Culture, Not Politics We live in a politicized time. Culture wars and increasingly partisan conflicts have reduced public discourse to shouting matches between ideologues. But rather than merely bemoaning the vulgarity and sloganeering of this era, says acclaimed author and editor Gregory Wolfe, we should seek to enrich the language of civil discourse. And the best way to do that, Wolfe believes, is to draw nourishment from the deepest sources of culture: art and religious faith. Wolfe has been called (...) “one of the most incisive and persuasive voices of our generation,” and this penetrating and wide-ranging book makes a powerful case for the importance of beauty and imagination to cultural renewal. He begins by tracing his own journey from a young culture warrior bent on attacking the modern world to a career devoted to nurturing the creation of culture through contemporary literature and art that renew the Western tradition. Along the way, Wolfe finds in Renaissance Christian humanists like Erasmus and Thomas More—and their belief that imagination and the arts are needed to offset the danger of ideological abstractions— a “distant mirror” in which to see our own times. Beauty Will Save the World offers a revealing introduction to the artists and thinkers who are the Christian humanists of the modern era, from well-known figures like Evelyn Waugh and Wendell Berry to lesser-known authors like Shusaku Endo, Andrew Lytle, and Geoffrey Hill. A section on visual artists Mary McCleary, Fred Folsom, and Makoto Fujimura (accompanied by reproductions of their works) demonstrates that there are artists who can reimagine the Western tradition in strikingly contemporary terms. Finally, Wolfe pays tribute to the conservative thinkers who served as his mentors: Russell Kirk, Gerhart Niemeyer, Marion Montgomery, and Malcolm Muggeridge— all of whom rejected rigid ideology and embraced culture and tradition. At a time when our public discourse has come to be dominated by warring factions with little regard for truth, Wolfe's affirmation of beauty as a redemptive force is both refreshing and encouraging. (shrink)

_The Life of the Mind _presents an original and striking conception of the mind and its place in nature. In a spirited and rigorous attack on most of the orthodox positions in contemporary philosophy of mind, McCulloch connects three of the orthodoxy's central themes - externalism, phenomenology and the relation between science and common-sense psychology - in a defence of a throughly anti-Cartesian conception of mental life. McCulloch argues that the life of the mind will never be understood until we (...) properly understand the subject's essential embodiment and immersion in the world, until we give up the idea that intentionality and phenomenology must be understood separately. The product of over twenty years' thinking on these issues, McCulloch's book is a bold and significant contribution to philosophy. (shrink)

It is indeed a pleasure to introduce this collection of essays that honor one of the world's leading scholars in the field of utopian studies. I have known Lyman Tower Sargent since 1986, when upon moving to St. Louis I was delighted to discover that we lived a short distance away from each other. Our collaboration on a variety of projects has continued ever since then, most notably in the series Utopianism and Communitarianism, published by Syracuse University Press; as intellectual (...) advisers to the New York Public Library/Bibliothèque Nationale exhibition Utopia, which took place in 2000; in the two editions of The Utopia Reader ; in many years of joint "skills"... (shrink)

Most cases of plagiarism involve a power differential where not every person has the same ability to enter into a social contract. A social contract requires that each party understands the expectations or norms of the contract, has a voice in setting or changing the norms and has the ability to exit the contract. If those with less power want to gain power then they have to engage in activities bound by norms set by others with little or no ability (...) to exit and no voice. Even if one determines that it is an option to choose a role that requires academic writing, even at the earliest grades, then the social contract demands a shared norm of what constitutes correct behavior. This study reviewed the abstracts of articles indexed in Google Scholar from 1999–2019 through the lens of integrative social contract theory (ISCT) and found, in the case of plagiarism, an existing consensus of correct behavior does not exist. Recommendations for establishing a social contract conclude the article. (shrink)

John Gregory presents new translations of a selection of key passages from Neoplatonist writings, an introduction that puts in context the writings, and an..

Journal Name: Apeiron Issue: Ahead of print.

A half-billion years ago, a few species of single-celled protozoa stumbled irreversibly from loose social interaction into a tight, specialized interdependence. They became multi-celled metazoa, and human beings are one sort. Metazoa greatly transcend their constituent cells in lifetime, abilities, experiences and even materials (like bone). New kind of beings emerged out of the interactions of the old.

Hilbert’s unpublished 1917 lectures on logic, analyzed here, are the beginning of modern metalogic. In them he proved the consistency and Post-completeness (maximal consistency) of propositional logic -results traditionally credited to Bernays (1918) and Post (1921). These lectures contain the first formal treatment of first-order logic and form the core of Hilbert’s famous 1928 book with Ackermann. What Bernays, influenced by those lectures, did in 1918 was to change the emphasis from the consistency and Post-completeness of a logic to its (...) soundness and completeness: a sentence is provable if and only if valid. By 1917, strongly influenced by PM, Hilbert accepted the theory of types and logicism -a surprising shift. But by 1922 he abandoned the axiom of reducibility and then drew back from logicism, returning to his 1905 approach of trying to prove the consistency of number theory syntactically. (shrink)

Looks at Plato's theory of the cosmos, as well as what earlier Greeks thought of the makeup of the universe. Original.

[The war for a ring through the eyes of philosophers].

Based on an original synthesis of the work of Marx and Bergson, the key theorists of capitalism and creativity, the book presents an astonishing analysis of ...

Five experiments investigated how people use categories to make inductions about objects whose categorisation is uncertain. Normatively, they should consider all the categories the object might be in and use a weighted combination of information from all the categories: bet-hedging. The experiments presented people with simple, artificial categories and asked them to make an induction about a new object that was most likely in one category but possibly in another. The results showed that the majority of people focused on the (...) most likely category in making inductions, although there was a group of consistently normative responders who used information from both categories (about 25% of our college population). Across experiments the overall pattern of results suggests that performance in the task is improved not by understanding the underlying principles of bet-hedging but by increasing the likelihood that multiple categories are in working memory at the time of the induction. We discuss implications for improving everyday inductions. (shrink)