This is the first comprehensive study in English of Voltaire's contes philosophiques--the philosophical tales for which he is best remembered and which include his masterpiece Candide. Pearson situates each story in its historical and intellectual context and offers new readings in light of modern critical thinking. He rejects the traditional view that Voltaire's contes were the private expression of his philosophical perplexity, and argues that it is narrative that is Voltaire's essential mode of thought. His book is a witty, lucid, (...) and scholarly guide to the "fables of reason" through which Voltaire's skepticism undermined the contemporary religious and philosophical explanations of human experience. (shrink)

As scholars of the American tradition, we know Charles Sanders Peirce as an original thinker with personal foibles and complex ideas, a primary source and yet an enigma in the main channel of the tradition. He is most profound in developing an architectonic system that rivals and proceeds beyond Kant in the interest of furthering the inquiry necessary for self-control and the development of the community of inquiry. The object of the Real consistently appears as a figure to Peirce's inquiry (...) as its true home, and the community of self-and-other correcting minds sharing this goal of inquiry may bring themselves together in experience and work. This handbook is an example of such work that extends beyond this... Read More. (shrink)

L'intérêt des sciences humaines pour les rapports entre TIC, langues et savoirs n'est pas nouveau. Cependant l'intelligibilité d'une construction épistémologique des relations reste un domaine en friche dans le contexte de la mondialisation. Le présent article essaie de s'en prendre à ce vide épistémologique en interrogeant particulièrement les enjeux des langues africaines dans le travail de structuration et de dissémination du savoir global et des savoirs locaux. Ces savoirs, chacun à sa manière, tentent de se construire un statut nouveau en (...) s'insérant dans les divers marchés de la connaissance. Pour cela, ils tirent profit du renouvellement des thématiques occidentales vis-à-vis des consommateurs africains d'information scientifique. En conséquence, des politiques de productivité et de circularité des savoirs s'érigent dans des stratégies d'uniformisation épistémologique. Parallèlement, la mode de la «diversité linguistique et culturelle», censée protéger les langues et savoirs locaux, risque de les transformer en de simples objets ethnographiques.The interest of the humanities to the relationship between ICT and language knowledge is not new. However, the intelligibility of a construction epistemological relations remains a fallow field in the context of globalization. This article tries to take this empty epistemological questioning particularly the issues of African languages ​​in the work of structuring and dissemination of global knowledge and local knowledge. This knowledge, in their own way, trying to build a new status by inserting themselves into the various markets for knowledge. For this, they benefit from the renewal of western themed vis-à-vis African consumers of scientific information. As a result, productivity and political knowledge circularity themselves up in uniform epistemological strategies. Meanwhile, the fashion of the "linguistic and cultural diversity," intended to protect indigenous knowledge and languages, may turn them into mere ethnographic objects. (shrink)

In his Introduction to The Encyclopaedia Logic, G.W.F. Hegel reflects at great length upon the question “Where does philosophy begin? Where does the inquiry start?” And in this reverie, he concludes that because philosophy “does not have a beginning in the sense of the other sciences” it must be the case that “the beginning only has a relation to the subject who takes the decision to philosophise.”1 For Hegel himself, it is the ultimate project of such philosophizing to bring this (...) person—the finite spirit, the single intellect, the philosopher—into identity with God as the object of pure thinking. And it is also for Hegel that, like Confucianism, persons are not facts but achievements... (shrink)

Philosophy, like most things Chinese, must be understood in terms of continuities. And any discussion of the cultural interests of contemporary China must begin from context: the “where” and the “whenh” of things. In contrast to Western philosophy, which began from the decontextualizing metaphysical sensibilities of the classical Greeks, the Chinese tradition is resolutely historicist. Reason is a series of historical instances of reasonableness; culture is a specific historical pattern of human flourishing; logic is the internal coherence of this particular (...) human narrative; knowledge modestly is local and site‐specific – making one's way smoothly and without obstruction; truth is proximate – the capacity to foster productive relationships that begin with the maintenance of one's own integrity and extend to the enhancement of one's own natural, social and cultural contexts. (shrink)

In the second edition of this groundbreaking text in non-Western philosophy, sixteen experts introduce some of the great philosophical traditions in the world. The essays unveil exciting, sophisticated philosophical traditions that are too often neglected in the western world. The contributors include the leading scholars in their fields, but they write for students coming to these concepts for the first time. Building on revisions and updates to the original, this new edition also considers three philosophical traditions for the first time—Jewish, (...) Buddhist, and South Pacific philosophy. (shrink)

For more than a century scholars both inside and outside of China have undertaken the project of modernizing Confucianism, but few have been as successful or influential as Li Zehou (b. 1930). Since the 1950s, Li's extensive efforts in this regard have in turn exerted a profound influence on Chinese modernization and resulted in his becoming one of China's most prominent social critics. To transform Confucianism into a contemporary resource for positive change in China and elsewhere, Li has reinterpreted major (...) ideas and concepts of classical Confucianism, including a rereading of the entire Analects, replete with his own philosophical speculations derived from other Chinese and Western traditions (most notably, the ideas of Kant and Marx), and developed an aesthetical theory that has proved especially far-reaching. Although the authors of this volume hail from East Asia, North America, and Europe and a wide variety of academic backgrounds and fields of study, they are unanimous in their appreciation of Li's contributions to not only an evolving Confucian philosophy, but also world philosophy. They view Li first and foremost as a sui generis thinker with broad global interests and not one who fits neatly into any one philosophical category, Chinese or Western. This is clearly reflected in the chapters included here, which are organized into three parts: Li Zehou and the Modernization of Confucianism, Li Zehou's Reconception of Confucian Philosophy, and Li Zehou's Aesthetical Theory and Confucianism. Together they form a coherent narrative that reveals how Li has, for more than half a century, creatively studied, absorbed, and reconceptualized the Confucian ideational tradition to integrate it with Western philosophical elements and develop his own philosophical insights and original theories. At the same time, he has transformed and modernized Confucianism for the purpose of both coalescing with and reconstructing a new world cultural order. (shrink)

