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The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, second edition, edited by Nick Bunnin
and Eric Tsui-James (Blackwell) (PAPERBACK)
The second
edition of this distinguished and popular
The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy
introduces new chapters on the philosophy of biology; bioethics, genethics, and
medical ethics; environmental ethics; business ethics; ethnicity, culture and
philosophy; Plato and Aristotle; medieval philosophy; Francis Bacon; Nietzsche;
Husserl and Heidegger; and Sartre, Foucault and Derrida. It also revises several
existing chapters to extend its comprehensive and authoritative exploration of
the issues, controversies and problems that arise from the study of philosophy.
The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy functions primarily as a flexible and distinctive
introductory textbook, but even advanced students will welcome its stimulating
and accessible chapters and the guidance provided by cross-references, glossary
entries, boxed highlights, bibliographies, discussion questions, and further
reading.
For most of the modern period of philosophy, from Descartes to the
present, epistemology has been the central philosophical discipline. It raises
questions about the scope and limits of knowledge, its sources and
justification, and it deals with sceptical arguments concerning our claims to
knowledge and justified belief This chapter firstly considers dif faculties
facing attempts to define knowledge and, secondly, explores influential
responses to the challenge of scepticism. Epistemology is closely related to
METAPHYSICS (chapter 2), which is the philosophical account of what kinds of
entities there are. Epistemological questions are also crucial to most of the
other areas of philosophy examined in this volume, from ETHICS (chapter 6) to
PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE (chapter 9) and PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS (chapter 11) to
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY (chapter 14). Chapters on individuals or groups of
philosophers from DESCARTES (see chapter 26) to KANT (chapter 32) discuss
classical epistemology, while several chapters about more recent philosophers
also follow epistemological themes.
Contents: Preface. Notes on Contributors. Contemporary
Philosophy in the
United States
: John R. Searle. Contemporary Philosophy: A Second Look: Bernard Williams.
Part I: Areas of Philosophy: 1. Epistemology: A. C. Grayling. 2. Metaphysics:
Simon Blackburn, with a section on Time Robin Le Poidevin. 3. Philosophy of
Language: Martin Davies. 4. Philosophy of Logic: A. W. Moore. 5. Philosophy of
Mind: William G. Lycan. 6. Ethics: John Skorupski. 7. Aesthetics: Sebastian
Gardner. 8. Political and Social Philosophy: David Archard. 9. Philosophy of
Science: David Papineau. 10. Philosophy of Biology: Elliott Sober.
11. Philosophy of Mathematics: Mary Tiles. 12. Philosophy of Social
Science: Martin Hollis. 13. Philosophy of Law: N. E. Simmonds. 14. Philosophy of
History: Leon Pompa. 15: Philosophy of Religion: Charles Taliaferro. 16. Applied
Ethics: John Haldane. 17. Bioethics, Medical Ethics and Genethics: Rebecca
Bennett, Charles A. Erin, John Harris & Søren Holm. 18. Environmental Ethics:
Holmes Rolston, III. 19. Business Ethics: Georges Enderle. 20: Philosophy and
Feminism: Jean Grimshaw & Miranda Fricker. 21. Ethnicity, Culture and
Philosophy: Robert Bernasconi.
Part II History of Philosophy: 22. Ancient Greek Philosophy: Robert Wardy. 23.
Plato and Aristotle: Lesley Brown. 24. Medieval Philosophy: Jorge Gracia. 25.
Francis Bacon: Stephen Gaukroger. 26. Descartes and Malebranche: Richard Francks
& George MacDonald Ross. 27. Spinoza and Leibniz: Richard Francks & George
MacDonald Ross. 28. Hobbes: Tom Sorell. 29. Locke: R. S. Woolhouse. 30.
Berkeley
: Howard Robinson. 31. Hume: Peter Jones. 32. Kant: David Bell. 33. Hegel:
Michael Inwood. 34. Marx: Richard Norman. 35. Bentham, Mill and Sidgwick: Ross
Harrison. 36. Pragmatism: Susan Haack. 37. Frege and Russell: R. M. Sainsbury.
38.
Moore
: Thomas Baldwin. 39. Wittgenstein: David Pears. 40. Nietzsche: David E. Cooper.
41. Husserl and Heidegger: Taylor Carmen. 42. Sartre, Foucault and Derrida: Gary
Gutting. Glossary. Index.
Memory, History, Forgetting by Paul Ricoeur, translated by Kathleen Blamey,
David Pellauer (University of Chicago Press) The French philosopher Paul
Ricoeur’s monumental effort to wed "poetics" (here understood as having
wide-ranging application to all creative acts, including those of knowledge) to
the structures of intentional consciousness has preoccupied him for
approximately forty years. His voyage from eidetics through empirics to the
hermeneutics of text and discourse has been variously documented. The shift from
static epistemological categories to a participatory ontological mode of
consciousness and action is inherent in this development. Though Ricoeur's
struggle to define the workings of the imagination as representation hardly a
yet fully articulated, the theme has given rise to his more recent reflections
upon narrative knowledges and ethics and has permeated his work virtually from
its inception.
Originally, one could say that
Ricoeur sought, within the bounds of a self-confessed post-Hegelian Kantian
framework, to locate the seat of human knowing and imagination in those
structures of intentional consciousness that allow symbolic forms to be
incorporated within a traditional epistemological framework.
Ricoeur’s explorations of
symbolic material, showed him that hermeneutics, as traditionally understood in
its role of interpretation, was at a methodological impasse between the
approaches of explanation and understanding and that the process itself could be
reductive in its application. From this latter perspective, hermeneutics did
not automatically encourage an undistorted interpretation of human experience
and its resultant modes of expression (be they words or symbols) but rather
could reinforce the viewpoint of the inquirer. In response, Ricoeur undertook an
optimistic search for a hermeneutical method that would be both heuristic and
corrective and would acknowledge a more humane knowledge and imagination.
As he came to appreciate the
dynamic qualities of imaginative productivity and the flexibility of his
appreciation of the hermeneutical circle and the phenomenological epoche,
Ricoeur moved away from an explicit Kantian treatment of the productive
imagination, particularly the conservative reworking of the topic in the second
edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. This inadequacy prompted Ricoeur
to search for a more congenial epistemology that celebrates the more explicitly
autonomous, innate dimensions of creative knowing and imagination.
In The Rule of Metaphor and in
various articles, Ricoeur mapped out a proposed agenda for his own solutions to
limitation of the Kantian understanding of reason and imagination and the
self-reification of uncritical hermeneutical inquiry. This reframing of
epistemological, ethical and imaginal issues has been at the core of his later
writings.
The groundwork in these
writings for a creative imagination that finds its most efficacious idiom in a
dynamic hermeneutics.
Ricoeur's revision of the role
of imagination entails a reconstitution of the hermeneutical task. To arrive at
this revised understanding of human knowing and imagination, Ricoeur adroitly
weaves together several strands of thought that permit him to focus on metaphor
and by extension narrative as paradigmatic for exemplifying the creative
dynamics of of human knowing and imagination. This vision of hermeneutics as
part of a wider spectrum of creative acts of knowledge by which we understand
ourselves in the active realm of Being within a spectrum of a "poetics of
experience." This imaginative experience has the power not only to generate
meaning but ultimately to change the world—that is, the world of experience, as
we live and understand it. Ricoeur's method is not without a hermeneutic of
suspicion that strives to eliminate historical and personal distortions of
symbols that have resulted in misguided theological declarations, as a closure
to the open-endedness of historical reflection.
In
Memory, History, Forgetting we have Ricoeur seeking the reciprocal
relationship between remembering and forgetting, that shows how it affects both
the perception of historical experience and the production of historical
narrative. Such practical questions as why major historical events as the
Holocaust come to occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while
other profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and
France's role in North Africa stand distantly and dimly behind? Is it possible
that history "overly remembers" some events at the expense of others?
Memory, History, Forgetting is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur
first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonic devices,
extending his work on the imagination. The underlying question here is how a
memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section
addresses recent work of historians by reopening the question of the nature and
truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can
write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory,
including memories that resist representation. Here Ricoeur opens up his
epistemology as developed in his three volume Time and Narrative to offer a
cultural and social extension to imaginative human knowledge. The third and
final section, Ricoeur invokes a creative vision of the human limits to
experience and knowing in a thoughtful consideration of the inevitability of
forgetting as a provision for the prospect of remembering, and whether there can
be something like happy forgetting as comparable to happy memory. This current
work provides a deeper picture how Ricoeur constructs the self as having a
catalytic effect, and provoking the depiction and aiding, through imaginative
representations, the appropriation of new ways of being in the world. It is in
cultural dialectic of memory and forgetfulness that renewed ways of being in
and of the world is brought to our attention and becomes the substance of out
acting as moral agents. This world, for Ricoeur, is grounded ultimately within a
Christian vista of promise and hope. So it is that imagination can deepen our
appreciation of the mysteries of faith. Ironically, imagination is, in some
form, the agent of revelation. But while Ricoeur's interdependent model allows
imagination free play in the fields of ontological exploration, it does not give
imagination the last word. For Ricoeur, any augmentation in knowledge results
from an interaction of the imagination with reflective and critical modes of
knowing, prior to any final incorporation into our present worldview.
Throughout
Memory, History, Forgetting there are vigilant and solid appraisals,
reinventions almost of key passages in Aristotle and Plato, Descartes and Kant,
and in extensive discussions of such recent contemporary sociology of Maurice
Halbwachs and the philosophical history of Pierre Nora.
Identifying Selfhood: Imagination, Narrative, and Hermeneutics in the Thought of
Paul Ricoeur by Henry Isaac Venema (McGill Studies in the History of
Religions: State University of New York Press) provides the first sustained
treatment of the development of Paul Ricoeur's decentered formulation of
selfhood from his earliest works to his most recent. For Henry Venema, Ricoeur's
affirmation that consciousness is always rooted in the signs, symbols, and texts
that precede the hermeneutical project of self-recovery and discovery provides
the thread that links all of Ricoeur's philosophical inquiries together.
However, as Venema argues, Ricoeur's hermeneutic is caught up in the semantics
of identity to such an extent that selfhood is confused and often equated with
the textuality of the reflective process and is never dealt with on the intimate
level of the reflexive structure of selfhood in relation to otherness. In the
end, Ricoeur's formulation of alterity identifies the other within the circle of
the self-same.
Ricoeur As Another: The Ethics of Subjectivity edited by Richard A. Cohen,
James L. Marsh (SUNY Series in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences: State
University of New York Press) This collection of essays by internationally known
Paul Ricoeur experts explores the noted philosopher's book, Oneself as Another.
Ricoeur's book represents the completion
of a decades-long inquiry into the self as he links
his earlier studies of symbolism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, the philosophy of
language, action theory, and theory of narrative to his most recent concern for
ethics and the social constitution of ethical subjectivity. Cohen and Marsh's
volume is divided into two parts, the first primarily involving Ricoeur's
thought itself, and the second involving the relation of his thought to that of
others, such as Levinas, Rawls, Habermas, Apel, Taylor, and MacIntyre. The
contributors also offer detailed examinations of Ricoeur's ethical theory and
its ontological implications.
Logical Empiricism in North America edited by Gary L. Hardcastle, Alan W.
Richardson (Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, V. 18: University of
Minnesota Press) This latest volume in the longest-standing and most influential
series in the field of the philosophy of science extends and expands on the
discipline's recent historical turn. These essays take up the historical,
sociological, and philosophical questions surrounding the particular
intellectual movement of logical empiricism-both its emigration from
Europe
to
North America
in the 1930s and 1940s and its development in
North America
through the 1940s and 1950s. With an introduction placing them in their
philosophical and historical context, these essays bear witness to the fact that
the history of the philosophy of science, far more than a mere repository of
anecdote and chronology, might be able to produce a decisive transformation in
the philosophy of science itself.
Contributors: Richard Creath, Arizona State U; Michael
Friedman, Stanford U; Rudolf Haller, U of Graz; Don Howard, Notre Dame;
Diederick Raven, U of Utrecht; George Reisch; Thomas Ricketts, Northwestern U;
Friedrich K. Stadler, U of Vienna; Thomas E. Uebel, U of Manchester.
Since the 1980s, the philosophy of science has taken a
historical turn. We do not refer to the attention philosophers of science have
paid to rich historical accounts of scientific episodes, a turn often taken to
have been motivated by Thomas Kuhn's
Structure of Scientific Revolutions ([1962] 1996) and to have importantly
transformed philosophy of science. We refer, rather, to a more recent but
equally significant development, in which philosophers of science have begun to
recover the problems, solutions, and motivations of earlier projects in the
philosophy of science, paying attention especially to how the historical figures
engaged in these projects understood them.' Crucially, this work aims not to
disconnect such historical projects from contemporary issues in philosophy of
science but to reconnect contemporary philosophy of science with its history in
a new way. Adapting what is perhaps the most famous sentence in the philosophy
of science of the second half of the twentieth century, we can assert that the
history of the philosophy of science is coming to be viewed as more than a
repository for anecdote or chronology, and can, if we allow it, produce a
decisive trans-formation in the philosophy of science we now possess.
Logical Empiricism in North America is a contribution to this historical
turn in philosophy of science. It contains essays that take up, in one way or
another, the historical, sociological, and philosophical questions surrounding
the particular intellectual movement of logical empiricism, both its emigration
from
Europe
to
North America
in the 1930s and 1940s and its development in
North America
through the 1940s and 1950s. Although conceived as a companion to an earlier
volume in the series Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Origins of
Logical Empiricism (1996),
Logical Empiricism in North America can be read independently of it
What has motivated this historical turn in the philosophy
of science? Why have philosophers of science begun examining the history of
philosophy of science in the way they have? Professional stagnation comes to
mind as a possible answer. As Don Howard notes in chapter 2, the philosophy of
science is not a leading (or even, perhaps, a growing) field in today's academic
world. Within the general learned culture, philosophy of science is not even
currently the most widely respected arena of reflection on science. Other
branches of science studies—sociology of science, social history of science, and
cultural studies of science, for example—are more widely read and debated among
those interested in the study of science as a human practice. Perhaps, then, it
is from the perspective of such doldrums that some philosophers of science are
looking outward for new topics, methods, tools, and skills and looking,
therefore, to historical figures in philosophy who concerned themselves with
science. Considerable attention is being paid by philosophers of science, after
all, to acknowledged historical figures (such as Hermann von Helmholtz, Charles
S. Peirce, Rene Descartes, Henri Poincare, Rudolf Carnap, Karl Popper, Immanuel
Kant, and Hans Reichenbach), and lesser-known figures (such as Johann Friedrich
Fries, Alois Riehl, and Hermann Cohen) are getting a first look. Perhaps this is
all an attempt by philosophers of science to reinvigorate their discipline.
Attention to historical figures in philosophy of science is
not novel, of course. For example, a typical training regime in the discipline
includes exposure to the canonical issues—confirmation, explanation, the nature
of theories, the empirical meaning of theoretical claims, the ontological status
of theoretical entities, intertheoretical reduction—and this is often combined
with some attention to what historically important philosophers said about those
topics. Occasionally (perhaps in Peirce or William Whewell) unanticipated
resources might be found for thinking through these issues; more often, one is
invited to use an important historical figure (such as Carnap or Karl Pearson)
as a whipping boy or dialectical opponent. In either case, however, the student
in philosophy comes to the historical texts confident of already knowing the
canonical philosophical issues surrounding science.
