Antonín J. Liehm (1924–2020) was a prominent Czechoslovak journalist and cultural critic, who played a significant role in the cultural liberalization during the 1960s as editor of the literary magazine Literární noviny. Following the Soviet invasion of 1968, Liehm went into exile and joined the struggle to liberate his homeland. He was a major contributor to the exile magazine Listy, established in Rome in the early 1970s by Jiří Pelikán. After some years of teaching at universities in (...) the United States, Liehm moved to Paris where, besides teaching at a number of institutions of higher learning, he founded the cultural magazine, Lettre internationale. In 2010, I met Liehm for the first time and we remained in close contact until his death ten years later. In this article I present Liehm’s most significant achievements and my own personal recollections of him as a public intellectual. (shrink)

Title: The Politics of Culture Publisher: Grove Press ISBN: 039447824X Author: Antonin J. Liehm Title: From the Diary of a Counterrevolutionary Publisher: McGraw-Hill ISBN: 0070352968 Author: Pavel Kohout.

Why does symbolic communication in humans develop primarily in an oral medium, and how do theories of language origin explain this? Non-human primates, despite their ability to learn and use symbolic signs, do not develop symbols as in oral language. This partly owes to the lack of a direct cortico-motoneuron control of vocalizations in these species compared to humans. Yet such modality-related factors that can impinge on the rise of symbolic language are interpreted differently in two types of evolutionary storylines. (...) 1) Some theories posit that symbolic language originated in a gestural modality, as in “sign languages”. However, this overlooks work on emerging sign and spoken language showing that gestures and speech shape signs differently. 2) In modality-dependent theories, some emphasize the role of iconic sounds, though these lack the efficiency of arbitrary symbols. Other theorists suggest that ontogenesis serves to identify human-specific mechanisms underlying an evolutionary shift from pitch varying to orally-modulated vocalizations (babble). This shift creates numerous oral features that can support efficient symbolic associations. We illustrate this principle using a sound-picture association task with 40 learners who hear words in an unfamiliar language (Mandarin) with and without a filtering of oral features. Symbolic associations arise more rapidly and accurately for sounds containing oral features compared to sounds bearing only pitch features, an effect also reported in experiments with infants. The results imply that, beyond a competence to learn and use symbols, the rise of symbolic language rests on the types of signs that a modality of expression affords. (shrink)

In recent years the study of well-being has attracted considerable attention, fostering hope that the scientific community will ultimately succeed in discovering its very nature, thereby emulating successful scientific projects in other disciplines. However, there have been recurring worries about how to measure and define well-being. In this context, Hersch (Br J Philos Sci 73:1045–1065, 2022) has recently argued that we could progressively alleviate these worries through an iterative dialogue between theory and measurement, by seeing them as stemming from a (...) coordination problem. In this article, I argue that the concept of well-being fails to meet the prerequisites for Hersch’s approach. If the latter is the best defense of the capacity of science to uncover the nature of well-being, it follows that the science of well-being should probably relinquish this ambition. (shrink)

A short rebuttal to Antonín Mokrejš's hostile reply to my critical review of his translation of Roman Ingarden's 'The Literary Work of Art'.

The literary sources for the Flavian and Antonine periods of Roman history, it is a notorious and unhappy fact, where they exist at all, are infuriatingly fragmentary, frequently obscure, too frequently inaccurate or mendacious. Significant gaps still linger even in chronology; hence it can hardly occasion surprise that we are rarely permitted a glimpse of the political activity which preoccupied the emperors and Senate.

Professor Housman states that stella never is used to mean sidus, and for authors of the best age I believe he is right; at least I know of no examples except those which he convincingly explains away in the article quoted. There seem, however, to be instances of this usage perhaps as early as the age of the Antonines. Hyginus, fab. cxcv, says of Orion, ab Ioue in stellarum numenim est relatus, quam stellam Orionem uocant. Again, fab. ccxxiv, Crotos…in stellam (...) Sagittarium. Hyginus, it is true, was a fool, and his book is crammed with mistakes, including astronomical blunders; thus, just after the last-quoted passage, and also in fab. cxxx, he names the star Arcturus when he means the constellation Arctophylax, or Bootes. But I cannot think him quite so grossly ignorant, since he was interested in star-myths, as not to know that Orion and Sagittarius are constellations. It may be, however, that the use of stella in these passages is due, not to Hyginus himself, but to the epitomators whose extracts from the original work are all that has come down to us. Of these gentry I can believe almost anything that implies false Latin or general ignorance. (shrink)

