This landmark book is now reissued in a new edition that has been vastly rewritten and updated to respond to recent Kantian literature. It includes a new discussion of the Third Analogy, a greatly expanded discussion of Kant’s _Paralogisms, _and entirely new chapters dealing with Kant’s theory of reason, his treatment of theology, and the important Appendix to the Dialectic. _Praise for the earlier edition: _ “Probably the most comprehensive and substantial study of the Critique of Pure Reason written by (...) any American philosopher.... This is a splendid book.”—Lewis White Beck “This masterful study... will most certainly join the canon of required reading for future interpreters of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. Superbly organized and lucidly written.”—Garrett Green, _Journal of Religion_. (shrink)

This paper discusses findings from a research study that investigated the experience of being a breastfeeding woman in New Zealand. The study was motivated by a desire to better understand why the majority of New Zealand women wean their infants before 6 months of age, despite the benefits of prolonged breastfeeding being well accepted. Nineteen women, who were breastfeeding or had recently breastfed, were engaged in unstructured interviews about their experience, and the results were examined using a reflective lifeworld research (...) methodology. The findings presented here demonstrate that women often employ an interpretive framework that is aligned with the philosophical tradition of Descartes’ mind–body split, also know as Cartesian dualism. This leads to a widely held perception of the breast as an object, which emerged in the participants’ narratives and is explored using Heidegger's philosophical interpretation of equipment. We conclude that the objectification of the breast in our society fails to provide women with language that describes the breastfeeding experience in a meaningful way, thus undermining women's ability to articulate and reconcile their embodied breastfeeding experiences. (shrink)

Revision of thesis (Ph. D.)--U.C.L.A., 1982?Includes index. Bibliography: p. 151-156.

With the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, the discourse of an authoritarianism and the echoes of a fascist past have moved from the margins to the center of American politics. A culture of war buttressed by the forces of white supremacy and militarization has been unleashed in a series of policies designed to return the United States to a history in which the public sphere was largely white and Christian, and the economy (...) and the state were governed by a ruling corporate elite. Militarization and a war culture have become normalized in the United States and this article explores the ways in which a neo-fascism has emerged that furthers war not only abroad but also at home, especially with regards to the ongoing assaults waged by the state against Muslims, immigrants, women’s reproductive rights, and poor minorities of class and color. Against the rise of neo--fascism, this article advances the idea that education is central to any viable notion of politics, that progressives... (shrink)

Contemporary understanding of the mechanisms of disease increasingly points to examples of “genetic diseases” with an infectious component and of “infectious diseases” with a genetic component. Such blurred boundaries generate ethical, legal, and social issues and highlight historical contexts that must be examined when incorporating host genomic information into the prevention, outbreak control, and treatment of infectious diseases.

We examine the ethical, social, and regulatory barriers that may hinder research on therapeutic potential of certain controversial controlled substances like marijuana, heroin, or ketamine. Hazards for individuals and society and potential adverse effects on communities may be good reasons for limiting access and justify careful monitoring of these substances. Overly strict regulations, fear of legal consequences, stigma associated with abuse and populations using illicit drugs, and lack of funding may, however, limit research on their considerable therapeutic potential. We review (...) the surprisingly sparse literature and address the particular ethical concerns pertinent to research with illicit and addictive substances, such as undue inducement, informed consent, therapeutic misconception, and risk to participants, researchers, and institutions. We consider the perspectives of key research stakeholders and explore whether they may be infected with bias. We conclude by proposing an empirical research agenda to provide an evidentiary basis for ethical reasoning. (shrink)

The final published book by Nobel Prize-winning author and philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941), La pensée et le mouvant (translated here as The Creative Mind), is a masterly autobiography of his philosophical method. Through essays and lectures written between 1903 and 1923, Bergson retraces how and why he became a philosopher, and crafts a fascinating critique of philosophy itself. Until it leaves its false paths, he demonstrates, philosophy will remain only a wordy dialectic that surmounts false problems. With masterful skill and (...) intensity, Bergson shows that metaphysics and science must be rooted in experience for philosophy to become a genuine search for truth. And in the quest for unanswered questions, the spiritual dimension of human life and the importance of intuition must be emphasized. A source of inspiration for physicists as well as philosophers, Bergson's introduction to metaphysics reveals a philosophy that is always on the move, blending man's spiritual drive with his mastery of the material world. (shrink)

Darwinian Evolution and Classical Liberalism brings together a collection of new essays that examine the multifaceted ferment between Darwinian biology and classical liberalism.

