For more than forty years Gilbert Ryle has been a unique figure on the skyline of British philosophy, and for at least half that time an influential one. No philosopher since James has written in such a vivid, racy, down-to-earth style. No philosopher since Russell in his heyday has used epigrams and sallies more devastatingly to expose “grave conceptual bosh.” Little wonder then, that for large numbers of students Ryle is a delight to read, or that many of his coinages (...) are a familiar part of the currency of our era. Yet his philosophical influence comes, I think, not from the charms of his person or his style, but from the vigour of his ideas and arguments. Whether he is unravelling a particular knot of problems, as in The Concept of Mind, or dealing with a whole series of problems, as in these Collected Papers, his ideas and arguments rarely fail to stimulate and provoke. I cannot imagine how anyone could study Ryle and remain intellectually motionless. Moreover, just because the pieces reprinted here have such an impressive range, they set off motions along a multitude of fronts, even in the case of those who have read the pieces before. Their publication is thus a most welcome philosophical event. (shrink)

The history of Wakanda began thousands of years ago when five African tribes fought over a meteorite containing vibranium. In the world of Black Panther, Killmonger's plan to arm African descendants across the globe represents the beginning stages of the Pan‐African ideal, where Blacks all over the world fight for liberation by any means necessary. Pan‐Africanism represents the expression of shared values and common interests of Africans across the diaspora. In a departure from liberalism toward a more realist theoretical approach, (...) African Americans realized with frustration that the expectation that emancipation would end exploitation of Blacks and restore their dignity was mistaken. Whereas Killmonger wants Wakanda to free oppressed Black communities all over the world, T'Challa wants to work through global institutions and the international community. (shrink)

One will be hard-pressed to find a morally perfect agent in this world. It’s not that there aren’t any morally good people. It just takes a lot to be morally perfect. However, theists claim that God is morally perfect. (Atheists claim that if God exists, God is morally perfect.) Perhaps they are mistaken. This chapter presents an argument for the conclusion that God is not morally perfect. The argument depends upon two things: (1) the nature of the concept of moral (...) perfection, and (2) the modest theistic claim that God is involved in the affairs of the world. (shrink)

Lars Porsena Or the Future of Swearing Robert Graves Originally published in 1927 "Not for squeamish readers." Spectator "A deliciously ironical affair." Bystander "Humour and style are beyond criticism." Irish Statesman As relevant now as when it was first published, this volume and its ironic look at the political correctness of society has become a classic of the Today & Tomorrow series. 90pp Breaking Priscian’s Head Or English As She Will Be Spoke and Wrote J Y T Greig Originally (...) published in 1928 "The most vehement attack we have ever read." Morning Post "A rollicking book" Spectator This volume discusses the nature of language, grammar, the influence of America, of slang dialect and many other subjects. 90p **************** Delphos The Future of International Language E Sylvia Pankhurst Originally published in 1927 In this volume, Sylvia Pankhurst argues that an international language would be one of the greatest assets to modern civilization. She surveys past attempts from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries and predicts the arrival of the inter-language, its form, its social and cultural utility and its influence for world peace. 90pp Pomona or the Future of English Basil de Sélincourt Originally published in 1926 "Equal to anything yet produced in this brilliant series." Spectator An analysis of the present condition of the English language and the paths along which it is progressing. 88pp. (shrink)

To think up vocational training devices aims at enabling persons to experiment with different situations, at different moments with in-turn periods of training and actual employment. Persons come to “dialogue” with different situations, at different moments, to make sense out of them, to create links between them and thus to build their own apprenticeship. Can this dialogue, this rhythmic training/experience only be observed in the frame of those vocational training devices? Couldn’t this dialogue or this rhythmic be observed on longer (...) periods, beyond the duration of these devices, on a career’s scale for instance? This article tries to transcribe the processing of comprehensive/biographical interviews of four Heads of Catholic primary schools. The processing is based on methods of analysis that use what has been called “sets of training and experience temporalities” Being part of a thesis which aims at highlighting the professional dynamics of this emergent group of Heads, the analysis of this dialogue, this rhythmic training/experience contributes to typify interviews and takes part in the definition of a socio-professional world and in the definition of an identity proper to the Heads who were interviewed. (shrink)

_Self-Reflection for the Opaque Mind_ attempts to solve a grave problem about critical self-reflection. Psychological studies indicate not just that we are bad at detecting our own "ego-threatening" thoughts; they also suggest that we are ignorant of even our ordinary thoughts. However, self-reflection presupposes an ability to know one’s own thoughts. So if ignorance is the norm, why attempt self-reflection? While admitting the psychological data, this book argues that we are infallible in a limited range of self-discerning judgments—that in some (...) cases, these judgments are self-fulfilling or self-verifying. Even so, infallibility does not imply indubitability, and the author does not wish to provide a "foundation" for empirical knowledge. The point is rather to explain how self-reflection as a rational activity is possible. The book will be of interest to scholars working on the issue of self-reflection across a wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science. (shrink)

For more than two centuries, Kant scholars have operated on the unquestioned premise that Kant's three Critiques offered a systematic exposition of his philosophy. But this unitary view, argues T. K. Seung, is gravely mistaken. Here Seung shows how each of the three works represents a major reformulation of the initial commitment to Platonism which Kant had made in his Inaugural Dissertation of 1770.

