The answer to philosophical questions will often depend on the position one takes regarding the fact-value problem. It is, therefore, not surprising that, in the tradition of western philosophy, the past 200 years or so record an animated discussion of it. In the present collection the debate is continued by representatives of various "schools" in contemporary western thought. A number of philosophers from non-western cultures, too, enter into it. The contributions do not all reflect on the same theme, nor do (...) they use the same approach. Essays written by philosophers sympathetic to the analytical tradition are followed by reflections on the part of those inspired by phe nomenology. A third group of contributions is by non-western thinkers, who are more likely to approach the problem in terms of culture. Their engage ment with the issue clearly shows, among other things, that it is almost exclusively in the western tradition that the fact-value distinction is often understood as an outright dichotomy. The occasion for the publication of this collection is Dr. Cornelis Anthonie van Peursen's retirement as Professor of Philosophy. This year he leaves the Free University, Amsterdam; until 1982 he was professor at the University of Leyden as well. In the Netherlands and beyond he has become known for his concern with constructive comparison of diverging philosophical trends and the cross-cultural fertilization of thought. Characteristic of his career are his efforts to render the results of academic philosophizing understand able to a broader audience. (shrink)

Professor Lewis and I have some important differences of opinion regarding the identity and distinctness of conscious persons, which it will be well to try to clarify on the present occasion, first of all by enumerating a number of points on which we are, I think, in agreement. Both of us believe in the existence of individual persons, each of whom can be said to live in a ‘world’ of his own intentional objectivity, a world ‘as it is for him’, (...) which differs in a considerable extent, both in content and emphasis, from the world as it is for anyone else. Both of us further believe that all these intentionally objective worlds for a large part coincide in content, and are in fact excerpted from a more comprehensive real world which is common to us all, and which, in addition to in some sense including all such intentionally objective worlds, also includes many real material objects which exist regardless of our intentionality, and which further includes our own material bodies, which appear in so central a manner in each of our intentionally objective worlds. Both of us believe in matter as a transcendent reality, as well as an intentional object, and are content to accept the dicta of science as to the most probable view of its structure. We are in fact quite Cartesian and Lockean in our belief in the primary and secondary qualities of matter. We believe further that our intentional subjectivity is geared causally into our material objectivity, and that the gearing takes place, in some inscrutable manner, in our nervous systems. We both also believe that our intentional subjectivity transcends bodily mechanisms and instrumentalities, and can be liberated from the latter, but that, when thus liberated, our subjectivity may still affect some sort of an intentionally objective material body such as we wear in dreams, a body in which it will manifest itself to itself and to others much as we do in our dreams and fantasies. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to give a characterisation of religion and the Religious Spirit, basing itself on the Platonic assumption that there are Forms, salient jewels of simplicity and affinity, to be dug out from the soil of vague experience and cut clear from the confusedly shifting patterns of usage, which will give us conceptual mastery over the changeable detail in a given sector. It will further be Platonic in that it will not seek to discount the deep (...) gulfs between the species into which religion qua genus divides itself, i.e. its theistic, polytheistic and atheistic subvarieties, taking it to be of the essence of a true genus to extend itself over mutually exclusive species, only being what it is by including in its sense the alternatives which are thus mutually exclusive. And my treatment will be Platonic, thirdly, in that it will endeavour to delimit the Religious Spirit by, on the one hand, setting it over against what it excludes, all purely this-world talk and life which is quite irreligious, and by, on the other hand, opposing it to forms of talk and life which fall short of it in various ways or which deviate from it variously, thereby likewise contributing to our understanding of what it is. The practice of Plato, which could study the deviations from his ideal city in order to confirm his notion of its structure and excellence, and which also paired every ideal pattern with its opposite— piety with impiety, justice with self-interested tyranny, etc.—is plainly one to be followed: Plato, as we know from a citation from his contemporary Hermodorus in one of the Aristotelian commentators, always set beside the ‘in itself’ of the pure Form the deviant and the wholly negative which were nonetheless part of its sense. Religion will therefore stand before us as a target that it is possible to fall short of or miss altogether as well as to hit squarely, and we shall try by a series of glancing darts to end by hitting it squarely. (shrink)