This paper discusses the 'master argument' of diodorus cronos from a semantic perspective. An argument is developed which suggests that proposition (1), 'every proposition true about the past is necessary', May have provided the principal motivation for diodorus denial of proposition (3), I.E., His equation of possibility with present-Or-Future truth. It is noted that (1) and (3) are jointly inconsistent only given the assumption of a linear ordering of time. It is further noted that diodorus' fatalism "could" be employed (...) to justify this additional assumption. However, To then use the conclusion of the 'master' to argue for fatalism would obviously be circular. I suspect, Rather, That diodorus' assumption of temporal linearity was implicit and uncritical. (shrink)

A Master-like argument, in the usage of the present paper, is an argument that employs a reductio ad impossibile principle to transmit the necessity of what are or become past truths to the remainder of time by means of necessary conditionals of some sort. The conclusion of such an argument is some no-unactualized-possibilities principle. This paper argues that the formulation of a Master-like argument by A. N. Prior in a mixed modal temporal propositional logic introduces certain artifacts into (...) the logical analysis of the argument. One of these, a principle of temporal discreteness, is not essential to a Master-like argument. Another, a principle of forwards temporal linearity, is technically essential; but it is usually tacitly presupposed by the necessary temporal conditionals employed to 'tie together' past and future time in less formal accounts of Master-like arguments. (shrink)

The selections in this anthology provide original sources for an understanding of the development of American thought and society. The central theme of the book deals with the impact of modern science and scientific method upon thinkers from the time of Edwards to that of Dewey. Some philosophers responded by trying to limit the scope of science in order to protect their threatened moral and religious beliefs. Others tried to use science and scientific method to restructure common sense, theology, metaphysics, (...) morals, and even society itself. This volume presents the many diverse reactions, including the transcendentalism of Emerson, the pragmatism of Charles Peirce and William James, and the naturalism of Santayana and Dewey. Because the philosophers of this period felt that contemporary cultural issues were as much the province of philosophy as abstract theoretical questions, several selections reflect the impact of science on other areas of civilization, including religion, morals, law, education, and politics.Although the anthology focuses on leading American philosophers from the eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, selections from Locke, Coleridge, and Spencer are also included because American thinkers have been profoundly influenced by their European masters and contemporaries. Professor White has provided a general preface and concise introductions on each of the philosophers represented. The anthology may be read independently or in conjunction with the editor’s SCIENCE AND SENTIMENT IN AMERICA: Philosophical Thought from Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey – Publisher. (shrink)

In the face of limited resources during the COVID-19 pandemic response, public health experts and ethicists have sought to apply guiding principles in determining how those resources, including vaccines, should be allocated.

"The professional memoir of Henry Burroughs--former president of the White House Press Photographers Association, chairman of the Senate Standing Committee for Photographers, and "shooter" for the Associated Press for thirty-three years--whose career docu.

This article describes the spiritual formation training program for counseling students at Richmont Graduate University, an evangelical institution providing Master’s-level instruction for counselors and ministers. This model of spiritual formation has a dual foundation which includes the centrality of love to the Christian life and the importance of attachment to the development of persons. The training is intentionally designed to invite students to pursue a more secure attachment to God, healthier relationships with others, and a more grace-based self-awareness. Integrative (...) and clinical instruction, and experiences that foster establishment of secure attachment are described. Co-curricular efforts in research and student advisement focus on grace and wellness, as well as opportunities for service, and these serve to further contribute to a supportive environment for spiritual formation. (shrink)

Basic writings of Henri Bergson, Charles Sanders Peirce, Alfred North Whitehead, William James, Benedetto Croce, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, George Santayana, John Dewey, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others.

