Preview: If we define “philosophy” simply as “love of knowledge,” then it is obviously a requirement for any serious scientific, scholarly, or professional pursuit – in whatever field. Philosophy’s relevance is also wide-ranging or even universal when we define it as the most basic or general discipline: the one that poses foundational questions regarding the nature and legitimacy of knowledge itself. Philosophy does seem, however, to have special pertinence for the human sciences, and perhaps especially for the mental-health-related disciplines and (...) professions of psychiatry and clinical psychology. Physics and the biological sciences run up against such problematic issues as the nature of causality, the impact of the observer on the observed, or the essence of life; yet these disciplines seem able to progress quite nicely on their own, with little demand for philosophers or for philosophizing of an explicit sort. Fields like psychiatry and clinical psychology appear, by contrast, to have a more profound need for such input; and indeed, without self-critical philosophical thinking, they often seem to run the risk of degenerating into one or another form of what philosopher of science Imre Lakatos called a “degenerating research program” – whether this take the form of reductionism, rigidification, or mere banality. (shrink)

Paul Feyerabend’s 1970 article “Experts in a Free Society” tries to make the case that scientific experts can only be tolerated if they are dilettantes. He uses Galileo, Newton and Kepler as examples of great scientists whose writing is nothing like that of contemporary “experts’, these latter being represented by the authors of the well-known book Human Sexual Response, Bill Masters and Virginia Johnson. He goes on to argue against the idea that the Scientific Revolution represented the triumph of empiricism. (...) I take issue with the way Feyerabend represents Galileo as implacably opposed to empiricism, with his supposition that good science requires a particular personality, and with the way in which he represents the work of Masters and Johnson. (shrink)

The article concentrates on a key concept of the Fin de Siecle in Europe – namely, “dilettantism” and its connection with Czech Decadent literature. Dilettantism, as explained by Paul Bourget in his essay on Ernest Renan , is characterized by the individual’s refusal to forego any possible experience by adhering to a setmode of life. The “dilettante critic” originates in the idea of the “critic as artist” as developed by Oscar Wilde, who in turn is indebted to Pater’s (...) conception of the “aesthetic critic.” In dilettantism there are many pitfalls: the dilettante may be the perfect embodiment of the “Decadent” type with his Willenskrankheit, hypertrophied analysis, over-refinement, hyper-aestheticism, eclecticism, and sterility. Arnošt Procházka , for instance, applies the term “dilettante” to Andrea Sperelli , modelled on Huysmans’s Des Esseintes. The controversies over Dilettantism appear here as an expression of an exclusive concern with “life,” a concept that a cornerstone of philosophical debate of the period. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Tale.

SUMMARYDuring the 1970s, widespread scientific interest in the risks of climate change prompted John A. Eddy, an astrophysicist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO, to investigate whether sunspots could be used to predict future climate changes. Methodologically, Eddy’s investigations were uniquely historical in nature. By interrogating old manuscripts of solar observations since the early seventeenth century, he identified what appeared to be a correlation between the so-called Maunder Minimum – a virtual cessation of sunspots between 1645 (...) and 1715 – and severely cold temperatures during the Little Ice Age. While he could not identify the physical mechanisms that governed solar-climate relationships, this historical episode fostered his curiosity. Fortuitously, Eddy’s solar-climate research coincided with efforts to use satellites to monitor and record variations in solar energy output, which in context constituted a significant development in managing environmental and technological risk.But using the Maunder Minimum to advance the frontiers of knowledge about solar-terrestrial relationships was not Eddy’s only – or even primary – motivation. In the mid-1840s, German astronomer Heinrich Schwabe discovered what appeared to be a decadal sunspot cycle, the existence of which inspired generations of astrophysicists to more precisely estimate its length as well as determine its underlying causes. Eddy, however, came to believe that the astronomical community failed to consider the implications of subsequent evidence suggesting that Schwabe's solar cycle was not an enduring characteristic of the sun. Instead, he reasoned that evidence offered by nineteenth-century European astronomers Gustav Sporer and Edward Maunder in the 1880s and 1890s had been entirely overlooked. But rather than arguing that their evidence was overlooked in error, Eddy identified what he cast as a conspiracy of wilful ignorance on the part of a staid and conservative astronomical community. By utilizing Eddy's private hand-written notes as they appeared in undergraduate lectures, public speeches and academic talks, as well as his appreciation for the seminal views of sociologist of science Thomas Kuhn, I show that Eddy sought to rectify this injustice by proposing a contrasting vision of science as an interdisciplinary, collaborative and creative process of exploring the ignored areas between scientific disciplines. (shrink)

[A dilettante admires a constellation from a hot tub, and considers it the next day. Is it a prose poem, creative nonfiction, or "light" verse; phenomenology, astrophysics, metaphysics, or half-lit paronomasia?]A photon hit my retina. Again, again; others also hit. The sensation seemed continuous, albeit twinkling, rather than as discrete and separated points. It was like dust, but I didn't blink.It came from a thing I would call bright, in front of me, over my head, on a dark night; it (...) is said to be a star from the cluster of a pattern I learned to call Cassiopeia, and just in a similar way, I learned about my retina, and I learned about photons, and I learned that some consider them a duality of either wavering... (shrink)

Opera dilettantes will forever argue over the relative importance of words and music in the creation and performance of their beloved art form. For philosophers brave enough to enter the fray, the issue raises a number of interesting ontological and phenomenological questions. In what does the work of opera primarily exist? What is distinctive of opera as a mode of dramatic presentation?

