Compiled in China in the fourth-third centuries B.C.E., The Book of Lord Shang argues for a new powerful government to penetrate society and turn every man into a diligent tiller and valiant soldier. Creating a "rich state and a strong army" will be the first step toward unification of "All-under-Heaven." These ideas served the state of Qin that eventually created the first imperial polity on Chinese soil. In this new translation, The Book of Lord Shang's intellectual boldness and surprisingly modern-looking (...) ideas shine through, underscoring the text's vibrant contribution to global political thought. The Book of Lord Shang is attributed to the political theorist Shang Yang and his followers. It epitomizes the ideology of China's so-called Legalist School of thought. In the ninety years since the work's previous translation, major breakthroughs in studies of the book's dating and context have recast our understanding of its messages. This edition applies these advances to a whole new reading of the text's content and function in the sociopolitical life of its times and subsequent centuries. This fully annotated translation is ideal for newcomers to the book while also guiding early Chinese scholars and comparatists in placing the work within a timeline of influence. It highlights the text's practical success and its impact on the political thought and political practice in traditional and modern China. (shrink)

During the first few years of the twenty-first century, a number of high-profile populist books offering an aggressively atheist critique of religion appeared. This “clustering” of prominent works of atheist apologetics may be attributed to the fact that developments in biology, especially evolutionary biology, have profound negative implications for belief in God. Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion and Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, both published in 2006, argue that the Darwinian theory of evolution erodes many traditional metaphysical notions—such (...) as belief in God—through its “universal acid.” Several saw Darwinism as a potential challenge to at least some aspects of the traditional Christian view of creation, but most early evolutionists, including Charles Darwin himself, rejected the notion that they were promulgating or promoting atheism. Drawing on the recent works of Dennett and Dawkins, this chapter explores how Darwinism has been transposed in recent atheist apologetics from a provisional scientific theory to an antitheistic ideology. In particular, it considers the ideological use of the biological sciences, especially evolutionary biology, in recent atheist apologetics. (shrink)

My chief purpose, in the remaining part of this paper, is to study LAVOISIER'S work upon the Nature of Water in itself and in its bearing on opinion in the eighteenth century: to show how it arose, how it was carried on, how it was published and how it was received.

Volume 4 of’ “The Early Works” series covers the period of Dewey’s last year and one-half at the University of Michigan and his first half-year at the University of Chicago. In addition to sixteen articles the present volume contains Dewey’s reviews of six books and three articles, verbatim reports of three oral statements made by Dewey, and a full-length book, The Study of Ethics. Like its predecessors in this series, this volume presents a “clear text,” free of interpretive (...) or reference material. Apparatus, including references, corrections, and emendations, is confined to appendix material. Fredson Bowers, the Consulting Textual Editor, has provided an essay on the textual principles and procedures, and Wayne A. R. Leys, Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University, has written an Introduction discussing the relationship between Dewey’s writings of this period and his later work. That Dewey’s scholarship and writing was at an especially high level during 1893 and 1894 may be considered an index to the significance of this two-year period. (shrink)

The renowned Christian theologian Bernard Lonergan was also a professor, teaching courses on theological method at universities in Canada, the United States, and Italy. This volume records his lectures and teaching materials, thus preserving and elucidating his intellectual development between the publication of Insight in 1957 and Method in Theology in 1972. The present volume contains a record of the lectures delivered in 1962, 1964, and 1968. This is the most 'interactive' volume yet published in the Collected Works series. (...) The audio recordings of the 1962 and 1968 lectures are now available on the website www.bernardlonergan.com, as are PDF files of original papers from his 1964 institute at Georgetown. These lectures help to elucidate the development of Lonergan's ideas on such key notions as horizon, conversion, and meaning, as well as his evolving opinion on how best to divide theology into fields of specialization. (shrink)

This third volume in the definitive edition of Dewey's early work opens with his tribute to George Sylvester Morris, the former teacher who had brought Dewey to the University of Michigan.

