Originally published in 1942, this book examines Plato's later dialogues, particularly Timaeus, in terms of their dependence on pre-Socratic philosophy and other aspects of ancient thought and life. Skemp assesses Plato's views on reality and how it could be more than his idealized Forms. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the Socratic and Platonic philosophies and the circumstances of their development.

Joseph G. Ramsey argues that Richard Wright’s 1940 novella “Bright and Morning Star” has been consistently misunderstood. What has been almost universally read as a narrative of communist heroism stages instead a heroic mistake. “Bright and Morning Star” is not a story primarily about heroic individual sacrifice, but about the ways collective struggle can fail.

Prior studies report that the business group structure and the associated intra-group capital flows are prone to conflicts of interest between controlling shareholders and minority investors. Yet business group is a prevalent and stable structure around the globe, particularly where capital markets are underdeveloped. Using data from China, this paper empirically studies the trade-off between the negative and positive roles played by intra-group capital flows and tests the efficiency implications of such trade-off. We find that from the perspective of the (...) whole group, intra-group capital flows are most efficient when the groups are least subject to conflicts of interest between controlling shareholders and minority shareholders and when they face strong external financing constraints. (shrink)

Excerpt from Still Thrilled by the Future: And Other Comments on the Modern Scene Some people have personalities that produce much the same sort of effect when they come into a room. We are lighted up by them. Before they come we may be depressed, discouraged, disconsolate. Or we may just be tired. But when an inspiring person greets us, new life seems to flow into us and brightness replaces darkness. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of (...) rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Seeking the Sources of a Theologian:In Memory of Fr. Roch Kereszty, O.Cist. (1933–2022)Joseph Van House O.Cist.Fr. Roch Kereszty long enjoyed thinking about how, and how much, we can discover the truth about Jesus of Nazareth through historical research into his earthly life. Fr. Roch also often enjoyed indicating that at least part of the answer is that research about a human being can never be content with descriptions (...) of any number of empirical facts or ideas from that person's life. The true goal of one who writes or reads about the life of another is insight into the meaning of that person's life. Such insight is possible some extent while the person's life is ongoing, but it calls for a more decisive kind of assessment after the person's death. The meaning of a life also cannot truly reveal itself when viewed through the lens of an inadequate philosophy or theology. Indeed, Fr. Roch tended to think that philosophy itself is adequate to show that any quest to understand another human being cries out to be structured by love, or at least some form of empathy: I can truly understand another only in my proportion to my ability to discover communion or affinity with that person, to find in him or her another self who is in some deep way similar to my own self.1 [End Page 781] Although Fr. Roch elaborated such ideas to guide historians seeking to write a "biography" of Jesus, and although they make great demands of many kinds, it nevertheless seems fitting to consider them when beginning to memorialize Fr. Roch himself.Last December, God granted Fr. Roch the gift of a passage from this life that was surrounded by the love of many people who had known him on earth. Among them were many who had known him through his theological writings and had found them to offer a special combination of intellectual vigor and personal relevance. It is a blessing now to be able to offer a short memorial for the benefit of his sympathetic readers of the past and the future. Attempting to explain the golden thread that unites his many books and articles seems unreasonable; the writings themselves remain their own best explanation. Such an approach could also perhaps suggest that we are most loved in our productivity rather than in the ways we are dependent on God and others. For both of these reasons, one good way to serve love and communion with a theologian of interest would be to portray him in some of the ways that he himself was loved, fathered forth and shaped, by the One from whom all fatherhood is named. In this essay, then, I offer a simple and very fragmented portrait of the sources of a theologian, the fontes theologi: the different ways that God fathered in Roch Kereszty a theological writer who was a blessing to people who read periodicals such as this one. If I provoke either fresh appreciation of his writings or deeper reflection on the variety and patterns in the ways God leads his children generally (and especially those who are interested in theology), then this act of thanksgiving to God for a good teacher will have been successful.A Reader Raised in RomeIt is suggestive to notice that Fr. Roch was born in central Europe just six years after Joseph Ratzinger, and died seventeen days before him; their lifespans as theologians roughly overlapped and were formed by engagement with many of the same theological movements and crises. This said, moving quickly to the specifics of the person in question, it seems especially natural to attend to the character of Fr. Roch's formal theological education. This education took place in Rome, in the company of a handful of fellow bright young refugee Hungarian Cistercians, from 1957 to 1962 (during which time he also made his solemn vows and was ordained). In those days leading up to the Second Vatican Council, theology in the Roman universities was dominated by an increasingly stale and self-contained Neo-Scholasticism. The Benedictine Athenaeum of Sant'Anselmo, where young Roch and his [End... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Beauty, Transcendence, and the Inclusive Hierarchy of Creation1Thomas Joseph White, O.P.Interpreters of Thomas Aquinas have long argued about whether he holds that beauty is a “transcendental,” a feature of reality coextensive with all that exists, like unity, goodness, and truthfulness.2 In the first part of this article, I will argue that Aquinas can [End Page 1215] be read to affirm in an implicit way that beauty is a (...) transcendental. In the second part, I will consider what it might mean from a Thomistic point of view to speak of a transcendent divine beauty, given Aquinas’s metaphysical commitments, particularly with respect to his doctrine of divine simplicity. In the final part, I will treat the question of how the beauty of the creation both manifests and conceals divine beauty.Beauty as a Transcendental Feature of RealityAquinas does not list beauty as a transcendental term in texts on transcendental notions. Perhaps, then, one should simply exclude it from a responsible account of his teaching on this subject. However, at least two well-known texts should give us reason to pause before reaching such a conclusion. One is found in his Commentary on Dionysius’ Divine Names, chapter 4, lectio 5. The other is in his discussion of the beauty of the eternal Son of God in a discussion of the Holy Trinity in the Summa theologiae I, q. 39, a. 8.In the first of these texts, Aquinas is commenting on Dionysius. The extended text is analytically dense. Aquinas is discussing ways in which one might say that God is beautiful and in what ways one might not say so. I will return to his topic below. Here, however, it is pertinent to consider Aquinas’s discussion of the presence of beauty in all that exists. He makes six main points.3 First, all beauty comes [End Page 1216] from God insofar as God is the cause of all that exists. Second, he gives a first definition of beauty: beauty can be defined ontologically as the splendor (claritas) that results from form; everything has a formal determination of some kind insofar as it has existence (esse); therefore, insofar as anything exists (and has some formal ontological content) it has some degree of beauty. Third, the splendor of the form in created things is a participation in the divine splendor from which it originates. The divine nature is the transcendent exemplar of beauty in diverse finite created realities. Fourth, then (and perhaps most importantly), “ex divina pulchritudine esse omnium derivatur”: literally, the existence of everything originates from divine beauty. Fifth, a second definition of beauty is considered: beauty can be defined ontologically as a property of being that emerges from proportion or harmony (consonantia). For example, authentic relationships of personal friendship imply spiritual harmony or concord and are beautiful and noble in this respect. Sixth, then, the concord or beautiful harmonies we find in the created order are expressive of the wisdom of God, who is the author of creation.Evidently, if the existence of everything derives from divine beauty, and if everything that has existence is in some way beautiful by virtue of its intrinsic form, then it would seem to follow logically that beauty, for Aquinas, is a characteristic of being that is coextensive with all that exists. We see a similar idea expressed in the aforementioned passage of ST. Here, however, Aquinas gives a more synthetic definition of beauty in things that combines both the definitions found in our previous discussion, claritas and proportio, but it also adds a third, integritas: ontological integrity or wholeness.Species or beauty has a likeness to the property of the Son. For beauty includes three conditions, “integrity” or “perfection,” [End Page 1217] since those things which are impaired are by the very fact ugly; due “proportion” or “harmony”; and lastly, “brightness” or “clarity,” whence things are called beautiful which have a bright color.4The implication of this point of view is readily apparent. God is essentially beautiful, and God has created all that exists in light of the eternal Word and Wisdom of God, who is the Son. Consequently, all that exists and that... (shrink)

