Originally published in 1948, this book contains personal reminiscences by Frederick Blagden Malim on the various schools he attended, taught at or visited from 1895 to 1939. Malim discusses a number of schools in the UK and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, including several schools in Australia and New Zealand. The text is illustrated with photographs of several of the schools mentioned in Malim's account. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the history of education (...) in the British Empire. (shrink)

First published in 1914, this volume by F. B. Jevons was designed as a response to the simple question: What is philosophy? Consisting of five separate lectures, the work throws light on the themes of philosophy and science, materialism and idealism, scepticism, practical philosophy, and the notion of the whole and its parts. The aim of the study was not simply to provide an answer to the question in the title, but to bring out the meaning of the question itself (...) and to demonstrate the inherent utilitarian significance of philosophy to everyone. As Jevons notes in the preface, 'Philosophy is a concern of the average man and of practical life, and should not be the monopoly of the professed student.'. (shrink)

The present volume contains Part Four, "The Great Shift," of Susanne Langer’s projected six-part magnum opus entitled, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. The first volume dealt with three parts: "Problems and Principles," "The Import of Art," and "Natura Naturans;" Volume II rests squarely on these three foundational parts. The balance of the work will be concerned with "The Moral Structure," and with "Knowledge and Truth." In this reviewer’s opinion, Professor Langer’s essay is easily the most significant theory of mind (...) yet developed in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. The central task of her essay is to establish the total qualitative difference that divides human from animal mentality by showing that the nature and origin of that difference is explicable in terms of a continuous course of biological development. "The great shift" to human being as a mode of life typified by all that we understand as culture is accomplished, according to the conceptual framework extended throughout Volume II of the work, without recourse to metaphysical assumptions of nonzoological factors. By carefully locating a vast amount of exact psychobiological information in a conceptual structure that extends scientific definitions by modification, she makes the biological concept of human mentality adequate to the extraordinary reality it is intended to make comprehensible. Through the incorporation of highly sophisticated detail, she investigates repertoire and instinct; animal acts and ambients; animal values; interpretation of animal acts; the specialization of man; symbols and the evaluation of mind; and, finally, symbols and the human world. It is difficult to imagine that a reader could find fault with Susanne Langer’s method, because she never expands her conceptual structure by metaphorical extension, but only by modifying definitions in scientific terms so as to comprehend domains wider than those conventionally assigned to the sciences themselves. Her study, however, is not only eminently adequate methodologically, it is immensely satisfying in helping us understand that the uniqueness of human being can be fully articulated and intellectually sustained without resorting to a vitalistic discontinuity of any order. If, as Susanne Langer herself contends, the value of a philosophical outlook rests ultimately on its "serviceability," then this masterwork will serve all manner of investigators for a long time to come.—C.F.B. (shrink)

Etienne Gilson once remarked that if philosophers cannot agree about the nature or meaning of being, they will in all likelihood agree about very little else. This observation is certainly applicable to Professor Webster’s putative "dialogue" with Anglo-American philosophy on the problem of being, rational thought and natural theology. He contends that a genuinely fundamental interpretation of scientism, logicism or linguisticism necessitates a philosophical strategy based on unity as a transcendental which is accessible to logic. This initial confrontation leads to (...) another involving being as a radical transcendental. The author claims that whether we regard What is being? as the most primordial of questions, or as a meaningless phrase, or as a Scheinproblem, modern philosophical developments, antimetaphysical and metaphysical alike, provide the solution to that question in spite of themselves. He thinks that the various different forms of contemporary analytical philosophy represent a renewal of the radical Cartesian demand for univocity. Yet for him being is least of all univocal; rather it is analogous in a nonmathematical sense. His orientation is Thomistic and the book is basically an attempt "to show the functioning of being, univocity and analogy as they inevitably appear against the background of the dominant trends in Anglo-American philosophy." After outlining some general approaches to the respective problems of being, realism, and truth, he devotes almost two thirds of the volume to an analysis of the consequences of exclusive univocity and the logic of being. The remainder of the book turns to a philosophical consideration of the human being and some additional but rather peripheral matters. Webster writes with fervor on behalf of the inevitability of metaphysics, but his valuable insights are somewhat vitiated by the haphazard character of his overall presentation.—C. F. B. (shrink)

