"No other work treating Indian philosophy on a comparable scale contains the illuminating comparisons between doctrines of Indian schools and the thought of Western philosophy ranging from Plato to Sartre and Wittgenstein...It will, moreover, contribute to the understanding of Western philosophy by Indian thinkers and vice versa...Raju has an intimate acquaintance with a remarkable range of Western thinkers and this distinguishes his work from most of what has gone before...Raju, moreover, is himself a critical thinker and consequently, although he has (...) written a history, he treats the ideas and doctrines in a philosophical mode and his assessments of positions are often original and illuminating." -- John E. Smith, Clark Professor of Philosophy, Yale University "Purpose: To deal with Indian philosophy in a fashion reflecting the way the best German historians of philosophy deal with Western philosophy...The book is remarkable for its comprehensiveness in combination with extensive critical discussions...Raju's book...is more critical than Radhakrishnan's and more philosophical than Dasgupta's. Radhakrishnan's comments are far less philosophically sophisticated and interesting than Raju's....a monument to a senior Indian philosopher's lifelong study and thoughtful critical consideration of the great classical systems of his tradition." -- Karl H. Potter, Professor of Philosophy, University of Washington "Raju's credentials are impeccable. He is one of the few scholars in the world who could presume to write a major work on Indian thought. Accordingly, his knowledge of the Indian schools is accurate and impressive. To the extent that one of his intentions is to cast those schools in terms which make them more intelligible to western readers, his work measures up very well." -- Harold H. Oliver, Professor of Philosophy, Boston University. (shrink)

SS RAMA RAO PAPPU PROFESSOR PT RAJU: EVOLUTION OF HIS PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT "In India (PT Raju) represents and is really the original initiator of, ...

On the very first page of Spinoza's Ethics we find the perplexing definition of ‘attribute’: ‘By an attribute I mean what the understanding perceives in regard to a substance as constituting its essence’. Each attribute of a substance by itself thus constitutes the essence of a substance; if there are many attributes of the same substance, it does not take all of them together to constitute its essence. Spinoza, as we all know, in fact held that there is only one (...) substance, God, but there are infinitely many attributes, of which only two, Thought and Extension, are accessible to the human mind. Each attribute, we further learn, has to be conceived on its own account ; being conceived on its own account is, however, a distinguishing mark of the one substance, so how is it that the many attributes, which Spinoza says are really distinct, are not so many distinct substances, so many gods? That is the ontological side of the puzzle. Now for the logical or grammatical side — about which writers on Spinoza have, I think, said a great deal less, though it has been much discussed as regards less deviant theology than Spinoza's. Each attribute is clearly meant to be a concrete, active, individual entity; yet the attributes are designated by abstract nouns — ‘Thought’ and ‘Extension’. Now can we make sense of such a sentence as ‘God is Thought’ or ‘God is Extension’, as opposed to ‘God thinks’ or ‘God is extended’? What does it mean to predicate an abstract noun of a concrete individual? And if this ‘is’ here is not a bare copula of predication but an identity sign, then how can we avoid passing from ‘God is Thought’ and ‘God is Extension’ to ‘Thought is Extension’? Spinoza would deny the conclusion, and it is quite essential to his system to do so. For if Thought just is Extension, identically so, then any mode of the attribute Thought is a mode of the attribute Extension and vice versa. But for Spinoza, the last is diametrically opposite to the truth: no mode is a mode of more than one attribute, and indeed no causal relations link modes of different attributes — a causal linkage is always confined to one attribute. (shrink)

The language of Greek Tragedy can be considered as a whole by virtue of the characteristics which distinguish it from that of other branches of Greek literature, and the resemblance between the three tragedians in this respect is more noticeable than the differences. Still, if we compare Aeschylus and Euripides it is impossible not to feel a marked change of tone, in λ⋯ξις as in δι⋯νοια and ἤθη. As in E. the familiar legends are frequently set in a more everyday (...) atmosphere and the characters cast in a less heroic mould, it is natural that the tone of the language should be lowered, partly by the frequent use of distinctively prosaic expressions and partly by the introduction of what appear to be colloquialisms. This change of tone in language was at once noted by Aristophanes and is referred to by Aristotle as an innovation of E. On the other hand E.'s style presents a certain anomaly, since while deliberately securing a closer approximation to the language of prose and ordinary conversation he also shows a poetic and archaizing tendency in the use of Aeschylean and Homeric words and forms not found in Sophocles. This may be due to a reluctance to depart too far from the poetic tradition of Greek tragedy, and possibly to a scholar's interest in the language of Aeschylus and Homer, in a minor degree a foreshadowing of the learned archaism of the Alexandrian poets. (shrink)

