The paper focuses on the complex relations between aesthetics and phenomenology as they show themselves within the core locus of their interplay—the realm of the visible and the invisible. To do so, the paper examines a specific case study, a Rembrandt painting—A Woman Bathing in a Stream (1654)—through which the discussion illuminates the interconnected and inseparable relationship between aesthetics and phenomenology in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the visible and the invisible. The reading addresses both dimensions of the visible: the (...) essential intersubjective aspect of life and its complex visual representation in art. To achieve this, the paper first explores Merleau-Ponty’s late aesthetic ontology—a phenomenology that perceives the aesthetic realm, particularly the visible domain, as originating from human corporeal existence, thereby redefining the act of seeing and the concepts of the visible and the invisible; I show the manner in which invisible elements permeate our visual experience in the Rembrandt painting and in seeing as such. The paper also reveals the unique ontological role of painting and the painter in unveiling the aesthetic world, and in guiding the philosopher toward a vision that true philosophy—phenomenology—must embrace. The paper concludes by rethinking the significance of aesthetics, and especially, the arts, to phenomenological thought, and the necessity of phenomenology to aesthetic thought. (shrink)

Darwinism, Democracy, and Race examines the development and defence of an argument that arose at the boundary between anthropology and evolutionary biology in twentieth-century America. In its fully articulated form, this argument simultaneously discredited scientific racism and defended free human agency in Darwinian terms. The volume is timely because it gives readers a key to assessing contemporary debates about the biology of race. By working across disciplinary lines, the book's focal figures--the anthropologist Franz Boas, the cultural anthropologist Alfred (...) Kroeber, the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, and the physical anthropologist Sherwood Washburn--found increasingly persuasive ways of cutting between genetic determinist and social constructionist views of race by grounding Boas's racially egalitarian, culturally relativistic, and democratically pluralistic ethic in a distinctive version of the genetic theory of natural selection. Collaborators in making and defending this argument included Ashley Montagu, Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Lewontin. Darwinism, Democracy, and Race will appeal to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and academics interested in subjects including Philosophy, Critical Race Theory, Sociology of Race, History of Biology and Anthropology, and Rhetoric of Science. (shrink)

Cet article vise à présenter les principales étapes de l’histoire des traductions polonaises des dialogues de Platon, qui sont intimement liées à l’histoire de la Pologne et à la renaissance de la vie académique dans l’entre-deux-guerres. L’attention se porte en particulier sur les travaux de traductions de F.A. Kozłowski, A. Bronikowski, S. Lisiecki et W. Witwicki, qui représentaient diverses approches et appliquaient des méthodes différentes pour rendre les textes de Platon en polonais. Le développement de cette série de dialogues accessibles (...) au public polonais dans différentes traductions a suscité des discussions sur les méthodes mêmes pour rendre Platon. Chaque nouveau dialogue était discuté et examine par les philologues classiques, les enseignants, les spécialistes de littérature, et même les théologiens, et seulement accessoirement par les philosophes. Bien que de nouvelles traductions de Platon commencent de plus en plus à apparaître, les productions anciennes, en particulier celles de Witwicki, restent populaires et sont encore largement lues. (shrink)

Ever since I abandoned the philosophy of Kant and Hegel, I have sought solutions of philosophical problems by means of analysis, and I remain firmly persuaded, in spite of some modern tendencies to the contrary, that only by analysing is progress possible. (Russell, My Philosophical Development, ch. 1).

Shortly after his death in 1997, the New York Review of Books called him “one of the most influential men in contemporary France.” Lies, Passions, and Illusions is a fitting capstone to this celebrated author’s oeuvre: a late-career ...

In 1988 a piece of higher education reform legislation titled The Higher Education Funding Act was devised by the Labor Government and enacted by the Commonwealth of Australia to become law. The te...

Chris Pincock is offended that I presumed to write a historical overview of analytic philosophy without filling it with scholarly detail provided by specialists. Instead of relying on them, I simply read the works of leading philosophers and tried to figure out for myself what they were up to. Didn’t I know that this is impossible? I myself point out in the Epilogue that the history of philosophy is now a specialized discipline. How, Pincock wonders, could I have failed to (...) recognize the implications of this lesson for my own project? Don’t try this at home! Read the original works, if you must, but don’t dare say anything about the views you find – let alone evaluate them by contemporary standards -- unless you first vet your remarks with those in the archives. History isn’t easy, you know! On the contrary, Pincock tells us, “the overriding lesson of work in the history of analytic philosophy is that history is hard.” Conveying that lesson should, he tells us, be the main goal of any historical introduction to the subject. “Above all,” he says, “I would hope that the reader would finish reading such a book with an appreciation of the difficulties inherent in the study of the history of philosophy.” This, I submit, is self-serving nonsense. Conveying its own difficulty is not an overriding goal of any worthwhile intellectual enterprise. The chief difficulty that daunts Pincock is, of course, the secondary literature produced by those like himself. According to him, any proper historical introduction “would have to build on the mountain of books and papers” – by which he means the mountain of secondary literature – and, “judiciously choose from all the proposed interpretations of those details,” carefully referencing alternative interpretations. I disagree. There are different kinds of historical work, with different goals, which make different contributions. My goal was to present analytic philosophy by identifying both its most important 2 achievements and those of its failures from which we have the most to learn.. (shrink)

