Professor Orsini’s book enters the controversy that has marked the changing response to Coleridge’s work during the past forty years, stimulated recently by the accessibility of Coleridge manuscripts and by the publication of hitherto unpublished works. Professor Orsini himself contributes to our new knowl­edge by publishing here for the first time texts from the note­books. His book is of importance and interest because it examines problems which are rooted in world-wide intellectual developments of recent times. Counterposing his argument (...) against the theory that Col­eridge had anticipated Kant and Schelling, Professor Orsini marshalls impressive evidence that shows that Coleridge was familiar with the works of the German idealists and that they greatly influenced his thinking, to the extent that he was for a time an expounder of transcendental idealism, and should be credited with bringing it to England. Professor Orsini’s new findings will lead inevitably to reassessment of Coleridge’s status as a philosopher, though he insists that his report is an interim one, that a final estimate must wait until all Coleridge’s writings have been published and assessed. (shrink)

Excerpt from Benedetto Croce: Philosopher of Art and Literary Critic In Italian of course there are several aids to the study of Croce, including a full bibliography, completely indexed; see Appendix 2. But there are still a number of unsettled points concerning the development of Croce's thought and the chronology of his doctrines. The current view of this chronology as it refers to aesthetic theory is cited above, but each date may be pushed backwards. The theory of art as expression (...) is already outlined in a book of 1893. The lyrical intuition, announced in the Heidelberg lecture of 1908, was already formulated in the first draft of the Logic The first formulation of ex pression as an a priori synthesis is dated, even by some Italian scholars, in 1912, but it is to be found in the Logic of 1908. The cosmic intuition is dated 1918, but it is already found in a book which goes back to 1915. My book gives some attention to chronology, but does not attempt to solve all the relative problems. A complete study of Croce's intellectual develop ment still remains to be done. However, the ultimate aim of this work is not biographical or purely historical but critical. The goal has been to see whether there is a practical theory of literary criticism in Croce. Are the problems of criticism solved more clearly and satisfactorily when viewed from Croce's standpoint? Is the question I have asked myself throughout. Accordingly, I have endeavored to see things as much as possible from his point of View and to present his doctrines in the most favorable light. However, dissent will appear on three main points of doctrine: Croce's handling of the image in his theory of practical criticism (chapters III and VIII), his third or universalistic aesthetics (chapter XI) and his later criticism of contemporary writing (chapter XIV). In other words, Croce in this book has been criticized only from within, when his conclusions appeared to be inconsistent with his premises. Of course these premises themselves are sub jcet to discussion. But this discussion is profitable only when it arises out of complete knowledge of what Croce had to say. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Eclipsing Art: Method and Metaphysics in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria *Tim MilnesColeridge’s PredicamentIn his self-addressed “letter” which precipitates the abrupt end to the thirteenth chapter (and with it, the first volume) of the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge likens the current state of his argument to “the fragments of the winding steps of an old ruined tower.” 1 The suggestion of intellectual ascent in this is revealing and is echoed a few (...) years later by his explanation of the pedagogical function of the “Landing-Places” between the essays in The Friend (1818). 2 The underlying idea, as usual with Coleridge, is akin to that of an exercise in intellectual and spiritual mountaineering. The thinker, having established a safe base camp in fixed first principles, gradually ascends to higher truths, which are at the same time taken to be foundational and which form the ground of the whole process. The logical return here is what Coleridge elsewhere explains as the “seeming argumentum in circulo, incident to all spiritual Truths.” 3 In the Biographia, however, this process of simultaneous levitation and descent remains notoriously incomplete, left over for the projected but never completed “great book on the constructive philosophy.” 4 Thus, the procedure initiated in the philosophical [End Page 125] theses of chapter twelve having been arrested, the project of chapter thirteen, “in which the results [of the theses] will be applied to the deduction of the imagination, and with it the principles of production and genial criticism in the fine arts,” 5 is left as a fragmentary exposition in the hugely influential but attenuated and gnomic sequence of distinctions between primary and secondary imagination, and fancy.Consequently, students of Coleridge have been left to puzzle over the “missing” argument for themselves and to explain why Coleridge seems to give up at this point. At least since Thomas McFarland’s Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition it has been accepted that a significant part of the problem lies with the “counter-pull” 6 exerted upon Coleridge’s thought at this point in time between Kant and Schelling (or, as McFarland sees it, between Kant and Schelling / Spinoza). In other words, it is the pull between a system in which free will is preserved at the price of being declared noumenal and one in which free will is imperilled but set against the goal of a system of total and undivided philosophy at ease with the infinite. The difference between the methodologies of Kant and Schelling, as Gian Orsini noted, is the product of their contrasting first postulates, or philosophical starting-points. While Kant sets out from the epistemological problem of to what extent objects can be said to conform to human knowledge, Schelling asks, “do we deduce Mind from Nature or Nature from Mind?” 7 Each of these presumes a completely different kind of enquiry from the other, and thus a different method; a fact Coleridge appears to have fully appreciated only during the composition of the Biographia.The Biographia’s problems have provoked a diverse range of critical responses over the years. 8 Among these, however, there is a more or less settled [End Page 126] opinion that Coleridge’s failure at this stage to come to terms with the Kant / Fichte / Schelling debate merely added to the difficulty of a work which, having begun its life as a reply to and a rebuttal of Wordsworth’s empirical and associative definition of imagination as set out in the Preface to his Poems (1815), had already far exceeded its initial plan both in scope and size. As the statement of his poetic principles and critique of Wordsworth had turned into a literary life, and this into a broader exploration of his developing views on epistemology, religion, and the history of language, so the “Preface” to the Sibylline Leaves (as it had originally been conceived) now dwarfed that work. Coleridge’s printer’s decision to produce the Biographia in two volumes only served to emphasize the break between its “philosophical” and literary-critical planes and the failure of Coleridge’s declared intention to apply the rules of art, “deduced from philosophical principles, to poetry and criticism.” 9Yet there was always something... (shrink)

