Reviews concepts of hope, despair, and depression. Hope is viewed as the belief and expectation that one has some control over life and the future, that unpleasant events are products of both personal perspective and fate, and that problems will be mastered or will fade.

Toward A Sociological Imagination builds on the ideas C. Wright Mills expressed in The Sociological Imagination for an approach to the scientific method broad enough to open up to the full range of knowledge within the sociology discipline. In this book, nine sociologists and one philosopher provide detailed tests of the utility of the approach within diverse substantive sociological areas.

This chapter contains section titled: Upbringing English Works, Dutch Sources The Fable Last Work and Legacy.

ABSTRACTIn the first section I ask two questions: what sort of a poem is Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and what is the immediate experience of reading it in sequence? These two questions are the practical equivalents of the main terms of my title. I try to answer them by reconstructing a first reading of the poem in the light of my own experience and the imagined one of the first readers of the poem. I suggest that two terms—accretion and elimination—are (...) helpful here and that, in some ways, the structure and sequential experiencing of the poem resemble the structures of extended nineteenth-century musical forms. In the second section, I reverse perspective and take a position at the end of the poem. From such a point, it is easier to find what the poem has included and eliminated and this, in turn, suggests the kind of poem that it is. In the third section I tackle the terms “improvisation” and “hybrid genres” directly, link them with my earlier arguments, and engage with some theorists, especially Bakhtin.... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bernard Mandeville and the Therapy of “The Clever Politician”Harold J. CookAs the institutional authority of the learned physicians of Augustan London waned, new threats to the classical foundations of medical practice appeared. 1 Patients had more freedom to chose from a variety of practitioners and practices, giving both consumer demand and the advertising skills of suppliers an even more powerful hand in medical affairs. While the burgeoning (...) medical marketplace developed mostly because of the profound socio-economic and political changes of the late Stuart period, intellectual transformations were at play, too. The new science appeared to encourage empiricism and the development of new remedies based on experimentation, devaluing university education in medical classics, but conversely the new science could strengthen physicians’ claims to superiority over mere patients and practitioners. Medical materialists, for instance, could turn the classical advisor/client relationship into that of an expert contolling a passive recipient (patient) for his or her own good.One contemporary debate that shows the implications of materialism for medical relationships is the theory of the passions. The passions linked mind and body. According to most classical accounts, one could (or should) control the passions by applying reason, resulting in both a virtuous and a healthy life. But according to a strong version of materialism, the mind could not hope to control the passions. A doctor therefore could no longer appeal to patients’ reason; rather, he had to manipulate the patient’s passions for his or her own good. Hence for a materialist, the doctor was not an adviser to the patient but an expert therapist, not a teacher of health and virtue but a “clever politician” who ordered bodily passions. Some versions of the new science, then, favored [End Page 101] the expertise of physicians while undermining older views about learned authority. Such an outlook is clear in the work of Dr. Bernard Mandeville, whose famous Fable of the Bees shows how the “clever politician” played on passions to make the body politic run smoothly. Mandeville held coherent views on politics, economics, moral philosophy, and medicine. Like many doctors of his time, he fought to establish his expertise in the new science. His views are expressed most clearly in the theory of the passions. By examining his discussion of the passions in both his social commentary and his medical dialogues, we can note similarities among his various writings and glimpse one of his fundamental positions on medicine and humanity.The Fable and its CriticsTo many English minds of the early eighteenth century, no one exemplified materialism’s threat better than Dr. Bernard Mandeville. Mandeville’s famous slogan, the subtitle of his Fable of the Bees—“private vices, public benefits”—seemed to epitomize materialism’s inherent immorality. The book seemed to argue that what most people recognized as human vices were the main engines of the collective good. Mandeville’s famous book pictured human nature as animalistic, in which the passions held sway over reason. In Mandeville’s world, it appeared, reason became little more than the ability to rationalize, the instrument of hypocrisy, merely letting people cover their true motives (grounded as they were in the passions) with empty words pretending to more exalted ends.His Fable had begun as a little, anonymous, satirical poem in 1705, titled “The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turn’d Honest.” It began by speaking of “A Spacious Hive well stockt with Bees, / That liv’d in Luxury and Ease.” Many of the bees were knaves, with no calling free of deceit, but while “every Part was full of Vice, / Yet [was] the whole Mass a Paradise; /... Such were the Blessings of that State; / Their Crimes conspir’d to make them Great.” Avarice, prodigality, luxury, pride, envy, vanity, folly, fickleness, and inconstancy employed millions, encouraging ingenuity and industry and creating pleasures and comforts “To such a Height, the very Poor / Liv’d better than the Rich before.” But many of the thriving bees complained, shouting for honesty and virtue. When Jove “rid / The bawling Hive of Fraud,” economic collapse followed, with the consequent end of arts and sciences as well; population declined; the hive’s territory decreased; and the remaining bees toiled long and... (shrink)