But when the canonical issues seem either misconceived or
simply exhausted—when philosophy of science seems intellectually or
professionally stagnant—the historical figures are read differently. When
philosophers are fundamentally unsure of the philosophical project that ought to
be associated with scientific explanation, for example, they are inclinedto
read, say, Emile Meyerson's Identity and Reality ([1908] 1962) not to find out
what his account of scientific explanation was but to help with a rich set of
concerns concerning the philosophical project of understanding scientific
explanation. They will ask: Why did Meyerson have an account of scientific
explanation at all? What resources did he employ in giving one? What relation
did that account have to Meyerson's other concerns in philosophy of science?
What scientific theories did he use as his explanatory exemplars or marshal as
resources for his own work? To take another example, one can read the
Marburg
neo-Kantians not simply to find out what they thought were the foundations of
exact science but to find out what they thought was the philosophical import of
the task of giving the foundations of exact science. In these cases, the
historical figures no longer simply provide views on the canonical topics or
texts to think our way through and beyond. They provide philosophical projects
to think with. The more stagnant the contemporary philosophical situation, the
more interest we would expect in the historical figures, since these now appear
as exemplars of fresh philosophical projects that we might in some way be able
to take up and extend.
As a result of their contextualism and historicism,
moreover, such historical approaches do not (and indeed, cannot) devolve into
crude "back to X" movements, for any historical X. What such accounts show,
indeed, is that we cannot go back to Kant, Helmholtz, Carnap, or Popper. Our
philosophical and scientific world is not theirs. Nevertheless, the deepest
issues in the philosophy of science are sufficiently open that we can still
learn important lessons from these figures, especially regarding what it is to
articulate a new philosophical project concerning science. There is an important
difference between going "back to Kant" and going forward by keeping Kant firmly
in mind.
No doubt a good deal of the work in this volume looks to
historical figures for just these reasons (see, for example, the chapters by
Howard, Thomas Uebel, and Alan Richardson). But this is not the only motivation
for the historical turn in the philosophy of science. A philosopher confidently
ensconced in one or another ongoing living enterprise in the philosophy of
science (even one that appears entirely ahistorical) still needs to connect his
or her enterprise with philosophical projects of the past, and that requires
work in the history of philosophy of science. As Alasdaire Maclntyre (1984) and
others (see, for example, Wilson 1992) have argued, philosophy in general is
deeply historical, even when it expresses itself in a completely antihistorical
fashion; there is simply no way to claim that one's interests are philosophical
without finding some tradition of philosophy into which they fit. Thus W. V. O.
Quine, although famous for erecting a distinction between philosophers and
historians of philosophy, always in his own accounts embeds his philosophical
projects in a well-worked-out story of "the empiricist tradition" (see, for
example, Quine 1969, 1981, 1995). Even extreme philosophical revolutionaries'
have to find a way to tie their work to some philosophical tradition, on pain of
being seen simply as having changed the topic or as having missed the point. A
physicist, a counselor, a thief, or a gardener cannot simply declare him- or
herself a philosopher. It is little wonder that some of the most effective
revolutionaries in philosophy attempt less to argue against previous ways of
doing philosophy than to "overcome," "deflate," or "turn away from" them. Here,
at least, traditions of philosophy are not revealed as simply mistaken so much
as interestingly and importantly misconceived and thus useful, at least as signs
of roads no longer to be taken.
Whether philosophy of science is currently in crisis or
not, then, philosophers of science can find ample justification for the
historical turn that has in fact emerged in the philosophy of science. And
although the scope of philosophy of science extends far beyond logical
empiricism, it is no surprise that logical empiricism has been of particular
interest to contemporary philosophers of science: It is, after all, not just a
major part of the intellectual puzzle of the twentieth century but, for many
philosophers of science, the core of our philosophical heritage. And with two
decades of serious work in the history of logical empiricism behind us and with
an active and well-established center for this work in the Vienna Circle
Institute at the
University
of
Vienna
, a number of philosophical, historical, and historiographic issues are
emerging. In the following section we will describe three such issues that, in
one way or another, run through all the pieces in this volume. But first, we
will quickly summarize the volume's eleven chapters.
The volume's first two chapters, Richardson's "Logical
Empiricism, American Pragmatism, and the Fate of Scientific Philosophy in North
America" and Howard's "Two Left Turns Make a Right: On the Curious Political
Career of North American Philosophy of Science at Midcentury," address the
history of logical empiricism in general ways and in terms of general themes.
Although Richardson and Howard each argue for specific and provocative theses,
their chapters also serve to introduce those new to the historical work
surrounding logical empiricism to the set of figures, movements, and research
problems currently on the table.
Richardson
, for example, raises the question of logical empiricism's relation to North
American pragmatism. Simple characterizations of this question invite overly
simple solutions: Logical empiricism replaced pragmatism, we might be inclined
to say, and it did so because it solved a greater range of philosophical
problems, because it was truer, or perhaps just because it was (at thetime) more
promising. In place of a simple formulation of the question,
Richardson
argues instead that logical empiricism and pragmatism were of a piece, that
piece being scientific philosophy. Notably, in the course of his argument,
Richardson
brings to the fore Charles Morris, a figure many contemporary philosophers of
science may view as only marginal to the logical empiricist program. Such a
recovery of figures who are marginal by our present lights is indeed a theme of
recent work in the history of philosophy of science, and one much in evidence in
Logical Empiricism in North America.
Howard's extensive analysis of the complex philosophical
and historical relationship among philosophy of science, politics, and political
life introduces readers to a different but equally significant set of issues in
the history of logical empiricism. Noting that "there was rather more politics
in prewar philosophy of science than our contemporary image of the discipline
usually acknowledges," Howard asks how it is that the philosophy of science
became politically disengaged in the course of its professionalization (a
disengagement Howard himself characterizes as "tragic") and how and why the
political engagement of our predecessors was obscured in early histories of
logical empiricism. Against the background of political histories of both the
Vienna Circle
and the journal Philosophy of Science, Howard identifies the lack of a
"successor paradigm" to logical empiricism and, ultimately, the "loss of the
sense of a cultural, social, and political mission" that philosophy of science
ought to have as the chief causes of the discipline's political disengagement.
Reengagement, Howard suggests, might take place via a reconsideration of "the
naturalism of Neurath and Dewey."
Richardson's and Howard's respective essays set the stage
for the four chapters that follow, each of which focuses on a figure significant
to logical empiricism. Philosophers of science trained since the 1970s will
readily and rightly associate the name of Carl G. Hempel with the movement, and
they are furthermore likely to characterize his intellectual development over
several decades as proceeding from logical empiricism and toward a view
sympathetic to Kuhn's, a trajectory that culminated in his emphasis on
"provisoes" in science (Hempel 1988). In a demonstration of how work in the
history of logical empiricism can lead to revisions in its "received history,"
Michael Friedman argues in chapter 3, "Hempel and the Vienna Circle," that
Hempel's later pragmatic and naturalistic views in fact had their roots in
Hempel's earliest thinking, specifically, in his sympathy with Otto Neurath's
position in the Vienna Circle's protocol-sentence debate of the 1930s. In a
similar vein, Rudolf Haller's "On Herbert Feigl," chapter 4, reminds us that
Herbert Feigl, a young member of the Vienna Circle and among the first of its
members to emigrate permanently to the United States (Moritz Schlick had visited
Stanford in 1929, a year before Feigl moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts),
defended philosophical views more often associated with a later time, including
a view of theories that emphasizes the extent to which they are "free
constructions" and a conviction that probability plays a central role in
science.
If the stories of Hempel and Feigl are stories of
professional success (to which we could add the stories of Carnap, Reichenbach,
and several other emigre logical empiricists), Diederick Raven's contribution to
Logical Empiricism in North America, chapter 5, "Edgar Zilsel in America,"
reminds us that not all such emigrations were successful. After recounting
Zilsel's life in
Europe
and the
United States
(culminating in his self-inflicted death in 1944), Raven attends to the
specific and complicated matter of what went wrong for Zilsel and to the more
general matter of what his trajectory can tell us about the philosophical and
historical dimensions of logical empiricism in
North America
. In all, these three chapters remind us that the success of the logical
empiricists in
North America
(as well as significant aspects of their philosophical views) was a contingent
matter.
The twin issues of contingency and success recur in Thomas
Uebel's chapter 6, "Philipp Frank's History of the
Vienna Circle
: A Programmatic Perspective." Via a comparison of two instances in which Frank
told the story of the Vienna Circle and logical empiricism (first in his 1941
Between Physics and Philosophy and eight years later in his Modern Science and
Its Philosophy), Uebel argues that Frank strove, without success, to carve a
place for the social-historical concerns that were championed by Neurath but
that were not well represented after Neurath's 1945 death. In the process, we
are led not just to Frank's role in logical empiricism in
North America
but to Neurath's as well.
The history of logical empiricism in
North America
is a history not just of individuals but of cooperative ventures.
Logical Empiricism in North America’s next two chapters take up separate
cooperative efforts of some significance to logical empiricism. In chapter 7,
"Debabelizing Science: The Harvard Science of Science Discussion Group,
1940-41," Gary Hardcastle recounts the workings of the short-lived Harvard
Science of Science Discussion Group (SSDG) and argues that the SSDG reflected a
commitment to a particular notion of scientific unity, one best associated with
Neurath. Although the group lasted just one academic year, the threads it shared
with Frank's later Inter-Science Discussion Group and ultimately with the
Institute for the Unity of Science suggest that an important aspect of Neurath's
thinking did, in fact, make it to North America. In chapter 8, "Disunity in the
International Encyclopedia of Unified Sciences," George Reisch gives a detailed
history of logical empiricism's most prominent cooperative effort, the
International Encyclopedia of Unified Science (IEUS). He documents the somewhat
ironic disunity between the IEUS's editors, Carnap, Neurath, and Morris,and
employs this tension (among others) to explain why the ZEUS never realized
Neurath's extensive plans for it. In Reisch's hands, this example serves to
introduce a dispute between what Reisch calls "large-large" and "small-large"
(or as Reisch points out, "Neurathian") explanations in the history of
philosophical movements. For Reisch, the story of the IEUS is small-large; it is
the story of specific people and the decisions they made.
The logical empiricists were, of course, not the only
intellectuals forced to flee
Europe
in the 1930s. Friedrich Stadler's chapter 9, "Transfer and Transformation of
Logical Empiricism: Quantitative and Qualitative Aspects," applies the framework
of emigration studies to understand logical empiricism. After establishing that
the emigration of the
Vienna Circle
was "manifold and conflicting, involving both success and failure,
acculturation and disintegration, diffusion and isolation," Stadler explores a
variety of perspectives that might be brought to bear on the emigration and
suggests that these perspectives themselves are continuous with philosophy of
science.
For many, the most challenging philosophical issue raised
by logical empiricism is analyticity. Indeed, if one were asked to locate a
point around which logical empiricism has seemed to turn, historically and
philosophically, one would be well-advised to select Carnap and Quine's 1950s
debate over this very topic.
Logical Empiricism in North America’s final two chapters, Richard Creath's
"The Linguistic Doctrine and Conventionality: The Main Argument in `Carnap and
Logical Truth— (chapter 10), and Thomas Ricketts's "Languages and Calculi"
(chapter 11), take up the Quine-Carnap debate. Each underscores analyticity's
central role in logical empiricism while suggesting that the issue was not, pace
popular opinion, fruitfully engaged by Quine and Carnap. Creath, for example,
explores an early argument of Quine's against the "linguistic doctrine of
logical truth," one that has received less attention than the others in Quine's
well-known "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951) but that forms, Creath argues, the
"basis of much of Quine's subsequent writing?' By thinking carefully about
Quine's reliance on the claim that logic is "obvious," Creath stakes out two
deeply different epistemic perspectives associated with Quine and with Carnap,
and he argues that Quine does not argue for his picture so much as presume it.
In "Languages and Calculi" Ricketts engages this matter from Carnap's
perspective rather than Quine's. After tracing Carnap's account of analyticity
as it applies especially to mathematics, Ricketts locates a deep contrast
between Quine and Carnap over the relationship of logic to languages, artificial
or natural.
Logical Empiricism in North America thus presents a broad array of work in
the history of logical empiricism. Taken altogether, this work raises a number
of philosophical and methodological issues that the editors address in the
introduction to the work.
A House Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental Philosophy edited by C.
G. Prado (Humanity Books)
a collection of essays A House Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental
Philosophy edited by C.G. Prado. Carnap, Russell, Moore, Davidson, Quine,
Wittgenstein and Rorty are compared to some of the continentals: Heidegger,
Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty and Foucault. Lite essays.
A House Divided examines cross-influences and similarities between pivotal
thinkers in the analytic and Continental philosophical traditions. The various
articles in this anthology establish that the two traditions have more in common
than most think. Consideration of apparently unlikely but definite connections
between Carnap and Nietzsche, Davidson and Gadamer,
Quine and Heidegger, Searle and Foucault, and others, shows that, despite
conventional wisdom and all-too-common mutual disparagement, contemporary
philosophy does not divide neatly into two intellectual domains defined by
incommensurable principles. The differences among these groupings of
philosophers are more a matter of disparities among aggregates of university
philosophy departments than a gulf between two fundamental perspectives, and the
disparities are due more to selective reading, ingrained conversational styles,
and scholarly inertia than to incompatible perspectives.
The undeniable differences in the ways analytic and Continental--or "European"--
philosophers talk, write, and conduct their classes are largely methodological
and canonical, and should not preclude useful philosophical dialogue. The
insightful articles collected here are not blueprints for closer cooperation
between philosophers with different methods and objectives, but they clearly
demonstrate that regardless of approach and precedents, analytic and Continental
philosophers are all doing philosophy, and there are many important and
potentially productive points of contact between them.
The contributors include Richard Rorty, Barry Allen, Babette E. Babich, David
Cerbone, Sharyn Clough, Jonathan Kaplan, Richard Matthews, C. G. Prado, Bjorn
Torgrim Ramberg, Mike Sandbothe, Barry Stocker, and Edward Witherspoon.
Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization by Remi Brague (Saint
Augustine's Press) Western culture, which influenced the whole
world, came from Europe. But its roots are not there. They are in
Athens
and
Jerusalem. European culture takes its bearing from references that
are not in
Europe:
Europe
is eccentric.
What makes the West unique? What is the driving force
behind its culture? Rémi Brague takes up these questions in Eccentric Culture.
This is not another dictionary of European culture, nor a measure of the
contributions of a particular individual, religion, or national tradition. The
author’s interest is especially, with regard to the transmission of that
culture, to articulate the dynamic tension that has propelled
Europe
and more generally the West toward civilization. It is this mainspring of
European culture, this founding principle, that Brague calls "Roman."
Yet the author’s intent is not to write a history of
Europe
, and less yet to defend the historical reality of the
Roman Empire
. Brague rather isolates and generalizes one aspect of that history or, one
might say, cultural myth, of ancient
Rome
. The Roman attitude senses its own incompleteness
and recognizes the call to borrow from what went before it.
Historically, it has led the West to borrow from the great traditions of
Jerusalem
and
Athens
: primarily the Jewish and Christian tradition, on
the one hand, and the classical Greek tradition on the other. Nowhere does the
author find this Roman character so strongly present as in the Christian and
particularly Catholic attitude toward the incarnation.
At once an appreciation of the richness and diversity of the sources and their
fruit, Eccentric Culture points as well to the fragility of their nourishing
principle. As such, Brague finds in it not only a means of understanding the
past, but of projecting a future in (re)proposing to the West, and to
Europe
in particular, a model relationship of what is proper to it.
