This article examines the use of images of “light” and “enlightenment” in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and in the controversy that greeted the book, with an emphasis on caricatures of Burke and his book by James Gillray and others. Drawing on Hans Blumenberg’s discussion of the metaphor of “light as truth,” it situates this controversy within the broader usage of images of light and reason in eighteenth-century frontispieces and (drawing on the work of J. G. (...) A. Pocock and Albert O. Hirschman) explores the ways in which Burke’s critique of Richard Price operates with a rhetoric that views Price as part of an enlightenment that was inherently “radical” and, hence, a threat to the “enlightenment” that, in Burke’s view, had already been achieved. (shrink)

This paper seeks to develop the rhetorical approach to the study of social psychology, by looking at the rhetorical aspects of British attitudes towards the monarchy. The rhetorical approach stresses that attitudes are stances in public controversy and, as such, must be understood in their wider historical and argumentative context. Changes in this context can lead to changes in attitudinal expression, such as the phenomenon of Taking the Side of the Other, which should be distinguished from the sort of attitudinal (...) changes normally described by social psychological theories of attitudes. One needs to assume that attitudinal stances contain both explicit and implicit aspects, and also that these may be contrary to each other. The change in James Gillray's cartoons from anti-monarchical themes in 1792 to pro-monarchical themes in 1793 is discussed as an example of Taking the Side of the Other in response to changing historical contexts. Contemporary monarchical attitudes are also examined to show the rhetorical nature of implicit criticisms and justifications, as well as the rhetorical complexity of these attitudes. General implications for the rhetorical study of implicit and explicit aspects of attitudes are discussed. (shrink)

This essay argues for the significance of visual sources in intellectual history, using a case study on the central importance of snuffboxes in eighteenth-century debates regarding politeness, commerce, virtue, and manners. It highlights the authors, artists and advertisers who celebrated snuff-taking in both verbal and visual texts as a positive symbol of elegance, sociability and the transformative effects of polite commerce. And it analyses the highly sophisticated texts of London satirists who challenged this practice as symbolising the corruption associated with (...) luxury and commerce. Challenges to this practice, which involved some of the century’s most brilliant pens, from Sir John Vanburgh to William Hogarth and James Gillray, have been neglected by intellectual historians because of a tendency to treat visual sources as illustrations, rather than as significant contributions to political theory and debate. This essay argues that such an approach has resulted in an impoverished intellectual history and that images – and even snuffboxes themselves, used in highly articulated ritual performances of politeness and satirised in highly gendered terms – should be regarded as ‘texts’ and ‘idioms’ in the politics of politeness and patronage. It highlights Cambridge school contextualism as a method by which such texts may be read productively. (shrink)

The book demonstrates that speaking, feeling, reflecting, and identifying are interrelated processes and shows how desire or shame are attached to language.

This book offers a systematic examination of the place of religion within Kant's major writings. Kant is often thought to be highly reductionistic with regard to religion - as though religion simply provides the unsophisticated with colourful representations of moral lessons that reason alone could grasp. James DiCenso's rich and innovative discussion shows how Kant's theory of religion in fact emerges directly from his epistemology, ethics and political theory, and how it serves his larger political and ethical projects of (...) restructuring institutions and modifying political attitudes towards greater autonomy. It also illustrates the continuing relevance of Kant's ideas for addressing issues of religion and politics that remain pressing in the contemporary world, such as just laws, transparency in the public sphere and other ethical and political concerns. The book will be valuable for a wide range of readers who are interested in Kant's thought. (shrink)

2013 Word Guild Award (Academic) How does worship work? How exactly does liturgical formation shape us? What are the dynamics of such transformation? In the second of James K. A. Smith's three-volume theology of culture, the author expands and deepens the analysis of cultural liturgies and Christian worship he developed in his well-received Desiring the Kingdom. He helps us understand and appreciate the bodily basis of habit formation and how liturgical formation--both "secular" and Christian--affects our fundamental orientation to the (...) world. Worship "works" by leveraging our bodies to transform our imagination, and it does this through stories we understand on a register that is closer to body than mind. This has critical implications for how we think about Christian formation. Professors and students will welcome this work as will pastors, worship leaders, and Christian educators. The book includes analyses of popular films, novels, and other cultural phenomena, such as The King's Speech, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, and Facebook. (shrink)