In this book philosophers, scholars of religion, and activists address the theme of responsibility. Barbara Darling-Smith brings together an enlightening collection of essays that analyze the ethics of responsibility, its relational nature, and its global struggle.

In his own time, Lao Sze-Kwang formulated his own intra-cultural approach to the philosophy of culture that begins from the interdependence and organic nature of our cultural experience. In this essay, I address three questions: Why did Lao abandon his early reliance on the Hegelian model of philosophy of culture and formulate his own “two- structured” theory? Again, given Lao’s profound commitment and contribution to Chinese philosophy and its future directions, why is it not proper to describe him as a (...) “Chinese philosopher?” And why is the much accomplished Lao Sze- Kwang not installed in the CUHK pantheon as yet one more of the great “New Confucian” philosophers (xinruxuejia 新儒學家) to be associated with this institution? (shrink)

In these essays, Deutsch's critics both praise and attack him, and he offers his thoughtful responses.

Christopher Buondelmonti, famous «traveller, geographer, cartographer», priest of Florence, spent the last years of his life at Rhodes, where he served as dean of the cathedral chapter in 1430. This article reminds the substantial work that has been devoted to him in recent years. Then, it states much of what is known of the Latin Church of Rhodes, in particular of its cathedral chapter, in the early years of the fifteenth century. Finally, two acts of 1430 on Buondelmonti, dean of (...) this chapter, are presented here. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas died a few days before he would have been ninety years old, on December 25, 1995, very early on a Monday morning, in the Paris clinic of Beaujon, where he had been admitted the previous day with serious heart complications.

Charles Sanders Peirce, a profound philosopher and logician, mortgaged the result of his enquiry on the future possibility of a community of inquirers. Peirce was not a democrat, nor a believer in the trustworthiness of common opinion, yet his agapistic metaphysics makes the incorporation of individual inquirers into the scientific community a pragmatic necessity. In this paper I attempt to bring out Peirce's political dimension, which is embedded in his logic and his treatment of time. I suggest that at the (...) core of Peirce's community is a polis dependent on pragmatic temporality, a time within time that is not ordered by the facticity of the past, the immediacy of the present, or the 'would be' of the future. I conclude that politics is a philosophical limit for Peirce's semiotic metaphysic, revealing the depth of his existential and philosophical problem of the freedom of the self in light of secondness, or brute experience. I suggest that this kind of treatment is necessary for a recovery of American idealism in the ongoing discussion of politics and democracy. Key Words: community • logic • Peirce • politics • time. (shrink)

The doctrine of a ‘state of nature’ is at best a metaphor. Nevertheless it enables us to describe with vividness the distinction between those goods which might precede, and those which can only result from, the formation of society. I suspect that the goods which establish our well-being as rational creatures belong exclusively to the latter class, so that a rational creature is necessarily a zōon politikon.

The effort involved in playing sports calls for a hermeneutical reflection on the power that we have to move our bodies. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenology of the lived body and his later ontology of the flesh, I explore how athletic displays of agility, strength, and speed within the theater of sporting competitions exemplify the way that the effort made by athletes attests to their will and desire to succeed. The agonistic spirit of the Greek Olympics is evident in sporting (...) events where competitors or teams strive against one another. At the same time, the players’ willingness to enter the field of play has a counterpart in real-life situations over which we cannot exert complete control. The contingencies of the game in which the players are caught up are a model of the absence of aseity that is a mark of all human existence. By setting the playing field off from the concerns of everyday life, the game places this feature of the human condition on stage. The players’ physical exertion is the sign of a form of consent that sets the will, desire, and effort to exist against the wish for absolute freedom. Sporting competitions are therefore a theater for dramatizing the misery and grandeur of a specifically human freedom. (shrink)

Introduction: Conversion and the practice of transformation -- The philosophical structure of Jonathan Edwards's religious affections -- Habit, habit change, and conversion in C.S. Peirce -- Reconstructing faith : religious overcoming in Dewey's pragmatism -- Transforming obligation in William James -- Dwelling in absence: the reflective origin of conversion -- Creative transformation : the work of conversion -- The evasion of conversion in recent American philosophy.

This essay unearths the meaning of community in John Dewey’s Experience and Nature, using Marilyn Friedman’s terms “community of choice” and “community of origin.” The authority of communication as determinative of Dewey’s community comes out. In fact, communication seems to be the philosophical point of Dewey’s descriptions in that book which reveals his anticipation of a community wherever communication obtains. Dewey is shown, in conclusion, to call us beyond communities of choice or origin to a community of authority which holds (...) both peculiar promise for, and demands of, individuals. (shrink)