Because of the two crucial problems just described, it is concluded that Stace's theory of the nature of mystical experience is inadequate. An alternative approach is outlined, which obviates the weaknesses in Stace's theory by combining C. J. Ducasse's distinction between connate and alien accusatives, with the suggestion by Gilbert Ryle and David Hamlyn that experiencing is like the exercise of a skill. Mystical experience, it is then proposed, is the exercise of the difficult yet rewarding acquired skill of experiencing (...) unitively. ;The second problem concerns the relation between the mystical experience and the interpretation made of it by the mystic. On this topic Stace is found to support two distinct positions: first, that experience or the given in general is independent of mental activity, and that mystical experience is pure, that is, uninterpreted; second, that pure experience is "psychologically impossible," and that no uninterpreted mystical experiences occur. Without passing judgment upon the issue of "psychological impossibility," an argument is here advanced to show that all mystical experiences reflect the specific context in which they occur, and hence that, in Stace's sense, all such experiences are "impure." ;In the evaluation of Stace's views about the nature of mystical experience, two main problems emerge. The first of these concerns the relation between the mystical experience and its object. Stace contends that mystical experience is identical with its object, the "Universal Self." However, his arguments for this belief, founded upon his general theory of experience and upon his examination of reports of mystical experiences, are demonstrated to be unsuccessful. ;The philosophical context of Stace's views on mystical experience includes, it is shown, Stace's many studies of mysticism in addition to his major survey of the field, Mysticism and Philosophy. It also embraces his more general writings about the concept of the given, the structure of human knowledge, and what Stace calls "phenomenalist metaphysics." ;A foundational element of Walter Terence Stace's pioneer work in the philosophy of mysticism is his theory of the nature of mystical experience. Accordingly, this thesis has two purposes: to outline the context of Stace's views on mystical experience; and to evaluate Stace's views on the nature of mystical experience. (shrink)

For more than fifty years, Sterling M. McMurrin served as one of the preeminent intellectual voices of the LDS community. From his beginnings as an Institute of Religion instructor to U.S. Commissioner of Education, and from a professor of philosophy to U.S. Envoy to Iran, he showed by example how personal and institutional morality can be defended.In a series of candid discussions with Jack Newell, McMurrin reveals his ability to reconcile freedom and conscience. In a spirit of repartee and (...) friendship, writes Boyer Jarvis in the foreword, Newell probes, challenges, and constantly draws McMurrin out as he... reflects upon his wide-ranging ideas and experiences. Rich in insight and humor, this remarkable dialogue captures the sweep and depth of McMurrin's thoughts as Newell engages him in discussing his approaches to philosophy, education, and religion.Among the qualities that characterized McMurrin's life and mind, explains Newell, perhaps the most notable is the freedom with which he has spoken his views on both the sacred and the profane. His intellectual integrity -- coupled as it almost always is with his humane instincts and innate fairness -- has simultaneously confounded and earned the respect of critics. (shrink)

STUDYING RELIGION in its many aspects is profoundly important to understanding our cultural diversity, our history, and our values. If religion is at the heart of every culture, it is imperative that we seek to know more about its influence in our lives and its place in our world. These six inaugural lectures, delivered by Sterling McMurrin from 1992 to 1994, introduce and discuss religion in various aspects. Subsequent volumes featuring the work of invited lecturers will continue to present (...) the very best scholarship on religion. (shrink)

"This reviewer had to be restrained from stopping people in the street to urge them to read it: They would learn something of the way science is done,...

Contemporary society involves a number of different persons, groups, and ways of life that are deeply divided and very often opposed on fundamental matters of deep concern. Today, many contemporary philosophers regard this 'fact of diversity' as a problem that needs to be addressed when assessing the principles employed to organize society. In this paper, I discuss the fact of diversity, as it is understood by the notion of reasonable pluralism, and explain why it is thought by some to challenge (...) the stability of a society's political morality. I examine the leading attempt to offer an account of the stability of a political morality and I argue that John Rawls's attempt to account for the stability of Justice as Fairness fails for reasons applicable to all political moralities because the very notion of a stable political morality is implausible. Diversity, as reasonable pluralism understands it, is not a problem that can be solved either by identifying a stable political morality or by modifying a political morality in some way that will make it more stable. Instead, the fact of diversity indicates only that disagreements on all aspects of society's organization, including its organizing principles and matters of value, is a permanent feature of social life that cannot be ignored, wished away, or solved. (shrink)

