This essay analyses the role played by okra in The Underground Railroad, together with how it functions in relation to the soil that sustains it and which allows it to grow. I argue that okra represents an otherwise lost African past for both protagonist Cora and for the show in general and that this transplanted plant, similar to the transplanted Africans who endured the Middle Passage on the way to ‘New World’ slave plantations, survives by going through ‘black holes’, something (...) that is not only linked poetically to the established trope of the otherwise absent Black mother but which also finds support from physics, where wormholes (similar to the holes created by worms in the soil) take us through black holes and into new worlds, realities or dimensions. This is reflected in Jenkins’s series (as well as Whitehead’s novel) by the titular Underground Railroad itself, which sees Cora and others disappear underground only to reappear in new states (the show travels from Georgia to South Carolina to North Carolina to Tennessee to Indiana and so on), as well as specifically in the show through the formal properties of the audio-visual (cinematic/televisual) medium, which, with its cuts and movements, similarly keeps shifting through space and time in a nonlinear but generative fashion. Finally, I suggest that we cannot philosophise the plant or the medium of film (or television or streaming media) without philosophising race, with The Underground Railroad serving as a means for bringing together plants and plantations, soil and wormholes and Blackness and black holes, which, collectively and playfully, I group under the umbrella term ‘black (w)hole foods’. (shrink)

I argue that contrary to their own intentions Casser and Schiller should think that their pain-in-mouth argument is invalid. I cast doubt on whether a hole must be in a host of it but show that the crux of Casser and Schiller’s proposal does not depend on this.

In the second half of the twentieth century, a surprising change in the notion of scientific truth gained ground when an evolutionary cosmology made the Newtonian world machine into no more than a passing phase of the cosmos, subject to exceptions in the neighborhood of Black Holes and other unusual objects. Physical and chemical laws ceased to be eternal and universal and became local and changeable, that is, fundamentally historical instead, and faced an uncertain, changeable future just as they had (...) in the initial phases of the cosmos.The earth sciences along with biology had become historical in the nineteenth century; and the Big Bang cosmology in effect brought physics and chemistry into line, allowing venturesome intellects to concoct a new all-embracing worldview that recognizes the catalytic role of the observer in defining what is observed, and how different levels of local complexity provoke new and surprising phenomena--including terrestrial life forms, and most notably for us, humanly-constructed symbolic meanings--of which science is only one example.The article then argues that it is time for historians to take note of the imperial role thus thrust upon their discipline by making a sustained effort to enlarge their views and explore the career of humankind on earth as a whole, thus making human history an integral part of the emerging scientific and evolutionary worldview.Tentative suggestions of how this might be addressed, focusing on changes in patterns of communication that expanded the scale of human cooperation, and thus conduced to survival, follow. Dance, then speech, were early breakthroughs expanding the practicable size of wandering human bands; then caravans and shipping allowed civilizations to arise; writing expanded the scale of coordination; warfare and trade harshly imposed best practice across wide areas of Eurasia and Africa and kept the skills of that part of the world ahead of what the peoples of other continents and islands had at their command. Then with the crossing of the oceans after 1492 our One World began to emerge and swiftly assumed its contemporary shape with further improvements in the range and capacity of communication--for example, printing, mechanically-powered transport, instantaneous data transmission--with consequences for human society and earth's ecosystem yet to be experienced.Much remains to be investigated and, in particular, interactions between the history of human symbolic meanings and the history of other equilibria--ecological, chemical, physical--within which we exist needs further study. But with suitable effort, history can perhaps become scientific and the emerging scientific evolutionary worldview begin to achieve logical completeness by bringing humankind within its scope. (shrink)

The essays in this volume were written by leading researchers on classical mechanics, statistical mechanics, quantum theory, and relativity. They detail central topics in the foundations of physics, including the role of symmetry principles in classical and quantum physics, Einstein's hole argument in general relativity, quantum mechanics and special relativity, quantum correlations, quantum logic, and quantum probability and information.

