Review of: Robert Louden, Johann Bernard Basedow and the Transformation of Modern Education: Educational Reform in the German Enlightenment, London, Bloomsbury, 2021, 225 p. ISBN: 9781350163669.

_The Contradictions of Modern Moral Philosophy_ is a highly original and radical critique of contemporary moral theory. Paul Johnston demonstrates that much recent moral philosophy is confused about the fundamental issue of whether there are correct moral judgements. He shows that the standard modern approaches to ethics cannot justify - or even make much sense of - traditional moral beliefs. Applied rigorously, these approaches suggest that we should reject ethics as a set of outdated and misguided claims. Rather than (...) facing up to this conclusion, most recent moral philosophy consists of attempts to find some ways of preserving moral beliefs. This places a contradiction at the heart of moral philosophy. As a resilt it is often impossible to tell whether a contemporary philosopher ultimately rejects or endorses the idea of objective right and wrong. On the basis of a Wittgenstein approach Paul Johnston puts forward an alternative account of ethics that avoids this contradiction and recognises that the central issues of ethics cannot be resolved by conceptual analysis. He then uses this account to highlight the contradictions of important contemporary moral theorists such as Bernard Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre, Thomas Nagel and Charles Taylor. (shrink)

This second and concluding article of Mr. Wuellner's series recounts various attempts on the part of naturalistic philosophers and some eminent physicists to solve the riddle of entropy.They have so far been unsuccessful. The solutions of Johnstone, Maeterlinck, Bergson, Maeckel, Lodge, and MacMillan are cited.Of course, even if entropy is solved, the need of a Creator remains as strong as before.

The debate on the communitarian notion of personhood as initiated by Gyekye, in response to Menkiti, is both exhaustive and exhausted. Its exhaustiveness and exhaustion lies in the fact that, in all probability whatever can be said around it has been said, with truly nothing new likely ever being added. What is possibly left, is the potential for further additions to be more strident in their picking of sides or repeating that Gyekye and Menkiti are not sufficiently different or insisting (...) on the authenticity of either approach to African thought. What is needed is to transcend the constraints of this debate by opening up new vistas of interpreting communitarian thought in personhood. Whatever merit there is in showing whether radical or moderate communitarianism is real, or in showing which of these two is better than the other, this discussion can be furthered by looking at implications of communitarianism to other facets of philosophy. The most plausible avenue that could be implicated in communitarian considerations is the sphere of politics. Theorising about the communitarian notion of persons, I suggest, is partly to theorise about the political. If the commitments on which the doctrine of communitarianism is founded, are used to capture the sort of relations that exist between individuals, and between individuals and the community, then this relationship has an effect on how we conceive of the political theory we think appropriate. It is suggested here that contemplating on the communitarian polity will show the shortcomings of communitarianism as conceived by Gyekye and Menkiti. Keywords: Menkiti, Gyekye, Communitarianism, Limited Communitarianism, Personhood, Classical Communitarianism. (shrink)

Process engraver and printer Emery Walker was a pivotal figure in the English, American, and continental European Private Press Movement from the 1880s until his death in 1933. This article looks at his theories for the typography, design, and production of books, and how those theories were developed by key designers and close associates of Walker such as William Morris, T. J. Cobden Sanderson, and Bruce Rogers and through the practical teaching of figures such as J. H. Mason and Edward (...) Johnston. It examines how the theories were then taken up by the exponents of fine printing from the early 20th century through to the 1930s, focusing on the presses of Bernard Newdigate, Harry Kessler, Harold Curwen, and Francis Meynell. From these presses, and also via Stanley Morison and the Monotype Corporation, Walker’s theories are shown to have spread into mainstream book publishing in the first half of the 20th century. The article considers questions of whether the improvement in the readability of books in the early 20th century has had a continuing impact in book publishing, and makes suggestions how to access the incunabula referenced by the designers discussed, as well as collections of private press books and other early 20th-century fine printing. (shrink)