In an interesting letter to Anna George, the daughter of Henry George, Bernard Shaw wrote: “Your father found me a literary dilettante and militant rationalist in religion, and a barren rascal at that. By turning my mind to economics he made a man of me”. I am not able to determine what making a man of Bernard Shaw would exactly consist of, but it is clear that the kind of moral and social problems with which Shaw was deeply concerned could (...) not be sensibly pursued without examining their economic aspects. For example, the claims of property rights, which some would defend and some would dispute, are not just matters of basic moral belief that could not possibly be influenced one way or the other by any empirical arguments. They call for sensitive moral analysis responsive to empirical realities, including economic ones. (shrink)

У статті досліджуються особливості буття й розвитку художньої самодіяльності як національно-культурного феномена та її роль у єдиному культурному просторі. Одним із джерел цього розгляду виступає творча діяльність самодіяльних композиторів Донеччини.

Das Phänomen des Amateurkünstlers und Dilettanten zählt zu den bisher kaum beachteten Gegenständen der kunsthistorischen Forschung. Das Werk dieser Schaffenden darf gleichwohl als ein entscheidender Beitrag zur Kunst- und Künstlergeschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts verstanden werden. Unter einem Dilettanten versteht man gemeinhin einen Laien und Stümper, welcher dem Metier, in dem er sich versucht, eher Schaden als Nutzen bringt. Dabei wird ausser Acht gelassen, dass sich künstlerisch begabte Personen vor allem deshalb als Dilettanten bezeichneten, um sich vom professionellen Künstler abzugrenzen. Dilettieren (...) wurde als eine dem Adel vorbehaltene exklusive Form der Kunstausübung verstanden, die sich weder finanziellen Interessen noch dem Geschmack eines grösseren Publikums unterwerfen musste und sich somit kreative Freiräume ermöglichte. (shrink)

"Life must be something more than dilettante speculation. And religion a great deal more than mere gratification of the instinct for worship linked with the straight-teaching of irreproachable credos. Religion must be life made true, and life is action, growth, development—begun now and ending never."In September 2016, a first-year student at East Tennessee State University interrupted a Black Lives Matter protest on campus, parading in a gorilla mask. Clad in overalls and barefoot, the young man offered bananas to the protesting (...) students, heckling them.2 When set within a wider historical context, this student's actions evoke a legacy of intimidation in which perceived differences... (shrink)

This article problematizes the state of the contemporary scientific community, which fluctuates between the desire for autonomy and creative freedom, on the one hand, and responsibility to social challenges, on the other. In this context, the social meaning of Paul Feyerabend’s epistemological anarchism is reconstructed, revealing not only critical but also positive significance for contemporary science. Answering the two-sided question, “What kind of society does science need, and what kind of science does society need?”, Feyerabend gives a disappointing diagnosis of (...) both society and science. The political desire for ideological monism and totalitarianism is supported by science, which is sometimes a form of ideology – a militant rationalism that excludes alternative points of view – and in turn parasitizes society. This circle can only be broken in a regime of genuine pluralist democracy, which will lead to a change in the understanding of science and its role in society. The ability to “defamiliarize” (B. Brecht), to take the position of the “other”, to refuse to gain intellectual power – these are the key characteristics of free reason, as Feyerabend understood it. If we try to reconstruct a social group that possesses such a mind, then in the social projection it will include marginal people, dilettantes, scientists whose activities diverge from the disciplinary paradigm and norms of the standard scientific ethos. A precarian is such a subject of science that breaks the monopoly on the truth and contributes to changing the understanding of science. The question is raised about the productivity and effectiveness of the scientific precariat in relation to the concept of science in a free society, as well as to the positioning of this phenomenon in the context of current discussions about expert knowledge, citizen science and pseudoscience. (shrink)

The article explores common ground shared by Alexander Herzen's `Dilettantism in Science' (1843) and Mikhail Bakhtin's `Towards a Philosophy of the Act' (1919) in the context of the Russian intellectual tradition as a whole. The primary aim is to explore in many ways, perhaps, unlikely affinities between two very different writers in the early stage of their careers. The secondary aim is to explore identifiably `Russian' motifs which may be said to call into question conventional typologies of Russian thought (...) based on the progressive/conservative divide. (shrink)