RESUMEN Este artículo propone reinterpretar la noción de cuerpo en la filosofia de Nietzsche contrastada con dos perspectivas relevantes de los estudios nietzscheanos en habla hispana: primero, la idea de que el cuerpo es sinónimo de naturaleza; y segundo, la idea de que el cuerpo es causa del sujeto. Pasando la mirada sobre una parte de la obra -publicada e inédita- de Nietzsche posterior al año 1885, se observa que la noción de cuerpo funge el papel de una metodologia que (...) permite llevar a cabalidad una renovada tarea de su filosofia, a saber, la tarea de conocerse a si mismo. Asi, la noción de cuerpo en Nietzsche, más allá de ser un concepto innovador o reivindicado, es una herramienta interpretante que le permite al autor establecer nuevas dimensiones "entre" el conocer y la experimentación corporal. ABSTRACT This paper proposes a re-interpretation of the idea of Body in Nietzsche's philosophy to distinguish it from two important perspectives of Nietzsche-studies in Spanish: The first one maintains that the Body is comparable with Nature, and the second one, states that the Body is a cause of subjectivity. Analyzing part of Nietzsche's work after 1885 -published and unpublished- shows that the idea of the Body works as a methodology that allows Nietzsche to accomplish a new task of his philosophy, such as the task of self-knowledge. In this way, the Body in Nietzsche's philosophy, besides being an innovative and redeemable concept, is a performative tool that establishes new dimensions "in-between" human knowing and bodily experimentation. (shrink)

Book synopsis: Philosophers have long been fascinated by the connection between cause and effect: are 'causes' things we can experience, or are they concepts provided by our minds? The study of causation goes back to Aristotle, but resurged with David Hume and Immanuel Kant, and is now one of the most important topics in metaphysics. Most of the recent work done in this area has attempted to place causation in a deterministic, scientific, worldview. But what about the unpredictable and chancey (...) world we actually live in: can one theory of causation cover all instances of cause and effect? (shrink)

There has been a long debate on whether demonstratives are directly referential as Kaplan originally argued, or indirectly referential like a definite description. I propose a new analysis of demonstratives that combines intuitions from both direct and indirect approaches. The demonstrative is analyzed as an indirectly referential expression with a binary maximality operator that takes two arguments, where the second argument can be a deictic pointing, an anaphoric index, or a relative clause. Direct reference is encoded not in the meaning (...) of the demonstrative but in the meaning contributed by the pointing gesture, thus capturing both direct and indirect uses. I further propose that some pronouns in English function as demonstratives, realizing the binary structure and competing with the demonstrative. The main advantages of this proposal include (a) deriving the distribution of pronominal and adnominal demonstratives systematically; (b) capturing the unique interaction that demonstratives have with a pointing gesture; and (c) locating English demonstratives against a larger, cross-linguistic picture. (shrink)

In a number of influential articles published since 1972, Dorothy Grover has developed the prosentential theory of truth. Brought together and published with a new introduction, these essays are even more impressive as a group than they were as single contributions to philosophy and linguistics. Denying that truth has an explanatory role, the prosentential theory does not address traditional truth issues like belief, meaning, and justification. Instead, it focuses on the grammatical role of the truth predicate and asserts that (...) “it is true” is a prosentence, functioning much as a pronoun does. Grover defends the theory by indicating how it can handle notorious paradoxes like the Liar, as well as by analyzing some English truth-usages. The introduction to the volume surveys traditional theories of truth, including correspondence, pragmatic, and coherence theories. It discusses the essays to come and, finally, considers the implications of the prosentential theory for other theories. Despite the fact that the prosentential theory dismisses the “nature of truth” as a red herring, Grover shows that there are important aspects of traditional truth theories that prosentential theorists have the option of endorsing. (shrink)

Beginning with an exploration into the question of what war is, War and Warfare Since 1945 provides a chronological analysis of military history since the end of World War II extending through to an analysis of the limits of modern warfare in the nuclear age with the purpose of examining why war occurs and how it is carried out. The book concludes with an investigation into modern war and speculation on the changing face of warfare."--Provided by publisher.