The Heidegger-Jaspers Correspondence (1920-1963) by Martin Heidegger, Karl
Jaspers (Humanity Books) The history of 20th century German philosophy can be
neatly summed up in three words: Husserl, Heidegger
and Jaspers. They were the giants of the rich philosophical tradition and most
of 20the century thought is influenced by them, either as followers who adapted
their thought to other paths or as opponents, deriding what was seen as a
preponderence of metaphysics over "clear thinking."
The emphasis on Heidegger in recent years has expanded into an investigation of
his personal life, intertwined as it was with the Nazi regime during the '30s.
We have access to the Arendt-Jaspers correspondence, but only get to know
Heidegger second-hand. That is why the release of the Heidegger-Jaspers
correspondence is a tresure for every student of philosophy. Not only do we gain
valuable insights into the workings of each author's conception of
existentialism, but we also get to soak in the atmosphere of German university
life, and its view of scholarship, so different from our own universities today,
which now serve as little else than extensions of high school.
The letters also give us the opportunity to see how the Heidegger-Japsers
friendship fared over the years. (The letters are from 1920 to 1963.) During the
'20s, the two are very close and share critiques of each others philosphy.
During the '30s, with the rise of the Nazis, we see a cooling off due to the
fact Heidegger sides with the Nazis and Jaspers, whose wife was Jewish,was
appalled by what was happening to
Germany
. Very few letters are exchanged during the period
from 1936 to 1948, when Heidegger, by now defanged by the Allied occupation,
once again ventures into the public eye. The letters of this perios lack the
warmth of the letters from the '20s, with Heidegger wishing to forget what
happened in the '30s and Jaspers wanting an explanation.
This is an unforgettable foray into the livers anf thought of two giants of
twentieth century philosophy, and, as such, is a must for every philosophical
library.
These letters, translated into English here for the first time,
provide extraordinary insights, both personal and philosophical, into two major
thinkers of the twentieth century. Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers met in 1920
at a celebration marking the sixty-first birthday of Edmund Husserl. Recognizing
in each other a shared vision of what philosophy should be, they struck up a
friendship, which continued through correspondence carried on over four decades
and which weathered intellectual, social, and personal struggles.
While the first thirteen years of their acquaintance were marked by a collegial
exchange of views on philosophical issues of mutual interest, their relationship
changed significantly in 1933, when Heidegger publicly supported the National
Socialist revolution, and, as a party member, implemented the National Socialist
agenda as rector of
Freiburg
University
.
By contrast, Jaspers, whose wife was Jewish, was forced into retirement. After
the war, during the
Freiburg
de-Nazification process, Jaspers sharply criticized Heidegger's conduct but
nonetheless stressed the lasting value of his philosophical contributions.
Despite this conflict, the two men continued to find common ground and
correspnded until 1963.
The letters touch on many points of philosophical interest to both men, yet only
hint at the political turmoil that swirled around them. They discuss how they
came to see themselves as personally connected but publicly misidentified as
"existentialists." There are also many illuminating exchanges concerning Hannah
Arendt, Karl Lowith, Max Weber, Edmund Husserl, and others. Editors Walter
Biemel and Hans Saner provide a wealth of references and annotations that make
these personal letters accessible to contemporary readers.
This first English translation of the correspondence between two giants of
twentieth-century German philosophy will be of great interest to philosophers,
historians, and anyone intrigued by the Heidegger controversy.
In characterizing the free and anarchic quality of this occurrence, Heidegger
emphasizes the facticity or suddenness of its happening. That it occurs is
stunning and uncanny and, indeed, uncanniness is itself a sign that we have been
touched by its originary power. The strangeness of Heidegger's language is, in
his view, a requirement of the Sache itself: Language must destroy traditional
and everyday meanings, including the meanings of scientific and metaphysical
propositions, in order to reveal that and how there is given to be anything to
be thought or said at all. And in the face of the uncanniness of the matter, the
ultimate indicative gesture of language is silence. Only in the silence of the
uncanny are we con-fronted with our own factical existence, which shows up as a
response to, and an echo of, the impact of being.
The emphatic questioning of being at work in formal indication is the
backdrop for Heidegger's critical review of Jaspers's Psychology of Worldviews,
which Heidegger shared with Jaspers as the occasion for their first public
philosophical confrontation. The gist of the critique is that Jaspers is too
uncritical of historically handed-down concepts and classifications (of
worldviews), that he does not radically question their historicity, and by
merely observing world-views as psychological phenomena and classifying them
according to formal types reveals them in their underlying truth. Jaspers, he
claims, does not appreciate the facticity of the I, which exists in my own
factual life and which in turn is not the individuation of a universal type or a
location within a taxonomic system. For Heidegger, rather, the deep horizon of
temporality opens the self, via formal indication, to the claim of the matter,
as that which I am called upon to think in response.
At first Jaspers is deeply struck by this critique. But he later claims that
it does not resonate for him and does not lead him to any new insights.
Furthermore, despite his personal affinity with Heidegger, there is much in
Heidegger's philosophizing that he finds disturbing.
In his three-volume Philosophy (1931), which is the culmination of his work
in the 1920s, Jaspers lays out a way of philosophizing that also takes its
departure from Kierkegaard. However, unlike Hei-
degger, Jaspers's thinking retains the radical inwardness of faith and the
appeal to personal consciousness. This inwardness is philosophical rather than
religious: It is an attitude of openness to being rather than a resolution in
the face of a transcendent and inconceivable God. As he insists, philosophy is
"an expression of faith without rev-elation." This means, as well, that being is
not a Sache in Heidegger's sense but a possibility of my being first and
foremost. Philosophizing, at its core, is about Existenz, my possibility for
existing, and is not dependent upon any nonpersonal origin or event. Its
movement transforms the consciousness of the one who philosophizes by directing
consciousness back to its own roots. These roots are never revealed but are
illuminated in enacting them as possibilities for my relations with the world
and with others.
Thus, for Jaspers, we show who we are when philosophizing produces effects in
our private and public lives, when our actions in the world indirectly
illuminate the hidden forces and motives that drive us in our choices and
decisions. Philosophizing must accept the fact of science and the existential
drives behind the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Although philosophy is not a
science in that it has no object, philosophical clarity is gained when objects
and objective concepts become ciphers of transcendence. Philosophical
consciousness can thus put science to use for the sake of transcendence toward
the inner grounds of being, which are never satisfied nor directly presented in
worldly (scientific) knowledge.
For Jaspers, transcending is the enactment of philosophizing, just as formal
indication is the path of thinking for Heidegger. However, the movement of
transcendence does not destruct concealing interpretations of being such that
the immediacy of being is revealed to us. It is a dissolution of objectivity
that transforms objective concepts into indications and ciphers for what lies
beyond them in the inwardness of consciousness. As Jaspers insists, there is no
clarity in philosophy without the precision of science. For language to allow
communication between and among Existenzen, it must always speak objectively.
The only way for language to speak to the inwardness of existential
consciousness is to use the objective categories and meanings that are shared by
consciousness-in-general.
Thus, without objective meaning, philosophy loses the anchor of
intelligibility and language loses the power to say anything at all, if only
indirectly by means of transcendence-in-dissolution.
The purpose of philosophical communication in Existenzphilosophie is to
prompt the other to enact transcendence by directing his consciousness toward
his own inner grounds and motives, which in turn must be illuminated through his
actions and decisions in the world, including his relationships with others who
philosophize. As Jaspers says, "The philosophizing of contemporaries shows how
fellows in existence help themselves." There is no doubt that Jaspers was
seeking just this sort of interlocutor in Heidegger and that his subsequent
disappointment with Heidegger, aside from the all-too-human factors on both
sides, has its root in what he takes to be Heidegger's deepest philosophical
failing: noncommunication.
For Heidegger what is at issue in formal indication is not the inwardness of
existential transcendence, but the ontological moment in which being shows
itself in a flash of unconcealment. For Jaspers, Heidegger's fascination with
the facticity of the Sache, which bursts forth in sudden revelations and
striking uncanniness, and whose ultimate indication is silence, is the
antithesis of philosophical communication between Existenzen. This same
fascination, one may surmise, lies behind Heidegger's 1933 Rectoral Address,
which marks the turning point in his friendship with Jaspers and which puts into
question the meaning of his philosophizing insofar as it is concretely enacted
in his historical decisions.
Those who are taken with this question of Heidegger's political involvements
will find much to consider in the present volume. In addition to the pertinent
letters concerning the events of 1933, the' editors have provided supplementary
materials, including passages from Jaspers's Philosophische Autobiographie and
his letter to the 1 Freiburg Denazification Committee regarding the disposition
of Heidegger's case. One will see in these texts Jaspers's unreserved critique
of Heidegger's actions, personal and philosophical, but also his lasting sense
that Heidegger and his thinking cannot simply be dismissed on the basis of
historical "facts." Indeed, to do so would be an abdication of the philosophical
imperative to get to the rootof things, especially if such a dismissal is
offered as an already accomplished coming-to-terms with the core of Heidegger's
philosophizing. A coming-to-terms with this matter still lies ahead of us.
Theories of Truth edited by Frederick F. Schmitt (Blackwell) The classic and
contemporary articles in this collection represent the four historically
important theories of truth — correspondence, pragmatist, coherence, and
deflationary theories.' Correspondence theories held the stage from antiquity to
the eighteenth century. Pragmatist and coherence theories emerged as contenders
in the nineteenth century. Deflationary theories are a twentieth-century
invention.
Philosophers have long debated the nature of truth. The classic and contemporary
articles in this collection represent the four most influential theories to
emerge from their debates - correspondence, pragmatist, coherence, and
deflationary theories.
Theories of Truth includes reflections on truth by C. S. Peirce, William
James, Bertrand Russell, Francis W. Dauer, Alfred Tarski, Hartry Field, Dorothy
Grover, Joseph L. Camp, Jr., Nuel D. Belnap, Jr., Philip Kitcher, and Anil
Gupta. These contributions are grouped into four sections, each dealing with one
major theory, but they also proceed broadly chronologically. In this way, the
reader gains both a clear idea of each theory and a sense of how theories of
truth have developed over time. Attention is focused particularly on the
resurgence of the correspondence theory since the 1970s, and on reactions to the
new correspondence theory among contemporary deflationists.
Theories of Truth opens with a substantial introduction to the theories of
truth, aimed at readers with little or no prior knowledge of philosophy. These
traditional theories share a basic assumption about truth: that truth has a
nature, at least in the sense that there are essential features of truth that we
can capture in a formula (or set of formulas). Typically, these theories propose
necessary and sufficient conditions for a proposition, sentence, statement, or
belief to be true. In proposing these conditions, traditional theorists may
intend to capture the meaning of the truth predicate "is true." Alternatively,
they may intend to identify the property of being true with a specified
property.
Traditional
theories of truth are motivated by diverse concerns and propose accounts of
truth so divergent from one another that one might wonder whether these theories
target the same phenomenon. Correspondence theories, as recently conceived, are
motivated by the role of truth in ascribing content to beliefs and in explaining
behavior. They define truth as correspondence to the way the world is.
Pragmatist theories aim at distilling what is useful in the notion of truth and,
in the case of William James's theory, explaining why true beliefs are useful.
These theories define truth as what is verifiable in the long run. Coherence
theories, for their part, are driven by metaphysical and epistemological
concerns — the doctrine of internal relations, and the idea that truth is
essentially knowable. These theories identify truth with what would be believed
in an ideal coherent system of beliefs. Finally, deflationary theories seek to
explain the utility of the truth predicate in linguistic acts like assenting to
a proposition. They treat the truth predicate as a mere logical device for
assent. Thus, correspondence, pragmatist, and coherence theories differ
fundamentally from deflation-ism in treating truth as a property of a truth
bearer. Deflationary theories, by contrast, deny that truth is a property and
affirm that the meaning of "true" turns entirely on its logical function in
language. As we can see, the traditional theories emerge from such different
concerns and end in such different accounts that one might be forgiven for
thinking that they are talking past one another.
The editor
takes as a working hypothesis that there is just one item, truth, with a single
nature, at which the theories aim. I believe that this working hypothesis will
be confirmed in the course of evaluating the theories.
Even though
the traditional theories differ dramatically from one an-other, they are all
party to a debate over a key issue: whether, by virtue of its nature, truth
involves a deep relation to thinkers. The issue is whether truth involves a
relation of the truth bearer (proposition, sentence, statement, belief) to some
(possible or idealized) cognizer (in particular, to some possible ascriber of
truth, or to the language in which truth is ascribed). This issue divides the
correspondence theory, on the one hand, from the alternatives to the
correspondence theory, on the other. Correspondence theories of truth do not
entail such a relation. On a correspondence theory, a truth bearer bears a
correspondence relation to the way the world is. But the truth bearer need not
bear any relation to an actual or possible cognizer, or to anyone who ascribes
truth to the truth bearer.' The correspondence relation of the truth bearer to
the world does not depend on actual or possible cognizers or truth ascribers. By
contrast, pragmatist and coherence theories entail that truth involves a
relation to some actual or possible cognizer of the truth. On pragmatist
theories, for example, a truth bearer is true just in case it would permanently
stand the test of inquiry. So a truth bearer is true only if it would be
accepted by some possible inquirer. Similarly, on coherence theories, a truth
bearer is true only if it belongs to an ideal coherent system – the system of
beliefs of a possible omniscient, infallible cognizer. Thus, both pragmatist and
coherence theories entail that truth involves a relation of the truth bearer to
a possible cognizer. In this respect, deflationism differs from pragmatist and
coherence theories a bit: it entails that truth involves a relation of the truth
bearer to possible cognition in a different way. Truth ascriptions, on
deflationism, are implicitly relativized to the language of ascription, and a
truth bearer is true only if it is appropriately related to this language. So
deflationism too entails that truth involves a relation to truth ascription.
Whether truth involves a relation to a cognizer is thus a pervasive issue in the
theory of truth. Much of the debate in the theory of truth can be seen as taking
a stand on this important issue.
Socratic Logic: A Logic Text Using Socratic Method, Platonic Questions, and
Aristotelian Principles by Peter Kreeft, Trent Dougherty (
Saint Augustine
's Press) There are hundreds of logic texts in print, but none like this one.
(1) This is the only complete system of classical
Aristotelian logic in print. The "old logic" is still the natural
logic of the four language arts (reading, writing, speaking, and listening).
Symbolic, or "mathematical," logic may be superior to classical
"ordinary-language" Aristotelian logic for the sciences, but not for the
humanities, and is more sophisticated theoretically but not more useful
practically. (How often have you heard non-philosophers argue in symbolic
logic?)
(2) This book is simple and user-friendly. It is highly interactive, with a
plethora of exercises and a light, engaging style. Most beginners need a "back
to basics" logic text rather than the latest overpriced one with
state-of-the-art "bells and whistles" that they will never use outside class.
(3) It is practical. It is designed for do-it-yourselfers as well as classrooms.
It emphasizes topics in proportion to probable student use: e.g., interpreting
ordinary language, not only analyzing but also constructing effective arguments,
smoking out hidden assumptions, making "argument maps," and using Socratic
method in various circumstances. It is divided into eighty-eight mini-chapters
for maximum mix-and-match flexibility.
(4) It is also philosophical. Its exercises expose students to many classical
quotations, and additional chapters introduce philosophical issues in a Socratic
manner and from a common-sense, realistic point of view. It prepares students
for reading Great Books rather than Dick and Jane, and models Socrates as the
beginner's ideal teacher and philosopher.
This book is a dinosaur.
Once upon a time in Middle-Earth, two things were different: (1) most students
learned "the old logic," and (2) they could think, read, write, organize, and
argue much better, at a younger age, and more naturally, than they can today. If
you believe these two things are not connected, you probably believe storks
bring babies.
