As it happened, I became acquainted with E.V. Il'enkov quite late, in the mid- or even the late 1960s. It was only a bit more than ten years before his death that I began to feel at home in his house, was able to visit without calling ahead, and was able to call him by his first name and the familiar "you"—that is, like many, many of not only his true friends but also like-minded thinkers, who became his close acquaintances, (...) most of whom justly considered themselves his pupils … The door would open wide, and Olia, Professor K.I. Salimova, Eval'd's wife and most devoted friend, not at all surprised by the unexpected guest and seemingly even quite happy at his arrival , would try first to draw him into the kitchen and feed him … which she more often than not succeeded in doing. I am not talking about myself: there were always many guests, and this is precisely how they arrived at the Il'enkovs' apartment. Recently, a critic in Literaturnaia gazeta recalled those whom he met in Eval'd's apartment in the 1960s: "This was a tight circle of like-minded thinkers," wrote the critic. "But some of them are no longer with us, while most are far away, beyond our borders." Obviously, he had not been in the house often or had forgotten things over the distance of years. There was no "circle," nor could there have been one—not with this host, not with his lifestyle and way of relating to people. I met a good hundred fine and various people in Eval'd's home: I.N. Korzhavin, V. Davydov, A. Meshcheriakov, S. Vinogradova, N. Dubinin, V. Zinchenko, A. Zinov'ev, Iu. Kamiakin, and … indeed, five pages would not be enough to list the quite famous and the not-quite-so-famous, simply ordinary people with no claim to fame. Nazym Khikmet, A.N. Leont'ev, and B.M. Kedrov were friends of the house … Ever new faces, figures, and words come to mind. I cannot forgive myself: once Eval'd Vasil'evich wanted to take me along to Iurii Liubimov's to read his play Neither God nor Tsar nor Hero … [Ni bog, ni tsar' i ni geroi], but I had some other business, something so important that I do not even remember now what it was, and it is probably not worth remembering. But most likely I was too timid to appear uninvited at the house of a person burning with creativity. The same thing happened with Galich … Eval'd liked especially his song about Zoshchenko. He did not sing it; he narrated it, but in such a way that tears always came to one's eyes. (shrink)

We propose a new approach to describe quantum mechanics as a manifestation of non-Euclidean geometry. In particular, we construct a new geometrical space that we shall call Qwist. A Qwist space has a extra scalar degree of freedom that ultimately will be identified with quantum effects. The geometrical properties of Qwist allow us to formulate a geometrical version of the uncertainty principle. This relativistic uncertainty relation unifies the position-momentum and time-energy uncertainty principles in a unique relation that recover both of (...) them in the non-relativistic limit. (shrink)

Structuralism about mathematical objects and structuralist accounts of physical computation both face indeterminacy objections. For the former, the problem arises for cases such as the complex roots i and \, for which a automorphism can be defined, thus establishing the structural identity of these importantly distinct mathematical objects. In the case of the latter, the problem arises for logical duals such as AND and OR, which have invertible structural profiles :369–400, 2001). This makes their physical implementations indeterminate, in the sense (...) that their structural profiles alone cannot establish whether a given physical component is an AND-gate or an OR-gate. Doherty has recently shown both problems to be analogous, and has argued that computational structuralism is threatened with the absurd conclusion that computational digits might be indiscernible, such that, if structural properties are all that we have to go on, the binary digit 0 must be treated as identical to the binary digit 1. However, we think that a solution to the indiscernibility problem for mathematical structuralists, drawing on the work of David Hilbert, can be adapted for the analogous problem in the computational case, thereby rescuing the structuralist approach to physical computation. (shrink)

Proceeding from dinamism's strategy, Russia's civilization tasks of strategy of new monistic (ontology) traditions are revealed. These tasks represent connected with each other problems: the Problem of Education having the ontology load from the Way's nature (Fatherland-East); the Problem of the Federalism having theontology load of the System (Motherland-West).

Its wisdom and sensitivity make Personal Knowledge required reading for epistemologists. By stressing the active components in scientific knowing--appraisal and commitment--Polanyi shows that knowledge is less "objective," more complex, and more widely distributed in nature than is tacitly supposed by most epistemologies. Knowing implies a foundation in skills, a confidence in one's ability to judge beyond the range of well-formulated rules, and a commitment to the existence of an answer to one's questions before the answer is in sight. Like a (...) Platonic dialogue, this book conveys more than it states, and the broad foundation of insight embodied in the examples would support more conceptual superstructure than Polanyi provides. But that serves to make it an instance of its thesis--that we know more than we can now say.--R. F. T. (shrink)

Although Marx dubbed landowners one of the ‘three great classes’ of modern society, the most prominent Marxian and socialist thinkers of capitalism and land over the past century – from Lefebvre to Massey to Harvey – have implicitly or explicitly argued that landowners are not capitalism’s ‘third class’, and that the social relations of land are marginal or contingent to the mode of production as a whole. Through assessing the work of Marxist geographers, political economists, value-form theorists, and others who (...) have dismissed the class-status of landowners and blurred the line between ground rent and interest, this article argues that the theory of the landowning class is fundamental to the understanding of the totality of capitalist social relations, as well as to developing more incisive analyses of struggles around housing, land, and movement today. (shrink)

The translations from Hindi which make up this collection of discourses by a contemporary sanyasi are smoothly done; the discourses themselves are primarily moral and devotional. --R. F. T.