It has been observed that whereas painters and musicians are likely to be embarrassed by references to the beauty in their work, mathematicians instead like to engage in discussions of the beauty of mathematics. Professional artists are more likely to stress the technical rather than the aesthetic aspects of their work. Mathematicians, instead, are fond of passing judgment on the beauty of their favored pieces of mathematics. Even a cursory observation shows that the characteristics of mathematical beauty are at variance (...) with those of artistic beauty. For example, courses in art appreciation are fairly common; it is however unthinkable to find any mathematical beauty appreciation courses taught anywhere. The purpose of the present paper is to try to uncover the sense of the term beauty as it is currently used by mathematicians. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss some of the criteria that are widely used in the linguistic and philosophical literature to classify an aspect of meaning as either semantic or pragmatic. With regards to the case of scalar implicature (e.g. some Fs are G implying that not all Fs are G), these criteria are not ultimately conclusive, either in the results of their application, or in the interpretation of the results with regards to the semantics/pragmatics distinction (or in both). I propose (...) a psychologically relevant criterion, that of the primary or secondary role of context. This criterion applies to sub-personal processes that derive the interpretation of a scalar term rather than to the eventual interpretation of the term, and there exist well-established experimental paradigms that can generate quantitative data. I present recent studies on scalar implicature which employ such off-line and real-time paradigms, aiming to demonstrate how research on the semantics/pragmatics distinction can benefit from experimental investigation. (shrink)

Offers a glimpse into the world of science and technology between 1950 and 1990 as seen through the eyes of a mathematician, and debunks various myths of scientific philosophy. Portrays some of the great scientific personalities of the period, including Stanislav Ulam, who patented the hydrogen bomb, and Jack Schwartz, one of the founders of computer science. Also discusses phenomenology of mathematics, and philosophy and computer science. Includes book reviews. For students and academics. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, (...) OR. (shrink)

This paper acknowledges the fact human beings are social animals, as they tend to live in well-organized societies. However, human population expansion explodes into internal implosions that continue to wreck havoc globally on the social, economic, political, architectural, and aesthetic environments. To harness the universal territorial imperatives, of contending components harmoniously, the world requires synergy and dialogue.