What is the self? And how does it relate to the body? In the second edition of Personal Identity, Harold Noonan presents the major historical theories of personal identity, particularly those of Locke, Leibniz, Butler, Reid and Hume. Noonan goes on to give a careful analysis of what the problem of personal identity is, and its place in the context of more general puzzles about identity. He then moves on to consider the main issues and arguments which are the (...) subject of current debate, including the work of Bernard Williams and Derek Parfit, and makes new and challenging interpretations of them. This new edition contains additional material assessing the biological approach which has become increasingly popular in recent years, and extends the treatment of indeterminate identity to take account of the epistemic view of vagueness. This book covers the problem of personal identity from its origin in Locke's work to the most recent debates in the philosophical literature, and will be invaluablereading for any student of the topic. (shrink)

In the past decade, philosopher Bernard Rollin points out, we have "witnessed a major revolution in social concern with animal welfare and the moral status of animals." Adopting the stance of a moderate, Harold Guither attempts to provide an unbiased examination of the paths and goals of the members of the animal rights movement and of its detractors. Given the level of confusion, suspicion, misunderstanding, and mistrust between the two sides, Guither admits the difficulty in locating, much less (...) staying in, the middle of the road. The philosophical conflict, however, is fairly clear: those who resist reform, fearing that radical change in the treatment of animals will infringe on their business and property rights, versus the new activists who espouse a different set of moral and ethical obligations toward animals. From his position as a moderate, Guither presents a brief history of animal protection and the emergence of animal rights, describes the scope of the movement, and identifies major players such as Paul and Linda McCartney and organizations such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals that are actively involved in the movement. He concentrates on what is actually happening in the 1990s, discussing in detail the possible consequences of the current debate for those who own, use, or enjoy animals in entertainment and leisure pursuits. A reference work for students in animal sciences and veterinary medicine, the book also poses questions for philosophers, sociologists, and public policymakers as well as animal owners, animal and biomedical researchers, and manufacturers and distributors of animal equipment and supplies. (shrink)

Harold Laski (Manchester, 1893-Londres, 1950) es de los pocos teóricos del Estado en el mundo anglo-sajón que, desde John Stuart Mill, merece ser recordado. Sus teorías se desenvuelven en el tránsito del pensamiento liberal a la acción de tipo socialista. Fue miembro de la renombrada Fabian Society aunque renunció a su puesto en el Comité Ejecutivo Fabiano aduciendo incompatibilidad de opiniones, pues no aceptaba la posición "gradualista" y evolucionista de la socialdemocracia. Además formó parte del comité ejecutivo del partido (...) laboralista -aunque con serias disensiones con el premier MacDonald-, que debería estudiar los cambios originados en la acción socialista tras la primera Guerra Mundial. A su renombre puede haber ayudado el hecho de haber enseñado en las prestigiosas universidades de Mac-Gill de Montreal y en Harvard. De todas formas, a pesar de ser un pensador que extrajo sus teorías de la práctica y dar a sus aportaciones un contenido pragmático, como Hobbes o Locke, no se puede parangonar en ningún caso con ellos. Se trata -a pesar de sus bandazos- de un intelectual independiente de izquierda, postura que afirmó en su pertenencia al partido laborista. De esta suerte su teoría política pudo fundarse en la ética, que como se verá no se deja entremezclar con el materialismo histórico marxista. El Estado en la teoría y en la práctica corresponde al período en el que busca un acomodamiento de la teoría del Estado a las nuevas circunstancias, una fase que el autor inicia en la década de los treinta del siglo XX. Es un libro que desarrolla y amplía, como él deja claro, su libro anterior, La Democracia en crisis (1933), que también fuera traducido para Revista de Derecho Privado, y supone un perfeccionamiento de sus principios filosóficos. Laski se ocupa de diagnosticar las causas del fracaso y avanza un proyecto de teoría social que se propone desenvolver en el marco de ocho años. Este plan sería corregido después de colaboraciones en simposios y de publicaciones en diversas revistas junto a un grupo de adalides del socialismo, entre los que cabe destacar a Bernard Shaw, J.A. Hobson o Lowes Dickinson entre otros. Este libro, que se vertió al castellano en 1936, fue traducido por Vicente Herrero Ayllón. INDICE. Presentación Prefacio Capítulo I.- La concepción filosófica del Estado Capítulo II.- Estado y Gobierno en el mundo real Capítulo III.- El Estado y la comunidad internacional Capítulo IV.- Perspectivas para nuestra generación. (shrink)

