This 1989 second volume of Professor Williams' translation of al-Tabarī's account of the early 'Abbāsī empire focuses on the reigns of the son - al-Mahdī - and grandsons - al-Hadi and Hārūn al-Rashīd - of Caliph al-Mansūr, the subject of the first volume. This was the 'Golden Prime' of the empire, before the civil war between the sons of al-Rashīd and the movement of the capital away from Baghdad. Also considered is the story of the Persian aristocratic family, the Barmakis, (...) who became the real rulers under the indolent al-Rashīd, until he destroyed them in a rage which astonished his contemporaries. The events are narrated through the reminiscences of eyewitnesses, woven together by the great historiographer al-Tabarī. The translator of the volume is an Islamicist who has lived many years in the Arab world and has a rare knowledge of its culture and literature. (shrink)

Persia’s Imperial Power in Late Antiquity: The Great Wall of Gorgān and Frontier Landscapes of Sasanian Iran. By Eberhard W. Sauer; Hamid Omrani Rekavandi; Tony J. Wilkinson; and Jebrael Nokandeh. British Institute of Persian Studies Archaeological Monographs. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2013. Pp. xvi + 711, illus. $150. [Distributed by the David Brown Book Co., Oakville, CT.].

Controversies about optimality models and adaptationist methodologies have animated the discussions of evolutionary theory in recent years. The sociobiologists, following the lead of E. O. Wilson, have argued that if Darwinian natural selection can be reliably expected to produce the best possible type of organism - one that optimizes the value of its genetic contribution to future generations - then evolution becomes a powerfully predictive theory as well as an explanatory one. The enthusiastic claims of the sociobiologists for the predictability (...) and applicability that the optimalist approach engenders have been met with severe criticism by Richard C. Lewontin, Stephen Jay Gould, and other biologists and philosophers of biology. These original essays take up both sides of the controversy over the role of optimality models in evolutionary biology, providing a refreshingly insightful and balanced discussion of optimality issues by an interdisciplinary group of leading philosophers of biology, biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and an economist. They focus on the current state of adaptationist and optimalist methodology in evolutionary theory, and on the possibility of extending such methodology to the human sciences, especially those of psychology and anthropology. Introduction / John Dupre -- Part 1. Methodological questions. Simple models of complex phenomena: the case of cultural evolution / Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd -- Natural selection and the null hypothesis / John Beatty -- Why not the best? / Philip Kitcher -- Part 2. Evolution and optimality. What is adaptationism? / Elliot Sober -- How to model evolution / John Maynard Smith -- Comments on Maynard Smith’s "How to Model Evolution" / Elliot Sober -- Reply to Sober / John Maynard Smith -- The shape of optimality / Richard C. Lewontin -- Part 3. Applications. Evolutionary ecology and the optimality assumption / John M. Emlen -- Optimality theory and behavior / John E.R. Staddon -- Part 4. Applications to human behavior. Optimization theory in anthropology: applications and critiques / Eric Alden Smith -- Evolution of a mesh between principles of the mind and regularities of the world / Roger N. Shepard -- From evolution to behavior: evolutionary psychology as the missing link / Leda Cosmides and John Tooby -- On the emotions as guarantors of threats and promises / Jack Hirschleifer -- Human kinds / John Dupre. (shrink)