Although this work begins with Franz Brentano’s critique of both the Humean "content" theory of awareness and the Cartesian "idea" view of consciousness, it is not precisely an historical presentation of Brentano’s study of intentionality. It is more properly a philosophic study of the ontological and epistemological problems raised by Brentano’s work and modern efforts to solve them. Aquila thus attempts to analyze and evaluate Chisholm’s attack on Brentano’s view of "intentional relations"; he presents and criticizes Meinong’s, Bergmann’s, and Russell’s (...) theories regarding the proper objects of judgment; he examines the difference between the contents and objects of mental acts, contrasting Husserl’s early conception of this distinction with his later, more Fregean view; finally he referees the debate between Wilfrid Sellars and Chisholm on the nature of intentionality, concerning whether or not it is a real "characteristic" or "property" of an entity. (shrink)

The way in which early followers of St. Thomas Aquinas interpreted or misinterpreted his metaphysical doctrines and works still needs much exploration, so a text edition and editor’s commentary of this kind is a most welcomed project, especially since Conrad of Prussia has possibly left us the earliest commentary on Aquinas’ De ente et essentia. The editing task is a precarious work, however, since Conrad’s commentary survives in only one known manuscript, located in the monastery library at Admont, Austria. The (...) editors’ printed result thus has a number of flaws, but without a copy of the codex it is impossible to say which derive from the manuscript and which from the editors. Without a text a reviewer cannot legitimately correct, but can only suggest alternatives to evident mistakes. In the first lectio there is a very humorous flaw. Conrad is trying to prove that little mistakes can sometimes lead to big ones. The edited text illustrates: "omnis canis creditur, celeste sydus est canis, ergo celeste sidus creditur. Interum: quidquid creditur, habet pedes; celeste sydus, ut dictum est, creditur; ergo habet pedes. Ecce quot inconvenientia sequuntur ex uno modico errore." Creditur makes no sense: "Every dog is believed."? Currit does make sense: "Every dog runs." Unwittingly the editors prove the point the author wanted to make. By misreading or failing to correct the fundamental word currit so frequently it grew into a big error. It grew into an even bigger one later because Professor Bobik’s commentary on this text is an explanation based on this faulty text. (shrink)

Six essays by two authors which deal with several facets of Weber’s work. Wolfgang Schluchter’s two longer pieces begin the collection: the first on the concept of rationalization, the second on the well-worn issue of value neutrality. Guenther Roth’s four essays are shorter: the first applying the concept of a charismatic community to contemporary counter-culture groups, the second examining the counter-culture in terms of the concept of religious virtuosi, the third comparing Fernand Braudel’s history of the longue durée with Weber’s (...) historical work, and the last analyzing the role of history in the whole of Weber’s thought. Thus, where Schluchter examines critically and modifies Weber’s arguments, Roth is more concerned to show their useful application to contemporary subjects. (shrink)

The polymathic Leibniz was surely one of the greatest and most enigmatic figures produced by the "century of genius." He is the only philosopher whom the renowned historian of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, Adolf von Harnack, would admit as a colleague to that august body, and Leibniz is universally admired by metaphysicians, theologians, advocates of cosmopolitanism and religious tolerance, students of international law, and, not the least, by philosophers of logic and language. Although efforts to canonize Leibniz as the (...) pure type of "harmonic synthesizer" have been under way for quite a long time, philosophers and historians are no longer so anxious as they once were to work out a synthetic unification of these and many other perspectives of Leibniz as was Mahnke, for instance, who characterized Leibniz’ philosophy as a synthesis of universal mathematics and individual metaphysics. (shrink)