The Ancient Greeks understood both art and technology (techne) as imitation (mimesis) of Nature (physis). This article argues that the rapidly growing ecological innovation strategy known as biomimicry makes it possible for technology to leave behind the modern goal of “mastering and possessing” Nature and instead to rediscover the initial vocation it shared with art: imitating Nature. This in turn suggests a general strategy for philosophical inquiry into the biomimetic principle of “Nature as model”: the transposition of philosophical analyses of (...) concepts associated primarily with poetics and related fields—mimesis, mimicry, translation, analogy, metaphor, etc.—into the philosophy of biomimicry. (shrink)

Emile Durkheim and Henri Bergson, two of the most important thinkers of early 20th-century France, give us different accounts of the relationship between habits, society and life. The article focuses on their use of embodied metaphors to illustrate how each thinker conceives of habit as a force of life. It argues that Durkheim uses the metaphor of ‘lifting’ to describe how social life creates habits capable of transcending bodily instinct. Bergson also recognizes the force of habits; he uses the language (...) of leaping to describe the kind of action required to transcend them. The article makes three claims. First, it argues that these metaphors are central to each thinker’s understanding of the means by which habits attach us to life. Second, they offer a means of revisiting, and explicating, Bergson’s tacit critique of Durkheim in his Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Third, they both symbolize processes of conversion that inform each thinker’s diagnosis of the moral challenges faced in modern social life. (shrink)

A distillation of the author's masterful Hegel's Ladder, this lucid introduction to Hegel's thought articulates the conceptual unity of the Phenomenology as well as the structure of Hegel's system and the place of the Phenomenology within it.

Consisting of fewer than two hundred verses written in an obscure if not impenetrable language and style, Patanjali's Yoga Sutra is today extolled by the yoga establishment as a perennial classic and guide to yoga practice. As David Gordon White demonstrates in this groundbreaking study, both of these assumptions are incorrect. Virtually forgotten in India for hundreds of years and maligned when it was first discovered in the West, the Yoga Sutra has been elevated to its present iconic status--and (...) translated into more than forty languages--only in the course of the past forty years. White retraces the strange and circuitous journey of this confounding work from its ancient origins down through its heyday in the seventh through eleventh centuries, its gradual fall into obscurity, and its modern resurgence since the nineteenth century. First introduced to the West by the British Orientalist Henry Thomas Colebrooke, the Yoga Sutra was revived largely in Europe and America, and predominantly in English. White brings to life the improbable cast of characters whose interpretations--and misappropriations--of the Yoga Sutra led to its revered place in popular culture today. Tracing the remarkable trajectory of this enigmatic work, White's exhaustively researched book also demonstrates why the yoga of India's past bears little resemblance to the yoga practiced today. (shrink)

For a generation increasingly fragmented by a glut of unassimilable information and unrelated "facts", "Wittgenstein" from The Element Masters of Philosophy series focuses on his groundbreaking perspective of understanding concepts.

In an introduction to Louis J. Halle's Civilization and Foreign Policy, Dean Acheson notes with approval that Halle believed a group of men, formerly members of the Policy Planning Staff of the United States State Department, to be seeking a new theory of foreign policy which would lie outside the traditional theory. Halle's work, like that of the others whose names were mentioned (George F. Kennan, Paul Nitze, and C. B. Marshall), represented a serious and searching analysis of the conceptual (...) frame of American foreign policy, a search largely accompanied by a demand for a more realistic consideration of problems of power. The members of the Policy Planning Staff were by no means the only, or even the first, Americans to question American thinking on foreign policy from the standpoint of power politics. Without going back to Alexander Hamilton, we must consider, in particular, Hans J. Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr. This kind of thinking is still being advanced; and, more recently, the warning that Americans misunderstood the problem of power was put with some forcefulness by Robert Endicott Osgood : “More than any other great nation, America's basic predispositions and her experience in world politics encourage the dissociation of power and policy.” There is no doubt that work of recent years has shown the increased seriousness of American interest in the problems of foreign policy and civilization. The contribution which these and other writers have made is a very great one. Despite many differences among themselves, their trend seems to embody a certain oneness, which lies in a perception of the problems of power. Acheson points to the practical experience of the State Department group and their intention to “see life steadily and see it whole,” in Matthew Arnold's famous phrase. Yet, a few years after these writers, whom Acheson so highly regarded, had tried to acquaint the American people with the realities of power in foreign policy, one of them, George F. Kennan, was publicly criticized by Acheson himself for “never having understood the realities of power politics.” Shortly thereafter, Acheson, in his latest book, reiterated the charge that “power politics” was, for Americans, still a derogatory term. Kennan, one of our most thoughtful and sensitive writers on foreign policy, and Acheson, one of our most articulate and eloquent secretaries of state, had failed to satisfy the American people, and Kennan had failed, apparently, to satisfy Acheson regarding the significance and the reality of power politics. Yet in the light of some of the literature which has appeared since the rise of these writers, whom we may call “realists” though they do not necessarily so characterize themselves, one may question whether the danger is still that which Acheson described. One who reads Henry A. Kissinger's Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy may wonder not whether Americans understand the realities of power but whether, indeed, some of them understand anything else. We face the danger that the wheel may come full circle, that a naïve idealism may be replaced by a purely methodical realism, and that the very words “politics” and “strategy” may become interchangeable terms. We face that danger, but let no one suspect that Americans, in general, have succumbed to it. (shrink)