The unfinished, posthumously published second volume of Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason consists for the most part of a study of the evolution of the Soviet Union under the reign of Stalin. Essentially, Sartre sees this history as amounting to a lengthy deviation from the goal of socialism, a deviation that he regards as thoroughly intelligible in light of social and historical circumstances. Some ten years after abandoning his work on this book, on the occasion of the Soviet invasion (...) of Czechoslovakia, Sartre concluded that this ‘deviation’ was permanent. At the same time, Sartre believed, as he had stated already in Volume I of the Critique, that the post-Stalinist era must be characterized as ‘One World’, a historical turning away from the plurality that had prevailed in all of past human history. The present essay attempts to capture Sartre's approach to history as ongoing ‘totalization’ – conflict-filled, subject to contingency and chance and the frequent occurrence of ‘holes’, and nevertheless intelligible. Although Stalin died many decades ago, and the Soviet Union itself no longer exists as such, it is argued here that Sartre's approach in this book is very useful as a key to the present time. Future history is indeed unpredictable, but Sartre's techniques of historical analysis remain valid. It is also contended, more controversially, that today the ideal of democracy may be in the process of following the path of socialism in the direction of permanent deviation. (shrink)

This essay hypothesizes that the Universe contains a self-reproducing neural network of Black Holes with computational abilities—i.e., the Universe can “think”! It then rephrases the Final Anthropic Principle to state: “Intelligent information-processing must come into existence in each new Universe to assure the birth of intelligent successor universes”. Continued research into the theory of Early Universe and Black Hole information storage, processing and retrieval is recommended, as are observational searches for time-correlated electromagnetic and gravitational wave emission patterns from widely (...) separated Black Hole transient events indicative of the existence of a universal inter-Black Hole faster-than-light communications network. (shrink)

Equity rights are the rights required for the equitable promotion of life prospects. They include negative opportunity rights, positive opportunity rights, and social insurance rights, including disability insurance, health insurance, retirement insurance, and maintenance rights. Social insurance rights establish a social floor without holes. This explains why they are inalienable and why making them inalienable is not paternalistic. The chapter compares his account with R. Dworkin’s account in terms of social insurance markets. He also compares the social insurance rights endorsed (...) by the main principle with the basic income rights favored by Van Parijs. He explains why Van Parijs’s proposal would have a benefit-spreading effect that would not be endorsed by the main principle. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Denial of PeterRené Girard, Mimetic Desire, and ConversionWilliam E. Cain (bio)Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.—René GirardI believe in commitment … We must be committed to one position and follow it through.—René GirardIn many books and essays throughout his long career, (...) the literary critic and cultural theorist René Girard presented, developed, and extended provocative ideas about, and insights into, mimetic desire. Our desires are not our own, Girard emphasizes; they do not come from within. We form our desires on the desires that we perceive in others; they are our models; we imitate them. Always, we seek to be aligned with the words and deeds of an envied model or, more generally, with those of a dominant group or crowd. [End Page 101]As Girard defines it, desire is extremely potent and controlling. We cannot resist its force, and all too often it propels individuals and societies into rivalry, hatred, and violence. There are descriptions of this formidable power in Sophocles, Shakespeare, and other great writers of the Western tradition, as Girard has demonstrated. But, even more, Girard maintains that we witness the operation, that is, the revelation, of mimetic desire—its origins, its consequences—in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.The temptation and sin of Adam and Eve, the story of Joseph and his brothers, the judgment of Solomon, the story of Job, the crucifixion of Jesus—these are some of Girard's recurring examples. However, the Biblical episode that may have mattered the most to him, one that he invoked repeatedly, is the Denial of St. Peter.The details of this story differ somewhat from one gospel to the next—Girard prefers the version of it in the gospel of Mark—but the core of it is this: At the Last Supper, Jesus predicted that Peter would deny him three times; Peter swore that he would not, but when the time of testing came, he did. When others confronted him, the fearful Peter, desiring to belong, desperate to be safely within the group, denied that he knew who Jesus was: "I do not know the man you speak of" (Mark 14:71).1Girard's explications of the Denial bring into focus his theory of mimetic desire. His reiterated point about St. Peter is really a point about us—that we are the same as this disciple: We would have betrayed Jesus too. In New Testament studies, some have claimed that "the story about Peter is simply a concretizing of the general denial of all the disciples."2 In our own times of test and trial, we have acted and will act as Peter did.Consider Girard's treatment of the Denial in Le Sacrifice (2003; English trans. 2011).3 The mob that calls for Jesus's death, Girard explains, "is constituted and nourished by swallowing up everything that passes within its reach. It is the black hole of violent mimeticism; where mimeticism is most dense, the mob emerges."4"The major example," he continues, "is that of Peter's denial":Peter cannot help but imitate their hostility. If we psychologize this denial, if we attribute it to the suggestible temperament of the apostle, we seek to prove (unconsciously) that in Peter's place, we would not have denied Jesus. It should be recalled that before his denial Peter, too, vows never to deny Jesus. He is too preoccupied with the opinion others have of him not to blindly adopt the politically correct attitude of the milieu at the center of which he has the misfortune of finding himself.5 [End Page 102] Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1."All the actors and witnesses of the crucifixion," Girard concludes, "are already hostile to Jesus or they become so, for mimeticism spares no one."6We cannot resist the influence of the mob: Inevitably we succumb to it. No more than Peter would we have remained steadfast. There is nothing inherent in Peter as an individual that explains why he... (shrink)

