In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In Kant’s Wake: Philosophy in the Twentieth CenturyRobert HannaTom Rockmore. In Kant’s Wake: Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Pp. 213. Paper, $24.95.In In Kant's Wake, Tom Rockmore sets himself the almost impossibly ambitious task of telling a coherent story about the sprawling set of thinkers, doctrines, arguments, journal articles, books, social institutions, teachings, and other intellectual practices that make up philosophy in the twentieth century. (...) His highly plausible unifying hypothesis is that twentieth-century philosophy is a series of creative and reactive footnotes to Kant's Critical Philosophy as encapsulated in the Critique of Pure Reason, and in particular, to Kant's transcendental idealism. Of course the same unifying hypothesis is equally plausible of the nineteenth century. In this sense, the history of philosophy since Kant is just the history of post-Kantian philosophy.Rather than telling a single long story, Rockmore tells five shorter stories. He begins his narrative with a chapter on Kant's metaphysics and immediate responses to the Critique of Pure Reason (ch. 2). Then he focuses, in turn, on the diachronic developments of Marxism (ch. 3), pragmatism, (ch. 4), phenomenology (ch. 5), and analytic philosophy (ch. 6). The five stories are framed by a methodological chapter on the problem of interpreting twentieth-century philosophy (ch. 1), and a concluding chapter on the relation between Kant and the overall shape of philosophy in the twentieth century (ch. 7).Three more or less explicitly-stated interpretive principles run through each of Rockmore's historical narratives. The first, as I have already mentioned, is the grand unifying hypothesis of the essentially protean character of Kant's first Critique and the metaphysics of transcendental idealism. The second is that each distinct philosophical movement is [End Page 676] fundamentally organized around the teachings and writings of a few "master" or "strong" thinkers (14). And the third is that the history of philosophy is nothing but a multi-voiced Socratic conversation (13). Everyone knows how even the most intensely animated intellectual conversation can end with an inconclusive whimper instead of a conclusive bang. According to Rockmore, that is basically what happened to the great philosophical conversation of the twentieth century.In the chapter on Kant, Rockmore usefully distinguishes between two strands of transcendental idealism that Kant regarded as fully complementary, but which tended to run and pull in sharply opposite directions in post-Kantian philosophy: (1) the representationalist strand, and (2) the constructivist strand (36). Now Kant's transcendental idealism says four things. First, cognition is the mental representation of objects. Second, the objects we cognize are nothing but appearances or phenomena and never things-in-themselves or noumena. Third, the generic structure of the objects and the world we cognize is identical to the non-empirical or a priori generic structure of the innate cognitive capacities or faculties of our minds. And fourth, the human mind is spontaneously active in producing the specific structures of the very objects we cognize when our faculties are triggered by particular sensory inputs. The first and second theses of transcendental idealism constitute its representationalist strand, and the third and fourth theses constitute its constructivist strand.The decomposition of the orginal Kantian vector into its representationalist and constructivist components helps Rockmore in his interpretation of the four main sub-movements of twentieth-century philosophy. Marxism or dialectical materialism, organized of course around the teachings and writings of Karl Marx, is an economic, social, and political version of post-Kantian constructivism focused on the concrete struggles of alienated individuals and groups to achieve liberation and self-realization in collective action. So too pragmatism, organized around the teachings and writings of C. S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, is another version of post-Kantian constructivism, this time focused on the idea that the meaning and truth of concepts and propositions is strictly determined by the practical pay-offs of applying those concepts and propositions.By contrast, phenomenology and analytic philosophy are both versions of representationalism. Phenomenology is organized around the teaching and writings of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and focuses on the structures of consciousness and object-directedness... (shrink)

This is the first book on Buber to address the full scope of his seminal influence for any number of thinkers and fields from philosophy to psychotherapy to literary theory.

ABSTRACT One of the promises of the internet was its power to unite individual knowers with one another, democratizing knowledge and spurring our collective efforts toward truth. In what sense is our current epistemic life a collective effort? This article examines the idea of the epistemic community. I contrast epistemic community with a collection of individual epistemic agents aiming for truth. I propose that this latter conception of epistemic life permits neglecting our epistemic and moral duties. I argue that healthy (...) epistemic community requires joint commitments to truth and epistemic trust, and where epistemic trust requires conditions of mutual epistemic respect. (shrink)

Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction. The Galileo Affair from Descartes to John Paul II: A Survey of Sources, Facts, and Issues 1. The Condemnation of Galileo 2. Promulgation and Diffusion of the News 3. Emblematic Reactions: Descartes, Peiresc, Galileo’s Daughter 4. Polarizations: Secularism, Liberalism, Fundamentalism 5. Compromises: Viviani, Auzout, Leibniz 6. Myth-making or Enlightenment? Pascal, Voltaire, the Encyclopedia 7. Incompetence or Enlightenment? Pope Benedict XIV 8. New Lies, Documents, Myths, Apologies 9. Napoleonic Wars and Trials 10. The Inquisition on Galileo’s Side? (...) The Settele Affair and Beyond 11. Varieties of Torture: Demythologizing Galileo’s Trial? 12. A Miscarriage of Justice? The Documentation of Impropriety 13. Galileo Right Again, Wrong Again: Hermeneutics, Epistemology, "Heresy" 14. A Catholic Hero: Tricentennial Rehabilitation 15. Secular Indictments: Brecht’s Atomic Bomb and Koestler’s Two Cultures 16. History on Trial: The Paschini Affair 17. More "Rehabilitation": Pope John Paul II Epilogue: Unfinished Business. (shrink)

