We develop a modified system of standard logic, Augmented Standard Logic (ASL), and we employ ASL in an effort to show that, contrary to prevailing opinion, both Aristotle and Diodorus presented impressive arguments, having valid structures and highly plausible premisses, in their famous fatalism debate. We argue that ASL, which contains standard logic and a full system of modal and temporal logic emanating from a modicum of primitives, should not only enable one to appreciate the sophisticated philosophizing which characterized this (...) ancient debate, but should prove to be quite useful in application to contemporary issues. (shrink)

The essays in this book, by a variety of leading Augustine scholars, examine not only Augustine's multifaceted philosophy and its relation to his epoch-making theology, but also his practice as a philosopher, as well as his relation to other philosophers both before and after him. Thus the collection shows that Augustine's philosophy remains an influence and a provocation in a wide variety of settings today.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reflections on Academic ReflectionJohn D. Copenhaver Jr.Contemplative pedagogy deserves both the careful scrutiny and the sustained exploration that the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies is uniquely well suited to provide. As higher education comes under increased pressure for accountability, we need to be able to explain clearly both the pedagogical value and academic integrity of these elements in our curriculum. Academics seeking to incorporate contemplative practices into their teaching need (...) to pay careful attention to their institutional setting. While people in all types of higher education may share certain values (e.g., free inquiry, critical thinking, intellectual rigor, clear reasoning), different institutional settings offer different kinds of opportunities and challenges. Shenandoah University, where I teach, is one of five private universities in Virginia related to the United Methodist Church (UMC). All these schools acknowledge the relationship, but some seem rather embarrassed by it. For us it is a warm embrace.In its mission statement, our university characterizes the relationship this way: “As an institution affiliated with the United Methodist Church, Shenandoah University practices the highest ethical standards in its interactions with the community and with students of other faiths.”1 While the university is clear about its church affiliation, the phrase “highest ethical standards in its interaction with students of other faiths” indicates the kind of mutual respect and understanding that characterize pluralism. Among its core values are “respect for diverse cultures, experiences, and perspectives” and “dedication to global outreach.”2 Dedication to “global outreach” sounds like window dressing, but it is genuine. With its Global Citizenship Project, the university funds all expenses for fifty-five students each year to travel to one of five countries over spring break for cultural immersion. This mission statement and our core values make it much easier to root our religious studies curriculum in an atmosphere of religious pluralism than one might expect at a church-related university.Our Department of Religion recognizes two purposes for religious studies. The first is to offer an array courses to meet general education needs for moral reasoning and cross-cultural understanding. One of the department’s goals for general education religion courses is to promote interreligious and multicultural understanding. Another is to serve the church by offering a program to train students for religious leadership roles, called the JustFaith Christian Leadership Program. It is designed to integrate theological education and spiritual formation that promotes social justice. [End Page 41] In the department’s view, this commitment to justice is consistent with our Wesleyan heritage, but is often neglected in churches and rare in higher education. Although our religion major requirements reflect the university’s Christian heritage, we do require a course in world religions and one course in a religious tradition other than Christianity.This institutional setting invites me to teach in very different ways. Of the eight courses I teach over a two-year rotation, two take a philosophical approach, two take a phenomenological approach without any contemplative practices, and two blend the phenomenological approach with contemplative practices.3 The other two I teach “from the inside,” as a Christian ordained in the United Methodist Church. I present my own experience and convictions as part of that tradition, and the course emphasizes religious practices such as fasting, prayer, meditation, contemplative prayer, and/or periods of solitude. This confessional approach would not be possible at a state university, but I think students should have this option at church-related schools. The delicate issue is that most students do not come to our university because of its religious heritage. Our students are much like their counterparts at state universities, and often register for courses on the basis of what fits their academic schedules rather than any particular interest in or affinity for the topic. For this reason, we try to be as clear as possible in course descriptions about the various contents and approaches of our courses. Still, that does not prevent a poorly advised agnostic or atheist from registering occasionally for my course on Christian spirituality. On the first day of class I discuss the confessional nature of the course and the spiritual exercises students will be expected to do. I do not screen anyone... (shrink)