Counterfactual theories of causation of the sort presented in Mackie, 1974, and Lewis, 1973 are a familiar part of the philosophical landscape. Such theories are typically advanced primarily as accounts of the metaphysics of causation. But they also raise empirical psychological issues concerning the processes and representations that underlie human causal reasoning. For example, do human subjects internally represent causal claims in terms of counterfactual judgments and when they engage in causal reasoning, does this involves reasoning about counterfactual claims? This (...) paper explores several such issues from a broadly interventionist perspective. (shrink)

What is the relationship between, on the one hand, the sorts of causal claims found in the special sciences (and in common sense) and, on the other hand, the world as described by physics? A standard picture goes like this: the fundamental laws of physics are causal laws in the sense that they can be interpreted as telling us that realizations of one set of physical factors or properties “causes” realizations of other properties. Causal claims in the special sciences are (...) then true (to the extent that they are) in virtue of “instantiating” these underlying causal laws; as it is often put, the latter serve as “truth-makers” for the former. The picture is thus one according to which the notion of cause, as it occurs in the special sciences, is reflected or “grounded” in a fairly straightforward and transparent way in a similar notion that occurs in fundamental physics. This paper explores some alternatives to this picture. (shrink)

In all these discussions, the author explains the arguments he is criticizing, for the benefit of the non-specialist reader, so that this work can serve as a ...

James M. Robins, Richard Scheines, Peter Spirtes, and Larry Wasserman. The Limits of Causal Knowledge.

Explores the Pragmatists' contributions to American social thought, drawing upon the writings of William James, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, James Hayden Tufts, and their various critics. This work also explores the Pragmatic analysis of society's potential for ongoing intelligent inquiry and cooperative evaluation to address social ills.

This paper concentrates on the issue of what happens to the confidence one has in the justification of one's belief when one discovers an epistemic peer with conflicting higher and/or lower order evidences. Certain symmetries surface during epistemic peer disagreement, which tend to make one less confident. The same happens in religious disagreements. Mostly externalist perspectives are considered. The epistemology of ordinary disagreements and that of religious ones behave similarly, such that principles used in the former can be seen to (...) apply also in the latter. (shrink)

In describing his seven and a half years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, the late Vice Admiral James B. Stockdale has said: "In that atmosphere of death and hopelessness, stripped of the niceties, the amenities of civilization, my ideas on life and leadership crystallized." Despite torture, intimidation, and isolation, Stockdale fulfilled his duties as senior officer among the prisoners with intelligence and courage, defining rules of conduct and maintaining morale. He often described the intense pressures of (...) that situation as a "melting" experience, in which preconceived feelings, fears, and bias melt as one comes to realize that, under the gun, you must grow or fail—or, in some cases, grow or die. This collection of his essays and speeches from the 1980s and 1990s reinforces how that experience formed a lifelong basis for his philosophical thought on issues of character, leadership, integrity, personal and public virtue, and ethics. The selections in this volume all reflect, in one way or another, a central theme: how man can rise with dignity to prevail in the face of adversity. (shrink)

The article discusses the concept of multisensuality in the satirical prints of the Georgian era in England, focusing on how the sensory perception enhances the visual humor. Drawing upon historical and cultural contexts, this study investigates how English caricaturists employed various sensory elements, such as sight, sound, smell, taste and touch to convey satire and provoke emotional responses among viewers. Ten satirical prints by five different authors were chosen for the analysis.