This third volume in the definitive edition of Dewey's early work opens with his tribute to George Sylvester Morris, the former teacher who had brought Dewey to the University of Michigan. Morris's death in 1889 left vacant the Department of Philosophy chairmanship and led to Dewey's returning to fill that post after a year's stay at Minnesota. Appearing here, among all his writings from 1889 through 1892, are Dewey's earliest comprehensive statements on logic and his first book on ethics. (...) Dewey's marked copy of the galley-proof for his important article The Present Position of Logical Theory, recently discovered among the papers of the Open Court Publishing Company, is used as the basis for the text, making available for the first time his final changes and corrections. The textual studies that make The Early Works unique among American philosophical editions are reported in detail. One of these, A Note on Applied Psychology, documents the fact that Dewey did not co-author this book frequently attributed to him. Six brief unsigned articles written in 1891 for a University of Michigan student publication, the Inlander, have been identified as Dewey's and are also included in this volume. In both style and content, these articles reflect Dewey's conviction that philosophy should be used as a means of illuminating the contemporary scene; thus they add a new dimension to present knowledge of his early writing. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper offers an account of the early career of Martha Kneale, née Hurst, and of the five papers she published between 1934 and 1950. One on metaphysical and logical necessity, from 1938, is particularly interesting. In it she considers the metaphysics of time and offers an explanation of ‘the necessity of the past’, which has some resemblance to Kripke’s ideas about metaphysical necessities, in that it assigns an important role to experience in how we come to know (...) them. But Kneale’s view is very different from Kripke’s, depending not on doctrines about rigid designation but rather on recognition of the failure of the atomist/empiricist account of ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ concepts. That account cannot deal with such things as the relations of the determinates of a determinable like colour. A plausible corollary of this, which Kneale exploits, is that some of our experience reveals to us that there are phenomena which are intrinsically complex in having multiple distinguishable aspects, but where those aspects are inseparable. Other of the papers show Kneale to have been pursuing interesting lines of thought about McTaggart’s argument against the reality of time and on the mind-body problem. (shrink)

Volume 1 of The Early Works of John Dewey, 1882-1898 is entitled Early Essays and Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding, 1882-1888. Included here are all Dewey's earliest writings, from his first published article through his book on Leibniz. The materials in this volume provide a chronological record of Dewey's early development--beginning with the article he sent to the Journal of Speculative Philosophy in 1881 while he was a high-school teacher in Oil City, Pennsylvania, and (...) closing with his widely-acclaimed work on Leibniz in the Grigg's Series of German Philosophical Classics, written when he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan. During these years be-tween 1882 and 1888, Dewey's life course was established: he decided to follow a career in philosophy, completed doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University, became an Instructor at the University of Michigan, was promoted to Assistant Professor, and accepted a position as Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota. With the publication of Psychology, he became well known among scholars in this country; a series of articles in the British journal Mind brought him prominence in British philosophical circles. His articles were abstracted in the Revue philosophique. None of the articles collected in this volume was reprinted during the author's lifetime. For the first time, it is now possible for Dewey scholars to study consecutively in one publication all the essays which originally appeared in many periodicals. (shrink)