This remembrance of the life and work of our friend and colleague, Drucilla Cornell, is a view of her through the lenses of Rosa Luxemburg, Hannah Arendt and through her lively participation in the Caribbean Philosophical Association. As a result, it focuses on her as a philosopher who had mastered the Western tradition of transcendental philosophy. From that base, she engaged the traditions of Western Marxism and Feminism, and was deeply engaged in mastering the traditions of Caribbean Marxism and creolizing (...) theory. (shrink)

A proposition containing an adjectival predicate has customarily been described as one which predicates some quality of its subject; thus "William is white" is said to attribute whiteness to William. The concrete adjectival form in such a situation was sometimes said (e. g. by Boethius) to be derived from the corresponding abstract (as "white" from whiteness, "just" from justice, and so on), thus enabling the subject in question to be "denominated" from the abstract by means of the concrete. (...) The quality is then said to be predicated of its subject in a denominative or paronymous fashion. Involved here also is the shaky assumption that adjectives may indeed be distinguished from substantives on the basis of the former's correlation with available abstract forms which the latter lack, but this need not concern us here. (shrink)

In Ps.-Plutarch's epitome,Doctrines of the Philosophers,lemma4.11 bears the heading: Πῶς γίνεται ἡ αἴσθησις καὶ ἡ ἔννοια καὶ ὁ κατὰ ἐνδιάθεσιν λόγος. The text reads: Οἱ Στωϊκοί ϕασιν· ὅταν γεννηθῇ ὁ ἄνθρωπος, ἔχει τὸ ἡγεμονικὸν μέρος τῆς ψυχῆς ὥσπερ χάρτην εὔεργον εἰς ἀπογραϕήν· εἰς τοῦτο μίαν ἑκάστην τῶν ἐννοιῶν ἐναπογράϕεται. Πρῶτος δὲ [ὁ] τῆς ἀναγραϕῆς τρόπος ὁ διὰ τῶν αἰσθήσεων. αἰσθανόμενοι γάρ τινος οἷον λευκοῦ, ἀπελθόντος αὐτοῦ μνήμην ἔχουσιν· ὅταν δὲ ὁμοειδεῖς πολλαὶ μνῆμαι γένωνται, τότε ϕαμὲν ἔχειν ἐμπειρίαν· ἐμπειρία γάρ ἐστι (...) τὸ τῶν ὁμοειδῶν ϕαντασιῶν πλῆθος. Τῶν δὲ ἐννοιῶν αἱ μὲν ϕυσικῶς γίνονται κατὰ τοὺς εἰρημένους τρόπους καὶ ἀνεπιτεχνήτως, αἱ δὲ ἤδη δι’ ἡμετέρας διδασκαλίας καὶ ἐπιμελείας· αὗται μὲν οὖν ἔννοιαι καλοῦνται μόνον, ἐκεῖναι δὲ καὶ προλήψεις. Ὁ δὲ λόγος, καθ’ ὅν προσαγορευόμεθα λογικοὶ ἐκ τῶν προλήψεων συμπληροῦσθαι λέγεται κατὰ τὴν πρώτην ἑβδομάδα. The Stoics say: When a human being has been born, the commanding part of his soul is like a sheet of paper in good condition for writing upon; upon this each one of his conceptions is written. The first way of writing is through the senses. For when humans perceive something, e.g. something white, they have a memory of it when it goes away; and when many memories of the same kind have come to be, then we say that they have experience; for experience is a plurality of impressions of the same kind. Of conceptions, some come about naturally and non-technically through the aforementioned ways, but others come about through our own learning and efforts. The latter are called ‘conceptions’, but the former are called ‘prolepses’ as well. And reason, according to which we are called ‘rational’, is said to be completely filled out with prolepses at the age of seven years. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reflections on Benjamin ButtonHenry Alexander (bio)IBenjamin Button was born at the age of seventy and as the years accumulated, grew younger physically. There are in his life three separate lines or threads. His chronological age begins in September of 1860 and terminated seventy years later. His "bodily age" consists of those stages of physical changes and of the different ways that he looked to others and to himself. In (...) 