There is widespread agreement that the most serious and debilitating contemporary social problem in the developed capitalist world is the problem of enforced or involuntary unemployment. The growth in mass unemployment in the 1970s and 80s has produced a renewal of the demand by the labour and trade union movement1 for the implementation of a ‘right to work’; presumably in the belief that the official recognition and legal enforcement of such a right would lead to the increased availability of jobs. (...) This campaigning slogan has sometimes emanated from the most unlikely sources. In his introduction to a published account of the 1971 Upper Clyde Shipbuilders occupation and work-in, entitledThe Right to Work, Mr Harold Wilson (then, significantly, in opposition) declared that ‘what the men of the Clyde proclaimed, and what I went to Clydeside to assert, was “the right to work”. And that principle cannot, and must not, be denied.’. (shrink)

In recent years "British" Idealism has been subject to sweeping re-evaluation and rehabilitation. The essays collected here by Will Sweet compare Bernard Bosanquet's ideas and arguments with those of Idealists and non-Idealists alike, and establish that Bosanquet was far more clear-headed and insightful than denunciations of the "Idealist school" by Moore, Russell, C. D. Broad, Harold Prichard, and A. J. Ayer suggest. Sweet observes in his introduction that Bosanquet has long remained in the shadows of T. H. Green (...) and F. H. Bradley, that Bosanquet was a prolific writer who shaped philosophical debates across the English-speaking world for decades, and that estimations of his social theory and political philosophy, and to a lesser extent his metaphysics, have diverted attention from his contributions to logic and aesthetics.Essays by Sandra M. den Otter, Peter Nicholson, and Kevin Sullivan deal directly with Bosanquet's social philosophy. Bosanquet was engaged from the 1880s in work with the Charity Organisation Society, an association that set the tone of late Victorian and Edwardian debates over British poverty. He and his wife served on the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws , against whose majority statement—cautioning against such direct assistance to the poor as. (shrink)

This book presents the thought of the Kyoto School in comparison with continental philosophers better known in the West and addresses the affiliation of some of its members with the militarism of the 1930s and 1940s.

This anthology on creativity represents a lifetime of reading and study by the late Charles Dewey Tenney, a philosopher who had been a student of Alfred North Whitehead at Harvard. In a series of fourteen essays Tenney considers the various factors that can be identified in creativity, followed by the recorded testimony of philosophers, artists, historians, explorers, scientists and others, both theorists and practitioners. The contributors extend in time from Aristotle and Sophocles to Buckminster Fuller and May Sarton. They include (...) such diverse thinkers as Martin Luther, Karl Marx, Lewis Carroll, Julian Huxley, Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, Gertrude Stein, Henry Nelson Wieman and Alfred North Whitehead. In all, more than 300 of the world's most creative individuals are included. Contents: Discovery, Invention and Creation; Roots of Discovery; Environs of Discovery; Agents of Discovery; Hinderances to Discovery; Observation and Discovery; Reason in Discovery; Reverie Discovery; Imagination in Discovery; Sensibility and Discovery; Method in Discovery; Artistry in Discovery; Diffusion; and Foresight and Discovery. (shrink)

In Simmons (Arch Math Logic 43:65–83, 2004), I described a method of producing ordinal notations ‘from below’ (for countable ordinals up to the Howard ordinal) and compared that method with the current popular ‘from above’ method which uses a collapsing function from uncountable ordinals. This ‘from below’ method employs a slight generalization of the normal function—the fruitful functions—and what seems to be a new class of functions—the helpful functions—which exist at all levels of the function space hierarchy over ordinals. Unfortunately, (...) I was rather sparing in my description of these classes of functions. In this paper I am much more generous. I describe the properties of the helpful functions on all finite levels and, in the final section, indicate how they can be used to simplify the generation of ordinal notations. The main aim of this paper is to fill in the details missing from [7]. The secondary aim is to indicate what can be done with helpful functions. Fuller details of this development will appear elsewhere. (shrink)

: This paper discusses the role of ethical considerations in the formulation of public policies aimed at shaping the scientific agenda. Specifically, new and controversial public policy issues will confront us in the twenty-first century as the result of developments on the frontiers of biomedical science. Some of the anxieties in the ethical arena generated by the rapid pace of these developments are likely to result in efforts to place constraints on the shape of the scientific agenda and the application (...) of new knowledge. Our moral propositions, therefore, will be tested and re-tested in their application to evolving social, cultural, and historical circumstances and the ever-changing technological context. (shrink)