The renowned Christian theologian Bernard Lonergan was also a professor, teaching courses on theological method at universities in Canada, the United States, and Italy. This volume records his lectures and teaching materials, thus preserving and elucidating his intellectual development between the publication of Insight in 1957 and Method in Theology in 1972. The present volume contains a record of the lectures delivered in 1962 (Regis College, Toronto), 1964 (Georgetown University), and 1968 (Boston College). This is the most 'interactive' volume yet (...) published in the Collected Works series. The audio recordings of the 1962 and 1968 lectures are now available on the website www.bernardlonergan.com, as are PDF files of original papers from his 1964 institute at Georgetown. These lectures help to elucidate the development of Lonergan's ideas on such key notions as horizon, conversion, and meaning, as well as his evolving opinion on how best to divide theology into fields of specialization. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Cross-Examining Socrates. A Defense of the Interlocutors in Plato’s Early DialoguesMark L. McPherranJohn Beversluis. Cross-Examining Socrates. A Defense of the Interlocutors in Plato’s Early Dialogues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xii + 416. Cloth, $69.95.This book is a valuable and thoroughly-researched contribution to the study of Plato's Socratic dialogues. Its fine qualities stem in part from its cathartic motivations: for years Beversluis suppressed his ever-growing (...) reservations concerning the "standard picture" of Socrates's interaction with his various interlocutors (16). On Beversluis's account, this position naively takes Socrates's own apologia at face-value, portraying him as a self-sacrificing soul-therapist who treats his corrupt, one-dimensional interlocutors fairly, despite their many carefully drawn faults (e.g., stupidity, vanity, and violence, followed by face-saving exits). Beversluis aims to rectify this picture by retrying Socrates in a class-action suit on behalf of Socrates's interlocutors—who, he thinks, the standard account has quite unfairly maligned (while it has simultaneously ignored Socrates's "dark side"; e.g., his unscrupulous, hypocritical, and harmful tactics [esp. his conscious use of fallacy]).Beversluis's book contains a Preface, Introduction, and seventeen chapters, finishing with a very good bibliography, general index, and indexes of passages cited, names, and modern authors. Chapter 1, "The Socratic Interlocutor," examines the structure of Plato's Socratic dialogues and the role of their interlocutors. Beversluis contrasts Plato's dialogues with those produced by Augustine, Anselm, Hume, and Berkeley, arguing that a key difference between them lies in the fact that Socrates is presented as having no system to expound, championing instead the intrinsic value of philosophizing. Also, Socrates's interlocutors are drawn from a "narrow sociological group," (29) and are unprepared for their (unpleasant) encounters with Socrates (31).Chapter 2, "Elenchus and sincere assent," cogently argues that the "say what you believe" constraint on Socrates's use of the elenchus represents a consensus in need of critical reappraisal. In particular, Beversluis contends that Socrates often relies on qualified or uncomprehending assent, and that our texts do not support the idea that Socrates never argues with the soul-ignoring intention to win an argument using faulty argumentation and willful misrepresentation of the interlocutor's statements.The next fourteen chapters closely assess Socrates's encounters with Crito, Ion, Hippias, Laches and Nicias, Charmides and Critias, Euthyphro, Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, Hippocrates, Protagoras, Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles. The book ends with a chapter on "The last days of the Socratic interlocutor," outlining the view that Plato's later work features non-elenctic spokesmen who are sensitive to the moral dangers of careless (i.e., Socrates's) elenchus-wielding.In his central chapters, Beversluis argues that "Saint Socrates" is in fact a philosophical [End Page 583] Jekyl and Hyde. Although scholars have celebrated the former philanthropic figure as a model philosopher, that has obscured his Hyde-like, predatory behavior towards innocents such as Euthyphro and Crito. However, here readers are themselves given a mixed bag: while Beversluis offers, for example, a detailed and smart defense of Cephalus against those who portray him as a petty-minded, superstitious, moral fraud (Chapter 9)—as well as sensitive, careful analyses of Socrates's less-than-clear arguments throughout—other chapters occasionally go overboard in their apologetic efforts. One example will have to suffice here.According to Beversluis, Euthyphro's typical characterization as a pretentious, dense, father-bashing, religious zealot who "would have done well in the Nazi Youth Movement," (R. F. Holland; 163), has drawn attention away from the fact that Socrates's treatment of Euthyphro is abusive and ineffectual. But although Beversluis rightly sees that the figure of Euthyphro is being used in a complex fashion by Plato, his account is marred in several ways. For example, although it is likely that Socrates does not himself possess complete definitions of virtue-concepts such as justice (164-169), unlike Euthyphro, Socrates can presumably provide elenchus-proof defenses of his own non-traditionalist claims. Again, while Socrates may overwhelm Euthyphro with his principles of proper definition (Eu. 5c-d, 6d-e), proceeding on uncomprehending, merely verbal agreement (169-177), Plato surely did not intend... (shrink)

The thesis is guided by the question: What is the subject matter of Heidegger’s philosophy in the period of Being and Time? I start by arguing that Heidegger’s formulation of the question of being is ambiguous because the term ‘being’ is open to at least two interpretations. I claim that this ambiguity has motivated two types of reading of Heidegger’s early work. On the first reading, Heidegger’s philosophy is understood as attempting to infer metaphysical claims (claims about what-is, or (...) being in a traditionally metaphysical sense) on the basis of claims about the structure of Dasein’s understanding. This reading typically renders Heidegger an idealist. On the second reading, Heidegger’s philosophy is taken to have no metaphysical ambitions, and thereby to be limited to elucidating the structure of Dasein’s understanding. I argue that both types of reading are inadequate and diagnose them as grounded in a Cartesian presupposition that Heidegger rejects. On the basis of direct textual evidence and a number of theoretical considerations I assert that although the second type of reading is right in that the primary object of Heidegger’s philosophy is the conditions of understanding and that the idealist reading is wrong, it is a mistake to deny that Heidegger’s philosophy has metaphysical implications. I claim that Heidegger’s exposition of the conditions of understanding involves a larger picture from the outset, a picture that delineates the relation between understanding and entities, and locates the objective in relation to Dasein. On this picture, 1) empirical entities are unqualifiedly independent of Dasein, 2) we have direct cognitive access to these entities as they are in themselves, and 3) there is no a priori unintelligible entities or aspects of entities. I address a number of potential objections to this way of interpreting Heidegger’s work. (shrink)

