In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 65.3 (2004) 455-474 [Access article in PDF] "Conscience the Ground of Consciousness": The Moral Epistemology of Coleridge's Aids to Reflection Jeffrey Hipolito Everett Community College. It will hardly come as a shock to the readers of this journal that Kant has been the philosophical gatekeeper of all those who have come after him and that the scale of his achievement was (...) recognized even by his immediate peers and the generation which followed them.1 It may be rather more surprising that Samuel Taylor Coleridge belongs among the most interesting members of that second generation, comparable to Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Hegel in the originality of his response—not because of the Biographia Literaria (1817), the book for which he is now most famous, but because of the stream of work that followed the publication of the revised Friend (1818). Though the Collected Coleridge project has made available a mass of previously unpublished material, which in turn has stimulated a great deal of interesting research, one must still agree with Elinor Shaffer's recent assessment that "we have no accurate or adequate conception of the late Coleridge from 1819 to his death in 1834."2 Shaffer's range of dates is not accidental, indicating that the revised [End Page 455] Friend (and, more specifically, the break with Schelling) marks the beginning of the "late" Coleridge. In the "Essays on Method" that were a part of the revised Friend (1818) Coleridge effectively freed himself of Schelling's Idealism, which is so notoriously crucial to philosophical chapters of the Biographia, by moving away from the latter's metaphysics of the Absolute towards a metaphysics grounded in an ongoing and in principle unending exploration of "inquiry" itself.3 Though it did not appear until 1825, Aids to Reflection was the first book published by Coleridge following the revised Friend. It was his most popular and influential work during the nineteenth century, but it has been read almost exclusively in strictly theological terms. The implicit contention that the "middle" Coleridge of the Biographia was philosophical and that the "late," post-Biographia Coleridge turned to theology as a refuge from the Biographia's failure was ratified by Thomas McFarland's classic argument concerning the late Coleridge's "trinitarian resolution" to the problems that the middle Coleridge could not solve.4 One pernicious effect of this view (which is more nuanced than I have presented it here) is that until fairly recently it was still possible to describe Aids to Reflection as simply "an effort to argue away the terrifying import of The Ancient Mariner, which would lead us, since it jars our moral feelings, to hatred of God."5I argue in this essay that although Aids to Reflection employs theological vocabulary it is more than—indeed, cannot rightly be considered—an exercise in dogmatic Christian apologetics. More specifically, I will show that the book includes a vigorous engagement with Kant's moral philosophy not primarily by undercutting the metaphysical basis of the critical project's architectonic, though this is an ancillary effect, but by putting pressure on the model of judgment that underlies Kantian ethics.The importance of Kant to Coleridge's intellectual development is not a secret. Coleridge himself describes the way Kant "took possession of me as [End Page 456] with a giant's hand," though he confesses he "could never believe it was possible for him to have meant no more by his Noumenon, or THING IN ITSELF, than his mere words express" and that he even "entertained doubts likewise, whether in his own mind, he even laid all the stress, which he appears to do on the moral postulates."6 Kant's impact on Coleridge was primarily due to his status as a logician and a moral philosopher. Thus Coleridge contends in a letter of 1820 that "Kant will demonstrate to you, that this [Christian] Faith is... grounded on Postulates authorized & substantiated solely by the Moral Being,"7 and adds in another letter five years later that he... (shrink)

This essay offers an introduction to Owen Barfield’s long romance poem, Riders on Pegasus. It argues that the poem is a complex example of “romantic modernism,” self-consciously following in the tradition of Blake and Shelley while responding in an equally self-aware way to the anti-romantic modernism of early Eliot and Auden. It argues for the formal and aesthetic accomplishment and interest of the poem, and suggests that it is an as yet overlooked masterpiece of mid-century English poetry.