Si l'on en croit Marcel Proust il faut admettre qu'on n'écrit qu'une seule œuvre. Mais alors on doit également accepter comme vraie l'inverse de cette proposition, notamment, si les préoccupations d'un auteur ne se suivent pas, si l'écrivain ou le philosophe voltige d'une fleur à l'autre, s'il se laisse tenter par mille aventures de l'esprit il peut à la rigueur mériter le titre peu flatteur de dilettante. La grandeur de toute œuvre de vie consiste dans sa profonde unité, unité qui (...) se forme derrière, ou si l'on veut au-delà des systèmes ou des théories. Heidegger nomme l'impenśe de l'auteur ce que Gide appelle la part du Dieu ou la part du diable. Mais l'impensé n'est le caché, le voilé que par rapport à ce qui est dévoilé, à ce qui est pensé. Il n'est donc autre que l'infra-structure. C'est à cette structuration alors que l'impensé doit son importance dans l'édifice de nos pensées. Autrement dit, les pensées claires ont leur racine dans le clair-obscur. Il y a toutefois un clair-obscur qui n'en est un que pour le lecteur. L'auteur y est plus à l'aise. C'est le domaine des confessions. Les confessions peuvent prendre des formes différentes, toutefois leur caractéristique générate permet de les distinguer des autres œuvres. Ainsi, quand un philosophe décide de publier son œuvre de jeunesse, dirions-nous, cela tombe dans la catégorie des confessions, tout comme les entretiens avec… et les testaments philosophiques. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:1 1 6 Philosophy and Literature 1.Jesse Kalin, "Philosophy Needs Literature: John Barth and Moral Nihilism,"Philosophy and Literature 1(1977): 170-82. 2.Kalin states, in summary fashion, that in argument by "exhibition" we are made aware that Jake's concern for Rennie is a "case of relative value which is genuinely reason giving" (p. 176). But he does not defend this claim, so we can only note it and pass on. 3.A. (...) C. Bradley, "Poetry for Poetry's Sake," Oxford Lectures On Poetry (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965), p. 24. 4.On the "heresy of the separable substances," see Bradley, p. 12 ff., where he defends the claim that "subject is the opposite... of the whole poem. Substance is within the poem." Recall also Robert Frost's dictum that the poem is what remains after translation. 5.J. Glenn Gray, On Understanding Violence Philosophically and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), p. 79. 6.Cf. Eliseo Vivas, "Critical Assizes," The Blue Guitar 1 (1975):84. "... The critic who is interested in going through literature to moral philosophy, political thought, social theory, or the rest, is a man the seriousness of whose interest in any of these disciplines can be questioned. As a moral philosopher, no novelist or literary critic can tie Kant's shoes or those of Bishop Butler; I know of no novelist or literary critic who as a political thinker can hold a candle to Edmund Burke or Michael Oakeshott, or who as a sociologist can rival Karl Marx or Max Weber. A literary critic who thinks he can go through literature to a well established discipline cultivated by the men I have mentioned or others of lesser stature is a dilettante in the pejorative sense of the term. He can't take his drink at the bar and take it straight; he sits in a booth and sweetens his bourbon with gingerale, or, God forbid, with Coca-Cola." 7.William Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), p. 11. "An idea must be thought before it can be tested, but a principle encased in fiction has, most likely, not been thought at all. It has been used." HOW WIDE THE GULF? a rejoinder by Jesse Kalin Several rather loosely related but important theses can be abstracted from Curtler's remarks. First, that philosophy and literature are so different in character that it is hard to see how they can seriously have anything to do with each other. Second, that the main thesis of my paper—that philosophy at least sometimes needs literature as an essential stage in its program—is false. And third, that my interpretation of Barth's novels is, if not incorrect, only one of several conflicting readings and hence not able to support the claims I base upon it. I shall discuss each of these in turn. Jesse Kalin117 Throughout, Curtler tries to draw the difference between philosophy and literature as sharply as possible. He concludes that not only do they have no need for each other, but to the degree that one "succeeds as a poet he fails as a philosopher" (p. 115). What might appear to be overstatement (and thus most unphilosophical) is supported by a series of contrasts. Philosophy is a matter of proof, not intuition, of argumentation, not persuasion, of concepts, not images, and so on. However, this rigid and rather positivistic picture of philosophy, resting on a supposedly clear and unbridgeable distinction between philosophy and literature made in terms of method and style, is mistaken, and with it the corollary that the two have nothing to contribute to one another.1 If we look at the actual practice of major philosophers, especially modern ones, we will find that their styles are not readily describable in the terms Curtler suggests they should be to count as philosophy. Imagination, intuition, images, makings, even the actual construction of characters and "dramatic action," are in many cases central. Descartes, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Sartre are all cases in point. The essence of this supposed gulf between philosophy and literature is brought out when Curtler says "the way of... (shrink)

When Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci was published, Valéry was not yet twenty-four. The period during which he wrote this work, as well as Soirée avec M. Teste, which appeared a year later, was extremely important in his biography, for it defined the principal trends of his thought for decades to come. After a twenty-year period of silence and retirement, there appeared his small volume La Jeune Parque, the collection Charmes, Album de vers anciens, and his Socratic (...) dialogues, all of which won him fame. The reader became aware of a brilliant stylist producing essays most abundant in number and themes, an acute analyst of culture in crisis, of the human community, mind, and morals, and the author of notebooks kept for many years in which he appears, as, among other things, a forerunner of the most diverse ideas in the realm of linguistics, psychology, information theory, aesthetic theory, and the like. Finally, there was to be the posthumous publication of Mon Faust, which, in the mind of the more perceptive reader, markedly emphasizes and sharpens the tragic aspects of Valéry's personality and consciousness of the world, for he is still today sometimes presented as a kind of causeur of high society, a cold master of "manufactured" poetry, an overly brilliant dilettante blinded by science or, at the very best, an utterly academic classicist in the category of those who are as dead as Bossuet or Boileau. All that was still in the future. However, it was precisely in these early works that, with all the fire of youth and maximalism of thought, he formulated ideas that must be central to the attention of those who wish to discover the system of Paul Valéry. (shrink)

