Like most topics in aesthetics, that of genre is far from simple and for the literary critic has an uninviting air. The questions which arise from its consideration fall under two heads: first, what is a genre? and second, what does it contribute to our understanding of a work of art that we can describe it as belonging to this or that genre? A clear answer to either of these questions is not readily forthcoming: the literary critic who is content (...) to be a critic here very properly hesitates where the philosopher is perhaps inclined to go further. If he does so he will find that the two primary questions about genre have many ramifications, some of which may be suggested by a quotation from René Wellek and Austin Warren's book, Theory of Literature . They ask one question about genre and then re-phrase it: but as they re-phrase their original question it is quite transformed. (shrink)

This article explores the role that ‘habit’ played in discourses on crime in the 18th century, a subject which forms an important part of the history of ‘the social’. It seeks to bridge the division between ‘liberal’ positions which see crime as a product of social circumstance, and the conservative position which stresses the role of will and individual responsibility, by drawing attention to the role habit played in uniting these conceptions in the 18th century. It argues that the Lockean (...) idea that the mind was a tabula rasa, and that the character was thereby formed through impression and habit, was used as a device to explain the ways in which certain individuals rather than others happened to fall into a life of crime, a temptation to which all were susceptible. This allowed commentators to define individuals as responsible for their actions, while accepting the significance of environmental factors in their transgressions. Further, the notion that the character was formed through habit enabled reformers to promote the idea that crime could be combated through mechanisms of prevention and reformation, which both targeted the individual criminal and sought more generally to reduce the likelihood of crime. (shrink)

Do free will beliefs influence moral judgments? Answers to this question from theoretical and empirical perspectives are controversial. This study attempted to replicate past research and offer theoretical insights by analyzing World Values Survey data from residents of 46 countries (n = 65,111 persons). Corroborating experimental findings, free will beliefs predicted intolerance of unethical behaviors and support for severe criminal punishment. Further, the link between free will beliefs and intolerance of unethical behavior was moderated by variations in countries’ institutional integrity, (...) defined as the degree to which countries had accountable, corruption-free public sectors. Free will beliefs predicted intolerance of unethical behaviors for residents of countries with high and moderate institutional integrity, but this correlation was not seen for countries with low institutional integrity. Free will beliefs predicted support for criminal punishment regardless of countries’ institutional integrity. Results were robust across different operationalizations of institutional integrity and with or without statistical control variables. (shrink)

Earlier in this century, many philosophers of science (for example, Rudolf Carnap) drew a fairly sharp distinction between theory and observation, between theoretical terms like 'mass' and 'electron', and observation terms like 'measures three meters in length' and 'is _2° Celsius'. By simply looking at our instruments we can ascertain what numbers our measurements yield. Creatures like mass are different: we determine mass by calculation; we never directly observe a mass. Nor an electron: this term is introduced in order to (...) explain what we observe. This (once standard) distinction between theory and observation was eventually found to be wanting. First, if the distinction holds, it is difficult to see what can characterize the relationship between theory :md observation. How can theoretical terms explain that which is itself in no way theorized? The second point leads out of the first: are not the instruments that provide us with observational material themselves creatures of theory? Is it really possible to have an observation language that is entirely barren of theory? The theory-Iadenness of observation languages is now an accept ed feature of the logic of science. Many regard such dependence of observation on theory as a virtue. If our instruments of observation do not derive their meaning from theories, whence comes that meaning? Surely - in science - we have nothing else but theories to tell us what to try to observe. (shrink)

Shakespeare's Coriolanus is one of the most brilliant political plays ever written. Despite its ancient Roman setting, it remains a perennially relevant study of the relationship between personality and politics. The Introduction to this new edition illuminates its relevance to Shakespeare'sown time and to later ages while also emphasizing the wide range of interpretations that are possible in performance.