Part I. Phenomenology -- Phenomenology and the return to beginnings -- Delimitations: phenomenology and the end of metaphysics -- Part II. Sallis's Plato interpretation -- Being and logos: reading the Platonic dialogues -- Chorology: on beginning in Plato's Timaeus -- Platonic legacies -- Part III. Art/Sallis -- Stone -- Shades-of painting at the limit -- Topographies -- Part IV. Sallis and other thinkers -- The gathering of reason -- Spacings-of reason and imagination in texts of Kant, Fichte, Hegel -- Echoes: (...) after Heidegger -- Crossings: Nietzsche and the space of tragedy -- Part V. Sallis speaks directly -- Double truth -- Force of imagination: the sense of the elemental -- On translation -- The Sallis/Derrida dialogue -- Derrida's "Tense" and Sallis's The verge of philosophy. (shrink)

A staunch hylomorphism involves a commitment to a sparse theory of universals and a sparse theory of composite material objects, as well as to an ontology of fundamental causal powers. Faint-hearted hylomorphism, in contrast, lacks one or more of these elements. On the staunch version of HM, a substantial form is not merely some structural property of a set of elements—it is rather a power conferred on those elements by that structure, a power that is the cause of the generation (...) (by fusion) and persistence of a composite whole through time. Bernard Williams discussed (and rejected) a faint-hearted version of HM in 1986, and faint-hearted HM has been defended more recently by Mark Johnston (2006) and Kathrin Koslicki (2008). I defend the superiority of the staunch version, in spite of its heavier ontological commitments, as a way of accounting for a real distinction between living organisms and heaps of matter, without recourse to dualism or vitalism, and as a way of combining a powers ontology with the possibility of gunk. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell presented three systems of propositional logic, one first in Principles of Mathematics, University Press, Cambridge, 1903 then in “The Theory of Implication”, Routledge, New York, London, pp. 14–61, 1906) and culminating with Principia Mathematica, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1910. They are each based on different primitive connectives and axioms. This paper follows “Peirce’s Law” through those systems with the aim of understanding some of the notorious peculiarities of the 1910 system and so revealing some of the early history (...) of classical propositional logic. “Peirce’s Law” is a valid formula of elementary propositional logic: [ ⊃ p] ⊃ p This sentence is not even a theorem in the 1910 system although it is one of the axioms in 1903 and is proved as a theorem in 1906. Although it is not proved in 1910, the two lemmas from the proof in 1906 occur as theorems, and Peirce’s Law could have been derived from them in a two step proof. The history of Peirce’s Law in Russell’s systems helps to reconstruct some of the history of axiomatic systems of classical propositional logic. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper reconsiders the arguments of my book, The Longing for Total Revolution, in response to the thoughtful analyses collected in this symposium. It restates the book’s main genealogical and critical arguments about the philosophical sources of uniquely modern forms of social discontent, while distinguishing those arguments from recent attempts to uncover the deeper, theological sources of discontent. It focuses, in particular, on the role played in modern social discontent by the group of thinkers I describe as the “Kantian (...) left”: a long line of social critics who sought to “realize” Kant’s understanding of human autonomy in society, thereby gaining what Marx called “control and conscious mastery” over our social world, not just over our wills. (shrink)

« Je me joignis à Hegel sans nulle difficulté, ayant coutume d'être hégélien avant lui » : Alain retrouve, admiratif, en Hegel, l'exemplaire réunion méthodologique du concept et de l'expérience, et — quant au contenu, surtout de la philosophie de l'esprit — l'application non moins exemplaire du grand principe selon lequel l'inférieur porte et règle le supérieur, qui l'éclairé et l'explique. — A tel point que, en récusant la politique de Hegel, Alain va s'employer à sauver de lui-même un hégélianisme (...) auquel il a été et reste un incomparable éveilleur. « Sehr unbedenklich schloss ich mich an Hegel darum an, weil ich sonst vor Hegel hegelisch war » : höchst bewundernd findet Alain bei Hegel die musterhafte methodologische Vereinigung des Begriffs mit der Erfahrung, und — rücksichtlich des Inhaltes, vornehmlich der Geistesphilosophie — die ebenso musterhafte Anwendung des grossen Grundsatzes, nach welchem das Untere das Obere trägt und regelt, aber durch dasselbe erläutert und erklärt wird, wieder. — So sehr, dass Alain — indem er die Hegeische Staatstheorie ablehnt — sich darum bemüht, solch einen Hegelianismus von sich selbst zu retten, zu dessen Studium er unvergleichbarerweise noch heute den Sinn erweckt. (shrink)