It is time to turn back the clock. Contrary to the cliché, you can turn back the
clock, and you should, whenever it is keeping bad time. (I learned that, and
thousands of other very logical paradoxes, from G.K. Chesterton, the 20th
century Socrates.)
As I write this, it is the last Sunday of October and we have just turned back
our clocks from daylight saving time to standard time. This is a parable for
what I am convinced we must do in logic. The prevailing symbolic/mathematical
logic is a logic that a computer can do; it is artificial, like daylight saving
time. It is very useful where there is already much intelligence (in the minds
of geniuses, especially in science), just as daylight saving time is very useful
in the summer when there is a plenitude of sunlight. But as the sunlight of
clear thinking, writing, reading, and debating decreases in our society, it is
time to make progress by turning back the clock from the "daylight saving time"
to real time, and real language and real people and the real world. The old
Socratic-Platonic-Aristotelian logic is simply more effective than the new
symbolic logic in helping ordinary people in dealing with those four precious
things.
This text
differs from nearly all other logic texts in print in the three ways suggested
by the subtitle. It does this by apprenticing itself to the first three great
philosophers in history, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. (Do we have better ones
today?)
(1) No other logic text explicitly sets out to train little Socrateses.
(2) No other logic text in print is so explicitly philosophical in a classical,
Platonic way.
(3) And only two or three other formal logic texts bypass mathematical and
symbolic logic for the "Aristotelian" logic of real people, real inquiry, and
real conversations. (The only other alternative to symbolic logic available
today is "informal logic" or "rhetoric.")
Crowded with Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh's Moment of the Mind
by James Buchan (HarperCollins) In the early eighteenth century,
Edinburgh
was a filthy backwater synonymous with poverty and
disease, and recently famous for religious persecution. When this small
walled-off city surrendered to a handful of Highlanders in 1745, things had
never looked bleaker. Yet by century's end, the ancient Scottish capital had
become the marvel of modern
Europe
, thanks to a group of friends whose trailblazing
ingenuity and passion for ideas changed the way all of us look at the world.
It was in
Edinburgh
that a unique gathering of the finest minds of the
day came together and made breathtaking innovations in architecture, politics,
science, the arts and economics, all of which continue to echo loudly today.
This was a time of radical upheaval and advancement, and a place of such
cerebral stature as to rival the Athens of Socrates. Adam Smith penned The
Wealth of Nations. James Boswell produced The Life of Samuel Johnson.
Alongside them, pioneers -- such as the
philosophers David Hume and Adam Ferguson, the poet Robert Burns, the chemist
James Black, the geologist James Hutton, and the novelist Sir Walter Scott --
transformed the way we understand our perceptions and feelings, sickness and
health, relations between the sexes, the natural world, and the purpose of
existence.
In
Crowded with Genius, James Buchan, himself a Scot with a strong
attachment to this history, beautifully reconstructs the intimate geographic
scale and boundless intellectual milieu of Enlightenment Edinburgh. With the
scholarship of a historian and the elegance of a novelist, he tells the story of
the triumph of this unlikely town and the men whose vision brought it into
being. Buchan has written an extraordinary account of the movement that turned
Edinburgh
from a city under siege into a hotbed of brilliant
achievements that changed the course of history and gave birth to the modern
mind.
Latin American Philosophy: An Introduction with Readings by Susana
Nuccetelli, Gary Seay (Prentice Hall) offers the reflections of Latin American
thinkers on the nature of philosophy, justice, human rights, cultural identity,
and other issues that have faced them from the colonial period to the present
day. Most of the essays are short and easy to read—making them accessible to
readers with little or no philosophical background. This book presents readers
with philosophical ideas about present-day controversies such as poverty,
racism, the equality of women, and the distribution of wealth. For anyone
interested Latin American philosophy and the development of philosophy in
Latin America
.
Educated
readers in the
United States
today are often familiar with some of the traditional literature and topics of
Western philosophy. Very little is known, however, about the development of
philosophy in
Latin America
. Is there, indeed, a Latin American philosophy at all? What exactly is
characteristically Latin American in the way intellectuals in Hispanic America
have reflected on philosophical issues? This volume intends to provide some
answers to questions of this sort by making available in the English-speaking
world the writings of Latin American thinkers on a variety of philosophical
problems. We do believe that there is a characteristically Latin American
philosophy, and ample evidence of its existence can be seen in the materials
included here. We hope that some familiarity with the works of las Casas, Sor
Juana, Sarmiento, and others will make it abundantly clear that Latin American
thinkers score high in both originality and sensitivity to live issues of
philosophical concern that have arisen in the subcontinent.
At the same
time, we do not regard the existence of a characteristically Latin American
philosophy as incompatible with the claim that there are some problems of
philosophy that have a universal import. For, traditionally construed,
philosophy can be taken to consist in a core of great controversies over
fundamental questions, together with numerous branches of "applied" philosophy
(e.g., biomedical ethics, environmental ethics, and philosophy of law), where
the elements of a general theory are analyzed more narrowly in connection with
specific uses or contexts. Latin American philosophy could thus be thought of as
another of these branches. Unfortunately, many supporters of this universalist
conception of philosophy who accept such applied branches as part of the subject
are nonetheless skeptical about the existence of a Latin American philosophy. To
us, any such skepticism could only rest on inadequate factual information about
the intellectual history of the subcontinent or—worse—raise suspicions of a
double standard at work. As far as we are concerned, if there is a role for
philosophical analysis in thinking about the problems that arise in the practice
of medicine, law, and public policy, then why not also in thinking about the
issues that have arisen in the experiences of Latinos?
The thesis
that there is a characteristically Latin American philosophy is supported in
this book by evidence that philosophy in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking
Americas
has gone beyond merely borrowing from major Western philosophical methodologies
and schools of thought. A careful reading of the selections included here
reveals that, from the colonial period to the present day, Latinos have devoted
serious thought to philosophical puzzles arising in their own historical and
social contexts, and often proposed original arguments to resolve them. Whether
those who applied themselves to these intellectual exercises were trained
philosophers, as all practitioners of the discipline are now expected to be,
does not matter to us. Although it has been only in the twentieth century that
academic philosophers in Latin America have achieved a status similar to those
in the Northern hemisphere, Latino intellectuals had long before that been
concerned with problems of social and political philosophy, ethics, and even
feminist epistemology. Sor Juana's vigorous defense of women's right to
knowledge, Acosta's rebellion against Aristotelian science, Mariategui's
discussion of the indigenous question, and the works of other thinkers
represented in this volume speak for themselves. Whether or not these thinkers
had formal training in philosophy, readers willing to put aside any
preconceptions about that discipline will find in their writings extraordinarily
rich material for philosophical reflection.
Needless to
say, no single volume could do justice to either the breadth of philosophical
questions that have concerned Latinos or the history of their philosophical
ideas. In selecting materials for this collection we have attempted to offer (a)
representative topics, (b) an approximate outline of the history of ideas in
Latin America
, and (c) original writings suitable for class discussion. The materials are
arranged into seven chapters, each of which takes up a different philosophical
topic related to the experience of Latinos. Each chapter also involves
different areas of philosophy, from social and political philosophy to
epistemology and metaphysics. If the reader desires a chronological sense of the
development of ideas in
Latin America
, from pre-Columbian cultures to the present, the chapters can be read as a
historical sequence.
Most of the
essays are short and easy to read, so they are accessible to readers with little
or no philosophical background. To maximize understanding of the selected
materials, we have whenever possible included articles illustrating contrasting
points of view. These readings also raise questions that lend themselves easily
to the use of vivid examples from present-day controversies in other parts of
the world, such as those concerning fairness in the distribution of wealth, the
persistence of poverty, racism, and the equality of women. At the same time,
such questions are often instances of larger, theoretical problems, and thus are
plainly connected with ongoing disputes in the mainstream areas of philosophy.
For readers who wish to pursue these topics beyond this volume, further readings
are suggested in a comprehensive bibliography that lists current materials as
well as classic sources.
Aristotle's Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient
Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages by Richard E. Rubenstein (Harcourt)
(Recorded Books:
Audio Cassette and Audio CD Unabridged) Europe was in the long slumber of
the Dark Ages, the Roman Empire was in tatters, and the Greek language was all
but forgotten, until a group of Arab, Jewish, and Christian scholars
rediscovered and translated the works of Aristotle. His ideas spread across
Europe
like wildfire, offering the scientific point of view that the natural world,
including the soul of man, was a proper subject of study. The Catholic Church
convulsed, and riots took place at the universities of
Paris
and
Oxford
.
Richard Rubenstein recounts with energy and vigor this magnificent story of the
intellectual ferment that planted the seeds of the scientific age in
Europe
and reflects our own struggles with faith and reason.
This book documents the intellectual explosion that
transformed
Europe
in the Middle Ages and follows a set of ideas as they course through the West.
These ideas triggered student riots and heresy trials, prompted Pope Innocent
III to recognize the Franciscan and Dominican orders, and set the stage for
today's rift between reason and religion.
This new perspective came from Aristotle. His work, like
the rest of Greek culture, had been lost in the centuries after the fall of
Rome
, when the Greek language was forgotten. But in the Muslim world, the wisdom of
the Greeks was never lost and contributed to the flowering of Islamic culture.
Then in the twelfth century in Toledo, Spain, groups of
Muslim, Christian, and Jewish scholars collaborated on translating the ancient
classics; and ideas long forgotten galvanized Europe, turning Western thinking
away from the supernatural world and toward the world of nature. With their
optimistic view of human nature, these concepts sparked fierce controversies in
the universities and caused major changes in the Catholic Church.
Rubenstein, author of When Jesus Became God, takes the
reader back in time to the translation center in
Toledo
and to the great universities in
Paris
,
Padua
, and
Oxford
. He shows how the Catholic Church adopted this new philosophy and struggled to
reconcile science and religion and how Western thinking was set on the path it
has followed ever since.
This is a feast for readers who are fascinated by medieval
history, and a treat for all who want to understand the ideas that are
fundamental to modern thought.
Defining Dialogue: From Socrates to the Internet by Geoffrey Rockwell
(Humanity Books) This original cross-disciplinary work examines the crucial role
of dialogue in philosophy from the oral dialogues of Socrates, through the
written dialogues of Plato, Cicero, Lucian, Valla, Hume, and Heidegger, to the
present ubiquitous form of dialogue on the Internet. Geoffrey Rockwell's main
point is that in dialogue, be it oral, written, or electronic, there is a common
mode of persuasion at work. The dialogue is an orchestrated event meant to be
overheard. While the author is absent, the readers of the dialogue are in a
sense present as eavesdroppers on a conversation scripted to encourage them to
judge between the characters and the philosophical positions they represent.
Relying
heavily on Italian Renaissance theories of dialogue, Rockwell builds on Sperone
Speroni's comparison of dialogue to comedy in which there is a mixture of
voices, each with its own form and content. He then looks to the essays of M. M.
Bakhtin to propose a working definition of dialogue as a unity of diverse
voices. This definition is used to show how one can interpret dialogues and
their particular rhetoric.
Dialogue is
many things, but it is principally a designed conversation where opinions
articulated in different ways come together into a culture of character in
thought. The ideas exchanged can range from philosophical arguments to leisurely
digressions on conversation itself. It is a genre suited to presenting how
people discuss ideas and how positions are related to character, and suited to
surveying positions that can be taken on a subject. In a world increasingly
connected by the Internet, there is no more appropriate genre for study.
Does
dialogue need to defend itself by means of dialogue? Rockwell claims that though
dialogue can show the range of difference, it also hides plenty of context and
often needed explicit evidence for investigation. Rockwell presents his
rhetorical investigation in classic exposition discourse though he gives short
examples of particular dialogues. He takes a step further the hermeneutical
principle that works should be interpreted through their internal hermeneutical
suggestions. He attempts to interpret a genre as it presents itself, and defends
itself. Hermes, the god of hermeneuticians, would say it is impossible for
writers of dialogue, or Dialogue itself, to define itself by dialogue; but
Hermes is only one voice among many, in dialogue.
Despite the
grounding in dialogues, this work is not a history of that vehicle. Rockwell
concentrates on particular dialogues appropriate to the line of the
investigation, specifically those of Plato, Xenophon, Lucian, Cicero, Bruni,
Hume, Valla, and Heidegger. The choice of dialogues is based on the needs of the
investigation and the desire to cover a representative sample of works.
Rockwell particularly wants to show that there are interesting philosophical
dialogues after Plato. While he does not presume to discuss these writers in as
thorough a fashion as they deserve, the discussion of dialogue in general does
prove interesting to those engaged in the discovery of any particular dialogue.
In Lucian’s
The Double Indictment we have the first sustained discussion of dialogue in
a dialogue. This discussion is a defense against accusations that Lucian opened
dialogue to unnatural uses, especially comical ones.
The Double Indictment is used as both an example of the new dialogue and an
answer to critics who were suspicious of this adaptation of a classical form.
Today we find dialogue also adapted to new contexts, and we can expect charges
to be brought that it is being misused. This book is neither a defense nor an
accusation of the expanded use of dialogue. It is a working definition for those
interested in thinking philosophically about dialogue and its possibilities.
Dialogue,
as Rockwell concludes, is a pattern of interaction (and persuasion) that works
at different levels. In this book he looks at dialogue at two levels: as an oral
event, and as a genre of writing. While he has not done so here, Rockwell
asserts it is possible to extend the discussion of dialogue to include two other
levels: thought and communal interaction. By this he means that, just as we talk
about dialogue as an oral activity, we can discuss it as a genre of thought and,
at the other end of the scale, as a genre of relationship between communities.
This position is different from saying that we can talk about what happens in
thought (or among communities) as if it were a dialogue—using dialogue as a
model or metaphor for thought and communal interaction. Rockwell suggests that
dialogue is more importantly a mode of interaction that manifests itself at
many levels, not just between people. This mode can be found in the thoughts of
an individual, among individuals, written down, or among communities. In this
context one could look at the soliloquy as a related genre of writing that
teaches us about the dialogue of thought, or one could look at the utopian
dialogue for more about communal dialogue.
It is not,
however, the case that dialogue at any one level is unconnected to dialogue at
the others. Our understanding of dialogue at each level informs our
understanding of dialogue at the others. The written dialogue presents us
paradigms for oral dialogue. The written dialogue also combines voices that
represent ideologies, that is, voices representing groups of people or
communities when they talk. We could go on to map the ways that each register of
dialogue influences the other, but that is another project. The point is that
the mode of dialogue is not separable from the levels at which it manifests
itself as if it were an abstract idea. Dialogue, to be understood, has to be
understood as a mode that manifests itself in a particular way, at particular
levels of human interaction. It is interesting at which levels it is meaningful
to talk about dialogue and it is important how dialogue at any one level echoes
though others while registering echoes from them. The understanding of dialogue
at one level cannot be cleanly separated from that of other levels as they all
resonate with voices from other levels. This is one of the features of dialogue
that makes it such an attractive paradigm. Expectations for dialogue at one
level can be inherited from another. For example, in the call for political
dialogue between communities, there can be echoes of the intimacy of a garden
dialogue between friends, or echoes of the rigor of a written Socratic dialogue.
It is tempting when defining dialogue to sever the connection between levels of
dialogue so that one can grasp one type of dialogue at a time. Doing so grasps
dialogue in a way that damages it. It may be a necessary first step, but
eventually one has to return to a view of the whole of dialogue resonating
through its different levels. The danger of an exposition such as this work is
that it has focused on two levels, grasping the oral and written dialogue.
Rockwell hopes his readers can release this grasp and hear that which echoes
through the other dialogues.
Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives edited by Quentin Smith,
Aleksandar Jokic (Oxford University Press) Consciousness is perhaps the most
puzzling problem we humans face in trying to understand ourselves.
Here, eighteen essays offer new angles on the subject. The contributors, who
include many of the leading figures in philosophy of mind, discuss such central
topics as intentionality, phenomenal content, and the relevance of quantum
mechanics to the study of consciousness.
Smith
begins his essay introducing the range of essay by demarcating two imcompatible
extreams in the debate. The nature of consciousness seems as elusive, ambiguous,
and questionable as the nature of intentionality, sensory qualities, and
mentality. From a form of dualism represented by Brentano's theory to a form of
physicalism by Paul Churchland's theory are held up as exemplifying the two
extremes of theories of consciousness.
“Brentano
lies at one extreme: in Psychology from an
Empirical Standpoint he argues that all mental phenomena are intentional
acts and intentional acts are identical with conscious acts. Brentano even holds
that irreducible sensory qualia are not only distinct from consciousness but
from all mental phenomena; they are physical phenomena. Sensed warmth, cold,
redness, and even images that appear in the imagination are physical phenomena,
not mental phenomena. Note that by `redness' Brentano does not mean a source of
light waves, nor a brain state, but rather the sensed quale that some
contemporary representationalists would say is a phenomenal content that
represents a source of light rays. Contemporary representationalists or
intentionalists often argue that sensory qualia are intentional or have
intentionality. For Brentano, they are instead objects of intentional acts; they
are not themselves intentional. In inner perception, to use Brentano's
terminology, we are conscious of sensory qualia such as redness and warmth, and
the `consciousness of' these qualia is the intentional act that has these qualia
for its intentional object. Mental access to physical things, such as mountains,
requires judgements pertaining to sensory physical phenomena to be intentional
objects of other (judging) intentional acts. So long as we remember that
Brentano used the terms `consciousness, 'intentionality, `mental phenomena',
and `physical phenomena' in ways different from contemporary philosophers of
mind, we may say that Brentano's equivalences lie at one end of the extreme in
the various theories of consciousness. For Brentano, it is the case that
consciousness = intentionality = mentality.
“At the
other end of the extreme, we have Paul Churchland's theory in
The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul, which states that consciousness
is the neural activity of the intralaminar nucleus of the thalamus.
Churchland's theory (which he puts forth as a proposal) implies that what
Brentano called `consciousness, `intentionality, and `mentality' do not exist.
For Churchland, even the physical phenomena Brentano discussed, the sensory
qualia of colours, odours, tastes, etc., do not exist. In so far as these words,
`consciousness, `mental, `colours, `odours' have a verifiable meaning, they
refer to arrays of neuronal firings or other configurations of mass-energy. In
particular, Churchland proposes that consciousness is a neural network radiating
to and from the intralaminar nucleus, a network that connects this nucleus to
all areas of the cerebral cortex. The variations in the level of neural activity
are the contents of consciousness (which Churchland does not distinguish from
acts of consciousness); conscious activities are non-periodic variations from
the steady 40-Hz oscillations in the neural activity of the cortex. Since there
are non-representational conscious and mental states, we do not have an
equivalence among consciousness, representation (`intentionality') and
mentality. Rather, the equivalence is: consciousness = non-periodic variations
in neural activity of the recurrent network radiating to and from the
intralaminar nucleus of the thalamus, a network that extends to every area of
the cerebral cortex.”
In between
Brentano and Churchland are most contemporary philosophers of mind and cognitive
scientists. Consciousness is often distinguished from intentionality, with some
intentional states being characterized as unconscious and others as conscious.
Here intentionality is not an intentional act in Brentano's sense, but an
intentional object in Brentano's sense, specifically, what Brentano calls a
physical phenomenon. Brentano's intentional acts do not play a large role in
contemporary discussions and intentionality is typically associated with what
Brentano would call intentional objects of inner perception. Consciousness is
also usually distinguished from mentality, mental states or processes can be
unconscious, other mental states can be non-intentional, and still other mental
states can be both unconscious and non-intentional. This by no means exhausts
theories of consciousness. Sometimes consciousness is identified with what is
now called phenomenal content (what Brentano called `physical phenomena');
others identify it with a system S that possesses a higher-order belief that it
is in S, or with a system S that has another informational state that monitors
S. Still others suggest that `consciousness might go the way of "caloric fluid"
or "vital spirit"' (Patricia Churchland) or that.there is no such thing as
consciousness.
A book of
original essays on consciousness should reflect this diversity and not specify
at the outset what consciousness is, define consciousness, or even delimit the
extension or intension of the word `consciousness'. Rather, the reader should be
presented with some of the most recent theories about consciousness (and the
variously related notions of intentionality, phenomenal content, mentality,
etc.) and learn about this diversity from the authors of the chapters
themselves.
Debates
about consciousness focus on at least four broad topics, corresponding to the
four parts of this book. The first three are intentionality and phenomenal
content (Part One), self-consciousness or knowledge of our own and others'
mental states (Part Two), and the problem of consciousness and the brain (Part
Three). Part Four focuses on a topic that is only recently being discussed by
philosophers of mind: the idea that classical mechanics is the wrong mechanics
to assume in one's study of consciousness, and that the adoption of quantum
mechanics instead will require us to reconceive familiar philosophical views
about the nature of consciousness. Quantum mechanics can tell us about
consciousness and conscious states, and not merely about the subcellular level
of the brain or the physical basis that `gives rise' to consciousness (Part
Four).
Part One on
`Intentionality and Phenomenal Content' includes chapters by Tye, Crane, Levine,
Loar, and McLaughlin that exhibit the various views that may be taken about
intentionalism (sometimes called representationalism) and phenomenal qualities
or contents, such as whether phenomenal contents are intentional, accompany
intentionality, or are objects of intentional consciousness.
Part Two on
`Knowing Mental States' includes Nichols and Stich's criticism of the Theory
Theory and their development of their Monitoring Mechanism Theory of
self-consciousness, as well as Andrews's criticism of the predication/
explanation symmetry assumption underlying both the Theory Theory and Simulation
accounts of how mental states of other people are known. Chalmers's and Sosa's
chapters focus on knowledge of our own experiences and both have relevance to
debates about foundationalism in epistemology.
Part Three
focuses on the debate about the relation of consciousness to the brain. Fetzer
develops a semiotic theory of the mind and body that aims to shed light on
consciousness and the mind–body problem. Van Gulick focuses on the nature and
meaning of the so-called `explanatory gap'. Papineau addresses a different
issue, `theories of consciousness'; he argues that extant theories of
consciousness attempt to answer a pseudo-question. Lycan further develops the
materialist's perspectival response to the Knowledge Argument, and Brueckner and
Beroukhim criticize McGinn's mysterian theory, i.e. that there is a natural
property responsible for consciousness to which we are cognitively closed.
Part Four
is entitled `Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness', and is about a new area in
the philosophy of mind. Traditionally, philosophers of mind or cognitive
scientists have assumed that psychology or neurophysiology are the sciences most
relevant to the philosophy of mind. But it is argued by Smith that quantum
mechanics is the most relevant science. Although philosophers tend to associate
the conjunction of quantum mechanics and consciousness with the popular writings
of the physicist Roger Penrose, more rigorous philosophical work in this area is
actually quite different from the Penrose (and Penrose—Hammeroff) theory. This
work is represented here by Lockwood, Page (himself a physicist), Loewer, and
Smith. The four chapters in Part Four are designed on the whole to be accessible
to philosophers who do not have a mathematical expertise in quantum mechanics.
CONTRIBUTORS: Quentin Smith is Professor of Philosophy and Distinguished Faculty
Scholar at
Western
Michigan
University
. His books include Language and Time (1993), Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang
Cosmology (1993), and The Felt Meanings of the World (1986); he has written over
a hundred articles, including more than twenty articles on consciousness,
intentionality, and the emotions.
Aleksandar
Jokic is Professor of Philosophy at
Portland
State
University
, and Director of the Center for Philosophical Education in
Santa Barbara
. He is the author of Aspects of Scientific Discovery (1996), and the editor of
War Crimes and Collective Wrongdoing (2001) and (with Quentin Smith) Time,
Tense, and Reference (2002).
Kristin
Andrews is a Philosophy Professor at
York
University
, specializing in the philosophy of psychology. She received her doctorate from
the
University
of
Minnesota
and has published in such journals as Journal of Consciousness Studies and
Philosophical Psychology.
Eskandar
Alex Beroukhim recently received a JD from the
University
of
California
at
Davis
, and is currently a clerk for the Federal Court in the District of Wyoming.
Anthony
Brueckner is Professor of Philosophy,
University
of
California
,
Santa Barbara
, has published numerous articles on such topics as scepticism, transcendental
arguments, self-knowledge, and the nature of mental content.
David
Chalmers is Professor of Philosophy and Associate Director of the Center for
Consciousness Studies at the
University
of
Arizona
, and author of The Conscious Mind (1996).
Tim Crane
is Reader in Philosophy at
University
College
,
London
, and Director of the Philosophy Programme of the
School
of
Advanced Study
in the
University
of
London
. He is the author of The Mechanical Mind (1995) and Elements of Mind (2001),
and the editor of The Contents of Experience (1992), Dispositions: A Debate
(1995), and (with Sarah Patterson) History of the Mind–Body Problem (2000).
James
Fetzer is Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the
University
of
Minnesota
,
Duluth
. He has published more than a hundred articles and reviews and twenty books on
the philosophy of science and on the theoretical foundations of computer
science, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science.
Joseph
Levine is Professor of Philosophy at The Ohio State University. He is the author
of Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness (2001).
Brian Loar
is Professor of Philosophy at
Rutgers
University
.
Michael
Lockwood is a Fellow of Green College,
Oxford
, and author of Mind, Brain, and the Quantum (1989).
Barry
Loewer is Professor of Philosophy at
Rutgers
University
.
William G.
Lycan is Professor of Philosophy at the
University
of
North Carolina
,
Chapel Hill
. His books include Consciousness (1987), Consciousness and Experience (1996),
and Real Conditionals (2001).
Brian P.
McLaughlin is Professor of Philosophy at
Rutgers
University
and is the author of numerous articles on the philosophy of mind, metaphysics,
and philosophical logic.
Shaun
Nichols is Harry Lightsey Associate Professor of Humanities at the
College
of
Charleston
. He has published papers in Philosophy of Science, Cognition, Mind and Language
and Philosophical Topics, on topics including moral judgement, altruism, and
folk psychology. He is the author (with Stephen Stich) of Mindreading (Oxford
University Press: forthcoming).
Don Page is
a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Cosmology and Gravity
Program and a Professor of Physics at the
University
of
Alberta
in
Edmonton
,
Canada
. He works mainly in theoretical gravitational physics (general relativity,
black hole thermodynamics and information, and quantum cosmology), but he also
has interests in the foundations of quantum mechanics, consciousness, and the
relation-ships between science and Christianity.
David
Papineau is Professor of Philosophy at King's College,
London
. His books include Reality and Representation (1987), Philosophical Naturalism
(1993), and Thinking about Consciousness (2002).
Ernest Sosa
is Romeo Elton Professor of Natural Theology and Professor of Philosophy at
Brown
University
and a regular Distinguished Visiting Professor of Philosophy at
Rutgers
University
. He has published papers on epistemology and metaphysics.
Stephen
Stich is Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at
Rutgers
University
. His books include From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science (1983), The
Fragmentation of Reason (1990), and Deconstructing the Mind (1996).
Michael Tye
has produced a number of books which include Ten Problems of Consciousness
(1995) and Consciousness, Color, and Content (2000).
Robert Van
Gulick is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Cognitive Science Program
at
Syracuse University
,
New York
.
Consciousness and the World by Brian O'Shaughnessy (Oxford University Press)
Brian O'Shaughnessy puts forward a bold and original theory of consciousness,
one of the most fascinating but puzzling aspects of human existence. He analyzes
consciousness into purely psychological constituents, according pre-eminence to
epistemological properties. He investigates what consciousness is and how it
engages, through perception, with the world. The result is an integrated picture
of the conscious mind in its natural physical setting. Whatever mystery there
may be about origins of consciousness, O'Shaughnessy suggests that there is no
mystery about what it is. It is his contention that consciousness consists in a
closely knit complex of occurrent mental phenomena and powers with thinking and
self-knowledge at the centre - and nothing else. He proceeds to give a
philosophical elucidation of its nature, analyzing it into its constituent
psychological parts. He argues that consciousness has a determinate character as
an internal but world-oriented phenomenon, and that there exist logically
necessary and sufficient conditions for its presence. Though consciousness is an
internal state, perception is its very foundation, being the source of the
material with which the mind develops, and essential to the processes whereby it
does so.
As plausible as his construction may be in its broad
outlines, some of O'Shaughnessy’s polemic is against the autonomous functioning
consciousness but rather at best as a gestalt of perceptual processes. This only
detracts from his constructive program because he minimizes the possibilities of
this propensity to major qualities of mind and religious sensibilities.
Contents
Introduction
Part
I.
Consciousness The Experience The Anatomy of Consciousness Self-Consciousness
and Self-Knowledge `Translucence' Consciousness and the Mental Will Interiority
and Thinking
Part II. The Attention and Perception Introduction The Attention The Attention
and Perception (1) The Attention and Perception (2) Perception and Truth The
Imagination (1) The Imagination (2) Imagination and Perception Active Attending
Part III. Seeing
Introduction `Blindsight' and the Essence of Seeing Seeing the Light Sense-Data
(1) Sense-Data (2) Secondary Qualities The `Perceptual Given' Appearances
Perceptually Constituting the Material Object
Part IV. Perception and the Body Introduction Proprioception and the Body Image
The Sense of Touch Conclusion Index
Essays in Radical Empiricism by William James (
Dover
) unabridged and corrected republication of the edition published by Longmans,
Green, and Co.,
New York
, 1912. The influential philosopher's preoccupation with ultimate reality and
his turn toward a metaphysical system are the focus of Essays in Radical
Empiricism. Originally published in journals between 1884 and 1906, these twelve
essays were selected by William James to illustrate the doctrine he called
"radical empiricism"--a concept that made him the center of a new philosophic
approach.
Proclaiming experience to be the ultimate reality, James explores the
applications of experience to the problem of relations, the role of feeling in
experience, and the nature of truth. He argues in favor of a pluralistic
universe, denying that experience can be defined in terms of an absolute force
determining the relationships between things and events. Relationships,
regardless of whether they hold things together or apart, are as real as the
things themselves-their functions are real, and there are no hidden factors
responsible for life's harmonies and dissonances.
Seminal
essays in this collection include "Does Consciousness Exist?" "The Essence of
Humanism," and "Absolutism and Empiricism." In addition,
this edition features a new translation of "On the Notion of
Consciousness"-the first English rendering of the essay, which was written in
French. Indispensable to an understanding of the great philosopher's other
works, this systematic and compact treatment functions equally well in and out
of the classroom.
Women in Philosophy
Singing in the Fire; Stories of Women in Philosophy edited by Linda Martin
Alcoff (Rowman & Littlefield) is a unique, groundbreaking collection of
autobiographical essays by leading women in philosophy. It provides a glimpse at
the experiences of the generation that witnessed, and helped create, the
remarkable advances now evident for women
in the field.
In the last
century, women went from having a complete absence among professional
philosophers in the United States to achieving a representation that is now
nearing 20 percent. From being denied entry into many colleges and universities,
even as undergraduate students, even up until the 1970s, some of us have now
become full professors in graduate departments. How did this change occur? How
were those who were the first women in their Ph.D.. programs treated by students
and faculty? And how did they survive?
