This chapter explores the cognitive and moral significance of the kind of imaginative experience poetry offers. It identifies two forms of imaginative experience that are especially important to poetry: ‘experiencing-as’ and ‘experience-taking’. Experiencing-as is ‘inherently first-personal, embodied, and phenomenologically characterized’ while in experience-taking one ‘takes the perspective of another, simulating some aspect or aspects of his psychology as if they were his own’. Through a sensitive and probing reading of Paul Celan’s Psalm, the chapter shows the role these two forms (...) of experience play in producing the unique form of ethical and epistemic value poetry can bear. The chapter’s argument for this has important implications for our understanding of the poetic imagination and nature of our experience of meaning in poetic contexts. (shrink)

Hume’s remark that “the conviction of religionists, in all ages, is more affected than real” is considered in relation to various monotheistic beliefs against the background of his account of belief more generally. The issue arises as to what Hume means by characterizing the assent associated with religious belief as an operation between disbelief and conviction. According to Hume, the obscurity of the ideas involved in the religious convictions of the “vulgar” prevents them from achieving the force and vivacity characteristic (...) of belief. As for philosophers, their idea of God encounters the problem of evil and the question of whether it is possible for the deity to possess moral virtues. Even the ascription to God of natural attributes takes us beyond what may meaningfully be imagined. Finally, the philosophical idea of God as a principle of order provides a form of theistic belief that is only verbally different from atheism. (shrink)

Originally published in 1936 as the second instalment of McKenzie's School Certificate series, this book explains the physical properties of heat. The text is accompanied by multiple photographs, drawings and diagrams to illustrate key points, and every chapter concludes with several questions for students to reinforce the chapter content. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the history of science education in Britain.

We introduce a multimodal logic for order of magnitude reasoning which considers a new logic-based alternative to the notion of closeness, we provide an axiom system and prove its soundness and completeness.