For two millennia philosophy has restlessly stalked a fundamental problem the answer to the question "what is art, really?" Aesthetic discourse, focused on the Platonic Matrix of truth and beauty, arthood and object, imitation and representation, form and idea, has not delivered on its promise, leaving us in bewilderment over principles that are either ignored or contradicted by the arts themselves. In this searching critique, some astonishing faux pas are brought to light. Notably that aesthetics makes do without a knower, (...) the heuristics of art, and the dynamics of self-exploration that are central to the aesthetic experience. What this book seeks to accomplish is a thorough reformulation of the terms of reference, based on the actual "form of life" that is art. This amounts to a framework for a wholly new philosophy of art. It demonstrates that art is quintessentially involved in the meaning of life, and through its heuristic dimension serves our impulse for self-knowledge and an understanding of the human condition. The book is in the first instance a philosophical treatise and therefore suitable for academic study in all grades, though perhaps with greatest benefit at post-graduate level. But it has been written in an approachable style to encourage a wider audience to engage with its tenets: accordingly it seeks also to address art aficionados, whether professional or dilettante, as well as general readers with an interest in these ever perplexing and profoundly intriguing issues of our human estate. (shrink)

En este trabajo propongo analizar la polémica de Manuel Ugarte con el periódico socialista La Vanguardia, en 1913, situándola en el marco más amplio de los conflictos en torno a definiciones doctrinarias marcadas por una tensión entre el internacionalismo proletario propio del socialismo decimonónico y las preocupaciones por los asuntos nacionales, durante el proceso de consolidación del Partido Socialista de Argentina. Estas últimas se vieron atravesadas por la necesidad de construir definiciones respecto de la inmigración, del imperialismo norteamericano en el (...) subcontinente y de la reciente inserción de Argentina en la división internacional del trabajo. Un examen detenido de algunas intervenciones de Ugarte, Justo y otros colaboradores de La Vanguardia revela una heterogeneidad de posicionamientos mucho mayor de la que ha sido señalada hasta hoy. Así, esto dio lugar a debates doctrinarios descentrados respecto de los debates europeos, que implicaron respuestas creativas en el interior de la Segunda Internacional Socialista durante los años previos a la Primera Guerra Mundial. A su vez, en el caso de Ugarte, la polémica es reveladora de un modo de intervención intelectual que puede caracterizarse en términos de un diletantismo militante propio de la tradición dreyfusiana, acaso en desfasaje respecto de las condiciones de un partido en pleno proceso de institucionalización. I aim to analyze Manuel Ugarte’s polemics with the socialist Journal La Vanguardia, in 1913, in the larger frame of the conflicts around doctrinarian definitions, which were characterized by a tension between proletarian internationalism typical from 19th Century Socialism, and a concern about national questions during the consolidation process of Socialist Party in Argentina. This concern was related to the necessity of making definitions on immigration, American imperialism along the Latin American area and the recent Argentinean insertion in international work division. A close approach of some of Ugarte’s, Justo’s and other articles in La Vanguardia reveals an heterogeneity of positions much bigger than the one that has been observed up to the present. In this way, the doctrinarian debates were a bit off-center in regard to European ones, and they implied some creative responses into the Second Socialist International previous to First World War. Besides, in Ugarte’s case, this polemics exposes a particular way of intellectual intervention which can be described as a dilettante engagement specific to Dreyfusian tradition, in phase shift with the conditions of a Party involved in a whole process of institutionalization. (shrink)