Hindu mystic, poet, teacher, Nobel prize winner, Rabindranath Tagore stands among the greatest of Asiatic poets of all time. William Butler Yeats says that this 19th century writer "like Chaucer's Forerunners, writes music for his words and (that he) is so abundant, so spontaneous, so daring in his passon, and so full of surprise". John Alden Carpenter, the noted American composer, has set several of these beautiful lyrics to music.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 117 of both. He is free to turn from things to their ideas, from objects to concepts. This turn is the soul's movement towards itself and the noetic. It is free from empirical reality; its reflections start from hypotheses making use of the sensible as symbol only. In this way it links the sensible to the intelligible and forces, so to speak, their relation to each other. (...) This type of life is conscious of itself as its own inner activity but it suffers from the dualities of its world and does not make the effort to transcend them. Thus it is "mixed," torn between good and bad and remains in time. To reach the "pure life" or consciousness of being, man has to abandon any relation to the sensible world. For man, as Plotinus says, participates in being, he is being. Real life is the life of the loges and of eternity and the noetic part of his soul reawakens his consciousness of these. When all "outer voices" are stilled, freed from the elements of perception, belief and reflection (dianoia), the soul follows the loges. In its ascent to Nous and the One dialectics is its helper and leads it to the insight that thought, life, and being are identical and that this identity is the lifegiving force to all else. The final aim and the highest experience of the soul is its union with the One. The means towards this are the soul's catharsis through the virtues, its fulfillment through science and knowledge, and its striving (eros) toward the beautiful and the Good. The wise man is the one who travels this, of necessity, solitary road. He alone has the strength and the will to turn all the powers of his soul into such intense noetic activity that what his soul once knew and forgot is restored to it in the vision of the identity of subject and object, of the beholder and what he beholds, of itself with the One. This is the mystic ecstasy, the unity of the human with the divine, which Plotinus describes as the "flight of the alone to the alone." It is life in truth and its highest bliss. Mr. Kostaras' look at the last of the great classical thinkers is a fruitful and refreshing one. By placing the concept of life at the center of Plotinus' thought, it seems to me, that he places man there also. All great philosophy starts from the life of man and after all its meanderings comes back to where it began. And since all systems are relative to certain purposes, is Plotinus' metaphysics a means towards helping man to find his true being? Is it a framework within which man is able to reach a degree of awareness undreamed of before in Greek philosophy, making it possible for him to experience the "eternal Now" within the succession of fleeting moments, to have an unclouded vision (theoria) of being in the midst of becoming, of the divine at the heart of the human? Once man has reached this experience, he is no longer in need of the metaphysical framework and the question of its objective validity becomes quite irrelevant. Mr. Kostaras does not commit himself to this view, but this reader wishes that he had. RIA STAVRIDES Temple Buell College Themes of Islamic Civilization. By John Alden Williams. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971. Pp. viii+382. $11.75) There are few published anthologies on Islamic civilization. Most of the available books on this topic are straightforward descriptive analyses of the intellectual development of Islam; the majority of these books tend to be repetitious in content. What is unique, however, about J. A. Williams' Themes of Islamic Civilization is the methodological approach adopted by the author. The editor has compiled for the reader a number of essays, drawn from various Islamic writings such as history, philosophy, 118 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY jurisprudence, ethics, poetry. Most of the compiled essays have been carefully edited and well translated from Arabic into English for the first time. Also included in this reader are the editor's numerous commentaries which help to shed much light... (shrink)

Contributors:Todd Alden, Lisa Anne Auerbach, Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, David Brown, Gilles Deleuze, Craig Ellwood, Bob Flanagan, Michel Foucault, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Mike Kelley, Joseph Kosuth, Chris Kraus, Julia Kristeva, Don Kubly, Sylvère Lotringer, Deran Ludd, John Miller, Eileen Myles, Darcy Jo Paley, Ann Rower, Sue Spaid, Frances Stark, Mark Stritzel, James Tyler.

Sir John Eccles, a distinguished scientist and Nobel Prize winner who has devoted his scientific life to the study of the mammalian brain, tells the story of how we came to be, not only as animals at the end of the hominid evolutionary line, but also as human persons possessed of reflective consciousness.

In a world plagued by disagreement and conflict one might expect that the exact sciences of logic and mathematics would provide a safe harbor. In fact these disciplines are rife with internal divisions between different, often incompatible, systems. Do these disagreements admit of resolution? Can such resolution be achieved without disturbing assumptions that the theorems of logic and mathematics state objective truths about the real world? In this original and historically rich book John Woods explores apparently intractable disagreements in (...) logic and the foundations of mathematics and sets out conflict resolution strategies that evade or disarm these stalemates. An important sub-theme of the book is the extent to which pluralism in logic and the philosophy of mathematics undermines realist assumptions. This book makes an important contribution to such areas of philosophy as logic, philosophy of language and argumentation theory. It will also be of interest to mathematicians and computer scientists. (shrink)

John Coggon argues that the important question for analysts in the fields of public health law and ethics is 'what makes health public?' He offers a conceptual and analytic scrutiny of the salient issues raised by this question, outlines the concepts entailed in, or denoted by, the term 'public health' and argues why and how normative analyses in public health are inquiries in political theory. The arguments expose and explain the political claims inherent in key works in public health (...) ethics. Coggon then develops and defends a particular understanding of political liberalism, describing its implications for critical study of public health policies and practices. Covering important works from legal, moral, and political theory, public health, public health law and ethics, and bioethics, this is a foundational text for scholars, practitioners and policy bodies interested in freedoms, rights and responsibilities relating to health. (shrink)

