A meeting on Hegel and Creativity was sponsored by the Society for Philosophy of Creativity, Eastern Division, in connection with the meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Washington, D.C. on December 29, 1977. The principal paper, entitled “Creativity in Hegel?,” was presented by Kenneth Schmitz. It was followed by papers of two commentators, Kenley Dove and David Lachterman. The session was chaired by Donald Verene and organized by George L. Kline, Chairman of the Society’s Eastern Division.

This is the introduction to the Ashgate volume on Rawls in their history of political thought series. It puts Rawls's life and work in context and then discusses the essays included in the volume, essays of high quality likely to shape scholarship on Rawls for the coming decades.

Most scholars regard Ernst Cassirer as a thinker in the Marburg Neo-Kantian tradition whose writings take him from its concern with the analysis of the logical foundations of science to problems in intellectual history, theory of language, and culture. The critical work on his thought has reflected and supported this view. There is a second image of Cassirer which is shared by the large number of students and general readers who have come to his thought through two works that appeared (...) at the end of his life—An Essay on Man and the Myth of the State. These works have gone through numerous printings and have appeared in editions in most major Western and Oriental languages. These readers have found in Cassirer not primarily an epistemologist and historian of thought but a philosopher of humanity, an interpreter of the fragmentation of contemporary cultural life and the nature of the political world. These two sides shown by Cassirer’s thought are not exactly opposed, but also they are not joined. (shrink)

The essays in this volume are by fellow historians of ideas and philosophy, colleagues, and former students of Richard Popkin; its editor is his son, a historian at the University of Kentucky. The volume is in the style of a festschrift, but it has a special personal component. The notes on the contributors indicate how each came to know Popkin. The essays do not concentrate on developments of each author’s own work, but access Popkin’s work, in some instances extending it, (...) and often relating it to aspects of his career. The final contribution is a biographical sketch of his career, done by the editor, from letters that are part of Popkin’s papers housed in the Clark Library at UCLA. This biographical sketch is preceded by a memoir by Avrum Stroll, recounting his collaboration with Popkin on their Philosophy Made Simple, which they co-authored in 1955 and which, in its multiple printings, has served as an introductory textbook for generations of students.The fourteen essays are by B. Copenhaver, A. P. Coudent, S. Hutton, P. K. J. Park, and K. Peden ; J. E. Force, M. Mulsow, and D. B. Ruderman ; J. C. Laursen, J. R. Maia Neto, and G. Paganini ; and Y. Kaplan, D. S. Katz, and M. Goldish. (shrink)

In this review essay, I first set out and then subject to criticism the main claims advanced by William Talbott in his excellent recent book, “Which Rights Should be Universal?”. Talbott offers a conception of basic universal human rights as the minimally necessary and sufficient conditions to political legitimacy. I argue that his conception is at once too robustly liberal and democratic and too inattentive to key features of the rule of law to play this role. I suggest that John (...) Rawls’s conception of human rights comes closer to hitting the mark Talbott sets for himself and that Talbott incorrectly rejects Rawls’s view. I conclude that what likely divides Talbott and Rawls is that Rawls, but not Talbott, explicitly frames the inquiry into the minimally necessary and sufficient conditions to political legitimacy in terms of a liberal democratic people attempting to determine, as a matter of its just foreign policy, whether or not to recognize other organized polities as independent and self-determining within the international order. (shrink)

Professor Soll’s book is a short, introductory account of some of the central features of Hegel’s metaphysics. It is a welcome addition to literature on Hegel in English for two reasons. It helps to fill a gap that exists for students first coming to Hegel’s work between standard, full-length commentaries on Hegel’s thought and the capsule presentations of it found in histories of philosophy and the commentaries of philosophical anthologies and textbooks. The issues Soll discusses are presented in straight-forward, readable (...) terms, a task which is never easy to accomplish when treating a major philosopher and one traditionally difficult for writers on Hegel. (shrink)

