This book examines education and the aim of life through the ages; how the conception of progress is the primary driving force in the modern world; and how this limited understanding of progress has failed to satisfy the deepest aspirations of humanity, bringing modern civilisation to its present crisis and highlighting the limitations of today's education to meet this crisis. The author presents the free progress system at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education and explains how the views of (...) Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on integral education can prepare the children of today to consciously and luminously participate in the evolutionary destiny of the future. (shrink)

Ce livre est la version remaniée d'une thèse dont l'Auteure est désormais maître de conférence à l'EPHE et travaille également à l'Institut Européen en Sciences des Religions récemment fondé sur la recommandation de Régis Debray. Isabelle Saint-Martin évoque un monde en voie de disparition, celui des images pieuses qui ont contribué à la formation religieuse des chrétiens de la génération de nos grands et arrière-grands-parents. Publié pour la première fois vers le milieu des années 1880 et c..

Part I: WHAT IS ETHICS? Plato: Socratic Morality: Crito. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part II: ETHICAL RELATIVISM VERSUS ETHICAL OBJECTIVISM. Herodotus: Custom is King. Thomas Aquinas: Objectivism: Natural Law. Ruth Benedict: A Defense of Ethical Relativism. Louis Pojman: A Critique of Ethical Relativism. Gilbert Harman: Moral Relativism Defended. Alan Gewirth: The Objective Status of Human Rights. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part III: MORALITY, SELF-INTEREST AND FUTURE SELVES. Plato: Why Be Moral? Richard Taylor: On the Socratic Dilemma. David Gauthier: Morality and (...) Advantage. Gregory Kavka: A Reconciliation Project. Derek Parfit: Later Selves and Moral Principles. Bernard Williams: Persons, Character, and Morality. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part IV: VALUE. Jeremy Bentham: Classical Hedonism. Robert Nozick: The Experience Machine. Richard Taylor: Value and the Origin of Right and Wrong. Friedrich Nietzsche: The Transvaluation of Values. Derek Parfit: What Makes Someone’s Life Go Best? Thomas Nagel: Value: The View from Nowhere. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part V: UTILITARIANISM AND CONSEQUENTIALISM. John Stuart Mill: Utilitarianism. J.J.C. Smart: Extreme and Restricted Utilitarianism. Kai Nielsen: Against Moral Conservatism. Bernard Williams: Against Utilitarianism. John Hospers: Rule-Utilitarianism. Robert Nozick: Side Constraints. Peter Singer: Famine, Affluence and Morality. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part VI: KANTIAN AND DEONTOLOGICAL SYSTEMS. Immanuel Kant: Foundation for the Metaphysic of Morals. W. D. Ross: What Makes Right Acts Right? Onora O’Neill: Kantian Formula of the End in Itself and World Hunger. Thomas Nagel: Moral Luck. Philippa Foot: Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives. Judith Jarvis Thomson: Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part VII: CONTRACTARIAN ETHICAL SYSTEMS. Thomas Hobbes: The Leviathan. David Gauthier: Why Contractarianism? John Rawls: Contractualism: Justice as Fairness. T.M. Scanlon: Contractualism and Utilitarianism. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part VIII: VIRTUE-BASED ETHICAL SYSTEMS. Aristotle: The Ethics of Virtue. Bernard Mayo: Virtue and the Moral Life. William Frankena: A Critique of Virtue-Based Ethics. Walter Schaller: Are Virtues No More than Dispositions to Obey Moral Rules? Alasdair MacIntyre: The Nature of the Virtues. Susan Wolf: Moral Saints. Louis P. Pojman: In Defense of Moral Saints. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part IX: THE FACT/VALUE PROBLEM: METAETHICS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. David Hume: On Reason and the Emotions: The Fact/Value Distinction. G. E. Moore: Non-Naturalism. A. J. Ayer: Emotivism. R. M. Hare: Prescriptivism: The Structure of Ethics and Morals. Geoffrey Warnock: The Object of Morality. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part X: MORAL REALISM AND THE CHALLENGE OF SKEPTICISM. J.L. Mackie: The Subjectivity of Values. Jonathan Harrison: A Critique of Mackie’s Error Theory. Gilbert Harman: Moral Nihilism. Nicholas Sturgeon: Moral Explanations. Bernard Williams: Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Bruce Russell: Two Forms of Ethical Skepticism. Michael Smith: A Defense of Moral Realism. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part XI: RELIGION AND ETHICS. Plato: Morality and Religion. Immanuel Kant: God and Immortality as Necessary Postulates of Morality. George Mavrodes: Religious and the Queerness of Morality. Kai Nielson: Ethics Without God. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part XII: CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES TO CLASSICAL ETHICAL THEORY. Part A. Sociobiology and the Question of Moral Responsibility. Charles Darwin: Ethics and the Descent of Man. E.O.Wilson: Sociobiology and Ethics. Michael Ruse: Evolution and Ethics: The Sociobiological Approach. Elliot Sober: Prospects for an Evolutionary Ethics. J.L. Mackie: The Law of the Jungle, Evolution and Morality. Suggestions for Further Readingon Sociobiology. Part B. The Challenge of Determinism to Moral Responsibility and Desert. Galen Strawson: The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility. Louis Pojman: Free Will, Determinism, and Moral Responsibility:A Response to Galen Strawson. Richard Taylor: A Libertarian Defense of Free Will and Responsibility. Suggestions for Further Reading on Moral Responsibility. Glossary of Ethical Terms. (shrink)