Several psychological experiments have suggested that concepts can influence perceived color (e.g., Delk and Fillenbaum in Am J Psychol 78(2):290–293, 1965, Hansen et al. in Nat Neurosci 9(11):1367–1368, 2006, Olkkonen et al. in J Vis 8(5):1–16, 2008). Observers tend to assign typical colors to objects even when the objects do not have those colors. Recently, these findings were used to argue that perceptual experience is cognitively penetrable (Macpherson 2012). This interpretation of the experiments has far-reaching consequences: it implies that the (...) way we think of objects determines how we see them, thus threatening the role of perception in justifying beliefs. In this paper, I show that the psychological findings can be accounted for without admitting cognitive penetrability. An underestimated but key feature of the experiments is that observers had to judge colors in borderline cases, in conditions of reduced acuity, or on the basis of color-concepts instead of matching. Such judgments are sensitive to the form of bias that Tversky and Kahneman (Science 185:1124–1131, 1974) have termed ‘anchoring’. Adopting a suggestion from Raffman (Philos Rev 103(1):41–74, 1994), I argue that the way subjects in the experiments think of the objects could affect their color judgments without altering their color experiences. (shrink)

_A major theoretical statement by a distinguished political scholar explains why a policy of liberal hegemony is doomed to fail_ In this major statement, the renowned international-relations scholar John Mearsheimer argues that liberal hegemony, the foreign policy pursued by the United States since the Cold War ended, is doomed to fail. It makes far more sense, he maintains, for Washington to adopt a more restrained foreign policy based on a sound understanding of how nationalism and realism constrain great powers (...) abroad. It is widely believed in the West that the United States should spread liberal democracy across the world, foster an open international economy, and build institutions. This policy of remaking the world in America’s image is supposed to protect human rights, promote peace, and make the world safe for democracy. But this is not what has happened. Instead, the United States has ended up as a highly militarized state fighting wars that undermine peace, harm human rights, and threaten liberal values at home. Mearsheimer tells us why this has happened. (shrink)

This book, first published in 1990, takes a critical look at the major assumptions which support critical thinking programs and discovers many unresolved questions which threaten their viability. John McPeck argues that some of these assumptions are incoherent or run counter to common sense, while others are unsupported by the available empirical evidence. This title will be of interest to students of the philosophy of education.

Kant -- drawing on his eighteenth-century predecessors -- provided a discerning and powerful characterization of what biologists had to explain in organic form. His difference from the rest is that he opined that was impossible to explain it. Its ’inscrutability’ was intrinsic. The third ’Critique’ essentially proposed the reduction of biology to a kind of prescientific descriptivism, doomed never to attain authentic scientificity. By contrast, for Locke, and ’a fortiori’ for Buffon and his followers, ’intrinsic purposiveness’ was a fact of (...) the matter about concrete biological phenomena; the features of internal self-regulation were hypotheses arising out of actual research practice. The difference comes most vividly to light once we recognize Kant’s distinction of the concept of organism from the concept of life. (edited). (shrink)

John Rist surveys the history of ethics from Plato to the present and offers a vigorous defence of an ethical theory based on a revised version of Platonic realism. In a wide-ranging discussion he examines well-known alternatives to Platonism, in particular Epicurus, Hobbes, Hume and Kant as well as contemporary 'practical reasoners', and argues that most post-Enlightenment theories of morality depend on an abandoned Christian metaphysic and are unintelligible without such grounding. He also argues that contemporary choice-based theories, whether (...) they take a strictly ethical or more obviously political form, are ultimately arbitrary in nature. His lively and accessible 2001 study is informed by a powerful sense of philosophical history, and will be of interest to both students and scholars of ethics. (shrink)

