This Differential Emotions Scale (DES) is an objective pencil-and-paper instrument designed to measure the subjective-experience components of the fundamental emotions, based on the assumption that mood states involved a characteristic pattern. Following Boyle (Boyle, G.J. Reliability and validity of Izard's Differential Emotions Scale, Personality, 56, pp. 747-750, 1984), the present paper reports a repeated-measure multiple discriminant function analysis for individual items across raters. At least, two-thirds of the DES items are sensitive indicators of the different mood states, however, the construct (...) validity of the subscales is not clear. In particular, the profiles for the South African participants indicated that there is need for improving the construct validity and retest reliability of DES in order to be useful in applied psychological contexts in non-Western nations. (shrink)

Monetary intelligence theory asserts that individuals apply their money attitude to frame critical concerns in the context and strategically select certain options to achieve financial goals and ultimate happiness. This study explores the dark side of monetary Intelligence and behavioral economics—dishonesty. Dishonesty, a risky prospect, involves cost–benefit analysis of self-interest. We frame good or bad barrels in the environmental context as a proxy of high or low probability of getting caught for dishonesty, respectively. We theorize: The magnitude and intensity of (...) the relationship between love of money and dishonest prospect may reveal how individuals frame dishonesty in the context of two levels of subjective norm—perceived corporate ethical values at the micro-level and Corruption Perceptions Index at the macro-level, collected from multiple sources. Based on 6382 managers in 31 geopolitical entities across six continents, our cross-level three-way interaction effect illustrates: As expected, managers in good barrels, mixed barrels, and bad barrels display low, medium, and high magnitude of dishonesty, respectively. With high CEV, the intensity is the same across cultures. With low CEV, the intensity of dishonesty is the highest in high CPI entities —the Enron Effect, but the lowest in low CPI entities. CPI has a strong impact on the magnitude of dishonesty, whereas CEV has a strong impact on the intensity of dishonesty. We demonstrate dishonesty in light of monetary values and two frames of social norm, revealing critical implications to the field of behavioral economics and business ethics. (shrink)

Corruption involves greed, money, and risky decision-making. We explore the love of money, pay satisfaction, probability of risk, and dishonesty across cultures. Avaricious monetary aspiration breeds unethicality. Prospect theory frames decisions in the gains-losses domain and high-low probability. Pay dissatisfaction (in the losses domain) incites dishonesty in the name of justice at the individual level. The Corruption Perceptions Index, CPI, signals a high-low probability of getting caught for dishonesty at the country level. We theorize that decision-makers adopt avaricious love-of-money aspiration (...) as a lens and frame dishonesty in the gains-losses domain (pay satisfaction-dissatisfaction, Level 1) and high-low probability (CPI, Level 2) to maximize expected utility and ultimate serenity. We challenge the myth: Pay satisfaction mitigates dishonesty across nations consistently. Based on 6500 managers in 32 countries, our cross-level three-dimensional visualization offers the following discoveries. Under high aspiration conditions, pay dissatisfaction excites the highest- (third-highest) avaricious justice-seeking dishonesty in high (medium) CPI nations, supporting the certainty effect. However, pay satisfaction provokes the second-highest avaricious opportunity-seizing dishonesty in low CPI entities, sustaining the possibility effect—maximizing expected utility. Under low aspiration conditions, high pay satisfaction consistently leads to low dishonesty, demonstrating risk aversion—achieving ultimate serenity. We expand prospect theory from a micro and individual-level theory to a cross-level theory of monetary wisdom across 32 nations. We enhance the S-shaped Curve to three 3-D corruption surfaces across three levels of the global economic pyramid, providing novel insights into behavioral economics, business ethics, the environment, and responsibility. (shrink)

Monetary Intelligence theory asserts that individuals apply their money attitude to frame critical concerns in the context and strategically select certain options to achieve financial goals and ultimate happiness. This study explores the bright side of Monetary Intelligence and behavioral economics, frames money attitude in the context of pay and life satisfaction, and controls money at the macro-level and micro-level. We theorize: Managers with low love of money motive but high stewardship behavior will have high subjective well-being: pay satisfaction and (...) quality of life. Data collected from 6586 managers in 32 cultures across six continents support our theory. Interestingly, GDP per capita is related to life satisfaction, but not to pay satisfaction. Individual income is related to both life and pay satisfaction. Neither GDP nor income is related to Happiness. Our theoretical model across three GDP groups offers new discoveries: In high GDP entities, “high income” not only reduces aspirations—“Rich, Motivator, and Power,” but also promotes stewardship behavior—“Budget, Give/Donate, and Contribute” and appreciation of “Achievement.” After controlling income, we demonstrate the bright side of Monetary Intelligence: Low love of money motive but high stewardship behavior define Monetary Intelligence. “Good apples enjoy good quality of life in good barrels.” This notion adds another explanation to managers’ low magnitude of dishonesty in entities with high Corruption Perceptions Index. In low GDP entities, high income is related to poor Budgeting skills and escalated Happiness. These managers experience equal satisfaction with pay and life. We add a new vocabulary to the conversation of monetary intelligence, income, GDP, happiness, subjective well-being, good and bad apples and barrels, corruption, and behavioral ethics. (shrink)

The concern of this paper is to argue against Maduabuchi Dukor’s conception of African philosophical ideas of man, universe and God as“theistic humanism”. Dukor’s submission is an anti-thesis of the claims by many pioneer scholars in African philosophy who claimed that if Africans do not live in a religious universe perhaps one can affirm that their universe is theistic. But indeed the Africans’ perceptions and attitude to life in their various manifestations reveal an idealistic metaphysical orientation without an attenuation of (...) humanistic elements. It is argued in this paper that Dukor’s philosophical idea of reality in the African context though contributes to knowledge, it is in sharp contrast to African metaphysical theories such as Placide Temple’s theory of vital forces, Olubi Sodipo’s theory of mystical causality, Dagogo Idoniboye’s theory of spiritism among others. Even Sophie Oluwole, who argues that the Yoruba idea of morality is humanistic, still concludes that in moral issues the gods act as agent of sanction. In situating the African idea of reality in context, the Yoruba example is used in this paper with a view to establishing, contrary to Dukor’s“theistic humanism”; that reality among the Yoruba is better construed as“humanistic theism”. (shrink)

The present study investigated normalised stens for 380 Xhosa children in standard 5 using the Children's Motivation Analysis Test. The CMAT was administered to separate groups of girl and boys upper elementary school children, representing the first such normative data available for this instrument in South Africa. The gender differences in the means and standard deviations for the main CMAT subscales for each group are investigated and reported. It is suggested that the norms presented are also recommended for use with (...) other African samples, as previous comparative work with CMAT norms has shown that they are not significantly influenced by Zimbabwean/South African cultural differences. (shrink)