Renowned philosopher J. N. Mohanty examines the range of Indian philosophy from the Sutra period through the 17th century Navya Nyaya. Instead of concentrating on the different systems, he focuses on the major concepts and problems dealt with in Indian philosophy. The book includes discussions of Indian ethics and social philosophy, as well as of Indian law and aesthetics.

All recent memory theories of hippocampal function have incorporated the idea that the hippocampus is required to process items only of some qualitatively specifiahle kind, and is not required to process items of some complementary set. In contrast, it is now proposed that the hippocampus is needed to process stimuli of all kinds, but only when there is a need to associate those stimuli with other events that are temporally discontiguous. In order to form or use temporally discontiguous associations, it (...) is essential to maintain some memory of the first component until the second component has occurred. When the temporal gap to he spanned is small, and the number of items to be temporarily retained is low, a limited-capacity, short-term store is sufficient to allow associations to be formed. Such a store is presumed to operate in parallel with the hippocampus in normal animals. Hippocampal damage disrupts a much higher-capacity store that has a slower decay rate, and so leaves animals with only a very limited ability to form temporally discontiguous associations. Hippocampal damage, however, is not held to affect the long-term storage of associations of any kind, if they can be formed. Analyses of both new and existing data are presented to show that by classifying tasks in terms of the need to use a temporary memory store to retain temporally discontiguous information one can cut right across existing classifications as well as achieve a better fit to the data. The hippocampus thus seems best described as a high-capacity, intermediate-term memory store. (shrink)

In his award-winning book _The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl: A Historical Development_, J. N. Mohanty charted Husserl's philosophical development from the young man's earliest studies—informed by his work as a mathematician—to the publication of his _Ideas_ in 1913. In this welcome new volume, the author takes up the final decades of Husserl's life, addressing the work of his Freiburg period, from 1916 until his death in 1938. As in his earlier work, Mohanty here offers close readings of Husserl's main texts (...) accompanied by accurate summaries, informative commentaries, and original analyses. This book, along with its companion volume, completes the most up-to-date, well-informed, and comprehensive account ever written on Husserl's phenomenological philosophy and its development. (shrink)

This volume is a collection of my essays on philosophy of logic from a phenomenological perspective. They deal with the four kinds of logic I have been concerned with: formal logic, transcendental logic, speculative logic and hermeneutic logic. Of these, only one, the essay on Hegel, touches upon 'speculative logic', and two, those on Heidegger and Konig, are concerned with hermeneutic logic. The rest have to do with Husser! and Kant. I have not tried to show that the four logics (...) are compatible. I believe, they are--once they are given a phenomenological underpinning. The original plan of writing an Introduction in which the issues would have to be formulated, developed and brought together, was abandoned in favor of writing an Introductory Essay on the 'origin'- in the phenomenological sense -of logic. J.N.M. Philadelphia INTRODUCTION: THE ORIGIN OF LOGIC The question of the origin of logic may pertain to historical origin (When did it all begin? Who founded the science of logic?), psychological origin (When, in the course of its mental development, does the child learn logical operations?), cultural origin (What cultural - theological, metaphysical and linguisti- conditions make such a discipline as logic possible?), or transcendental constitutive origin (What sorts of acts and/or practices make logic possible?). (shrink)

It is claimed that cantor had the technical apparatus available to derive russell's paradox some ten years before russell's discovery.

In this revolutionary study of the philosophical problems of language, J.N. Hattiangadi offers a new approach which simultaneously solves several venerable conundrums in the origin and development of language and thought. His argument includes acute criticisms of the later Wittgenstein's theory of language use, Quine's approach to subjunctive conditionals, Kripke's analysis of proper names, and Chomsky's conjecture of an innate universal grammar.