A mathematical theory of society, built around a concept of quanta of human energy, and applied in support of a social order combining capitalist and feudal features. "For those impatient of minute analysis," the jacket assures us, "the first 80 pages or more can be read lightly..."; to those impatient for such analysis, this is good advice regarding the whole book. --R. F. T.

Basson's introduction to Hume follows the pattern which has led to successful treatments of Aquinas and Kant in this series: he limits himself almost exclusively to exposition and minimal criticism, apparently assuming that the reader will not be able to obtain or to follow the original text.--R. F. T.

A non-technical exposition of the proof and related questions in the foundations of mathematics is presented here. The work is built around the authors' study which appeared in Scientific American.--R. F. T.

In this group of well-written essays Randall discusses explicitly the group of ideas which have been implicit in his earlier works in intellectual history. The first section, which deals with the philosophy of history, argues that particular things have particular histories, and that these histories belong to them on the basis of what they are taken to be and expected to become. The metaphysics of the second section is a pluralistic analysis of actual experience and its symbolic representation.--R. F. T.

After pointing out that Augustine's appreciation of Aristotle is narrowly limited by the former's religious interests, Mr. Schneider argues that in the realms in which their interests overlapp--theology and psychology--Augustine may be fruitfully regarded as carrying to completion the principle lines of Aristotle's analysis, and that this is due to a common basic interest in and body of opinion on ontology.--R. F. T.

A short study of the techniques of geochronology.--R. F. T.

Taton's study is very poorly organized, aiming at no particular thesis. Nevertheless, the individual examples of reason and chance are intrinsically interesting, and many are made available for the first time in English.--R. F. T.

By dramatizing Spinoza's relations to the Jewish community in Amsterdam and filling in some of the historical background. Feuer has made the story of Spinoza's life a commentary on the situation of the liberal in modern America. As an appraisal of Spinoza's political philosophy, however, the work suffers from the extreme vagueness of categories such as Liberal Republican, Scientific Philosopher, and Mystic.--R. F. T.

"I...brought out my wife to see this silhouette... made on the clean concrete by the oil dropping out of the engine... and we all remarked that this was 'the Christ'." But when the newspapers took their pictures, Mr. Baillie remarked it was a pity that the picture had not been taken the day before, when it had been so perfect.--R. F. T.

After a short argument for the Reformation reduction of the sacraments to two, this book treats the variations in practice among the Reformed Churchs.--R. F. T.

Father Owens suggests the outlines of a renewed Thomist attack on the post-Cartesian metaphysical questions and positions which would take advantage of the "analogical," "Platonic" and "existentialist" interpretations of St. Thomas' thought.--R. F. T.

The "perspectivism" of the late Dr. McGilvary's 1939 Carus Lectures has two moments. On the one hand it is an examination of the implications of physical relativity for epistemology. In this area McGilvary is at his best--particularly in clearing up misunderstandings of Einstein. But perspectivism is also a revival of the "man the measure" doctrine, and this has less happy results. Viewing the philosopher's task as the making clear of his own postulates, McGilvary is led to beg many of the (...) questions one would like to see him discuss. If a philosophy is put forward postulationally and is to be more than an abstract schema, it must be formulated positively and it must be applied at every opportunity. Perspectivism does not meet either test very well.--R. F. T. (shrink)

"Pure" capitalism is the remedy for the country's ills, Kelso holds. Its chief ingredients are distribution of the proceeds of labor according to ownership of the means of production, and a broadening of the ownership base.--R. F. T.

Claudel's last work, J'aime la Bible is an appreciation of great feeling at its best and a kind of muddy carping with the Bible's detractors at its worst. The translation, by Wade Balkin, is idiomatic rather than poetic, and reads smoothly and easily.--R. F. T.

Based largely on popular scientific, psychological, and anthropological material, this essay attempts to unify the facts of experience and morality in terms of an underlying spiritual medium. This medium is variously identified with God, pure consciousness, and Brahman.--R. F. T.

As fascinating as its title, this "study in medieval political theology" explores the origins and significance of the concept that the King "has in him two Bodies, viz., a body natural, and a Body politic. His body natural is a Body mortal, subject to all Infirmities that come by Nature or Accident... But his Body politic is a Body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of Policy and Government..." In Professor Kantorwicz's sure hands the fiction of the king's two (...) bodies becomes a focal point for a wide-ranging study of medieval theology and political thought, and the center of a microcosm in which we can observe man's universal activity of borrowing concepts from one discipline to deal with changing situations in another.--R. F. T. (shrink)

Sambursky, a physicist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, sheds light on Greek thought from the perspective of modern science. Within its self-imposed limits, this is a first-rate exposition --clear, concise, and thorough. R. F. T.

The interest of Roman philosophy, Clarke says in his Preface to this work, "lies not so much in the originality or intrinsic value of the doctrines held as in the fact that particular men held them, and in the relation of the doctrines to the political and literary activities of their adherents." The study is remarkable for its breadth of coverage rather than for penetration into the coherence or merit of the schools he discusses.--R. F. T.

Although nominally concerned to rethink the pre-Aristotelian positions on space and time, this work actually pays little attention to the texts, striking out on its own line in the tradition of Heidegger.--R. F. T.

Working within the framework of Ryle's "knowing how-knowing that" distinction, Hartland-Swann argues that all knowing involves a decision and that "knowing that" is a special case of "knowing how": knowing how to say what is the case.--R. F. T.

In this revised edition of his 1934 work, Kraft takes up the themes of authority and scientific method, concluding that the Geisteswissenschaften are not a homogeneous group and hence have no single method or principles.--R. F. T.