Behavior change is the only available means of curtailing new HIV infections in South Africa. This study investigated the relationship between sexual risk taking and attitudes to AIDS precautions. The participants were about 25% white, about 30% colored/mixed blood and 45% black in their second year in polytechnics (413 females and 402 males). Participants responded to the 40-item HIV-related knowledge, attitudes and behaviors. Data indicated that young women showed more positive attitudes to AIDS precautions than young men (reflecting in part (...) the stereotypic negative attitudes of young men toward condoms). In general, most males and females were found to have less knowledge about HIV transmission and less favorable attitudes toward safe sex behavior than their counterparts in the west. Also young men with more partners expressed more fatalistic attitudes toward AIDS. The possibility that a finergrained multivariate analysis of attitudes to AIDS and safe-sex behaviour is something that needs to be taken seriously in future research, however. (shrink)

Surrogacy as a practice is supported by science, technology, morality and legality. It follows that the issues concerning it cut across all facets of life. And different arguments have being advanced for and against this practice. The belief espouse in this paper is that one cannot discuss successfully the moral, the science or the legality of surrogacy without delving into the cultural question of who is a mother. In other words, it is possible to have simple scientific and legal understandings (...) of the practice and still disagree on the cultural level because of its stronger emotional appeal. The purpose of this work is to expose the Yoruba-African religio-cultural beliefs that have bearing on the understanding of motherhood or ownership of a child. This will be done through a critical analysis of Yoruba cultural beliefs about personhood and the metaphysical underpinning between birth and the ontology of life itself. Theargument here is that given some Yoruba ontological belief about life, motherhood and personhood it may be difficult for the products of surrogacy to fit-in into the society in terms of personal and social development. This work goes further to recommend that cultural beliefs should be taking into consideration when making laws to guide surrogacy in order to avoid conflict between the mothers and the child. (shrink)

The Abuja Game is a newly created “board and card game” for entertainment, relaxation, general education, national awareness and national unity. The Abuja Game is made up of two parts - practices and theory. The practical side has to do with the movement of players from certain parts of the country to Abuja using the shortest routes. The theoretical part of the game has to do with testing the players' knowledge of Nigeria through carefully selected questions. The Abuja game is (...) a brain-testing game whose winners are determined tlirough qualities such as skills, speed, memory and ingenuity which are reflected in their ability to manipulate the cards. (shrink)

How good gets better and bad gets worse: measuring the face of emotion Given the history of the past, black South African students from different settings face unique academic and emotional climate. Using the Differential Emotions Scale which focuses on ten discrete emotions, and building upon Boyle's seminal work, this study reports a repeated-measure multiple discriminant function analysis for individual items across raters. The findings further indicate that majority of the DES items are sensitive indicators of the different innate and (...) universal facial expressions. However, the construct requires revision so that it offers the examiner maximum flexibility in assessment at diverse levels, in terms of more extensive norming and programmatic replication. In brief, the DES potentially has much to offer provided that it is adequately developed for use in non-Western nations or contexts. (shrink)

This study was carried out to examine the relative efficacy of literature in geography education at the secondary school level. Literature in geography was categorized into penned thought, penned pictures and penned diagrams. The three categories were used singly and collectively to assess their impact on geographical learning. As a further extension of the study a smog test was conducted on selected geography textbooks to determine the books index of readability and their suitability for secondary education. A combination of the (...) three categories of literature in geography coupled with the use of simple, monosyllabic words in textual presentation of geographical facts are recommended for the enhancement of efficacy of literature in geography Education. (shrink)

This study was carried out to find-out the relatively most predom inant opposites of what is taught in the school otherwise termed the negatives of curriculum and instruction. These are classified into negatives of thought (NOT) negatives of speech (NOS) and negatives of action (NOA). The location characteristics, the most vulnerable victims of the negatives, and the possible ways of removing or minimizing the negatives were carefully studied. The study revealed the following: That the negatives of curriculum and instruction are (...) predominantly society-based; That the youths are the most vulnerable victims of the negatives; and The moral education, societal re-orieritation and living by exam ples rather than by precepts are the three major ways of removing of minimizing the negatives. A simple conceptual model for solving societal problems is offered with the concluding note that the youths are victims of circumstance, a misled generation whose enemies are not in the home or school but on the streets. (shrink)

Although the notion of spatiality has always lurked in the background of discussions of literary form, the self-conscious use of the term as a critical concept is generally traced to Joseph Frank's seminal essay of 1945, "Spatial Form in Modern Literature."1 Frank's basic argument is that modernist literary works are "spatial" insofar as they replace history and narrative sequence with a sense of mythic simultaneity and disrupt the normal continuities of English prose with disjunctive syntactic arrangements. This argument has been (...) attacked on several fronts. An almost universal objection is that spatial form is a "mere metaphor" which has been given misplaced concreteness and that it denies the essentially temporal nature of literature. Some critics will concede that the metaphor contains a half-truth, but one which is likely to distract attention from more important features of the reading experience. The most polemical attacks have come from those who regard spatial form as an actual, but highly regrettable, characteristic of modern literature and who have linked it with antihistorical and even fascist ideologies.2 Advocates of Frank's position, on the other hand, have generally been content to extrapolate his premises rather than criticize them, and have compiled an ever-mounting list of modernist texts which can be seen, in some sense, as "antitemporal." The whole debate can best be advanced, in my view, not by some patchwork compromise among the conflicting claims but by a radical, even outrageous statement of the basic hypothesis in its most general form. I propose, therefore, that far from being a unique phenomenon of some modern literature, and far from being restricted to the features which Frank identifies in those works , spatial form is a crucial aspect of the experience and interpretation of literature in all ages and cultures. The burden of proof, in other words, is not on Frank to show that some works have spatial form but on his critics to provide an example of any work that does not. · 1. Frank's essay first appeared in Sewanee Review 53 and was revised in his The Widening Gyre . Frank's basic argument has not changed essentially even in his most avante-garde statements; he still regards spatial form "as a particular phenomenon of modern avante-garde writing." See "Spatial Form: An Answer to Critics," Critical Inquiry 4 : 231-52. A useful bibliography, "Space and Spatial Form in Narrative," is being complied by Jeffrey Smitten .· 2. This charge generally links the notion of spatial form with Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, the imagist movement, the "irrationality" and pessimistic antihistoricism of modernism, and the conservative Romantic tradition. Frank discusses the complex motives behind these associations in the work of Robert Weimann and Frank Kermode in his "Answer to Critics," pp. 238-48. W. J. T. Mitchell, editor of Critical Inquiry, is the author of Blake's Composite Art, and The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon. The present essay is part of Iconology: The Image in Literature and the Visual Arts. "Diagrammatology" appeared in the Spring 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. Leon Surette responds to the current essay in "‘Rational Form in Literature’". (shrink)

