2015 conference, and the present volume are that postmodern civilization faces life-threatening crises rooted in that impoverished physicalist worldview, that we desperately need a more commodious, life-affirming, and ecologically sound alternative to it, and that Whitehead’s metaphysical vision can help take us in the needed direction. Like Stanley Krippner in the book’s brief Foreword, I am strongly sympathetic to these views. (shrink)

The introduction of computer simulation to paleobiology ushered in a new, experimental style of reasoning. Rather than starting with observed fossil patterns and hypothesizing causal processes that may have produced them, it became possible to start with a process model, and from it to simulate a range of possible patterns. ;The MBL Model is a stochastic model of phylogenetic evolution . Computer simulations conducted with the MBL Model served as thought experiments in stochastic evolution. In the MBL work, similarities between (...) empirical and stochastically simulated clades mounted a visual argument that stochastic processes potentially explained large fluctuations in diversity. Stanley and others countered that the similarities were an artifact of scaling. The scaling problem may have been obscured by visual bias: measures of clade shape are scale-invariant, but diversification itself is highly scale-dependent. ;Null and neutral models are frequently conflated. Null models generate hypothetical data distributions under conditions that exclude some process of interest to test whether patterns in an actual data distribution provide statistical evidence for that process. A neutral model assumes selective equivalence among all units at a specified hierarchical level in the evolving system. Neutral models are often inappropriate as null models. Pattern recognition presupposes a null model, but tacit null models are subject to persistent cognitive biases, necessitating explicit formulation of null models. Nonetheless, failure to reject the null model should not preclude further investigation of a pattern. ;Often, models are not candidates for falsification, but serve to simulate data for testing concepts or methods. Sepkoski and Kendrick , and Robeck, Maley, and Donoghue used the MBL Model to test whether mass extinction periodicity is an artifact of paraphyly in taxonomic data. Such numerical experiments, which make all assumptions explicit, can serve as templates for localizing points of disagreement. Models may fall into lineages, each generation providing lessons for the next, but often sharing operational assumptions. Artifacts of shared operational assumptions are often a threat to the validity of inferences. Results holding across models should not be accepted unless they withstand rigorous robustness analysis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:_Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2501\REVIEWS.251 : 2005-09-14 19:58 Reviews  THE STANLEYS UP TO DATE S T Russell Archives & Russell Research Centre / McMaster U. Hamilton, , Canada   @. Thomas, Lord Stanley of Alderley. The Stanleys of Alderley, –: a Politically Incorrect Story. Rev. ed. Altimcham, ..: , . Pp. . £.. lthough the book is called The Stanleys of Alderley, the Stanleys have not (...) Alived at Alderley, the family home for  years, since  when it was sold. Not long after, Penrhos, the family’s property in Wales, left the family as well, sold in . Naturally the author, who would have inherited these properties, laments not only these losses but the fire-sale prices—Alderley sold for£, and is now estimated to be worth £ million; Penrhos was sold for a mere £, but then its owner, the author’s cousin, was a homosexual and upon leaving the Navy decided it would be unwise to live at Penrhos because homosexuality was then a crime in Britain (p. ). The author provides an appendix on the Alderley Settled Estate and his trials with the Royal Bank of _Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2501\REVIEWS.251 : 2005-09-14 19:58  Reviews Canada when he inherited what was left (pp. –). Lord Stanley’s path to inheriting his title was much more tortuous and full of tragedy than Bertrand Russell’s inheritance of his earldom. Thomas’s two older brothers, John and Martin, died at the same time in Penrhos just before it was sold when the cliff collapsed, weakened by old tunnels that they had dug chasing rabbits in their childhood. After that, two cousins, Edward and Lyulph, had to die without heirs before the title became Thomas’s in . The author blames them for losing, and losing easily, in the span of  years wealth that had taken nine centuries to accumulate. Lord Stanley also had some difficulty in taking his seat in the House of Lords (as did Bertrand), since proof was needed that no offspring with a better claim might appear (p. ). The author exhibits some of the same wit that makes Russell’s writing sparkle. Lord Stanley sat in the House of Lords, although on different sides (Conservative vs. Liberal Democrat), with his cousin Conrad, Russell’s youngest son. The two of them had rather different professions, Thomas a farmer and Conrad a university professor. He notes: “When on one occasion I said that he looked tired, he, as any academic would, said that he found getting his mind down to the level of his undergraduates very exhausting. I replied that trying to understand the minds of my sheep surely must be more exhausting” (p. ). Another example of wit (which is frequent, particularly in the first part of the book) concerns his strict upbringing and the learning of rules. The rules were discarded until he joined the House of Lords when he found them “useful, if only to remember to put the milk in the cup first if sitting next to a life peer and last if next to an hereditary one” (pp. –). Milk first or last has always been a mystery to me, and I’m afraid this remark does not help much! Born in , the author was brought up to believe “that it was a privilege to be a Stanley” although any arrogance because of superior lineage was not allowed by his father (p. ). The author’s mother was Lady Kathleen Thynne, the daughter of the th Marquess of Bath. The passages concerning Christmas visits to the family’s very grand estate, Longleat, make fascinating reading (pp. –). The book contains chapters on Lord Stanley’s childhood (he was raised at Llanfawr near Penrhos), his career in the military followed by farming, his family, his hobbies and the House of Lords. It includes a family tree, a chronology from  to , and family photographs (the author bears more than a passing resemblance to his cousin Conrad). This book provides much information on Russell’s maternal family, moving the story forward from the period covered in The Amberley Papers, The Ladies of Alderley, and The Stanleys of Alderley. Russell favoured the Russell side of the family in his youth, but as he grew older... (shrink)

