In this, his first book, originally published in 1926, Henry Nelson Wieman sets forth a view on the relationship of religious experience and scientific method which in substance he has maintained ever since. According to Wieman, our knowledge of the concrete world consists of immediate sensuous experience as interpreted through some set of concepts. Religious experience is the richest form of immediate sensuous experience. It is our awareness of God, who is as much an object of experience as are tree (...) and hill and stone. And scientific method is the systematic procedure by which the conceptual network for interpreting immediate sensuous experience is clarified and corrected, with the experience-concept compound thus becoming "science." Religious experience, therefore, receives its most adequate interpretation in science; while science, in turn, receives its most stimulating input from religious experience. In principle, the highest of the individual sciences is theology; in fact, however, the very complexity of religious experience and the difficulty of distinguishing it clearly from other types of immediate sensuous experience have prevented more than merely minimal progress in achieving a truly scientific theology. On the whole our ideas about God are marked by confusion and controversy, therefore, despite the fact that some of these notions probably are true. Wieman’s book serves as an excellent example of the liberal thought which dominated much of theology and philosophy-of-religion during the last part of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth. The religious thinker with a liberal perspective conceives his primary challenge as developing a scientifically acceptable interpretation of religious experience, taking that experience itself as being obvious and almost universally recognized. One need not be particularly well read to know that current judgments regarding the obviousness of religious experience are hardly so sanguine, however, and that the religious thinker typical of our own age therefore conceives his primary challenge quite differently.—J. M. V. (shrink)

Neither the speculative depth of Meister Eckhart nor the willpower and inner drive of Tauler are to be found in the writings of the third great mystic of fourteenth-century Rhineland, Henry Seuse. But we might well be compensated by authenticity of the description of the spiritual experience. This is not an edition for scholars and does not even try to resurrect the so savagely fought for issue on the authorship of Seuse's autobiography. We have here a major document of spiritual (...) life, with a great literary work making up about one-half of it. The other half contains the Booklet of the Eternal Wisdom, the Booklet of Truth, the Booklet of Letters, and two Sermons. Perhaps a little more critical apparatus and a little more comment on the themes of the texts would have improved the book, but instead of giving this, the translator simply refers to a book on Henry Seuse published in the same year, 1966. Even so this is a beautiful and important collection.--M. J. V. (shrink)

This is an ambitious venture into the thicket of medieval philosophy: what is the true object of metaphysics? The book begins with a number of texts, printed after various manuscripts through which the author hopes to illustrate the development of a certain chain of ideas. After a short introduction on the Aristotelian and Arabic sources of the whole problematics, there are three fundamental solutions of the question: God is one of the many subjects of metaphysics, God is the cause of (...) the subject of metaphysics, God is a part of the subject of metaphysics. These major alternatives are followed by their respective development in the works of later authors. Besides the more usual writers like St. Thomas, Scotus, R. Bacon, Siger of Brabant, Henry of Ghent, we are given interesting and penetrating accounts of the ideas of men like Augustinus Triumphus of Ancona, Petrus of Alvernia, John Quidort of Paris, etc. Despite the first impression provoked by the table of contents this book is not a herbarium of rarities or curiosities but a highly concentrated and often fascinating study of the real topics of all metaphysics and through this perhaps of the very possibility of metaphysics as such.--M. J. V. (shrink)

A highly interesting collection of lectures on the central themes of contemporary philosophy and theology in the European tradition. Out of twenty-seven fascinating titles a few especially interesting ones are: Heinrich Ott, "The Structure of the Act of Faith," Karl Kerényi, "The Myth of Faith," Antoine Vergote, "Myth, Belief, and Theological Faith," Henri Bouillard, "To Believe and to Understand," Geo Widengren, "Myth and Faith in the Light of Religious Phenomenology," Giulio Girardi, "Demythisation and Atheism," René Marlé, "Is the Christian (...) Faith a Religion?" Huguette Fugier, "Time and the Sacred in the Religious Vocabulary of the Romans," Renato Lazzarini, "Myth and Faith in Eschatological Perspective." All the lectures and the discussions centered around them are in French.—M. J. V. (shrink)