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

Christian tradition has largely held three affirmations on the resurrection of the physical body. Firstly, that bodily resurrection is not a superfluous hope of afterlife. Secondly, there is immediate post-mortem existence in Paradise. Finally, there is numerical identity between pre-mortem and post-resurrection human beings. The same tradition also largely adheres to a robust doctrine of The Intermediate State, a paradisiacal disembodied state of existence following the biological death of a human being. This book argues that these positions are in fact (...) internally inconsistent, and so a new metaphysics for life after death is required. (shrink)

Our lives are dominated by technology. We live with and through the achievements of technology. What is true of the rest of life is of course true of medicine. Many of us owe our existence and our continued vigour to some achievement of medical technology. And what is true in a major way of general medicine is to a significant degree true of psychiatry. Prozac has long since arrived, and in its wake an ever-growing armamentarium of new psychotropics; beyond that, (...) neuroscience promises ever more technological advances for the field. -/- However, the effect of technology on the field of psychiatry remains highly ambiguous. On the one hand there are the achievements, both in the science and practice of psychiatry; on the other hand technology's influence on the field threatens its identity as a humanistic practice. In this ambiguity psychiatry is not unique - major thinkers have for a long time been highly ambivalent and concerned about the technological order that now defines modern society. For the future, the danger is that the psychiatrically real becomes that which can be seen, the symptom, and especially that which can be measured. Disorders and treatments might become reduced to what can be defined by diagnostic criteria and what can be mapped out on a scale. -/- This book exams how technology has come to influence and drive psychiatry forward, and considers at just what cost these developments have been made. It includes a range of stimulating and thought-provoking chapters from a range of psychiatrists and philosophers. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for a computational theory of thinking that does not eliminate the mind. In doing so, I will defend computationalism against the arguments of John Searle and James Fetzer, and briefly respond to other common criticisms.

Discussing authorial power, landscape metaphor and the notions of community and sense of place, this explores the ways in which spatial and cultural analysis have found much common ground in making sense of ourselves and the landscape we inhabit.

Moral Measures is a clear, fresh and accessible introduction to ethics which carefully illuminates the difficult issues surrounding cross-cultural ethics and moral thought. By examining Western and Eastern moral traditions, James Tiles explores the basis for determining ethical measures of conduct across different cultures.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

A PERSONAL PHILOSOPHY FOR WAR TIME BY THE AUTHOR OF STREAMLINE YOUR MIND A Personal Philosophy for War Time JAMES L. MURSELL Professor of Education Teachers ...

This essay constructs an argument for a dialectic between the scientific and clinical aspects of medicine using the hermeneutical approach of Paul Ricoeur as a theoretical and philosophical guide. Additionally, the relationship between this dialectic and narrative case histories is examined as a way of expressing this abstract and theoretical concept in more concrete terms.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Who Is a Buddhist?James William ColemanAs a sociologist who has done a lot of work on Western Buddhism, the question of exactly who is a Buddhist and who isn't is a big one. The answers to such fundamental sociological issues as how many Buddhists there are, their age, ethnic group, marital status, social background, and place of residence all rest on that fundamental definitional question. There are, moreover, (...) a number of reasons that question may be harder to answer than for the Judeo-Christian religions from which most of the working assumptions of the social sciences about religion are drawn. To take only a single example, almost all the survey research on religion in the West assumes that one can have only a single religious affiliation. Someone is a Mormon or a Muslim or a Jew, not all three. That assumption makes perfectly good sense when working with the Western hegemonic traditions, but of course, as we can see from the articles in this journal someone can identify with more than one religion at the same time. In fact, it may be more common for people in Japan to identify as both Shinto and Buddhist than to identify as either one or the other. If left undiscovered, hidden Eurocentric biases can obviously lead to a very distorted understanding.The usual sociological approach to such questions as who is a Buddhist, or an African American, or a Republican, has its theoretical foundations in labeling theory.1 According to this view, if you define yourself as a Buddhist and other Buddhists accept you as such, then you are a Buddhist, if not, then you aren't. One obvious issue with this approach is how to handle people who define themselves as belonging to a particular group but are not accepted as a member by others in the group. For example, people of mixed racial ancestry may identify with their more privileged ancestors but be excluded by that group because of their physical appearance. But this isn't generally a big problem in the research on Buddhism, and I won't pursue the issue further here. But another more important problem comes up when we apply this approach to Western Buddhism, for there is an interesting reluctance among many people to label themselves as Buddhists, even when they are deeply involved in Buddhist practice.When my book The New Buddhism: The Western Transformation of an Ancient Tradition first came out in 2001,2 journalists and scholars asked me one question over and over again: "How many Buddhists are there in the West?" The answer to this question [End Page 33] obviously rests on how we define who is a Buddhist, and an examination of this issue is actually an excellent way to explore the definitional problems we run into in deciding who is a Buddhist and who isn't. At that time, all I had to offer were a few educated guesses from various sources, which surprisingly turned out not to be so very far off the mark. But since then, several good surveys have helped clarify the issue.The best of these was the 2007 Pew Religious Landscape Survey of more than thirty-five thousand Americans.3 It was a phone survey, which isn't much of a methodological problem these days, but there are other reasons for believing that it underestimated the total number of Buddhists. For one thing, it didn't include Hawai'i, which because of its large Japanese American population in all probability contains a much higher percentage of Buddhists than most other states. Further, it was conducted only in English and Spanish, which would therefore exclude immigrants from Asian Buddhist countries who do not speak either of those languages. But whatever its weaknesses, the Pew survey is the broadest, most reliable source of data we have. Of those who were questioned by the Pew survey, 0.7 percent said they were Buddhists. If we multiply that by the adult population of the United States for that year, there were about 1.6 million American Buddhists at that time. If we multiply 0.7 percent by the total American population, thus including children as well... (shrink)