Named for the famous Chinese minister of state, Guan Zhong, the Guanzi is one of the largest collections of ancient Chinese writings still in existence. With this volume, W. Allyn Rickett completes the first full translation of the Guanzi into English. This represents a truly monumental effort, as the Guanzi is a long and notoriously difficult work. It was compiled in its present form about 26 B.C. by the Han dynasty scholar Liu Xiang and the surviving text consists of some (...) seventy-six anonymous essays dating from the fifth century B.C. to the first century B.C.The forty-two chapters contained in this volume include several which present Daoist theories concerning self-cultivation and the relationship between the body and mind as well as the development of Huang-Lao political and economic thought. The "Dizi zhi" chapter provides one of the oldest discussions of education in China. The "Shui di" chapter refers to the circulation of blood some two thousand years before the discoveries of William Harvey in the West. Other chapters deal with various aspects of statecraft, Yin-Yang and Five Phases thought, folk beliefs, seasonal calendars, and farming. Perhaps the best-known chapters are those that deal with various methods of controlling and stimulating the economy. They constitute one of the world's earliest presentations of a quantity theory of money. Throughout the text, Rickett provides extensive notes. He also supplies an introduction to the volume and a comprehensive index. (shrink)

Unlike old soldiers, the rhetoric of the great neither dies nor fades away. And so Hume's celebrated ‘is-ought’ passage still provokes debate.Hume was worried about the relation between ought statements and those supporting them: between ‘tolerence brings peace’ or ‘is God's will’, and ‘so one ought to be tolerant’. He denies the deducibility of the latter from the former, as the ‘ought’ expresses ‘a new relation or affirmation’, ‘entirely different from the others’. And this is commonly taken as saying that (...) the ought statement is ‘different’ and non-deducible, because it is no longer a ‘purely factual statement’, to wit one that makes another ordinarily testable truth claim.However, recent criticism, by W. D. Hudson and others, points out that Hume says other things seemingly inconsistent with this. In the passage, he mentions ‘ought’ and ‘virtue’ interchangeably, and ‘tolerance is virtuous’ as in the same boat as ‘one ought to be tolerant’. But, also, he treats the virtue of an action as sensibly discernible by the approbation which it evokes, and takes us to mean by a virtuous action that we will approve of it on contemplation. (shrink)

The question naturally arises: Is public art inherently violent, or is it a provocation to violence? Is violence built into the monument in its very conception? Or is violence simply an accident that befalls some monuments, a matter of the fortunes of history? The historical record suggests that if violence is simply an accident that happens to public art, it is one that is always waiting to happen. The principal media and materials of public art are stone and metal sculpture (...) not so much by choice as by necessity. “A public sculpture,” says Lawrence Alloway, “should be invulnerable or inaccessible. It should have the material strength to resist attack or be easily cleanable, but it also needs a formal structure that is not wrecked by alterations.”12 The violence that surrounds public art is more, however, than simply the ever-present possibility of an accident—the natural disaster or random act of vandalism. Much of the world’s public art—memorials, monuments, triumphal arches, obelisks, columns, and statues—has a rather direct reference to violence in the form of war or conquest. From Ozymandias to Caesar to Napoleon to Hitler, public art has served as a kind of monumentalizing of violence, and never more powerfully than when it presents the conqueror as a man of peace, imposing a Napoleonic code or a pax Romana on the world. Public sculpture that is too frank or explicit about this monumentalizing of violence, whether the Assyrian palace reliefs of the ninth century b.c., or Morris’s bomb sculpture proposal of 1981, is likely to offend the sensibilities of a public committed to the repression of its own complicity in violence.13 The very notion of public art as we receive it is inseparable from what Jürgen Habermas has called “the liberal model of the public sphere,” a dimension distinct from the economic, the private, and the political. This ideal realm provides the space in which disinterested citizens may contemplate a transparent emblem of their own inclusiveness and solidarity, and deliberate on the general good, free of coercion, violence, or private interests.14 12. Lawrence Alloway, “The Public Sculpture Problem,” Studio International 184 : 124.13. See Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, “The Forms of Violence,” October, no. 8 : 17-29, for an important critique of the “narrativization” of violence in Western art and an examination of the alternative suggested by the Assyrian palace reliefs.14. Habermas first introduced this concept in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence . First published in 1962, it has since become the focus of an extensive literature. See also Habermas’s short encyclopedia article, “The Public Sphere,” trans. Sara Lennox and Frank Lennox, New German Critique 1 : 49-55, and the introduction to it by Peter Hohendahl in the same issue, pp. 45-48. I owe much to the guidance of Miriam Hansen and Lauren Berlant on this complex and crucial topic. W. J. T. Mitchell, editor of Critical Inquiry, is Gaylord Donnelly Distinguished Service Professor of English and art at the University of Chicago. His recent book is Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Unmasking the Maxim: An Ancient Genre And Why It Matters Now W. ROBERT CONNOR We live surrounded by maxims, often without even noticing them. They are easily dismissed as platitudes, banalities or harmless clichés, but even in an age of big data and number crunching we put them to work almost every day. A Silicon Valley whiz kid says, Move Fast and Break Things. Investors try to Buy (...) Low and Sell High. Investigative reporters Follow the Money. Others Follow their Bliss. The lavish host thinks, The More the Merrier, while the Modernist architect is sure that Less is More. Captains of Industry whisper to themselves, Me First; captains of sinking ships shout, Women and Children First. Be Prepared was the Boy Scouts’ marching song, while the Proud Boys Stand Down and Stand By, awaiting their marching orders. Maxims are perhaps the smallest members in a large family of speech acts, which among the Greeks included proverbs, oracles, riddles, blessings, curses and lamentations. Not all of these continue in use, but maxims have found companions—mottos, mantras, advertising tag lines and jingles, slogans, political rallying cries, hashtags, three- or four-letter acronyms and 280 character tweets from the goddess Twitter. Familiarity, however, can breed contempt, or at least inattentiveness to the full range of their influence. Sometimes what sounds at first like empty verbiage turns into action. Bruce Lee adapted an old Taoist saying when he said, Be Water, and thereby provided what was for a while a surprisingly effective strategy for protesters in Hong Kong. arion 28.3 winter 2021 6 unmasking the maxim Maxims empower, for good or ill. In the hands of bigots or ideologues, they can turn deadly. Sic Semper Tyrannis shouted John Wilkes Booth after shooting Abraham Lincoln. A manufacturer of assault rifles urged potential customers to Earn Your Man Card. How better to earn it than to obey 8chan, a web site favored by white nationalists, with its own maxim, Embrace Infamy. A devotee of the site did just that, perpetrating a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas. Maxims, then, should not be lightly dismissed. Since the ancient Greeks so relished maxims, they should surely be interrogated to help us better understand the power of these often underestimated speech acts. Before turning to the Greeks, however, the English word maxim needs a closer look. english “maxim” english borrowed maxim from a Latin phrase and boiled it down for everyday use. In Latin writings about logic, the expression maxima propositio, biggest proposition, denoted a statement that did not need to be proved, but could provide the basis for proof of other, lesser propositions. This phraseology goes back at least to Boethius in the sixth century of our era. It’s the equivalent of the generalizations that serve as the major premises in syllogistic logic. If this makes maxims sound like the axioms of geometry, that is historically right. The starting points of plane geometry are propositions that deserve to be accepted; even without proof that they are worthy of belief. That’s the meaning of the term axiōma. No one needs to prove that things equal to the same thing are equal to each other. Think about it; after a while it seems self-evident. It is worthy of assent. We might equally well call such an axiom a maxim; indeed, the earliest (1426) attested use of maxim in English is described in the Oxford English Dictionary as “an axiom; a self-evident proposition assumed as a premise in mathematical, or dialectical reasoning.” W. Robert Connor 7 This usage is now obsolete, but Thomas Jefferson understood the idea behind it, since he believed that there were such truths, waiting to be put to work in building a society where all people were equal and possess certain inalienable rights. He did not feel he had to prove these propositions; they were in his view self-evident. In using these ideas in his draft of the Declaration of Independence, he was, in effect, transferring to politics what Euclid had done in geometry. It was a swift, strategic stroke on his part, for, since self-evident truths require no argument or explanation, they focus discussion not on... (shrink)

