Includes writings on pragmatism by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., George Herbert Mead, Percy W. Bridgman, C. I. Lewis, Horace M. Kallen, Sidney Hook, and, especially, William James, Charles S. Peirce, and John Dewey.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wittgenstein, Tolstoy, and ShakespearePeter B. LewisNear the middle of the first of his 1938 Lectures on Aesthetics, Wittgenstein talks about what he calls "the tremendous things in art"(LC, I 23 8, italics in original).1 Apart from a brief indication of the way in which our response to the tremendous differs from the non-tremendous, he does not refer again in this way to the tremendous things in art, though he (...) does refer elsewhere to what he calls "supreme art." But he does provide a couple of examples of the tremendous in art, the symphonies of Beethoven and Gothic Cathedrals. Suppose, now, like the student in the Investigations §185, we are asked to continue the series. I take it that, even given the lack of information, we could safely propose, say, Homer—the Iliad and the Odyssey—and Michelangelo—the Sistine Chapel—as further examples of the tremendous things in art. The idea is that the tremendous things in art are not works that are just very good or very fine, but rather they are great, supremely great; works of stature; special cases; instances of the highest kind of artistic achievement, occupying a distinctive place in the history of (Western) civilization.Another obvious candidate for the list of the tremendous things in art would be Shakespeare, where the name is shorthand for the great plays, the tragedies in particular, Lear, Hamlet, Othello,and so on. So it comes as something of a surprise to discover on reading that miscellaneous compendium of remarks known as Culture and Value that Wittgenstein himself had serious doubts about including Shakespeare in the pantheon of the tremendous things in art. There are seven passages in Culture and Value in which Wittgenstein reflects on Shakespeare.2 The earliest is dated 1939–40, though this passage does not appear to be critical of Shakespeare. The next two passages are [End Page 241] dated August 1946, the remainder coming in 1949 and 1950. The remarks critical of Shakespeare are, then, all very much late Wittgenstein.It is well-known that lots of people dislike Shakespeare's plays. Generations of school children have developed indifference or boredom or hatred that persists throughout their lives. And yet that does not count against Shakespeare's greatness; for, to borrow Hume's remark on those who would prefer Ogilby to Milton, "no one pays attention to such a taste; and we pronounce without scruple the sentiment of these [people] to be absurd and ridiculous."3 That rhetoric is, however, not available, at least not immediately, when the "pretended critic" (Hume's phrase) has the intellectual clout and aesthetic sensibility of a Wittgenstein; nor, for that matter, the artistic achievement of a Tolstoy.I have particular grounds for bringing Tolstoy into this discussion. In the first place, there is the importance of Tolstoy in the development of Wittgenstein's thinking about religious, moral and aesthetic issues. Secondly, it is by contrast with Tolstoy's criticism of Shakespeare that we can gain further understanding of Wittgenstein's remarks on Shakespeare. These two points are related. For it seems to me that it is partly through his reflections on Tolstoy's theories about art that Wittgenstein is led into commenting upon Shakespeare.Tolstoy famously attacks Shakespeare in his pamphlet, "Shakespeare and the Drama,"4 published in 1903 when Tolstoy was seventy-five years of age. Some have taken this essay as evidence that Tolstoy was in his dotage, his mind warped by religious-moralistic fervor. Not only does this fail to do justice to Tolstoy's reasons for criticizing Shakespeare—reasons that Howard Mounce has recently argued are by no means ridiculous5 —it also neglects the fact that the essay is the culmination of Tolstoy's life-long antagonism to Shakespeare. Nevertheless, that very slur on Tolstoy's sanity attests to Shakespeare's status in our culture as something tremendous. His achievement is a standard against which others are measured. And this, I think, is at least partly what Wittgenstein is hinting at in his remarks about the contrast between the tremendous and the non-tremendous in art when he says of the tremendous that "it plays an entirely different role... (shrink)