This article surveys some of the philosophical issues raised by recent experimental work in economics on so-called social preferences. This work raises a number of fascinating methodological and interpretive issues that are of central importance both to economics and to social and political philosophy.

James Robert Ballantyne taught oriental languages in India for sixteen years, producing grammars of Hindi, Sanskrit and Persian, along with translations of Hindu philosophy. In 1859, for the use of Christian missionaries, he prepared a guide to Hinduism, in English and Sanskrit. Published in two volumes in 1852, Synopsis of Science was intended to introduce his Indian pupils to Western science by using the framework of Hindu Nyaya philosophy, which was familiar to them and which Ballantyne greatly respected. Volume (...) 1 proceeds through a series of aphorisms exemplifying Western logic, forms of argument, the workings of the body and the senses, basic astronomy, geography, laws of Newtonian motion, the action of liquids, pneumatics, acoustics and optics. The second part of the volume is a Sanskrit translation. Overall, the work serves as an excellent primary source on the educational aspects of British imperialism. (shrink)

Charlatan, magician, heroic man of action, revolutionary... Gurdjieff's rich and vivid life conjures up conflicting images. But who was the real Gurdjieff? On the fiftieth anniversary of Gurdjieff's death, James Moore draws on a lifetime's contact with Gurdjieffian pupils to tell the compelling and extraordinary stow of this eclectic revolutionary: his studies with the Red Hat Tibetan Lamas at the turn of the century, his travels disguised as a dervish, and how he was shot and almost killed twice. This (...) inveterate and restless seeker of the truth coaxed from archaic sources relevant philosophy that drew tides of men and women to his cause. Through the humanity and dry humor of his writing, and through scholarship evidenced in an unprecedented note section, Moore offers the reader an entertaining and reliable introduction to one of the most remarkable men of this century. (shrink)

Building upon the scholarship of Michael Polanyi, William Poteat has dedicated himself to offering an alternative model to the Cartesian dichotomy of mind and matter that has dominated Western thought for centuries. These essays, collected by James Nickell and James Stines, cover a wide range of subjects, from Poteat's analysis of the epistemological crisis brought on by the Cartesian program to his first attempts at formulating an alternative to the mind-body dichotomy. These essays relentlessly diagnose the present situation (...) of Western thought by making explicit the philosophical presuppositions to which it is committed. They include theological affirmations, reflections on epistemology, conceptual analyses, as well as dialogues with other writers in the field of cultural criticism and linguistic theory such as George Steiner, Noam Chomsky, and Walker Percy. Most significant is Poteat's bold affirmation of the primacy of persons and his analysis and critique of our cultural misconstructions of human awareness. _The Primacy of Persons and the Language of Culture_ provides an excellent introduction to the scholarship of William Poteat. It should be of particular interest to scholars of philosophy and theology, as well as others who share Poteat's deep concern for the state of human culture. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------- The above was already on the database - below was copied from the web William Poteat has dedicated himself to offering an alternative model to the Cartesian dichotomy of mind and matter that has dominated Western thought for centuries. These essays further diagnose the present situation of Western thought by making explicit the philosophical presuppositions to which it is committed. (shrink)