Jonathan Edwards's work is notable because he understands emotions to be central to character and agency. As such, he offers an alternative to currently dominant approaches to character ethics, often inspired by Aristotle, which largely ignore emotions or, when they do recognize that emotions are important dimensions of character, treat emotions in a problematic manner. In order to demonstrate Edwards's relevance to contemporary work on character and emotions, I begin by providing some background on character ethics. I then set out (...) relevant features of Edwards's work before relating those features to the constructive work of Stanley Hauerwas and Robert Solomon. Such comparisons illustrate the contributions which Edwards can make to an ethic of character. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article addresses shortcomings in the way that philosophers and cultural critics have considered propaganda by offering a new genealogical account. Looking at figures such as Marx, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas, Bourdieu, and Stanley, this article finds that their consideration of propaganda has not necessarily been wrong but has missed some of the most significant and important functions of propaganda. This text draws on archival and published materials from propagandists, most notably Edward Bernays, to elaborate a new governmentality (...) of propaganda and public relations. Through focusing on the concept of public opinion, I argue that propaganda is best thought of as an apparatus whose function it is to construct, modify, counter, and destroy relations of force within public opinion in order to produce the subjectivities and conduct that propagandists and their clients desire. (shrink)

A seminal 1921 work by the linguist Edward Sapir, outlining his influential ideas and hypotheses on language and its speakers.

The Nature of God explores a perennial problem in the philosophy of religion. Drawing upon developments in philosophy, most notably those in philosophical logic, Edward R. Wierenga examines the traditional divine attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, eternity, timelessness, immutability, and goodness. His philosophically defensible formulations of the nature of God are in accord with the views of classical theists. The author provides an account of each of the divine attributes by stating in contemporary terms what such classical theists as Augustine, (...) Anselm, and Aquinas wrote about the nature of God; he then seeks to determine whether one can defend the ascription of traditional divine attributes to God against philosophical objections. Clearly written and comprehensive, The Nature of God contains a wealth of illuminating and original material on a central topic in the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Instead of investigating the interference between two stationary, rectilinear wave functions in a trajectory representation by examining the trajectories of the two rectilinear wave functions individually, we examine a dichromatic wave function that is synthesized from the two interfering wave functions. The physics of interference is contained in the reduced action for the dichromatic wave function. As this reduced action is a generator of the motion for the dichromatic wave function, it determines the dichromatic wave function’s trajectory. The quantum effective (...) mass renders insight into the behavior of the trajectory. The trajectory in turn renders insight into quantum nonlocality. (shrink)

Edward Erwin's clear analysis addresses some of the fundamental questions on behavior therapy that remained in 1978, when this book was first published.

The additional information within a Hamilton–Jacobi representation of quantum mechanics is extra, in general, to the Schrödinger representation. This additional information specifies the microstate of \ that is incorporated into the quantum reduced action, W. Non-physical solutions of the quantum stationary Hamilton–Jacobi equation for energies that are not Hamiltonian eigenvalues are examined to establish Lipschitz continuity of the quantum reduced action and conjugate momentum. Milne quantization renders the eigenvalue J. Eigenvalues J and E mutually imply each other. Jacobi’s theorem generates (...) a microstate-dependent time parametrization \ even where energy, E, and action variable, J, are quantized eigenvalues. Substantiating examples are examined in a Hamilton–Jacobi representation including the linear harmonic oscillator numerically and the square well in closed form. Two byproducts are developed. First, the monotonic behavior of W is shown to ease numerical and analytic computations. Second, a Hamilton–Jacobi representation, quantum trajectories, is shown to develop the standard energy quantization formulas of wave mechanics. (shrink)

I argue in favor of the view that all the constituents of the propositions hearers would intuitively believe to be expressed by utterances are the result of assigning values to the elements of the sentence uttered, and combining them in accord with its structure. The way I accomplish this is by questioning the existence of some of the processes that theorists have claimed underlie the provision of constituents to the propositions recovered by hearers in linguistic interpretation, processes that apparently bypass (...) assigning these constituents to elements of the logical form of the expression uttered. (shrink)

Are humans rational? Various experiments performed over the last several decades have been interpreted as showing that humans are irrational we make significant and consistent errors in logical reasoning, probabilistic reasoning, similarity judgements, and risk-assessment, to name a few areas. But can these experiments establish human irrationality, or is it a conceptual truth that humans must be rational, as various philosophers have argued? In this book, Edward Stein offers a clear critical account of this debate about rationality in philosophy (...) and cognitive science. He discusses concepts of rationality - the pictures of rationality that the debate centres on - and assesses the empirical evidence used to argue that humans are irrational. He concludes that the question of human rationality must be answered not conceptually but empirically, using the full resources of an advanced cognitive science. Furthermore, he extends this conclusion to argue that empirical considerations are also relevant to the theory of knowedge - in other words, that epistemology should be naturalized. from the reviews: 'Stein has done a great service in bringing together all of the important arguments in the human rationality debate and providing a measured critical assessment of them.... This will be an important book and is essential reading for epistemologists, philosophers of mind, and cognitive and evolutionary psychologists.' Choice 'very considerable value... for professionals' Times Higher Education Supplement. (shrink)

An alternative neutrino oscillation process is presented as a counterexample for which the neutrino may have nil mass consistent with the standard model. The process is developed in a quantum trajectories representation of quantum mechanics, which has a Hamilton–Jacobi foundation. This process has no need for mass differences between mass eigenstates. Flavor oscillations and \ oscillations are examined.