Rationale, aims and objectives This randomized controlled trial was designed to evaluate the 2-year costs and effects of a proactive, public health nursing case management approach compared with a self-directed approach for 129 single parents (98% were mothers) on social assistance in a Canadian setting. A total of 43% of these parents had a major depressive disorder and 38% had two or three other health conditions at baseline. Methods Study participants were recruited over a 12 month period and randomized into (...) two groups: one receiving proactive public health nursing and one which did not. Results At 2 years, 69 single parents with 123 children receiving proactive public health nursing (compared with 60 parents with 91 children who did not receive public health nursing services) showed a slightly greater reduction in dysthymia and slightly higher social adjustment. There was no difference between the public health and control groups in total per parent annual cost of health and support services. However, costs were averted due to a 12% difference in non-use of social assistance in the previous 12 months for parents in the public health nursing group. This translates into an annual cost saving of $240 000 (Canadian) of costs averted within 1 year for every 100 parents. Conclusions In the context of a system of national health and social insurance, this study supports the fact that it is no more costly to proactively service this population of parents on social assistance. (shrink)

Dogmatic Metaphysics and Tschirnhaus's M ethodology MARTIN SCHONFELD ACCORDING TO STANDARD COMMENTARIES, Tschirnhaus's main work, Medicina mentis, ~ supposedly furnished the methodological basis for the Leibnizian-Wolffian metaphysics. ~ Christian Wolff and his disciples, at any rate, preferred to think so. Wolff taught classes on Tschirnhaus and claimed that he had developed his own tenets on the basis of Tschirnhaus's ideas; Johann Christoph Gottsched praised the Medicina mentis as the basic methodology of the Wolffian enlightenment.3 Mirroring these views, W. Wundt and (...) H. J. de Vleeschauwer saw in Tschirnhaus the inventor of the "geometric method" adopted by the School Philosophers.4 According to M. ' Medicina Mentis, sive Tentamen genuinae Logicae, in qua disseritur de Methodo detegendi incoKaitas veritates, Amsterdam, 1687. Second and revised edition, Medicina Mentis, sive Artis inveniendi Praecepta generalia, Leipzig, 1695. ~For example, cf. Wilhelm Windelband, Geschichte der Philosophie, 3~o-33 and 356; Friedrich Ueberweg, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, III: ~95-97, 3 x~ 34o-43; A. Robert Caponigri, A History of Western Philosophy (Notre Dame/London: University of Notre Dame.. (shrink)

Dans ce volume considérable, on été réunies les contributions d'un Congrès international tenu à Louvain en 1998 pour marquer l'achèvement de la première édition de la Théologie Platonicienne de Proclus. Ces contributions, toutes rigoureusement centrées sur la Théol. Plat. concernent (1) les principes et les sources de la Théol. plat. (2) Les méthodes théologiques de Proclus (3) La postérité de la Théol. plat. dans le monde grec, païen comme chrétien, et dans le monde islamique. Des indices très détaillés permettent de (...) retrouver tous les passages cités et commentés dans ce volume. (shrink)

From the author: This dissertation undertakes a critical examination of one central problem in Hegelian philosophy: viz., whether the final realization of “absolute knowledge” is logically consistent with significant epistemic progress in the system’s continuing development. Serious consideration of the concept of systematic completeness, as interpreted on Hegel’s terms, uncovers the existence of a profound paradox. On the one hand, if the Truth is the Whole, then the truth of any finite part or aspect of that Whole depends upon its (...) place within the system as a totality. In order to grasp the part and comprehend it correctly, one must already have a systematically ordered knowledge of the universe in its entirety. Yet the methodological open-endedness of dialectical thinking precludes the acceptance of any particular theoretical formulation as final or complete in itself. Hegel interprets the history of philosophy as a progression of successive formulations of the Truth, each of which improves on its predecessors by reconciling their internal contradictions, but no one of which is adequate in itself. Hence, no theoretical world view, including Hegel’s own, can rest content within its limits, for the inevitable advance of thought must in the end throw it down. (shrink)