Soon after arriving in Asia, Jesuit missionaries published apologetic and catechetical works for the immediate needs of conversion. Later on, they also introduced writings on spirituality to nourish the spiritual life of the Catholic communities. In Japan and China, the classic text Imitatio Christi by Thomas à Kempis and the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola appeared in different versions. When the Franciscans arrived in China in the 1630s, they relied on the Jesuits' Chinese writings. At the end of (...) the seventeenth century, they even reprinted some Jesuit works in Canton. To foster their own mission, the Franciscans wrote also their own catechisms and spiritual works.This article presents Pedro de la... (shrink)

A common analysis of Edmund Husserl’s early works on the philosophy of logic and mathematics presents these writings as the result of a combination of two distinct strands of influence: on the one hand a mathematical influence due to his teachers is Berlin, such as Karl Weierstrass, and on the other hand a philosophical influence due to his later studies in Vienna with Franz Brentano. However, the formative influences on Husserl’s early philosophy cannot be so cleanly separated (...) into a philosophical and a mathematical pathway. Growing evidence indicates that a Brentanist philosophy of mathematics was already in place before Husserl. Rather than an original combination at the confluence of two different streams, his early writings represent an elaboration of topics and problems that were already being discussed in the School of Brentano within a pre-existing framework. The traditional account understandably neglects Brentano’s own work on the philosophy of mathematics and logic, which can be found mostly in his unpublished manuscripts and lectures, and various works by Brentano’s students on the philosophy of mathematics which have only recently emerged from obscurity. Husserl’s early works must be correctly placed in this preceding context in order to be fully understood and correctly assessed. (shrink)

Because the paperback edition of Dewey’s early works places within easy reach those writings in which he was coming to terms with the foundational issues of his philosophical methodology, it should stimulate the much needed examination of the underpinnings of the later, more popular expressions of his thought. Dewey’s basic ideas grew and changed form many times over his long career, yet there are unifying themes and standpoints which are more rigorously expressed in the early works, (...) and without an understanding of which the reader of later Dewian [[sic]] epistemology is likely to be either hopelessly lost or think himself to be floating on a sea of ungrounded opinion. Two connecting themes which span the breadth of his writing career are worthy of special comment: the first since it helps to locate the center and tie together the periphery of Dewey’s many faceted work, and the second because it is a lingering and unexpressed presupposition of his later metaphysical work. (shrink)

Ian Hacking has defined himself as a philosopher in the analytic tradition. However, he has also recognized the profound influence that Michel Foucault had on much of his work. In this article I analyse the specific imprint of certain works by Foucault—in particular Les mots et les choses—in two of Hacking’s early works: Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? and The Emergence of Probability. I propose that these texts not only share a debt of Foucauldian thought, but (...) also are part of what I believe is Hacking’s central project: the analysis of the historical and situated conditions of possibility for the emergence of concepts and of objects, inspired also by the French philosopher’s thought. (shrink)

According to the editors, Alfred Tarski: Early work in Poland – Geometry and Teaching has three main goals. First, to publish translations so that all of Alfred Tarski's work will be accessi...

The purpose of this study is to provide a detailed exposition of Heidegger's conception of philosophy as "destruction [Destruktion]." My thesis is that the ultimate motivation for engaging in this practice of Destruktion is the value of an "authentic" way of life. That is, "destruction" is a philosophical practice that aims at cultivating authenticity as a concrete possibility for individual men and women. I argue for this claim by first of all examining the theological sources for Heidegger's notion of "destruction," (...) with a particular focus on Luther. Second, I provide a detailed exposition of the development of "destruction" in Heidegger's work from the 1920's, and of the ideas intimately linked with it. ;In Chapter One, I undertake to clarify Heidegger's philosophical position on the importance of religion and theology not only for Western intellectual history as a whole, but also for his own idiosyncratic philosophical project. In Chapter Two I explore the role that his study of Luther played in the development of Heidegger's conception of philosophy as "destruction." In Chapter Three, I lay some necessary groundwork for my later discussion by examining Heidegger's conception of human selfhood. In Chapter Four, I undertake to give a thorough account of Heidegger's conception of an "inauthentic" way of life. In Chapter Five, I examine Heidegger's views about the way public discourse, particularly intellectual discourse, is oftentimes complicit in an inauthentic way of life. In Chapter Six, I locate Heidegger's conception of authenticity within the tradition of Romantic personalism, and show how he investigates the roots of this tradition in primitive Christianity. In Chapter Seven, I present an explication of Heidegger's conception of an "authentic life" by focusing on his works before and including Being and Time. Having laid the groundwork for understanding the meaning of "destruction" in Chapters One through Seven, I begin an explicit examination of the nature of Heidegger's conception of philosophy in Chapter Eight. Chapter Nine is the culmination of my argument, in which I focus on the idea of "destruction," and show that it is everywhere linked with Heidegger's ideal of an authentic way of life. (shrink)

