This volume contains thirteen papers that were presented at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics/Société canadienne d’histoire et de philosophie des mathématiques, which was held at Ryerson University in Toronto. It showcases rigorously reviewed modern scholarship on an interesting variety of topics in the history and philosophy of mathematics from Ancient Greece to the twentieth century. A series of chapters all set in the eighteenth century consider topics such as John Marsh’s techniques (...) for the computation of decimal fractions, Euler’s efforts to compute the surface area of scalene cones, a little-known work by John Playfair on the practical aspects of mathematics, and Monge’s use of descriptive geometry. After a brief stop in the nineteenth century to consider the culture of research mathematics in 1860s Prussia, the book moves into the twentieth century with an examination of the historical context within which the Axiom of Choice was developed and a paper discussing Anatoly Vlasov’s adaptation of the Boltzmann equation to ionized gases. The remaining chapters deal with the philosophy of twentieth-century mathematics through topics such as an historically informed discussion of finitism and its limits; a reexamination of Mary Leng’s defenses of mathematical fictionalism through an alternative, anti-realist approach to mathematics; and a look at the reasons that mathematicians select specific problems to pursue. Written by leading scholars in the field, these papers are accessible to not only mathematicians and students of the history and philosophy of mathematics, but also anyone with a general interest in mathematics. (shrink)

_Philosophy Beside Itself _ was first published in 1986. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The writings of French philosopher Jacques Derrida have been the single most powerful influence on critical theory and practice in the United States over the past decade. But with few exceptions American philosophers have taken little or no interest in Derrida's work, and the task of reception, (...) translation, and commentary has been left to literary critics. As a result, Derrida has appeared as a figure already defined by essentially literary critical activities and interests. Stephen Melville's aim in _Philosophy Beside Itself _ is to insist upon and clarify the distinctions between philosophy and criticism. He argues that until we grasp Derrida's philosophical project as such, we remain fundamentally unable to see his significance for criticism. In terms derived from Stanley Cavell's writings on modernism, Melville develops a case for Derrida as a modernist philosopher, working at once within and against that tradition and discipline. Melville first places Derrida in a Hegelian context, the structure of which he explores by examining the work of Heidegger, Lacan, and Bataille. With this foundation, he is able to reappraise the project of deconstructive criticism as developed in Paul de Man's _Blindness and Insight _and further articulated by other Yale critics. Central to this critique is the ambivalent relationship between deconstructive criticism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Criticism—radical self-criticism—is a central means through which the difficult facts of human community come to recognition, and Melville argues for criticism as an activity intimately bound to the ways in which we do and do not belong in time and in community. Derrida's achievement has been to find a new and necessary way to assert that the task of philosophy is criticism; the task of literary criticism is to assume the burden of that achievement. Stephen Melville is an assistant professor of English at Syracuse University, and Donald Marshall is a professor of English at the University of Iowa. (shrink)

Our lives are such that moral wrongdoing is sometimes inescapable for us. We have moral responsibilities to persons which may conflict and which it is wrong to violate even when they do conflict. Christopher W. Gowans argues that we must accept this conclusion if we are to make sense of our moral experience and the way in which persons are valuable to us. In defending this position, he critically examines the recent moral dilemmas debate. He maintains that what is important (...) in this debate is not whether there are irresolvable moral conflicts, but whether there are moral conflicts in which wrongdoing is unavoidable. Though it would be incoherent to conclude moral deliberation by deciding to perform incompatible actions, he argues that there is nothing incoherent in supposing that we have conflicting moral responsibilities. In this way, he shows that it is possible to capture the intuitions of those who have defended the idea of moral dilemmas while meeting the objections of those who have rejected this idea. Gowans carefully evaluates utilitarian and Kantian analyses of moral dilemmas. He argues that these approaches eliminate genuine moral conflict only by displacing persons as direct objects of moral concern. As an alternative, he develops a more concrete account in which moral responsibilities to persons are central. The book also includes discussions of Melville's Billy Budd, methodology in moral philosophy, moral pluralism, moral tragedy, and "dirty hands" in politics. (shrink)

Figures of Simplicity explores a unique constellation of figures from philosophy and literature—Heinrich von Kleist, Herman Melville, G. W. Leibniz, and Alexander Baumgarten—in an attempt to recover alternative conceptions of aesthetics and dimensions of thinking lost in the disciplinary narration of aesthetics after Kant. This is done primarily by tracing a variety of “simpletons” that populate the writings of Kleist and Melville. These figures are not entirely ignorant, or stupid, but simple. Their simplicity is a way of thinking, (...) one that Birgit Mara Kaiser suggests is affective thinking. Kaiser avers that Kleist and Melville are experimenting in their texts with an affective mode of thinking, and thereby continue a key line within eighteenth-century aesthetics: the relation of rationality and sensibility. Through her analyses, she offers an outline of what thinking can look like if we take affectivity into account. (shrink)

