It is often argued that a shared culture, or at least shared cultural references or practices, can help to foster peace and prevent war. This essay examines in detail and criticizes one such argument, made by Patrick Leigh Fermor, in the context of his discussing an incident during World War II, when he and a captured German general found a form of agreement, a ground for peace between them, in their both knowing Horace's ode I.9 by heart (...) in Latin. By way of introducing the sixth and final installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means,” this essay proposes that Leigh Fermor's narrative be understood in terms of commerce, rather than consensus. It concludes by examining Ezra Pound's use of the word commerce in his poem “A Pact” to define his relationship with his “detested” and “pig-headed” poetic “father,” Walt Whitman. (shrink)

The Oxford or Tractarian Movement and later Ritualists and Anglo-Catholics schooled numerous converts in elements of the Catholic faith. Foremost among them was John Henry Cardinal Newman, one of the original founders of the Oxford Movement. Converts numbered in the hundreds and included another cardinal, Henry Edward Manning, the second Archbishop of Westminster, the religious foundress Cornelia Connelly, the priest novelist Robert Hugh Benson and later literary figures such as G.K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh and Mgr Ronald Knox. American historian, (...) class='Hi'>Patrick Allitt, has argued that on both sides of the Atlantic converts dominated Catholic intellectual life between 1840 and 1960. While such 'Tractarian' converts have indeed greatly influenced Catholic life, many 'Tractarians' who never converted have also had a considerable impact on English-speaking Catholicism. C.S. Lewis is an obvious example. But there have been others, including author Charles Williams, poet T.S. Eliot and theologians John Macquarrie and Michael Ramsey. The author Dorothy L. Sayers also deserves to be counted among their number. (shrink)

First ever philosophy treatise on photography, analytic in approach but sensitive to photo-history, not confined to aesthetics or art (illus.), Walker Evans photo on cover. Papercover printing, Dec. 2000.

Philosophers and scientists often describe theories, laws, and explanations as applying to the world at different 'levels'. The idea of a 'level of application' is often used to demarcate disciplinary or sub-disciplinary boundaries in the sciences. For instance, stoichiometric laws and quantum mechanical laws might be said to describe chemical phenomena at different levels. More generally, the idea of levels is used to distinguish more fundamental laws or theories from less fundamental ones: more fundamental theories are those that apply at (...) more fundamental levels. (shrink)

We submit that, contrary to the standard view, gravitational waves do not carry energy-momentum. Analysing the four standard arguments on which the standard view rests - viz. the kinetic effects of a GW on a detector, Feynman’s Sticky Bead Argument, an application of Noether’s Theorem and a general perturbative approach – we find none of them to be successful: Pre-relativistic premises underlie each of them – premises that, as we argue, no longer hold in General Relativity. Finally, we outline a (...) GR-consistent interpretation of the effects and, in particular, the spin-down of binary systems. (shrink)

Predictions about the future and unrestricted universal generalizations are never logically implied by our observational evidence, which is limited to particular facts in the present and past. Nevertheless, propositions of these and other kinds are often said to be confirmed by observational evidence. A natural place to begin the study of confirmation theory is to consider what it means to say that some evidence E confirms a hypothesis H.

On other formatting matters, follow the 15th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS). The online edition is free with a uiuc internet connection and there are non-circulating paper copies in many campus libraries, including the History and Philosophy Library.

Based on a fresh examination of the original, this is the first ever full-length commentary and English translation of one of Sallust's major works. It covers the years 78-67 BC, one of the least-documented but eventful periods of the era.

'Doing an Aristotle' on Form: a highly compressed attempt to explain what we mean by the ambiguous term "form" in visual arts.

From a perceptual psychology and philosophy conference on linear perspective: points out standard fallacies about perspective, then challenges psychology's and philosophy's widespread assumption that a satisfactory understanding of depiction in any medium can be reached via theories of spatial--or any other kind of--visual perception.

The third and purportedly final attempt to outline a personalism appropriate for a post-modern, post Marxist cultural phase, linked to but independent of Grant's (English, U. of Victoria, British Columbia) Literature and Personal Habits (1992) and Spirituality and the Meaning of Persons (1994). Concerned here with the idea of the person in relation to the politics of culture, he considers certain relationships between literature and religion to find clues about persons and human community. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, (...) OR. (shrink)

Substructural pluralism about the meaning of logical connectives is best understood as the view that natural language connectives have all (and only) the properties conferred by classical logic, but that particular occurrences of these connectives cannot simultaneously exhibit all these properties. This is just a more sophisticated way of saying that while natural language connectives are ambiguous, they are not so in the way classical logic intends them to be. Since this view is usually framed as a means to resolve (...) paradoxes, little attention is paid to the logical properties of the ambiguous connectives themselves. The present paper sets out to fill this gap. First, I argue that substructural logicians should care about these connectives; next, I describe a consequence relation between a set of ambiguous premises and an ambiguous conclusion, and review the logical properties of ambiguous connectives; and finally, I highlight how ambiguous connectives can explain our intuitions about logical rivalry. (shrink)

Should all digital communication be accessible to government inspection? Is robust cryptography in the hands of the public a threat to our national security? With Dorothy Denning and Patrick Sullivan.

Extensive revision of 1998 entry (for expanded new edition of Encyclopedia of Aesthetics) to include, besides mini-essays on technology, art, depiction and the aesthetic, a development of the last in terms of facture--the materials of a work and their working there, as perceivable in the work.

This paper argues that modern society does not meet the problems posed by the experience of disease in a satisfactory way. It attempts to show this by examining the distinction between disease and plague. Disease is formulated as necesssarily involving the self in unforeseeable ways with what is other to itself: the challenge of disease is treated as the challenge of this involvement. On the other hand, plague as an abstract threat is that towards which the collective shows principled indifference. (...) The strength and the limits of this indifference are explored. Subsequent upon this, the paper examines the consequences of the loss of the distinction between disease and plague, particularly with respect to the implications of that loss for the treatment, management, and control of disease in modern society. (shrink)

Concerns photography and time as duration, sequence, equability, past and present (illus.).

The successful specification of the definition of art has so far proven elusive. Discouraged by repeated failed attempts at the definition of art, numerous anti-essentialist philosophers have suggested alternative accounts. In this paper I defend the project of the definition of art by arguing that the strongest anti-essentialist arguments are unsuccessful in ruling out either the possibility or the value of a definition of art. Based on my observations regarding a blind spot in Wittgenstein’s anti-essentialist “look and see” approach, I (...) conclude by suggesting a new avenue of investigation for essentialism regarding art. (shrink)

What constitutes better schooling for today's youth? In 1984 educational theorist Theodore R. Sizer formulated nine Common Principles to answer this question and launched The Coalition of Essential Schools, an organization of schools attempting to change their own structure, curriculum, pedagogy, and power relations according to Sizer's Principles. This important book, the first comprehensive look at Coalition schools, charts the course of reform at eight charter member schools. The Coalition now counts over 900 private, parochial, public, urban, suburban, and rural (...) secondary schools among its affiliates nationwide. Donna E. Muncey and Patrick J. McQuillan, experts in anthropology as well as education, conducted a five-year ethnographic study to understand what happened in Coalition schools. The authors looked at curricular and pedagogical developments; how changes affected individual students, teachers, administrators, and other school personnel; and how American cultural beliefs influenced efforts to change. The schools' reform experiences differed: some efforts were sustained when others stalled, change divided some faculties while others found a sense of shared purpose, and the principals of some schools facilitated change while others clearly inhibited it. This compelling book, written for all who are concerned with education in America, offers a wealth of insights into the complexities of change efforts in individual schools and in classrooms. (shrink)