The paper offers a new account of the rule of law, revising my previous view, and criticising some alternatives. It focuses on the rule of law's aim to avoid arbitrary government, and on its relation to the essential functions of government. The rule of law requires that government action will manifest an intention to protect and advance the interests of the governed. As such it is almost a necessary condition for the law's ability to meet other moral demands, and it (...) facilitate coordination and cooperation internally and internationally. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Overtones:A CollagePaul Youngquist (bio)Mom leans against the keyboard of the old upright piano in the den. She puckers her lips and gently fingers the valves. A couple of times a month, she frees her trumpet from the purple velveteen lining its case—out of love or frustration I can never tell. She stares hard at the bell, pointed somewhere near my feet. She inhales deeply, pressing the silver mouthpiece to (...) her crumpled lips. A silent moment passes—torn by a noise pitched past the sun, a shrieking flare sound. Another follows and another, bright glissandos blinking out somewhere below middle C. They shatter everything I know about her. Everything I thought I knew. What sound was that, what cry? What aspiration to be free? After those initial stabs, she falls into familiar melodies: "Bugler's Holiday" by Leroy Anderson, maybe, or "When the Saints Go Marching In." I'm unsettled for the rest of the day.Trumpeter Don Cherry's sound unsettled me too. I was much older when I first encountered it on Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come. It took me back to Mom's cries. I heard her sound in his: bright, high, and transient: less pitch than smudge, transmitting unknowable overtones. On "Lonely Woman," for instance. Cherry states the plaintive melody in hazy unison with Coleman, blurs the third note, wavers and plays his peculiar temper, untimely and free to move beyond the platitudes of harmony until, after Coleman's baffled cry, he parts company to play a sixth above (if such language matters, and it doesn't), descending in half steps to resolve (not happily) on a minor third, Cherry now pitched below. Their unison breaks apart to reconverge, and the brief bridge feels like a heaving between sobs. This isn't music. It's too raw for the repartee of bebop or the sociability of swing. But everybody can feel it, which explains the scandal of Coleman and company's extended appearance in late 1959 at the Five Spot in New York's East Village. Writing in the New York Times Magazine years later, Joseph Hooper likened it to the furor erupting after Stravinsky's Paris premier of "The Rite of Spring" in 1913. In an interview with Terry Gross, Cherry remembers everyone who was musically anyone being there—from Leonard Bernstein to Thelonious Monk—to witness the sacrilege. The implacable trickster Charles Mingus appeared one [End Page 133] night with Phineas Newborn, a keyboard virtuoso famous for his perfect pitch. Newborn sat and stared at his cufflinks. He never played a note. After the set, Mingus barreled onto the stage and, with his long arms and big hands, crashed all the keys. "That's where it is," he bellowed. "It's all there." Everywhere and nowhere. Cherry and Ornette decentered intonation. They distempered tradition's scales. Afflicted with perfect pitch, Newborn couldn't follow their cries and whispers. They flew free from the comforting staff. Still you feel them, hear their immeasurable sound.Don Cherry: "I've always been on the outside, and that's a good quality for the music to have, like the wind in your face."Cherry's mother Daisy gave him his first horn when he was fourteen. It breathed life into him, offering a way to express sounds his body harbored. Born in Oklahoma City in 1936 to "Negro-Choctaw Indian parents" (his words—his mother's mother was half native), Cherry heard gospel, blues, and Indian songs from the start. The family's move to the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1940 only multiplied the sounds of diverse ethnicities mixed with the rumble of jazz from the Cherry Blossom, his father's club, where Don and his sister sometimes danced for dimes. His horn funneled all this sound—all the music he'd ever make—through a peculiarly powerful feeling: "that feeling to me, through as much music as I've learned, I still remember just that feeling when I first got that horn." What feeling exactly? "Infant happiness" (in-fant, not speaking). The feeling of life before language: "infant happiness, infant happiness, beautiful! That's what music is really... (shrink)