Originally published in 1934, this book contains the last three books of the Latin text of Cicero's Disputations at Tusculum, the second volume of Dougan's two-volume critical edition of the text. The Latin is accompanied by a running commentary, and Dougan provides an introduction on the arguments contained in the books and the manuscript sources for the text. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the works of Cicero.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Virtue and Grace in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas by Justin M. AndersonThomas V. BergVirtue and Grace in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas by Justin M. Anderson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), xiii + 327 pp.To ignore Aquinas's theological backstory to his account of the virtues—namely, his account of grace in its relation to human action—is to distort his account of the virtues. This is the very valid (...) thesis explored by Justin Anderson in Virtue and Grace in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas. Anderson critiques the tendency among contemporary Anglophone virtue ethicists to quietly bracket his account of grace even as they admire his account the virtues. More pointedly, Anderson holds that Aquinas's account of virtue is inseparable from his account of sin, grace, "and God's presence in human life and action." He endeavors to evidence Aquinas's authentic account of virtue and its "inner reliance on the theological categories of grace, sin, and divine providence" (1).Anderson thus proposes a reading of Aquinas that is diachronic, analytical and systematic, and text-based, and which follows the logic inherent in Aquinas's own reasoning.And he delivers.After a brief overview of Aquinas's understanding of virtue in chapter 1, in chapter 2, Anderson explores the Thomistic distinction that will largely serve as a heuristic for most of the study: the distinction between virtue secundum quid (pagan virtue) and virtue simpliciter, virtue infused in us by God—virtue in the truest sense of the term.In chapter 3, Anderson traces the historical evolution in Aquinas's understanding of grace as this impacts his understanding of the conditions under which a person can possess or embody virtue. He bases this exploration in part on the work of both Henri Bouillard and Bernard Lonergan. First Anderson explores how that evolution came about in the context of the emergence of two powerful categories of thought: the Aristotelian concept of nature in the twelfth century and the category of the supernatural in the thirteenth. According to Bouillard, Aquinas's understanding of grace would [End Page 1421] have been further shaped by two sets of discoveries during his sojourn in Italy in the early 1260s, the first being two anti-Pelagian tracts of St. Augustine, and the second being the Liber de bona fortuna, a Latin compilation, possibly translated by William of Moerbeke, consisting of two chapters on good fortune, one taken from Aristotle's Magna Moralia, and the other from the Eudemian Ethics.Aquinas discovers in Augustine's anti-Pelagian works the contention that the beginning of faith is from God and not from the individual. As with the grace of final perseverance, both initiation and perdurance in faith are gratuitous gifts of God. In his encounter with the Liber (and particularly his consideration therein of the "problem of the first deliberation"), like other medievals, Aquinas "[was] presented Aristotelian investigations regarding the possibility of a divine movement, even unacknowledged by the agent, at the very roots of human action" (98). And, in Thomas's evolved understanding, this divine influence would constitute an inner movement within the human agent apart from those external circumstances ordained by providence.Anderson embraces the thesis that, in this context, and under these influences, Aquinas's understanding of grace underwent a "revolution," that a mature Aquinas—and this is the thesis of Lonergan—moves beyond a consideration of grace merely as habitus (gratia gratum faciens) to a notion of operative grace, of grace as a movement, utilizing "the unique idea of a 'moving grace', a movement of God in, and in some cases with, the human soul" (105).And—Anderson is emphatic—this revolution in thought quickly steers Aquinas clear of what centuries later will be termed semi-Pelagianism, and toward a firmly anti-Pelagian conception of the human capacity for virtue.Chapters 4–9 comprise the second and third parts of the book. It is here that Anderson masterfully and exhaustively engages in the heavy lifting of evincing just how, in fact, Aquinas's account of virtue is inseparable from his theology of grace. On the supposition that Aquinas's mature theology of grace understands the latter to... (shrink)