The corps of philosophers who make up the Society for Philosophy & Technology has now been collaborating, in one fashion or another, for almost fifteen years. In addition, the number of philosophers, world-wide, who have begun to focus their analytical skills on technology and related social problems grows increasingly every year. {It would certainly swell the ranks if all of them joined the Society!) It seems more than ap propriate, in this context, to publish a miscellaneous volume that em phasizes (...) the extraordinary range and diversity of contemporary contribu tions to the philosophical understanding of the exceedingly complex phenomenon that is modern technology. My thanks, once again, to the anonymous referees who do so much to maintain standards for the series. And thanks also to the secretaries - Mary Imperatore and Dorothy Milsom - in the Philosophy Department at the University of Delaware; their typing and retyping of the MSS, and especially notes and references, also contributes to keeping our standards high. PAUL T. DURBIN vii Paul T. Durbin, Philosophy ofT echnology, p. vii. (shrink)

It is shown, assuming the linear case of Schinzel's Hypothesis, that the first-order theory of the structure $\langle \omega; +, P\rangle$ , where P is the set of primes, is undecidable and, in fact, that multiplication of natural numbers is first-order definable in this structure. In the other direction, it is shown, from the same hypothesis, that the monadic second-order theory of $\langle\omega; S, P\rangle$ is decidable, where S is the successor function. The latter result is proved using a general (...) result of A. L. Semenov on decidability of monadic theories, and a proof of Semenov's result is presented. (shrink)

In this article, the author describes ethical decision-making in unique circumstances. A dichotomy exists between the dual roles of nurse and disaster manager in a wartime set ting. The circumstances of the situation had never been faced before and no precedents existed for the type of decisions being made. Clearly, professional codes of conduct existed along with international conventions with reference to war. The circumstances required the author to challenge the concepts of teleology and deon tology in a search for (...) the most fitting answers to a unique problem. His aim was to try to create the greatest good out of an impossible situation. The author reflects on his actions in the light of ethical thinking and considers whether his decisions were right. (shrink)

BACKGROUND: DEPARTMENTS, SPECIALIZATION, AND PROFESSIONALIZATION IN AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION For over half of its history, U.S. higher education turned out mostly cler gymen and lawyers. Looking back on that period, we might be tempted to think that this meant specialized training for the ministry or the practice of law. That, however, was not the case. What a college education in the U.S. prepared young men (almost exclusively) for, from the founding of Harvard College in 1636 through the founding of hundreds (...) of denominational colleges in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, was leadership in the community. Professionalization and specialization only began to take root, and then became the dominant mode in U.S. higher education, in the period roughly from 1860--1920. In subsequent decades, that seemed to many critics to signal the end of what might be called "education in wisdom," the preparation of leaders for a broad range of responsibilities. Professionalization, specialization, and departmentalization of higher education in the U.S. began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. (shrink)

Both the Correspondence Theory of Truth and the Redundancy/Performative Theory of Truth appear to be unquestionably correct and yet each seems to be inconsistent with the other. As a result we have a puzzle. The way out of this dilemma is to be found by taking a closer look at the role that ‘Is’ and its cognates play in the structure of the standard statement. Once this is done it can be seen that both theories are compatible with one another.

It is suggested that anoversight occurred in classical mechanics when time-derivatives of observables were treated on the same footing as the undifferentiated observables. Removal of this oversight points in the direction of quantum mechanics. Additional light is thrown on uncertainty relations and on quantum mechanics, as a possible form of a subtle statistical mechanics, by the formulation of aclassical uncertainty relation for a very simple model. The existence of universal motion,i.e., of zero-point energy, is lastly made plausible in terms of (...) a gravitational constant which is time-dependent. By these three considerations an attempt is made to link classical and quantum mechanics together more firmly, thus giving a better understanding of the latter. (shrink)

Nearly everyone agrees that life has changed in our technological society, whether the contrast is with earlier stages in Western culture or with non-Western cultures. "Modernization" is just one of various terms that have been applied to the process by which we have arrived at the peculiar lifestyle typical of our age; whatever the term for the process, almost all analysts agree in finding technology to be one of its key ingredients. This is the judgment of critics of all sorts (...) - anthropologists, historians, literary figures, sociologists, theologians. Volume 4 in the Philosophy and Technology series brings the perspectives of philosophers to bear on the issue of characterizing contemporary life, mainly in high-technology societies. Some of the philosophers look at the issue directly. Others focus on work life - or on the living arrangements that surround or condition or offer refuge from work life in technological society. Still others reflect on particular technologies, especially biotechnology and computer technology, that are increasingly affecting both work and family life. There is also a paper on the nature of thinking in technologi cal praxis, along with two papers on whether it is appropriate to export this sort of thinking to Third World countries, and another paper on the issue of responsibility in technology - which would have fit better in volume 3 of the series, entitled Technology and Responsibility (1987). Finally, volume 4 closes with a broad-ranging bibliography that takes work and technology as its focus. (shrink)