If the word ‘devastated’ feels most appropriate when thinking of the passing of a beloved one, it also undergirds, through the waste of its desert, two essential notions of Western philosophy and literature: chaos and khōra. Looking at our world twenty years after Derrida’s passing, and at how for more than five decades he thought and wrote on the notion of world, this essay examines the radicality of Derrida’s deconstruction for our past and future conceptions of a world, of ourselves, (...) and of each and any threshold between these terms. (shrink)

By 1999, the Falun Gong religious movement had spread widely and broadly throughout China. While on the surface its ideology of spiritual and physical cultivation did not seem threatening, the Chinese government felt otherwise. That year, the government cracked down hard on the movement, and its successful repression of it over a six year period is a textbook example of how the Chinese state operates in the face of perceived internal threats. Its success in containing the movement speaks volumes about (...) the regime's resilience as well. Revenge of the Forbidden City is the definitive account of China's response to Falun Gong. As James Tong shows, the episode also tells us a great deal about the Chinese state's political institutions, its media apparatus, and its formidable ability to crush dissent. The result is a book that will be essential for any scholar interested in how the Chinese state actually operates. (shrink)

Ours is an age full of desires but impoverished in its understanding of where those desires lead—an age that claims mastery over the world but also claims to find the world as a whole absurd or unintelligible. In The Vision of the Soul, James Matthew Wilson seeks to conserve the great insights of the western tradition by giving us a new account of them responsive to modern discontents. The western— or Christian Platonist—tradition, he argues, tells us that man is (...) an intellectual animal, born to pursue the good, to know the true, and to contemplate all things in beauty. Wilson begins by reconceiving the intellectual conservatism born of Edmund Burke’s jeremiad against the French Revolution as an effort to preserve the West’s vision of man and the cosmos as ordered by and to beauty. After defining the achievement of that vision and its tradition, Wilson offers an extended study of the nature of beauty and the role of the fine arts in shaping a culture but above all in opening the human intellect to the perception of the form of reality. Through close studies of Theodor W. Adorno and Jacques Maritain, he recovers the classical vision of beauty as a revelation of truth and being. Finally, he revisits the ancient distinction between reason and story-telling, between mythos and logos, in order to rejoin the two. Story-telling is foundational to the forms of the fine arts, but it is no less foundational to human reason. Human life in turn constitutes a specific kind of form—a story form. The ancient conception of human life as a pilgrimage to beauty itself is one that we can fully embrace only if we see the essential correlation between reason and story and the essential convertibility of truth, goodness and beauty in beauty. By turns a study in fundamental ontology, aesthetics, and political philosophy, Wilson’s book invites its readers to a renewal of the West’s intellectual tradition. (shrink)

Is Aquinas's Sententia libri Ethicorum an interpretation of Aristotle based on `principles of Christian ethics'? Or do we have in that work a presentation of the foundation of Aquinas's moral philosophy? Professor Doig answers these questions through an examination of the historical context within which the Sententia was composed. In Chapters 1-2, the work's role as a corrective of earlier commentaries is established. Chapter 3, by examining philosophy at Paris between 1215 and 1283, reveals that the proposal by Aquinas of (...) a moral philosophy would have been unexceptional. Chapter 4's investigation of the principles underlying the moral theory of the Sententia makes apparent that they were regarded by Aquinas as both philosophical and Aristotelian. The date to be assigned the composition of the Sententia is studied in Chapter 5, and the conclusion is drawn, that with some probability, the Sententia is its author's final proposal of moral doctrines. The closing Chapter offers a summary of that moral philosophy against the historical background brought out earlier. (shrink)

i^J <^\<*01 «<^>V^> \0r> I^K^) j^jt^j<J>» AN ESSAY ON POETRY AND MUSIC, AS THEY AFFECT THE MIND. ...