Cynical speech is a proper form of manifestation of what we call cynicism. It takes the form of a persuasive strategy which assumes the achievement of the rhetorical consubstantiation of a cynical speaker and her/his auditorium. Cynical speech is a game that takes place between three sides: a cynical speaker posing as an immoralist, a moralist and an auditorium, the acquisition of which is the aim of both interlocutors. At the outset, the cynical speaker gives the identity of naive dilettantes’ (...) to both the members of the auditorium and the moralist and then tries to persuade the audience to side with him and take on the role of the students of a cynical expert. This is what can be described as cynical modulation. In its course, the initial opposition of a professional versus dilettante turns into an opposition of master versus student, while the unattractive identity of a dilettante is transferred to a moralist. In this way, the speaker achieves what Kenneth Burke thinks is the right goal for any rhetorical act: the speaker’s consubstantiation with the auditorium. This process is presented based on the example of the disputes between Socrates, as a moralist on the one hand, and sophist-politicians Thrasymachus and Callicles, who personify the type of cynical speakers, on the other. The analysis of cynical speech carried out in the paper leads to an indication of some basic features of this way of speaking, as well as the relationship that exists between them and the content of viewpoints voiced by cynical speakers. These viewpoints have been described as aristocratic democratism and people’s anti-democratism. These are two forms of what has been described as the cynical counter-ideal. The adoption of these positions is an indirect expression of the same systematic ambiguity that lies in the form of cynical speaking, which belongs to the very essence of cynicism as a cultural phenomenon. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Role of Malebranche in Ernest Renan's Philosophical Development BENJAMIN ROUNTREE RENANHASBEENCALLEDwith some justification the "Malebranche du dix-neuvi~me si~cle." 1 In his praise of the seventeenth-century philosopher, Renan was unconciously inclined to call attention to the similarities between himself and Malebranche by pointing out qualities which they were apt to share. A thinker as sinuous as Renan was bound to appreciate the power of subtle reasoning in such a (...) work as the admirable Recherche de la V~rit6. In a certain sense Renan is even the heir of a spirit to which Malebranche gave fresh impetus. Like Malebranche, he inveighed against pedants, dilettantes, and idolators of antiquity; he turned his back on tradition to favor modem thought over ancient, and placed his faith in a world governed by knowledge and reason in which progress and human perfectibility promise man happiness. In his basic optimism, in his belief that man is capable of knowing truth, in his somewhat pantheistic mysticism, Renan joins hands with Malebranche across the eighteenth century. How well did Renan know Malebranche? What did he think of him? Did his opinion of him undergo any evolution? To find the answers to these questions one must go back to about 1840, when Renan, a.t seventeen, began his study of Malebranche. By the time he was twenty, Renan, under the guidance of M. Gosselin, who little suspected how great a contribution Malebranche would make to Renan's decision to leave the Church, was reading the philosopher with enthusiastic regularity. Indeed, the Oratorian had become "l'objet perp6tuel" of his reflections, he tells us. The speculative terminology of the Entretiens sur la M6taphysique and the M6ditations chrgtiennes echoed through his class compositions and notebooks. His ideas on the general action of Providence in the universe were already similar to those of this philosopher, who, "illustre" and "saint," soon became for him a kind of spiritual hero, a hero whose exemplary intellectual zeal drew Renan instinctively ever more deeply into the contemplative life, into.the fervent and determined quest for "Truth." This "penseur hardi" was destined to excite Renan's own paradoxical mind as "le plus beau r~veur et le plus terrible logicien" ever to exist.~ 1L. L~vy-Bruhl, "La Religion de Renan," Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique (A~pril,1923), p. 344. Ernest Renan, Souvenirs d'en]ance et de ieunesse, in Les Oeuvres completes d'Ernest Renan (Paris: Calmann=L~vy, 1947), II, 843-846. All future references to Renan will be made from this edition unless otherwise specified. See also Lewis F. Mott, Ernest Renan (New York: D. Appleton, 1921), pp. 15-16; Jean Pommier, Renan (Paris: Perrin, 1923), p. 37; La Jeunesse clSricale d'Ernest Renan (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1933), p. 138; "Les Lectures de Renan au sSminaire,"La Revue d'histoire litt6raire de la France (1934), p. 93. [47] 48 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY For a moment Malebranche, like Pascal, even helped delay Renan's loss of faith. The attempt of a Christian to satisfy the intelligence through vigorous application of Cartesian rationalism to theology and science fascinated the young student in 1843 as he read the Conversations chr~tiennes and the Recherche de la Vdritd. He eagerly believed that reason leads one to knowledge of God, that the search for Truth is the search for God. Thus, equating the Diety to Truth and retaining his belief in a providence evident in immutable natural law, Renan continued to accept the Catholic dogma, the Bible and revealed truth in a "general sense," as he says in his Souvenirs. After Renan's first soul-shattering year of philosophy Malebranche still stood alongside Pascal and Bossuet as a model of piety, as a "grand esprit," a profound intelligence capable of remaining genuinely Christian, a powerful thinker "qui dit sa messe route sa vie." a He appeared as one solution to Renan's own growing spiritual problem, for Malebranche's example seemed a way of retaining intellectual independence without leaving the Church. Here was a priest, Renan thought, who, in a time of steadily increasing ecclesiastical authority, had been able to live "peacefully" even as a member of a religious congregation without... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.1 (2004) 107-108 [Access article in PDF] H. H. M. van Lieshout. The Making of Pierre Bayle's Dictionaire Historique et Critique: With a CD-ROM containing the Dictionaire's library and references between articles. Translated by Lynne Richards. Amsterdam and Utrecht: APA-Holland University Press, 2001. Pp. xxiv + 339. Cloth, + 58,00. Bayle's Dictionaire Historique et Critique was published in 1697 in Rotterdam with a (...) second edition appearing in 1702. In this journal there should be no need to point out that Bayle (1647-1706) was by vocation a professor of philosophy. His courses were divided into logic, ethics, physics, and metaphysics and their emphasis was upon science and the methods appropriate to its pursuit. That is to say that Bayle's students received a grounding in the post-Cartesian philosophy syllabus that had spread throughout continental Europe in the second half of the seventeenth century. Indeed, that Bayle was no dilettante was evidenced by the fact that before embarking on the Dictionaire in 1692, he had published various monographs on natural philosophy and works of public criticism in the skeptical/rationalist tradition. The French thinker, furthermore, despite his success as an encyclopaedist, returned increasingly in the years from 1697-1706 to his first calling as a critical philosopher. [End Page 107]Nevertheless from his student days Bayle loved books for their own sake, a passion which in due course came to support his first literary enterprise, the journal of books Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (1684). As author of the Dictionaire, he attracted attention from scholars in many disciplines. This study addresses therefore the general scholar rather than the historian of philosophy, for the Dictionaire did indeed become an indispensable work of reference for lexicographers, as well as for the encyclopaedists, the philosophes, the historians, the economists, the physiocrats, the satirists, the poets, and the reformers throughout the eighteenth century and on both sides of the Atlantic. Bound within four in-folio volumes, its second edition consisted of some seventeen hundred bio-bibliographical articles rigorously annotated and devoted to the ideas of authors in print, profane and sacred.Yet how could one author, it has often been asked, have produced in a mere five years so monumental a work? The Dutch scholar Leny Van Lieshout, already author of works of distinction about Bayle, has sought to answer this question and has done so with a rigor that equals that of Bayle himself. To assist her analysis she has compiled a bibliography of all the sources cited in the text of the Dictionaire itself. She has then matched this source, which she describes as a "library for learned Europe" (177), with Bayle's prodigious and lifelong correspondence about books with an ever-expanding network of friends and associates.With such tools at her elbow, Dr. Van Lieshout has been able to throw new light on many questions about the making of the Dictionaire. For example, how far did Bayle consider his method to be a model for the sort of reference book appropriate to a post-theological culture which today we call a plural age? His medium was indeed part of the message insofar as he sought to separate fact from comment, to cite relevant evidence, and to invoke many classical and heterodox sources whether or not they might offend an apologist for Christian doctrine. And how far did Bayle's own life really lie "only in his writings" (150) as Voltaire suggested, implying that Bayle could not have achieved so much had he not been a dry Huguenot recluse who knew little or nothing of the real world? The two questions are shown to be connected. In respect of the first, Dr. Van Lieshout observes that through the very structure of the Dictionaire Bayle seeks to assert that the political authority of the Church, following the breakdown of former Catholic Christendom, had ceased to be appropriate to the pursuit of scientific... (shrink)