La Lettre Internationale is a new, international journal, edited by Antonin Liehm in French (with Paul Noirot) and in Italian (with Federico Coen). German and Spanish editions are in the planning stages. Liehm is known not only as a film critic, social thinker and political commentator; he is also the former editor of Literamy Listy, the journal of the Czech writers' union that was one of the important elements in the creation of the Prague Spring of 1968. Listy (...) was a cultural organ that played apolitical role without abandoning its primary mission. Small countries, Liehm explains, cannot afford parochialism. They are open necessarily to the outside world, from whose offerings they must know how to pick and choose. They do not have the luxury of purity; they cannot indulge their fantasies of autonomy. (shrink)

Cet ensemble ne cherche pas à gommer par des ponts et des raccords le disparate des préoccupations, l'aléatoire des sollicitations. Il forme toutefois un ouvrage qui a ses obsessions, ses retours, ses insistances. Le cours de l'Histoire et les philosophies qui ont cherché à le comprendre, la place dominante prise aujourd'hui par le discours économique, les quêtes extrêmes de sens, aux limites de la raison, la fidélité à des causes qui ont pu passer pour utopiques, voilà quelques tracés qui se (...) rendent visibles. Quoi de commun entre l'espoir fou d'Antonin Artaud de "guérir la vie" en transgressant les frontières de la rationalité occidentale, et la tentative d'Emmanuel Lévinas de fonder l'éthique sur le visage de l'autre pour subvertir la tyrannie de l'universel et de l'impersonnel? Quoi de commun entre la temporalité anhistorique de l'Islam et l'espoir militant d'une libération des femmes qui ouvre une autre Histoire? Dans le choc des réflexions aux prises avec l'inattendu, dans l'irruption des conjonctures inquiétantes, ces effets de brisures, ces fractures du temps, ne contredisent pourtant pas un souffle d'irréversible, qui confirme ce que les pensées de l'Histoire et leur foi dans l'avenir ont pressenti. J.J.G. (shrink)

Theodor W. Adorno is best known for his contributions to aesthetics and social theory. Critics have always complained about the lack of a practical, political or ethical dimension to Adorno's philosophy. In this highly original contribution to the literature on Adorno, J. M. Bernstein offers the first attempt in any language to provide an account of the ethical theory latent in Adorno's writings. Bernstein relates Adorno's ethics to major trends in contemporary moral philosophy. He analyses the full range of Adorno's (...) major works, with a special focus on Dialectic of Enlightenment, Minima Moralia and Negative Dialectics. In developing his account Bernstein lays particular stress on Adorno's contention that the event of Auschwitz demands a new categorical imperative. This book will be widely acknowledged as the standard work on Adorno's ethics and as such will interest professionals and students of philosophy, political theory, sociology, history of ideas, art history and music. (shrink)

The meta-problem is 'the problem of explaining why we think that there is a problem of consciousness' (Chalmers, 2018, p. 6). This presupposes that we think there is a problem in the first place. We challenge the breadth of this 'we', arguing that there is already sufficient empirical evidence to cast doubt on the claim. We then add to this body of evidence, presenting the results of a new cross-cultural study extending the work of Sytsma and Machery (2010).

_The Foundations of Arithmetic_ is undoubtedly the best introduction to Frege's thought; it is here that Frege expounds the central notions of his philosophy, subjecting the views of his predecessors and contemporaries to devastating analysis. The book represents the first philosophically sound discussion of the concept of number in Western civilization. It profoundly influenced developments in the philosophy of mathematics and in general ontology.

With contributions by leading scholars in the field, this book is the first collection in the English language devoted to Baumgarten’s aesthetics.

I argue physicalism should be characterized as the thesis that all behavior is law-governed. This characterization captures crucial desiderata for a formulation of physicalism, including its broad import and worldview defining features. It also has more local virtues, such as avoiding Hempel’s dilemma. A particularly important implication, I argue, is that this thesis makes the question of the mind’s physicality turn on what the mind can do- rather than what experience is like.

J. B. Schneewind's "The Invention of Autonomy" has been hailed as a major interpretation of modern moral thought. Schneewind's narrative, however, elides several serious interpretive issues, particularly in the transition from late medieval to early modern thought. This results in potentially distorted accounts of Thomas Aquinas, Hugo Grotius, and G. W. Leibniz. Since these thinkers play a crucial role in Schneewind's argument, uncertainty over their work calls into question at least some of Schneewind's larger agenda for the history of ethics.

Built in the centre of Copenhagen, and noted for its equestrian stairway, the Rundetaarn, was intended as an astronomical observatory. Part of a complex of buildings that once included a university library, it affords expansive views of the city in every direction, towering above what surrounds it. The metaphor of the towering figure, who sees what others might not, whose vantage point allows him to visualize how things fit together, and who has an earned-stature of respect and authority, fits another (...) Danish stalwart, Hans Vilhelm Hansen, whose contributions to the fields of informal logic and argument theory have earned the gratitude of his colleagues, and inspired this collection of essays, written to express the appreciation of its authors and of the many, many colleagues they represent. (shrink)

Orthologic is defined by weakening the axioms and rules of inference of the classical propositional calculus. The resulting Lindenbaum-Tarski quotient algebra is an orthoimplication algebra which generalizes the author's implication algebra. The associated order structure is a semi-orthomodular lattice. The theory of orthomodular lattices is obtained by adjoining a falsity symbol to the underlying orthologic or a least element to the orthoimplication algebra.