From the time of Locke, discussions of personal identity have often ignored the question of our basic metaphysical nature: whether we human people are biological organisms, spatial or temporal parts of organisms, bundles of perceptions, or what have you. The result of this neglect has been centuries of wild proposals and clashing intuitions. What Are We? is the first general study of this important question. It beings by explaining what the question means and how it differs from others, such as (...) questions of personal identity and the mind-body problem. It then examines in some depth the main possible accounts of our metaphysical nature, detailing both their theoretical virtues and the often grave difficulties they face. The book does not endorse any particular account of what we are, but argues that the matter turns on more general issues in the ontology of material things. If composition is universal--if any material things whatever make up something bigger--then we are temporal parts of organisms. If things never compose anything bigger, so that there are only mereological simples, then we too are simples--perhaps the immaterial substances of Descartes--or else we do not exist at all (a view Olson takes very seriously). The intermediate view that some things compose bigger things and others do not leads almost inevitably to the conclusion that we are organisms. So we can discover what we are by working out when composition occurs. (shrink)

This paper argues that Cicero’s critique of Epicureanism in De finibus is motivated by a concern about its degrading effect on the moral sensibility of Rome’s best men. In place of earlier objections to Epicureanism, which centered on its inability to explain or recommend the virtuous conduct of Roman maiores, De finibus focuses on its inability to do so properly and, more prospectively, to assist boni in the work of maintaining the dignity and respectability of Roman civic life. Responding to (...) optimates like Cassius who claimed that Epicureanism was compatible with Roman politics because it treats virtue as being necessary for pleasure, Cicero holds that instrumentalizing virtue in this way is actually a grave corruption of it. Not only do Epicureans debase politics by reducing it to considerations of utility alone: they also introduce deeper forms of civic confusion by distorting and abusing the very idea of honorableness. (shrink)

This chapter is about the view that we are simple immaterial substances–immaterialism–and related views. It is claimed to be best supported by the difficulty of saying what material things we could be. For instance, the paradox of increase threatens to show that nothing can have different parts at different times, and materialists can solve it only at considerable cost. Immaterialism is then shown to face grave problems concerning the relation of souls to material things. Compound dualism, Swinburne's view that each (...) of us is composed of an immaterial soul and a material body, is shown to face difficulties in addition to those of immaterialism. The Thomistic view that we are hylomorphic compounds is shown to combine the problems of compound dualism with those of the bundle view. The views of Chisholm and Lowe that we are simple material things are then critically discussed. (shrink)

It is widely held that every person is a person essentially, where being a person is having special mental properties such as intelligence and self-consciousness. It follows that nothing can acquire or lose these properties. The paper argues that this rules out all familiar psychological-continuity views of personal identity over time. It also faces grave difficulties in accounting for the mental powers of human beings who are not intelligent and self-conscious, such as foetuses and those with dementia.

Beginning ca. 500 bc, the Athenians annually buried their war dead in a public cemetery and marked their graves with casualty lists. This article explores the formal and expressive content of the lists, focusing in particular on their relationship to defeat. The lists created a monumental, visual rhetoric of collective resilience and strength that capitalized on Athenian notions of manhood and exploited conceptions of shame. For most of the fifth century, the casualty lists were undecorated, austere monuments testifying to (...) the endurance of the community. When decoration began anew, the public reliefs, in contrast to private funerary reliefs, represented, through imagery and setting, struggle rather than victory. The selective remembrance and, paradoxically, frequent forgetting both enacted and enabled by the lists helped the Athenians elide internal political strife and facilitated their repeated return to the fields of war. (shrink)