Both Alexius Meinong and Edmund Husserl wrote about relations in their early works, in periods in which they were still influenced by Franz Brentano. However, besides the split between Brentano and Meinong, the latter also accused Husserl of plagiarism with respect to the theory of relations. Examining Meinong’s and Husserl’s early works and the Brentanist framework they were written in, we will try to assess their similarities and differences. As they shared other sources besides Brentano, we (...) will consider very carefully whether we should speak at all of influence or plagiarism. Despite Meinong’s accusations it seems that both he and Husserl took over some elements from Brentano and, partially through him, from John Stuart Mill, who appears to be the most probable source on relations. (shrink)

The article analyses mystical teaching of Hasidism in the early works of Martin Buber (before publication of “I and Thou” in 1923) in the context of the concept of Orientalism by E. Said. Analysis is based on the M. Buber’s appeal to Hasidic sources in the 1900s-1910s (in particular, in his first two collections, “Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav” and “The Legend of Baal Shem”). Two factors allow examining Hasidism in the early Buber’s writings in the context of (...) Orientalism: a growing interest in the Orient in the circles of European Jewish intellectuals during late 19th cent, as well as the negative stereotype of traditional East European Jew (Ostjuden, “an Eastern Jews”) present in the modernized Jewish society. The article demonstrates that this stereotype is closely related to the criticism of Hasidism by representatives of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah). In particular, the accusations of traditional Eastern European Jews of inclination to vanity and prejudice, as well as of subjugation to the infinite power of the miracle workers (tzadikim), clearly have a source in maskilic criticism of Hasidism. The Buber’s turn towards Hasidism took place in mid-1900s. It was connected with Buber’s interest in Oriental mysticism, and with his social activities as “cultural Zionist”. Overcoming the “Ostjude” stereotype turned out to be an essential part of Buber’s cultural program. Buber reconstructs Jewish mysticism as an integral phenomenon, the subject of academic study. According to Buber, the most striking manifestation of this phenomenon is the Eastern-Euro pean mystical movement of Hasidism. It is from Ostjuden that the source of Hasidic wisdom is linked, which in the essays of the cycle of “Judaism” is a true “light from the East.”. (shrink)

Freud was interested in the problem of memory from the time of his very early works. The processes taking place in memory, imaging, remembering and forgetting images focused his attention and were one of the pillars of shaping his conception of the unconscious and mind as “the storehouse of total memory,” which in one of his works he compared to “the Eternal City of Rome”, which accumulate images-memories gathered throughout life. Shifts, changes, deformations, strong emotional components determine (...) the specificity of many processes of remembering and forgetting, a specific “coding” of information in the form of visual, acoustic and other images. Nowadays, there are indications of Freud’s views in various dimensions of scientific research on memory and the consciousness of the importance of these approaches in our culture and its discovery of the role of autobiographical memory. (shrink)

This paper investigates the magnet as a classic “boundary object” of modern technoscientific culture. Equally at home in the nursery, dynamo, measuring instrument and navigational compass, its capricious performance nevertheless persistently eluded the powers of nineteenth century electromagnetic expertise in pursuit of the completely “permanent” magnet. Instead the untamed magnet’s resilient secularity required its makers to draw upon ancient techniques of chemical manipulation, heat treatment and maturation to render it eventually sufficiently stable in behaviour for orderly use in modern engineering. (...) The precise methods for accomplishing this quasi-permanence were typically protected by trade secrecy – until that is Marie Sklodowska Curie’s first research publication opened up this topic for rigorous comparative research in 1898. Nevertheless, over the next quarter century her work in this field was gradually eclipsed by heavily gendered citation practices, just as the futility of attempting to accomplish complete permanency in magnets was eventually established by Sydney Evershed in the 1920s. (shrink)

Through reading the early work of Walter Benjamin—up to and including the Trauerspiel, author Monad Rrenban elicits a cohesive conception of the wild, inforgettable form, philosophy, as inherent in everything. This book, distinct in its analysis and depth of analysis, elaborates the wild, unforgettable form—philosophy in relation to language, the discipline and the practice of philosophy, criticism, and the politics of death.

