Rousseau preceded Sade: Rousseau (1712–1778) published most of his major works in two remarkably fecund years, 1761–17621; Sade (1740–1814) published most of his major texts between 1791 and 18012;...

It is a well-worn, yet astonishingly resilient, cliché that the Enlightenment was the “Age of Reason”. By focusing on Diderot and Helvétius this paper shows that, rather than proceeding in the name of reason, key figures within the progressive philosophy of the French Enlightenment were in fact extremely suspicious of abstract reasoning and attempted to construct a philosophy which purged the faculty of reason entirely from its philosophical anthropology and reduced the mind’s functions to the single faculty of sensation and (...) so to the passions. It is in this sense that philosophy of the French Enlightenment attempted to produce a philosophy without reason. This paper reconstructs this attempt. In doing so it again engages critically with the idea that the philosophy of the Enlightenment was dogmatically rationalist, it provides a historical case study of a period in which philosophy pushed against the limits of its own identity, and it uses this attempt to reflect on the mythological not historiographical service which the cliché of Enlightenment Reason plays for the philosophical identity. (shrink)

This special issue of Parrhesia has developed from the 2010 Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy’s Conference at the University of Queensland on the theme of the philosophy of affect.

Rethinking the Enlightenment connects new work in intellectual history with fresh understandings of Continental philosophy and political theory. The collection bridges the disciplinary divides between the Enlightenment as understood in history, philosophy, and politics and moves towards a critical self-understanding of the present.

This paper examines the different interpretations of the distinction between closed and open societies put forward by Henri Bergson, Leo Strauss, Karl Popper, and Gilles Deleuze. These vary both in the features attributed to the two kinds of society, especially to openness, and in the authors’ evaluations of what they describe. The similarities and differences between their views are documented in detail, and their significance considered.

cognitive, neuropsychological, and neurophysiological studies of both memory and consciousness. Before proceeding further, some discussion of terminology is necessary. It comes as no surprise to state that "consciousness" is one of the ...

Although a good deal has been written about Kant's conception of free will in recent years, there has been no serious attempt to examine in detail the development of his views on the topic. This book endeavours to remedy the situation by tracing Kant's thoughts on free will from his earliest discussions of it in the 1750s through to his last accounts in the 1790s. This developmental approach is of interest for at least two reasons. First, it shows that the (...) path that led Kant to view freedom as a transcendental power that is both radically distinct from and compatible with the causality of nature was a winding one. Second, it indicates that, despite the variety of views of free will that Kant held at various times, the concept occupied a central place in his thought, because it was the point of union between his theoretical and practical philosophy. (shrink)

Quantum mechanical theories of consciousness are contrasted to classical ones. A key difference is that the quantum laws are fundamentally psychophysical and provide an explanation of the causal effect of conscious effort on neural processes, while the laws of classical physics, being purely physical, cannot. The quantum approach provides causal explanations, deduced from the laws of physics, of correlations found in psychology and in neuropsychology.

Quantum approaches to consciousness are sometimes said to be motivated simply by the idea that quantum theory is a mystery and consciousness is a mystery, so perhaps the two are related. That opinion betrays a profound misunderstanding of the nature of quantum mechanics, which consists fundamentally of a pragmatic scientific solution to the problem of the connection between mind and matter.

CHAPTER I GENERAL ACCOUNT OF THE SUBJECT THERE is some difficulty in defining the subject of Ethics in a manner which can fairly claim general acceptance ...

_ Theoretical Physics Group_ _ Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory_ _ University of California_ _ Berkeley, California 94720_.

Few if any philosophical schools have championed family values as persistently as the early Confucians, and a great deal can be learned by attending to what they had to say on the subject. In the Confucian tradition, human morality and the personal realization it inspires are grounded in the cultivation of family feeling. One may even go so far as to say that, for China, family reverence was a necessary condition for developing any of the other human qualities of excellence. (...) On the basis of the present translation of the Xiaojing (Classic of Family Reverence) and supplemental passages found in other early philosophical writings, Professors Rosemont and Ames articulate a specifically Confucian conception of "role ethics" that, in its emphasis on a relational conception of the person, is markedly different from most early and contemporary dominant Western moral theories. This Confucian role ethics takes as its inspiration the perceived necessity of family feeling as the entry point in the development of moral competence and as a guide to the religious life as well. In the lengthy introduction, two senior scholars offer their perspective on the historical, philosophical, and religious dimensions of the Xiaojing. Together with this introduction, a lexicon of key terms presents a context for the Xiaojing and provides guidelines for interpreting the text historically in China as well as suggesting its contemporary significance for all societies. The inclusion of the Chinese text adds yet another dimension to this important study. The Chinese Classic of Family Reverence is sure to appeal to specialists of comparative and Chinese philosophy and to all readers interested in the enduring importance of the family. (shrink)