The Gesta Normannorum Ducum is one of the most important sources for the history of Normandy and England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and contains the earliest prose account of the Norman Conquest. It was written by a succession of authors, the first of whom was William of Jumieges, who wrote for William the Conqueror. Later historians, such as Orderic Vitalis and Robert of Torigni, interpolated and extended the chronicle as far as King Henry I. The later accretions reveal (...) much not only about changing attitudes towards the Norman invasion of England, but also about views of the early Viking foundations of Normandy.Elisabeth van Houts's two-volume edition is based on a study of all forty-seven extant manuscripts of the Gesta, including the earliest surviving copy of c. 1100, unknown until very recently. The full original text of William of Jumieges is supplied, as well as the integral text of the subsequent revisions and additions. Volume I contains Dr van Houts's introduction to the whole work, together with the text and translation of books i-iv. Volume II contains books v-viii. The edition forms an important contribution to our understanding of Anglo-Norman politics. (shrink)

Between 1940 and 1945, while still a student of theoretical physics and without any contact with the history of science, Thomas S. Kuhn developed a general outline of a theory of the role of belief in science. This theory was well rooted in the philosophical tradition of Emerson Hall, Harvard, and particularly in H. M. Sheffer’s and C. I. Lewis’s logico-philosophical works—Kuhn was, actually, a graduate student of the former in 1945. In this paper I reconstruct the development of that (...) general outline after Kuhn’s first years at Harvard. I examine his works on moral and aesthetic issues—where he displayed an already ‘anti-Whig’ stance concerning historiography—as well as his first ‘Humean’ approach to science and realism, where his earliest concern with belief is evident. Then I scrutinise his graduate work to show how his first account of the role of belief was developed. The main aim of this paper is to show that the history of science illustrated for Kuhn the epistemic role and effects of belief he had already been theorising about since around 1941.Keywords: Intension; Belief; Causality; Thomas Kuhn; Clarence Irving Lewis; Henry Sheffer. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to reveal philosophical ideas in the mythology and folklore of the indigenous peoples of North America. An important question: "Can we assume that the spiritual culture of the American Indians contained philosophical knowledge?" remains relevant today. For example, European philosophy is defined by appeals to philosophers of the past, their texts. The philosophical tradition is characterized by rational argumentation and formulation of philosophical questions that differ from the questions of ordinary language. However, the problem (...) lies in the term "philosophy", which belongs to the so-called "philosophical untranslatability" and has many definitions. The question of whether philosophy is exclusively a phenomenon of European culture is still controversial. In the article, the concept of philosophy is used in a broad sense, which allows the analysis of the intellectual heritage of the culture of the indigenous people of North America for philosophical ideas. Theoretical basis of the study consists of primary sources, which are limited due to the "documentary horizon". It contains myths about the Twins, ritual rhetoric, examples of dream interpretation practices and the practical wisdom of tribal chiefs. The Chronicle of "Vallamolum", or "the Red List", testifies to the special idea of the Indians about history and their own historicity. Analysis of cosmogonical and cosmological ideas reveals the special features of the anthropological ideas of the North American Indians. Combined with the philosophical ideas of the Puritan philosophy of the settlers of New England, this analysis allows us to explore in more detail the processes of acculturation. The study uses critical literature from scholars and leading researchers of the wisdom and philosophy of Native Americans, such as Michael Yellow Bird, J. Baird Callicott, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dennis H. McPherson, Lewis Henri Morgan, Thomas M. Norton-Smith, J. Douglas Rabb, Paul Radin, Jon Ewbank Manchip White. The views of early American philosophers: R. Williams, W. Penn, R. W. Emerson, on the problem of the relationship between the culture of settlers and the indigenous people of North America are noteworthy. Originality lies in the application of historical and philosophical methodology, identifying the features of philosophizing in the spiritual culture and worldview of the indigenous people of North America. Conclusions. In the conclusions, the obtained results complement the history of the origin and development of philosophical thought of the early American philosophy. (shrink)