This essay responds to John McDermott’s diagnosis of politics and religious life in the U.S.: “[B]oth traditional political and religious institutions are no longer an adequate let alone rich resource for a celebratory language.” I present a new celebratory language by reading William James’s description of saintliness in Varieties of Religious Experience. James gives me the resources to naturalize and democratize saintliness. Distinguished not by her transcendent miracles but by her this-worldly energies and experiments, the pragmatic saint remakes the (...) experience of her community through celebration, a form of appreciation and criticism exemplified in engaged art. My ethical and aesthetic description of the saint thus builds on E. Paul Colella’s recent political description of the saint as the “strenuous citizen.”. (shrink)

The book deals with the notion of Downward Causation from a wide array of perspectives, including physics, biology, psychology, social science, communication studies, text theory, and philosophy. The book includes proponents as well as opponents discussing the validity of the notion.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:270 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY The Prophets of Paris. By Frank E. Manuel. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962.) This perceptive and sophisticated contribution to the history of ideas is organized around the intellectual biographies of Turgot, Condorcet, Saint-Simon, the Saint-Simoniarts, Charles Fourier, and Auguste Comte. Professor Manuel's prophets were all Frenchmen and all, he believes, can be placed in a common tradition marked by their conviction that Paris (...) was the mount from which the new gospel had to be delivered, that love was the key to social organization, and that social and religious relationships were more significant than political forms. He presents them as prophets in the Old Testament sense--as unsparing moral critics, teachers and the "revealers of a divine historical design." They were philosophers of an age of crisis, convinced that theirs was the instant of a great human divide and therefore victims "of the anguish of futurity." The future they so confidently foretold to anyone who cared to listen, and to many who did not, has found many of their prophetic visions to be poor predictions, but for Manuel they cannot be dismissed as utopian cranks or frustrated totalitarians. Many of the issues they raised and problems they sensed have yet to be adequately confronted, and it is this prescience, particularly with regard to the psychological conditions of social existence, that Manuel wishes to emphasize. This treatment, as its author admits, is a "frank attempt at rehabilitation, to right the balance of historical judgement and bestow new worth upon thinkers who have often been treated with superficiality" (pp. 1-10). Manuel's approach to the history of ideas lends itself quite effectively to this purpose. He admits to a "romantic view of history-writing" which entails an effort to establish an intimacy with his subjects through an immersion in their manuscripts, in the "scribbled brouillons, the casual notes, the personal letters," as well as in the identity presented through their published works. His writing of history is romantic not only in this regard but much more profoundly in his historicism, which attempts an immediate empathetic confrontation with the total organic complex of his subject's life, ideas, and environment. Manuel's evident sympathy occasionally tempts him into apologetics, but essentially he is not arguing a brief for the defense but trying to understand what it was that made these men see so far, and yet with such myopic arrogance, and what it was they saw. It seemed to me that his approach is most successful with Fourier, and least so with Turgot. Charles Fourier, the self-taught travelling salesman from Besan~on, is often summarily dismissed as a cosmic crank with easy reference to his fantastic aberrations --his seas of lemonade and the copulation of the planets. Manuel helps us to understand not only the aberrations but the prescient insights by establishing the relationship between Fourier's personality and his ideas, as well as by tracing the connections between apparently contradictory conceptions. He does not misuse this technique of intellectual biography by patronizing or justifying a system of thought with reference to its psychological antecedents, but rather helps to illuminate a philosophy by examining the reasons for its expression. This works particularly well with Fourier, an obsessed and deprived personality, whose great contribution, according to Manuel, was the assimilation into a social doctrine of the fundamental needs and drives of mankind--its "manifold wants, its secret desires, and its obstinate fixations" (p. 203). Both