For most literary sociologists serious modern work starts with Robert Escarpit’s Sociologie de la Littérature , a book which proposes that sociology can usefully explain how literature operates as a social institution. Subsequent Escarpit-inspired work on the literary enterprise covers topics such as the profession of authorship; the stratified “circuits” of production, distribution, and consumption; and the commodity aspect of literature. Critics have objected that Escarpit’s increasingly macroquantitative and statistics-bound procedures bleach out literary and ideological texture. And his model of (...) literature as discrete social system encourages the abstract model making which Raymond Williams despises.1 But, whatever its shortomcings, Escarpit’s definition of literary product and practice as social faits forms an essential starting point for the sociologist intending to investigate the apparatuses of literature.In what follows, I shall mainly fix on a problem currently disabling constructive research on the literary-sociological lines projected by Escarpit: namely, scholarly ignorance about book trade and publishing history technicalities. This sets up, I shall suggest, a large and troubling hole at the centre of the subject, and there is little indication, at this stage, how or when the hole is to be filled. 1. See Raymond Williams, “Literature and Sociology,” Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays , pp. 11-30. John Sutherland is professor of literature at the California Institute of Technology. His books include Fiction and the Fiction Industry , Bestsellers , and Offensive Literature . He is currently completing an encyclopedia of Victorian fiction. (shrink)

This paper addresses recent examples of militant atheism. It considers the theistic reply that describes atheism as deriving from a “God-shaped hole” in the human soul. The paper will argue that American pragmatism offers a middle path that avoids militant atheism without suffering from this problem. The paper describes this middle path and considers the problem that is seen in Rorty’s recent work: how the pragmatist can remain critical of religious fundamentalism without succumbing to a militant version of atheism. (...) The solution proposed is tolerant acceptance of religion along with melioristic criticism developed within shared norms of inquiry. (shrink)

This article shows that William E. Connolly’s work holds resources for projects of racial justice but must be revised to fully meet the challenge of racial inequality. There are two interrelated problems in Connolly’s theory: first, the drive to destabilize identity, for which he argues, rejects the need for collective identity, which is necessary in democratic politics. Furthermore, because domination renders identity unstable, the call to destabilize identity places too great a burden on already marginalized groups. The problem of (...) destabilizing identity is underwritten by a second problem: the white working class and its grievances occupy too important a position in Connolly’s analysis. This article uses insights provided by James Baldwin to amend Connolly’s contributions. The article argues that there is a need to destabilize the ‘we’ of American politics that allows white, male identity to occupy the ‘heart’ of liberal democracy. Baldwin’s insights help solve the problem of the ‘black hole’ at the center of liberal democracy which, Connolly argues, sustains fundamentalism and racial injustice. This article’s contribution is to amend Connolly’s work to meet the challenge of racial injustice, offer a novel reading of the place of political imagination in Baldwin’s work, and show how political imagination adds depth to conversations about democracy, racial justice, and pluralism. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This chapter presents the following hypothesis: There is a perfectly sensible conception of the mind, consciousness, the self, what we mean by ‘I,’ how we perceive and know, and how we remember and decide, all of which cohere amongst one another as well as with what we know about the brain, according to which it is possible for one person to experience directly the conscious states of another person. Not only can one person be directly aware of the conscious states (...) of another person, he can be more aware of them than their original owner. He can even be aware of them when their original owner will never be aware of them. Mindmelding is possible, and this possibility removes much of the force from the mind-body problem by removing the impasse caused by the belief in privacy. It removes what some philosophers saw as a need to posit strange metaphysical categories. The subject's sense of self can be separated from the object of her conscious awareness which can be bound to another's sense of self. (shrink)