In An Ethic of Trust: Mutual Autonomy and the Common Will to Live, W. Royce Clark uses the work of theologians and philosophers Albert Schweitzer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and John Rawls to create an inclusive ethic in which both the religious and non-religious will have equal freedom and stability.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Women Poets and the Origin of the Greek Hexameter W. ROBERT CONNOR A very considerable question has arisen, as to what was the origin of poetry. —Pliny the Elder, Natural History 7.57 i. a road trip with pausanias Tennyson called the dactylic hexameter “the stateliest measure / ever moulded by the lips of man,” but he did not say whose lips first did the moulding. Despite much arguing we (...) do not know for sure where it came from, or who developed it. But some ancient Greeks did, or thought they did. For them, the hexameter came with a personal history, a legendary one to be sure, but no less powerful for that. The legend, moreover, started with a woman poet. The trail that leads to this is a long and devious one, but a good guide presents himself, Pausanias, author of A Greek Guidebook (Hellados Periegesis). Although he is now valued primarily as a quarry cordoned off for topographers and archaeologists, he had a strong interest in poets, especially women ones. These include Sappho, of course, the valiant Telesilla of Argos of whom he tells two stories (2.20.8, and 2.35.2), and Praxilla of Sicyon (3.13.5). In his account of Boeotia he mentions another woman poet of the fifth century before our era, Corinna of Tanagra. She, he says (9.22.3f.), once defeated Pindar in a poetry contest, and was, he thinks, the most beautiful woman of her time, judging by a statue of her he had seen. He also speaks of Myro of Byzantium (9.5.8). Pausanias was confident that she had written epic and elegiac verse. arion 27.2 fall 2019 Pausanias chooses, moreover, to end his work with an enigmatic story about another woman poet, Anyte of Tegea. He had not mentioned her in his lengthy account of her home town in the mountains of Arcadia, but now her story seems to speak to him. It is set at a ruined shrine of Asclepius near the port town of Naupactus. The reason that Anyte had come there was a strange one: She had had, he says, a vision—not a dream, but a real vision—at the end of which she found herself holding a sealed tablet addressed to one Phalysius of Naupactus. He was, it turns out, a prosperous citizen of the town, but was going blind. Anyte made the journey, surely not an easy one, and delivered the tablet. As soon as Phalysius broke its seal, he found he could make out the letters—a wondrous improvement in his vision, which he attributed to the healing god Asclepius. That is why he built the shrine that Pausanias saw many years later. And the content of the message? Give Anyte two thousand gold staters. Phalysius did so. End of story. End of the Guidebook. So, indeed, Pausanias paid attention to women poets, and there were plenty of them to pay attention to. There is good evidence of a vibrant tradition of women’s poetry among the ancient Greeks. Pausanias is not the only writer of his time to note this. In fact, if on his journeys Pausanias had encountered the well-travelled rhetorician Tatian, the two near-contemporaries could have challenged one another to see who could name the largest number of women poets and identify the sculptors of statues honoring them. Tatian might have won, to judge from his Address to the Greeks, ch 33. But then, Tatian had an agenda. As a convert to a “barbarian” cult he wanted to show that his co-religionists had precedents for respecting women’s intellects: “My object in referring to these women is, that you may not regard as something strange what you find among us, and that, comparing the statues which are before your eyes, you may not treat the women with scorn who among us pursue philosophy.” So much for the Christian Tatian. Did Pausanias have an agenda, too? His stories of two women from Delphi, Boio 86 women poets and the origin of the greek hexameter and Phemonoe, help answer that question. ii. boio’s disruptive poetry when pausanias’s work describes Delphi, the plot thickens. In... (shrink)

This note deals with the prepositional uniformity principlep-UP: p x N A (p, x) x N p A (p, x) ( species of all propositions) in intuitionistic mathematics.p-UP is implied by WC and KS. But there are interestingp-UP-cases which require weak KS resp. WC only. UP for number species follows fromp-UP by extended bar-induction (ranging over propositions) and suitable weak continuity. As corollaries we have the disjunction property and the existential definability w.r.t. concrete objects. Other consequences are: there is no (...) non-trivial countable partition of;id is the only injective function from to; there are no many-place injective prepositional functions; card () is incomparable with the cardinality of all metric spaces containing at least three elements. (shrink)

Nature of the problem: Testimony from scientists. Reflex action and theism (1881) by W. James. The organization of thought (1916) by A.N. Whitehead. The changing scientific scene 1900-1950 (1952) by J.B. Conant. A note on methods of analysis (1943) by H.J. Muller. The way things are (1959) by P.W. Bridgman. A definition of style (1948) by J.R. Oppenheimer.--Consequences of the problem: Testimony from artists and writers. Existentialism (1947) by J.-P. Sartre. The testimony of modern art (1957) by W. Barrett. Parts (...) of speech and punctuation (1935) by G. Stein. The waves (1931) by V. Woolf. The imperfect paradise, by W. Stevens. A note on style and the limits of language, by W. Gibson. (shrink)

The central theme of the prologue is the notion of responsibility, as well it might be, given the subject, Accordingly, those first seven pages swamp the reader with the word “responsibility” to the point where they could be described as “variations on the theme.” Inundation, alas, is not elucidation, and all closer references to the notion remain impenetrability elliptic: Derrida possesses the unique art of combining extreme ellipsis with extreme verbosity. In fact these “variation” are more musical than analytic: “responsibility” (...) comes close to being a Wagnerian leitmotiv. Like a characteristic melody, the word winds through the text in a constant sequence of appearances and temporary disappearances, ever expected, always ready to reemerge. Although there is no clear-cut line of argument, there does seem to be a general direction of development. The question of de Man’s responsibility, which we might have thought to be crucial, is touched on only briefly and vaguely; we read much more about responsibility to de Man. Ours and Derrida’s: “responsibility” is associated with “responding,” which is increasingly read as Derrida’s obligation to respond for de Man. From the outset, this emphasis evokes the danger of an apologia rather than the conscientious quest for truth that is demanded in the same breath. There are further suggestions of this nature when Derrida later briefly returns to this subject and this style. “Responding for the other” is here connected with transference, allegory , and prosopopeia—that is, connected with two rhetorical categories and psychoanalytic one. To write about responsibility with so little reference to ethical categories is something of a tour de force. W. Wolfgang Holdheim, professor of comparative literature and romance studies and Frederic J. Whiton Professor of Liberal Studies at Cornell University, has published numerous articles on literature and literary theory as well as a number of books, including The Hermeneutic Mode. (shrink)