Indian philosophical thought has been deeply metaphysical, and it is no surprise that, faced with the anti-metaphysical thrust of contemporary philosophy, one of the issues uppermost in the minds of Indian thinkers is the question of the possibility of metaphysics. In recent philosophical literature, two tendencies are discernible: an attempt to defend metaphysics in the traditional grand style, and a concern with the idea of descriptive metaphysics as an alternative. For the former, we may turn to Kalidas Bhattacharyya and J. (...) N. Chubb; for the latter to J. N. Mohanty and S. N. Ganguly. (shrink)

THERE are two conflicting motives in Husserlian phenomenology, one of which leads, in my view, to a more genuinely transcendental philosophy. According to one of its original programs, phenomenology was to be a descriptive science of essences and essential structures of various regions of phenomena and also of the empty region of object in general. The concern with meanings, as contradistinguished from essences, is equally original; it pervades the Prolegomena and the first three of the logical investigations and, of course, (...) the first volume of the Ideas. But the specifically phenomenological enterprise of clarification of meanings—and this is the second of the two motives-slowly moves to the forefront, for a while overshadowed by the essentialism of the beginning, but later on freed from it and reasserting its primacy as the philosophical activity par excellence. The concern with essences affiliates phenomenology to the classical rationalistic tradition, while the concern with meanings brings it closer to the empiricistic tradition. If in the former enterprise phenomenology appears to be an essentialism of Aristotelian sort, in the latter, Hume remains its acknowledged precursor. One of my contentions, which I will try to substantiate in the following pages, is that the peculiarly Husserlian sort of transcendental phenomenology develops out of the second concern rather than from the first. This rather broad claim needs to be qualified in various ways, which I will be doing as we proceed. For the present, I may perhaps add this much: there is a conception of transcendental subjectivity which can be reached only through an eidetic phenomenology of essences: on such a theory, transcendental subjectivity is the essence of empirical consciousness, transcendental ego is the essence of the empirical ego. But this is not exactly Husserl’s conception of ‘transcendental'. The transcendental according to Husserl is not the essence of the empirical, but the domain in which the meanings constituting the empirical have their origin. However, I should add that these two points of view are intertwined, in Husserl’s thought, in such a strange manner that my efforts to separate them may seem futile. They influence each other: there are, as a matter of fact, two conceptions of essence in Husserl, one of which is, in my view, closer than the other one to the specifically Husserlian conception of transcendental subjectivity. So also in the theory of meaning, the early essentialism did cast its shadow, but as soon as it is freed from essentialism it lays the foundation of a more truly phenomenological transcendental philosophy. (shrink)

Dionysius Lardner rose to prominence in the 1830s as a popular scientific writer, lecturer and British literary figure. He became popular by promoting the ideals of scientific self-education, technological progress, and the practical applicability of science. His rapid fall from public favour after 1840 partly resulted from his involvement in a marital scandal; prior to that scandal, however, his character had provoked satire, and his caution and even pessimism about some technological prospects had offended the confident hopes of the audiences (...) of that time, confident hopes which Lardner had helped to create. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

If, as it is usually understood, incommensurable theories must be compatible then one need never choose between two such theories. But if theories were incompatible and incommensurable one would have to choose between them. What if they are incompatible only outside the domain of observation? The fact that Darwin's biology can clash with Kelvin's physics (each with their respective auxiliary assumptions) regarding the age of the earth shows how commensurable theories may yet be incompatible. But it also shows that they (...) need not be alternatives--i.e. that one may not be able to simply and satisfactorily replace the other in our world view. But standard examples of scientific revolutions consist of the replacement of one theory by another in one's world view. These alternative theories must therefore be more than merely incompatible--what do they share if not content? (I.e. they must be commensurable.). (shrink)