No account of the development of contemporary empiricism is adequate which neglects the writings and the influence of Charles Peirce. Although he is not easily pigeon-holed and can not be claimed as the exclusive property of any school or movement, it is appropriate that the hundredth anniversary of his birth should be commemorated at this Congress. For the movement of which it is a manifestation is engaged in a coöperative, intensive cultivation of the methods of the sciences with the help (...) of the most advanced tools of modern logic; and Peirce's intellectual career was also a single-minded devotion to that task. It is fitting, also, that his birth-year be celebrated at Harvard by an international congress. For although he was denied the privilege of teaching at this university, much of his influence was propagated by William James and Josiah Royce, two of its great teachers; and however much he may have suffered from neglect during his life-time, his work surely merits recognition from a movement not confined by national bounds. It is characteristic of the best established sciences that though individuals may pursue researches in them independently of one another, the conclusions reached tend to support each other and to converge toward a common stream of sound beliefs; and such convergence is indeed the sole identifiable warrant for the confidence that some measure of the truth has been attained. It is therefore a happy sign that so many of the central ideas of the present movement have been independently developed on both sides of the Atlantic. One is not minimizing the contributions of the Vienna Circle in pointing out that many of its recent views have been taken for granted for some time by American colleagues, largely because the latter have come to intellectual maturity under the influence of Peirce. (shrink)

On Evidence in Philosophy sketches an epistemology of philosophy itself, a method for philosophical inquiry. Part 1 defends a version of Moore's method of “common sense,” in which humble, boring everyday facts like “I have hands” and “I had breakfast earlier today” trump the a priori philosophical premises of arguments for various eliminative idealisms and skepticisms. Part 2 exhibits the deeper poverty of philosophical method, arguing that philosophy cannot prove or even refute any interesting thesis. But Part 3 defends intuitions (...) as giving us good prima facie reason to accept the judgments they support, and then develops the method of wide reflective equilibrium in the context of a broader explanatory-coherentist epistemology. (shrink)

This generous omnium-gatherum brings together all the writings William James published that have not appeared in previous volumes of this definitive edition of ...

Récurrente sous différentes formes dans le domaine de la lexicométrie, l’analyse cooccurrentielle vise à dévoiler les attractions lexicales qui opèrent dans un texte en restituant un état intermédiaire entre la séquence textuelle et l’inventaire lexical, état qui doit combiner l’explicitation syntagmatique de l’une avec la hiérarchisation statistique de l’autre. Pour dépasser les résultats des méthodes de cooccurrence classiques et identifier des systèmes cooccurrentiels plus complexes à l’oeuvre dans le texte, il s’avère nécessaire de substituer à l’approche analytique des associations lexicales (...) une vue synthétique de ces attractions prééminentes en contexte. (shrink)

The pedagogical technique of the playful Plato, especially his ability to create living discourses that directly address the student, is the subject of Plato the Teacher. “The crisis of the Republic” refers to the decisive moment in his central dialogue when philosopher-readers realize that Plato’s is challenging them to choose justice by going back down into the dangerous Cave of political life for the sake of the greater Good, as both Socrates and Cicero did.

This article seeks to develop an under-appreciated aspect of spectator activity: the way in which viewers make use of film to enter or sustain a project of bad faith. Based on Jean-Paul Sartre's account of bad faith in Being and Nothingness (1943), the article explains the aspects of bad faith that are pertinent to viewer activity, then explores the way viewers can make use of filmic depictions to facilitate self-denial. For example, spectators may emphasize the fact that persons are depicted (...) in narrow terms as corroboration for their belief that human nature is just as its depicted, thereby denying that we have the freedom to be otherwise. Or spectators may deny the relevance of problematic aspects of themselves when they find it depicted in characters who are admirable in other ways. I then consider whether films themselves can be described as being in bad faith. While technically they cannot, I identify ways that a film may encourage or discourage bad faith in viewers. I also examine how the immersive aspect of film enables viewers to turn attention away from themselves while they engage in self-denial. The case for this approach to viewer activity and film analysis is supplemented by a distinction between traits that do apply to film, e.g., being racist, sexist, or homophobic, and the resources it gives persons to be in bad faith about these social attitudes. I argue that a film can have traits like these while not encouraging bad faith and vice versa, demonstrating the unique perspective offered by approaching film and spectator activity in terms of bad faith. (shrink)

