A statistical method for inference of formal causes was introduced. The procedure, referred to as the method of corresponding regressions, was explained and illustrated using a variety of simulated causal models. The method reflects IV/DV relations among variables traditionally limited to correlational or structural equation analysis. The method was applied to additive, subtractive, multiplicative, recursive and reflected models, as well as models of unrelated and correlated dependent variables. Initial applications to data from physical science, biology, economics, marketing and psychology were (...) developed, with generally supportive results. (shrink)

On june 13th, the Belgian voters had to choose their representatives in four assemblies: the European Parliament, the Chamber of Representatives, the Senate, and the Regional Council of either the Flemish, the Walloon or the Brussels Capital regions accordingly.Thus these elections made it possible to measure possible differences in the results a same list obtained in the different polls. These differences could be observed for some lists, but not for all and were essentially due to the personality of certain candidates (...) rather than to a political will to differentiate, with the exception perhaps of the Ecologists, who traditionally perform better in European elections.These elections also saw an increased use of computer based voting: some 44 % of the registered voters had to express their choice via a computer screen. As a consequence one observed a sensitive drop in "blank and spoilt" ballots.The elections have been characterized by several phenomena. First, there was a marked decline, amounting to some 10 % of the votes, in the support for the parties of the outgoing majority: christian democrats and socialists. In losing each somewhat less than 5 %, they have both hit their historical low and together no langer hold a simpte majority in Parliament.The liberal family bas become the largest in Belgium, which had never accured since the introduction of the single vote system. This first position was conquered more through the decline in the results of the socialists and the christian democrats than via a true advance of the liberals. Though the Flemish component of the liberals progressed by 1.14 %, the French-speaking wing receded by 0.13 %.The overall winners of the elections are the ecologists who on the whole climb from 8. 44 % to 14.36 %. This progression is ho wever proportionately much more marked for the French-speaking component than for the Flemish part. Ecolo bas become the thirdmost important party of Wallonia and the second one in Brussels, whereas Agalev remains the fifth party in Flanders.The extremist parties have had diverging results. The extreme left remains altogether very marginal in Belgium, whereas the extreme right appears to be a typically Flemish phenomenon. Indeed, the Vlaams Blok increases its share of votes by 3.12 % and with 15.31 % has become the third party in Flanders and thereby even surpasses somewhat the result obtained by the VN.V in 1939.The French-speaking extreme right suffered a decline due among others to internal divisions and only stands for 4.09 % in Wallonia and 4 % in Brussels. As a consequence of these results the composition of the assemblies has changed drastically. To constitute a government holding a simpte majority in the Chamber of Representatives, one needs at least three political families or two families and the support of another party. In the Flemish parliament, one needs either a three party coalition, but necessarily comprising the CVP, or a four party coalition to obtain a majority. In the Walloon parliament, a two party coalition is only possible if the PS participates.In Brussels, the Vlaams Blok, although passing from 2 to 4 seats, bas not succeeded in paralysing the functioning of the institutions as this party didn't obtain the majority in the Flemish group.Opinion polls held before the elections had forecast the direction in which votes would shift, but not the extent. The dioxine crisis bas reinforced this shift and has undoubtedly accentuated the progression of the ecologist lists. (shrink)

All volumes of Professor Guthrie's great history of Greek philosophy have won their due acclaim. The most striking merits of Guthrie's work are his mastery of a tremendous range of ancient literature and modern scholarship, his fairness and balance of judgement and the lucidity and precision of his English prose. He has achieved clarity and comprehensiveness.