This study employs ethnographic field data to trace a dialogue between the self-psychological concept of the self object and experiences regarding the concept of “interbeing” at a Vietnamese Buddhist monastery in the United States. The dialogue develops an understanding of human experiences with the nonhuman natural world which are tensive, liminal, and nondual. From the dialogue I find that the self object concept, when applied to this form of Buddhism, must be inclusive enough to embrace relationships with animals, stones, and (...) other natural forms. The dialogue further delineates a self-psychological methodology for examining religions in their interactions with natural forms. (shrink)

Most work to date seeking to link CSR level and performance has treated CSR as a strictly firm level variable. It is the argument of this author that any investigation of CSR that fails to incorporate industry level realities, particularly of an economic nature, will be fatally deficient. Hypotheses are proposed, building off the work of James Post, the gravamen of which is that CSR level depends significantly on industrial and economic status. The hypotheses are tested against a currently popular (...) database and receive moderate support. (shrink)

Roughly eight years ago we met in Manhattan with Nick Phillipson to plan a new journal to be launched by Cambridge University Press. Two Americans who knew each and had worked together well, and who were largely in agreement about what MIH should accomplish. We were well aware of the quality of Nick's scholarship, of course, and had heard through the transatlantic grapevine that he was a great colleague. Still, we were more than a little apprehensive. What if Nick had (...) a totally different idea of the journal? What if the personal chemistry didn't work? Within an hour of our discussion we knew that we had ???lucked out??? on both counts. Readers familiar with Nick's work will surely agree that he has one of the sharpest and most imaginative minds in the discipline, and that he had been combining intellectual history with social and cultural history well before historians started making such a fuss about it. Manhattan was the right place to meet. An urban gentleman , Nick is a gourmet of awesome range and a sparkling conversationalist and raconteur. Lunch or dinner with him is an event. No one takes more care, or pleasure, in ordering a good bottle of wine. The subject of conversation need not be history; he is a lover of art and music, and has been very active in the cultural and civic life of Edinburgh, where he was a celebrated teacher at the university from 1965 to 2004. (shrink)

Groundhog Day animal weather forecasting ceremonies continue to proliferate around the United States despite a lack of public confidence in the oracles. This essay probes religio-historical and original ethnographic perspectives to offer a psychological argument for why these ceremonies exist. Employing Paul Shepard's notion of a felt loss of sacred, intimate relationships with nonhuman nature, as well as Peter Homans's concept of the monument that enables mourning, this essay argues that groundhog oracles serve as monuments that allow humans experientially to (...) attempt to heal lost sacred relationships with animals like weather forecasting bears, hedgehogs, and badgers. (shrink)

Learning Love from a Tiger explores the vibrancy and variety of humans' sacred encounters with the natural world, gathering a range of stories culled from Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Mayan, Himalayan, Buddhist, and Chinese shamanic traditions. Readers will delight in tales of house cats who teach monks how to meditate, rivers that grant salvation, shamans who shape-shift into jaguars, crickets who perform Catholic mass, and many others. More than a collection of wonderful stories, this book introduces important concepts and approaches that (...) underlie much recent work in environmental ethics, religion, and ecology. Capper's light touch prompts readers to engage their own views of humanity's place in the natural world and in particular question longstanding assumptions of human superiority"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Before Tony La Vopa had joined Nick Phillipson and me in founding Modern Intellectual History in 2004, Tony had successfully traveled in the spiral spirit of Vico's philosophy of history. Born in the Bronx to a Catholic Italian-American father and Irish-American mother, educated at the Jesuit Boston College and later at Cornell University, Tony launched his scholarly career as an intellectually inflected social historian with his book Grace, Talent, and Merit: Poor Students, Clerical Careers, and Professional Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Germany (...) . Then, while much of the historical profession was abandoning social history for the seemingly more capacious field of cultural history, he deepened further his strongly intellectual and social history approach in his Mosse Prize-winning rendering of the identity and career of a single poor but tremendously ambitious young philosopher. In Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762–1799 , he embedded his striving scholar in a thick web of political and religious discourses, which Fichte tried both to penetrate and transcend through his rigorously soaring philosophy of the Transcendental “I.” Currently, Tony is completing a manuscript titled Manly Thoughts. The Labor of the Mind and the Specter of Effeminacy in Enlightenment Cultures . Promising to offer a fascinating further extension of his socio-intellectual method, the book will serve as a timely capstone of his career as one of the Enlightenment's preeminent historians working today. (shrink)

A 2020 scientific report indicated the presence of phosphine, a potential biosignature chemical, in the atmosphere of Venus. As a result, Venus instantly became a global cultural celebrity. How did Venus become so fashionable, so cool in colloquial language, so quickly? I contend that Venus became the center of attention at least temporarily because Venus became moral. Since life at present is a concept that is as much moral as it is scientific, I explain this point by offering a geographically (...) broad sampling of world philosophies that show that secular and religious Western forms of thought strongly value life over nonlife as do many Asian traditions. These cultural valuations of life over nonlife become infused in human psychologies globally and astonish us at the discovery of extraterrestrial life. This essay's substantial culture sample thereby demonstrates that Venus became revered because of deep‐seated but also widespread attitudes of special moral attendance to the presence of life especially in extraterrestrial settings. (shrink)

Unity in government -- The family in English history -- Medieval English sovereignty -- The old jury -- Becket and the law.