This book, first published in 1991, offers an integrative approach to the study of formal models in the social and behavioural sciences. The theory presented here unifies both the representation of the social environment and the equilibrium concept. The theory requires that all alternatives that are available to the players be specified in an explicit and detailed manner, and this specification is defined as a social 'situation'. A situation, therefore, not only consists of the alternatives currently available to the players, (...) but also includes the set of opportunities that might be induced by the players from their current environment. The theory requires that all recommended alternatives be both internally and externally stable; the recommendation cannot be self-defeating and, at the same time, should account for alternatives that were not recommended. In addition to unifying the representation and the solution concept, the theory also extends the social environments accommodated by current game theory. (shrink)

This paper surveys current theories on the nature of conscious experience, from traditional central state identity theories and functionalism, to more recent higher-order and representationalist theories. It is concluded that no current theory really solves the fundamental problem of how to incorporate conscious experience into the physical world, though much progress has been made.

On September 17, 1994, Karl Popper died at the age of 92.He was described as the official opposition of the “ Vienna Circle”, the philosophical club which in the inter-war period was glamorous and which espoused the then popular doctrine of logical positivism, so-called. His relations with that club were friendly-hostile, to use the term with which he liked to characterize the relations between scientific researchers. He is the last of that generation (unless it is Carl G. Hempel, who, however, (...) sees himself as too young to belong there). The public aspect of Popper’s friendly-hostile relations with his Viennese peers was unfortunately more hostile than friendly. Somehow, philosophers have managed to keep the accounts open for too long. The end of the era is the time to close accounts so as to be able to go on with the job at hand, since the intermingling of personal affairs with objective knowledge is unhealthy. Yet most of the leading heirs of the “ Vienna Circle” still coast around the issues raised by Popper, and so they can neither overlook him nor quote him correctly. If past evidence is reliable here, then this will alter just about now. Is it? (shrink)