I argue that when we use ‘probability’ language in epistemic contexts—e.g., when we ask how probable some hypothesis is, given the evidence available to us—we are talking about degrees of support, rather than degrees of belief. The epistemic probability of A given B is the mind-independent degree to which B supports A, not the degree to which someone with B as their evidence believes A, or the degree to which someone would or should believe A if they had B as (...) their evidence. My central argument is that the degree-of-support interpretation lets us better model good reasoning in certain cases involving old evidence. Degree-of-belief interpretations make the wrong predictions not only about whether old evidence confirms new hypotheses, but about the values of the probabilities that enter into Bayes’ Theorem when we calculate the probability of hypotheses conditional on old evidence and new background information. (shrink)

Everett (1957a, b, 1973) relative-state formulation of quantum mechanics has often been taken to involve a metaphysical commitment to the existence of many splitting worlds each containing physical copies of observers and the objects they observe. While there was earlier talk of splitting worlds in connection with Everett, this is largely due to DeWitt’s (Phys Today 23:30–35, 1970) popular presentation of the theory. While the thought of splitting worlds or parallel universes has captured the popular imagination, Everett himself favored the (...) language of elements, branches, or relative states in describing his theory. The result is that there is no mention of splitting worlds or parallel universes in any of Everett’s published work. Everett, however, did write of splitting observers and was willing to adopt the language of many worlds in conversation with people who were themselves using such language. While there is evidence that Everett was not entirely comfortable with talk of many worlds, it does not seem to have mattered much to him what language one used to describe pure wave mechanics. This was in part a result of Everett’s empirical understanding of the cognitive status of his theory. (shrink)

Personalistic Bayesian decision theory provides a simple, roomy framework for hypothesis-testing and choice under uncertainty. Call the theory Bayesianism, for short. It’s the line that L. J. Savage made respectable among statisticians and economists. It’s the same thing as the expected utility hypothesis, in this form: preference does or should go by personal probabilistic expectation of utility. The question of whether to say “does” or “should” is the question of whether the theory is meant to be normative or descriptive.

Intelligent design (ID) raises several challenges for the relation between science and religion. One's views on these matters ramify across the other sciences, including physics. Can design, especially supernatural design, play any legitimate role in science? Is the ID question just a matter of evidence? What is the proper role for naturalism in all this? These are important questions in the philosophy of science. Before taking them up, this chapter briefly looks at the core concepts used in ID today. There (...) is a less visible but equally menacing problem for the viability of ID. Methodological naturalism (MN) gets a lot of attention, but there is another methodological shaping principle to be contended with, namely, conservatism. Conservatism is also the reason ID attracts so many theists and few nontheists. If one already believes in an intelligence that can play the role of designer, then ID‐based science is not a radical move. (shrink)

Epicureanism after the generation of its founders has been characterised as dogmatic, uncreative and static. But this volume brings together work from leading classicists and philosophers that demonstrates the persistent interplay in the school between historical and contemporary influences from outside the school and a commitment to the founders' authority. The interplay begins with Epicurus himself, who made arresting claims of intellectual independence, yet also admitted to taking over important ideas from predecessors, and displayed more receptivity than is usually thought (...) to those of his contemporaries. The same principles of autonomy and openness figure importantly in the three major areas of focus in these essays: theology, politics and the emotions. (shrink)