Abstract:Although best known to English-speaking readers as the general editor of the Dictionary of Untranslatables, the work of French philologist and philosopher Barbara Cassin is eclectic, encompassing literary studies, ancient philosophy, rhetoric, translation theory, psychoanalysis, politics, and more. From Presocratic philosophy to more recent reflections on Big Tech and democracy, Cassin's work is rooted in "sophistics," an approach that emphasizes the primacy of language in shaping our interactions with the world. Situating this sophistical approach vis-à-vis classical philology (Bollack) and the (...) philosophical tradition (Heidegger, Derrida), this essay explores the contribution of "sophistical reading" to our understanding of philosophical and literary texts. Showing how Cassin uses rhetorical theory to problematize any simple opposition of the latter, the essay concludes with a critical evaluation of Cassin's reading of Helen, Euripides' most sophistical play. (shrink)

"I know of no religious writer more pertinent to our time."—T. S. Eliot, Introduction to Pensees Intended to prove that religion is not contrary to reason, Pascal's Pensees rank among the liveliest and most eloquent defenses of Christianity. Motivated by the seventeenth-century view of the supremacy of human reason, Pascal (1623–1662) had intended to write an ambitious apologia for Christianity in which he argued the inability of reason to address metaphysical problems. His untimely death prevented the work's completion, but the (...) fragments published posthumously in 1670 as Pensees remain a vital part of religious and philosophical literature. W. F. Trotter translation. Introduction by T. S. Eliot. (shrink)

Davidson’s 1965 paper, “Theories of Meaning and Learnable Languages”, has invariably been interpreted, by others and by myself, as arguing that natural languages must have a compositional semantics, or at least a systematic semantics, that can be finitely specified. However, in his reply to me in the Żegleń volume, Davidson denies that compositionality is in any need of an argument. How does this add up? In this paper I consider Davidson’s first three meaning theoretic papers from this perspective. I conclude (...) that Davidson was right in his reply to me that he never took compositionality, or systematic semantics, to be in need of justification. What Davidson had been concerned with, clearly in the 1965 paper and in “Truth and Meaning” from 1967, and to some extent in his Carnap critique from 1963, is that we need a general theory of natural language meaning, that such a theory should not be in conflict with the learnability of a language, and that such a theory bring out should how knowledge of a finite number of features of a language suffices for the understanding of all the sentences of that language. (shrink)

The two brothers Julius and Adolf Hurwitz were born in the middle of the nineteenth century in a small town near Hanover (not far from Göttingen). Already during their schooldays, the two of them became acquainted with mathematical problems and both started to study mathematics, but while the younger brother Adolf turned out to be extremely successful in his research, the elder brother and his work seem to be almost forgotten. This paper examines the lives and works of the (...) two brothers with particular emphasis on the contributions of Julius Hurwitz, and the subsequent reception of their research. It deals with the development of an arithmetical theory for complex continued fractions by Julius and Adolf Hurwitz around 1890 and its rediscovery in the twentieth century. (shrink)

This book offers a detailed account of the importance of psychoanalysis in Derrida's thought. Based on close readings of texts from the whole of his career, including less well-known and previously unpublished material, it sheds new light on the crucial role of psychoanalysis in shaping Derrida's response to a number of key questions. These questions range from the psyche's relationship to technology to the role of fiction and metaphor in scientific discourse, from the relationship between memory and the archive to (...) the status of the political in deconstruction. Focusing on Freud but proposing new readings of texts by Lacan, Torok and Abraham, Laplanche and Pontalis, amongst other seminal figures in contemporary French thought, the book argues that Derrida's writings on psychoanalysis can also provide an important bridge between deconstruction and the recent materialist turn in the humanities. Challenging a still prevalent 'textualist' reading of Derrida's work, it explores the ongoing contribution of deconstruction and psychoanalysis to pressing issues in critical thought today, from the localizing models of the neurosciences and the omnipresence of digital technology to the politics of affect in an age of terror. (shrink)