Exgesis on Mīmāṃsābhāṣya, Śabarasvāmi's commentary on Jaiminī's Mīmāṃsāsūtra, basic aphoristic work of the Mīmāṃsā school in Hindu philosophy; includes supercommentaries.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.2 (2003) 280-281 [Access article in PDF] Maria Dimova-Cookson. T. H. Green's Moral and Political Philosophy: A Phenomenological Perspective. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Pp. xiii + 175. Cloth, $60.00 Like most today who study Green's idealism, Dimova-Cookson finds only his ethics to be still relevant. She rejects his metaphysical epistemology and consequently his teleology, but offers an alternative. Dimova-Cookson proposes a Husserlian analysis (...) of Green's positions on goodness and a critical defense that attempts to rectify his apparently inconsistent formulations of that concept. Provided we recall that Husserl's method is not unproblematic and resist the tendency to adjust the doctrine analyzed for the sake of methodological fidelity, there is reason to be open to the author's proposal. Several of Husserl's ideas seem relevant to Green's thought: intentionality; "noematic content of the determinable X" and "horizon" developed in Ideas; intersubjectivity; and Husserl's teleological descriptions of phenomenological consciousness. But Dimova-Cookson pursues none of these. She employs Husserl's problematic "epoche" and a "necessary feature of human practice" she calls "the phenomenological circle" (69, hereafter, PC).Dimova-Cookson uses PC to resolve certain confusions imputed to Green. Green himself anticipates the charge of vicious circularity concerning the moral ideal when he reasons that "the unconditional good for man" is the good will and that the good will is to will the unconditional good. He subsequently explains that the circularity is not logically vicious for the two terms describe different states of one teleological process of a will actualizing its potential for perfection, and are distinguished "as the complete from the incomplete." According to Dimova-Cookson, Green hasn't escaped the charge and needn't try. Rather, he has unwittingly stumbled upon PC, but confused matters by carelessly conflating perspectives on the senses of "good" which she believes are two different definitions of two different things, elements in PC. "Circularity in explaining morality can be legitimized," she says, provided one rigorously clarifies the shift in perspective between the two elements in PC (70ff.). This move, she holds, can resolve certain contemporary criticisms. But note that if Green hasn't escaped the charge, and it is a genuine logical circle, then, as Husserl recognized, it cannot be avoided simply by making a rigorously clear shift in perspective. That would be a psychologistic response to a logical problem. Moreover, even if clarity of perspectival shift is useful here, it fails to capture the continuity in the moral progress of the self-actualization of moral agent to moral citizen. Finally, had Green represented his distinction in such dichotomous fashion, this would have compromised the teleological component of his explanations and made it more difficult to keep his theory from being conflated with utilitarianism. Green is far-sighted here, given recent tendencies to confuse utilitarianism and teleology on the basis that both can be represented as versions of consequentialism, a confusion based on the fallacy of undistributed middle.Most of Dimova-Cookson's connections are highly suggestive and many of her distinctions useful. She teases out several possible meanings of Green's conception of good, and is to be commended for having tried to answer some of his critics and calling attention to the valuable content of Green's doctrine. Her attempt at a phenomenological approach is novel.It is troubling, though, that Dimova-Cookson thinks it is also transcendental, for her words reveal a grave confusion about what this means. When discussing what she thinks is either transcendental or phenomenological, she uses the language of contingent psychological experience; e.g., "storing experience" (44), and projecting and relating to one's self-image (65). The process of learning she describes is more reminiscent of Piaget's "assimilation-accommodation" model than anything Husserlian or transcendental. Yet the author considers this an "advanced transcendentalism" wherein "our experience is preconditioned—that is, made possible—by the conceptual baggage that has accumulated and is always present at the back of our minds" (27). If one holds that we accumulate... (shrink)

Kant says that ideas have to be linked with sense experience to be meaningful. Rational ideas can be so linked via the "symbolical process" which is a process of creating a similarity (in rules of application) between an idea and its symbol. In this process the imagination goes beyond a concept (which is already linked with sense experience) to another concept in order to say something about the latter. This turns out to be the metaphorical process. For in every metaphor (...) there is an idea that receives expression in another, The latter already meaningful (i.E., Having a literal meaning). (shrink)

The present work is an anthology of Kumarila Bhatta's works the Slokavarttika and the tantravarttika which deal with such subjects as the nature of the Atman the nature of the Dharma the nature of the Sabda the self Validity of the veda the concept of Sphota the nature of the svarga, generality, Individuality, negation, sunyata, Vijnanavada, Apohavada etc. according to Mimamsa shcool. A reader can derive a fair knowledge of the tenets of the Mimamsakas on different subjects. Besides the author (...) has supplied a short history of the Purvamimamsa in addition to details about Kumarila Bhatta Sabarasvamin Mandana Misra and other important writers of the sastra in the elaborate Introduction. (shrink)

T. A. Cavanaugh defends double-effect reasoning (DER), also known as the principle of double effect. DER plays a role in anti-consequentialist ethics (such as deontology), in hard cases in which one cannot realize a good without also causing a foreseen, but not intended, bad effect (for example, killing non-combatants when bombing a military target). This study is the first book-length account of the history and issues surrounding this controversial approach to hard cases. It will be indispensable in theoretical ethics, applied (...) ethics (especially medical and military), and moral theology. It will also interest legal and public policy scholars. (shrink)

Contributed articles on self-realization.

"The Tao Encounters in West" by Chenyang Li is reviewed.

On divine reincarnations (avatars) in Hindu mythology.

Philosophy, social problems, and global environmental change.