In a historical moment when cross-cultural communication proves both necessary and difficult, the work of comparative philosophy is timely. Philosophical resources for building a shared future marked by vitality and collaborative meaning-making are in high demand. Taking note of the present global philosophical situation, this collection of essays critically engages the scholarship of Roger T. Ames, who for decades has had a central role in the evolution of comparative and nonwestern philosophy. With a reflective methodology that has produced creative translations (...) of key Chinese philosophical texts, Ames-in conjunction with notable collaborators such as D.C. Lau, David Hall, and Henry Rosemont Jr.-has brought China's philosophical traditions into constructive cross-cultural dialogue on numerous ethical and social issues that we face today. The volume opens with two parts that share overlapping concerns about interpretation and translation of nonwestern texts and traditions. Parts III and IV-"Process Cosmology" and "Epistemological Considerations"-mark the shift in comparative projects from the metaphilosophical and translational stage to the more traditionally philosophical stage. Parts V and VI-"Confucian Role Ethics" and "Classical Daoism"-might best be read as Chinese contributions to philosophical inquiry into living well or "ethics" broadly construed. Lastly, Part VII takes Amesian comparative philosophy in "Critical Social and Political Directions," explicitly drawing out the broader dimensions of social constitution and the ideal of harmony. The contributors-scholars working in philosophy, religious studies, and Asian studies-pursue lines of inquiry opened up by the work of Roger Ames, and their chapters both clarify his ideas and push them in new directions. They survey the field of Chinese philosophy as it is taking shape in the wake of Ames's contributions and as it carries forward a global conversation on the future of humanity. (shrink)

The post-Civil War American natural history craze spawned a new institution -- the natural history dealer -- that has failed to receive the historical attention it deserves. The individuals who created these enterprises simultaneously helped to promote and hoped to profit from the burgeoning interest in both scientific and popular specimen collecting. At a time when other employment and educational prospects in natural history were severely limited, hundreds of dealers across the nation provided encouragement, specimens, publication outlets, training opportunities, and (...) jobs for naturalists of all motivations and levels of expertise. This paper explores the crucial role that specimen dealers played in the larger natural history community. After briefly examining the development of local taxidermy shops in the mid-nineteenth century, it then traces the history of four large natural history dealerships established in the United States during the latter half of the century: Ward's Natural History Establishment, Frank Blake Webster's Naturalists' Supply Depot, Southwick & Jencks' Natural History Store, and Frank H. Lattin & Co. By the early twentieth century, changing tastes in interior design, the growth of the Audubon movement, and the dramatic expansion of alternate training and job opportunities for naturalists led many specimen dealers either to shift their emphasis or to shut their doors. (shrink)

In Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason, J. L. Schellenberg argues that the phenomenon of “reasonable nonbelief” constitutes sufficient reason to doubtthe existence of God. In this essay I assert the reasonableness of entertaining doubts about the kind of reasonable nonbelief that Schellenberg needs for a cogent argument. Treating his latest set of arguments in this journal, I dispute his claims about the scope and status of “unreflective nonbelief,” his assertion that God would prevent reasonable nonbelief “of any kind and duration,” (...) and his confidence that we can know that some doubters are not self-deceived. (shrink)

Do children have a theory of mind? If they do, at what age is it acquired? What is the content of the theory, and how does it differ from that of adults? The Child's Theory of Mind integrates the diverse strands of this rapidly expanding field of study. It charts children's knowledge about a fundamental topic - the mind - and characterizes that developing knowledge as a coherent commonsense theory, strongly advancing the understanding of everyday theories as well as the (...) commonsense theory of mind. Wellman presents evidence that children as young as age three do possess a commonsense theory of mind - that they grasp the distinction between mental constructs and physical entities and that they have an understanding of the relationship between individuals' mental states and their overt actions. He delves in detail into questions about the nature of adults' commonsense theories of mind and about the nature of commonsense theories. Wellman then examines the content of the three-year-old's theory of mind, the nature of children's notions of mind before age three, the changes in the theory during subsequent development from ages three to six, and the young child's conception of mind in comparison with those of older children and adults. Henry M. Wellman is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Center for Human Growth and Development at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. (shrink)