In this book, J.H. Plumb investigates the way that humankind has, since the beginning of recorded time, molded the past to give sanction to their institutions of government, their social structure and morality. The past has also been called upon to explain the nature of our destiny in order both to strengthen the objectives of society and to reconcile us to our lot. J.H. Plumb questions this sanction of the past, the force that it has on our sense of destiny (...) and its relevance to our own times. This classic text is now reissued with a new introduction by Niall Ferguson, placing it within a contemporary context, and with a new foreword by the eminent historian Simon Schama, a former student of J.H.Plumb himself. (shrink)

Aristotle and the sea battle, by G. E. M. Anscombe.--Aristotle's different possibilities, by K. J. J. Hintikka.--On Aristotle's square of opposition, by M. Thompson.--Categories in Aristotle and in Kant, by J. C. Wilson.--Aristotle's Categories, chapters I-V: translation and notes, by J. L. Ackrill--Aristotle's theory of categories, by J. M. E. Moravcsik.--Essence and accident, by I. M. Copi.--Tithenai ta phainomena, by G. E. L. Owen.--Matter and predication in Aristotle, by J. Owens.--Problems in Metaphysics Z, chapter 13, by M. J. Woods.--The meaning (...) of agathon in the Ethics of Aristotle, by H. A. Prichard.--Agathon and eudaimonia in the Ethics of Aristotle, by J. L. Austin.--The final good in Aristotle's Ethics, by W. F. R. Hardie.--Aristotle on pleasure, by J. O. Urmson.--Bibliography (p. 335-41). (shrink)

In focusing on the story of Darwin's religious doubts, scholars too often overlook Darwin's positive contribution to the study of religion. J. David Pleins traces Darwin's journey in five steps. He begins with Darwin's global voyage, where his encounter with religious and cultural diversity transformed his understanding of religion. Surprisingly, Darwin wrestles with serious theological questions even as he uncovers the evolutionary layers of religion from savage roots. Next, we follow Darwin as his doubts about traditional biblical religion take root, (...) affecting his career choice and marriage to Emma Wedgwood. Pleins then examines Darwin's secret notebooks as he searches for a materialist theory of religion. Again, other surprises loom as Darwin's reading of Comte's three stages of religion's development actually predate his reading of Malthus. Pleins explores how Darwin applied his discovery to the realm of ethics by formulating an evolutionary view of the "Golden Rule" in his Descent of Man. Finally, he considers Darwin's later reflections on the religion question, as he wrestled with whether his views led to atheism, agnosticism, or a new kind of theism. The Evolving God concludes by looking at some of the current religious debates surrounding Darwin and suggests the need for a deeper appreciation for Darwin as a religious thinker. Though he grew skeptical of traditional Christian dogma, Darwin made key discoveries concerning the role and function of religion as a natural evolutionary phenomenon. (shrink)

This chapter discusses methodology in epistemology. It argues that settling the facts, even the epistemic facts, fails to settle the questions of intellectual policy at the centre of our epistemic lives. One upshot is that the standard methodology of analysing concepts like knowledge, justification, rationality, and so on is misconceived. More generally, any epistemic method that seeks to issue in intellectual policy by settling the facts, whether by way of abductive theorizing or empirical investigation, no matter how reliable, is inapt. (...) The argument is a radicalization of Moore’s open-question argument. In conclusion, the ramifications of this argument for the debate surrounding modal security, a proposed necessary condition on undermining defeat, are considered. (shrink)

At some distance from a high-rate source in an elastic half-space, the dominant wave motion at the free surface is a Rayleigh surface wave. The calculation of surface waves generated by a concentrated force in a half-space is a basic problem in elastodynamics. By straightforward manipulations, the result can be used to obtain surface waves for other kinds of wave-generating body-force arrangements. For example, appropriate combinations of double-forces (or dipoles) can be used to represent the surface loading due to laser (...) irradiation, or due to acoustic emission from the opening of a sub-surface crack or from sliding over a fault surface. The surface wave motion is usually obtained by the application of integral transform techniques and the subsequent extraction of the surface waves as the contributions from poles in the integral for the inverse transform. In this paper, we use a much simpler approach based on the elastodynamic reciprocity theorem. We consider a transversely isotropic solid whose axis of symmetry is normal to the surface of the half-space. Surface wave pulses generated by a single force, by irradiation from a laser source, and by opening of a crack, have been determined. (shrink)