To write a history “from antiquity to the present” of classical art or literature (or, worst of all, classicism) is the ultimate nightmare aspiration for a scholar whose colleagues are attentive methodologists. The product, when there is one (which I add because the aspiration can yield paralysis), is always in part an apologetic treatise on historical method. Professor Vout—of Christ's College, Cambridge—apologizes with the first word of her subtitle, A, which stresses that many differing histories may be as valid as (...) her own. The next two words, Life History, imply that her study is unauthorized, conjectural, a bit personal or informal, and reliant to an extent on unconfirmable stories. Her book, she tells readers, is of necessity an arrangement of “fragments” and “a mapping not of facts, but of ways in which Greek and Roman artifacts experience history.” She sets down, moreover, as a rule that “classical” is not “a self-standing category: it is always relational” (which historians of the novel have been telling us for many decades about “realism”).We might expect the result of Vout's axioms to be evenhanded diffidence when treating definitions of the classical, and indeed she entertains even the idea of Jeff Koons—maker of Balloon Venus (Orange) and Gazing Ball (Barberini Faun)—as a classical sculptor. There is, however, one approach that she dismisses out of hand: the obsession of classical humanism with authenticity and its renascence. She objects especially to research into the original conditions of objects and to the application of increasingly intrusive methods of restoring them. As she writes, “ ‘Real knowledge’ comes not from antiquities that have been ripped from their original context, cleaned and reconstituted for display in galleries and glass cabinets. ‘Real knowledge’ comes from antiquities that carry their dirt with them.”What Vout, as a critic of humanism, means by dirt is patina—the residue, interesting and sometimes beautiful in itself, of the use and misuse of objects. Dirt is a word that would occur to a humanist art historian when examining the patina of a Greek or Roman object. Vout's use of the word is a parodic expression of reverse snobbery. When studying changes, whether mistakes or enhancements, in a Greek or Roman document, a humanist literary historian would speak of corruption and edit the corrupt text by means of processes that humanist editors invented and perfected. Despite the humanists’ devotion to the recovery of classical learning, however, once a Renaissance edition of a manuscript was in print, the original, however rare, was often destroyed or lost. In effect, the work was reborn, better than new. Rebirth is not the same as preservation: though both are perhaps conservative (or better, in Ulysses's words, “rere regardant”), a renascence or a resurrection is cataclysmic.The humanist approach to the past can appear unlovable and is certainly arrogant, but it can also inspire awe and gratitude. The work of Michelangelo depended on it, and so (more to the point) did Martin Luther's. Vout's attitude toward dirt (patina, corruption, misprision, insertions, recontextualizations, bowdlerizations, misappropriations, translocations) resembles that of Catholic theologians to the depositum fidei. Restoring the original conditions of the Christian church involved methods of research learned from Renaissance humanists and the removal, often destructive, of the “deposit” or residue or patina that adhered to, distorted, discolored, and obscured the conditions of the “primitive church.” A Roman Catholic may well dislike the processes that Luther set in motion, but imagine a scholarly history of Christianity that mentioned Protestantism only to regret its existence.Still, Vout's reasoning, it seems to me, is more sophisticated in its defense of dirt and in its criticism of restoration than any offered against the Protestants’ reasoning during the Counter-Reformation. Consider, for instance, this inspiring passage: “When the curators at the Munich Glyptothek removed Thorwaldsen's restorations from the Aegina pediments, they did not so much take them back to a pristine state as out of the feedback loop, rendering them damaged goods. It was not a restriction of avenues or a change of direction that was being enacted here, but a refusal to speak the language, or rather an insistence that the only language worth speaking was an academic [humanist, restorationist] one.... In 2011, the Glyptothek marked the two hundredth year of the pediments’ discovery by putting new versions of Thorvaldsen's restored figures on display. They had relearned the lingo. For art to be ‘classical,’ it has to know its place in the discourse.” May lingo and feedback loop have successful careers in the lexicon of classical scholarship. “Far from producing a nostalgic narrative,” as Vout informs us, “the lessons learned from looking back ensure that we keep traveling.”. (shrink)

This article explores and categorizes the belief of what awaited the soul after bodily death held by English divine Samuel Clarke, D.D. as compared to that held by his close friend Isaac Newton. Evidence taken from the corpus of Clarke's writings reveals both he and Newton to be mortalists, but of differing types and to different degrees. While it has long been known that Clarke and Newton were often of one mind in matters of theology, a comparative study of their (...) conceptions of soul reveals that the two friends held even more parallels than has been acknolwedged. (shrink)

In 1967, after a talk Deleuze gave to the Society of French Philosophy, Ferdinand Alquiéé expressed concern during the question and answer session that perhaps Deleuze was relying too heavily upon science and not giving adequate attention to questions and problems that Alquiéé took to be distinctively philosophical. Deleuze responded by agreeing with Alquiéé; moreover, he argued that his primary interest was precisely in the metaphysics science needs rather than in the science philosophy needs. This metaphysics, Deleuze argues, is to (...) be done ‘‘in the style of Whitehead’’ rather than the style of Kant, and in developing this metaphysics Deleuze draws heavily on Spinoza. The present essay examines this Deleuzian-Spinozist metaphysics done in the style of Whitehead, the ‘‘metaphysics science needs’’, drawing on the writings of David Hume and Bruno Latour in the process. This discussion will in turn enable us to situate Deleuze's metaphysics in relation to contemporary debates concerning speculative realism and correlationism, and especially Quentin Meillassoux's critique of the latter. Our conclusion will be that the kind of metaphysics Deleuze pursues is neither correlationist nor straightforwardly realist, but rather charts a course between realism and anti-realism. (shrink)

I argue that relations between non identical times, such as the relations, earlier than , later than , or 10 seconds apart , involve contraction, and only co temporal relations are non contradictory, which would leave presentism the only non contradictory theory of time. The arguments I present are arguments that I have not seen in the literature.