Through a comprehensive, critical examination of the theories, practices, and real-world results of Buddhist environmental ethics, this book responds to climate change by synthetically exploring lived ecological interactions across seven worlds, from ancient India to the contemporary United States.

Several defences, viewed in this study as specifications or 'offspring' of the 'parent' greater-good defence, have been formulated in response to the charge that Christianity is untenable because God's existence is incompatible with evil's existence. In this first book-length study of the parent defence, Stewart begins with careful definitions of the omni-attributes central to the dispute: omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence. The parent defence is traced to tenets of theism and variant accounts of the defence considered. Plantinga's modal free-will defence and Hick's (...) and Yandell's soul-growth specifications are carefully analyzed and several difficulties resolved. An original formulation of a redemption specification and an original account of the origin of moral evil are offered. Stewart argues that the defences are rightly viewed as a family of defences falling under the greater-good heading, and that they comprise a complementary apologetic complex that refutes the claim of inconsistency. (shrink)

`Therefore this terror and darkness of the mind Not by the sun's rays, nor the bright shafts of day, Must be dispersed, as is most necessary, But by the face of nature and her laws.' Lucretius' poem On the Nature of the Universe combines a scientific and philosophical treatise with some of the greatest poetry ever written. With intense moral fervour Lucretius demonstrates to humanity that in death there is nothing to fear since the soul is mortal, and the world (...) and everything in it is governed not by the gods, but by the mechanical laws of nature. By believing this, men can live in peace of mind and happiness. Lucretius bases his argument on the atomic theory expounded by the Greek philosopher Epicurus. His poem explores sensation, sex, cosmology, meteorology, and geology through acute observation of the beauties of the natural world and with moving sympathy for man's place in it. Sir Ronald Melville's accessible and accurate verse translation is complemented by an introduction and notes situating Lucretius' scientific theories within the thought of 1st century BCE Rome and discussing the Epicurean philosophy that was his inspiration and why the issues Lucretius' poem raisies about the scientific and poetical views of the world continue to be important. (shrink)

The purpose of the text is to demonstrate a distinction between good or virtue and evil or vice, introduced by Hannah Arendt on the grounds of the novel by Hermann Melville Billy Budd. I analyze this distinction in relation to the life story of Romulus Gaita, the hero of the autobiographical novel My father Romulus, written by the Australian ethicist Raimond Gaita. The first paragraph deals with the said distinction, indicating the re-evaluation of such concept as virtue and vice (...) in Melville’s novel and his understanding of virtue. Then, I make an attempt to answer the question of why Gaita writes about his father using a category of character instead of virtue. Then, I reflect on the relationship between virtue, character, goodness and Romulus’s mental illness. Finally, I answer the question about the metaphysical foundation on which Gaita forms his conviction about the superiority of Good and goodness over virtue, and I show what particular components make up the ethics of goodness assumed by Romulus. (shrink)

This two-volume collection of cutting edge thinking about science and religion shows how scientific and religious practices of inquiry can be viewed as logically compatible, complementary, and mutually supportive.

THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO ATTEMPT TO SOLVE THE\nPROBLEM OF OTHER MINDS. THE METHOD USED INVOLVES\nINTRODUCING THREE NEW TERMS, EACH OF WHICH IN SOME WAYS\nRESEMBLES IN MEANING, AND IN SOME WAYS DIFFERS FROM IN\nMEANING, THE ORDINARY TERM "EXISTS." WHEN THE PROBLEM OF\nOTHER MINDS IS RESTATED WITH THESE NEW TERMS, THERE IS A\nPRONOUNCED INCREASE IN THE COMPLEXITY OF THE DISCUSSION,\nBUT THERE IS ALSO A PRONOUNCED DECREASE IN THE VAGUENESS OF\nTHE DISCUSSION. A COMPLETE SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF OTHER\nMINDS IS (...) OFFERED. A VERSION OF THE PRINCIPLE OF THE\nRELATIVITY OF TIME, WHICH IS EVEN MORE DRASTIC THAN\nEINSTEIN'S VERSION OF THE PRINCIPLE OF THE RELATIVITY OF\nTIME, IS NEEDED IN THE SOLUTION. (shrink)