Lewis was not, and is not, very popular in the academy. I think there are three reasons.First, he did not stick to his subject, which was medieval and Renaissance literature. He wrote highly successful children's books, theological works, and articles accessible to nonspecialists, and was an acclaimed broadcaster. All this allowed his critics to suggest that he was not a proper academic, because proper academics do not throw their nets so wide.Second, he was good at everything he did (except (...) perhaps some areas of philosophy: he was famously bested by Elizabeth Anscombe when he ventured onto her home ground). This was perhaps the most infuriating thing about him. The justification for academic superspecialization is that one cannot do more than one thing really well. But Lewis did. He was a better Renaissance scholar than those who criticized him, moaned about him in the Oxford cloisters, and blackballed him for appointments. He is relentlessly readable; therefore (said his detractors) his scholarship must be shoddy.Lewis infuriates me too. Often, when I think I have had an original thought in some domain a million miles from Renaissance literature, I discover not only that Lewis had had that thought already, but had explicated it, seeing angles I never noticed, and more often than not he had exploded it, using a tenth of the words I used, and all in devastatingly simple prose that would entertain and illuminate the most uninterested plumber.And third, of course, he was a Christian, which was then becoming an unforgivable sin, as it remains now in the humanities (though not the physical sciences or mathematics). The usual (stated) objection to academic Christians is that their theological commitment precludes objectivity, but Lewis's academic writing (notably his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama [1954]) was so good that that indictment could not stick, and his opponents descended into incoherent fulmination about superannuated paradigms.These reasons help to explain the chilly reception (or, more often, nonreception) by self-billed “serious thinkers” of Lewis's “space trilogy”: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength (hereafter THS). In relation to THS there is another reason: the novel is about them. No, about us. Lewis's view of us is just too keen, his diagnosis too alarming.The main concerns of THS are dehumanization, the role of institutions in that dehumanization, and the desire of individuals to be part of an esoteric circle. More broadly, it concerns the nature of evil. Its debt to the Divine Comedy and to Charles Williams, Lewis's fellow Inkling, are clear.The central character is a young academic, Mark Studdock. We all know him. His education had been “neither scientific nor classical—merely ‘Modern.’ That left him pathetically manipulable. The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour.” Studdock was “a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge.” He stood for nothing; he weighed nothing.Humans are not supposed to be weightless. We will do anything to convince ourselves that we have mass. Many of our strategies are counterproductive. Some are disastrous and lead to dissolution. Studdock's strategy is one of the commonest and most catastrophic: he tries to get to the center of things—to the “Inner Ring” whose geography is described by Lewis in his 1944 lecture (and later essay) of that name. At some level, at least occasionally, Studdock knows the stupidity of this ambition, but he closes his eyes and his mind. And he begins to be used by forces far greater than any he had dreamed of.The book opens with a merciless (and horribly entertaining) account of academic politics. Read it and cringe in recognition: the mechanics of toadyism; the devices for getting your own way with a committee (put the real business in coded form at the end of an agenda, to be dealt with on a hot day after lunch); infuse everything with an appeal to self-interest, but never put it quite like that, for fear of awakening long-dormant altruism. Obfuscate: do not call the sale of an ancient woodland in which Merlin's body lies “the sale of Bragdon Wood” but the sale of “the area coloured pink on the plan.” Learn to talk like the bursar of Studdock's college, for each of his sentences was “a model of lucidity: and if his hearers found the gist of his whole statement less clear than the parts, that may have been their fault.” As a manual for getting your own way in institutions, The Prince is artless and benign beside THS.Studdock becomes a pawn in a big and diabolical game. A vast organization, the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments, known, of course, as “NICE” (never underestimate the importance of an acronym), which turns out to be the instrument of dark supernatural forces, is becoming a state within a state. It is unaccountable. That is its tagline, indeed: it will be free of the red tape that inhibits the research of more conventional institutions. And who can define with sufficient exactitude the difference in principle between tedious administrative red tape and moral stricture? If you are in with the NICE, anything goes.The NICE's project is the unmaking of everything that is quintessentially human and, eventually, everything that is biological. Life itself is just too unhygienic. Beauty is a joke. Sentiment a delusion. Love merely a result of chemical interactions in the brain. Nothing signifies.The NICE has a handful of opponents—a raggedy bunch (including a bear) under the direction of Ransom, who has traveled outside planet Earth in the previous two books in the trilogy. The company, it turns out, is the remnant of the old Arthurian kingdom of Logres, which has always been in tension, if not war, with the modern kingdom of Britain: “Haven't you noticed that we are two countries? After every Arthur, a Mordred; behind every Milton, a Cromwell: a nation of poets, a nation of shopkeepers: the home of Sidney—and of Cecil Rhodes.” They recruit Studdock's wife, Jane, who can spy clairvoyantly on the NICE, and then a revived Merlin comes from his tomb to their aid.THS is strong meat. Many will balk at its supernaturalism, and perhaps in particular its complementarian view of the relationship between the sexes. But hear Lewis out: you might not agree with him, but he is always interesting. When I read THS thirty years ago, I thought it a ripping yarn. It still is. But now I see it as prescient, prophetic, and profoundly important. It should be on every university reading list, for every subject, and no one should be allowed to hold any kind of public office until they have shown that they have assimilated its lessons. (shrink)