Christof Koch and Klaus Hepp, in a recent essay in this journal1, issued a challenge to “those who call upon consciousness to carry the burden of the measurement problem in quantum mechanics.” Lest absence of a response be construed as admission of a failure of the idea that consciousness can play, via quantum measurement effects, a crucial role in neurodynamics, or that this idea has been in any rational way damaged by the arguments put forth in the cited article, I (...) respond here to that challenge. (shrink)

Replies are given to arguments advanced in this journal that claim to show that it is to nonlinear classical mechanics rather than quantum mechanics that one must look for the physical underpinnings of conscious ness..

Introduction: On trying to be an Aristotelian or a Thomist in today's world -- QUIETING VARIOUS OF THE ALARMS AND EXCURSIONS IN RECENT PHILOSOPHY: Can philosophy ever be a thing for Hoosiers? -- Folly and sense in present-day philosophy -- Is Quine a metaphysician? -- Richard Rorty's would-be deconstruction of analytic philosophy -- WHAT PRICE ETHICS IN THE EYES OF MODERN MORAL PHILOSOPHERS? : Telos and teleology in Aristotelian ethics -- Variations, good and bad, on the theme of right reason (...) in ethics -- Language and ethics: 'What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?' -- In appreciation and refutation of Alan Gewirth's principle of general consistency -- Ethical egoism, new style: should its trademark be libertarian or Aristotelian? -- A CONCLUDING MISCELLANY, RANGING FROM A DEFENSE OF THE HUMANITIES TO A DEFENSE OF NATURAL LAW: The what and why of the humanities -- Why need a general be human? -- The poor, hapless humanities -- Natural law: dead or alive? -- Can John Finnis bright of a revival of natural law? -- Natural law and the"is"-"ought" question: queries to Finnis and Grisez -- A poor benighted philosopher looks at the issue of judicial activism / Henry B. Veach. (shrink)

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that.

This volume, originally published in 2002, assembles the historical sequence of writings that Kant published between 1783 and 1796 to popularize, summarize, amplify and defend the doctrines of his masterpiece, the Critique of Pure Reason of 1781. The best known of them, the Prolegomena, is often recommended to beginning students, but the other texts are also vintage Kant and are important sources for a fully rounded picture of Kant's intellectual development. As with other volumes in the series there are copious (...) linguistic notes and a glossary of key terms. The editorial introductions and explanatory notes shed light on the critical reception accorded Kant by the metaphysicians of his day and on Kant's own efforts to derail his opponents. (shrink)

This is the first comprehensive study of the sublime in Lucan. Drawing upon renewed literary-critical interest in the tradition of philosophical aesthetics, Henry Day argues that the category of the sublime offers a means of moving beyond readings of Lucan's Bellum Civile in terms of the poem's political commitment or, alternatively, nihilism. Demonstrating in dialogue with theorists from Burke and Kant to Freud, Lyotard and Ankersmit the continuing vitality of Longinus' foundational treatise On the Sublime, Day charts Lucan's complex (...) and instructive exploration of the relationship between sublimity and ethical discourses of freedom and oppression. Through the Bellum Civile's cataclysmic vision of civil war and metapoetic accounts of its own genesis, through its heated linguistic texture and proclaimed effects upon future readers and, most powerfully of all, through its representation of its twin protagonists Caesar and Pompey, Lucan's great epic emerges as a central text in the history of the sublime. (shrink)

A generalization of Weinberg’s nonlinear quantum theory is used to model a reported violation of the predictions of orthodox quantum theory.

How is mind related to matter? This ancient question in philosophy is rapidly becoming a core problem in science, perhaps the most important of all because it probes the essential nature of man himself. The origin of the problem is a conflict between the mechanical conception of human beings that arises from the precepts of classical physical theory and the very different idea that arises from our intuition: the former reduces each of us to an automaton, while the latter allows (...) our thoughts to guide our actions. The dominant contemporary approaches to the problem attempt to resolve this conflict by clinging to the classical concepts, and trying to explain away our misleading intuition. But a detailed argument given here shows why, in a scientific approach to this problem, it is necessary to use the more basic principles of quantum physics, which bring the observer into the dynamics, rather than to accept classical precepts that are profoundly incorrect precisely at the crucial point of the role of human consciousness in the dynamics of human brains. Adherence to the quantum principles yields a dynamical theory of the mind/brain/body system that is in close accord with our intuitive idea of what we are. In particular, the need for a self-observing quantum system to pose certain questions creates a causal opening that allows mind/brain dynamics to have three distinguishable but interlocked causal processes, one micro-local, one stochastic, and the third experiential. Passing to the classical limit in which the critical difference between zero and the finite actual value of Planck's constant is ignored not only eliminates the chemical processes that are absolutely crucial to the functioning of actual brains, it simultaneously blinds the resulting theoretical construct to the physical fine structure wherein the effect of mind on matter lies: the use of this limit in this context is totally unjustified from a physics perspective. (shrink)

