An adequate approach to any of Aristotle's qualitative parts of tragedy must be grounded in an understanding of their hierarchical ranking within the Poetics. Any "whole" must present "a certain order in its arrangement of parts" ,1 and in a drama each part is "for the sake of" the one "above" it. Contrary to Rosenstein's formulation, for instance, the Aristotelian view is that character as a form "concretizes" and individualizes thought as matter. Rosenstein's question as to whether "these . . (...) . indeed form a genuine disjunction" should not even arise. By ignoring the hierarchy, and therefore collapsing it, Rosenstein weakens his otherwise sound assertion that tragedy is not philosophy. Such is the result, whether intended or not, of holding that "thought must also be some form or concretization of action, just as plot and character are" . This vocabulary seems to suggest in the end that a tragic work is organized by philosophical "themes." "To understand spoken thought as an object of imitation in this manner is to understand it not merely as a content or object being imitated . . . but as the supposedly valid expression of an interpretation of the doings of the aesthetically worked world generally. . . . Thought in this sense becomes theme" . · 1. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of Aristotle are from The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon . James E. Ford responds in this essay to Leon Rosenstein's "On Aristotle and Thought in the Drama" . An assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University—Hawaii Campus, he is currently writing on interpretative theory. See also: "Metaphor and Transcendence" by Karsten Harries in Vol. 5, No. 1. (shrink)

We argue that the propositional and link-based approaches to human contingency learning represent different levels of analysis because propositional reasoning requires a basis, which is plausibly provided by a link-based architecture. Moreover, in their attempt to compare two general classes of models (link-based and propositional), Mitchell et al. refer to only two generic models and ignore the large variety of different models within each class.

This commentary raises a number of questions in connection with Colin Koopman's paper “Conceptual Analysis for Genealogical Philosophy: How to Study the History of Practices after Foucault and Wittgenstein.” Specifically, this commentary asks about the precise relationship between concepts and practices in Koopman's account and the possibility of resisting certain practices of subjectivation.

Utilitarian ideas in nineteenth-centuryAmerica have been given short shrift inmodern historical and philosophicalscholarship. Collecting the relevant publishedwork together in one place is an essentialstarting point for any serious investigation of American utilitarians andtheir critics. James Crimmins and Mark Spencer have made an expertselection from scattered sources of around 60 important articles andessays. These include treatments of Bentham by his friend John Neal,editor of The Yankee, and commentaries on John Stuart Mill gatheredfrom rare American journals. There are also discussions of (...) utilitarianjurisprudence by the great American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, andpieces by many other writers. This collection, with its substantialeditorial introduction, will be vital reading for historians of ideas,scholars of philosophy and political thought, and any one elseinterested in the fate of utilitarianism in America. (shrink)

Primary, or basic, colors have been discussed for centuries. Over time, three criteria have emerged on their behalf: (a) their physical mixture yielding all other spectral colors, (b) the physiological attunement of receptors or pathways to particular wavelengths, and (c) the etymological history of the color term. These criteria can be applied usefully to taste to clarify issues.

The primordial chaos of Genesis 1 may be understood as the Pandemonium Tremendum (or PT), the infinite field of variety or abundance within God. The concept of variety is taken from Claude Shannon's theory of communication. Especially significant is Shannon's notion that communication is the limitation of variety through decision processes. In one model of the divine life suggested by the theory, the PT is the boundless source of potential reaped by an agential God in the act of creation as (...) a communication process. Other models for creation include the PT in a biased mode and creatures themselves as decision agents. (shrink)

Deductive Irrationality examines and critiques economic rationalism by assessing the work of influential political philosophers and economic theorists such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Gunnar Myrdal, and John F. Muth. It is one of the first serious attempts to investigate the dominant sub-fields in economic theory through the lens of political philosophy.

Explores the philosophical theology of Alfred North Whitehead.