Assesses the limits and possibilities of humanism for engaging with issues of pressing political and cultural concern. In his book The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism, William V. Spanos critiqued the traditional Western concept of humanism, arguing that its origins are to be found not in ancient Greece’s love of truth and wisdom, but in the Roman imperial era, when those Greek values were adapted in the service of imperialism on a deeply rooted, metaphysical level. Returning to that question (...) of humanism in the context of the United States’ war on terror in the post-9/11 era, Toward a Non-humanist Humanism points out the dehumanizing dynamics of Western modernity in which the rule of law is increasingly made flexible to defend against threats both real and potential. Spanos considers and assesses the work of thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière, and Slavoj Žižek as humanistic reformers and concludes with an effort to imagine a different kind of humanism—a non-humanist humanism—in which the old binary of friend versus foe gives way to a coming community without ethnic, cultural, or sexual divisions. William V. Spanos is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University, State University of New York. He is the author of many books, including American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam and Herman Melville and the American Calling: The Fiction after Moby-Dick, 1851–1857, both also published by SUNY Press. (shrink)

In "Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction", William Spanos examines the controversy, both in Europe and the United States, surrounding Heidegger and recent disclosures about his Nazi past. Not intended as a defense or apology for Heidegger's thought, Spanos instead affirms the importance of Heidegger's "antihumanist" interrogation of the modern age, its globalization of technology, and its neo-imperialist politics. The attack on Heidegger's "antihumanistic" discourse (by "liberal humanists" who have imported the European debate into the United (...) States) aligns ideologically with the ongoing policing operations of William Bennett, Allan Bloom, E.D. Hirsch, Roger Kimball, Dinesh D'Souza, and others in the spheres of higher education and cultural production. Throughout his arguments, Spanos focuses not so much on Heidegger the historical subject, as on the transformative cultural and political discourses and practices, implicit in and enabled by Heidegger's interrogations of Being and Time, that have led to the contemporary emergence of the multiplicity of resistant "Others" colonized by hegemonic discursive formations. All the while he reminds us that Heidegger's philosophic interrogations eventually generate a diverse body of transgressive writing and an oppositional intellectual climate in the West. Spanos is author of "Repetitions: the Postmodern Occasion in Literature and Culture" (1987) and "The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism" (Minnesota, 1992), and the editor of "Martin Heidegger and the Question in Literature" (1980) and the co-editor of "The Question of Textuality: Strategies of Reading in Contemporary American Criticism" (1982). This book is intended for those in the fields of philosophy, literary theory, political theory. (shrink)

W.K.C. Guthrie has written a survey of the great age of Greek philosophy - from Thales to Aristotle - which combines comprehensiveness with brevity. Without pre-supposing a knowledge of Greek or the Classics, he sets out to explain the ideas of Plato and Aristotle in the light of their predecessors rather than their successors, and to describe the characteristic features of the Greek way of thinking and outlook on the world. Thus The Greek Philosophers provides excellent background material for the (...) general reader - as well as providing a firm basis for specialist studies. (shrink)

All volumes of Professor Guthrie's great history of Greek philosophy have won their due acclaim. The most striking merits of Guthrie's work are his mastery of a tremendous range of ancient literature and modern scholarship, his fairness and balance of judgement and the lucidity and precision of his English prose. He has achieved clarity and comprehensiveness.

Greek ways of thinking -- Matter and form: (ionians and pythagoreans) -- The problem of motion: (Heraclitus, Parmenides and the pluralists) -- The reaction towards humanism: (the Sophists and Socrates) -- Plato (I): the doctrine of ideas -- Plato (II): ethical and theological answers to the sophists -- Aristotle (I): the aristotelian universe -- Aristotle (II): human beings.

A study of imperialism that stretches from ancient Rome to the post-Cold War World, this provocative work boldly revises our assumptions about the genealogy of the West.

All volumes of Professor Guthrie's great history of Greek philosophy have won their due acclaim. The most striking merits of Guthrie's work are his mastery of a tremendous range of ancient literature and modern scholarship, his fairness and balance of judgement and the lucidity and precision of his English prose. He has achieved clarity and comprehensiveness.

Plato's views on the nature of the soul, by W.K.C. Guthrie.--Die Erneuerung der Philosophie in der Zeit Ciceros, von O. Gigon.--Gott und Seele im kaiserzeitlichen Denken, von W. Theiler.--Interprétations néo-platonisantes du livre VI de l'Énéide, par P. Courcelle.--Der Platonismus und die altchristliche Gedankenwelt, von J.H. Waszink.--Humanisme et christianisme chez Clément d'Alexandrie d'après le "Pédagogue," par H.I. Marrou.--Some aspects of Platonism in Islamic philosophy, by R. Walzer.

