The history of Australian art has been punctuated with survey exhibitions in London from the late 19th century to the present, just as our artists were drawn to Europe both to study and for the possibilities of wider recognition. This review article focuses on the post-war years from 1950 to 1965, a high point of Australian cultural expatriatism focused on London – now viewed as a significant episode in the history of Australian art. The two most influential figures supporting key (...) Australian artists were Kenneth Clark (promoting the work of Sidney Nolan and Russell Drysdale) and Bryan Robertson, director of the avant-gardist Whitechapel Gallery. Robertson was responsible for organizing the most significant of these exhibitions of Australian art: Australian Painting Today in 1961, focusing on the work of a younger generation of artists that included Charles Blackman, John Olsen, Fred Williams and Brett Whiteley. Australian’s most significant art historian, Bernard Smith, who had also sought to bring about comparable exhibitions, but without success, challenged the orientation and the cultural framing by Robertson and the young Australian art critic Robert Hughes in the catalogue of this key exhibition. (shrink)

The author explores recent cases involving Church closure, cancellation of historical figures, instructional materials in public schools, display of religious symbols on public land, and his current work defending the First Amendment rights of Christian bakers.

Vitalism, from its early modern to its Enlightenment forms (from Glisson and Willis to La Caze and Barthez), is notoriously opposed to intervention into the living sphere. Experiment, quantification, measurement are all ‘vivisectionist’, morally suspect and worse, they alter and warp the ‘life’ of the subject. They are good for studying corpses, not living individuals. This much is well known, and it has disqualified vitalist medicine from having a place in standard histories of medicine, until recent, post-Foucauldian maneuvers have sought (...) to change the situation (but for unrelated, contextualist reasons). What is perhaps more suprising is that if we consider the emergence of medical ‘theory’ as a whole, from Harvey through to Locke and Sydenham, is the presence of a sustained anti-experimentalist line of argument, and this from the ‘empiricist’ (not Cartesian or Boerhaavian rationalist) side. It would seem then that ‘empiricks’, medical empiricists and other protagonists of an ‘embodied empiricism’ are not Boylean experimentalists who seek to map out Nature in its transparency, but deliberately archaic, Hippocratic observers of living bodies. (shrink)

In the 18th century, the pre-modern Judeo-Greco-Christian problem of freedom and determinism is transformed by Kant into the modern problem of the freedom of human agency in the natural and cultural worlds of deterministic structures; it is this version of the freedom and determinism issue which centres the Science and Humanism debates, and thus marks the history of the social sciences. Anthony Giddens is credited with providing the new vocabulary of ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ in order to formulate the problem of (...) freedom and determinism in those terms, thus making this formulation fruitful. In this book, Charles R. Varela proposes that Kant originally formulated this problem, and makes a series of wide-ranging and groundbreaking observations based on Kant's metaphysics of realism which enables Varela to propose a solution to the structure/agency problem. Subjects revisited in this book include: · "Giddens’ Call" · The stalemate of the social and psychological sciences · The determinist tradition of modern science · Postmodernism This breadth of themes, drawn together by Varela with his work on Kant, fully realizes Giddens’ principle that human agency is a real causal force. It is Kant's conception of causal power that is the causal force Giddens' has called for. _Science For Humanism: The Recovery of Human Agency_ will be of particular interest to students of humanism and therefore realism, Kant and Giddens. (shrink)

Perhaps more than any other major historical phenomena, we tend to look through revolutions as much as we look at them, and ascribe to them meanings that have little to do with the intentions and e...

Since structural descriptions rather than ostensive ones are required by the logic of the cultural sciences, the Platonic eidos as a regulative idea continues to play a creative role in establishing the formal unity of historical concepts. Paul Natorp, Troeltsch’s neo-Kantian contemporary and early proponent of the logicist thesis in Germany, first construed mathematical logic as a Platonistic search for the unconditioned in the form of absolutely foundational concepts or categories of thought. The hidden Platonism expressed in Troeltsch’s formal logic (...) of history is rather close to Natorp’s reading of the Platonic ideas as functions of knowledge, as methods, unities, and pure postulates of thought whose cognitive role is to be comprehensive, heuristic, and revelatory. Moreover, such characteristic 19th-century Hegelian histories of philosophical concepts as those of Adolf Trendelenburg and Gustav Teichmüller, or F. C. Bauer’s dialectical historical methodology of congruence and manifestation in ecclesiastical historicity, were Platonically oriented in that development meant fulfillment as abstract pristination [[sic]] or as the progressively emergent pure logic of historical ideas. The same climate of thought is expressed in F. H. Bradley’s version of the Identity of Indiscernibles and a Platonic-Hegelian ascent of concepts is present even later in Nicolai Hartmann’s neo-idealist treatment of the realization of concepts as "living spirit" in the progressive movement of research itself. (shrink)

