This book constitutes one of the most important contributions to recent Kant scholarship. In it, one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Kant, Henry Allison, offers a comprehensive, systematic, and philosophically astute account of all aspects of Kant's views on aesthetics. The first part of the book analyses Kant's conception of reflective judgment and its connections with both empirical knowledge and judgments of taste. The second and third parts treat two questions that Allison insists must be kept distinct: the normativity (...) of pure judgments of taste, and the moral and systematic significance of taste. The fourth part considers two important topics often neglected in the study of Kant's aesthetics: his conceptions of fine art, and the sublime. (shrink)

Paget introduces the general reader to Afro-Caribbean philosophy in this ground-breaking work. Since Afro-Caribbean thought is inherently hybrid in nature, he traces the roots of this discourse in traditional African thought and in the Christian and Enlightenment traditions of Western Europe.

Aimed at those new to studying Spinoza, this book provides a comprehensive introduction to his thought, placing it in its historical and philosophical contexts, and assessing its critical reception. In addition to providing an analysis of Spinoza's metaphysical, epistemological, psychological, and ethical views in the Ethics, Henry Allison also explores his political theory and revolutionary views on the Bible, as well as his account of Judaism, which led to the excommunication of the young Spinoza from the Jewish community in (...) Amsterdam. Although the book's main focus is on the analysis of Spinoza's views, including a close reading of the central arguments of the Ethics, it also considers many of the standard objections to these arguments as well as possible responses to them. This completely revised and updated new edition of Allison's classic book, with two new chapters, will help a new generation of students to understand and value Spinoza's work. (shrink)

The views of Quine and Strawson on the significance of 'mass terms' are rehearsed, and the metaphysical status of substances, in the chemist's sense, is considered. It is urged that the ontological dichotomy of particulars and universals is not adequate to accommodate such substances, which are in a sense to be explicated concrete but non-particular.

This paper takes up Berman and Hafner's (1993) challenge to model legal case-based reasoning not just in terms of factual similarities and differences but also in terms of the values that are at stake. The formal framework of Prakken and Sartor (1998) is applied to examples of case-based reasoning involving values, and a method for formalising such examples is proposed. The method makes it possible to express that a case should be decided in a certain way because that advances certain (...) values. The method also supports the comparison of conflicting precedents in terms of values, and it supports debates on the relevance of distinctions in terms of values. (shrink)

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)

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 ...

ABSTRACT As well as the mathematically-supported celestial mechanics that Newton developed in his Principia, Newton also proposed a more speculative natural philosophy of interparticulate forces of attraction and repulsion. Although this speculative philosophy was not made public before the ‘Queries’ which Newton appended to the Opticks, it originated far earlier in Newton’s career. This article makes the case that Newton’s short, unfinished manuscript, entitled ‘De Aere et Aethere’, should be seen as an important landmark in Newton’s intellectual development, being the (...) first work in which Newton assumed there are repulsive forces operating at a distance between the particles of bodies. The article offers an account of how Newton came to write ‘De Aere et Aethere’ and why. It also outlines its relationship to the ‘Conclusio’, with which Newton briefly intended to finish the Principia, and to the ‘Queries’ in the Opticks. The date of the manuscript is disputed, and the article also aims to settle this dispute. Claims that the ‘De Aere et Aethere’ must have been written before the ‘Hypothesis... of Light’ of 1675 are dismissed, and it is suggested, following R. S. Westfall, that it was written after a well-known letter Newton wrote to Boyle early in 1679. (shrink)

Recent discussions in the physical literature, designed to clarify the logical position of modern physical theory, have brought to light an amazing divergence of fundamental attitudes which may well bewilder the careful student of physics as well as philosophy. Quantum mechanics, representing an abstract formalism, should be capable of having its logical structure analyzed with great precision like any other mathematical discipline. Its consequences in all problems to which its method can be applied are so unambiguous, consistent, and successful in (...) predicting physical experience as to disperse immediately all thoughts of possible discrepancies in its fundamental texture. Yet it must be said that even the founders of quantum theory are not in harmony in their various expositions of the bases of that theory. However, while this situation seems disquieting on the face of it, there is no cause for serious brow raising, for it is a fact that there exists agreement with regard to the central axioms of the theory, and that the ambiguities affect only their philosophical interpretation, a field in which differences of opinion may at present be honestly entertained. (shrink)

The idea of a single scientific method, shared across specialties and teachable to ten-year-olds, is just over a hundred years old. For centuries prior, science had meant a kind of knowledge, made from facts gathered through direct observation or deduced from first principles. But during the nineteenth century, science came to mean something else: a way of thinking. The Scientific Method tells the story of how this approach took hold in laboratories, the field, and eventually classrooms, where science was once (...) taught as a natural process. Henry M. Cowles reveals the intertwined histories of evolution and experiment, from Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection to John Dewey's vision for science education. Darwin portrayed nature as akin to a man of science, experimenting through evolution, while his followers turned his theory onto the mind itself. Psychologists reimagined the scientific method as a problem-solving adaptation, a basic feature of cognition that had helped humans prosper. This was how Dewey and other educators taught science at the turn of the twentieth century-but their organic account was not to last. Soon, the scientific method was reimagined as a means of controlling nature, not a product of it. By shedding its roots in evolutionary theory, the scientific method came to seem far less natural, but far more powerful. This book reveals the origin of a fundamental modern concept. Once seen as a natural adaptation, the method soon became a symbol of science's power over nature, a power that, until recently, has rarely been called into question. (shrink)