Galileo's Dialogue (1632) can be read from the viewpoints of methodological judgment and critical reasoning; methodological judgment means the avoidance of onesidedness and extremes; and critical reasoning means reasoning aimed at the analysis and evaluation of arguments. Classic sources for these readings are Thomas Salusbury (1661) and the Port-Royal logicians (1662). This focus does not deny the book's scientific, historical, rhetorical, and aesthetic dimensions; it is critical of excessively rhetorical readings; and it suggests solutions to the problems of hermeneutical pluralism, (...) interpretation versus evaluation, and theory versus practice. The book's methodological judgment and critical reasoning can be shown to correspond to Galileo's self-reflections. (shrink)

Traces the life of the renowned Jewish religious philosopher, discussing his youth, his education in turn-of-the-century Vienna, his Zionism, and the impact of world politics on his life and thought.

Although the fallacy of composition is little studied and trivially illustrated, some view it as ubiquitous and paramount. Furthermore, although definitions regard the concept as unproblematic, it contains three distinct elements, often confused. And although some scholars apparently claim that fallacies are figments of a critic’s imagination, they are really proposing to study fallacies in the context of meta-argumentation. Guided by these ideas, I discuss the important historical example of Michels’s iron law of oligarchy.

Renaissance humanism.--Valla's Encomium of St. Thomas Aquinas and the humanist conception of Christian antiquity.--Machiavelli.

Feyerabend's views are construed as formulating the problem of determining the role of rhetoric in scientific rationality and posing the solution-theory that scientific rationality is essentially rhetorical. He is taken to give three arguments against reason, of which the one from the insufficiency of reason and the one from incommensurability are shown to presuppose his historical argument; his historical argument is based on his account of Galileo, which hinges essentially on Feyerabend's analysis of the tower argument. This analysis is insightful (...) in certain important ways but misconceived in others. Feyerabend's main error is to see a conflict between reason and rhetoric, where none exists; it is argued that rhetorical devices have their own standards of propriety and impropriety, different from those of rational arguments, and that at the same time sound rhetorical analysis presupposes sound logical analysis. (shrink)

This Book Incorporates Prof. Friedman S Lectures And Discussions That Were A Part Of The Inter-Cultural Dialogue At Many Levels. His Major Contribution Is In Developing An Approach That Is Within The Framework Of The Human Image.

BackgroundKnowledge development depends on an unbiased representation of the available evidence. Selective citation may distort this representation. Recently, some controversy emerged regarding the possible impact of swimming on childhood asthma, raising the question about the role of selective citation in this field. Our objective was to assess the occurrence and determinants of selective citation in scientific publications on the relationship between swimming in chlorinated pools and childhood asthma.MethodsWe identified scientific journal articles on this relationship via a systematic literature search. The (...) following factors were taken into account: study outcome (authors’ conclusion, data-based conclusion), other content-related article characteristics (article type, sample size, research quality, specificity), content-unrelated article characteristics (language, publication title, funding source, number of authors, number of affiliations, number of references, journal impact factor), author characteristics (gender, country, affiliation), and citation characteristics (time to citation, authority, self-citation). To assess the impact of these factors on citation, we performed a series of univariate and adjusted random-effects logistic regressions, with potential citation path as unit of analysis.ResultsThirty-six articles were identified in this network, consisting of 570 potential citation paths of which 191 (34%) were realized. There was strong evidence that articles with at least one author in common, cited each other more often than articles that had no common authors (odds ratio (OR) 5.2, 95% confidence interval (CI) 3.1–8.8). Similarly, the chance of being cited was higher for articles that were empirical rather than narrative (OR 4.2, CI 2.6–6.7), that reported a large sample size (OR 5.8, CI 2.9–11.6), and that were written by authors with a high authority within the network (OR 4.1, CI 2.1–8.0). Further, there was some evidence for citation bias: articles that confirmed the relation between swimming and asthma were cited more often (OR 1.8, CI 1.1–2.9), but this finding was not robust.ConclusionsThere is clear evidence of selective citation in this research field, but the evidence for citation bias is not very strong. (shrink)

This article uses transcriptions from video recordings of airline pilots at work, on actual flights, to consider some locations and the interactional significance of a feature of routine talk in the airline cockpit: and-prefaced turns. As pilots’ work is formally organized for them as many discrete and ordered tasks, and-prefacing is a local means for maintaining an ongoing sense of their conduct of a flight as a whole. By and-prefacing their talk, pilots present some new talk or task as connected (...) and relevantly next in a larger macro-sequence of work for their flight. And-prefacing is evidence of pilots’ orientation to a sense of sequence that can extend well beyond pairs of turns at talk and/or non-talk activities, or even a series of such paired sequences. It allows pilots to make salient the sequentiality of their work where the officially prescribed wordings they must use can leave this implicit. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est une réédition numérique d’un livre paru au XXe siècle, désormais indisponible dans son format d’origine.