A compilation of essays that cover the life and work of Masao Abe, one of the greatest Zen Buddhist communicators of the 20th century. Masao Abe has opened up a rich dialogue between Japan and the West. He is considered the leading living Zen figure in the Kyoto School of Buddhist thought and the successor of D.T. Suzuki, his early mentor, as the foremost exponent of Zen Buddhism in the West. In this volume, through stories and recollections, 35 leading intellectual (...) figures explore Abe's encounter with the West, incl'g. his work on interfaith dialogue as a basis for world peace, as well as his comparative philosophical scholarship over the past 30 years. "An extraordinary step ahead in the encounter between Zen and the West.". (shrink)

The organizational history of American government during the past 100 years has been written principally in terms of the creation of larger and larger public organizations. Beginning with the Progressive movement, no matter the goal, the reflexive response has been to consolidate and centralize into formal hierarchies. That efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability, and the coordination necessary to achieve them, are promoted by such reorganizations has become widely accepted. Borrowing from social psychology, sociology, political science, and public administration, and using the (...) public transit system of the San Francisco Bay area for illustrative purposes, Donald Chisholm directly challenges this received wisdom. He argues that, contrary to contemporary canons of public administration, we should actively resist the temptation to consolidate and centralize our public organizations. Rather, we should carefully match organizational design with observed types and levels of interdependence, since organizational systems that on the surface appear to be tightly linked webs of interdependence on closer examination often prove decomposable into relatively simpler subsystems that may be coordinated through decentralized, informal organizational arrangements. Chisholm finds that informal channels between actors at different organizations prove remarkably effective and durable as instruments of coordination. Developed and maintained as needed rather than according to a single preconceived design, informal channels, along with informal conventions and contracts, tend to match interorganization interdependence closely and to facilitate coordination. Relying on such measures reduces the cognitive demands and obviates the necessity for broadscale political agreement typical of coordination by centralized, formal organizations. They also advance other important values that are frequently absent in formally consolidated organizations, such as reliability, flexibility, and the representation of varied interests. _Coordination Without Hierarchy_ is an incisive, penetrating work whose conclusions apply to a wide range of public organizations at all levels of government. It will be of interest to a broad array of social scientists and policymakers. In an earlier version, _Coordination Without Hierarchy_ received the American Political Science Association 1985 Leonard D. White Award for the best doctoral dissertation in the field of public administration, including broadly related problems of policy formation and administrative theory. (shrink)

In the continuing discussion and debate over the development of letter-forms in fifth-century Athens, the official casualty lists from the public cemetery have played little part. One of them, however, the so-called ‘Koroneia’ epigram and related fragments , has been used in the argument by H. B. Mattingly, who has assigned it to Delion and claims its tailed rho for the 420s. But, the epigraphical argument aside, it seems to me that in so doing he has ignored two important characteristics (...) of the lists—characteristics that are not apparent from these fragments by themselves but that can be seen from all the inscriptions of this class taken as a group. No summary of our knowledge of these lists has been written for almost 50 years, during which time the number known has almost doubled. In this paper I should like to outline the present state of our knowledge and to give some impressions of them gained from examining all known fragments and preparing them for publication. I wish to stress that these impressions were formed slowly, with no parti pris, no idea of their being used in any debate over letter-forms, but merely with the purpose of understanding as much as possible about the lists as a group. (shrink)

Metaphysics is the thoroughly empirical science. Every item of experience must be evidence for or against any hypothesis of speculative cosmology, and every experienced object must be an exemplar and test case for the categories of analytic ontology. Technically, therefore, one example ought for our present theme to be as good as another. The more dignified examples, however, are darkened with a patina of tradition and partisanship, while some frivolous ones are peculiarly perspicuous. Let us therefore imagine three lollipops, made (...) by a candy man who buys sticks from a big supplier and molds candy knobs on them. Lollipop No. 1 has a red round peppermint head, No. 2 a brown round chocolate head, No. 3 a red square peppermint head. The circumstance here which mainly provokes theories of subsistence and inherence is similarity with difference: each lollipop is partially similar to each other and partially different from it. If we can give a good account of this circumstance in this affair we shall have the instrument to expose the anatomy of everything, from an electron or an apple to archangels and the World All. (shrink)

If a bit of perceptual behavior is a trope, so is any response to a stimulus, and so is the stimulus, and so therefore, more generally, is every effect and its cause. When we say that the sunlight caused the blackening of the film we assert a connection between two tropes; when we say that Sunlight in general causes Blackening in general, we assert a corresponding relation between the corresponding universals. Causation is often said to relate events, and generally speaking (...) any event is a trope: a smile, a sneeze, a scream, an election, a cold snap, a storm, a lightning flash, a conspiracy, perhaps a wave, and so on up to such big and important events that they have proper names, like the Passover and Lulu the H-bomb explosion. We have called a trope a "case" of its universal, while the universal is the "kind" of the trope, so it is no surprise that a medical "case" is a trope--in the sense, at any rate, in which a person is said to have a case of typhoid fever rather than to be a case of it. A high-school boy, uncoached, has assured me, "Of course there's such a thing as Redness--this pencil has a case of it." When a scientist reports a temperature or a velocity or a viscosity he is reporting a trope--not a universal, because it is a once-for-all occurrence, but not a concrete thing either, though doubtless a component of one. He is likely to call it an "aspect" of the thing or, preferably, a "state," and generally speaking a "state" of a thing or a nation is a trope. Recent developments in sub-atomic physics, a none too reliable oracle, suggest that an electron, e.g., just is an existent state, and that the common-sense philosophy of concreta here abdicates altogether in favor of the trope. (shrink)

