Holy Wednesday, 1953, was a great day for Santiago, a village of the Highland Maya Indians in the Central American Republic of Guatemala. On the church porch, strung up on a post decorated with lush tropical leaves, hung a four-foot puppet clothed in Indian costume with a large sombrero and a wooden mask, into whose mouth a long cigar had been planted by his worshipers. This, I had learned, was Judas Iscariot—but a strange Judas it was, for, instead of being (...) burned, stoned, or otherwise reviled and derided as is usually the case with village Judas figures, it was cared for by Indian priests constantly on guard, presented with gifts of fruit, candles, and incense, and altogether made far more fuss of than the saint whose fiesta this bright Eastern week should have been: Jesucristo, the Mayanized Christ. The thousand bananas and hundreds of cocoa beans and other tropical fruit, for instance, which the young Indian municipal officials had gathered in a three-day trek toward the Pacific coast, had been presented to the puppet before being hung up among the gilded wooden columns of the main altar inside the church. (shrink)

Originating in the Sophistic pedagogy of Protagoras and reflecting the sceptical practice of the New Academy, Quintilian's rhetorical pedagogy places a special emphasis on the juxtaposition of multiple, competing claims. This inherently dialogical approach to argumentation is referred to here as controversia and is on full display in Quintilian's own argumentative practice. More important to this paper, however, is the role of controversia as an organizing principle for Quintilian's rhetorical curriculum. In particular, Quintilian introduces the protocols of controversia through a (...) series of progressively more complex exercises in imitation, role-playing, and declamation (now referred to as situational games). All of these exercises are open for adaptation by contemporary teachers who would promote a dialogical approach to argument, i.e. argument with its methods of inquiry, invention, and judgment based on direct interaction with opposing parties. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.4 (2001) 467-489 [Access article in PDF] "By the Things Themselves":Eudaimonism, Direct Acquaintance, and Illumination in Augustine's De Magistro 1 Michael Mendelson 1. The Eudaimonistic Interlude It comes as a surprise. Two-thirds of the way through De Magistro, amid a torturous and at times obscure discussion of the nature of language, Augustine pauses to provide Adeodatus, his son and interlocutor, with what (...) seems a rather odd digression:...with so many detours, it's difficult to say at this point where you and I are trying to get to! Maybe you think we're playing around and diverting the mind from serious matters by some little puzzles that seem childish, or that we're pursuing some result that is only small or modest....Though we do perhaps play around, this should itself not be regarded as childish. Nor are we thinking about small and modest goods. Yet if I were to say that there is a happy and everlasting life, and I want us to be led there under the guidance of God (namely by Truth Himself) by stages that are suitable to our weak steps, I'm afraid I might seem laughable for having set out on such a long journey by considering signs rather than the things themselves that are signified. So then, you'll pardon me if I play around with you at first—not for the sake of playing around, but to exercise the mind's strength and sharpness, with which we're [End Page 467] able not only to withstand but also to love the heat and light of that region where the happy life is. 2One is left wondering—if one pauses long enough to wonder at all—what exactly the preceding tightly woven and technical discussion of signification has to do with the "heat" (calor) and the "light" (lux) of the "region" (regio) where the "happy life" (beata vita) is to be found. Indeed, even the passage itself acknowledges the ostensible obliqueness of the connection without doing very much to highlight its nature.It is not surprising that readers of De Magistro often overlook this eudaimonistic interlude in favor of the more prominent and arresting difficulties with which the text confronts us. There is, after all, the somewhat awkward view of language which underlies the entire discussion, and there is also what seems to be the abrupt and jarring reversal of positions that occurs near the very end of the text. Perhaps most notorious of all, there is the famous theory of "divine illumination" with which the dialogue concludes. It is worth noting, however, that as odd and as digressive as this eudaimonistic interlude may strike the present-day reader, it does not seem to strike Adeodatus as at all odd, nor does it seem out of keeping with the eudaimonistic emphasis that is such a prominent feature of Augustine's other works from roughly the same period. 3 Indeed, our passage, although easily swept aside and passed over, can do much to provide a unifying strand which ties our difficulties together; it is, indeed, a helpful prism through which we can view those difficulties in a new light. [End Page 468] 2. Some Initial Darkness And the difficulties are indeed quite real. To begin with, there is the awkward view of language that underlies the entire discussion. "Words" (verba) are "signs" (signa) (DM 2.3), and there is a fundamental distinction between a "sign" and "signifiables" (significabilia) which are signified by signs (DM 4.8). Language, on this account, is fundamentally instrumental (see, e.g., DM 9.25), for each word is a means by which one attempts to draw attention to that which the word, qua sign, somehow signifies. As Wittgenstein says in his famous gloss on Confessions I.8, In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea, E.g. Every word has a meaning. The meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands... (shrink)

Leibniz' prästabilierte Harmonie kann leicht als ein Versuch ausgelegt werden, die Beziehung zwischen cartesianischem Geist und Körper zu erklären, während gleichzeitig das Problem der 'kausalen Gleichheit' vermieden wird, das der cartesianische 'Interaktionismus' aufwirft. Es entstehen jedoch zwei Probleme durch eine Interpretation dieser Art. Erstens, warum wendet der frühe Leibniz die prästabilierte Harmonie auf alle Interaktionen zwischen Substanzen an und nicht nur auf die zwischen Geist und Körper? Zweitens, warum wendet der frühe Leibniz die prästabilierte Harmonie auf die Beziehung zwischen Geist (...) und Körper an, obwohl seine Ontologie nicht cartesianisch ist und also keine prästabilierte Harmonie zu rechtfertigen scheint? Ich behaupte, daß die Antwort auf die erste Frage in dem, was ich Leibniz' 'metaphysischen Fundamentalismus' nenne zu finden ist, und die Antwort auf die zweite Frage in Leibniz' Bemühung, die 'moralische Identität' der rationalen Seele zu erhalten. Ich behaupte außerdem - in beiden Fällen - 'daß Leibniz' Ziel eine fundamentale Alternative zum Cartesianismus und nicht nur eine bloße Abwandlung ist. (shrink)