Although the thesis that equal basic liberties take priority over increases in wealth is one of the two most important theses in the rawlsian theory of justice, The argumentation for it is obscure. This article emphasizes the centrality of self-Respect in rawls' treatment of liberty, Specifies five particular assumptions he makes, And constructs a deductive argument from the rawlsian assumptions to the rawlsian conclusion about liberty. Of special interest are the premises of economic adequacy for the worst-Off man and the (...) incentive value of economic inequality, Which reveal the relation between the difference principle and the priority of liberty. (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)

Introduction This book is not a systematic commentary on the canonicaJ topoi of "Nietzsche's philosophy." Since my emphasis is on those parts or aspects of ...

First, a comment on a pessimistic note: Salmon says we can't be sure there is any such thing as inductive inference: in demanding that some explanations have the form of correct inductive inferences, “we may be laying down a requirement which cannot be fulfilled.” To doubt that we can fulfill that requirement is to doubt that we can formalize inductive logic. It may be true, but why begin the fight by throwing in the sponge? It is also true that there (...) are difficulties involved in formalizing acceptance rules for inductive conclusions, but these difficulties may be overcome. It is false to claim that we ‘cannot claim to know exactly’ what these acceptance rules are. Only two years ago I did just that. It was true that my claim was shown to be erroneous a year later, but that fate can befall almost any worthwhile claim. (shrink)

Theme 1 pertains to "importance." By ‘most important’ I mean most important to human beings. Physicists have generally shied away from the problems of human beings, and the role of our minds in nature, because they are so complex: these problems have been set aside for a later time. But that time has now arrived. The needed technologies, funding, and interest are all at hand. Moreover, the advances in technology now allow scores of laboratories to participate, and the number will (...) soon grow to hundreds: the data will come from many diverse sources, not just a few billion dollar facilities. (shrink)

This is a reprint of the classic work by Henry Churchill King, "The Seeming Unreality of the Spiritual Life."At Oberlin College from 1884, he taught in mathematics, philosophy, and theology. From 1902 to 1927, he was president of the college. With a tenure of 25 years, is Oberlin's longest-serving president. In 1919, he served on the King-Crane Commission, whose recommendations on the fair and just disposition of non-Turkish areas of the Ottoman Empire might, had they been followed, would have (...) averted many of the tragedies that have come to pass in the Middle East since that time. The findings of that commission, suppressed until 1922, were finally made public in the King-Crane Commission Report and shed tremendous light on the wishes of the indigenous peoples of the region, as to who would be entrusted with the various mandates, the future of Palestine, and other vital issues.He was prominent in the councils of the Congregational Church and a moderator (1919-21) of its National Council as well as chairman (1921-27) of the Congregational Foundation for Education. (shrink)

In recent years biomimicry has emerged as a powerful response to the problem of sustainability and today exerts an important influence on both architecture and urbanism. The implications of this trend for the humanities have, however, been largely overlooked. Taking a historical approach, the first key argument of this article is that throughout Western history the dominant model for the polis, qua both city and State, has been the human being and that it was also this basic model that underlay (...) traditional understandings of the place of humans in cities and States. With the transition to biomimetic cities and States, the key model of which is the forest ecosystem, the question of the place of humans arises once again. In response to this question, the article proposes a speculative philosophical anthropology based on a combination of Heidegger’s thinking of the clearing and recent insights from the study of human evolution and pre-history with a view to grounding a new model of the polis not simply on the forest, but rather on the forest and the clearing. (shrink)

Michael S. Gazzaniga is a renowned cognitive neuroscientist. He was Editor-in-Chief of the 1447 page book The Cognitive Neurosciences, which, for the past decade, has been the fattest book in my library, apart from the ‘unabridged’. His recent book The Ethical Brain has a Part III entitled “Free Will, Personal Responsibility, and the Law”. This Part addresses, from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience, some of the moral issues that have been dealt with in the present book. The aim of this (...) Part III is to reconcile the materialist idea that brain activity is determined with the notion of moral responsibility, which normally depends upon the idea that we human agents possess free will. (shrink)

In this discussion I respond to some of the criticisms raised by Béatrice Longuenesse and Hannah Ginsborg to my account of Kant's aesthetic theory presents in Kant's Theory of Taste.

INTRODUCTION For over five centuries the New World has been an object of curiosity to the Old, and for almost half of that time the United States, ...