Online supplement, "Mulsow: Additions to Notes drawn from the 2002 edition of Moderne aus dem Untergrund" full versions of nearly 300 notes that were truncated in the print edition. Hosted on H. C. Erik Midelfort's website. Martin Mulsow's seismic reinterpretation of the origins of the Enlightenment in Germany won awards and renown in its original German edition, and now H. C. Erik Midelfort's translation makes this sensational book available to English-speaking readers. In Enlightenment Underground, Mulsow shows that even in (...) the late seventeenth century some thinkers in Germany ventured to express extremely dangerous ideas, but did so as part of a secret underground. Scouring manuscript collections across northern Europe, Mulsow studied the writings of countless hitherto unknown radical jurists, theologians, historians, and dissident students who pushed for the secularization of legal, political, social, and religious knowledge. Often their works circulated in manuscript, anonymously, or as clandestinely published books. Working as a philosophical microhistorian, Mulsow has discovered the identities of several covert radicals and linked them to circles of young German scholars, many of whom were connected with the vibrant radical cultures of the Netherlands, England, and Denmark. The author reveals how radical ideas and contributions to intellectual doubt came from Socinians and Jews, church historians and biblical scholars, political theorists, and unemployed university students. He shows that misreadings of humorous or ironic works sometimes gave rise to unintended skeptical thoughts or corrosively political interpretations of Christianity. This landmark book overturns stereotypical views of the early Enlightenment in Germany as cautious, conservative, and moderate, and replaces them with a new portrait that reveals a movement far more radical, unintended, and puzzling than previously suspected. (shrink)

Prekäres Wissen handelt nicht von den großen Themen der Metaphysik und Epistemologie, sondern von Randzonen wie der Magie und der Numismatik, der Bibelinterpretation und der Orientalistik. Es geht nicht nur um Theorien, sondern auch um Furcht und Faszination, nicht um die großen Forschergestalten, sondern um vergessene und halbvergessene Gelehrte. Es ist ein Buch voller spannender Geschichten, eine andere Ideengeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit und zugleich der ambitionierte Versuch, den Begriff des Wissens selbst im Zeichen des" material turn", des" iconic turn"und der (...) Kommunikations- und Informationsgeschichte neu zu denken. (shrink)

In [6] Messmer and Wood proved quantifier elimination for separably closed fields of finite Ershov invariant e equipped with a (certain) Hasse derivation. We propose a variant of their theory, using a sequence of e commuting Hasse derivations. In contrast to [6] our Hasse derivations are iterative.

We give modest upper bounds for consistency strengths for two well-studied combinatorial principles. These bounds range at the level of subcompact cardinals, which is significantly below a κ+-supercompact cardinal. All previously known upper bounds on these principles ranged at the level of some degree of supercompactness. We show that by using any of the standard modified Prikry forcings it is possible to turn a measurable subcompact cardinal into ℵω and make the principle □ℵω,<ω fail in the generic extension. We also (...) show that by using Lévy collapse followed by standard iterated club shooting it is possible to turn a subcompact cardinal into ℵ2 and arrange in the generic extension that simultaneous reflection holds at ℵ2, and at the same time, every stationary subset of ℵ3 concentrating on points of cofinality ω has a reflection point of cofinality ω1. (shrink)

Abstract: Several critics of contextualism claim that this view cannot consistently maintain its advertised neutrality between skepticism and anti-skepticism. Some critics contend that contextualists are forced to side with the skeptic, since any defense of contextualism unavoidably puts in place the skeptic's high requirements for knowledge; others hold that the contextualists' claim to have knowledge of what their own view entails forces them to reject the skeptic's knowledge denial. I show that these arguments misconstrue the role of context in contextualism, (...) and explain how we are to understand the contextualist's proposed agreement with both the skeptic's knowledge denial and the anti-skeptic's knowledge attribution. (shrink)