This may be an especially favorable moment in intellectual history to come to some understanding of notions like “abstraction” and “the abstract,” if only because these terms seem so clearly obsolete, even antiquated, at the present time. The obsolescence of abstraction is exemplified most vividly by its centrality in a period of cultural history that is widely perceived as being just behind us, the period of modernism, ranging roughly from the beginning of the twentieth century to the aftermath of the (...) Second World War.1art is now a familiar feature of our cultural landscape; it has become a monument to an era that is passing from living memory into history. The experiments of cubism and abstract expressionism are no longer “experimental” or shocking: abstraction has not been associated with the artistic avant-garde for at least a quarter of a century, and its central masterpieces are now firmly entrenched in the tradition of Western painting and safely canonized in our greatest museums. That does not mean that there will be no more abstract paintings, or that the tradition is dead; on the contrary, the obsolescence we are contemplating is in a very precise sense the precondition for abstraction’s survival as a tradition that resists any possible assault from an avant-garde. Indeed, the abstract probably has more institutional and cultural power as a rearguard tradition than it ever did as an avant-garde overturning of tradition. For that very reason its self-representations need to be questioned more closely than ever, especially its account of its own nature and history. This seems important, not just to set the record straight about what abstract art was, but to enable critical and artistic experimentation in the present, and a more nuanced account of both pre-and postmodern at, both of which are in danger of being swallowed up by the formulas of abstract formalism. If art and criticism are to continue to play an oppositional and interventionist role in our time, passive acceptance and reproduction of a powerful cultural tradition like abstract art will simply not do. 1. I define modernism and “the age of abstraction” here in familiar art historical terms, as a period extending from Kandinsky and Malevich to Jasper Johns and Morris Louis. There are other views of this matter which would trace modernism back to the emergence of an avant-garde in the 1840s , or to romanticism , or to the eighteenth century . My claim would be that “the abstract” as such only becomes a definitive slogan for modernism with the emergence of abstract painting around 1900. W. J. T. Mitchell, editor of Critical Inquiry, is professor of English and a member of the Committee on Art and Design at the University of Chicago. His most recent book is Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. (shrink)