This
collection of autobiographical essays will begin to answer these questions.
Included here are first-person accounts from many of the pioneers of our
profession-women who entered philosophy departments at a time when in most there
had never been a woman professor, much less a woman president of the American
Philosophical Association (APA), and when philosophy written by women was all
but invisible. The women included here not only stayed; they succeeded to become
respected and influential.
The stories
collected here explain how the authors survived a socialization into
mid-twentieth-century femininity with their intellects, and their intellectual
curiosity, intact. These stories also explain how the authors negotiated,
sometimes accepting and sometimes resisting, the standard second-class treatment
of female graduate students, and how they worked around the restrictions
imposed on women, especially mothers, in the workplace. Readers will also get a
sense of the development of feminist philosophy from its first amorphous
emergence, and its early links to critical social theory as well as the
anti-imperialism of the antiwar movement. The stories collected here provide a
rich and diverse sample, with no political uniformity among the authors beyond
the commitment to work toward more justice for womenhowever they define that
idea.
These women
are all brilliant, complex, and philosophically astute, with sufficient
experience in the profession to consider with maturity and measure how they
have been treated, how they might have done things differently, and how we
might be able to make some progress for the next generation. Indeed, there are
two past presidents of the APA represented here, as well as elected members of
the APA Divisional Executive Committees, leaders of other academic
organizations, and women who have led philosophy toward whole new arenas of
philosophical work.
Excerpt:
Philosophy is a demanding and extremely competitive discipline. For several
decades now, the job market has been so difficult that I have heard more than
one APA president say a person must be slightly crazy to pursue a career in
philosophy. However, women have faced special challenges, and often the price
of our survival in the profession has been our silence. I remember well that in
the spring term of the first year of my master's degree program, I discovered I
was pregnant, this despite the aggressive use of contraception. My husband and
I, both in shock, debated the pros and cons of continuing the pregnancy, given
that he had just been laid off work, that we were without health insurance, that
we had a two-year-old child already, and that I had just won a small scholarship
for the following year. During this period of uncertainty, I did not want to
tell my professors of my condition, and I was especially concerned not to reveal
my morning sickness in my 10 A.M. class on "Augustine and Aquinas," where the
professor was a young Thomist with a wife who cared for their six children at
home. Thus, I struggled to maintain my head in a fixed and stable position
throughout the morning classes, even while I felt I must have been turning green
and had to fight an overwhelming temptation to slide out of my chair and onto
the floor. I participated in a university-sponsored public debate later that
year on the question of abortion. I argued in favor of its remaining a legally
protected practice whereas my opponent argued in favor of making it illegal.
Here again, I chose to keep silent about the fact that I had had an abortion at
the age of sixteen, which gave me insight into the philosophical issues on the
topic but which also made it emotionally taxing for me to engage in public
debates, even in seminars.' Some years later, I had to ask a professor for an
incomplete grade in a graduate seminar because my children had had consecutive
bouts of chicken pox, thus requiring me to miss two full weeks of class. He was
fully sympathetic, but he instructed me to lie on the form about the reason for
my request, explaining that if certain parties found out that my family
responsibilities had interfered with my course work, they would simply say I had
no business pursuing a Ph.D.. Shortly after I became an assistant professor, I
was loudly called a "bush" by a senior colleague in front of graduate students
(in the departmental office!), though what he said to me in the privacy of my
own office was even more disconcerting. Another (female) colleague convinced me
to speak to my chair about it, yet the person never desisted; and so, I
ultimately had to find ways to avoid or endure his persistent provocations on
my own.
Overt and
explicit forms of sexual harassment, which can cause a lot of stress and even
the loss of jobs or degrees, have received recent public attention (although
philosophers as a group generally seem seriously behind the rest of the academy
in their understanding about what counts as harassment and why it is wrong).
But women in the academy face many more kinds of challenges than sexual
harassment, from having to keep pregnancies secret to having to keep one's
child-care responsibilities invisible and to a minimum (while men sometimes
receive admiration for attending to their family responsibilities) to foregoing
children and even partners altogether. In addition, a persistent tradition of
sexism from colleagues, administrators, and students (both male and female)
subtly demeans our capacities, undermines our confidence, and undercuts our
ability to perform at our best. Perhaps worst of all, publication, hiring,
salary, and promotion decisions have been affected in demonstrable ways in some
cases by sexist prejudice.' I have heard male faculty suggest that a female
faculty member got pregnant just so that she could get a research leave. I was
shocked to hear a male philosopher I know comment about a prominent female
philosopher that "I don't know if she would have even been in philosophy except
for her husband." Senior women who ask for the same things that senior men ask
for are often called "divas," a term with no male equivalent. Prominent women
who have a following of graduate students and younger philosophers are called
"queen bees," even though men with comparable influence are simply admired.
In the
not-too-distant past, it was quite routine to deny women graduate fellowships on
the grounds that it was a "waste" to give them to women. Women with Ph.D.'s,
even from leading departments, were never considered worthy of tenure-track
positions but were instead hired only as instructors or adjuncts. Women seeking
jobs were asked regularly about their relationships and their plans to have
children. This was the climate of the profession when many of the contributors
to this volume were beginning their careers. One still finds ugly rumormongering
about senior women's sex lives that is clearly based on antiquated double
standards as well as great leaps of inference that we instruct our logic
students against. Sometimes our esteemed profession seems little different from
high school, where sexual rumors about girls are used to isolate and demean them
and where the normative male and female roles are exhaustively represented by
the metaphor of football players and cheerleaders.
Today such
statements may well be castigated as manifestations of the "culture of
complaint," which suggests that anyone who can claim victim status happily does
so and proceeds to whine with an attitude of self-righteous martyrdom. More than
one of the women included in this volume have schooled themselves to avoid
complaining at all cost, even in the face of outrageous indignities, and they
found the task of telling the simple truth about their lives as women in
philosophy a daunting proposition, given the likelihood they would be seen as
whiners." But as philosophers, we clearly need to make some distinctions here.
We all know whiners on the job, the people who complain but do nothing to
address the problems own faults; who seem too wedded to their self-image never
considering the other as the unjustly treated; and who cannot seem to
distinguish between petty aggravations and serious problems. Obviously, however,
every complaint of unfair treatment is not an example of such whining. In fact,
many of those women who do have the courage to complain and even to attempt
remedial action about very serious problems in the academy are vilified not just
as whiners but as hysterics, whores, and/or general incompetents. This suggests
that what we have is less a culture of complaint and more a culture of cruelty
toward anyone who challenges male privilege. If members of the philosophy
profession refuse to hear or consider clear statements about the problems in our
discipline, then they are simply operating as apologists for an unjust status
quo. Women's experiences in philosophy have not all been difficult, of course,
and they have steadily improved. My experience is probably typical in that as an
undergraduate in the 1970s, I had no female philosophy professors, nor were
there female philosophy teaching assistants or graduate students at my
university. As an M.A. student in the early 1980s, I had one female philosophy
professor, Linda Bell, and I also had the opportunity to take one of the first
courses on feminist issues in philosophy, which she had courageously developed.
In my Ph.D.. program, there were two female professors at the associate level
and about 20 to 25 percent of the graduate students were women. Today, most
departments would probably feel remiss if they did not have a single woman on
the faculty. European American women have especially made significant strides;
the scant numbers of women of color is in line with the dismal limitations of
the profession as a whole (African American men and women comprise less than 5
percent of the profession; Latinas and Latinos make up less than 2 percent; and
Asian Americans and American Indians fare even worse). We must surely
acknowledge that those of us who have obtained tenure are extremely fortunate,
after all, with better and more secure jobs than the majority of workers, even
in rich societies. Women's enjoyment is no doubt all the sweeter, for we are all
aware how close we came-just one generation-to being unable in all likelihood
to practice philosophy. But the writers collected here were brave enough to
express their range of experiences, positive and negative. My hope is that the
analysis of discrimination given especially by respected senior European
American women will help push open the door wider than it currently is, making
it possible for more women of color to enter.
My intent
was precisely to collect the stories of women who are generally over fifty and
thus senior enough to have seen some significant changes in the academy. I was
loose with the age limit to try to ensure some ethnic diversity, though there
is unfortunately too little (see the essays by Narayan and Schutte). Women at
this level have many demands on their time and stacks of prior commitments. Most
of those whom I invited were supportive of the project, but some understandably
had to decline. It is interesting that quite a few were unwilling out of a
concern for the repercussions they may face if they "told the truth," a
consequence that can be quite unpleasant even for those with tenure and stature.
Beyond specific recriminations, there can be a general disapproval of female
scholars for making personal revelations of any sort: it can lessen our
collective, hard-won credibility; invite accusations of personal exhibitionism;
or reinforce the tendency to view our gender identity as all-determining over
our thought, life, and work. Why take such risks? For the simple reason that
true examples have a greater impact than any arcane thought experiments in
altering people's beliefs about the world.
Some years
ago a woman colleague, Lynne McFall, and I decided, with no doubt the
foolhardiness of the naive and untenured, to do an anonymous survey of all the
women connected with our department-faculty, graduate students, and office
workers-about the conditions of their work in general and about any problems of
sexual harassment they experienced in particular. We were motivated by some
particular and persistent problems, but our intention in doing the survey was
decidedly not to point fingers at individuals nor to establish evidence; rather,
it was to try to generate a general conversation about the conditions for women
in our department. We planned to collect the surveys and write a report that
would provide a picture of the current conditions and problems without specific
information regarding individuals. This objective may seem hardly possible, but
I believe we managed to pull off the anonymity, which was proven by the fact
that some male faculty members were desperate to know "who" had done x, y, or z
as described in our report. They did not want to have an open and general
discussion of problems for women in the department; they just wanted to know who
was culpable and whether they were personally on that list. Lynne and I were
very frustrated by this reaction. It indicated a great deal of concern for
self-protection with little or no concern for whether the women were being
treated with fairness and respect.
Litigation,
of course, requires establishment of clear culpability, though culpability can
sometimes accrue to groups or institutions and not just individuals. But
litigation is not the only nor is it always the best remedy for certain kinds
of problems. In writing up our survey, we thought that many men lacked
information on (a) what commonly occurs to women and (b) how these occurrences
generally affect women. We hoped they would be interested to learn about the
reality of women's lives in our department and thus be motivated to develop
remedies.
This book
is another attempt to provoke a general conversation. Some themes here may not
seem related to gender at all, but I urge readers to consider whether what may
look like universal problems are really unrelated to gender. Consider the
following themes that appear in these essays: the theme of finding a way to make
philosophy "meaningful," or "relevant" as we used to say in the 1960s, has been
especially important for many women who have found themselves incapable of
ignoring the world around them; the theme of finding a way to have a private
life as well as a professional one, which can be a challenge for men as well
but not generally as great a challenge as women still face; and the theme of
lack of confidence. I remember being totally amazed when a senior woman whom I
admired and considered brilliant shared with me how constant her lack of
confidence has been throughout her career. (The woman was Sandra Bartky, and in
her essay here, she writes with great wit and humor about her struggles of
confidence). But then I remembered a woman my mother worked with who said that
in professional life, a woman had to be like a duck: smooth on the surface and
paddling like hell underneath. We enter these previously male-only realms and
try hard to maintain our sense that we have a right to be here, but as Simone de
Beauvoir described so clearly fifty years ago, the heightened self-consciousness
that is inevitable when crossing a social barrier interferes with focused
concentration and the easy confidence of presumed entitlement. As I now tell
younger women who struggle with giving conference papers, what you need is a
good bluff. You cannot conquer the confidence problem just as an act of
willpower, but you can develop a placid demeanor and a confident expression. One
never can tell how many of the women perusing the meetings of the APA with
confident expressions are in actuality paddling like hell underneath.
Academic
philosophy in the APA feels today sometimes like a case of parallel worlds. In
one, white men in suits, or at least in sports jackets, congregate in large
halls at the conventions, filling the sessions, and dominating all the research
departments and most others besides. The tone of speakers is serious, sometimes
arrogant, often clever, and devoid of personal or cultural reference. But today
there is a parallel world to this older one, a world that is much newer, much
smaller, but vigorous and growing. This world is not quite the polar opposite of
the first world, as in Star Trek, where the good Kirk and Spock must fight the
evil Kirk and Spock. In this case, Uhuru's at the helm, Spock is a yeoman, and
Kirk is apparently absent.
Of course,
the thought of African American women having control over philosophy is at this
stage pure fantasy; however, what does exist is a feeling of parallel worlds in
the sense that there are now two arenas of philosophical work that currently
have, alas, too little intersection. All of us must have some presence in that
first world, or we cannot survive in the profession. But reciprocal interest
and participation in the second world remains small. In this latter world, new
philosophical questions are emerging that have never been asked before in
academic halls.
Women today
are often operating in both worlds with vigor, if not with great representation.
This book is also an effort to represent a diversity of women who operate in
different ways in the field: some who are leading insiders to the APA, others
who purposefully avoid the APA; some who are stalwarts of the Society for Women
in Philosophy (SWIP)---a major player in the parallel world-and others who are
not primarily involved in feminist philosophy or SWIP and who in fact may be
quite critical of them.
In order to
improve the situation of women in philosophy further, we need to begin to share
criticisms and disagreements concerning both our organizational work and our
philosophical ideas. Neither will advance without critique, although I continue
to agree with the many feminists who believe that there is more than one way to
do critique and that the adversary method so persuasively analyzed by Janice
Moulton is neither necessary nor always the best means to advance philosophical
truth. Still, all of us need to fight our small-group mentality or our
prejudgements, and hear from women across the discipline. I myself have never
been content with what we on the left refer to as "small-group politics," in
which the politically marginalized come to revel in their marginal status and
forget organizing rule number one: get in there with the masses and struggle. I
do not at all mean to imply that problems occur only or more so among some
arenas and less in others. The problem of insularity happens on all fronts, from
women who are so identified with certain trends that they dismiss those who act
or think differently, to women who still fear being tarred with low status if
they are seen to fraternize [sic] too much with the girls instead of the boys.
I think most or all of us, certainly I, have probably made mistakes in both of
these regards. Women of all political orientations who are concerned about
women's situation in the profession need to listen to all the women's stories
and diverse analyses.
Women in
philosophy will no doubt always disagree with one another (we are, after all,
philosophers). Yet I would argue that the difficulties among women in our
profession need to be analyzed in a political context. In brief, the less
powerful and less secure groups in any constituency are easily divided and
often more desperately competitive. Moreover, women as a group are hardly immune
from the heterosexism and racism widespread in our society, and some can be
fearful of being perceived as lesbian or can be peremptorily dismissive of the
claims of people from other ethnic or cultural groups. Sometimes, even feminists
themselves fall into either making assumptions about women's sexual opportunism
or castigating those who have achieved prestige as necessarily having been
morally compromised in order to attain it.
Thus, there
is unfortunately plenty of blame to go around. Too many men in power evidence no
intention of critiquing the arbitrary aspects of the system that put them
there, much less sharing that power. Women of the older generation sometimes
forget, or deny, that it took a women's movement for them to be where they are,
preferring to believe in their own invincible individual intellect. In
addition, women of the younger generation sometimes imagine their senior women
mentors to have unrealistic amounts of power, unlimited energy, and the moral
duty to support without question all female students. Men who do not have the
prestige they imagine they should sometimes scapegoat the women and people of
color now in the profession, as if we have personally undermined their careers.
And there are still many of both sexes who make negative assumptions about
feminist philosophy without having engaged in a serious study of it, in some
cases without even having read a single book.
