In 1991 Nancy Floyd bought her first handgun. Soon she was participating in Ladies Day at her local shooting range and reading Women & Guns magazine. In 1993 she began interviewing and photographing women who were fellow gun owners. In 1997 she started researching "gun women" from the past to see how they were represented in the popular imagination. Now she has brought her work together in a book, filled with remarkable photographs and candid first-person stories, accompanied by an (...) eye-opening illustrated history of female gun ownership in America. Sympathetic but unsentimental, Floyd presents gun-toting women young and old, including an eleven-year-old girl competing in her first gun competition, a woman whose grandmother was killed by an intruder, and a war veteran who experienced firefights while stationed in Iraq. Whatever you might think about gun-toting women before you open this book, your preconceptions are sure to be shattered by the end.--From publisher description. (shrink)

CCP is not, generally speaking, well-respected today. This is not so much because CCP is impure, being, as it is, all mixed up with dogmatic statements drawn from Scripture, Church teachings, and so on, but because CCP is impure in a certain way. All philosophies are always and everywhere impure in the sense of always and everywhere being embedded in some particular time and culture. Philosophies are written by philosophers, each of whom is taught many things at his mother’s knee (...) long before he ever becomes a philosopher. What he is taught, though, will vary, and some doctrines, it would seem, are more damaging than others to what today is considered good philosophizing. My purpose in this paper is to set out the obnoxious form of impurity which is generally thought to invalidate CCP, and then briefly to provide some hints as to why the situation is not at all as bad as the critics make it out to be. (shrink)

A recent study suggests that doctors often diminish effective time with patients by talking about themselves in a manner that does not improve the patient visit and is sometimes disruptive to it. Good care requires hearing what the patient has to say, as the doctor cannot set proper goals for a visit without knowing the patient's agenda. Listening to the patient is the key both to good patient care and to caring for the patient.

C.S. Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, was an American philosopher and mathematician whose influence has been enormous on the field of semiotics. Merrell uses Pierce's theories to reply to the all-important question: "What and where is meaning?".

Contemporary society, according to Centore, is dominated by a post-modern philosophical world-view. Lacking until now, from the many works that have been written on post-modernism, is one that scrutinizes its fundamental assumptions and presuppositions. Being and Becoming attempts to fill this need by synthesizing the key developments in contemporary post-modernism. By taking the reader through the various historical periods and developments which have led to the current situation, Centore shows what is now taken for granted by the vast (...) majority of people is not necessary for either philosophical or theological reasons. (shrink)

Paul Signac and Color in Neo-Impressionism is a groundbreaking examination of the artistic technique of "divisionism" in terms of modern scientific theory of color. Truly interdisciplinary in his approach, Floyd Ratliff treats the evolution of both color theory and artistic practice in an integrated way. Signac was the principal advocate for the new movement launched by Georges Seurat in the 1880s. The book is handsomely illustrated with both Neo-Impressionist paintings and scientific drawings and diagrams. Ratliff's five-part essay provides an (...) extended introduction to a translation of Signac's monograph, From Eugene Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism, widely regarded as the basic document of the movement, but never before available in English. This will be an invaluable reference for scholars in art and design, as well as students of the psychology and neurophysiology of color vision and those interested in the relation between the arts and the sciences. Its clarity of style also makes it accessible to the general reader interested in art history, painting, or the perception of color, particularly with its glossary of technical and art terms, index, and bibliography. (shrink)

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Floyd brings queer critique to bear on the Marxian categories of reification and totality and considers the dialectic that frames the work of Georg Lukâas, Herbert Marcuse and Frederic Jameson.

A survey of current evidence available concerning Wittgenstein's attitude toward, and knowledge of, Gödel's first incompleteness theorem, including his discussions with Turing, Watson and others in 1937–1939, and later testimony of Goodstein and Kreisel; 2) Discussion of the philosophical and historical importance of Wittgenstein's attitude toward Gödel's and other theorems in mathematical logic, contrasting this attitude with that of, e.g., Penrose; 3) Replies to an instructive criticism of my 1995 paper by Mark Steiner which assesses the importance of Tarski's semantical (...) work, both for our understanding of Wittgenstein's remarks on Gödel, and our understanding of Gödel's theorem itself. (shrink)

A look at Wittgenstein's comments on the incompleteness theorem with an inter-pretation that is consistent with what Gödel proved.

From the time of the thinkers of ancient Greece, the question of what can be said about the existence and nature of God has been debated by many philosophers and theologians. In Theism and Atheism: The Eternal Debate, F.F. Centore presents a broad analysis of the major positions that address the question and the thinkers who have contributed to the debate. This is an admirably lucid and thorough examination of the history of natural theology. Covering the material in a (...) thematic rather than in a strictly chronological way, Centore draws out the key positions on topics such as the relationship of science and religion, the problem of evil, Naturalistic and Supernaturalistic theism and the dispute between essence and existence. The proponents of the various positions are considered alongside their most explicit critics. Important thinkers dealt with in this work include Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Pascal, Kant, Hume, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud and Darwin. The diversity of exploration also goes beyond the Judeo-Christian tradition to look at Hinduism, Buddhism, Stoicism, Zoroastrianism, Confucianism and Classical Paganism. This work, however, is much more than a survey of the major historical arguments and rebuttals concerning God's existence and nature. Overall, it is a work by a well-established Catholic philosopher who concludes that God's existence and nature are indeed compatible with modern science, human freedom and the existence of evil in the world. (shrink)

This book brings together the chief elements of 3,000 years of philosophy as found mainly in Western thought in a highly readable form. The work concentrates on problems and issues much more than on names, dates and places. he book includes an extensive bibliography of works related to the main themes of the text, followed by a long list of names and dates of leading historical figures in various fields, especially in science, philosophy, and theology.

This work penetrates difficult ethical issues by examining human experience and reasoning in conjunction with actual choices of action.

ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD has been dead now for almost a quarter-century. Nevertheless, his influence lives on. This fact is revealed both by the appearance in recent years of scholarly books directly about Whitehead and by works bearing the unmistakable stamp of direct Whiteheadian influence.

Contemporary philosophers often construe mercy as a supererogatory notion or a matter of punitive leniency. Yet it is false that no merciful actions are obligatory. Further, it is questionable whether mercy is really about punitive leniency, either exclusively or primarily. As an alternative to these accounts, I consider the view offered by St. Thomas Aquinas. He rejects the claim that we are never obligated to be merciful. Also, his view of mercy is not restricted to legal contexts. For him, mercy's (...) scope is considerably broader, as it concerns a wide range of needs and hardships to which human beings are vulnerable. Such a view, I submit, affords a kind of normative depth lacking in many contemporary accounts. Unlike those views that construe mercy as either a supererogatory or legal concept, Aquinas's account illuminates mercy's obligatory nature and encourages us to make mercy a more salient fixture of our moral lives. (shrink)

Three premises set the stage for a Peirce based notion of resemblance, which, as Firstness, cannot be more than vaguely distinguished from Secondnessand Thirdness. Inclusion of Firstness with, and within, Secondness and Thirdness, calls for a nonbivalent, nonlinear, context dependent mode of thinkingcharacteristic of semiosis — that is, the process by which everything is always becoming something other than what it was becoming — and at the same time itincludes linear, bivalent classical logic as a subset. Certain aspects of the (...) Dao, Buddhist philosophy, and Donald Davidson’s ‘radical interpretation’ affordadditional, and perhaps unexpected, support for the initial set of three premises. (shrink)