1860, he was an old man; his hair was sparse, scraggly, and nearly white; he had "a long smoke-colored beard"; his eyes were faded, watery, and tired; his teeth were ancient; his skin wrinkled, his voice had a cracked quaver and he had an aged stoop, even though he was five feet eight inches tall. From that time on, he gradually and steadily lost these characteristics of old age and became younger looking both to others and to himself until that time in 1930 when, an infant in his white crib, everything "faded out altogether from his mind." Finally, the third thread in Button's life consists of various psychological stages, attitudes, and feelings: his querulousness, his compliancy, his inquisitiveness, his assertiveness, his love for his wife, his business ability, his generosity, his enthusiasm for pleasure, his discontent with home life, his love of military activity and excitement, his delight in the company [End Page 1] of young women, the pleasure he took in his youthful appearance, his ambition to succeed at Harvard, the humiliations he suffered, his childish cheerfulness. These three threads in Benjamin Button's life—his chronological age, his bodily age, and his psychological age are seldom congruent and frequently unharmoniously interwoven.There are times when in ordinary life we may distinguish one or another of these threads out of a person's life. We may on occasion comment that someone looks so much older than she is where physical hardship, unusual sickness, or emotional pressures have left their scars. We may remark that another is so very young for her age, where, for example, inexperience, callousness, naivete show themselves in a person whose age would not lead us to expect such traits. We may remark upon how well one has kept oneself in shape when one's physique, muscle tone, and endurance are those of a decidedly younger person. Sometimes, certain traits of character—crabbiness, bossiness, old womanishness, crankiness, arbitrariness—associated with the elderly, may unexpectedly emerge in young people. Sometimes, traits perhaps conventionally associated with youth may crop up at a later stage of life, for example, carelessness, daredeviltry, sensuality, self-absorption, etc. The theme comes out in cases where we are surprised or shocked by the discrepancies between age and appearance or by changes in appearance or by psychological shifts which strike one as dissonant with one's own or another's age. There must be numerous variations on such discrepancies and they crop up from time to time in the ordinary course of things.But Benjamin Button's life was not ordinary. Those three threads of a person's life which may on occasion be singled out or contrasted are in his case systematically independent of one another. His years bear little relation to his physical age. His psychological states reflect little, if anything, of his years. Except for his middle years (between thirty-five and forty, say), there was little congruence between his chronological age, on the one hand, and his physical appearance or his psychological life, on the other.This dissonance between physical and chronological age has its ironical twists. For instance, when Benjamin was about twenty (in years), he met Hildegarde Moncrief (to whom he was later married). During their first meeting, she mistook him for his father's brother and she told Benjamin that fifty is "the mellow age" and that she "loves fifty." Of course, he appears to be a man of fifty, but he has forgotten how he appears [End Page 2] to others. He even "longed passionately to be fifty" (p. 73).1 The irony is that to Hildegarde and to everyone else, he was fifty.One anomaly that runs through much of Benjamin Button's life is his unawareness as to how... (shrink)

HOUSE AND PHILOSOPHY Is being nice overrated? Are we really just selfish, base animals crawling across Earth in a meaningless existence? Would reading less and watching more television be good for you? Is House a master of Eastern philosophy or just plain rude? Dr. Gregory House is arguably the most complex and challenging antihero in the history of television, but is there more to this self-important genius than gray matter and ego? This book takes a deeper look at House (...) to reveal the philosophical underpinnings of this popular medical drama and its cane-waving curmudgeon’s most outrageous behavior. What emerges is a remarkable character who is part Sherlock Holmes, part Socratic philosopher, part Nietzschean superman, part Taoist rhetorician, and not at all as screwed up as you might think. With everything from Aristotle to Zen, House and Philosophy takes an engaging look at everyone’s favorite misanthropic genius and his team at Princeton-Plainsboro Hospital. To learn more about the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture series, visit www.andphilosophy.com. (shrink)