The Platonic MS. Vat. gr. 225 contains tetr. I, VI. 3, 4, II–IV, while its companion volume in the same hand Vat. gr. 226 contains V–VI. 2, VIII. 3, VII, Spp., VIII. 1, 2. Posts states that for tetr. I and VI. 3 A is close to Vind. suppl. gr. 7 and thereafter derives from the Clarkianus . I am here concerned only with the testimony of Δ in. 2 . This manuscript has been largely ignored by commentators and editors. (...) Schanz does not quote it, nor does Bekker . Alline is scornful about it. Neither Burnet nor Croiset quotes it—and indeed Burnet claims that it is merely an interpolated apograph of W. Stallbaum seems to be the only editor who quotes it for Apol. This appears to be an unwarranted neglect since A has, in fact, a good claim to be considered as a primary witness in this dialogue. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 129-135. Introduction Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei Successions of words are so agreeable. It is about this. —Gertrude Stein Nachoem Wijnberg (1961) is a Dutch poet and novelist. He also a professor of cultural entrepreneurship and management at the Business School of the University of Amsterdam. Since 1989, he has published thirteen volumes of poetry and four novels, which, in my opinion mark a high point in Dutch contemporary literature. His novels even more than his poetry are (...) criticized for being inaccessible, which I generally take to be a compliment. It would be like saying that Fernando Pessoa is inaccessible, which he is not. Neither is Wijnberg. When we think of the combination economist-poet we are immediately reminded of the American poet Wallace Stevens, who, as the story goes, had two stacks of paper on his desk, one for contracts, one for poems. We also know that Stevens wrote on the economy and that questions of economy and insurance surface at multiple points in his poems. The following text is a very preliminary attempt to point at the intersections between poems, novels, business, and poetry in Wijnberg’s work. On the back cover of his novel De opvolging ( The Succession , 2005), Wijnberg states the following: “[This is] a novel for whomever is interested in the workings of a company as much as in the workings of a poem.” Wijnberg thus claims that the way in which a company “works” may be similar to the way in which a poem “works.” The question is the obvious one, what does this similarity consist in? De opvolging tells the story of company in which bosses and company doctors, secretaries, children, clowns, and beggars have tons of meetings, recite poems, perform plays, tell jokes, and succeed each other, climbing up and down in the company’s hierarchy. De opvolging is a novel in which the career of people follows the career of words. It resonates with Gertrude Stein's sentences, "Grammar. What is it. Who was it" (1975, 50). The words in Wijnberg's poems are like he characters in his novel. And if we keep in mind this allegorical reading of De opvolging , which is obviously only one of the possible readings, we may be able to understand some aspects of Wijnberg’s poetry. A repetition is already a pun. Look, that word is trying it again, as if it is afraid that by not doing it it would give up the hope that it will ever be able to do something. A pun is the opposite of the first word coming to the mind of someone who shouts it when he suddenly discovers something. (104) The repetition, the succession of the same word, is already a pun, a joke. The succession of the father by the son after the revolution is a joke. "Look he's trying it again!" The essence of a joke is a repetition. Archimedes’ “Eureka!” is its opposite. Poems can easily become jokes, depending on the way the words follow and repeat each other. In De opvolging , the careers of the bosses, good and bad secretaries, and company doctors easily become jokes, as they are “afraid that by not doing it [they] would give up the hope that [they] will ever be able to do something.” Not only the repetition, but also the distance and difference between the words in a poem, their cause and effect relations can be read as company relations. This becomes clear when we, for example, read the first lines of the poem “Cause, sign” from Het leven van ( The Life Of , 2009). A sign lets know what is going to happen, a cause lets it happen. If the sign also lets happen there is no reason to isolate it, because then I would isolate some- thing only because it’s different for me. If I didn’t have to write this myself, but would have secretaries to whom I could dictate it, I would be able to say more about it. (49) Upon reading the first two lines we can already conclude that any word may be cause or sign or both. If a sign is also a cause there is no reason to discriminate it, yet to the poet they are still different. This difference only becomes expressible the moment he would have a secretary. Just like in De opvolging , the secretary introduces a distance; not in a company but in a poem. Hence the difference between “good” and “bad” secretaries in a company, where the good secretary of one boss may be the bad secretary of another one. The more we can say about the bosses of the company, or signifiers of the poem, the greater the distance we introduce between them and us. We should take serious the relation between Wijnberg’s novels and poems. Although they operate on different scales, they explain and converse with each other. Another example may be the novel Politiek en liefde ( Politics and Love , 2002), which deals with the relation, precisely, between politics and love. In the novel, Nicolai, a lieutenant in the Dutch army, is sent to Africa on a military mission. Upon leaving a receives a letter from his father. Dear son, Don’t do anything stupid before your father has advised you to do so. Your mother asked me to write a wise letter. I have been looking for wisdom for half a day and haven’t found much. If you borrow a small amount from a bank you become the bank’s slave, but if you borrow a couple of millions and spend them as quickly as possible the bank becomes your slave. What I want to say is that you have to return from Africa in good health, and before you know it the world will be your slave [....] Signed with a kiss from your father. (88) The line, “If you borrow a small amount from a bank you become the bank’s slave, but if you borrow a couple of millions and spend them as quickly as possible the bank becomes your slave,” returns as the title of poem in Het leven van: “If I borrow enough money the bank becomes my slave” (12-3), which elaborates this theme. So both in the way that these poems are structured and in their subject matter, they refer to the structures of our economy, to the ever-continuing line of CEOs succeeding each other like words, to the distance between them introduced by bureaucracy, and giving and receiving as economical and poetical acts. Poem and economy map onto each other, as in another episode from De opvolging : Edward reads two of the beggar’s poems about presents. Of a holiday nothing remains, except for memories, and if some of them are bad I’d rather forget them all; if I get a present I’d rather get something that’s useful to me for a long time. If I may choose, I choose what I can use longest, long enough to partially forget that this was the present, because it feels bad when nothing is left of it. […] Giving away becomes destruction in the stock destruction economy [ voorraadvernie -tigings-economie ], that is a gift economy [ geschenkeneconomie ], encountering for the first time an economy in which there’s selling and buying on markets. Instead of destroying supplies someone can also quickly say that they aren’t worth anything anymore; if someone wants to take them I’d gladly give him something extra. In a stock destruction economy he is someone who each day wants to work more hours than his colleagues. If around a company there is a gift economy in which someone’s rank is determined and made visible by the gifts someone can give someone else, a company will be more often character- ized by an invisible or unclear system of ranks. (152) Two poems about gifts present two different economical models, described by Wijnberg with the terms “stock destruction economy” and “gift economy.” Here we immediately recall the opposition introduced by George Bataille’s work on the concept of expenditure in The Accursed Share , where a “general economy” would surpass the stock destruction economy based on scarcity (capitalism) and become a gift economy (potlatch) and an egalitarian (communist) society. These claims are made both on the level of the poems and in their discursive explanation. They follow each other and on each other. I would like to finish this introduction to Wijnberg’s writing with a translation from his novel De joden ( The Jews , 1999), which develops the story of Hitler abdicating as chancellor of the Third Reich, appointing philosopher Martin Heidegger as his successor. In a conversation with two Russian actor-spies, sent by Stalin to figure out the situation, philosopher Walter Benjamin describes the abdication scene. Maimon: You were there when Hitler resigned? Benjamin: In the room we’re right now. The desk and the chairs are new. After his resignation Hitler would like to take his furniture to his new house. Martin naturally agrees. It is a sunny day. Martin is very nervous and complains about the heat. Martin is wearing his best dark blue suit, not his professor’s robe. Hitler is wearing his uniform. We enter the room and Hitler gets up and embraces Martin. Martin is not very good at embracing. Hitler shakes his hand. Hitler’s cap is on the desk. The cap has a metal lining. Hitler has strong neck muscles. Hitler says: A man is unclean. He takes a bath. Does he make the bath water unclean? I say: a man is unclean. He steps into a river. A little further a man steps into the river; does he become unclean? Hitler nods. I say: a man is standing in music. Another man hears the music but also sees the first man moving on the beat of the music in a way that he is certain that the music would excite different feelings in him if he wouldn’t to see the first man. Hitler says: a man is clean, listens to music, is suddenly touched and he doesn’t know by what. The conversation ends in the way you know it ends. Hitler picks up his cap from the desk and puts it on Martin’s head. (73-4) Aware of the never ending debate on the question of Heidegger’s involvement in the Nazi regime, Wijnberg has the audacity to present the arguments of complicity in the religious terminology of cleanliness and uncleanliness, while at the same time recalling overtones of Hitler’s supposed love for Wagner, suggesting a relation between Benjamin and Hitler, and so on. The space of this introduction is to small to treat a novel like De joden , a reading of which together with passages from Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political , Jacques Derrida's Of Spirit , Christopher Fynsk's Heidegger: Thought and Historicity , and Avital Ronell's The Telephone Book would be extremely elucidating and potentially open new avenues in thinking Heidegger's emphasis on poetry after the fall of the Nazi empire. But at this point we will have to curb our curiosity and follow the poet himself. The themes of the relation between business and poetry, but also Chinese landscape painting, love, Indian and Japanese poetry, and Western philosophy are analyzed and assimilated in Wijnberg’s work without ever losing the clarity of expression. It may be that, according to Alain Badiou, the “Age of the Poets” is over, but its end (Paul Celan) has exactly brought a new balance between philosophy and poetry, and it is this playful, but nonetheless serious balance that makes one hope that one day Wijnberg’s complete oeuvre might become available to readers across the planet. Tiranë, Albania February 15, 2011 English translations (all of them translated by David Colmer, who is preparing an English collection of Wijnberg’s poems entitled Advanced Payment ): Poetry International Words Without Borders Green Integer Review from Het leven van ( The Life of ) THE LIFE OF KANT, OF HEGEL As if every day he takes a decision that is as good as when he’d been able to think about it all his life. The life of Kant, of Hegel, the days of the life of, select three or four of them. Tell what he has discovered during those days as if he were the last one who knew so little. Give me something that I can cancel against then I can prepare myself for it. The reward is that I may continue with what I’m doing, it doesn’t matter how long it takes. This has nothing to do with everything remaining the same if I say that I no longer want anything else. I wouldn’t be able to say in which one and the other occur in a way that I if I knew something to cancel that one against it wouldn’t be possible now. The stars above my head and being able to say what belongs to what if I’ve let them in. FOLLOWING MY HEART WITHOUT BREAKING THE RULES Observing the rules without observing the rules by going where the rules no longer apply. I could also observe the rules there by applying them to what at great distance may resemble what the rules are about. But why would I do that, not to confuse someone who is seeing me from a great distance? Behind this morning the morning prepares itself when the rules are everything I have. IF I BORROW ENOUGH MONEY THE BANK BECOMES MY SLAVE A bank lends me money, if I don’t pay it back they tell my boss that he has to pay them my salary. But they have to leave me enough to eat and sleep and an umbrella when it’s raining. They can also empty my house, the furniture isn’t worth a lot, but every little helps. Each morning I leave for work, if I don’t start early they’ll soon get someone else, no bank will lend me money when the sun is shining. My boss has given me a cat to raise as a dog. Of course I know that it won’t work out, but I’ve asked for a week—maybe the cat gets lucky, maybe I get lucky. My hands around a cup of coffee, before I leave for work, warm-empty, cold-empty, as if hidden in the mist over a lawn. What I make when there’s no work left for me, I’m ashamed to say how little it is. Once I’m outside I check it, if they watch out of the window they can see me doing it. Suppose it is so much that I’d stay counting for hours, it’s getting dark and I’m still there. They stay watching for a while once they’ve finished their work, but have to go home, I get that, sure, I could also go home and continue counting there. If it’s too little running back immediately won’t help, because nobody’s there anymore, and if I come back tomorrow I may have spent what’s missing tonight. Going somewhere where it’s warm enough to walk around without clothes during daytime, it helps me to know that something’s more there than here. For someone like me there’s work anywhere, it shouldn’t take a week to find work for me there. Three times work and a home close to work, I may choose one and try for a week whether I want to stay there. If at the end of the week I don’t want to stay I’m back on the next day, then it was a week’s holiday. RULES If that’s against a rule, it’s yet another one that I cannot observe, or only so briefly that I cannot re- member it later. Anyways the rules are only there to help me remember what I need in order to do better what I do. In that respect there’s no difference between the rules that I find in a book and the rules that I think of early in the morning. I know that because I’ve made a rule just now nothing has yet to observe it. CAUSE, SIGN A sign lets know what is going to happen, a cause lets it happen. If the sign also lets happen there is no reason to isolate it, because then I would isolate something only because it’s different for me. If I didn’t have to write this down myself, but would have secretaries to whom I could dictate it, I could to say more about it. If something is taken away from me I consider how it would be if the opposite had been taken from me. That is what causes or signifies what is farthest away from what is caused or signified by what has been taken away from me. note: For the translations of “The life of Kant, of Hegel” and “If I borrow enough money the bank becomes my slave” I was able to consult David Colmer’s wonderful translations. (shrink)