In Survive and Resist: The Definitive Guide to Dystopian Politics Shauna L. Shames and Amy L. Atchison aim to give the readers an insight into various key concepts in political science by analyzing some of the world's most famous dystopian fictional works. Among them are George Orwell's 1984, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, but also more recent novels such as Scott Westerfield's 2005 Uglies Trilogy. In separate chapters, the authors draw on a wide array of concepts in political philosophy to (...) confront real-life and fictional dystopias. The book makes for an excellent introduction to political theory that is highly approachable to dilettantes.The book consists of eight chapters, a preface, an introduction, an... (shrink)

During the first half of the twentieth century there was a marked decline in biological conceptions of man and society. This paper describes the development of the views concerning eugenics held by the Norwegian scientific expertise, from open racism before World War I to a moderate nonracist eugenic program in the 1930's. It is claimed that public criticism of the popular eugenics movement by the experts came earlier in Norway than in most other countries, including the United States. The first (...) attack in 1915 was directed at dilettantic and irresponsible handling of scientific ideas, data and arguments. The conflict was over different views of science and its social role rather than over different aims for social development. The strict methodological demands that the scientific expertise wanted to enforce, provided a barrier against extreme eugenic views and proposals, and a source for critical arguments against eugenics in general. The experts differed considerably in their political views, but united in the crusade against dilettantism. They all feared premature applications of science to social problems. John Alfred Mjøen was leader of the popular eugenics movement in Norway. He learned about race-hygiene in Germany and started a public campaign in Norway around 1908. Mjøen formulated the so-called « Norwegian program for racehygiene » and played a prominent role in the international eugenics movement, but he was ostracized by Norwegian genetic scientists. Mjøen's strongest critic was Otto Lous Mohr, medical doctor and biologist, trained in genetics under T. H. Morgan. Mohr led the attack on Mjøen in 1915. Besides being a human geneticist of international prominence Mohr was strongly involved in campaigns for birth control and sexual instruction. Important supporters of a moderate eugenic program were Ragnar Vogt, founder of modern Norwegian psychiatry, and Johan Scharffenberg, psychiatrist and central public figure. Both were clearly on Mohr's side in the conflict with Mjøen. (shrink)

Of late, two contrasting departures from the analytic mainstream have become fashionable: the displacement of philosophy by the natural sciences, epitomized by the Churchlands' theme of "neurophilosophy," and the displacement of philosophy by the literary, epitomized by Rorty's theme of philosophy as "just a kind of writing," as "carrying on the conversation" of Western culture. Both are disastrous. My purpose here is to articulate a metaphilosophy which, avoiding both scientism and literary dilettantism, allows a more robustly plausible account of (...) the relation of philosophy to the sciences, and of its relation to literature, than either. In this enterprise, my starting point will be the work of C. S. Peirce. This may come as something as a surprise; for Peirce's avowed aspiration "to rescue the good ship Philosophy for the service of Science from the lawless rovers of the sea of literature" (5.449, 1902), not to mention his unkind remarks about "studying in a literary spirit" (1.33, 1869), might suggest that he is as scientistic, and as hostile to literature, as Rorty is dilettantish, and hostile to science. But, as I shall show, far from being a precursor of those "lawless rovers of the sea of science" among our contemporaries, Peirce points the way to just such a... (shrink)

Les actes du colloque international « La femme lettrée à la Renaissance » tenu à Bruxelles les 27-29 mars 1996 sont présentés par Michel Bastiaensen dans une édition très soignée chez Peeters (avec un index nominum). Cette publication quadrilingue apporte quelques réponses argumentées à la vaste question de la « place de la femme dans la Res Publica Litterarum ; Citoyenne ou ilote? Engagée ou dilettante? Objet de curiosité isolé ou affirmation d'une condition universalisable? ». À p...

Isaiah Berlin was deeply admired during his life, but his full contribution was perhaps underestimated because of his preference for the long essay form. The efforts of Henry Hardy to edit Berlin's work and reintroduce it to a broad, eager readership have gone far to remedy this. Now, Princeton is pleased to return to print, under one cover, Berlin's essays on Vico, Hamann, and Herder. These essays on three relatively uncelebrated thinkers are not marginal ruminations, but rather among Berlin's most (...) important studies in the history of ideas. They are integral to his central project: the critical recovery of the ideas of the Counter-Enlightenment and the explanation of its appeal and consequences--both positive and tragic.Giambattista Vico was the anachronistic and impoverished Neapolitan philosopher sometimes credited with founding the human sciences. He opposed Enlightenment methods as cold and fallacious. J. G. Hamann was a pious, cranky dilettante in a peripheral German city. But he was brilliant enough to gain the audience of Kant, Goethe, and Moses Mendelssohn. In Hamann's chaotic and long-ignored writings, Berlin finds the first strong attack on Enlightenment rationalism and a wholly original source of the coming swell of romanticism. Johann Gottfried Herder, the progenitor of populism and European nationalism, rejected universalism and rationalism but championed cultural pluralism.Individually, these fascinating intellectual biographies reveal Berlin's own great intelligence, learning, and generosity, as well as the passionate genius of his subjects. Together, they constitute an arresting interpretation of romanticism's precursors. In Hamann's railings and the more considered writings of Vico and Herder, Berlin finds critics of the Enlightenment worthy of our careful attention. But he identifies much that is misguided in their rejection of universal values, rationalism, and science. With his customary emphasis on the frightening power of ideas, Berlin traces much of the next centuries' irrationalism and suffering to the historicism and particularism they advocated. What Berlin has to say about these long-dead thinkers--in appreciation and dissent--is remarkably timely in a day when Enlightenment beliefs are being challenged not just by academics but by politicians and by powerful nationalist and fundamentalist movements.The study of J. G. Hamann was originally published under the title The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism. The essays on Vico and Herder were originally published as Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas. Both are out of print. (shrink)