However, I
believe strongly that we must fight the cynicism that such persistent problems
can sometimes engender. We must expand the unity that we can sometimes find for
small projects, in order to push for larger goals, and we must be willing to
hear and consider new ideas and uncomfortable viewpoints. Our personal
careerism and insecurities too often get in the way of our ability to
contextualize the problems we face and to put larger aims than our own at the
foremost. I very much admire all of the women who have contributed to this
collection for their courage, their honesty, their principled integrity, and
their political commitment to advance the situation of women as a whole even at
the risk of hurting some of their collegial relationships and diminishing their
professional opportunities. Women may not be naturally more moral than men, but
I do believe our "outsider within" status in this profession, as in many others,
gives rise to a sharp critical eye and can yield a moral compass unrestricted to
merely maintaining the internal mechanisms of the discipline.
One
contributor who has even more of an "outsider within" status than the rest
deserves some special explanation here. I recently was asked by the Pacific
division program committee to organize a panel on "being black, gay, Latino/a,
female, Asian American, etc. in philosophy before the era of 'diversity." At the
suggestion of several leading female philosophers who could not come to the
panel, I invited Stephanie Lewis to speak to the issue of being female. I did
not know very much about Stephanie except in so far as we had had some exchanges
in the APA: she serves on the Board of Officers as treasurer of the APA and I
had made various appeals to that board in my capacity as chair of the Committee
on Hispanics/Latinos. I knew that she had had an "interrupted" career path,
having done graduate work at UCLA and Oxford, and that she had been considered
good enough to teach as an instructor at several colleges and universities but
never offered a tenure-track job. This was of course a very common story for
women in the academy in the 1960s and earlier. Moreover, if such women married,
as Stephanie had, the consensus of social expectations was that their career
aspirations would
be
subordinated to their husbands' careers, and to caring for their children and
maintaining their home lives. In order to understand the "era before
diversity," I knew that we needed to hear from a woman who had had that very
common experience.
When
Stephanie began speaking on that panel, in her characteristically sharp and
funny and self-deprecating way, it became immediately clear to all in the room
that she was one of the most intelligent people one could ever meet anywhere.
Thus the injustice of her exclusion from philosophy was very much the
profession's collective loss. To understand the situation in which women
attained a foothold in philosophy, we must also take note of the women whose
talents the profession squandered. Hence, I entreated Stephanie to write up her
comments for this volume, and she, after some long hesitation, complied. I hope
she will not regret this decision; I know that readers of this volume will
benefit from her contribution to the discussion.
Stephanie
entitled her talk on the program and her essay here "Etc." to mark the category
that she felt able to represent among those I had listed. From her long tenure
in APA leadership, Stephanie contributes a perceptive account of how the
profession has made progress toward coming closer to its self-image as a
meritocracy.
Why (and
how) are women so regularly overlooked, especially in our classrooms? I think we
need to engage in a broad discussion about the gendered nature of the
intellectual virtues. This area is rich for philosophical work. It involves a
whole body of assumptions that are used to assess quality of work and fit
characteristics for the academic life. Is temerity and confidence in one's own
ideas more important or valuable than receptiveness? Is the problem of being
regularly distracted by personal obligations always and only a drag on the
philosophical mind, or can it be at least sometimes a resource? Is the ascetic
mode of life really the best philosophical model or the best for reaching the
truth? Where does love fit into the picture of intellectual virtues, only as
interruption and vulnerability or also as perceptive acuity? Obviously, we
should not assume that either traditionally masculine or traditionally feminine
dispositions are more or less closely aligned with a philosophically inclined
intellect, but we do need to take a fresh look at both.
Women often
wrestle with these issues, whether or not we have done philosophical work on
them, as have Alison Jaggar and Martha Nussbaum, who are included in this
volume.' We silently wonder if it is our own female proclivities that are
keeping us back or if we are in fact just psychologically ill equipped for the
academic life. Some of us also daydream about a possible world in which the
default image of philosophers would no longer be male. One of the principal ill
effects of sexual harassment is its ability to undermine the victim's sense that
she has a right to be where she is, doing what she is doing. The motives of the
perpetrator of harassment are often to send just such a message.
What has
come to be called sexual harassment has been almost a constant across my various
jobs and schools, and I am not referring to simple compliments (which some think
feminists overblow into harassment) or invitations but clear attempts to put me
in my place or to enjoy sexual contact without my consent. A favorite philosophy
professor tried to undress me in a hallway when I was an undergraduate, and both
my beloved high school physics teacher and, later, my boss in the physics lab
where I worked during college took advantage of moments when we were alone to
accost me. As I already related, when I was a new assistant professor, I was
loudly called a "bush" in front of graduate students by a senior colleague. My
chair's promise to "speak to him" seemed to have no effect on his subsequent
regular editorial comments. My husband came up with a rather obscene nickname
for this guy, for my private amusement and mental health, but when my sons
picked it up, I had to be careful to keep them several rooms apart from him
during departmental parties. From discussions with other women, these kinds of
experiences are certainly on the milder side of what women sometimes get from
male philosophers. I was also very fortunate in both my graduate schools to have
been treated with consistent respect and to have had several energetic and
wonderful male mentors. However, I have twice been a whistle-blower in sexual
harassment cases affecting students, and it has cost me dearly.
It was not
until my second year of graduate school that I took a course in philosophy with
a woman professor: Linda Bell's "Philosophy of Woman" at Georgia State
University, where I was working toward an M.A. Her confidence that I could
someday move from student to teacher both floored me and solidified my
determination. She treated me with real respect, as she did all of her students,
and she became a model that showed me a different way to be a philosopher, with
all of her care and concern for the world inside (rather than left behind) her
philosophical "rigor." The only other female professor that I studied with later
in my Ph.D.. program was Martha Nussbaum, who was similar to Linda Bell in
exemplifying a kind of feminine philosophical form. Rather than aiming toward
"out manning" the men, Linda and Martha quietly and confidently went about
philosophy in their own way, drawing from their lives (but without privileging
their own experience) and insistently bringing philosophy down to earth in both
its subject matter and its method. And personally, they were (and are) women
with rich lives, lives that included sexuality, political passions, strong
familial commitments, and in Martha's case, motherhood. Thus, I was quite
privileged to have two such examples of how to be both a woman and a philosopher
without inviting internal dissonance.
Within a
few weeks of discovering the pregnancy that appeared during my master's program,
my husband and I decided to go forward with it. He managed to get a temporary
job driving taxis, and I took a second job while accepting the scholarship. With
my comprehensive exams approaching, I was determined to finish them before the
baby came, knowing from previous experience how much would be demanded of me
when I brought the baby home. So I found myself taking my exams at nine-months
pregnant, having to stretch out my arms to reach the table for the four-hour
exam. Besides the practical motive, I also had in the back of my head a
determination to prove that, no matter how busy a woman's body was, her mind
could still perform at its peak. I passed the exam, then gave birth three weeks
later.
Just two
days after Teresa Brennan sent me the final revisions of her essay for this
volume, she was hit by a car while crossing the street, went into a coma, and
subsequently, in a matter of weeks, passed away at the age of fifty-one. Teresa
was a bravely original philosopher, astonishingly erudite, and her own recent
work on the transmission of affect--the ways in which we transfer emotional
states to one another--has the potential for causing us to rethink assumptions
in the metaphysics of the self, the philosophy of mind, as well as political
theory. Teresa was intensely feminist in her head, her heart, and her soul (and
she was one of the few feminist theorists who openly declared a belief in
souls).
She was
also a friend and mentor. In the fall of 2000, I spent a semester as a visiting
professor in the innovative, interdisciplinary Ph.D.. program at Florida
Atlantic University that she helped to design and found. For four months I was
fortunate to enjoy her company and her intellectual stimulation. One bit of
advice she gave me then has had ever since a transfixing effect, as one of
those life-altering moments that will affect one forever hence. She asked me,
"Have you ever written precisely and exactly what you truly think and believe,
without editing yourself down? Have you ever thought about writing not for a
present-day audience but for the future?" Teresa's own writing was always like
this direct, fully honest, and with an eye toward the possibilities of a better
future for all women. She is greatly missed.
Why Privacy Isn't Everything: Feminist Reflections on Personal
Accountability by Anita L. Allen (Feminist Constructions: Rowman & Littlefield)
Accountability for conduct is a pervasive feature of human association. For
example, along with explicit concerns about its proper means and ends,
accountability operates implicitly in the fields of public administration and
corporate governance. Accountability imperatives drive the law of tort and
crime. Accountability should not and cannot be total in any domain short of
dystopia. Still, in every sector of society a degree of accountability for
conduct is critical. It "is an essential and undismissable desideratum for
orderly social interaction" without which "it is impossible to conceive of a
society resembling an organized interlocking of individual actions, or for that
matter maintaining sociality and intersubjectivity." In the United States, as in
other places, accountability and concerns about accountability range beyond the
affairs of government and business enterprises whose stakeholders decry daft
decision making and disappointing bottom lines.
Accountability and accountability concerns also extend into what Americans call
"private life." Yet, how can that be? "Accountability for private life" is
surely an oxymoron. After all, calling a realm or activity "private" is one of
the ways to signal that answering to another earthly being is not required. It
seems that, by definition, we are supposed to be unaccountable for what we term
"private" life and accountable for the less precious rest of life.
So the
story goes. And it is something of a story, one that some of us sometimes
imagine to be true. When designating certain realms or activities "private,"
"personal," and the like, we imagine ourselves as citizens of a free society,
each entitled to enjoy a number of states, feelings, thoughts, acts, and
relationships for which we owe others no accounting. Although others have a say
in what we do in our capacities as managers, employees, and driver's license
holders, they have no similar say in what we do as private persons. We imagine
that other people are allowed to share in our private lives or not, at our
discretion and on our terms, subject to very few exceptions. We often think and
talk this way, drawing a sharp divide between public and private. The political
philosophies some of us hold dear pay tribute to
On Liberty, the classic essay in which John Stuart Mill famously wrote: "The
individual is not accountable to society for his actions, in so far as these
concern the interests of no person but himself." American jurisprudence on
occasion prominently echos Mill's sentiment. Dissenting in Poe v. Ullman,
Justice John Marshall Harlan exploited the familiar political ideal of the
private home, marriage, and family to build a revolutionary constitutional case
for reproductive freedom that set the stage for Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe
v. Wade. Justice Harlan vigorously attacked Connecticut statutes on the grounds
that laws criminalizing contraception intrude "into the very heart of marital
privacy" and require "husband and wife to render account before a criminal
tribunal the uses of ... intimacy."
However,
accountability for the uses of intimacy is a common imperative, expectation, and
deeply felt obligation in our society. As individuals, couples, families, and
communities we live lives enmeshed in webs of accountability for conduct that
include accountability for intimacies relating to sex, health, child rearing,
finances, and other matters termed private. We are accountable for nominally
private conduct both to persons with whom we have personal ties and to persons
with whom we do not have personal ties. We are accountable to the government,
and we are accountable to nongovernment actors. We are accountable for plainly
harmful conduct and other-regarding conduct in our nominally private lives (for
example, date rape) and we are accountable for the best candidates we have for
harmless and self-regarding conduct (for example, consensual oral sex between
monogamous partners in their own bedroom). We do not simply face others'
"advice, instruction, persuasion, and avoidance,"-devices Mill approved. We face
social and legal demands for sanctions and other reckoning he disapproved.
Mill's assertion that individuals are "not accountable to society" for actions
that concern only themselves is debatable as a matter of ethics or political
morality and flatly inaccurate as a matter of fact. Not only are we held
accountable for what is commonly termed private life, but our accountability for
some personal, arguably self-regarding, conduct extends to the extreme of
criminal liability.
Why Privacy Isn't Everything is a group of essays about accountability in
and for private life in the
United States
. Allen’s main goal is a series of thick descriptions of the say that others
have in our nominally private lives. It is nothing new to point out that
government has a complex and thoroughgoing say. Nor is it novel to note that
our employers, insurance companies, and families have a say. She manages to
contribute a fuller sense of how, why, and to whom we are accountable for our
personal lives, stressing more that others have both the varieties of
accountability and the variety of people to whom we are expected to answer. The
picture that will emerge from these discussions is that of highly social actors
enmeshed in flexible but sticky webs of accountability that restrain without
curtailing most individual freedoms. So long as we stick without, in the main,
getting stuck, we remain personally and politically free.
Allen’s
aims are not entirely descriptive. She ventures into normative perspectives on a
number of situations in which people ought to hold others accountable but do
not, and in which people should not hold others accountable but do. Rather than
attempt to work self-consciously from within the confines of a specified,
overarching normative theory, Allen expresses normative considerations in
familiar moral, ethical, and political vocabularies, contributing to normative
debates surrounding the accountability practices and policies she describes. Her
highly contextual discussions seek to illuminate accountability for private life
demanded of intimacy and gender equality; family and ethno-racial community; and
public trust and leadership.
Why Privacy Isn't Everything emphasizes the centrality of accountability in
ordinary personal life while promoting ideals of accountability and privacy that
are consistent with contemporary reconstructions of liberalism. Chapter 1 is an
introduction to the theory and practice of personal accountability. We are
accountable for private life to many other people and entities, in many
different ways. To elaborate this deceptively simple observation, Allen begin by
distinguishing diverse forms and functions of accountability. What does it mean
to be accountable for conduct? Who can be held accountable? What forms of
accountability are reciprocal? What bearing do specific roles, professions,
hierarchies, and cultural identities have on the nature and extent of one's
accountability to others? What are the grounds of accountability in private
life? Feminism has been blamed in the popular press for fostering excessive
accountability for private life. Allen explains why, and consider the broad
parameters of a normative theory of accountability that might be thought to
issue from the insights of contemporary feminist theory.
With
chapters 2, 3, and 4, Allen takes a topical turn. Chapter 2 studies the
question of to whom one is accountable for personal life; chapters 3 and 4, for
what personal matters one is accountable. In chapter 2, she examines
accountability to family and race for decisions basic to contemporary family
life: whom we marry (or the equivalent), how our children will be raised, and
whether we use drugs. Allen begins with accountability for drug use as an
instance of arguably "self-regarding" high-risk conduct that can breach
intrafamilial accountability imperatives. She continues by discussing the
emerging expectation that adoptive families will form ongoing relationships
with birth families as an instance of shifting norms toward greater
accountability for family life. The "open adoption" movement calls on the
parties of adoption to engage in an exchange of information and dialogue prior
to and after the placement of the child in a new home. Several feminist lawyers
and legal philosophers have voiced support for open-adoption practices as a way
of (1) empowering birth mothers to care for their offspring and (2) binding
adopted children to their biological families and communities of origin.
Adoptive families have always been more accountable than other families to third
parties. Open-adoption practices make adoptive parents more accountable still,
by requiring information sharing and dialogue with biological parents to an
extent unheard of in traditional adoptions. Allen endorses common pre-placement
accountability practices and accountability to the state of all parents,
biological and adoptive, for child protection. However, She suggests that
certain postadoption accountability practices that give birth families and other
third parties a say in child rearing may make adoption a less attractive option
for prospective adoptive parents who want families of their own.
"Transracial" adoption is a growing trend. The popularity of open adoption stems
in part from the belief that children adopted outside their own racial group
need access to that group to ensure that the child will develop an "appropriate"
racialized identity. Concerns about the racial identities of children have been
a part of discussions about "transracial" adoption and "interracial" marriage.
Liberal moral and political theories seldom acknowledge the special,
group-specific accountability norms recognized by members of minority groups.