The great biologist Louis Pasteur suppressed 'awkward' data because it didn't support the case he was making. John Snow, the 'first epidemiologist' was doing nothing others had not done before. Gregor Mendel, the supposed 'founder of genetics' never grasped the fundamental principles of 'Mendelian' genetics. Joseph Lister's famously clean hospital wards were actually notorious dirty. And Einstein's general relativity was only 'confirmed' in 1919 because an eminent British scientist cooked his figures. These are just some of the revelations explored (...) in this book. Drawing on current history of science scholarship, Fabulous Science shows that many of our greatest heroes of science were less than honest about their experimental data and not above using friends in high places to help get their ideas accepted. It also reveals that the alleged revolutionaries of the history of science were often nothing of the sort. Prodigiously able they may have been, but the epithet of the 'man before his time' usually obscures vital contributions made their unsung contemporaries and the intrinsic merits of ideas they overturned. These distortions of the historical record mostly arise from our tendency to read the present back into the past. But in many cases, scientists owe their immortality to a combination of astonishing effrontery and their skills as self-promoters. (shrink)

Nowadays, science is treated an instrument of policy, serving the material interests of government and commerce. Traditionally, however, it also has important non-instrumental social functions, such as the creation of critical scenarios and world pictures, the stimulation of rational attitudes, and the production of enlightened practitioners and independent experts. The transition from academic to ‘post-academic’ science threatens the performance of these functions, which are inconsistent with strictly instrumental modes of knowledge production. In particular, expert objectivity is negated by entanglement with (...) political and commercial interests. We cannot go back to the old academic model for science, but need to consider how to maintain its vital non-instrumental roles. (shrink)

A passage on the origin of property in Grotius, De iure praedae , pp. 226-230 [Note 1] seems to contain echoes of the controversy between pope John XXII and William of Ockham on Franciscan poverty. Grotius's note (b) on p. 227 refers to the decretals..

Discussing the relations between logic and probability, this book compares classical 17th- and 18th-century theories of probability with contemporary theories, explores recent logical theories of probability, and offers a new account of probability as a part of logic.

The Human Condition is a response to the growing disenchantment in the Western world with contemporary life. John Kekes provides rationally justified answers to questions about the meaning of life, the basis of morality, the contingencies of human lives, the prevalence of evil, the nature and extent of human responsibility, and the sources of values we prize. He offers a realistic view of the human condition that rejects both facile optimism and gloomy pessimism; acknowledges that we are vulnerable to (...) contingencies we cannot fully control; defends a humanistic understanding of our condition; recognizes that the values worth pursuing are plural, often conflicting, and that there are many reasonable conceptions of well-being. Kekes emphasizes the importance of facing the fact that man's inhumanity to man is widespread. He rejects as simple-minded both the view that human nature is basically good and that it is basically bad, and argues that our well-being depends on coping with the complex truth that human nature is basically complicated. Finally, Kekes argues that the scheme of things is indifferent to our fortunes and that we can rely only on our own resources to make what we can of our lives. (shrink)

The presence of a kinship link between nuclear families is the strongest predictor of interhousehold sharing in an indigenous, predominantly Dolgan food-sharing network in northern Russia. Attributes such as the summed number of hunters in paired households also account for much of the variation in sharing between nuclear families. Differences in the number of hunters in partner households, as well as proximity and producer/consumer ratios of households, were investigated with regard to cost-benefit models. The subset of households involved in reciprocal (...) meal sharing is 26 of 84 household host-guest pairs. The frequency of reciprocal meal sharing between families in this subset is positively correlated with average household relatedness. The evolution of cooperation through clustering may illuminate the relationship between kinship and reciprocity at this most intimate level of food sharing. (shrink)

Research scientists are trained to produce specialised bricks of knowledge, but not to look at the whole building. Increasing public concern about the social role of science is forcing science students to think about what they are actually learning to do. What sort of knowledge will they be producing, and how will it be used? Science education now requires serious consideration of these philosophical and ethical questions. But the many different forms of knowledge produced by modern science cannot be covered (...) by any single philosophical principle. Sociology and cognitive psychology are also needed to understand what the sciences have in common and the significance of what they generate. Again, traditional modes of ethical analysis cannot deal adequately with the values, norms and interests activated by present-day technoscience without reference to its sociological, political and economic dimensions. (shrink)

This volume of the collected writings of John Sallis presents his lecture courses on Immanuel Kant. Each course takes up one of Kant's three Critiques, and thus the text as a whole treats the entirety of the Kantian critical project. Sallis displays here, as he does in all of his lecture courses, an uncanny ability to open up dense philosophical texts. Sallis patiently and successfully lays out the issues-theoretical, practical, aesthetic, and philosophical-and his critical approach to them. For students (...) and seasoned scholars who require a step-by-step interpretation of Kant, these texts by Sallis are attuned to the spirit, structure, and principle of these foundational works. (shrink)

It is based on extensive use of the twelve volumes of Ortega's Obras completas, the eighty microfilm reels of his archive in the Library of Congress, and his private library of fifteen hundred volumes in Madrid.