The article argues that Marx’s use of the concept of ideology in The German Ideology is incidental to a sustained critique of how those he described as the German ideologists think and reason about society and history and that this critique is not simply of an idealist theory that represents society and history as determined by consciousness but of methods of reasoning that treat concepts, even of those of political economy, as determinants. His view of how consciousness is determined historically (...) by our social being does not envisage some kind of mechanical transfer of class status to class consciousness. Rather, he works with an epistemology that takes the concepts foundational to political economy as expressions or reflections of the social relations of a mode of production. The difference between ideology and science is the difference between treating those concepts as the primitives of theory and treating them as sites for exploring the social relations that are expressed in them. Thus, the historical rather than further undermining claims to knowledge, provides both the conditions under which knowledge is possible and its limitations. (shrink)

Benedict Spinoza (1634–1677) is feted as the philosopher par excellence of the popular democratic multitude by Antonio Negri and others. But Spinoza himself expresses a marked ambivalence about the multitude in brief asides, and as for his thoughts on what he calls “the rule of (the) multitude,” that is, democracy, these exist only as meager fragments in his unfinished Tractatus Politicus or Political Treatise. This essay addresses the problem of Spinoza’s multitude. First, I reconstruct a vision of power that is (...) found in the Ethics but that tends to be overlooked in the scholarly literature: power is not just sheer efficacy or imposition of will, but rather involves a capacity for being-affected; I call this the conception of power as sensitivity. The second part of my argument shows how, given Spinoza’s emphatic political naturalism, the conception of power as sensitivity can be extended to his political philosophy to shed light on what Spinoza calls potentia multitudinis, or “the power of the multitude”—a term found solely in the Political Treatise and nowhere else in his oeuvre. This juxtaposition reveals significant qualifications to the liberatory potential of the multitude currently claimed in the scholarly literature. (shrink)

Book synopsis: Vagueness is currently the subject of vigorous debate in the philosophy of logic and language. Vague terms-such as "tall", "red", "bald", and "tadpole"—have borderline cases ; and they lack well-defined extensions. The phenomenon of vagueness poses a fundamental challenge to classical logic and semantics, which assumes that propositions are either true or false and that extensions are determinate. Another striking problem to which vagueness gives rise is the sorites paradox. If you remove one grain from a heap of (...) sand, surely you must be left with a heap. Yet apply this principle repeatedly as you remove grains one by one, and you end up, absurdly, with a solitary grain that counts as a heap. This anthology collects papers in the field. After an introduction that surveys the field, the essays form four groups, starting with some historically notable pieces. The 1970s saw an explosion of interest in vagueness, and the second group of essays reprints classic papers from this period. The following group of papers represent current work on the logic and semantics of vagueness. The essays in the final group are contributions to the continuing debate about vague objects and vague identity. (shrink)

From birth to 15 months infants and caregivers form a fundamentally intersubjective, dyadic unit within which the infant’s ability to recognize gender/sex in the world develops. Between about 18 and 36 months the infant accumulates an increasingly clear and subjective sense of self as female or male. We know little about how the precursors to gender/sex identity form during the intersubjective period, nor how they transform into an independent sense of self by 3 years of age. In this Theory and (...) Hypothesis article I offer a general framework for thinking about this problem. I propose that through repetition and patterning, the dyadic interactions in which infants and caregivers engage imbue the infant with an embodied, i.e., sensori-motor understanding of gender/sex. During this developmental period (which I label Phase 1) gender/sex is primarily an intersubjective project. From 15 to 18 months (which I label Phase 2) there are few reports of newly appearing gender/sex behavioral differences, and I hypothesize that this absence reflects a period of developmental instability during which there is a transition from gender/sex as primarily inter-subjective to gender/sex as primarily subjective. Beginning at 18 months (i.e., the start of Phase 3), a toddler’s subjective sense of self as having a gender/sex emerges, and it solidifies by 3 years of age. I propose a dynamic systems perspective to track how infants first assimilate gender/sex information during the intersubjective period (birth to 15 months); then explore what changes might occur during a hypothesized phase transition (15 to 18 months), and finally, review the emergence and initial stabilization of individual subjectivity-the period from 18 to 36 months. The critical questions explored focus on how to model and translate data from very different experimental disciplines, especially neuroscience, physiology, developmental psychology and cognitive development. I close by proposing the formation of a research consortium on gender/sex development during the first 3 years after birth. (shrink)