Interviews with researchers in two fields of condensed matter physics point to differences in their strategies for success. In one, synthesizing interdisciplinary knowledge takes priority over developing sophisticated instrumentation; in the other, developing instru ments is crucial. As a result, the fields differ in other ways, such as growth rates, presence of dilettantes, and freedom available to plan experiments. The differing priority given to instrumentation in each field suggests that blanket generalizations about advances in instrumentation being crucial to advances in (...) science are too simple. (shrink)

That Jefferson execrated Plato in an 1814 letter to friend John Adams. In it, he expresses an unsympathetic, hostile view of Plato’s Republic, and the reasons are several. Nonetheless, Plato’s views on what makes government fundamentally sound are, at base, remarkably similar to Jefferson’s both in substance and sentiment, so much so that it is inconceivable to think that Plato’s Republic had little effect on Jefferson’s political thinking. That makes his execration of Plato difficult to understand. This paper is an (...) attempt to show that Jefferson, despite the tenor of his letter to Adams, had much more than a dilettante’s grasp of the political content of Plato’s major work. Jefferson was very likely quite familiar with the work, since his own political philosophy assimilates key substratal Platonic political principles of good, stable governing. His disavowal of the work and execration of Plato, then, is due to a constellation of other factors: Adams’s feelings toward Plato, Jefferson’s views on the corruptions of Jesus’s teachings, his deep-dyed detestation of metempiricism, his view that Plato was an unoriginal thinker, and strong disagreement with Plato’s means to instantiate substratal political principles. (shrink)

The text tries to base a theory of dilettantism on the definition of the dilettante as an insufficiently skilled underperformer who is well-aware of his shortcomings. Various measures designed to undermine the difference between professionals and dilettantes do not alter the fundamental distinction. Catherine Drinker Bowen’s »Friends and Fiddlers« (1935) is read as a moralizing self-testimony of musical amateurism that celebrates community and humility, against the imputed selfishness of the virtuoso.