Son of a North German businessman, Thomas Mann chose as theme for his early narrative work the conflict between the standards and values of business and those of the artist-writer.Buddenbrooks andTonio Kröger exhibit the tension of values in opposite ways. InThe Magic Mountain, Mann expands his canvas to include military as well as business values in their relation to the creative potential in a young engineer who exiles himself to an Alpine tuberculosis sanatorium to enjoy a unique educational experience. Mann (...) believed that the businessman, like the artist, had a light and dark side, committed by the Protestant ethic, yet bound to entrepreneurial standards of utility and profit. On that account, the businessman, like the creative artist, may experience a certain alientation from ‘Life’. (shrink)

Early Buddhist texts were first being composed and compiled during South Asia’s Iron Age, and thus contain many references to iron and other metal technologies. This article examines one metalworking image that came to play a special role in the imagination of early Buddhists: the red-hot iron ball. I argue that the iron ball, which comes to be a torture device in hell, force-fed by hell wardens, is a mimesis of the pi??ap?ta, or almsfood offered to monks and nuns by (...) the laity. Around iron ball imagery clusters a set of related Buddhist concerns: anxieties about undisciplined and deceitful monks and nuns, especially in relation to taking alms; the public perception of the sa?gha; the conceptualization of Buddhist hells as an unfortunate karmic result of lacking discipline; and the relationship between these hells and Indian juridical forms of punishment. (shrink)

BackgroundBioethics and law distinguish between the practices of "physician-assisted death" and "allowing the patient to die."DiscussionAdvances in biotechnology have allowed medical devices to be used as destination therapy that are designed for the permanent support of cardiac function and/or respiration after irreversible loss of these spontaneous vital functions. For permanent support of cardiac function, single ventricle or biventricular mechanical assist devices and total artificial hearts are implanted in the body. Mechanical ventilators extrinsic to the body are used for permanent support (...) of respiration. Clinical studies have shown that destination therapy with ventricular assist devices improves patient survival compared to medical management, but at the cost of a substantial alteration in end-of-life trajectories. The moral and legal assessment of the appropriateness and permissibility of complying with a patient's request to electively discontinue destination therapy in a life-terminating act in non-futile situations has generated controversy. Some argue that complying with this request is ethically justified because patients have the right to request withdrawal of unwanted treatment and be allowed to die of preexisting disease. Other commentators reject the argument that acceding to an elective request for death by discontinuing destination therapy is 'allowing a patient to die' because of serious flaws in interpreting the intention, causation, and moral responsibility of the ensuing death.SummaryDestination therapy with cardiac and/or ventilatory medical devices replaces native physiological functions and successfully treats a preexisting disease. We posit that discontinuing cardiac and/or ventilatory support at the request of a patient or surrogate can be viewed as allowing the patient to die if--and only if--concurrent lethal pathophysiological conditions are present that are unrelated to those functions already supported by medical devices in destination therapy. In all other cases, compliance with a patient's request constitutes physician-assisted death because of the pathophysiology induced by the turning off of these medical devices, as well as the intention, causation, and moral responsibility of the ensuing death. The distinction between allowing the patient to die and physician-assisted death is pivotal to the moral and legal status of elective requests for death by discontinuing destination cardiac and/or ventilatory medical devices in patients who are not imminently dying. This distinction also represents essential information that must be disclosed to patients and surrogates in advance of consent to this type of therapy. (shrink)

Divine commands are typically held, by theists, to be made not only at the foundations of morality, but also in an 'everyday' setting, when there are already moral considerations applicable to the addressee(s). My aim is to show how a particular command could relate to these pre-existing moral considerations, if it is more than just a repetition of them. If it is right that an action be obligatory, wrong or supererogatory, why would God want to change its status? Anyone can (...) make a normative difference by giving information, making co-ordination proposals, or transferring rights, and it is clear why these actions will sometimes by worthwhile. The problem must be focused on when God makes a moral difference directly, using a 'special moral authority', when His commands are efficacious qua commands. Using this authority, God can perfect imperfect duties, which may make it easier to carry them out. He can extend duties, to make sure more value is produced. He can allocate sacrifices, which can be carried by anyone. And He can resolve conflict games, to everyone's benefit. This explains why God should issue commands in the way that theists typically represent him as doing. (shrink)

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections (...) in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. (shrink)

Confirms the importance of literature in Derrida’s development of a postmodern ethics.

The removal of controversial names and monuments from the public sphere in the United States has gained traction in the context of efforts to achieve social justice for historically mistreated and marginalized communities. Such debates are increasingly raising issues in the healthcare setting as hospitals and medical schools grapple with the legacies of figures whose scientific contributions are clouded with ethical transgressions. Present efforts to address these challenges have largely occurred at the institutional level. The results have been guidelines that (...) are complex, highly inconsistent across institutions, and largely downplay the symbolic importance of such historical redress. This paper proposes a simpler three-part test for name and monument removal in the medical and hospital settings that places greater weight on the symbolic importance of the renaming process itself instead of only considering the outcomes. (shrink)