One cannot step twice into the same river, nor can one grasp any mortal substance in a stable condition, but it scatters and again gathers; it forms and dissolves, and approaches and departs—Heraclitus. Play is always play of absence and presence, but if one wishes to think it radically, one must think it before the alternative of presence and absence; it is necessary to think of Being as presence or absence from the possibility of play on, and not the other (...) way around—Derrida. (shrink)

Review of William J. Prior's "Unity and Development in Plato's Metaphysics".

William S. Robinson has for many years written insightfully about the mind-body problem. In Understanding Phenomenal Consciousness he focuses on sensory experience and perception qualities such as colours, sounds and odours to present a dualistic view of the mind, called Qualitative Event Realism, that goes against the dominant materialist views. This theory is relevant to the development of a science of consciousness which is now being pursued not only by philosophers but by researchers in psychology and the brain sciences. (...) This provocative book will interest students and professionals who work in the philosophy of mind and will also have cross-disciplinary appeal in cognitive psychology and the brain sciences. (shrink)

Plato's Sophist provides a careful translation of the Sophist, one of Plato's most complex and difficult dialogues, and includes materials designed to facilitate its usefulness as a text in college courses. The translation employs a minimum of interpretative paraphrasing while being presented in clear, readable English. Special attention has been given to consistency in translating key Greek terms. The book presents a special list of these terms and discusses them in the endnotes. The result is a translation that enables the (...) reader who lacks a knowledge of Greek to get much closer than usual to the original text. Cobb's introduction contains a detailed summary of the entire dialogue, clarifying the main themes and the general structure. He offers a fresh interpretation of the dialogue that shows how each theme contributes to the exploration of the nature of, and the relation between, philosophy and sophistry. The introduction is particularly useful to first readers of the Sophist. (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)

Exploration of Alfred North Whitehead's influence on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's ontology of nature.

In a careful exposition of French Marxism, William Lewis places Althusser and his thought alongside the pre- and post-war French communist intellectual climate: the result is an excellent and unique work. Part theoretical treatise on some of Althusser's more complicated and less explored ideas, part intellectual history, Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism is, in total, an important text for philosophy, French and francophone studies, political thought, cultural studies, marxist thought, and several other disciplines interested in the (...) intellectual life and times of the twientieth century. (shrink)

William S. Allen sets the works of Theodor Adorno, Immanuel Kant and Peter Weiss in dialogue, revealing how an interrogation of the aesthetics of 'the whole' and the conception of history in Western thought reveals new ways of thinking about history and historically. This book traces how Adorno's reconsideration of history through his readings of Kant's Critique of Judgement are distinct from formulations offered by other thinkers. More than any of them though, Adorno's aesthetics has introduced an alternative thought, (...) which, Allen shows, has been modified and extended in the work of Peter Weiss and other contemporary thinkers. (shrink)

In the extensive study, Systems of Ethics and Value Theory, author William S. Sahakian deconstructs these two complex philosophical systems for a scholarly audience.

Peter Carruthers offers a model that embraces first order representations and higher order representations or higher order thoughts . His model stipulates certain features of FORs and HOTs. Carruthers agrees with qualia realists that the FORs of his model are not adequate for phenomenal consciousness, and invokes HOTs to supply the required addition. It is argued that Carruthers' HOTs fail to provide anything that will enable him to account for phenomenal consciousness, i.e., that his model fails to include phenomenal consciousness (...) and thus provides no help in understanding human consciousness, animal consciousness, or the "hard problem". In "Natural Theories of Consciousness" Peter Carruthers describes a model that he claims will show the "hard problem" to be not so hard after all. To evaluate this claim, we should begin with the model, which contains the following elements and stipulations. (shrink)

C. Theses: 1. Content Externalism strictly implies the possibility of acquiring a new concept as the result of an unwitting switch of environments. 2. This intuitively compels us to accept the possibility of someone possessing a concept without being aware that she does. 3. This possibility strictly favors causal models of meta-cognition over constitution models. 4. The possibility of possessing a concept unawares suggests that the contents of metacognitive.

This paper offers an account of why the Hard Problem cannot be solved within our present conceptual framework. The reason is that some property of each conscious experience lacks structure, while explanations of the kind that would overcome the Hard Problem require structure in the occurrences that are to be explained. This account is apt to seem incorrect for reasons that trace to relational theories of consciousness. I thus review a highly developed representative version of relational theory and explain why (...) I do not find it acceptable. This rejection requires a nonrelational alternative, which I describe and defend against a certain further objection. Finally, I discuss implications of the foregoing for the views of McGinn and Chalmers. (shrink)

by Wolfe Mays It is a great pleasure and honour to write this preface. I first became ac quainted with Herbert Spiegelberg's work some twenty years ago, when in 1960 I reviewed The Phenomenological Movement! for Philosophical Books, one of the few journals in Britain that reviewed this book, which Herbert has jok ingly referred to as "the monster". I was at that time already interested in Con tinental thought, and in particular phenomenology. I had attended a course on phenomenology (...) given by Rene Schaerer at Geneva when I was working there in 1955-6. I had also been partly instrumental in getting Merleau-Ponty to come to Manchester in 1958. During his visit he gave a seminar in English on politics and a lecture in French on "Wittgenstein and Language" in which he attacked Wittgenstein's views on language in the Tractatus. He was apparently unaware of the Philosophical Investigations. But it was not until I came to review Herbert's book that I appreciated the ramifications of the movement: its diverse strands of thought, and the manifold personalities involved in it. For example, Herbert mentions one Aurel Kolnai who had written on the "Phenomenology of Disgust'!, and which had appeared in Vol. 10 of Husserl's Jahrbuch. It was only after I had been acquainted for some time with Kolnai then in England, that I realised that 2 Herbert had written about him in the Movement. The Movement itself contains a wealth of learning. (shrink)