Con "Fede e critica", saggio inedito del 1955-1956, Guido Morselli volle innanzitutto spiegare a se stesso, ragionando con quella lucidità ben nota ai lettori dei suoi romanzi, un passaggio decisivo della sua vita, in cui si sentì ricondotto, dalla sua posizione di «uomo qualsiasi... senza alcuna particolarità pia o edificante» a quella di uomo religioso. Piuttosto che darci ancora una volta «il racconto, drammatico o più spesso patetico, di una conversione», illuminato perciò da un punto d’arrivo, Morselli ha voluto offrirci (...) la sua vicenda «nella successione degli aspetti che le cose hanno mostrato via via che si presentavano». Perciò, al sorprendente manifestarsi di una ‘fede’ si accompagna qui a ogni passo la lama affilata della ‘critica’, una dura critica che vuole continuamente mettere «con le spalle al muro» le giustificazioni teologiche – innanzitutto per quanto riguarda il rapporto fra Dio e il male – e insieme mettere alla prova quell’ignoto personaggio che, all’interno del soggetto, dichiara appunto di credere. Nulla di apologetico, conciliativo o acquietante si troverà dunque in questo libro, che rivela l’altra parte, saggistica e speculativa, del narratore Morselli, ma una mobilissima e pulsante «fisiologia della vita religiosa», in forma di resoconto scritto da uno spirito disincantato sulla scoperta del mistero. Tutti i più grandi temi ed enigmi della religione cristiana vengono toccati in questo percorso: dalla carità al "Libro di Giobbe", dall’esistenza del male alla preghiera, dalla Trinità al peccato originale. E su tutti questi punti il ‘dilettante’ Morselli parla con rigoroso acume ‘critico’, ma soprattutto con una straordinaria capacità di rendere concreto ciò che ciascuno di quei grandi temi veniva a rappresentare, come d’improvviso, nella sua esperienza personale. Così egli ci offre un saggio che è anche un prezioso frammento di autobiografia e vuole consapevolmente «confermare la sentenza di Nietzsche: essere la nostra filosofia nient’altro che il compendio delle nostre memorie». E anche delle memorie future: sicché non saremo meravigliati quando, alla fine di un capitolo, troveremo alcune parole che poi sarebbero comparse, in forma quasi uguale, nel romanzo Roma senza papa: «E in ogni caso, non dimentichiamolo: Dio non è teologo. Dio non è prete». (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 122.3 (2001) 454-458 [Access article in PDF] Stephen J. Harrison. Apuleius: A Latin Sophist. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. vi + 281 pp. Cloth, $74.00. Despite the flurry of books on Apuleius in the last fifteen years, Stephen Harrison's is the first to offer a systematic analysis and coverage of all of Apuleius' works, including the fragments. Others have either focused entirely on the Metamorphoses (...) or on the philosophical works, but Harrison approaches the whole corpus as the work of an author with one aim throughout: to entertain and to display his learning. Putting Apuleius firmly in the intellectual context of the Second Sophistic, as it manifested itself in a Latin form in the cultural "backwater" of North Africa, Harrison consistently argues for a reading of Apuleius which makes his works seem less anomalous, more in the Latin mainstream, and even "unsurprising," given their context within the Greek Sophistic traditions as modified for a Latin audience. While there is much in the general outlook of this book with which I disagree, the work is a compendium of useful information and resources. Harrison has read absolutely everything on Apuleius and related fields and makes it all accessible to the reader via a copious bibliography and instructive footnotes.Each of six chapters covers a separate body of work: chapter 1: life, background and fragmentary or lost works; chapter 2: Apology; chapter 3: Florida; chapter 4: De Deo Socratis, chapter 5: De Mundo and De Platone; and finally chapter 6: the Metamorphoses. Harrison usefully refers the reader to the most convenient editions, translations, and other relevant material for each work, and in most cases reviews their content. We are given, for example, not only a summary and analysis of each Florida selection, but also a book-by-book plot summary of the Metamorphoses. Such a treatment indicates that Harrison expects a readership inexperienced in Apuleius, though other aspects of the book, such as untranslated Latin passages from De Deo Socratis, where no English translation is currently in print, imply a different kind of reader. In the end, the book will probably be of most use as a resource for those writing on Apuleius' less well-known writings. [End Page 454]As Gerald Sandy's book The Greek World of Apuleius: Apuleius and the Second Sophistic (Leiden 1997) might at first seem to cover much the same ground as Harrison's, some distinction is in order. Sandy's book is more concerned to illustrate the nature of the Greek cultural framework in which Apuleius worked and focuses as much on the nature of that world as on Apuleius. Harrison, on the other hand, keeps Apuleius very much at the center of his investigation, emphasizing also the Roman qualities of his adaptations. The two books do, however, share a view of Apuleius as a Sophist rather than a committed philosopher, a dilettante with many fairly shallow interests whose central aim is to entertain and show off.In the first chapter, Harrison's collection and assessment of the fragments is quite convenient, as it includes several not in Beaujeu's Budé edition, and it represents the first attempt to make any real sense of the fragments and the works to which they may belong. Occasionally, Harrison's zeal to set a fragment in the context of the Sophistic work he expects to find leads to implausibility. For example, Apuleius quotes a phrase at Apology 33, saying that his opponents have read in one of his [lost] works: "interfeminium tegat et femoris obiectu et palmae velamento." In Harrison's view, reasonably enough, the phrase must describe a statue in a Venus-like pose, but this observation leads him to conclude: "It is tempting to think that Apuleius might have written a work describing real or imaginary statues or paintings in the sophistic manner of the Imagines of Lucian or Philostratus, perhaps plundering the sections on art in Pliny's Natural History, but this remains pure speculation" (36). This example, though not representative of Harrison's usual caution, will give a sense of the book's efforts... (shrink)

Those who associate the name of Joseph Owens only with his magisterial work in Aristotelian and Thomistic metaphysics will, with this issue of his collected ethical writings, be forced to reassess their appreciation of his scholarly breadth. The twenty-seven chapters which make up this book, though humbly put forward by their author as side-paths along his main intellectual road, are no dilettante’s work: they constitute a significant and challenging contribution to many of the central debates in Aristotelian/thomistic ethics.

When Kant finished the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, he was 56 years old and had already published more than 25 essays and monographs. In this precritical oeuvre the young Kant unabashedly answered some of the most difficult questions of theoretical physics, physical geography, cosmology, theology, and moral theory, advancing ambitious theories about the origin and history of the universe, the nature of space, the age of the earth and the stability of its rotation, the causes of earthquakes, winds, (...) and fire, the ultimate components of reality, the soundness of optimism, the legitimate domain of logic, the character of the beautiful and the sublime, the first principles of theology and morality, the possibility of proving God’s existence, and—tellingly, at the end—the connection between metaphysics and madness. Since this dizzying speculative array appears to be unified only by the young Kant’s “metaphysical exuberance”, his precritical thought is often dismissed as the work of an unfocused dilettante. (shrink)

Suffering bodies/ bodies on vacation. Writer M. Blecher and painter Lucia Dem. Bălăcescu in the Tekirghiol sanatorium. What we propose is an analysis of the creative sharing that two artists, M. Blecher and Lucia Dem. Bălăcescu, both suffering from a bone disease, developed it during their joint hospitalization in the C.T.C sanatorium in Tekirghiol for a year, in 1933-1934. The characteristic of this space is the presence of over 300 children, the sanatorium only exceptionally housing adults. From these children, who (...) have their own way of using play and toys to hide their illness, the two artists learn a childlike way of living their own suffering and feel suggested to cultivate (and) forms of a miniature art. Lucia Dem. Bălăcescu makes a series of 50 mini-gouaches, which he calls Surrealist Fantasies. Blecher, like Robert Walser did in the same years, fantasizes about a miniature writing, designing drawings whose lines are made up of small words to the limit of illegibility. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Milieu Philosophy or Physics? Apprenticeship Starting Research and Minerva From Physics to Philosophy Causality and Levels Teaching Acknowledgment Books by Mario Bunge.