Essays on Aristotle's "hylomorphism" - i.e., his conception of an organism's body as standing to its soul as matter (hulê) to form (morphê). Common readings - that there is only one form per species and that matter is what distinguishes individuals within a species from one another - are rejected in favor of the view that each member of a biological species has its own numerically distinct form. Original grounds are given for Aristotle's conception of soul as "the form and (...) essence" of an organic body: he thinks it needed to account for the distinction between generation and destruction simpliciter and the mere alteration of existing stuff. The compatibility of this with Aristotle's conception of matter as the substratum of coming-to-be and passing-away is defended by appeal to a distinction between functionally defined organic parts (such as eyes) and the elements that constitute them. An original reading of the perceiving part of soul as one with the desiring part is given and asymmetries afforded by Aristotle's teleology explored. "Normative" cases (where formal explanations dominate) are contrasted with "defective" ones (where matter is incompletely "mastered" by form), with special attention to akratic subjects: their desires are not fully mastered by practical reason, which stands in normative cases as form to matter. The role played by Aristotle's conception of soul in his account of rational agency is employed against the dogma that he lacked the allegedly "modern" conception of "self" found in Locke and an original reading of Locke's account of personal identity is developed. (shrink)

Kantian and Hegelian responses to Greek ethics have been carried on—against the backdrop of Joseph Butler, J. S. Mill, Henry Sidgwick, T. H. Green, and others—right through the Twentieth Century. Although other philosophical notions have also been important in the historiography of Greek ethics—‘morality’, ‘ethics of virtue’, ‘contingency’—an overriding theme has been the notion that in Greek ethics a way was found to eliminate deliberative conflict, and to show that in the end all rational human aims are reconcilable within (...) a single notion of happiness of eudaimonia. Various harmonizing strategies have been attempted, and ascribed to the Greeks. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a new interpretation of Margaret Cavendish’s remarks on beauty. According to it, Cavendish takes beauty to be a real, response-independent quality of objects. In this sense, Cavendish is an aesthetic realist. This position, which remains constant throughout her philosophical writings, contrasts with the non-realist views that were soon after to dominate philosophical reflections on matters of taste in the early modern period. It also, I argue, contrasts with the realism of Cavendish’s contemporary, Henry More. (...) While there are passages in Cavendish’s work that might seem to count against my reading—specifically, passages on disagreement in aesthetic judgement, on the power of beauty to elicit the passions, and on our inability to specify the nature of beauty—I show that, when situated against the background of Cavendish’s broader metaphysical and epistemological views, those passages in fact support the realist interpretation. (shrink)

The main point developed in this paper is the demonstration of the attitudes characterizing the major Belgian political parties. This is achieved through a factorial analysis applied to a set of data resulting from the answers given by the major parties leaders to various specific questions regarding bath the prevailing economie as well as institutional issues at the eve of the election of December 17th, 1978. From that point it has been possible to compare those results with the one obtained (...) from the data concerning the 1974 programmes.The results of the statistical analysis show that white in 1974 the strongest positive associations between parties corresponded to tht traditional ethical and socioeconomic cleavages, four years later the linguistic dimension was predominant with a stronger homogeneity characterizing the Dutchspeaking group than what could be observed for the Frenchspeaking one.The factorial analysis allows for a graphical representation of the respective positioning of the parties along the statistically significant factorial axes. Applied to two sets of data, the first one on purely institutional matters, the second one on both institutional and economic policies, the analysis reveals clearly through the various graphs presented the linguistic cleavage as well as the divergences about the extent of regional competences and minorities protection, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the degrees of regional economic autonomy and of public intervention in the business life. (shrink)