The Gesta Normannorum Ducum is one of the most important sources for the history of Normandy and England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and contains the earliest prose account of the Norman Conquest. It was written by a succession of authors, the first of whom was William of Jumièges, who wrote for William the Conqueror. Later writers, such as Orderic Vitalis and Robert of Torigni, interpolated and extended the chronicle as far as King Henry I. The later accretions reveal (...) much not only about changing attitudes towards the Norman invasion of England, but also about views of the early Viking foundation of Normandy. Elisabeth van Houts's two-volume edition is based on a study of all forty-seven extant manuscripts of the Gesta, including the earliest surviving copy of c. 1100, hitherto unknown. The full original text of William of Jumièges is supplied, as well as the integral text of the subsequent revisions and additions. Volume I contains Dr van Houts's introduction to the whole work, together with the text and translation of books i-iv. Books v-viii will appear in Volume II. The edition forms an important contribution to our understanding of Anglo-Norman politics. (shrink)

J. L. Schellenberg’s Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason claims that the existence of reflective persons who long to solve the problem of God’s existencebut cannot do so constitutes an evil rendering God’s existence improbable. In this essay, I present Schellenberg’s argument and argue that the kind of reasonable nonbelief Schellenberg needs for his argument to succeed is unlikely to exist. Since Schellenberg’s argument is an inductive-style version of the problem of evil, the empirical improbability of the premise I challenge renders (...) the conclusions derived from it empirically improbable as well. (shrink)

The idea of a single scientific method, shared across specialties and teachable to ten-year-olds, is just over a hundred years old. For centuries prior, science had meant a kind of knowledge, made from facts gathered through direct observation or deduced from first principles. But during the nineteenth century, science came to mean something else: a way of thinking. The Scientific Method tells the story of how this approach took hold in laboratories, the field, and eventually classrooms, where science was once (...) taught as a natural process. Henry M. Cowles reveals the intertwined histories of evolution and experiment, from Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection to John Dewey's vision for science education. Darwin portrayed nature as akin to a man of science, experimenting through evolution, while his followers turned his theory onto the mind itself. Psychologists reimagined the scientific method as a problem-solving adaptation, a basic feature of cognition that had helped humans prosper. This was how Dewey and other educators taught science at the turn of the twentieth century-but their organic account was not to last. Soon, the scientific method was reimagined as a means of controlling nature, not a product of it. By shedding its roots in evolutionary theory, the scientific method came to seem far less natural, but far more powerful. This book reveals the origin of a fundamental modern concept. Once seen as a natural adaptation, the method soon became a symbol of science's power over nature, a power that, until recently, has rarely been called into question. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to study the importance of Pushkin's work in the age of scientific and technological progress, to identify and analyze the moral values that accompany the work and personality of Alexander Pushkin and are particularly relevant to our time. The article discusses the moral values of honor and dignity, the ratio between good and evil, concepts of duty, justice, love and friendship, happiness, freedom, creativity, patriotism, national idea, peoples’ friendship and the problem of preserving Russian (...) language in modern Russia. The article is written through the prism of interpretation of Pushkin’s creativity by Russian philosophers abroad and modern philosophers. The article deals with the problem of using neural networks that make it possible to reproduce the style of A. S. Pushkin. The author concludes about the relevance of the work of A. S. Pushkin in our days. The issues of preserving spirituality, moral values, national identity, and optimistic Renaissance perception of the world, of understanding the beauty of life, remain relevant and in demand in modern age of rapid scientific and technical progress, both in Russia and in the world. (shrink)