Many studies have considered the probability that a pairwise majority rule (PMR) winner exists for three candidate elections. The absence of a PMR winner indicates an occurrence of Condorcet's Paradox for three candidate elections. This paper summarizes work that has been done in this area with the assumptions of: Impartial Culture, Impartial Anonymous Culture, Maximal Culture, Dual Culture and Uniform Culture. Results are included for the likelihood that there is a strong winner by PMR, a weak winner by PMR, and (...) the probability that a specific candidate is among the winners by PMR. Closed form representations are developed for some of these probabilities for Impartial Anonymous Culture and for Maximal Culture. Consistent results are obtained for all cultures. In particular, very different behaviors are observed for odd and even numbers of voters. The limiting probabilities as the number of voters increases are reached very quickly for odd numbers of voters, and quite slowly for even numbers of voters. The greatest likelihood of observing Condorcet's Paradox typically occurs for small numbers of voters. Results suggest that while examples of Condorcet's Paradox are observed, one should not expect to observe them with great frequency in three candidate elections. (shrink)

This book is a general survey of the Greeks' extraordinarily rapid advance from a mythological to a rational view of the world and of man's origins and place in the universe. The continuity of this development and the influence of myth on philosophy are closely studied. There is also a constant assessment of the Greeks' approach to modern scientific and philosophical conceptions, including the Darwinian theory, but the affinity of our civilization to theirs is never overstressed.

We have extremely strong reasons for supposing that the exposure of infants, very often resulting in death, was common in many different parts of the Roman Empire, and that it had considerable demographic, economic and psychological effects. The evidence for the first of these propositions has been reviewed or alluded to in several recent publications.1 However, a thorough new study, covering the whole of Greek and Roman antiquity, would be worth while. In the meantime Donald Engels has declared that in (...) the Greek and Roman worlds the exposure of children was ‘of negligible importance’ , 112–20). (shrink)

_Exiles in the City: Hannah Arendt and Edward W. Said in Counterpoint,_ by William V. Spanos, explores the affiliative relationship between Arendt’s and Said’s thought, not simply their mutual emphasis on the importance of the exilic consciousness in an age characterized by the decline of the nation-state and the rise of globalization, but also on the oppositional politics that a displaced consciousness enables. The pairing of these two extraordinary intellectuals is unusual and controversial because of their ethnic identities. In (...) radically secularizing their comportment towards being, their exilic condition enabled them to undertake inaugural critiques of the culture of the nation-state system of Western modernity. As variations on the theme of exile, the five chapters of this book constitute reflections on what is foundational and abiding in both Arendt’s and Said’s work. They not only document the heretofore unnoticed affiliation between the two thinkers. They also shed light on Arendt’s and Said’s proleptic activist explorations of the urgent “question of Palestine,” especially on the fraught present situation, which bears increasing witness to the irony that the Israeli nation-state’s “solution” has, from the beginning, systematically repeated the degradations the Jewish people suffered at the hands of German nationalism. (shrink)

Pronoun interpretation is often described as relying on a comprehender's mental model of discourse. For example, in some psycholinguistic accounts, interpreting pronouns involves a process of retrieval, whereby a pronoun is resolved by accessing information from its linguistic antecedent. However, linguistic antecedents are neither necessary nor sufficient for interpreting a pronoun, and even when an antecedent has been introduced in earlier discourse, there is little evidence for the retrieval of linguistic form. The current study extends our understanding of pronoun interpretation (...) by examining whether the semantics of antecedent expressions are retrieved from representations of past discourse. Participants were instructed to move displayed objects in a Visual World eye-tracking task. In some cases, the semantics of the antecedent were no longer viable after an instruction was completed (e.g., “Move the house on the left to area 12,” where the result was that a different house is now the leftmost one). In this case, retrieving antecedent semantics at the point of hearing a subsequent pronoun (“Now, move it…”) should entail a processing penalty. Instead, the results showed that antecedent semantics have no direct effect on interpretation, raising additional questions about the role that retrieval might play in pronoun interpretation. (shrink)