This landmark collection of essays by six renowned philosophers explores the implications of the contentious realism/antirealism debate for epistemology. The essays examine issues such as whether epistemology needs to be realist, the bearing of a realist conception of truth on epistemology, and realism and antirealism in terms of a pragmatist conception of epistemic justification. Richard Rorty's essay provides a critical commentary on the other five.

My main thesis is that the necessary and its necessity are factual, or matters of fact, in the sense that they are realities on the same ontic plane or planes with any other beings there may be, physical, phenomenal, or Platonically transcendent, and are no more creatures of thought and speech than dogs and gravity are; if I think they are all physical actualities, this is only because I think everything is. I have a second thesis, however, which is that (...) the realities objectively characterized by necessity are "facts" in the more special sense in which we say it is a fact that the earth is round but not that the earth is a fact or that roundness is a fact. It is fashionable to declare that necessity and contingency pertain only to statements, judgments, or "propositions"; and though the popularity of this is due, I am afraid, to what is false in it, namely, its subjectivism, its philosophic force is due to a covert truth, that necessity can qualify nothing short of the states of affairs which make statements or judgments necessarily true. Any shifts that can avoid the admission of facts in general as first-class members of the universe can provide for what I shall say of necessary facts, but meanwhile the worth of the category will be so proving itself that I cannot foresee abandoning it, and it is all I shall be meaning hereinafter by the word "facts.". (shrink)

"Papermacs 3002." Bibliography: p. 72-73.

The Harvard philosopher Donald C. Williams (1899-1983) was a key figure in the development of analytic philosophy. He played a crucial role in reviving metaphysics at a time when other philosophers ridiculed, criticized, and committed it to the flames. He constructed an explanatorily powerful and parsimonious ontology and cosmology founded on logic, science, and common sense. This volume, with its comprehensive introduction, is set to be the definitive source for William's work, both for historians of analytic philosophy and (...) for contemporary metaphysicians. (shrink)

Argues against G.E. Moore's thesis that "good" is unanalysable. Consulting the dictionary ("more illuminating than many volumes of rational axiology"), Williams concludes that the fundamental meaning of "good" is being in accord with my purposes. That does not rule out a search for some highest good that will unify my purposes.

An extract from Williams' The Ground of Induction (1947): "The sober amateur who takes the time to follow recent philosophical discussion will hardly resist the impression that much of it, in its dread of superstition and dogmatic reaction, has been oriented purposely toward skepticism: that a conclusion is admired in proportion as it is skeptical; that a jejune argument for skepticism will be admitted where a scrupulous defense of knowledge is derided or ignored; that an affirmative theory is a mere (...) annoyance to be stamped down as quickly as possible to a normal level of denial and defeat. It is an age which most admires the man who, as somebody has said, 'has a difficulty for every solution'. Whether or not this judgment is fair, however, it is safe to say, with Whitehead, that 'the theory of induction is the despair of philosophy - and yet all our activities are based upon it'. [A.N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York, 1925, p. 35] So prodigious a theoretical contretemps cannot remain a tempest in the professors' teapot. The news that no foundation is discoverable for the procedures of empirical intelligence, and still more the proclaimed discovery that there is no foundation, and still more the complacency which recommends that we reconcile ourselves to the lack, condemn the problem as a 'pseudoproblem', and proceed by irrational faith or pragmatic postulate, will slowly shatter civilized life and thought, to a degree which will make the modernist's loss of confidence in Christian supernaturalism, so often cited as the ultimate in spiritual cataclysms, seem a minor vicissitude. The demand that rational man adjust himself to a somewhat bleaker universe than he once hoped for is only one large and picturesque instance of the sort of re-orientation which inductive intelligence, in its very nature,continually imposes, and well within the proved capacities of human reason and good-will.. (shrink)

The definitive principle of actualism is that the world is composed wholly of actual or factual entities, including concreta like a horse and abstracta like his neigh, and the sums and the sets thereof, all on the one plane of particular and definite existents. There are no substrata of potency or prime matter, no forces or virtues, no blur of indefiniteness or press of tendency; no superstructure of unexampled essences or disembodied possibilities or transcendental acts of Be-ing. Our actual entities, (...) I specify further, are all either simple qualia, or relations belonging to one of three primitive categories, or some compound of these. The relational categories which I think sufficient and necessary are the whole-part or "merological" relations, resemblances or "comparisons," and locative distances and directions, not necessarily the physical geometry of space-time, but at least some analogous modes of deployment. "Factualism" here is a rhyming synonym of "actualism" and does not connote the very dubious doctrine of the young Wittgenstein that the world is the sum of "facts" in the sense of Sachverhalten. Nor does "actualism" connote the doctrine, so popular in New York and environs, that things must be active, though quite likely most of them are. (shrink)