This study was a preliminary exploration of the value changes taking place in the United States since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York, which was a significant emotional event or cultural upheaval. Rokeach told us that "a person's total value system may undergo change as a result of socialization, therapy, or cultural upheaval..." (Rokeach, The Nature of Human Values, 1973, p. 37). The researchers explored the value changes of 500 aviation industry employees (...) before the attack and 500 after the attack. The statistically significant research results showed a total of twenty-seven of thirty-six values changed. Before the attack respondents valued much higher self-esteem and self-actualization values like A Sense of Accomplishment and Self-Respect. After the attack respondents placed a much higher value importance on survival, safety and security values like A World at Peace, Freedom, Family Security, National Security, Mature Love, Salvation, and True Friendship. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: The Insanity Defense and the Trial of John W. Hinckley, Jr. By Lincoln Caplan.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dieu comme soi-même: connaissance de soi et connaissance de Dieu selon Thomas d’Aquin: l’herméneutique d’Ambroise Gardeil by Camille de BelloyThomas M. Osborne Jr.Dieu comme soi-même: connaissance de soi et connaissance de Dieu selon Thomas d’Aquin: l’herméneutique d’Ambroise Gardeil. By Camille de Belloy, O.P. Paris: Vrin, 2014. Pp. 297. €32.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-2-7116-2605-2.This book is a discussion of La Structure de l’âme et l’expérience mystique (1927) by Ambroise Gardeil (...) (1859–1931). In this two-volume work of mystical theology, Gardeil explains the material cause of the experiential knowledge that comes from the gift of wisdom, which is one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. La Structure is the third book in a trilogy that focuses on the supernatural knowledge of God, beginning with apologetics in La Crédibilité et l’apologétique (1st ed. 1908), and continuing with the nature of revelation in Le Donné révélé et la théologie (1st ed. 1910). In La Structure, Gardeil develops the thesis that there is an analogy between experiential self-knowledge and the mystical experiential knowledge of God. In the course of his inquiry, Gardeil touches upon philosophical and theological problems concerning self-knowledge, intentionality, the structure of the mind (mens), God’s indwelling in the souls of the just, and the relationship between faith and the gift of wisdom. De Belloy’s new volume is on Gardeil’s presentation of this analogy and its reception by his contemporaries.De Belloy considers largely the issues that surround self-knowledge, the structure of the soul, and mystical experience. He draws together material from Gardeil’s own sources, Gardeil’s contemporaries, and subsequent Thomistic scholarship. He sheds light on the issues themselves, the historical context, and different hermeneutical strategies in Thomism. According to De Belloy, this twentieth-century Thomistic and largely Dominican discussion is important for contemporary philosophers and theologians. To shed light on the context, De Belloy considers a lengthy three-part “Examen de conscience” in Revue Thomiste (1928–29), in which Gardeil responded to published and unpublished comments by his fellow Dominicans Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange (a former student), Marie-Dominique Roland-Gosselin (Le Saulchoir), and Albino González Menéndez-Reigada, as well as a young student, Jean Daujat. De Belloy remarks that Maritain’s discussion of Gardeil in The Degrees of Knowledge to some extent attempts to harmonize the substance of Gardeil’s work with Garrigou-Lagrange’s critical comments. De Belloy emphasizes the interaction between Gardeil and Roland-Gosselin, and at the end of his volume, includes their previously unpublished correspondence.Although De Belloy often notes the difficulty of reading Gardeil’s neo-Scholastic prose, it seems to me that the non-native French reader will find Gardeil more accessible than De Belloy, especially when the latter draws on writers such as Henri Bergson and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Moreover, De Belloy’s discussion is easier to follow if one has already read and is familiar with the four parts of Gardeil’s La Structure. In part 1, Gardeil addresses the structure of mind or spirit (mens), and in particular considers Augustine’s [End Page 472] three main, threefold divisions of the soul in De Trinitate (mens, notitia, amor; memoria [sui], intelligentia, voluntas; memoria [Dei], intelligentia, amor) and Aquinas’s own interpretation and appropriation of these divisions. In part 2, Gardeil describes the way in which sanctifying grace, a created quality that is distinct from the infused virtues, causes the soul’s conformity to God’s essence. In part 3, he discusses God’s presence within the souls of the just and agrees with previous Thomists that God is especially present to the just as an object of faith and love. In part 4, he applies the previous discussion to the structure of mystical knowledge. This last part is the culmination of the entire work, as it addresses the analogy between self-knowledge and the knowledge of God that was defended by earlier Dominican Thomists such as John of St. Thomas (1589–1644) and Thomas de Vallgornera (c. 1595–1665).Part... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reach Without Grasping: A Retrospective Appreciation of Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet LOUIS A. RUPRECHT JR. Everything I know about love and its necessities I learned in that one moment when I found myself thrusting my little burning red backside like a baboon at a man who no longer cherished me. There was no area of my mind not appalled by this action, no part of my body that (...) could have done otherwise. But to talk of mind and body begs the question. Soul is the place, stretched like a surface of millstone grit between body and mind, where such necessity grinds itself out. Soul is what I kept watch on all that night. —Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay” (1995) It is always tricky, the question of whether to read an author’s work in light of his life or not. —Anne Carson, The Albertine Workout, no. 56 (2014) anne carson (b. June 21, 1950, in Toronto, Canada) is one of the most versatile of contemporary writers in the English language who have drawn deeply from the Classical well. She has achieved a unique place in the realm of North American letters, and much deserved recognition in the past twenty years: she was awarded the Lannan Literary Award in 1996; the Pushcart Prize in 1997; a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998; the MacArthur Foundation arion 27.2 fall 2019 “genius grant” in 2000; the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001 (the first woman to be so recognized); the T. S. Eliot Prize also in 2001; the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation in 2010; and a second Griffin Poetry Prize in 2014 (the only person ever to receive this award twice). in 2018, she was an Inga Maren Otto Fellow at the Watermill Center in Watermill, New York, on leave from a Creative Writing position at New York University. Trained as a classicist—she received her Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Toronto in 1981, and an Honorary Degree in 2012—but better known as an accomplished poet and translator, Carson burst on the scene in 1986 with the publication of her first and most philosophical work, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay.1 What this book announced most clearly, in addition to Carson’s complex identity as a poet-and-classicist-and-philosopher-in-one, was her unique ability to work against the expectations and across the loose boundaries which define a genre, and thus to create new genres along the way. In this essay, I would like to offer a retrospective appreciation of Carson’s first book, published (it is scarcely believable to note) more than thirty years ago. There are historical precedents to her achievement in this text, as I hope to show, but her authorial voice is altogether unique, and the reach of her influence has been long. ❖ on rare occasion, a first book may give us a telling glimpse into everything that will follow. Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet is such a first book. What the book does best is to announce itself, and its author, as the bearer of unconventional news, reported in an unconventional manner, all of it expressed in uncommonly luminous prose. It is a book that refuses to be categorized, a book that refuses genre— strangely enough, virtually by creating one. And along the way of creating—that is, of poeticizing—in its singular way, this book generates new desires all its own. There is a history to such literary and generic non-conformity. 138 reach without grasping When Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was invited to take up a professorship at the astonishing age of 24, without even having produced his dissertation yet, the expectations surrounding his first book were elevated, to say the least. Well aware of this, aware too of having been described by his mentor as “the future of Classics in Germany,” Nietzsche published The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music in 1872.2 He was still just 26 years old, and very few classicists knew what to make of it; even his mentor regretted the rashness of the thing. Meaner spirits mockingly called it a work of “future-philology!” suggesting that... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:F. H. Bradley and the Working-out of Absolute Idealism* JOHN HERMAN RANDALL, JR. FRANCIS HERBERTBRADLEY (1846-1924) 1 agreed with the other English idealists that the real world is the experienced world. But he started with the fundamental conviction that "experience" is more than "thought," as Green had maintained. Bradley's basic drive is the refusal to abolish "feeling" in favor of knowledge and intelligibility. "Feeling" is a fundamental and (...) ineradicable aspect of "reality"m more fundamental, in fact, than thinking. In the immediately experienced world, all intelligible distinctions and relations are merged in a "whole of feeling" which is the ultimate subject-matter of philosophy. "Thought" arises out of feeling, out of "immediacy," as an interpretation of immediate experience by distinguishing relations and aspects in it. "Knowledge " is only one aspect of the experienced world; it needs blending with "feeling" and will to include all the experienced aspects. "Feeling" starts for Bradley, in his Principles of Logic (1883), in pretty much the empiricist sense, as isolated sensations, and as subjective (in flavor at least). It then becomes neutral: "feeling" is identified with "the felt"; and it grows richer, attempting to include the whole wealth of immediate experience. Thus Bradley gets very close to Dewey's conception of "direct experience," "non-reflective experience," without, however, Dewey's biological analysis. It is through this conception of experience that Bradley approaches the naturalism to which his thinking almost arrived at the end. Thought, that is, has a setting in experience " it is relational, and by its analysis it breaks up experienced and felt wholes. There is a double insistence in Bradley. On the one hand, reality is experienced, but is not adequately expressed in thought. On the other, reality/s accessible to knowledge. What has often been called Bradley's "skepticism" is really