The first part of this paper presents the mystery of Eucharist as the symbol or sacrament of, and hence as identical with, the central mystery of Christian faith: the paschal mystery of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. It also situates Rahner’s theology of Eucharist within the larger context of his theology as a whole, particularly his Christology. The humanity of Jesus as the real symbol or sacrament of the Logos provides the prime analogate for understanding Eucharist as sacrament, (...) and the two-fold movement of Christology as both descending and ascending provides the basic structure of sacramental activity as embodying both the divine offer of grace and human response to it. The second part considers Rahner’s contribution to specific problems in Eucharistic theology: real presence, the idea of transubstantiation, sacramental causality and institution by Jesus.The third and final part looks to the still unfinished agenda of Karl Rahner’s theology of Eucharist. He describes the task facing theology in the future as that of transposing theoretical beliefs into practical imperatives, “so that the theological as such becomes a principle of action.” For the Eucharist this means seeing Eucharist primarily in the context of the reign of God that was the center of the preaching and ministry of Jesus rather than only in the context of the church. More specifically, this means seeing the church’s Eucharist in the world within the larger context of the liturgy of the world. The liturgy of the world celebrates the ongoing transformation of the secular realm by the power of the Spirit in its movement towards its consummation in the final coming of God’s reign. (shrink)

Since the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), particularly its Pastoral Constitution on the Church and the Modern World, many Catholic theologians, including J. B. Metz, Karl Rahner, and Edward Schillebeeckx, have taken note of the need to see the practical implications of our theoretical doctrines. Taking its cue from a remark of Karl Rahner (1970) that the theological as such must be a principle of action, this article studies the implications of this for Christology, soteriology, and ecclesiology. The Christological implications are (...) rooted in the long overdue recovery of the faith and hope of Jesus himself as the basis of the church’s faith in Jesus. The soteriological implications are rooted in recovering Jesus’ proclamation of the reign of God as the center of Christian soteriology. Finally, the ecclesiological implications are rooted in seeing the church as existing not for itself, but for the sake of the ongoing proclamation and realization of God’s reign in the present. (shrink)

When voters’ preferences on candidates are mutually coherent, in the sense that they are at all close to being perfectly single-peaked, perfectly single-troughed, or perfectly polarized, there is a large probability that a Condorcet Winner exists in elections with a small number of candidates. Given this fact, the study develops representations for Condorcet Efficiency of plurality rule as a function of the proximity of voters’ preferences on candidates to being perfectly single-peaked, perfectly single-troughed or perfectly polarized. We find that the (...) widely used plurality rule has Condorcet Efficiency values that behave in very different ways under each of these three models of mutual coherence. (shrink)

Every thinker is related to the history of thought, but investigating this relationship is not always interesting or even profitable. In the case of Hegel, however, the philosopher’s relationship to the history of thought is one of the chief things that recommends his philosophy as a subject of study. But what makes Hegel interesting also makes him difficult, for Hegel was acutely conscious of his relation to the tradition. Perhaps Hegel had a broader and deeper awareness of this relationship than (...) any thinker before him. But this is not the important thing. What matters is that Hegel seized upon his relationship to the tradition as a problem, translating it from the language of dim, circumstantial connections into the language of philosophy’s essential vocation. For Hegel, philosophy’s relationship to the tradition is not in the first place a fact about the system of thought. It is rather the logical destiny that rules its genesis, development and perfection. The determination to put the problem of this relationship on philosophy’s agenda and so make it scientifically profitable for raising thought to maturity is the heart and soul of Hegel’s preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit. This text celebrates phenomenological science as the “ladder” for leading consciousness upward into its true element, science, just at the moment when consciousness has been prepared by its historical experience to take this step. (shrink)