The identity theory of truth takes on different forms depending on whether it is combined with a dual relation or a multiple relation theory of judgment. This paper argues that there are two significant problems for the dual relation identity theorist regarding thought’s answerability to reality, neither of which takes a grip on the multiple relation identity theory.

Cet article examine les choix de traduction, exposés dans deux préfaces se répondant, de deux traducteurs vers le latin de l’Ethique à Nicomaque, Joachim Périon, dont la traduction paraît en 1540, et Denis Lambin, dont le texte paraît en 1572. L’un et l’autre de ces traducteurs, à travers leur polémique, semblent en fait continuer les thèses d’un autre traducteur d’Aristote, théoricien du style de la traduction, Leonardo Bruni, dont le De interpretatione recta date de 1424-1426. Si Périon pense que le (...) seul style possible pour traduire Aristote en latin est celui des ouvrages philosophiques de Cicéron, qui a créé le seul latin philosophique, Lambin, après avoir remis en cause le principe même d’une traduction du grec vers le latin, finit par en accepter la validité, le latin restant la langue la plus riche stylistiquement, et la plus à même de rendre la richesse du grec. (shrink)

We provide a suitable theoretical foundation for the notion of the quantum coherent state which describes the electrostatic field due to a static external macroscopic charge distribution introduced by the author in 1998 and use it to rederive the formulae obtained in 1998 for the inner product of a pair of such states. (We also correct an incorrect factor of 4π\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$4\pi$$\end{document} in some of those formulae.) Contrary to what one might expect, (...) this inner product is usually non-zero whenever the total charges of the two charge distributions are equal, even if the charge distributions themselves are different. We actually display two different frameworks that lead to the same inner-product formulae, in the second of which Gauss’s law only holds in expectation value. We propose an experiment capable of ruling out the latter framework. We then address the problem of finding a product picture for QED—i.e. a reformulation in which it has a total Hamiltonian, arising as a sum of a free electromagnetic Hamiltonian, a free charged-matter Hamiltonian and an interaction term, acting on a Hilbert space which is a subspace (the physical subspace) of the full tensor product of a charged-matter Hilbert space and an electromagnetic-field Hilbert space. (The traditional Coulomb gauge formulation of QED isn’t a product picture in this sense because, in it, the longitudinal part of the electric field is a function of the charged matter operators.) Motivated by the first framework for our coherent-state construction, we find such a product picture and exhibit its equivalence with Coulomb gauge QED both for a charged Dirac field and also for a system of non-relativistic charged balls. For each of these systems, in all states in the physical subspace (including the vacuum in the case of the Dirac field) the charged matter is entangled with longitudinal photons and Gauss’s law holds as an operator equation; albeit the electric field operator (and therefore also the full Hamiltonian) while self-adjoint on the physical subspace, fails to be self-adjoint on the full tensor-product Hilbert space. The inner products of our electrostatic coherent states and the product picture for QED are relevant as analogues to quantities that play a rôle in the author’s matter-gravity entanglement hypothesis. Also, the product picture provides a temporal gauge quantization of QED which appears to be free from the difficulties which plagued previous approaches to temporal-gauge quantization. (shrink)

The teaching of ethics in UK medical schools has recently been reviewed, from the perspective of the teachers themselves. A questionnaire survey of medical undergraduates at King’s College London School of Medicine provides useful insight into the students’ perception of ethics education, what they consider to be the value of learning ethics and law, and how engaged they feel with the subject.