ABSTRACT This article engages Frater Taciturnus’s ‘Letter to the Reader’ to argue for a religious aesthetics in Kierkegaard. This religious aesthetics is designed to purify the passions and help the believer ‘see’ the religious ideal, but also to confront the aesthetic spectator with the religious reality of her own situation. My claim for this revised reading of religious poetics in Kierkegaard derives from Taciturnus’s view of a superior form of religious ideality that comes ‘after actuality’. This ideality is not an (...) envisioned ideal that is untested by actuality and thus ‘illusory’ but an ideal that is graspable only after the self has acknowledged the actuality of their sinful condition, rather than any specific actual sin. To appreciate this form of ideality, Frater Taciturnus repeatedly resorts to visual metaphors and the power of imagination, suggesting that the religious ideal must be ‘seen’ with a sort of synoptic vision capable of looking past both comedy and tragedy and resulting in the purification of our typical affective responses to aesthetic objects. Seeing in this way, the individual imaginatively engages in religious aesthetics and grasps the religious ideality by affirming the actuality of their own sinfulness and receiving forgiveness for that sinfulness. (shrink)

We suggest in this commentary an emotional origin of the Industrial Revolution. Specifically, increased living standards directly preceding the Industrial Revolution produced increased happiness and subjective well-being that, in turn, fueled the explosion of innovation and economic growth experienced in industrial England.

Discussions about resource allocation commonly invoke concerns of unfair and variable decisions when physicians ration at the bedside. This concern is no less germane in disaster medicine, in which physicians make triage and allocation decisions under duress, and patients and their families may be challenged to self-advocate. Unfortunately, a real-time mechanism to support a process for ethical decision making may not be available to medical relief workers. Yet, resources for ethics decision support can be important for the moral well-being of (...) the clinician, the ethical integrity of the relief effort, and to bolster the trust and confidence of the population receiving medical services. The need for clinical ethical support should be anticipated in disaster preparedness planning. (shrink)

What is secularity? Might it yield or define a distinctive form of reasoning? If so, would that form of reasoning belong essentially to our modern age, or would it instead have a considerably older lineage? And what might be the relation of that form of reasoning, whatever its lineage, to the Christian thinking that is often said to oppose it? In the present volume, these and related questions are addressed by a distinguished group of scholars working primarily within the Roman (...) Catholic theological tradition and from the perspectives of Continental philosophy. As a whole, the volume constitutes a conversation among thinkers who agree in their concerns but not necessarily their conclusions. Taken individually, each essay concentrates on a range of historical developments with close attention to their intellectual and sometimes pedagogical implications. Secular reason, they argue, is neither the antipode of Christian thought nor a stable and well-resolved component of it. Christian thinking may engage with secular reason as the site of profound difficulties, but on occasion will also learn from it as a source of new insight. _Christianity and Secular Reason_ contributes to the contemporary discussion of secularity prompted especially by Charles Taylor’s book _A Secular Age_. Unlike Taylor's work, however, this collection concentrates specifically on secular _reason_ and explicitly on its relation to Christianity. In this sense, it is closer to Michael J. Buckley’s _At the Origins of Modern Atheism_ or, to a lesser degree, Louis Dupré’s _Passage to Modernity_, which concern themselves with broad cultural developments. "This volume offers a variety of perspectives, some historical, some normative/constructive, on the questions of the relations between politics/culture/religion and the relations between selfhood/humanity/world. The essays are, without exception, of high quality in both scholarly-exegetical terms, and constructive-normative ones. The writers are learned, sometimes witty, and often interesting." —_Paul Griffiths, Duke Divinity School _ "This is no other volume I know of that covers just this ground. There is a substantial literature on, for example, the Habermas/Ratzinger exhange, and on Kant's view of the relation between philosophy and religion, and on the twelfth century background for thirteenth century reflection on this relation. The merit of _Christianity and Secular Reason_ is that it holds these threads together, and others besides, in a new and fruitful way." —_John E. Hare, Yale University_. (shrink)

Mitochondria are essential subcellular organelles containing an extranuclear genome (mtDNA). Mutations in mtDNA have recently been identified as causing a variety of human hereditary diseases. In most of these cases, the tissues of the affected individual contain a mixture of mutant and normal mtDNA, with this ratio determining the severity of symptoms. Stochastic factors alone have generally been believed to determine this ratio. Jenuth et al.(1), however, examining mice that contain a mixture of mtDNA types, show evidence of strong selective (...) forces at work in favoring one mtDNA variant over another in some tissues. (shrink)