If you never understood why Plato's philosophy of Ideal Forms is called Realism, Ideas of the Great Philosophers makes ideal reading. This compact book provides a veritable brief history of philosophy, offering precise descriptions of the major branches of philosophical thought and exploring the contributions of great thinkers to the various fields of philosophic inquiry. -- Amazon.

The Symposium and the Phaedrus are combined here because of their shared theme: a reflection on the nature of erotic love, the love that begins with sexual desire but can transcend that origin and reach even the heights of religious ecstasy. This reflection is carried out explicitly in the speeches and conversations in the dialogues, and implicitly in the dramatic depiction of actions and characters. Thus, the two dialogues deal with a theme of enduring interest and are interesting for both (...) their literary and their philosophical character. In addition to the introduction, the book contains substantial commentaries and thorough endnotes. Key Greek terms are discussed for readers who are unfamiliar with the language. A special feature is a discussion on the importance of the dramatic and literary aspects of the dialogues for interpreting their philosophical content. The introductions deal with the nature of the dialogues themselves as philosophical texts and with Plato’s philosophical assumptions and key concepts, as well as with the necessary background of Athenian society. The endnotes clarify any ambiguities and obscurities in the original text, identifying all references to people, places, gods, et cetera. The commentaries are designed to open up the dialogues for the reader, showing the issues that have been debated by commentators and considering some of the responses to them. They are designed to stimulate further reflection. (shrink)

This book traces the development of the notion of self throughout the Western intellectual and religious tradition. While using the historical thread as its guiding norm, it presents a dynamic model of selfhood.

The following pages attempt to develop the main outlines of an existential phenomenology of law within the context of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phe nomenology of the social world. In so doing, the essay addresses the rather narrow scholarly question, If Merleau-Ponty had written a phenomenology of law, what would it have looked like? But this scholarly enterprise, although impeccable in itself, is also transcended by a more complicated concern for a very different sort of question. Namely, if Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological descriptions of (...) the social world are correct-as I believe they largely are-then what are the philosophical consequences for an adequate understanding of law? Such a project may well occasion a certain surprise amongst observers of the contemporary philosophical landscape, at least in what concerns the terrain of continental thought, and for two different reasons. The first is that, although interest in Merleau-Ponty's work remains strong in the· United States and Can ada, his philosophical standing in his own country has been largely eclipsed! by that of, first, his friend/estranged acquaintance, Jean-Paul Sartre; by various Marxist philosophies and critical social theories; and finally by those doing her meneutics of language. In my view, current neglect of Merleau-Ponty's thought in France is most regrettable. (shrink)

The late Dr. William Hatcher was renowned both as an accomplished mathematician, logician and philosopher, and as one of the world?s foremost Bahá?í scholars. To those who knew him, he was also refreshingly approachable, supportive, honest and engaging. In this small but richly insightful volume, modern mathematics and logic meet religion and philosophy in a new and stimulating way. The five essays are entitled: "Platonism and Pragmatism", "Myths, Models and Mysticism", "From Metaphysics to Logic", "A Logical Solution to the (...) Problem of Evil", and "Science and the Bahá?í Faith" With characteristic originality, Dr. Hatcher explores the interface between these disciplines now approaching each other after centuries of mutual mistrust. These valuable intellectual contributions assist the reader to bring into closer harmony the two ultimate realms expressive of essential human nature - namely that of science and of religion. (shrink)

Through tracing the articulation, rise and eventual fall of Marxist theory in France, I seek in my dissertation to show the difficulties of wedding Marxist theory to ameliorative political practices.Specifically, I follow the development of French Marxism between 1920--1965 in order to demonstrate how the thought of Althusser is a reaction to and correction of both the crude materialist philosophy of the French Communist Party and of the more sophisticated humanist Marxism of such intellectuals as Cornu, Lefebvre, Garaudy, Sartre and (...) Merleau-Ponty. I do not affect this tracing to show that Marx's notions are untenable or artificial and that they will therefore always lead to problems in their application. Instead, I argue with Louis Althusser that Marx's philosophical insights into the relationship between humans and world remain of value and that they may serve as a guide for political practice. Both my analysis and my critique is intended as a response to those who, citing the apparent theoretical and practical inconsistencies and failures of Marxist practice, would criticize and altogether abandon this project. (shrink)

Sub-Thesis 1: We should be contingent reliabilists to avoid the threat of an unacceptably strong content skeptical thesis posed by content externalism and the possibility of twin thoughts. The predominant strategy for resisting this threat has been to rely on the claim that introspective self-attributions are immune to brute error; but this claim is problematic from a naturalistic standpoint.