Publication by Eugene Vanderpool of the ostrakon with the name vindicates an inference made by Gustav Gilbert, Beiträge zur innern Geschichte Athens, 144 f. There he claimed that Nicostratus son of Dieitrephes and Nicostratus , who is mentioned by Aristophanes, Wasps 81 f, were identical. Gilbert supposed that the qualities implied of Nicostratus in that passage were of the type to endear him to Nicias.

A radically immersive exploration of three pivotal moments in the evolution of human consciousness, asking what kinds of creatures humans were, are, and might yet be.

La première grande question qui se pose au lecteur de la Critique de la Raison Dialectique est certainement celle des rapports entre les problématiques sartrienne et marxiste. Dans sa conclusion à Questions de Méthode, Sartre la forrnule clairement en écrivant que l'existentialisme « ne remet rien en question, sauf un déterminisme mécaniste qui n'est précisément pas marxiste et qu'on a introduit du dehors dans cette philosophie totale. Il veut, lui aussi, situer l'homme dans sa classe et dans les conflits qui (...) l'opposent aux autres classes à partir du mode et des relations de production. Mais il veut tenter cette ‘situation’, à partir de l'existence, c'est-à-dire de la compréhension ». En termes plus généraux, l'existentialisme « veut dans le Savoir même et dans l'universalité des concepts réintroduire l'indépassable singularité de l'aventure humaine ». Nous sommes donc ici simultanément en présence d'une profession de foi dans le marxisme—car même la carence que Sartre reproche à celui-ci, l'élimination de l'homme, «tient à l'événement et non aux principes mêmes de la doctrine»—et d'une volonté d'introduire dans cette philosophie une méthode propre à l'idéologie de l'existence. (shrink)

Chomsky's conservatism, with its explicit distrust of politicians and corporate managers, may explain why his most strident critics are to be found among liberals. Two of Britain's liberal newspapers, The Guardian and The Observer, attack him more regularly than the right-wing press does. Chomsky may have earned their ire by pointing out from time to time mistakes made in their news pages, particularly in war zones. Observer reviewer Rafael Behr summarized Hopes and Prospects and concluded that Chomsky should recognize "the (...) irony that he owes his considerable success to the system he despises." Let us suppose for a moment that Behr is right, that Chomsky's considerable success is an achievement of the system rather than of Chomsky's genius and insights into the nature of language that have transformed modern philosophy and psychology as much as they have linguistic studies. Would he have said that Andrei Sakharov "owes his considerable success to the system he despises"? Sakharov became a victim of the Soviet system after his discoveries in physics, but the importance of Sakharov as political critic (rather than as physicist) was that he criticized a system that he believed was harmful to world peace, human dignity and the society of which he was a beneficiary. The same can, and should, be said of Chomsky. (shrink)

Let us now consider the third class of statements, those completely nonrestrictive. For example, "Something exists." Since this is the pure contradictory of the wholly restrictive, "Nothing exists," which we have found reason to regard as impossible, and since the contradictory of an impossible statement is necessary, we should expect "Something exists" to be necessarily true, a statement valid a priori. And we see that it excludes nothing from existence, except bare "nothing" itself. But the existence of bare nothing is (...) no existence. Further, "Something exists" is in no conceivable circumstances falsifiable, since the falsifying experience would have to exist, and it would also have to be the experience of something existing--at least if, as I should maintain, experience is essentially a relative term, requiring that to which it is relative, or of which it is the experience. But though "Something exists" is unfalsifiable, it is verified every moment. Could the verifiable but in any conceivable world absolutely unfalsifiable be false? I hold that the necessarily true must be knowable as true and only as true, and that, conversely, whatever is in principle verifiable though not falsifiable is thereby shown to be necessarily true. (shrink)