Reviewed Works:S. N. Artemov, B. M. Schein, Arithmetically Complete Modal Theories.S. N. Artemov, E. Mendelson, On Modal Logics Axiomatizing Provability.S.N. Artemov, E. Mendelson, Nonarithmeticity of Truth Prdicate Logics of Provability.V. A. Vardanyan, E. Mendelson, Arithmetic Complexity of Predicate Logics of Provability and Their.S. N. Artemov, E. Mendelson, Numerically Correct Provability Logics.

Bibliography of A. A. Fraenkel (p. ix-x)--Axiomatic set theory. Zur Frage der Unendlichkeitsschemata in der axiomatischen Mengenlehre, von P. Bernays.--On some problems involving inaccessible cardinals, by P. Erdös and A. Tarski.--Comparing the axioms of local and universal choice, by A. Lévy.--Frankel's addition to the axioms of Zermelo, by R. Mantague.--More on the axiom of extensionality, by D. Scott.--The problem of predicativity, by J. R. Shoenfield.--Mathematical logic. Grundgedanken einer typenfreien Logik, von W. Ackermann.--On the use of Hilbert's [epsilon]-operator in scientific theories, (...) by R. Carnap.--Basic verifiability in the combinatory theory of restricted generality, by H. B. Curry.--Uniqueness ordinals in constructive number classes, by H. Putnam.--On the construction of models, by A. Robinson.--Interpretation of mathematical theories in the first order predicate calculus, by T. Skolem.--The elementary character of two notions from general algebra, by R. Vaught.--Foundations of arithmetic and analysis. Axiomatic method and intuitionism, by A. Heyting.--On rank-decreasing functions, by G. Kurepa.--On non-standard models for number theory, by E. Mendelson.--Concerning the problem of axiomatizability of the field of real numbers in the weak second order logic, by A. Mostowski.--Non-standard models and independence of the induction axiom, by M. O. Rabin.--Sur les ensembles raréfiés de nombres naturels, par W. Sierpinski.--Philosophy of logic and mathematics. Remarks on the paradoxes of logic and set theory, by E. W. Beth.--Logique formalisée et raisonnement juridique, par R. Feys.--Im Umkreis der sogenannten Raumprobleme, von H. Freudenthal.--Process and existence in mathematics, by H. Wang. (shrink)

Reviewed Works:B. I. Zil'ber, L. Pacholski, J. Wierzejewski, A. J. Wilkie, Totally Categorical Theories: Structural Properties and the Non-Finite Axiomatizability.B. I. Zil'ber, Strongly Minimal Countably Categorical Theories.B. I. Zil'ber, Strongly Minimal Countably Categorical Theories. II.B. I. Zil'ber, Strongly Minimal Countably Categorical Theories. III.B. I. Zil'ber, E. Mendelson, Totally Categorical Structures and Combinatorial Geometries.B. I. Zil'ber, The Structure of Models of Uncountably Categorical Theories.

One of us has previously argued that the Church-Turing Thesis (CTT), contra Elliot Mendelson, is not provable, and is — light of the mind’s capacity for effortless hypercomputation — moreover false (e.g., [13]). But a new, more serious challenge has appeared on the scene: an attempt by Smith [28] to prove CTT. His case is a clever “squeezing argument” that makes crucial use of Kolmogorov-Uspenskii (KU) machines. The plan for the present paper is as follows. After covering some necessary (...) preliminaries regarding the nature of CTT, and taking note of the fact that this thesis is “intrinsically cognitive” (§2), we: sketch out, for context, an open-minded position on CTT and related matters (§3); explain the formal structure of squeezing arguments (§4); after a review of KU-machines, formalize Smith’s case (§5); give our objections to certain assumptions in Smith’s argument (§6); support these objections with some evidence from general but limited-agent problem solving (§7); and explain why Smith’s argument is inconclusive (§8). We end with some brief, concluding remarks, some of which point toward near-future work that will build on the present paper (§9). (shrink)

Interpretation of the classics in political theory seems to go in waves. For a while we had John Locke, the bourgeois thinker. Now we seem to be in a Locke-as-radical-democrat phase. Locke-the-bourgeois had problems of its own, but a radically democratic Locke -- not just the old Locke as liberal democrat but Locke as quasi-Leveller -- strains the interpretative imagination more than most; yet in recent years, several different kinds of argument have been advanced in support of it, both textual (...) and contextual. The most effective argument has proceeded by situating Locke in the context of radical Whig politics in the 1670s and '80s, the struggles over religious toleration and the royal succession, in particular the �Exclusion Crisis� of 1679-81. This contextual argument has been accompanied by various textual interpretations having to do with Locke's conceptions of property, consent, representation, the right of revolution and natural law. Among other things, these are supposed to show that while Locke had nothing explicit to say about the extent of the franchise, the weight of evidence suggests that he would have supported a fairly wide franchise, perhaps even something like the (almost) manhood suffrage advocated by the Levellers (at least according to some, and probably the most convincing, interpretations of their ideas). Most recently, in these pages, Martin Hughes, building on the work of James Tully and Richard Ashcraft in particular, has pushed the argument as far as it can probably go. His argument on taxation and suffrage has provided a motivation here for a wider exploration of Locke's views on representation, consent and the franchise. (shrink)