Philibert Secretan compose ici une manière de portrait de Pascal par le choix de quelques "Pensées" où se dessine sa vision de la condition humaine ; il en commente certains thèmes et donne la voix à des pages riches de résonances poétiques : plus qu'il ne le lit, il écoute Pascal. Enfin, associant sa lecture à celle de trois autres grands lecteurs du philosophe Ludwig Wittgenstein, Edgar Morin et Pierre Bourdieu, il s'arrête sur deux aspects particuliers du philosophe : Pascal, (...) critique, précurseur de Kant ; Pascal, architecte d'une pensée qui s'organise autour de la hiérarchie des ordres. A rebours d'une tradition de lecture par aphorismes, Philibert Secretan privilégie une systématique pascalienne qui en fait ressortir les fulgurances et les abîmes. (shrink)

Grotius’s attempt to find a compromise both between reason and revelation, and between free will and predestination, his philological approach to the reading of Scripture, his refusal to engage in doctrinal disputes, and his insistence on ethics as the core of Christian teaching, were increasingly important in shaping a powerful strand of thinking about the Anglican church from the Great Tew circle to post-Restoration latitudinarianism. The references to Grotius’s apologetic work which appeared in moderate Anglican writing should be understood by (...) setting them in a broader context encompassing the settlement of Anglican Church, its religious doctrine, and its relations with civil authority. In order to recover the complexity of the political and ecclesiological context for the English translations of De Veritate , I will divide the period from 1632 to 1686 into three distinct phases: the initial phase goes back to the 1630s, when the members of the Great Tew circle at Oxford facilitated the circulation of the early translations and editions of De Veritate in England within the context of Caroline/Laudian religious policy. The second covers the 1650s, when a number of Grotius’s works were translated by the Anglican theologian Clement Barksdale in order to provide a new ideology for the post-Laudian Anglican Church. The third phase spans from the Restoration until 1686, when De Veritate converged in the complex political and intellectual background of ‘latitudinarianism’. (shrink)

Religion and science dialogues that orbit around rational method, knowledge, and truth are often, though not always, contentious. In this article, I suggest a different cluster of gravitational points around which religion and science dialogues might usefully travel: philosophical anthropology, ethics, and love. I propose seeing morality as a natural outgrowth of the human desire to establish and maintain social bonds so as not to experience the condition of being alone. Humans, of all animals, need to feel loved—defined as a (...) compassionate present-with in dynamic dyadic relation such that one experiences the sense of mattering—but that need has an equally natural tendency to be met by creating biased us-and-them distinctions. A “critical” natural ethics, then, is one in which we become aware of and work to undermine our tendency to reify in-group distinctions between “us” and “them.” Religious communities that work intentionally on this can be seen, to some extent, as laboratories of love—or as sites for co-creating knowledge in perilous times. (shrink)

This paper is devoted to the study of the emotions in Edith Stein’s early work On the Problem of Empathy. After presenting her work embedded in the tradition of the early phenomenology of the emotions, I shall elaborate the four dimensions of the emotional experience according to this authoress, the link between emotions and values and the phenomenon of the living body. I argue that Stein’s account on empathy remains incomplete as long as we ignore the complex phenomenology (...) of emotions underlying her work. (shrink)

"I know of no religious writer more pertinent to our time."—T. S. Eliot, Introduction to Pensees Intended to prove that religion is not contrary to reason, Pascal's Pensees rank among the liveliest and most eloquent defenses of Christianity. Motivated by the seventeenth-century view of the supremacy of human reason, Pascal (1623–1662) had intended to write an ambitious apologia for Christianity in which he argued the inability of reason to address metaphysical problems. His untimely death prevented the work's completion, but the (...) fragments published posthumously in 1670 as Pensees remain a vital part of religious and philosophical literature. W. F. Trotter translation. Introduction by T. S. Eliot. (shrink)