In _The Fragility of Things_, eminent theorist William E. Connolly focuses on several self-organizing ecologies that help to constitute our world. These interacting geological, biological, and climate systems, some of which harbor creative capacities, are depreciated by that brand of neoliberalism that confines self-organization to economic markets and equates the latter with impersonal rationality. Neoliberal practice thus fails to address the fragilities it exacerbates. Engaging a diverse range of thinkers, from Friedrich Hayek, Michel Foucault, Hesiod, and Immanuel Kant to (...) Voltaire, Terrence Deacon, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Alfred North Whitehead, Connolly brings the sense of fragility alive as he rethinks the idea of freedom. Urging the Left not to abandon the state but to reclaim it, he also explores scales of politics below and beyond the state. The contemporary response to fragility requires a militant pluralist assemblage composed of those sharing affinities of spirituality across differences of creed, class, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. (shrink)

This article reports original research examining characteristics of the active followers of the American animal rights movement. Typical respondents were Caucasian, highly educated urban professional women approximately thirty years old with a median income of $33,000. Most activists think of themselves as Democrats or as Independents, and have moderate to liberal political views. They were often suspicious of science and made no distinctions between basic and applied science, or public versus private animal-based research. The research suggests that animal rights activism (...) is in part a symbolic manifestation of egalitarian social and political views concerning scientific and technological change. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editors’ NoteJames M. DuBois, Ana S. Iltis, and Heidi A. WalshFrom childhood, David Slakter had undergone tests and invasive procedures to monitor his nephritis. It was not a surprise when in 2015, doctors told him he needed a kidney transplant. The wife of a childhood friend was a close match and gave him one of her kidneys. Before his transplant, aerobic exercise was difficult; a few months after transplant, (...) Slakter could ride his bike, hike, and work out with a personal trainer. He no longer had to weigh food or gauge his potassium consumption, a concern for people with kidney failure. For Slakter, “life post-transplant has been a significant improvement.”Individuals or family members of those who have received an organ transplant from a living or deceased donor share their stories in this issue of Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics. The symposium is titled “Receiving the Gift of Life: Stories from Organ Transplant Recipients.” Organ transplantation can extend an individual’s life by decades. It can also greatly improve an individual’s quality of life, as was Slakter’s experience. At the same time, organ transplantation is expensive and stressful. Recipients can experience complications, including organ rejection, and there are few appealing alternatives.After her heart transplant, author Leilani R. Graham required four open-heart surgeries, ECMO, and an intra-aortic balloon pump. She experienced delirium, necrotizing pneumonia, and severe muscular atrophy that required her to re-learn how to walk. She struggled with weight gain, explosive mood swings, hair loss, and was terrified that her body would reject the new heart. For Graham, “[Transplant] was not the miracle [she] was hoping for.” Graham says she felt unprepared for and inadequately informed about what to expect after her transplant, which left her “battered, beaten, and bruised” with a 12-inch line from neck to navel and “bullet holes” up and down her torso from the chest tubes. When reflecting on her experience post-transplant, Graham says, “It wasn’t the physical trauma that hurt the most. It was that no one seemed surprised [by the aftereffects of transplant].” Seemingly no one, that is except Graham, who calls on transplant providers to “prioritize empathy.”The symposium editors are Jason T. Eberl and Tristan McIntosh. Three commentary articles, written by Macey Leigh Levan, Heather Lannon, and Vidya A. Fleetwood, Roslyn B. Mannon & Krista L. Lentine, offer important insights into the authors’ stories. The editors thank Mid-America Transplant, the UCSF Lung Transplant Program, Donor Connect, William L. Freeman, MD, MPH, MJIL, CIP, Janet Monk, and the individuals who gave anonymous donations to support the publication of this issue, an open-access VOICES edition of the symposium, and accompanying teaching guides.The research article in this issue, “‘A Shell of My Former Self’: Using Figurative Language to Promote Communication about Patient Suffering,” was written by Tyler Tate, Elizabeth Stein, and Robert A. Pearlman. The relief of suffering is a primary goal of medicine. However, the authors note that clinicians often miss or ignore suffering because they focus on the causes rather than the experience of suffering, or the subjective nature of suffering makes it difficult to discuss. The authors believe that “the key to communicating about suffering lies in finding [End Page vii] the right kind of words to describe the experience” and say that figurative language offers a promising approach. In their research, the authors performed qualitative analysis on 52 works of literature and identified 254 excerpts of figurative language with themes of non-physical or psychological suffering. The authors found 13 salient themes: brokenness, diminishment, disorientation, drowning, emptiness, imprisonment, battle, darkness, isolation, invisibility, lifelessness, punishment, and torture. The authors reiterate that developing a shared language of suffering could foster a therapeutic patient-clinician relationship and improve clinicians’ ability to recognize and address a patient’s experience of suffering.María Susana Ciruzzi wrote the first of two case studies included in this issue. “The Sword of King Solomon” addresses a tragic and difficult subject—how to navigate the situation posed by conjoined twins when “any decision will produce damage and suffering.” The case involves two infant male patients born at 37 weeks gestation as omphalo-ischiopagus conjoined twins... (shrink)

