In the mid-1970s, the phrase “small is beautiful” became a counterculture slogan against the industrial threat to the environment and the scarcity of resources. Arguing against excessive materialism and meaningless growth, the late Dr. Ernest Friedrich Schumacher—the author of Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, promoted the use of small-scale technology to benefit both humankind and the environment. As an economist trained in a market-oriented discipline, his thinking evolved from believing that large-scale technology could be salvation for (...) industrial civilization to believing that large-scale technology is the root of degrading human beings and the environment. (shrink)

The centenary of E.F. Schumacher's birth (1911-1977) offered an urgent opportunity to revisit his work and life. Against the background of the crisis at the beginning of this century, reconsidering Schumacher's Small is Beautiful or frugality paradigm makes clear that advances in responsible economics continue to be a priority. This book contains the proceedings of the 2001 Annual Conference of the European SPES Forum on "Responsibility in Economics and Business: The Legacy of E.F. Schumacher", which was organised (...) in September 2011 by the Centre for Ethics of the University of Antwerp. (shrink)

This book is about the nature of sensory perception. Contributions focus on five questions, i.e.: (1) What distinguishes sensory perception from other cognitive states? Is it true, for instance, that perceptual content, in contrast to the phenomenal content of sensations like pain, always depends on the perceivers conceptual resources? (2) How do we have to explain the intentionality of perceptual states? (3) What is the nature of perceptual content? (4) In which sense do the objects of sensory perception depend on (...) the constitution of the perceiver? How, for instance, do secondary qualities like colours, sounds and smells depend on the perception of human subjects? (5) How can we account for the intentionality of misperceptions? These questions are addressed through the interpretation of classical historical texts as well as in the context of systematical reflections. With contributions by Margaret Atherton, Michael Ayers, Peter Baumann, Martha Brandt Bolton, Thomas Grundmann, Gary Hatfield, Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Andreas Kemmerling, Bertram Kienzle, Martine Nida-Rümelin, Dominik Perler, Jay F. Rosenberg, Katia Saporiti, Ralph Schumacher, Gerald Vision, and Russell Wahl. (shrink)

In spite of his profound influence on philosophy in general, Wittgenstein has had no discernible effect upon the philosophy of education. It was not to be expected that his rejection of doctrine in favour of the clarification of language as the goal of philosophical activity would readily find favour with those for whom the medium was intrinsically less important than the message it was intended to convey. Nevertheless philosophers of education have no medium other than language and no means of (...) identifying the subject of their discourse other than the word ‘education’. They cannot convey a clear message if the meaning of their words, ‘education’ in particular, is not clear. Accordingly they cannot take for granted but must clarify in accordance with a postulated theory of meaning the nexus between ‘education’ and education. In his early Tractatus and his later Philosophical Investigations respectively, Wittgenstein proposes alternative theories of meaning. I apply each in turn to ‘education’ and sketch my view of a Wittgensteinian philosophy of education. (shrink)

It is, I think, interesting to compare the views of E. F. Schumacher and J. M. Keynes on the ethical aspects of economics – both the economic systems of which they were a part and economics as a subject. Both agreed that economics (as commonly understood and taught) applied to only a limited sphere of life. They agreed about the role of profits, the market and the love of money. And they both believed that there was much more to (...) life than getting and spending. For Keynes, economic activity was the means to bring society to a position where the good life could be enjoyed. Schumacher was even more ambitious: he thought economic activity should be made part of the good life. (shrink)

The first thing to note about Peirce’s semiotic aesthetics is that Peirce himself had very little to say about it. Two articles published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism are concerned with determining Pierce’s views on aesthetic theory. The first was by Max Oliver Hocutt, in 1962, called “The Logical Foundations of Peirce’s Aesthetics.” This article has something less than an auspicious start, however, since its first sentence reads, “There is a sense in which it might be said (...) that Charles Peirce had no aesthetics.” And since that sentence is followed in the next paragraph with one of the flattest—or, if you prefer, deadest of metaphors, to wit. (shrink)

This is the first comprehensive translation of the expanded French version of E.F.F. Chladni's Traité d'Acoustique, using Chladni's 1802 Die Akustik for reference and clarification. Chladni's experiments and observations with sound and vibrations profoundly influenced the development of the field of Acoustics. The famous Chladni diagrams along with other observations are contained in Die Akustik, published in German in 1802 and Traité d'Acoustique, a greatly expanded version, published in French in 1809. The present translation was undertaken by Robert T. Beyer, (...) PhD (1920-2008), noted acoustician, Professor of Physics at Brown University, and Gold Medal recipient of the Acoustical Society of America. Along with many other projects completed over the course of his career, Dr. Beyer translated Von Neumann's seminal work, Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics from the original German, spent 30 years translating Russian physics treatises and journals, served as editor of the English translation of the Soviet Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics, and also authored Sounds of our Times: Two Hundred Years of Acoustics. Represents the first comprehensive English translation of a seminal work in acoustics Translated by a prominent acoustician, and former Gold Medal recipient of the Acoustical Society of America In addition to the classic experiments with glass plates and violin bows, covers topics in music, architecture, and anatomy of human and animal hearing Appeals to a wide audience in physics, acoustics, and history of science. (shrink)

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Mr. Ayer , in Language, Truth and Logic , says: “Sentences which simply express moral judgments do not say anything. They are pure expressions of feeling and as such do not come under the category of truth and falsehood.... Aesthetic terms are used in exactly the same way as ethical terms.".