The interplay between non-relativistic quantum theory and metaphysics has generated radically opposed interpretations for quantum theory. This book outlines the contours of these debates and presents an interpretation of quantum theory which resolves most of the paradoxes.

It is argued that the principles of classical physics are inimical to the development of a satisfactory science of consciousness The problem is that insofar as the classical principles are valid consciousness can have no e ect on the behavior and hence on the survival prospects of the organisms in which it inheres Thus within the classical framework it is not possible to explain in natural terms the development of consciousness to the high level form found in human beings In (...) quantum theory on the other hand consciousness can be dynamically e cacious quantum the ory does allows consciousness to in uence behavior and thence to evolve in accordance with the principles of natural selection However this evo lutionary requirement places important constraints upon the details of the formulation of the quantum dynamical principles.. (shrink)

This work offers a provocative new historical and systematic interpretation of the epistemological doctrines of three twentieth-century giants: Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Pietersma argues that these three philosophers, while connected by their phenomenological doctrines, have underappreciated and interestingly-linked views on the theory of knowledge.

Although it is, often considered a form of anti-realism, here it is argued that Bohr's complementarity viewpoint must accept entity realism based on its analysis of the causal interaction involved in observation. However, because Bohr accepts the quantum postulate he must reject the view that the goal of theory is to represent the independently existing object apart from observation. Thus he abandons the spectator account of knowledge and with it the correspondence theory of truth. In this respect his view is (...) parallel to the positions held by Hacking, Cartwright, and Ellis. (shrink)

Stranger and more momentous than the strangest of scientific theories is the appearance of God on the intellectual horizon of contemporary science. From Einstein, Planck, and Heisenberg, to Margenau, Hawking, and Eccles, some of the most penetrating modern minds have needed God in order to make sense of the cosmos.

"The Bush administration and Congress are in concert on the goal of developing a fleet of unmanned aircraft that can reduce both defense costs and aircrew losses in combat by taking on at least the most dangerous combat missions. Unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) will be neither inexpensive enough to be readily expendable nor-- at least in early development-- capable of performing every combat mission alongside or in lieu of manned sorties. Yet the tremendous potential of such systems is widely (...) recognized, and allies as well as potential adversaries are moving quickly to mount their own research and development programs. The United States is committed to fielding UCAV capabilities by 2010, principally for the missions of suppression of enemy air defense and deep strike, which are among the highest risk tasks for the Air Force and naval aviation."--Overview. (shrink)

This paper analyzes Kant's thesis in the Tugendlehre that there are certain ends that we are obligated to adopt. It contends that none of the three arguments which Kant advances in support of this thesis succeeds and that the attempted reconstruction by Nelson Potter likewise fails. It then maintains that the argument does work, if one brings in, as an implicit premise, transcendental freedom. Finally, it is argued that this late doctrine of obligatory ends marks a significant advance over the (...) treatment of broad duties in the Grundlegung and can serve as a basis for defending Kant's ethics against the familiar emptiness charge. Der Beitrag untersucht die These Kants in der Tugendlehre , daß es bestimmte Zwecke gibt, zu deren Verfolgung wir verpflichtet sind. Dabei stellt sich heraus, daß keines der drei Argumente, die Kant zur Stützung dieser These verwendet, durchgreift und daß der diesbezügliche Rekonstruktionsversuch von Nelson Potter ebenso fehlschlägt. Es wird weiterhin die Ansicht vertreten, daß die Argumentation dann überzeugt, wenn man die transzendentale Freiheit als Prämisse einbezieht. Schließlich wird gezeigt, daß diese späte Lehre Kants von den Zwecken, die zugleich Pflicht sind, einen erheblichen Fortschritt gegenüber der Behandlung der weiten Pflichten in der Grundlegung bedeutet und eine Grundlage dafür bietet, Kants Ethik gegen den üblichen Vorwurf des leeren Formalismus in Schutz zu nehmen. (shrink)

Reproduction of the original: Theology and the Social Consciousness by Henry Churchill King.