Fourier and the SaintSimonians believe that it was pointless to tinker with the social environment without regard for permanent psychological realities, but the latter hoped to sublimate human passions through a social organization that redefined them, while Fourier wanted a social system that would provide for their total gratification (p. 226). Occasionally Manuel rather triumphantly unearths striking parallels with our present BOOK REVIEWS 271 concerns that do not demonstrate the vision of his seers into the future so much as his discovery of analogues in the past. Fourier's case is not particularly strengthened by the observation that his vision of a climate so benign under the regime of phalansteries as to render tire very poles inhabitable is "no longer as... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:92 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY seulement apr~s qu'on a drmontr6 son existence (pp. 182, 183, 185, 188). Or ceci nous parait tout h fait erronr: la critique mrt~physique de l'activit6 rrv~le qu'elle implique drpendance, et non seulement par rapport ~t d'autres 8tres finis (ce qu'Aristote a drift vu), mais par rapport ~t une Cause transcendante et infinie qui, en crrant l'~tre fini, lui donne constamment le pouvoir de se drpasser (...) en produisant ses aetes seconds. C'est pourquoi l'analyse mrtaphysique de l'activit6 est une des voies qui conduisent ~t la drcouverte de Dieu. Scot lui-m~me, du reste, reconnait que tout changement implique drpendance et rrv~le l'existence d'un Etre immuable et absolu (pp. 184-185). Ceci nous donne l'occasion de revenir h la prima via de Thomas d'Aquin. La libert6 avec laquelle nous avons discut6 nagu~re la valeur des quinque viae ne permet pas de nous SOUl~onner d'attachement servile aux positions du saint Docteur. La prima via est une preuve incomplete de l'existence de Dieu entendu comme le Crrateur unique de l'univers, nous avons dit et redit pourquoi. Mais l'argumentation qui s'appuie sur le principe de motion nous a toujours paru et nous parait encore inattaquable: dans la Summa contra Gentiles (I, 13), Thomas 6tait encore emp~tr6 dans la physique d'Aristote, mais, dans la Summa theologiae il se maintient strictement au plan mrtaphysique : un ~tre qui change vraiment ne saurait changer par lui-mSme. Ce principe est inrbranlable et la critique de Duns Scot est inol~rante ici. F. VAN STEENBERGHEN Louvain Francesco Sanchez. By Salvatore Miecolis. (Bari: Tipografia Levante, 1965. Universith di Bari, Pubblicazioni dell'Istituto di filosofia, no. 8. Pp. 100, one plate. No price given). Francisco Sanches,1 the Portuguese philosopher and physician of Jewish parentage who was also a relative of Montaigne, ranks as one of the more interesting of sixteenthcentury thinkers. Not only is he an important reviver of scepticism in the sixteenth century, but his best known work Quod nihil scitur (first printed in 1581) was still well enough known in the next century to draw several separate attacks. What is more, various scholars have pointed out the similarities between the arguments used in Sanches' work and Descartes' cogito argument. Though there are now quite a number of studies on Sanches, especially in Portuguese, there is not yet a defnitive study of aU aspects of his life, thought, and influence. In English there is very little indeed and we could well use a monograph or at least an article on Sanches to make some of his ideas accessible to a wider audience. A definitive study will require much work and 1 This is the Portuguese form of his name. It is also sometimes given the Spanish spelling 'Sanchez' as in the title of Miccolis' book. He was born near the Spanish-Portuguese border about 1550 and moved to France, while still a boy, and there spent the remainder of his life. There has been much discussion whether Sanches was in fact Portuguese or Spanish by birth and, consequently, which is the correct form of his name. It does not seem as though the question of his nationality can be answered with certainty. We have chosen to use the Portuguese form since the Portuguese seem to have adopted him as one of their philosophers more frequently than have the Spanish. BOOK REVIEWS 93 would have to use the extensive notes made by H. P. Cazac, who died before he could utilize all of the material which he had collected,z For these reasons one might look to Miccolis' book as a new contribution to Sanches studies. One is bound to be disappointed, however, for little new material is brought forth here and even previous studies on Sanches are not fully utilized. Although this study has the format of a book, its length is little more than that of a substantial article (ca. 25,000 words). After a very brief introductory section on the life and works of Sanches, the author treats the Quod nihil scitur and 'Sanches and medicine' in... (shrink)