The following paper has two primary purposes. First it aims to articulate a theoretical proposition in general terms, namely, that every theory of doctrinal development presupposes a philosophy of history. The underlying significance of this proposition is that theories of doctrinal development are simultaneously narratives of the historical significance of the church’s pilgrimage through history, though that fact typically remains implicit in theories of doctrinal development. The second purpose is to illustrate the general proposition by analyzing a particularcase. I have (...) therefore outlined some of the salient features of John Henry Cardinal Newman’s theory of doctrinal development and, using ideas from Eric Voegelin’s philosophy, show how it implies a philosophy of history. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Fortuyn, Van Gogh, Hirsi AliWhy the Unholy Trinity Was Driven Out of the NetherlandsHenri Beunders (bio)“Vulnerability” and “tolerance” are pretty vague notions. A lot of suggestions, images, and good intentions cling to them, while scientific clarity is virtually absent.The same goes for the Netherlands. Abroad, my country had the image of a tolerant, liberal, and free society, a place where things could be said and done that were forbidden (...) elsewhere. So the question is: how on earth did this country turn into a battlefield due to a clash of civilizations almost overnight?I will try to explain to you how and why in the past decades the Netherlands became so vulnerable that in 2002 a political revolt broke out quite unexpectedly, a revolt that lasted for years and still is not over yet. The crisis resulted in two people becoming victims of political killings, while a third had to flee the country. Because all three of these people were liberal individualists who criticized two types of religion—the political-cultural left, or “Red Church,” and fundamentalist Islam—I will refer to them as the unholy trinity, an unholy trinity that had to be exorcized to restore the peace.Freedom of speech and freedom of religion are key factors in the Dutch crisis. Cultural wars and mimetic rivalry are other factors. Americanization and the advent of the multicultural society are the forces profondes. [End Page 201]I: Tolerance and the Dutch ConstitutionLet us talk briefly about tolerance first. Everybody seems to be in favor of it, except when we collectively decide we must not tolerate things, like drunk driving, smoking in public buildings, and so on.In the present Dutch constitution, created in 1983, article 1 begins with these sentences: “All persons in the Netherlands shall be treated equally in equal circumstances. Discrimination on the grounds of religion, belief, political opinion, race, or sex or on any other grounds whatsoever shall not be permitted.”1In essence, the constitution states that a colored Dutchman has the right to be treated in the same way as a white one. This has, however, nothing to do with tolerance. Tolerance means that a dominant group permits a nondominant group to have opinions or lifestyles that seem to deviate from the usual order. If we ask natives to be tolerant toward exotic immigrants, this implies hierarchy. There is a group that tolerates, and there is a group that is tolerated. In the strict sense of the word, tolerance implies discrimination and is therefore hostile to the constitution.As a Dutch historian once remarked, every philosopher who thought about these things, like John Locke, Mirabeau, or Thomas Paine, knew that the notion of religious tolerance is useless if you assume all men by nature to have inviolable rights anyway, like those of freedom of thought, expression, and religion.2Of course, a nation-state has to be intolerant sometimes, for instance, when freedom of religion is used to undermine the state, when, for example, the state is promoting violence, which in democratic societies is the monopoly of the state. This is a matter of principle. The rest is a matter of political debate.At this point we have to conclude that trying to give meaning to a word such as tolerance can be very complicated and confusing, and that such a word has to be used very carefully. The same goes for all those other container words, like racism, fascism, populism, and so forth, that have been used so frequently in recent decades to label and scapegoat people and things that are feared or simply disliked. But words are important.The idle and gratuitous manner in which container words of this kind are used to denounce “the enemy” represents the other side of the so-called liberal, “tolerant” society of the Netherlands. All this name calling definitely keeps you from researching and facing the things that are really going on. During the 1990s, this name calling resulted in the dominance of political correctness, a phenomenon that leaves no room for doubt as to who the angels and devils are in society, and it implies that there is no need to look... (shrink)

Since the time, about a century ago, when DeMorgan, Boole and Jevons, inaugurated the study of the logic of numerically definite reasoning, no one has been concerned to establish the validity rules for a very general type of numerically definite inference which is a strong analogue of the classical syllogism. The reader will readily agree that the traditional rules of syllogistic inference cannot even begin to decide whether the following proportionally quantified syllogism is a valid argument: at most 4/7 p (...) are at most 2/3 not-m and at least 3/5 s are precisely 7/8 m, hence, at most 1/3 s are p. Likely reasons, of broad methodological interest, why this readily definable type of formal inference has been neglected will presently be proposed. Among the masters of twentieth century logic, Hilbert and Bernays have, to be sure, meticulously shown how such numerically definite propositions as “at least 7 individuals have the property p” can be expressed in the predicate calculus with the use of the identity relation. They do not, since their concern with such propositions is indirect, proceed to establish a systematic calculus of classes whose “size” or extent is numerically definite. As we shall always notice, traditional logic and even ordinary Boolean algebra prefer to generalize about the laws governing the interrelationship of classes in inference systems without making any hypotheses concerning class “size” or extent except by the classical quantifier “some”, which quantifier admits the measure or extent of a class only in terms of the proposition that a given class contains or does not contain at least one member. Such a restricted admission of the relevance for inference of class size is among the fundamental reasons for the neglect of proportional quantifiers, i.e., quantifiers where numerical value is any rational number r such that 0/100 ≤ r ≤ 100/100. It can, of course, also be pointed out that the traditional syllogism and ordinary Boolean algebra do not i.e. measure, numerically define, the degree of inclusion of one class in another. Inclusion is taken either as total or partial, with no discrimination of the degree of partial inclusion. (shrink)