In this collection of seven essays, Raymond Geuss brings his distinctive philosophical perspective to bear on the interrelations among the three issues announced in his title. At one point calling his approach an “excursion into conceptual history”, Geuss manages to keep his potentially intractable topic under control by integrating very broad thematic elements with extended moments of textual analysis, focusing on such thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Theodor Adorno, and Ernst Tugendhat. Although the essays range fairly widely, it becomes evident (...) that the two central figures in Geuss’s loosely connected concerns are, in the end, Nietzsche and Adorno, signaling the volume’s chief preoccupation with the interrelations between art and morality in modern culture. In the pursuit of these and other complexities, the author’s deep learning is coupled with a style that is virtually crystalline. (shrink)

Thomas E. Hill, Jr., interprets and extends Kant's moral theory in a series of essays that highlight its relevance to contemporary ethics. He introduces the major themes of Kantian ethics and explores its practical application to questions about revolution, prison reform, and forcible interventions in other countries for humanitarian purposes.

Coping with uncertainty is a necessary part of ordinary life and is crucial to an understanding of how the mind works. For example, it is a vital element in developing artificial intelligence that will not be undermined by its own rigidities. There have been many approaches to the problem of uncertain inference, ranging from probability to inductive logic to nonmonotonic logic. Thisbook seeks to provide a clear exposition of these approaches within a unified framework. The principal market for the book (...) will be students and professionals in philosophy, computer science, and AI. Among the special features of the book are a chapter on evidential probability, which has not received a basic exposition before; chapters on nonmonotonic reasoning and theory replacement, matters rarely addressed in standard philosophical texts; and chapters on Mill's methods and statistical inference that cover material sorely lacking in the usual treatments of AI and computer science. (shrink)

The thesis of this book is that Herbert Marcuse is "indispensable to the theory and practice of the New Left." The one-dimensional quality of contemporary everyday life is to be disrupted by a critical theory of society based upon the works of Karl Marx as interpreted and brought to bear upon the 20th Century. Hence, this collection of six New Left studies on Herbert Marcuse is called Critical Interruptions. The contributors are former students of Marcuse and all are younger than (...) thirty-five. The work is dedicated to Theodor W. Adorno and Ho Chi-Minh. The book is poorly edited; not only does the heavy Marcusean terminology make intelligibility slow; but poor rhetoric, grammar and punctuation also add to the slowness of the pace. The content of the essays, however, is uniformly very worthwhile and the book deserves a careful reading. The Marcuse Festschrift of 1967, edited by Kurt H. Wolff and Barrington Moore, Jr., entitled The Critical Spirit, was a collection of essays "in honor of Herbert Marcuse." This 1970 book, Critical Interruptions, is addressed to the exposition, up-dating and critique of Marcuse himself. Therefore, this present work is of immediate help to all readers and students of Marcuse. Paul Breines, the editor, wrote the first essay, "From Guru to Spectre: Marcuse and the Implosion of the Movement"; this is a history of Marcuse's relation to the New Left over the past few years. The second essay, "Individuation as Praxis," by Shierry M. Weber, is an incisive and insightful critique of the New Left while studying the meaning of praxis, the personal dimensions of individuality and exploring realistic alternatives for a viable counter culture. "Reversals and Lost Meanings" by Russell Jacoby is a short attempt at dialectics. William Leiss' study, "The Critical Theory of Society: Present Situation and Future Tasks," is a fine review of the major representatives of the Frankfurt School of social philosophers. "On Sexuality and Politics in the Work of Herbert Marcuse" by John David Ober, explains the continuity and development in Marcuse's thought on sexuality from Eros and Civilization through One-Dimensional Man. Finally, the last essay, "One-Dimensionality: The Universal Semiotic of Technological Experience" by Jeremy J. Shapiro is an extended commentary on Marcuse's most recent thought as applied to the advancing technology of the age. The editor openly disclaims any inner unity to the six essays. The studies, however, reveal that at least these six students of Marcuse from the New Left understand the Master very well and are able to extend his thought successfully to key contemporary issues. At the end, there is a greater unity to the book than the editor anticipated.--E. W. R. (shrink)

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “a Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” The alleged evidence has mounted that ordinary folk are prone to inconsistency, and particularly that they are prone to inconsistency when it comes to probabilistic judgments. I write “alleged,” because it is open to question whether the experiments that provide this evidence are well designed—in particular whether Quine’s principle of logistical charity has been followed. I also do so because (...) in some cases of probability judgments the untutored intuitions of ordinary people seem to be at least as good as, and perhaps better than, the intuitions of those who run the experiments. (shrink)

Contemporary discussions of practical reason often refer vaguely to the Kantian conception of reasons as an alternative to various means-ends theories, but it is rarely clear what this is supposed to be, except that somehow moral concerns are supposed to fare better under the Kantian conception. The theories of Nagel, Gewirth, Darwall, and Donagan have been labeled “Kantian” because they deviate strikingly from standard preference models, but their roots in Kant have not been traced in detail and important differences may (...) go unnoticed. All this is not surprising, of course, because Kant’s conception of practical reason is inseparable from his ideas of freedom, which are notoriously difficult and controversial. It is hard enough to characterize these ideas accurately in Kantian terminology, harder still to explain them in terms of contemporary debates about reasons for action. (shrink)

This essay underscores the significant contribution Firestone and Jacobs make through the very thorough way their book surveys the wide range of recent scholarship bearing on Kant’s Religion. The essay then argues, however, that the complex scaffolding designed to summarize and categorize the varied responses to Kant has the effect of muting the authors’ own very bold interpretive stance. This point is particularly true with respect to their account of the compatibility of Kant’s Religion with the Christian tradition. In addition, (...) the essay suggests that the judicial metaphor of “defense” is overplayed, forcing certain interpretations of Kant into potentially misleading positions for the sake of the interpretive scheme. (shrink)

These essays are characterized by meticulous argument in the analytical tradition. The book concerns matters of metaphysics in a broad sense: philosophy of mind and the problems of subjectivity; questions concerning nomological and statistical laws of nature; and, as we would expect, chance and induction.