English summary: The question of how to determine the relationship between faith and knowledge is still one of the key questions in theology as well as in the philosophy of religion. Martin Schmuck suggests an answer to this question by illustrating Charles Sanders Peirce's philosophy of religion, which is based upon experience, common sense and pragmatism, in the sense of a strong interdependency of the religious and the scientific approach to one single reality. German description: Die Frage nach der (...) Bestimmung des Verhaltnisses von Glaube und Wissen gehort noch immer zu den zentralen Fragen der Theologie und Religionsphilosophie. Auf diese Frage gibt Martin Schmuck eine Antwort, indem er die auf Erfahrung, common sense und Pragmatismus aufbauende Religionsphilosophie von Charles Sanders Peirce im Sinne einer strengen Komplementaritat des religiosen und (natur-) wissenschaftlichen Zugangs zur einen Wirklichkeit entfaltet. Aus der Kritik an Peirces indeterministischer Metaphysik entwickelt er die Alternative einer naturalistischen Ontologie auf dem Stand der aktuellen wissenschaftlichen Diskussion um Dispositionen und Naturgesetze, die wichtige Aspekte der Philosophie Peirces - insbesondere den objektiven Idealismus, die Modalontologie und die Kontinuumsphilosophie - in neuer Weise zur Geltung bringt. 'Religion of Science' und Ontologie werden anschliessend fur das Projekt einer modernen Theologie des christlichen Glaubens fruchtbar gemacht, welche die christlichen Glaubensaussagen konsequent naturalistisch interpretiert. (shrink)

Given a Mahlo cardinal κ and a regular ε such that $\omega_1 we show that $\diamond_\kappa (cf = \epsilon)$ holds in V provided that there are only non-stationarily many $\beta , with o(β) ≥ ε in K.

A new explanation of the relation between schooling and work in the democratic, advanced industrial state emerges from this study that rejects both traditional views and the more recent Marxian perspective. Traditional views consider schools as autonomous institutions that are able to pursue the goals of equality and social mobility irrespective of the inequalities of capitalist society; the Marxian perspective views schools as serving the role of producing wage-labor for capitalistic exploitation. The authors suggest that the shortcomings of both views (...) are rooted in the fact that they do not recognize the true functions of the democratic, capitalist state. The state is seen as an arena for struggle between forces pushing for egalitarian, democratic reforms and those seeking to use the resources of the state for private capital accumulation. Depending on which side has primacy at the moment, schools will reflect one set of goals over the other. However, victory is never complete, and the tide of battle has shifted back and forth historically. The authors develop this theory through interpreting the dynamic relation between U.S. schools and the workplace. Based on this approach, they predict changes in both schooling and work as well as the forms that future conflicts between the contending forces are likely to take. (shrink)

This chapter is about how Deleuze read Hume and how that reading contributed to his idea of a transcendental empiricism. In particular it discusses, first, Deleuze's engagement with Hume's empiricism, which he understands to be founded on a thesis of the externality of relations; and, second, what Deleuze calls the problem of subjectivity, which is what he takes Hume's account of human nature to concern. The chapter provides some support for Deleuze's innovative readings and concludes with remarks on a contrast (...) between Deleuze's and Kant's transcendental philosophies, tracing a source for the contrast in Deleuze's and Kant's responses to Hume. (shrink)

This response to Jason A. Springs’s Healthy Conflict in Contemporary Society praises Springs for his recommendations for improving the discourse found in ethical conflicts in public life. Springs’s main prescription is for culture to stop repressing conflict. But if Springs ought to be praised for desiring to give conflict its due in public life, Healthy Conflict in Contemporary Life ought also to be criticized for not always being clear on whether there are criteria that authorize excluding some people (e.g. white (...) supremacists) from participating in nonviolent cultural conflict. The essay concludes by suggesting a rehabilitation in religious ethics of the category of the enemy. (shrink)

The saying reads, "The waking have a single cosmos in common," i.e., a single world-shape in which they take part in common. By this is already expressed what the later moral philosopher Plutarch, who preserved the fragment for us, pointed to in his interpretation: in sleep each turns away from the common cosmos and turns to something which belongs to him alone, something thus which he does not and cannot share with any other. That Heracleitus himself, on the contrary, understood (...) this less as the sleep of an individual, including the sphere of dreams, than as a cosmos, one among numberless fleeting world-shapes, in no way corresponds to what we know of his teachings. (shrink)

Update semantics1 embodies a radical view on the relation between context and interpretation. The meaning of a sentence is identified with its context change potential, where contexts are identified with information states. The recursive definition of semantic interpretation is stated in terms of a process of updating an information state with a sentence. Meanings of sentences, then, are update functions. In general, these are partial functions, since the possibility to update with a sentence may depend on the fulfillment of certain (...) constraints (presuppositions, the presence of antecedents for anaphora, etc.). It is important to note that context and interpretation are interdependent: the interpretation process depends on the context, `. (shrink)

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.