The first volume of a projected two-volume work in mathematical logic. Along with an introduction containing brief but careful and remarkably compact discussions of such topics as the kinds of expressions occurring in formalized language, the logistic method, syntax, and semantics, the book comprises clean and precise treatments of the propositional calculus, and first- and second-order functional calculi, including parenthetical remarks about the intended semantical interpretations of these calculi, some development of the calculi themselves, and discussions of completeness and consistency. (...) A great number of exercises are included, ranging from elementary exercises in technique to brief sketches of theories not treated in the text.--W. T. (shrink)

This translation of Heidegger's 1959 essay Gelassenheit is an appealing example of Heidegger's later thought. The introduction, though at points helpful, tends towards greater obscurity than Heidegger himself. Gelassenheit consists of a 1955 speech on the occasion of a gathering commemorating the German composer Conradin Kreutzer. In it, Heidegger discusses the difference between calculative thinking and meditative thinking, and advances a characterization of the latter as "releasement". Following the address, there is a prose-poetic dialogue between a teacher, scientist and scholar (...) which develops these ideas further and relates them to other themes in Heidegger's thought. The translators follow the "Robinson-Macquarrie" method, rendering each of Heidegger's important German terms by a single English word. Perhaps due to the fact that relatively few such terms are employed by Heidegger in Gelassenheit, this method here succeeds not only in presenting a terminologically clear translation, but also in capturing a certain amount of the extraordinary poetic appeal of the original.—A. W. W. (shrink)

Leclerc's systematic introduction is predicated upon the thesis that "Whitehead's basic problems belong to the great tradition of philosophical inquiry first opened up by the Greeks." A lucid discussion of the traditional problems surrounding "being" leads simply and logically to a consideration of the categories in terms of which Whitehead reformulates the traditional approach to "that which is." The great merit of this progression is that it dispels the illusion, so overwhelming on an initial glance at Whitehead himself, that his (...) terminology is arbitrary and completely disassociated from traditional usage.--D. W. S. (shrink)

The dominant interest here is in metaphysics today; three-quarters of the articles date from the Twentieth Century. The editor has successfully kept internal editing to a minimum; the original authors thus develop their subjects in their own way. Nonetheless, to this reviewer, the composite impression from the book was that metaphysics, if it exists, is disputatious, technical, and inconsequential. This may derive from a persistent image of too many conflicting theoretic alternatives, suggested internally by the approach of many of the (...) contemporary articles, and externally by the editor's desire to be representative. Tending to counter this general dissatisfaction, happily, is a successful section on "Being and Substance." There are many printing errors, disruptive to thought.--E. W. (shrink)

This is a collection of essays in ethics and the philosophy of religion contributed by former students and colleagues of Professor W. Harry Jellema to honor his 70th birthday and his retirement from Calvin College. The essays are quite diverse but uniformly worthwhile. They are nicely balanced between such traditional approaches as in Veatch's "For a Renewal of an Old Departure in Ethics" and Parker's "Traditional Reason and Modern Reason," contemporary analytic approaches as in Plantinga's "Necessary Being" and Brouwer's "A (...) Restricted Motive Theory of Ethics," and historical studies such as Stob's "The Ethics of Jonathan Edwards" and De Boer's "First Steps in Mysticism." The quality and seriousness of the collection as a whole appropriately honors a man who has been one of the most devoted and effective teachers in the American philosophic community for the past fifty years.—W. G. E. (shrink)

A critique of Dewey's ethics. Arguing from a Thomistic point of view, Bausola claims that Dewey's ethics lacks adequate speculative grounding, but provides an occasionally useful anti-formalist attitude.--E. W.

In addition to serving as a competent and sympathetic text for classical Indian philosophy, this book is meant to show that it was the universally presupposed concern of Indian speculation to defend the possibility of human freedom as a liberation from worldly determinism. Early chapters introduce the topics of bondage, self-knowledge, and liberation in a way attractive to the Western point of view. There is a helpful chapter introducing Indian logic. The author's "fresh classification of India's philosophical systems" evolves as (...) a systematic comparison of the alternative Indian theories of relations, and especially those relations of dependence or causality which constitute bondage, and whose reversal would effect liberation.--E. W. (shrink)

The broadest principles of James's thought are reviewed to show the primacy of his concern for morality over metaphysics, religion, and epistemology. The treatment is often too sympathetic to bring out the difficulties with which James struggled, and to which his dicta were aimed. Of greatest interest is the theme of the enrichment and transformation of morality by religion. The result obtains its authority and reality for man in terms of the happiness and steadfastness of the life it promotes.--E. W.