To define and explore contemporary philosophical critiques of Christian belief is the purpose of this book, which arises out of a conference held at Princeton Theological Seminary. In a frank and extensive confrontation, outstanding philosophers and theologians met to search for greater clarity on some important issues in the philosophy of religion. The book contains the papers written for the conference, the prepared criticism, and excerpts from the debates. The discussions revolved around the experiential grounds of religious belief; the question (...) as to what conclusions may legitimately be drawn from religious experience; the "emptiness" or otherwise of Christian belief and ethic in the modern world; the Freudian explanation of faith; and the Barthian defense of Christianity. (shrink)

In Faithful Reason, the noted Catholic philosopher John Haldane explores various aspects of intellectual and practical life from a perspective inspired by Catholic thought and informed by his distinctive philosophical approach: "Analytical Thomism." Haldane's discussions of ethics, politics, education, art, social philosophy and other themes explain why Catholic thought is still relevant in today's world, and show how the legacy of Thomas Aquinas can benefit modern philosophy in its efforts to answer fundamental questions about humanity and its place within (...) nature. Drawing on a Catholic philosophical tradition that is committed to concepts of the world's intrinsic intelligibility and the objectivity of truth, Faithful Reason's bold and insightful perspectives provide rich matter for debate, and food for further thought. (shrink)

Charles S. Peirce, William James, Josiah Royce, George Santayana, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead: each of these individuals is an original and historically important thinker; each is an essential contributor to the period, perspective, and tradition of classical American philosophy; and each speaks directly, imaginatively, critically, and wisely to our contemporary global society, its distant possibilities for improvement, and its massive, pressing problems. From the initiative of pragmatism in approximately 1870 to Dewey's final work after World War II, (...) classical American philosophy has come to represent the critical articulation of attitudes, outlooks, and forms of life imbedded in the culture from which it arose. John Stuhr brings together the works of these foremost thinkers to present a comprehensive collection in American philosophy. Extensive introductory essays, written especially for this volume by leading scholars of the subject, provide not only the bibliographical and cultural contexts necessary to a full appreciation of each thinker, but also original critical and interpretive philosophical observations. (shrink)

This essay is an attempt to sketch the evolution of type theory from its beginnings early in the last century to the present day. Central to the development of the type concept has been its close relationship with set theory to begin with and later its even more intimate relationship with category theory. Since it is effectively impossible to describe these relationships (especially in regard to the latter) with any pretensions to completeness within the space of a comparatively short article, (...) I have elected to offer detailed technical presentations of just a few important instances. (shrink)

Does strolling through an art museum, admiring the old masters, improve us morally and spiritually? Would government subsidies of "high art" (such as big-city opera houses) be better spent on local community art projects? In What Good are the Arts? John Carey--one of Britain's most respected literary critics--offers a delightfully skeptical look at the nature of art. In particular, he cuts through the cant surrounding the fine arts, debunking claims that the arts make us better people or that judgements (...) about art are anything more than personal opinion. Indeed, Carey argues that there are no absolute values in the arts and that we cannot call other people's aesthetic choices "mistaken" or "incorrect," however much we dislike them. Along the way, Carey reveals the flaws in the aesthetic theories of everyone from Emanuel Kant to Arthur C. Danto, and he skewers the claims of "high-art advocates" such as Jeannette Winterson. But Carey does argue strongly for the value of art as an activity and for the superiority of one art in particular: literature. Literature, he contends, is the only art capable of reasoning, and the only art that can criticize. Language is the medium that we use to convey ideas, and the usual ingredients of other arts--objects, noises, light effects--cannot replicate this function. Literature has the ability to inspire the mind and the heart towards practical ends far better than any work of conceptual art. Here then is a lively and stimulating invitation to debate the value of art, a provocative book that will pique the interest of anyone who loves painting, music, or literature. (shrink)