Philosophy differs from most other disciplines in that one of the questions with which its practitioners are professionally concerned is its own nature. There is nothing surprising about this since, having no special subject-matter of its own, it is free—and perhaps obliged—to enquire into the special nature of every discipline. But, such an obligation presumes that we know what in general we are—or should be—up to in philosophy. What is, in fact, our objective? To establish how we should live, the (...) nature of the good life? To determine the scope and limits of human knowledge? To achieve self-understanding? If properly understood, I think the last suggestion is correct. I do not mean that we should turn into psychologists or social scientists. Rather, I mean that our essential, if not our only, business is to get a clear view of our most general working concepts or types of concept and of their place in our lives. We should aim at general human conceptual self-understanding. (shrink)

Annotation: The article contains the research concerning the possible impact of Karl Barth`s figure and theological issues on the theology of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st century. There is a comparative analysis of how powerful and significant was the level of impact of Barth`s scientific experience on the theologians of his era, in comparison with the most prominent representatives of Christian thought from the earlier centuries, beginning with the times of ancient church, the (...) Middle Ages, the 16th century protestant Reformation, as well as his contemporaries. As it was clarified, Karl Barth made a striking impulse for the further radical deconstruction of what is considered to be the achievements of 19th`s century liberal protestant theology (which made him a lot of detractors among his colleagues), made a loud accent on the necessity of the Christocentric approach to all the spheres of theology, newly updated, actualized and convincingly demonstrated the importance of ancient church creeds and dogmas in the field of Triadology and Christology, as well as in an unusual way he intensified and revived the intellectual search in the protestant universities and academies by his reshaping and changing the paradigms of the whole western theology in a radical way. In the article were taken into account some reviews on Barth`s “Epistle to the Romans” (second edition, 1922), which caused lively discussions and prolonged controversy because of specific and non-standard hermeneutical approaches to the biblical text, which Barth demonstrated in this one of the most eminent theological works of the 20th century. The article reveals not only the attitude towards Barth`s theological heritage that was showed by his protestant colleagues, but also reveals the sincere admiration for his theology from some Orthodox researchers, in particular, the honored professor of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, John Karavidopulos, and the world famous specialist in the history of Christianity and medieval intellectual history, Jaroslav Jan Pelikan Jr., who converted to Orthodoxy in 1998. In the article`s conclusion there`s a piece of information concerning the fact that the impact of Barth`s dogmatics and hermeneutics on the modern departments of theology is not so noticeable as one might expect. In particular, we can make such a conclusion because of (1) the absence of true consolidation and common vision about the methods of theologizing between the western universities and church seminaries, (2) the popularity of so called “natural theology” which nowadays often seems to be regarded as an important prerequisite for all further theological researches, while Barth himself was a categorical opponent of this discourse, (3) the domination of binary opposition between conservatives and liberals in context of some modern theological discussions, while Karl Barth always tried to organically combine his devotion to the protestant orthodoxy with his efforts to be relevant and adequate to the requirements of his time. (shrink)

This book is the first full-length study of Eliot as the "greatest man of letters in his time." The book draws upon Eliot's experience as well as upon his poetry & prose, tracing the links between his life & his writings for the whole of his career.

Matthew Lipman befriended me at an APA meeting in 1974. Through more than twenty years of phone calls, I got to chat with, consult with, and learn from Matt the details and challenges of developing philosophy for children. He acknowledged that I convinced him that the program needed “branding,” lest anyone present similar-sounding programs—some of which might be good and others not. He got a snippet of a video of my teaching troubled sixth-graders with his book Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery on (...) the Today Show with Bryant Gumbel. That did much to shape my future, as did branding for sustaining Matt’s program. Lipman and I spoke by phone several times every year from 1976 until the mid-1990s. (shrink)

Sir George Porter is one of the country's leading scientists. In 1967 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on the chemistry of molecular synthesis caused by light. He is currently President of both the Royal Society and is immediate Past President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

This book traces the idea of the unconscious as it emerges in French and European literature. It discusses the functioning of the normal unconscious mind and provides examples of the abnormal unconscious in poems and literature. Psychiatric cases as they are understood today are illustrated as mirrored in literature describing the functioning of the disturbed mind.