In fascicles 9 through 12 of this volume, Weiss continues his analyses of art and begins to develop themes for his discussion of history and religion. There are also significant and lengthy sections devoted to metaphilosophy with critiques of Kant, Hegel, and Wittgenstein. The discussion of the arts reaches a degree of insight and breadth of synthesis not matched in the earlier fascicles, nor in The World of Art and The Nine Basic Arts. For here Weiss achieves a systematic relation (...) between fundamental concepts of Modes of Being and those of his aesthetic theory that is both less strained and schematic and more fruitful than any found elsewhere. The discussions of history are less happy, too quickly generalized and formalized in cosmic terms. The sections on religion are, however, excellent. Predominantly Christian themes are discussed at length. Weiss's metaphysics seems naturally sympathetic in their analysis. The metaphilosophy provides a valuable insight into Weiss's working habits and reveals what is, paradoxically, both a major strength and weakness-his appreciation of the formal and schematic demands of systematic thought. This appreciation can lead to productive analysis and insight, but also beyond experience and understanding. It is to Weiss's credit that these working journals show the dangerous side of his philosophic technique far more often than his regular, published work does. Now that we have the entire first volume of these journals, a few words must be said about their value as published works. They are, first, a useful, two-way bridge joining Weiss's formal, metaphysical works and his more descriptive, phenomenological works, such as The World of Art, Nine Basic Arts, History: Written and Lived, The God We Seek, etc.). Such a bridge is not absolutely necessary for one reasonably familiar with the whole of Weiss's published work, but it is helpful, especially to one beginning a study of Weiss with the more speculative formal writings. As independent works, the journals frequently provide valuable insights, suggest previously unsuspected avenues of analysis and inquiry, and demonstrate a level of argument and mode of explanation all too often ignored by contemporary philosophers. They should be read as what they are, journals, much as one would read Pepys' Diary. The Index is a thorough, accurate, and necessary tool for reference.—W. G. E. (shrink)

The author introduces axiology as a recently developed, independent branch of philosophy, in which values are found to reveal a subtle identity of nature and structure, and to constitute a domain distinct from that of being. Sketches of objectivist and subjectivist doctrines are offered, chiefly as foils for a final chapter which suggests that the exaggerations of both sides can be corrected and their truths preserved by analyzing and putting in proper context all relevant aspects of the concrete situation—factual, psychological, (...) and cultural.—E. W. (shrink)

These twenty-nine essays from a period of thirty-five years cover topics in ethics, critical and speculative philosophy, American philosophy and social philosophy. The late Professor Murphy's concern for the social and political relevance of theoretical philosophical issues is very much in evidence, and something of his humane personality shows through.—F. W. N.

The author, in outlining his theory of democracy, presents, with commendable logic of sequence, his views on the nature and scope of democracy, its presuppositions, its instruments, its conditions, its justification, and its prospects. Carey McWilliams, editor of The Nation, has called this book "by all odds the finest modern exploration of the subject by an American." From the standpoint of clarity, vigor, and good sense, that accolade is deserved. While not ranking as a seminal book or one that hoes (...) its ground with pioneering originality, it brilliantly molds into an unshakable structure an extensive amassment of stones, large and small, quarried diligently and judiciously from the tests of time and polished so as to smooth away ambiguities and other imperfections. Keystone of the structure is the definition, in which every word is expertly honed, "Democracy is that system of community government in which, by and large, the members of the community participate, or may participate, directly or indirectly, in the making of decisions which affect them all." The implications of this definition are meticulously studied in chapter after chapter, and Cohen presents at the end a "note on the future of democracy" in which, eschewing pessimism or optimism, he urges concerned citizens to do what is possible to improve the conditions which can make democracy effective.—W. G. (shrink)

Keen is dependent upon Norman O. Brown's Dionysian vision of reality in his description of the phenomenon of wonder. In a sense Keen's book is nothing more than a theological restatement of Brown's Love's Body in didactic and conceptual fashion. But the author argues persuasively that our vision of reality is much too dependent upon the Greek rational model, so that we become chained to ideas and can never be ourselves. From a Christian perspective, Keen argues, this is wrong. Christ (...) came to free men to be themselves--not to be slaves to ideas of themselves. The author uses much of the contemporary materials derived from the post-existentialistic mode of philosophizing. He discusses with appreciation Kazantzakis, Alan Watts, Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, MacLuhan, Merleau-Ponty, and others, whom he feels have attempted to pose a conception of reality that is characterized by "openness, availability, epistemological humility in the face of the mystery of being, and the ability to admire and be grateful."--W. A. J. (shrink)

An outgrowth of Ryle’s three week visit at Rice in the spring of 1972, this collection of critical essays bears some resemblance to the collection edited by Oscar P. Wood and George Pitcher in the Anchor series. The principle differences are: 1) the range of topics treated here and the detail of treatment is considerably less extensive than in the Wood collection, and 2) this volume contains two new essays by Ryle himself: "Thinking and Self-Teaching" and "Thinking and Saying." Four (...) papers by members of the philosophy staff at Rice form a group. Each of them discusses Ryle’s contribution to a problem in which the author is interested, carefully delineating Ryle’s analysis and treatment of the problem. Generally Ryle is regarded as having said some important things about the topic, having said some things which are questionable, and having at least advanced the topic in an important way. Subjects dealt with in roughly this fashion are "Reference and Existence" by Lyle Angene, "Sensations, Feelings, and Expression" by Richard J. Sclafani, "Dispositions and Hypotheticals" by Robert W. Burch, and "Why Virtue Cannot be Taught" by Thomas McElvain. As surveys of Ryle’s position and as assessments of his views, the essays are consistently good. (shrink)

This is a surprisingly good book. Published by Longmans in Great Britain as part of a series on "Education Today," it provides a very lucid and cogent first glimpse at the discipline of the philosophy of religion. The author's perspective is derivative of the analytic school, but what makes the book so valuable is that Goodall relates linguistic distinctions to Biblical categories. The author makes it obvious that he is a believer and authenticates the conviction that one can be a (...) believer and still sound like Flew or Ryle. The influence of Ian T. Ramsey comes through loud and clear. Goodall presents his proofs for the validity of religious statements with clarity and vigor. Worth the price of the book alone is Goodall's discussion of Lear's "The pobble who had no toes."--W. A. J. (shrink)

The Overview series functions as a kind of reputable pony for harried Roman Catholics. This particular volume gives a rather surprisingly competent description of what Existentialism is all about. The author finds Existentialism's greatest virtue in its emphasis upon human freedom. He rejects the Sartrean Existentialism in favor of its Marcelian form. This is a valuable little work, somewhat akin to Jean Wahl's book on the same subject of a few generations ago.--W. A. J.

Fr. Seidel sees "the crisis of creativity" as a perennial issue facing man, forcing him to make decisive choices that ultimately affect his destiny. The basic concern of the book is to analyze the creative process itself which Seidel does not accept as an irrational, brute eruption into consciousness. While recognizing the importance of the unconscious, he attempts to bring out those factors that are not immune to analysis. Drawing on insights of Aristotle, Kant, Hume, Freud, James, and Bergson, Seidel (...) discusses the significance of "selective forgetting," remembering, and the association of ideas. According to the author, creativity is a process that should be taken account of in the conscious reflections of philosophers. He feels its neglect in much modern and contemporary philosophy can be attributed to a fundamentally misleading conception of the importance of methodology that found its way into philosophy with Bacon and Descartes. The search for the single right method, which when found and exercised would yield "truth," is thus seen as concomitant with the denigration of an intuitive basis for knowledge. For Seidel, this is a reversal of the Aristotelian view which acknowledges the instrumental character of any method and its subordination to prior insight. Because of its non-technical nature, the book can be read with profit by both professional philosophers and the generally educated public.—L. W. (shrink)