For over a century, Hegel’s view of war is seen as controversial that results in mutually exclusive interpretations. To reach a proper evaluation of Hegel’s views, it is necessary to consider both Hegel’s initial states of philosophical doctrine about war and peace, and the development of his understanding of war from early works to mature ones. In the first part of the paper, I characterize Kant’s position on war, since it was the starting point for Hegel. Contrary to (...) popular representations about Kant as an exclusive pacifist, the philosopher of Koenigsberg had a philosophical-historical treatment of war, in which the war appeared as something sublime. However, both legal-ethical peace understanding and veto of war from the point of practical reason were not dominant in Kant’s philosophy, subordinating the sublime treatment of war. Kant’s next contemporaries could not already keep this position, emphasizing either one or the other side of war interpretation. Starting from the early writings (the paper “On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law” or manuscripts “System of Ethical Life” and “The German Constitution”), Hegel stresses an ethical aspect of war and its necessity, so that the shield is arranged on the way of systems isolation and individuals atomization, and the unity in its ethical health is saved. Perpetual peace, on the contrary, leads to diseases. The statement about equality of claims and the same truthfulness of warring parties’ rights is the originality of Hegel’s view. It makes absolutely impossible the war evaluation from the point of its justice and injustice. (shrink)

Beginning with an overview of Galileo's earliest work on free fall, the paper examines the relationship between experiment and theory in his study of motion in the period immediately before and after 1604. The possible role of experiment is assessed in relation to the manuscript evidence and by means of reconstructed experiments.

Heidegger's Eschatology is a ground-breaking account of Heidegger's early engagement with theology, from his beginnings as an anti-Modernist Catholic to his turn towards an undogmatic Protestantism and finally to a resolutely a-theistic philosophical method.

The editorial board of the co-operative Research on Dewey Publications Project at Southern Illinois University should be cheered for this magnificent edition of Dewey's Psychology. Anyone who has attempted to do serious scholarly work on Dewey knows the present chaos existing among his published works. We have needed a careful edition of Dewey's collected works. But the project at Southern Illinois is attempting to do much more—to provide definitive critical editions of Dewey's works. Without being pedantic, the (...) editorial board has made an intelligent use of the best modern scholarly techniques. The result is an invaluable edition of the Psychology for the scholar, and a very readable text for the curious. It is now possible to locate at a glance the various works that Dewey cites in his study, and to discover the ways in which Dewey altered his text in the course of its twenty-six printings. As for the Psychology itself—Dewey's first book—one is struck again by its oldness and newness. It is at once bound by the tradition of psychology textbooks of the time and breaks out of these bounds with fresh ideas that were destined to form the basis for Dewey's mature philosophic outlook. The care, intelligence, and taste used in designing this definitive edition ought to serve as a model for modern editions of philosophical texts.—R. J. B. (shrink)

In this study of Giorgio Agamben's pre-Homo Sacer work, I assess his idea of the ethical subject. Over the course of these early writings, he adopts a Walter Benjamin-inspired redemptive aim as he endeavours to uncover the circumstances of alienated subjectivity and possibility of authentic experience. However, while Agamben borrows from Benjamin to elaborate on the ethical potential of the nihilist pose, a more Kantian conception of idealist autonomy becomes increasingly pronounced. This Kantianism is at odds with the Benjaminian (...) nihilism that guides his redemptive prescription, leaving Agamben's ethical subject mired in a realm of meaningless authenticity. (shrink)

Recently the attempt has been made to demonstrate Heidegger's relevance to the concerns of analytic philosophers. A focus for this effort has been the criticism in his early work of Cartesian ontology. While a number of important works have mapped out this area of Heidegger's thought, a crucial task has not been carried out, namely that of assessing how Heidegger can accommodate those phenomena which motivate the Cartesian to adopt his highly counter-intuitive ontology. As long as we fail (...) to examine how Heidegger's early ontology copes with the possibilities of error and of hallucination, the suspicion will remain that Heidegger is simply insensitive to those phenomena on which the Cartesian focuses. Neither Heidegger nor the Cartesian have been done any favours by commentators showing little inclination to bring the opponents into closer combat. This paper attempts to correct that omission. (shrink)

In these highly selective and condensed considerations, I could only offer a comparison of the main sociological themes in Gurwitsch's inaugural dissertation with the corresponding themes in Schutz's first book. Other sociological themes were not discussed, mainly because they were not developed far enough in one or the other or both sources. The crucial theme of explicit and implicit ontological presuppositions had to be ignored because it demands an extensive treatment of its own. The same goes for the proper consideration (...) of the particular conceptions of Husserl mobilized by each author for his purposes.Even so, I hope to have conveyed an idea of the convergences and differences in the early views of Gurwitsch and Schutz, as mirrored in the studies which were compared. This article should be seen as a small beginning of the huge task of studying comprehensively the unique personal and intellectual friendship of two seminal thinkers and the influences they exercised upon each other's work, even though they operated in substantively quite different areas. (shrink)