It is debated among open theists whether propositions about the contingent future should be regarded as straightforwardly true or false, as all false without exception, or as lacking truth-values. This article discusses some recent work on this topic and proposes a solution different than the one I have previously endorsed.

In "The Cerebral Code," he has solidly embedded his ideas in experimental neurophysiology and neuropharmacology, deriving from his decades in the laboratory.

_Metaphysics of Consciousness_ opens with a development of the physicalist outlook that denies the need for any explanation of the mental. This "inexplicability" is demonstrated not to be sufficient as refutation of physicalism. However, the inescapable particularity of modes of consciousness appears to overpower this minimal physicalism. This book proposes that such an inference requires either a wholly new conception of how consciousness is physical or a deep and disturbing new kind of physical inexplicability.

Once we realize that the indivisible and infinitely repeatable One of the arithmetic lesson in Republic7 is generated by διάνοια at Parmenides 143a6-9, it becomes possible to revisit the Divided Line’s Second Part and see that Aristotle’s error was not to claim that Plato placed Intermediates between the Ideas and sensible things but to restrict that class to the mathematical objects Socrates used to explain it. All of the One-Over-Many Forms of Republic10 that Aristotle, following Plato, attacked with the Third (...) Man, are equally dependent on Images and above all on the Hypothesis of the One. (shrink)

Vernunft und Glaube, Wissenschaft und Religion stehen keineswegs in einem Gegensatz. Trotz der abweisenden Haltung, die Säkularität gegenüber der Religion an den Tag legt, sind fundamentale Überzeugungen des säkularen Bewusstseins unverkennbar theologischer Natur, viele haben gar eine spezifisch christliche Prägung: Begriffe wie Verantwortung, Gewissens- und Wissenschaftsfreiheit, Toleranz und Volkssouveränität, Menschenwürde und Wirklichkeit beispielsweise tragen eine religiöse Signatur. Wenn uns auch heute oft verborgen, so steht doch die aufgeklärte Vernunft auf einem theologischen Fundament, das diese trägt. Genauere begriffsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen belegen das. (...) Nur durch solche Vergewisserungen, die den Sinn von Begriffen erschließen, erlangt der Mensch inmitten der Brave New World seine innere Freiheit. (shrink)

Latin dē, both in its prepositional and preverbal form, is characterized by multiple, varied, and seemingly unrelated senses. Unlike proposition-based lexicographical and historical linguistic accounts, an image-schematic definition systematically explains the range of its literal, physical senses and of its figurative, abstract senses, as well as the relations between them. Defining dē in terms of an image-schematic “scenario” portraying two entities connected by a directional trajectory in fact accommodates the co-existence of even antonymous senses within this word's semantic structure and (...) apparently radical divergences from its presumed essential literal meaning in Latin literature, due to the susceptibility of image schemas to “embodied” transformations such as perspective shifts and profiling effects. Dē's more abstract senses may also be linked in this way to widespread metaphorical patterns in Latin, showing that these senses are not haphazard but highly motivated semantically—with significant implications for lexicography, and literary and cultural history. (shrink)

