2. If by "normative judgment" one means such statements as "We ought always to try to produce as much good as we can," I agree with Thesis 2.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Reissue from the classic Muirhead Library of Philosophy series (originally published between 1890s - 1970s).

To some students this method was too uncompromising for human frailty. To others, while chastening almost to despair, it was immensely stimulating; and the writer of this notice, who had the privilege of working with him for three years, falls emphatically in the latter group. Joachim was a remark able teacher who had no use for the arts and devices of the teacher. He gained his effect through the purgative influence on his pupils of his rare singleness of mind. Frail (...) of body, shy, deficient in animal spirits, he was still so obviously and wholly interested in the truth of the matter, so scrupulous in scholarship, and so just in statement, so incapable of glossing over difficulties with rhetoric, so reverent of the great philosophers and so modest about himself, that one's hours with him were memorable lessons in the patience and the discipline of good work. Though the discipline was rigorous, one was given to feel that something of great price lay at the end, nothing less indeed than a vision of reality. Logic in his hands was no mere razor-honing, nor was it a manipulation of symbols according to rules, nor yet a rattling of semantical dry bones; it was a study of the nature and conditions of intelligibility. And since intelligibility reached its high point in philosophy, he chose to study logic by studying the ideals of understanding implicit in the great philosophers. For his own part, the test of any theory was its power to maintain itself in the light of reflectively ordered experience as a whole, and hence he would not have regarded his classical learning, his studies in German literature, or even his virtuosity on the violin as wholly alien to his thought. He belonged to the tradition in which philosophy, if not identical with wisdom, at least carried it as a corollary. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

I am grateful to the group of philosophers who gave so liberally of their time and talent to the January issue of Idealistic Studies, which was devoted to my work. My thanks go particularly to Richard De George and Charles Landesman, who conceived the idea of such a collection, and to Robert Beck who, as editor, cooperated with them warmly. I treasure the collection the more because all the writers have been in one way or another students of mine. Judging (...) by their admirable essays, I was more successful in persuading them that rival positions were wrong than that my own were right. About that I cannot complain. The business of a philosophy teacher is not to produce disciples but to offer a discipline in thinking; and if the discipline is effective enough to expose cracks in his own system, that is at least some evidence that he has done his job. (shrink)

Portrays the lives of four influential philosophers and describes that their lives were lived in a quiet and reasonable manner.