In the Aeneid, Virgil sets out to achieve a new sublime style, paradoxically steeped in the common parlance. He aims for the spontaneity of everyday language to win readers’ involvement, while elaborating a discourse both expressively taut and stylistically marked, that avoids a register too colloquial or prosaic. Above all, he tirelessly deploys an array of subtle strategies – below the threshold of perception – that defamiliarize language in order to elevate its style. The present paper furnishes a selection of (...) case studies. (shrink)

In this paper we show that the Gupta-Belnap systems S# and S* are П12. Since Kremer has independently established that they are П12-hard, this completely settles the problem of their complexity. The above-mentioned upper bound is established through a reduction to countable revision sequences that is inspired by, and makes use of a construction of McGee.

This paper considers the issue of fear in the field of international relations studies. Fear is a typical condition of international relations because of the anarchical nature of the international political system characterized by a common threat perception among states. Since the very beginning of international political thought the notion of fear has been given great consideration due to its correlation with conflict which is the main object of international relations. The paper argues that in order to better understand what (...) fear and perception in international relations is about is necessary to undertake the notion of political identity. In that sense we propose a would be political identity account of state that might share light on the perception of fear. We claim that the perception of fear depends on the type of identity of a given state. Hence we discuss three type of state political identity: weak-tribal, medium-ideological, strong-pluralistic. (shrink)

In this paper we describe expertise as a way of seeing. We use match analysis `punditry’ as a setting to show how professional vision is interactionally achieved in TV sport broadcasts through environmentally coupled gestures enhanced by camera actions and a new technology of vision called telestrator. The paper is based on data from video sequences of football TV broadcasts where the pundit shows to the TV host in the studio and to the non-expert audience at home what happened during (...) a football match. We argue that the transparency of seeing is the product of an artfully instructed process whereby the pundit shows what should be seen, how it should be made accountable, and what the audience should expect in order to fully appreciate what they see. The paper shows how broadcasted match analysis expertise interactionally achieves this through the time-critical linking of talk, gesture, and technological environment. (shrink)

In this paper we apply the idea of Revision Rules, originally developed within the framework of the theory of truth and later extended to a general mode of definition, to the analysis of the arithmetical hierarchy. This is also intended as an example of how ideas and tools from philosophical logic can provide a different perspective on mathematically more “respectable” entities. Revision Rules were first introduced by A. Gupta and N. Belnap as tools in the theory of truth, and they (...) have been further developed to provide the foundations for a general theory of (possibly circular) definitions. Revision Rules are non-monotonic inductive operators that are iterated into the transfinite beginning with some given “bootstrapper” or “initial guess.” Since their iteration need not give rise to an increasing sequence, Revision Rules require a particular kind of operation of “passage to the limit,” which is a variation on the idea of the inferior limit of a sequence. We then define a sequence of sets of strictly increasing arithmetical complexity, and provide a representation of these sets by means of an operator G(x, φ) whose “revision” is carried out over ω2 beginning with any total function satisfying certain relatively simple conditions. Even this relatively simple constraint is later lifted, in a theorem whose proof is due to Anil Gupta. (shrink)

These are the very last words of Eumolpus' testament. The editors all print them thus, but I suspect a hidden corruption in devoverint. The text may seem to have an acceptable meaning, but only on a superficial reading inattentive to the whole context. A certain exegetical discomfort becomes noticeable if the translations are compared: Ernout renders ‘maudire mon âme’, Ehlers in Müller's second and third editions translates ‘sie meinen letzten Atemzug herbeiwünschten’ , and Cesareo- Terzaghi's edition prefers to render with (...) a nuance of the future ‘con quel cuore stesso con cui mi avranno maledetto l'anima’. Obviously, devovere is being understood as synonymous with exsecrari. This is an attested secondary meaning, ‘curse’, ‘execrate’, which developed from the technical religious one connected with the ritual of devotio. According to this interpretation, the captatores cursed the fact that Eumolpus, apparently a sick man on the verge of death, continued to live longer than they could reasonably have expected when they began to court him. But the expression does not seem adequate for conveying this meaning: instead, we would expect something like vitam meam devoverint or me et caput meum devoverint or, better, me ad mortem devoverint, or similarly explicit expressions. (shrink)