Sutton Elbert Griggs wrote the first major African-American political novel, Imperium in Imperio. Imperium is a utopian novel and the first novel to represent the New Negro, a figure that Alain Locke popularized a quarter of a century later. Griggs used the term New Negro to refer to a generation of educated black Americans born after emancipation, a multiplicity of voices that demanded equality at the turn of the twentieth century. The 1890s are often described as the nadir of race (...) relations in the United States, for blacks were disfranchised, legally segregated, and subject to terrorist mob violence in the form of lynching and burning alive. Race war was in the air.Sutton Griggs was born... (shrink)

From its genesis in the 1960s, the focus of inquiry in neuroscience has been on the cellular and molecular processes underlying neural activity. In this pursuit neuroscience has been enormously successful. Like any successful scientific inquiry, initial successes have raised new questions that inspire ongoing research. While there is still much that is not known about the molecular processes in brains, a great deal of very important knowledge has been secured, especially in the last 50 years. It has also attracted (...) the attention of a number of philosophers, some of whom have viewed it as evidence for a ruthlessly reductionistic program that will eventually explain how mental processes are performed in the brain in purely molecular terms. As neuroscience developed, however, there emerged a smaller group of researchers who focused on systems, behavioral, and cognitive neuroscience. These investigators have also made impressive advances in the last 50 years and they have been the focus of an even larger group of philosophers, who have appealed to systems level understanding of the brain as providing the appropriate point of connection to the information processing accounts advanced in psychology. (shrink)

Taking an analytic and historical approach, this work develops and defends Althusserian critical theory. This theory, it is argued, produces knowledge of how a particular class of people, in a particular time, in a particular place, is dominated, oppressed, or exploited. Moreover, without relying on a general notion of human emancipation, concrete critical theory can suggest political means for the alleviation of these conditions. Because it puts Althusser’s ideas in dialogue with contemporary social science and philosophy, the book as a (...) whole makes contributions to Althusser studies, to Anglo-American political philosophy, and to current debates in the philosophy of the social sciences. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Seeking to renew an ancient companionship between the philosophical andthe religious, this book’s meditative chapters dwell on certain elementalexperiences or happenings that keep the soul alive to the enigma of the divine.William Desmond engages the philosophical work of Pascal, Kant, Hegel,Nietzsche, Shestov, and Soloviev, among others, and pursues with a philosophicalmindfulness what is most intimate in us, yet most universal: sleep, poverty,imagination, courage and witness, reverence, hatred and love, peace and war.Being religious has to do with that intimate universal, (...) beyond arbitrarysubjectivism and reductionist objectivism.In this book, he attempts to look at religion with a fresh and open mind,asking how philosophy might itself stand up to some of the questions posed toit by religion, not just how religion might stand up to the questions posed to it byphilosophy. Desmond tries to pursue a new and different policy, one faithfulto the light of this dialogue. (shrink)

P. T. Geach, notoriously, holds the Relative Identity Thesis, according to which a meaningful judgment of identity is always, implicitly or explicitly, relative to some general term. ‘The same’ is a fragmentary expression, and has no significance unless we say or mean ‘the same X’, where ‘X’ represents a general term (what Frege calls a Begriffswort or Begriffsausdruck). (P. T. Geach, Mental Acts (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), p. 69. I maintain that it makes no sense to judge whether (...) things are ‘the same’, or remain ‘the same’, unless we add or understand some general term - ‘the same F’. (P. T. Geach, Reference and Generality, third Edition (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 63f. I am arguing for the thesis that identity is relative. When one says ‘x is identical with y’, this, I hold, is an incomplete expression; it is short for ‘x is the same A as y’, where ‘A’ represents some count noun understood from the context of utterance - or else, it is just a vague expression of a half-formed thought. (P. T. Geach, ‘Identity,’ Review of Metaphysics 21 (1967-8), p. 3.) One of the ways Geach seeks to support this is by tying it to the well nigh universally admired Fregean thesis about cardinality. (shrink)

The target article by Christopher Meyers concerning justification of deception for clinical ethicists is both well-reasoned and plausible. Clearly grounded in utilitarian considerations, its...

Citing the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal, the Leo Frank murder trial, and other cases, author William Simon takes a fresh look at the ethics of lawyering.

In this book, William H. F. Altman argues that it is not order of composition but reading order that makes Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates, Crito, and Phaedo “late dialogues,” and shows why Plato’s decision to interpolate the notoriously “late” Sophist and Statesman between Euthyphro and Apology deserves more respect from interpreters.