Yet, despite the diminishing socioeconomic significance of race and the stark
biological evidence that race is a myth, Americans commonly experience a need
to reckon with others of their own perceived kind. Focusing on African
Americans' moral objections to exogamy, Allen describes modes of explanation,
justification, and punishment-oriented accountability for interracial intimacy
that have persisted decades after the great era of civil rights in which the
Supreme Court's decision in Loving v. Virginia (1967) struck down state laws
banning miscegenation.
In chapter
3, Allen examines accountability to others for health information. Most
discussions of health information depict it as a confidential product of the
physician-patient relationship, a confidential product whose disclosure to third
parties could expose patients to the sting of indignity, embarrassment, and
discrimination. Allen stresses, however, that health information exists prior to
the physician-patient relationship or any record created in the context of the
physician-patient relationship. Because we must often reckon with our families,
friends, and even law enforcement officials about our health concerns and
secrets, significant accountability imperatives for information, explanations,
justifications, and sanctions can exist prior to any contact with medical
professionals. Meeting the imperatives of accountability for health requires a
learned understanding of the subtle demands of context and relationships. Allen
describes health accountability imperatives, in an effort to illuminate them and
a seemingly inconsistent cultural trend: greater openness about health matters
and increased popular demand for strong medical privacy laws.
In chapter
4, Allen addresses accountability for sex. Starting with accountability to
employers, she examines gender-related conduct at work, in business, and in
professional relationships. Some civil libertarians, privacy advocates, and
feminists believe contemporary employers have grown unduly intrusive. Employers
monitor employee email, prohibit dating between co-workers, and punish jovial
sex talk among peers. Some employee monitoring is designed to promote
performance and productivity, or to deter theft of business property. Other
monitoring, though, is specifically designed to satisfy the perceived demands
of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.25 Under judicial and Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission interpretations of Title VII, employers are
liable for discrimination based on sex, defined to include sexual harassment
and maintaining a hostile work environment. Civil libertarians characterize the
conduct some employers try to prevent in the name of Title VII as lawful
employee exercises of free speech or mere breaches of etiquette. Allen stresses
reasons for believing that continued punitive accountability for sexual
harassment and sexually demeaning expression in business and professional
relations will further equal employment opportunities for women.
Allen
continues the theme of accountability for sex by turning our attention to the
accountability of employees who work for us all, our public officials. Today
journalists freely disclose intimate facts about public figures. They employ
covert and high-pressure tactics for acquiring personal information and
explanations for conduct. Coverage of some officials and public figures has been
condemned as excessive, even cruel. Officials have been more accountable to the
public than they needed to be in recent decades, with costly consequences for
the public fisc, individual lives, and public character. Excessive
accountability constrains reasonable freedoms and fosters deception among honest
people. However, regulating sexual intimacy is unavoidable. Accountability for
sex is called for in a range of situations. Allen attempts to characterize two
such circumstances: first, when officials knowingly and avoidably commingle
private intimacies with official duties; and second, when there is a high
probability that serious, distinct harm to rights or official duties will
result from secrecy about personal affairs.
Why Privacy Isn't Everything is a response to the old accountability on the
occasion of the New Accountability. Under the old accountability, accountability
for personal life was pervasive. For example, in important respects, workers
were accountable to their bosses, and husbands to wives. Today, however,
quoting a newspaper headline, "Companies Dig Deeper into Executives' Pasts." The
New Accountability means that when a person applies for a managerial position
with a large corporation, the company may hire a private investigator to do
"everything short of 24-hour surveillance" to "find out if they did drugs, with
whom, and what, [and] if they had an affair." Today, "US. Agents Arrest Dozens
of Fathers in Support Cases." The New
Accountability means that if Bob has failed to pay child support to Linda, Linda
can make a highly publicized federal case out of it. It is not a purely personal
or local matter.
The essays
in Why
Privacy Isn't Everything ponder how a preeminently liberal, democratic
society accommodates the competing demands of vital privacy and vital
accountability- Other scholars conclude that the United States is a
privacy-obsessed nation whose laws and policies overvalue privacy at great cost
to the common good. Allen’s conclusion is quite different. Privacy is not an
overprivileged value in practice. In practice, privacy interests are balanced
against interests in safety, welfare, public health, national security, and
efficiency. Private life is far from a sacred, obsessive zone of immunity in
America, by custom or by law. The United States is a diverse and evolving
society in which accountability for personal life is pervasive and genuinely
paramount both for intimacy and social control. We have not evolved into a
society with perfect, consistent accountability norms. In some respects, extant
accountability norms are too weak, impairing legitimate calls to government and
private actors for more protection and equality. As feminists have emphasized,
accountability for domestic violence has lagged behind accountability for
violence generally. In other respects, however, extant accountability norms are
too strong. Not only are individuals still subjected to criminal sanction for
consensual adult sex, but a New Accountability has created novel expectations
of disclosure and answerability whose risks and consequences are not well
understood. Already underway, accountability reforms are needed to further core
liberal democratic values. Allen’s studies advance some important liberal
distinctions and helps to clarify how we need to redraw the line pf public and
private behavior.
Social Aggression among Girls by Marion K. Underwood, PhD, (Social and
Emotional Development: Guilford Publications) offers a thoughtful analysis of
the nature and forms of girls' aggression, providing a broad, interdisciplinary
review of
the extant research. Among the book's many strengths are its
developmental
perspective, its attention to the context of peer
relations, and its analysis of current conceptual frameworks for the study of
gender differences and aggression....[Underwood] has an exceptional ability to
look at established issues in a new and fresh way, and to examine both sides of
theoretical debates from a balanced position. Unraveling the complexities of the
topic and delineating a roadmap for future research, this book is a 'must' for
university libraries and for those who study girls' development. Students will
benefit as well from the author's careful consideration of methodological
questions. The book is suitable as a text for upper-level undergraduate and
graduate-level courses dealing with
antisocial behavior, aggression, peer relations, and related issues." —Debra J.
Pepler, PhD, LaMarsh Centre for Research on Violence and Conflict Resolution,
York University
,
Canada
While several recent popular books address the topic of girls' "meanness" to one
another, this volume offers the first balanced, scholarly analysis of scientific
knowledge in this area. Integrating current research on emotion regulation,
gender, and peer relations, the book examines how girls are socialized to
experience and express anger and aggression from infancy through adolescence.
Considered are the developmental functions of such behaviors as gossip,
friendship manipulation, and social exclusion; consequences for both victims and
perpetrators; and approaches to intervention and prevention. Presenting
innovative research models and methods, this is an accessible and much-needed
synthesis for researchers, professionals, and students.
Key Features:
- Hot topic, garnering coverage in general media (e.g., The New York Times
Magazine
- Accessibly written, with examples clarifying abstract points
- Covers and integrates both physical and social aggression
Contents:
I.
Setting The Stage
1. Girls' Anger and Aggression: The Bind between Feeling Angry and Being Nice 2.
Childhood Aggression: Sticks and Stones and Social Exclusion 3. Gender and Peer
Relations: Separate Worlds? II. Development 4. Girls' Anger in Infancy:
Early Lessons That Anger Is Unwelcome 5. Girls' Anger and Aggression in
Preschool: "If You Don't Do What I Say, I Won't Be Your Friend" 6. Middle
Childhood: Gossip, Gossip, Evil Thing? 7. Adolescence: Girl Talk, Moral
Negotiation, and Strategic Interactions to Inflict Social Harm III. Clinical
Implications 8. Developmental and Psychosocial Consequences of Girls'
Aggression 9. Prevention and Intervention: Harnessing the Power of Sisterhood
10. New Models of Social Aggression: For Its Own Sake
Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies by Ian Buruma. Avishai
Margalit (The Penguin Press) A pioneering investigation of the lineage of
anti-Western stereotypes that traces them back to the West itself.
Twenty-five years ago, Edward Said's Orientalism spawned a generation of
scholarship on the denigrating and dangerous mirage of "the East" in the Western
colonial mind. But "the West" is the more dangerous mirage of our own time, Ian
Buruma and Avishai Margalit argue, and the idea of "the West" in the minds of
its self-proclaimed enemies remains largely unexamined and woefully
misunderstood. Occidentalism is their groundbreaking investigation of the
demonizing fantasies and stereotypes about the Western world that fuel such
hatred in the hearts of others.
We generally understand "radical Islam" as a purely Islamic phenomenon, but
Buruma and Margalit show that while the Islamic part of radical Islam certainly
is, the radical part owes a primary debt of inheritance to the West. Whatever
else they are, al Qaeda and its ilk are revolutionary anti-Western political
movements, and Buruma and Margalit show us that the bogeyman of the West who
stalks their thinking is the same one who has haunted the thoughts of many other
revolutionary groups, going back to the early nineteenth century. In this
genealogy of the components of the anti-Western worldview, the same oppositions
appear again and again: the heroic revolutionary versus the timid, soft
bourgeois; the rootless, deracinated cosmopolitan living in the Western city,
cut off from the roots of a spiritually healthy society; the sterile Western
mind, all reason and no soul; the machine society, controlled from the center by
a cabal of insiders-often Jews-pulling the hidden levers of power versus an
organically knit-together one, a society of "blood and soil." The anti-Western
virus has found a ready host in the Islamic world for a number of legitimate
reasons, they argue, but in no way does that make it an exclusively Islamic
matter.
A work of extraordinary range and erudition, Occidentalism will
permanently enlarge our collective frame of vision.
Political Theory Classic and Contemporary Readings: Thucydides to Machiavelli,
Volume 1, 2nd Edition
Political Theory Classic and Contemporary Readings: Machiavelli to Rawls,
Volume 2, 2nd Edition, edited by Joseph Losco, Leonard A. Williams (Roxbury)
Like most books, the second edition of Political Theory: Classic and
Contemporary Readings was inspired by a perceived need. Until recently,
political theory instructors had a number of unsatisfactory options in selecting
readings for their students. They could, for example, exclusively use primary
works by the classic political theorists. Doing so usually meant, however, that
students had to purchase as many as a dozen books in order to cover the major
theorists in the traditional canon. Nor has the option of using a volume
containing abridged selections from those works offered a solution to the
problem. All too many students simply lack the background or context for making
sense of the selections or for seeing their relevance to political life today.
Another
option for the teacher of political theory has been to use a textbook of
summary and commentary by a contemporary scholar. Such works certainly treat a
large number of theorists in a short span of time, and they may provide students
with insights into the classic writings. Yet, many instructors believe that
students who read commentaries without encountering the texts themselves have
not really learned political theory. Students should develop firsthand
evaluations of the works of political philosophers, no matter how useful a
scholar's commentary may be in placing those works in social and historical
contexts.
It is
possible that Political Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings brings
together the best features of each of the above approaches, while minimizing
their liabilities. The editors have increased the number of entries of both
canonical figures and nontraditional authors. They have updated a substantial
number of commentaries to reflect more recent scholarship. There are new
section introductions that provide an overview of the historic and intellectual
currents giving rise to each generation of thinkers. Finally, they have
improved the pedagogical section by adding web sites, class discussion and
activity items, and annotated bibliographies.
The basic
features that distinguish this anthology from others are that this collection
provides significant excerpts from classic writings for students to confront
directly. The thinkers presented extend from Thucydides to Rawls, allowing
instructors to pick and choose from a significant range of political theorists.
Further, the editors have chosen commentaries that present multiple viewpoints
from which to evaluate the tradition of Western political thought. These
commentaries, representing a high degree of both scholarship and accessibility,
raise important issues concerning the relevance of the classics to today's
political problems.
By
combining primary texts with scholarly commentaries, students can study both
the content and the practice of political theory. They should therefore be able
to understand not only what classic theorists have had to say about politics,
but they can also learn how contemporary theorists have approached the study of
classic works.
Finally,
because some classes in political theory are divided along traditional timelines
of "ancient" and "modern," the editors have chosen to present this work in two
volumes. This seems best to accommodate
the needs of students without sacrificing coverage. Students taking a class in
only one time period can avoid the expense of a longer volume, while those
involved in a two-semester sequence will find that most major political
theorists have been covered by both volumes.
Where to
split the volumes was initially a problem. Traditionalists and Straussians
usually anoint Machiavelli or Hobbes as the initiator of the "modern era." On
the other hand, theorists who are more historically inclined often speak of the
modern period as properly beginning in the 18th century with the American and
French Revolutions. While contemporary theorists are themselves divided over
the proper interpretation of modernity, other works on the history of political
thought have provided a solution to this problem. Many popular books divide the
history of political thought around the work of Machiavelli, with some of them
placing his work at the end of a volume on ancient political theory and others
placing it at the beginning of a "modern" volume. Because his work is
transitional in many respects, we have chosen to cover Machiavelli in both
volumes. Purists may object, but again, The editors feel this provides
flexibility for both professors and students.
Each unit
in Political Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings contains an introduction
to a philosopher (his or her life and major theoretical contributions), selected
readings from his or her work, and commentaries illuminating critical aspects
of his or her thought. Though our selections are consistent with the type and
extent of difficulty encountered in most undergraduate theory courses, some of
the readings will undoubtedly require students to stretch themselves
intellectually. The editors have sought to help students by summarizing the key
arguments in our introductory essays and presenting brief annotated
bibliographies. Further assistance for both the student and the instructor can
be found in the discussion questions and World Wide Web addresses that are
included in each unit.
One
important issue remaining to be addressed concerns how the editors selected the
readings presented here. In selecting both philosophers and representative
texts, their goal has been to provide a fairly comprehensive introduction to
political theory, not a compendium of the world's political thought. We chose
selections that represent the broad scope of the classics of Western political
thought from Thucydides to the present day. These works are the subject of most
of the teaching and commentary done by political theorists and philosophers
today. They are works which have made singular contributions to our collective
understanding of politics, works to which we often return when seeking answers
to questions about political life.
As such,
this book of readings follows a well-established pattern for textbooks in the
history of Western political thought. Though they reject the idea that each
theorist plays a specific role in a grand drama, the editors assert that each
has made a distinctive and indispensable contribution to understanding
politics. Certainly, they could not include the writings of everyone who has
had anything of interest to say about politics. Many works of classic or
near-classic status simply had to be left aside. For instance, they have not
felt competent enough to include material expressing the unique insights of
Asian, African, or Middle Eastern political thought.
However, a
more difficult problem with selection emerges from the limitations of political
theory as a scholarly community and an intellectual enterprise. Like much other
historical writing, and like a good bit of political practice, political theory
has derived its language and outlook from a largely masculine experience. The
writers that traditionally have been accorded classic status have all been
male; they have all emerged from the conventionally masculine preserve of
politics; and they have all employed non-inclusive language to talk about
political life. Thus, many works of political theory either said nothing about
women, or if they did, what they had to say was dismissive, derogatory, and
sexist. The editors do not share such sentiments, and have been pleased that
the writings taught in political theory courses have been expanded to include
works by women. We have reflected that enlarged canon in these volumes.
The editors
selected the commentaries for each of the chosen philosophers by basing their
decisions on the following considerations: (1) They wanted commentaries that
reflected important ideas or controversies associated with the philosopher
under study, especially where the concepts advanced are rather murky. (2) They
sought commentaries that represented significant recent scholarship in political
theory. In this way, students may get a sense of the current state of the field.
However, when they felt that earlier commentaries were superior in illuminating
key ideas or controversies, currency took a back seat. (3) Finally, they
included commentaries that would be within the grasp of the average student
approaching political theory for the first time.
Thus, the
readings the editors have selected for this volume are a mix of classic writings
and contemporary views. We believe this mix will acquaint students with the
writings of a representative set of political theorists; provide them with
contemporary analyses and interpretations of those works; and raise the major
issues or questions associated with a particular theorist's contributions to
understanding political life.
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