Professor Lucas has written what is perhaps the most trenchant, sophisticated, and comprehensive treatise on time and space to have appeared in a long while. The book is distinguished not only by its acute treatment of the mathematical and physical concepts constituting its subject but also by a meditative quality all too rare in philosophical works dealing with the unquestionably fundamental and complex themes of time and space. The book is a phenomenology or morphology of time and space in that (...) it is a foundational analysis of the philosophical, mathematical, physical, logical, and theological aspects of our understanding of these concepts. The work is organized into five general sections each of which is internally refined with a keen sense of what is essential to the particular context of discussion. The first section investigates "Time by Itself" through reference to such notions as instant and interval, the topology and direction of time, cyclic time, permanence and omni-temporality, and the mathematical ideas of denseness and continuity. (shrink)

The present work is an excellent translation of Walter Burkert’s Weisheit und Wissenschaft: Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaus, und Platon, first published in 1962. It is very probably the most illuminating and comprehensive study of Pythagoreanism yet produced by a modern scholar. Obviously Pythagoreanism is a protean historical phenomenon, equally mysterious both in its origin and development, and in all epochs its interpretation has indicated as much about the winds of cultural doctrine as about the nature of Pythagoreanism itself. Burkert’s study (...) is the product of an astonishingly thorough penetration of all the relevant ancient evidence and all the critically significant modern literature, and it evinces the author’s remarkable ability to weave the diverse threads of Pythagoreanism into a comprehensible historical picture. (shrink)

Die Grieckischen Culten und Mythen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Orientalischen Religionen. Von O. Gruppe. Erster Band: Einleitung. Leipzig: Teubner. 1887. 14 Mk.

Plato, in one of his dialogues, says: “ The feeling of wonder is the genuine mark of the philosopher; for philosophy has its origin in wonder.” What Plato here says may be accepted as true: the philosopher does wonder. But the philosopher is not the only man who wonders about things. It might perhaps be going too far to say that all men experience the feeling, for some men seem to plod on their weary round without curiosity enough to wonder (...) at anything, whilst others, being comfortable, are satisfied to take things for granted, and never think of wondering at them. (shrink)

First published in 1900, this philosophical essay on Evolution questions how the acceptance of Evolution as scientific should influence the thoughts and actions of humankind from the perspective of morality and moral conduct. In his discussion, Frank B. Jevons deals with such subjects as pessimism and optimism towards evolutionary theory, the laws of motion and matter, and the importance of scientific evidence.

Augustine’s metaphysics is a subject little studied, but often much criticized. Among the recent studies of Augustine’s metaphysics, Scott MacDonald’s interpretation of Augustine’s notion of goodness claims that Augustine’s account is incoherent. This suggests a reading of Augustine that is somewhat problematic. This article argues that much of the difficulty that MacDonald claims rests on a misunderstanding of Augustine’s views about the goodness of creation and existence and the corruptibility of created things. Augustine’s position takes for granted an understanding of (...) existence as a good and the participation of all things in the pre–eminent good, that is God. (shrink)

Nicholas Wolterstorff's Divine Discourse attempts to give philosophical warrant to the claim that ‘God speaks’. While Wolterstorff's argument depends largely on his appropriation of J.L. Austin's speech act theory, he also uses two narratives that for him demonstrate how ‘God speaks’. The first is the story of Augustine's conversion in the Confessions and the second is a story that Wolterstorff recounts about a certain ‘Virginia’. This study argues that what Wolterstorff claims to derive from Augustine's narrative for his view of (...) divine discourse is not fully supported by the Confessions, and that Augustine's interpretation of the words ‘tolle lege, tolle lege’, can be construed as a useful interpretation of an ambiguous sign. This is consistent with Augustine's understanding of the interpretation of texts in both the De doctrina christiana and the Confessions. In short, Augustine is far more open to the ambiguity of signs than Wolterstorffs's account suggests. (shrink)