Alan Hirsch, Instructor in the Humanities and Chair of the Justice and Law Studies program at Williams College, has testified as an expert witness on false confessions in 23 states.In the introduct...

Writing about the intellectual development of a philosopher is a delicate business. My own endeavor to reinterpret the influence of Hegel on Dewey troubles some scholars because, they believe, I make Dewey seem less original.1 But if, like Dewey, we overcome Cartesian dualism, placing the development of the self firmly within a complex matrix of social processes, we are forced to reexamine, without necessarily surrendering, the notion of individual originality, or what Neil Gross calls “discourse[s] of creative genius.”2 To use (...) a mundane example, I can recall several conversations with Dewey scholars about his dislike for his home state of Vermont, all of which revolved around personal reasons he may.. (shrink)

This book taps the best American thinkers to answer the essential American question: How do we sustain our experiment in government of, by, and for the people? Authored by an extraordinary and politically diverse roster of public officials, scholars, and educators, these chapters describe our nation's civic education problem, assess its causes, offer an agenda for reform, and explain the high stakes at risk if we fail.

Between 1860-1920 a number of distinguished Scottish theologians grappled with the problems of reconciling a biblical faith with current philosophical and theological trends. Alan Sell has selected eight of these: John Kennedy of Dingwall ; Robert Flint ; John Caird ; A. B. Bruce ; James Iverach ; James Orr ; D. W. Forrest ; and James Denney. The book is not only of historical interest; many of the issues confronted by these scholars are also of contemporary interest. (...) Professor James Torrance comments: 'This study is invaluable in keeping alive the authentic tradition that Scotland has produced great theologians,... but perhaps supremely in the period covered by this eminently readable book.'. (shrink)

For two thousand years the Mencius was revered as one of the foundational texts of the Confucian canon, which formed the basis of traditional Chinese education. Today it commands considerable attention in current debates on "Asian values" raging in classrooms and boardrooms in both East Asia and the West. This volume, which represents the work of fifteen respected scholars of early Chinese thought and culture, is an especially timely effort to bring the Mencius under fresh scrutiny. Making use of recently (...) excavated manuscripts, the contributors approach the Mencius from novel perspectives, challenge established interpretations, and confront anew issues that continue to attract and divide students of this classic text. The famous Mencian doctrine of the "goodness" of human nature forms one main focus. Questions of context and interpretation bring into sharp relief key hermeneutical issues that surround the text. Does the Mencius present a coherent and systematically developed ethical teaching? Or should it be read as a composite work, comprising different layers of material that reflect different emphases and conflicting doctrines? Traversing contested territories and exploring new avenues of understanding, the essays presented here do not aim at settling debates; on the contrary, they afford ample opportunities for further discussion on the background, interpretation, and continued relevance of this classic of Confucian philosophy. Contributors: Roger T. Ames, Irene Bloom, A. Taeko Brooks, E. Bruce Brooks, Alan K. L. Chan, Kim-Chong Chong, Antonio S. Cua, Robert Eno, Jiuan Heng, Donald J. Munro, Ning Chen, David Nivison, Kwong-Loi Shun, Sor-Hoon Tan. (shrink)

Although philosophy has undergone a number of revolutions since the turn of the century, the existence of universals is still debated largely in the terms employed by Moore and Russell around 1910. A recent article by Alan Donagan illustrates this nicely, for Donagan expounds and defends what he takes to be the principal argument for universals given by Russell in The Problems of Philosophy. I shall comment critically on the case Donagan makes for Russell's metaphysical realism, but my main (...) concern is to establish a point of more general interest—namely, that the most plausible strategy for defending a commitment to universals actually raises more problems than it promises to solve. (shrink)

I would expect many readers of my book to want to agree with either Mark Heller or Alan Sidelle. The very idea of “rational constraints on lexicons” will immediately suggest to many people that either the constraints are of a purely pragmatic nature or there really are no such constraints. I can take some cold comfort in the fact that many philosophers will join me in rejecting, and many others will join me in rejecting, but since I have nothing (...) to offer in place of these positions—except mystification—I’m afraid that few will join me in rejecting both of them. (shrink)

In this chapter the intellectual-ecclesiastical context of religious philosophizing in Scotland in the second half of the nineteenth century is briefly sketched, and a selection of thinkers who followed in the wake of Reid’s common sense realism is introduced—Hamilton, Campbell Fraser and Flint among them. Responses to past philosophers and to then current trends in philosophy are reviewed. At a time when classical theistic arguments could no longer serve as once they had; when the ‘evidences’ of miracle and prophecy were (...) increasingly deemed suspect; and when evolutionary thought required a response, apologetic questions occupied such writers as Iverach and Bruce and Mackintosh. None of the philosophers here discussed could finally keep theology at bay. (shrink)

Contribution to symposium on Eli Hirsch's Dividing Reality.

In Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys, Irwin, a sixth-form history tutor destined for a media career (based, it is rumored, on that specialist in historical controversy Niall Ferguson) sets out his views on how a difficult change in the law that will affect individual rights should be dealt with. The tactic Irwin advocates is for the Government to insist that the Bill, rather than reducing the liberty of the subject “amplifies it.” The use of paradox, notes Irwin, “works (...) well . . . the loss of liberty is the price we pay for freedom type thing” (Bennett 2004, 3). Thus, in a few sentences, Bennett encapsulates one of the greatest, or, at least, what we in the West have come to think of as one of the greatest, of .. (shrink)

While acknowledging its theory-ladeness, Chalmers (history and philosophy, U. of Sydney) defends the objectivity of scientific knowledge against those critics for whom such knowledge is both subjective and ideological.

In Value and Context Alan Thomas articulates and defends the view that human beings do possess moral and political knowledge but it is historically and culturally contextual knowledge in ways that, say, mathematical or chemical knowledge is not. In his exposition of "cognitive contextualism" in ethics and politics he makes wide-ranging use of contemporary work in epistemology, moral philosophy, and political theory.

The themes of the book—the value of knowledge and epistemic appraisal broadly conceived—are introduced in this chapter. The Meno problem is explained and related to the swamping problem as discussed by Jonathan Kvanvig. The stance of virtue epistemologists is outlined. This is followed by a brief discussion of the role of truth in epistemic appraisal. The remainder of the introduction summarises the contributions to the book.

First published in 1967, _Writing and Difference_, a collection of Jacques Derrida's essays written between 1959 and 1966, has become a landmark of contemporary French thought. In it we find Derrida at work on his systematic deconstruction of Western metaphysics. The book's first half, which includes the celebrated essay on Descartes and Foucault, shows the development of Derrida's method of deconstruction. In these essays, Derrida demonstrates the traditional nature of some purportedly nontraditional currents of modern thought—one of his main targets (...) being the way in which "structuralism" unwittingly repeats metaphysical concepts in its use of linguistic models. The second half of the book contains some of Derrida's most compelling analyses of why and how metaphysical thinking must exclude writing from its conception of language, finally showing metaphysics to be constituted by this exclusion. These essays on Artaud, Freud, Bataille, Hegel, and Lévi-Strauss have served as introductions to Derrida's notions of writing and _différence_—the untranslatable formulation of a nonmetaphysical "concept" that does not exclude writing—for almost a generation of students of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. _Writing and Difference_ reveals the unacknowledged program that makes thought itself possible. In analyzing the contradictions inherent in this program, Derrida foes on to develop new ways of thinking, reading, and writing,—new ways based on the most complete and rigorous understanding of the old ways. Scholars and students from all disciplines will find _Writing and Difference_ an excellent introduction to perhaps the most challenging of contemporary French thinkers—challenging because Derrida questions thought as we know it. (shrink)

The book provides a novel theory of the criminal law that focuses, not on when it is appropriate to blame and make suffer an individual character, but on when it is legitimate to deprive a free agent of its liberty and on how it is possible to reconcile punishment with individual freedom.

Before he became a counterculture hero, Alan Watts was known as an incisive scholar of Eastern and Western psychology and philosophy. In this 1961 classic, Watts demonstrates his deep understanding of both Western psychotherapy and the Eastern spiritual philosophies of Buddhism, Taoism, Vedanta, and Yoga. He examined the problem of humans in a seemingly hostile universe in ways that questioned the social norms and illusions that bind and constrict modern humans. Marking a groundbreaking synthesis, Watts asserted that the powerful (...) insights of Freud and Jung, which had, indeed, brought psychiatry close to the edge of liberation, could, if melded with the hitherto secret wisdom of the Eastern traditions, free people from their battles with the self. When psychotherapy merely helps us adjust to social norms, Watts argued, it falls short of true liberation, while Eastern philosophy seeks our natural relation to the cosmos. (shrink)

This book analyzes the hermeneutics of place, raising questions about central issues such as textuality, dialogue, and play. It discusses the central figures in the development of hermeneutics and place, and surveys disciplines and areas in which a hermeneutic approach to place has been fruitful. It covers the range of philosophical hermeneutic theory, both within philosophy itself as well as from other disciplines. In doing so, the volume reflects the state of theorization on these issues, and also looks forward to (...) the implications and opportunities that exist. Philosophical hermeneutics has fundamentally altered philosophy’s approach to place. Issues such as how we dwell in place, how place is imagined, created, preserved, and lost, and how philosophy itself exists in place have become central. While there is much research applying hermeneutics to place, there is little which both reflects on that heritage and critically analyzes a hermeneutic approach to place. This book fills that void by offering a sustained analysis of the central elements, major figures, and disciplinary applications of hermeneutics and place. (shrink)