The first volume of this series presents fifteen selected papers dealing with a variety of topics in ontology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language.

Frank A. Lewis presents a close study of book Zeta of Aristotle's Metaphysics, one of his most dense and controversial texts, commonly understood to contain his deepest thoughts on the definition of substance and related metaphysical issues. Lewis argues that Aristotle returns to the causal view of primary substance from his Posterior Analytics.

Created as a poetic and visual journey, Touchless Automatic Wonder spans twenty-five years and four continents. These striking photographs capture “found text”: the sometimes mysterious, occasionally humorous, often cryptic presence of words in the everyday landscape. In Koch’s lyrical sequencing, the images reveal obscure and eccentric voices in their various and distinctive roles on the daily stage of the world around us. This intriguing approach at the intersection of language, image, and the social landscape will appeal to readers interested in (...) contemporary art and photography, popular culture, and conceptual concerns both literary and visual. (shrink)

Resumo "O candomblé aceita o homossexualismo porque é uma religião que não tem pecado. Não interessa se você seja homem, mulher ou gay. Não importa a opção sexual. (...) Você pode ver. É uma religião de homossexuais". É assim que um filho-de-santo responde a uma pergunta sobre a notável presença de homossexuais iniciados na religião dos orixás. Se comparadas a outras denominações hostis e indiferentes às orientações não-heterossexuais, o candomblé e outras devoções afro-brasileiras são, de fato, mais tolerantes à participação (...) de homossexuais, permitindo-lhes ocupar todos os postos previstos na hierarquia ritual. Embora estejam entre as expressões religiosas que menos discriminam o indivíduo por razões de preferência sexual, percebemos por meio da literatura especializada e de uma pesquisa de campo, realizada na região metropolitana de São Paulo, que os candomblecistas também empregam em seus discursos argumentos ou narrativas míticas, certos princípios e valores seculares articulados à moralidade cristã e que dão sustentação à hierarquia de sexo/gênero - conforme alguns sacerdotes, as categorias homem/mulher e masculino/feminino devem corresponder às expectativas sociais esperadas para cada ser sexuado. Em virtude disso, tratar de homossexualidade nas comunidades-terreiro, ao contrário do que possa parecer, é um tema delicado, restrito e rodeado de tabus. Palavras-chave: Candomblé; Gênero; Sexualidade; Homossexualidade." Candomblé accepts homosexualism because it is a religion where sin does not exist. It does not matter whether you are a man, a woman or gay. Your sexual choice does not matter. [...] You can see it. It is a religion of homosexuals." This is how a filho-de-santo answers a question about the remarkable presence of homosexuals initiated into the orixás ' religion. If compared to other denominations, hostile or indifferent to nonheterosexual orientations, candomblé and other Afro-Brazilian religions are indeed more tolerant to the participation of homosexuals, allowing them to hold all positions in the ritual hierarchy. However, based on the literature and on a field research carried out in the São Paulo metropolitan region, we realized that those affiliated to candomblé , although following one of the religions with the lowest degree of prejudice against individuals due to their sexual preference, also employ in their discourse arguments or mythical narratives, secular principles and values articulated with Christian morality, which support the sex/gender hierarchy: according to some priests, man/woman and male/female categories must correspond to the social expectations of each sexual being. Thus, on the contrary, approaching homosexuality in Afro-Brazilian religious communities is a delicate and restricted matter, surrounded by taboos. Key words: Candomblé; Gender; Sexuality; Homosexuality. (shrink)