P. B. Downing; VII.—Subjunctive Conditionals, Time Order, and Causation, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 59, Issue 1, 1 June 1959, Pages 125–140.

Originally published in 1969. This book explains what is wrong with the traditional methodology of "inductive" reasoning and shows that the alternative scheme of reasoning associated with Whewell, Pierce and Popper can give the scientist a useful insight into the way he thinks.

The reception of Buffon's Histoire Naturelle in the Enlightenment has not received the historical attention it deserves. Drawing primarily on archival sources, this paper examines Aberdeen reactions to the Histoire during the period c. 1750–1800. As pedagogues, the Aberdonians endeavoured to maintain intellectual orthodoxy, and hence they attacked Buffon for his apparent materialism and atheism. Moreover, the Aberdonians rejected Buffon's critique of taxonomy because they based their natural history courses on classifications of the three kingdoms of nature, and because they (...) attempted to use classification systems in nosology and the study of the human mind. Finally, in the 1790s Aberdeen readings of the Histoire were profoundly affected by the fears aroused by the French Revolution. (shrink)

Originally published in 1957, The Uniqueness of the Individual is a collection of 9 essays published from the ten years preceding publication. The essays deal with some of the central problems of biology. These are among the questions put and answered from the standpoint of modern experimental biology. What is ageing and how is it measured? What theories have been held to account for it, and with what success? Did ageing evolve, and if so how? Is Lamarckism and adequate explanation (...) of evolutionary process? Does evolution sometimes go wrong? Do human beings evolve in a way peculiar to themselves? Other essays touch upon the problems of scientific method and of growth and transformation. This book will be of interest to natural historians, evolutionists and anthropologists. (shrink)

We apply an online optimization process based on machine learning to the production of Bose-Einstein condensates. BEC is typically created with an exponential evaporation ramp that is optimal for ergodic dynamics with two-body s-wave interactions and no other loss rates, but likely sub-optimal for real experiments. Through repeated machine-controlled scientific experimentation and observations our ’learner’ discovers an optimal evaporation ramp for BEC production. In contrast to previous work, our learner uses a Gaussian process to develop a statistical model of the (...) relationship between the parameters it controls and the quality of the BEC produced. We demonstrate that the Gaussian process machine learner is able to discover a ramp that produces high quality BECs in 10 times fewer iterations than a previously used online optimization technique. Furthermore, we show the internal model developed can be used to determine which parameters are essential in BEC creation and which are unimportant, providing insight into the optimization process of the system. (shrink)

Central to Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society was the description and justification of the method adopted and advocated by the Fellows of the Society, for it was thought that it was their method which distinguished them from ancients, dogmatists, sceptics, and contemporary natural philosophers such as Descartes. The Fellows saw themselves as furthering primarily a novel method, rather than a system, of philosophy, and the History gave expression to this corporate self-perception. However, the History's description of their method (...) was not necessarily accurate. Rather, as will be argued below, by a combination of subtle misrepresentation and selective exposition, Sprat portrayed a method which would further the aims of social and ecclesiastical stability and material prosperity, essential for the Royal Society since its continued existence depended upon the creation of a social basis for the institutionalized pursuit of natural philosophy. Some link had to be forged between the activities of the Society and the intellectual and social aspirations of the Restoration. To understand the intent and meaning of Sprat's History and the method there portrayed, we must therefore look to the institutional needs which it fulfilled. (shrink)

Greek ontology eventually developed a notion variously described as ‘timeless’, ‘atemporal’, or ‘non-durational’ eternity. In Proclus and Simplicius it is already a school-commonplace, with a stable vocabulary in which aiōn is sharply distinguished from what is merely aïdios. Plotinus had perfected this notion beforehand, believing not only that he found it in Plato, but that Plato had developed it on Parmenidean grounds.