an objective relativism. Thought, logical structure, is not ultimate. In Appearance and *This study of F. It. Bradley is based on one of five chapters on post-ttegehan philosophical Ideahsm in Britain and America to be included in my forthcoming Career oJ Philosophy in Modem Times, Vol.III: The Hundred Years Since Darwin. ISee Bradley ed. of Mind, XXXIV (1925); A. E. Taylor, "F. H. Bradley"; J. H. Muirhead, "Bradley's Place in Philosophy." See also T. M. Forsyth, English Philosophy (London: 1910), chap. VII, 2rid part; Rudolf Kagey, F. H. Bradley's Logic (New York: 1931). The best philosophical analyses of Bradley are Robert D. Mack, The Appeal to Immediate Experience (New York: 1945),and Richard Wollheim,F. H. Bradley (Pelican Books, 1959). [245] 246 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Reality, he insists it is really self-contradictory; then later he emphasizes rather that it is always relative to its particular subiect-matter. The real, experienced world is never identical with the intelligible world, yet it is also never "extraneous " to it. The relation of the two can be said to be, in Aristotelian terms, that of substance to form, that of what is to its intelligible aspect. The intelligible world, the system of science and knowledge, thus fundamentally needs criticism in the light of its setting in the experienced world. This is not only the entire drive of Dewey's Experience and Nature; it is the expression of that whole current of thought on the Continent which began with the criticism of Hegel's "panlogism" in the 1840's and is today called "Existentialism." Bradley is the British counterpart of all those who have criticized philosophies of logical structure like T. H. Green's, or like the other contemporary forms of Neo-Kantianism in Germany and France. The "known world" is a world of relations distingflished in the richer "real world." These distinctions are ultimately relative to their particular setting, but in that setting they are valid enough. Bradley's celebrated doctrine of the "degrees of truth and reality" means that practically knowledge is "true"; any idea which fulfills its purpose of rendering some portion or aspect of experience intelligible and significant and meaningful, and which is not ousted by a better idea, Bradley is willing to say is "so far true." It is valid, in its own sphere and purpose, despite its ultimate inconsistency; the wave-theory... (shrink)

Contents: John A. HALL and Ian JARVIE: Preface. John A. HALL and Ian JARVIE: The Life and Times of Ernest Gellner. PART 1 INTELLECTUAL BACKGROUND. Ji_i MUSIL: The Prague Roots of Ernest Gellner's Thinking. Chris HANN: Gellner on Malinowski: Words and Things in Central Europe. Tamara DRAGADZE: Ernest Gellner in the Soviet East. PART 2 NATIONS AND NATIONALISM. Brendan O'LEARY: On the Nature of Nationalism: An Appraisal of Ernest Gellner's Writings on Nationalism. Kenneth MINOGUE: Ernest Gellner and the (...) Dangers of Theorising Nationalism. Anthony D. SMITH: History and Modernity: Reflection on the Theory of Nationalism. Michael MANN: The Emergence of Modern European Nationalism. Nicholas STARGARDT: Gellner's Nationalism: The Spirit of Modernisation? PART 3 PATTERNS OF DEVELOPMENT. Peter BURKE: Reflections on the History of Encyclopaedias. Alan MACFARLANE: Ernest Gellner and the Escape to Modernity. Ronald DORE: Sovereign Individuals. Shmuel EISENSTADT: Japan: Non-Axial Modernity. Marc FERRO: l'Indépendance Telescopée: De la Décolonisation a l'Impérialisme Multinational. PART 4 ISLAM. Abdellah HAMMOUDI: Segmentarity, Social Stratification, Political Power and Sainthood: Reflections on Gellner's Theses. Henry MUNSON, Jr.: Rethinking Gellner's Segmentary Analysis of Morocco's Ait cAtta. Jean BAECHLER: Sur le charisme. Charles LINDHOLM: Despotism and Democracy: State and Society in the Premodern Middle East. Henry MUNSON, Jr.: Muslim and Jew in Morocco: Reflections on the Distinction between Belief and Behavior. Talal ASAD: The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam. PART 5 SCIENCE AND DISENCHANTMENT. Perry ANDERSON: Science, Politics, Enchantment. Ralph SCHROEDER: From the Big Divide to the Rubber Cage: Gellner's Conception of Science and Technology. John DAVIS: Irrationality in Social Life. PART 6 RELATIVISM AND UNIVERSALS. John SKORUPSKI: The Post-Modern Hume: Ernest Gellner's 'Enlightenment Fundamentalism'. John WETTERSTEN: Ernest Gellner: A Wittgensteinian Rationalist. Ian JARVIE: Gellner's Positivism. Raymond BOUDON: Relativising Relativism: When Sociology Refutes the Sociology of Science. Rod AYA: The Devil in Social Anthropology; or, the Empiricist Exorcist; or, the Case Against Cultural Relativism. PART 7 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. William MCNEILL: A Swan Song for British Liberalism? Andrus PARK: Gellner and the Long Trends of History. Eero LOONE: Marx, Gellner, Power. Rosaire LANGLOIS: Coercion, Cognition and Production: Gellner's Challenge to Historical Materialism and Postmodernism. Ernest GELLNER: Reply to Critics. Ian JARVIE: Complete Bibliography of Gellner's Work. Name index. Subject index. (shrink)

A r anderson and n d belnap, Jr., Maintained in their 1962 article, "the pure calculus of entailment," that necessary propositions can be entailed only by necessary propositions, And not by contingent ones. Against this r w ashby offered an apparently conclusive counterexample in "entailment and modality" (1963). In support of anderson and belnap, The author of the present paper develops a definition of entailment and argues that contingent propositions never entail necessary ones. However, Psychological factors may intervene in our (...) logical perceptions to produce an appearance or illusion of entailment between a contingent and a necessary proposition. (staff). (shrink)