Philosophy for Children (P4C) is an approach to learning and teaching that aims to develop reasoning and judgement. Students learn to listen to and respect their peers' opinions, think creatively and work together to develop a deeper understanding of concepts central to their own lives and the subjects they are studying. With the teacher adopting the role of facilitator, a true community develops in which rich and meaningful dialogue results in enquiry of the highest order. Each chapter is written by (...) a leading P4C expert and provides an introduction to the relationship between P4C and the subject area, lesson stimuli and activities for extending and deepening students' thinking. The book includes: • guidance on how to embed P4C in curriculum subjects in a crowded and demanding secondary curriculum timetable • troubleshooting advice for the teacher-turned-facilitator • a companion website containing useful links, downloadable resources and material to display on your interactive whiteboard. Edited and collated by the UK's leading P4C organisation, this book introduces a rationale for using and adapting P4C in the secondary curriculum. (shrink)

Papers delivered at the International Philosophy Year conference at Brockport, 1967-68. Includes bibliographical references.

PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICE Charles Frankel I It will be no news to anyone that one of the vexatious problems of the moment is the relationship, ...

Landmarks of Scientfic Socialism: Anti-Dühring (German: Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft, "Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science") is a book by Friedrich Engels, which was first published in German in 1878. It had previously been serialised in a periodical called Vorwärts. There were two other German editions during Engels' life. Anti-Dühring was first published in English translation in 1907.The work was perhaps Engels' most important contribution and development within Marxist theory.Eugen Dühring had previously created his own version of socialism, (...) which was supposed to be a replacement for Marxism. This work was supposed to be a defence of Marxism against produced his own version of socialism, intended as a replacement for Marxism from Dühring's attack. (shrink)

This book offers an approach to Christian ethics. It does so first by organizing Christian ethics around the virtue of practical wisdom and suggesting what the guiding vision of a Christian practical wisdom should be. Second, it provides an account of practical wisdom that integrates literature drawn from the fields of philosophy, psychology, evolutionary theory, and the neurosciences. Reconceptualizing Christian ethics in this way can help us address-but not resolve once and for all-in a faithful way the challenges of our (...) divided age. (shrink)

I think there are no quality individuals which, in the way required, have the characteristics they ascribe to them. Without these features quality individuals will not serve the purpose for which Matthews and Cohen introduce them. So quite apart from the difficulties there are in Plato's account of predication, not only is Aristotle's account unacceptable as it stands, but also Matthews and Cohen's alteration offers no improvement. Indeed, it seems to me that no account of predication can be constructed which (...) will avoid a distinction between individuals and qualities which are not individuals, which some philosophers seem to find so distasteful. Matthews and Cohen's introduction of quality individuals is just one further attempt to avoid this distinction. In order to bring out what is wrong with the notion of quality individual I shall describe the context in which it is introduced and then discuss the mistakes I find in it. (shrink)

In Relativism and Religion five prominent philosophers from widely divergent perspectives have confronted fundamental questions about the epistemology and semantics of religious claims. Such questions in the philosophy of religion have become a matter of critical importance for anyone concerned about the status of religious claims to knowledge and truth. Is there any way, apart from a particular religious tradition, of knowing that the distinctive claims of a religious tradition are true or closer to truth than those of any other (...) religion? Does 'God' in religious speech and texts refer to the same Being as does philosophical theism? Would the disappearance of theistic belief and practice mean the death of the gods - or God? Or does this question assume a mistaken concept of truth or reference in religion? Included in this collection of essays is a spirited response by each contributor to the others' treatment of these issues. (shrink)