This is a meticulous, thoughtful, and progressive analysis and defense of the central question: Does religious experience provide evidence for religious belief? He answers the question affirmatively, provided that religious experience can be shown to be veridical, noncontradictory, and coherent. In so doing, he echoes one strain of medieval and contemporary thinking, that having evidence and having faith are compatible. In the tradition of Anselm of Canterbury, faith seeks understanding.

1. Michael A PetersBeijing Normal UniversityChatGPT is an AI chatbot released by OpenAI on November 30, 2022 and a ‘stable release’ on February 13, 2023. It belongs to OpenAI’s GPT-3 family (genera...

This paper defends three theses on the normativity of the suspension of judgment. First, even if beliefs have to fit the truth and disbelief the false, suspension can still have satisfiable fittingness conditions. Second, combining this view with specific theses on the link between fittingness and normative reasons in favour of attitudes commits one to the existence of reasons to suspend judgement, which are neither reasons to believe nor reasons to disbelieve. These independent reasons, in turn, generate a form of (...) epistemic permissivism. Finally, I argue that there are different routes to derive this commitment to independent reasons for suspending judgement. Not only fittingness-centred approaches to epistemic normativity but also many analyses in terms of reasons are committed to this form of epistemic permissivism. (shrink)

Originally published in 1979, The Darwinian Revolution was the first comprehensive and readable synthesis of the history of evolutionary thought. Though the years since have seen an enormous flowering of research on Darwin and other nineteenth-century scientists concerned with evolution, as well as the larger social and cultural responses to their work, The Darwinian Revolution remains remarkably current and stimulating. For this edition Michael Ruse has written a new afterword that takes into account the research published since his book's (...) first appearance. "It is difficult to believe that yet another book on Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution could add anything new or contain any surprises. Ruse's book is an exception on all counts. Darwin scholars and the general reader alike can learn from it."--David L. Hull, Nature "No other account of the Darwinian Revolution provides so detailed and sympathetic an account of the framework within which the scientific debates took place."--Peter J. Bowler, Canadian Journal of History "A useful and highly readable synthesis...skillfully organized and written with verve, imagination, and welcome touches of humor."--John C. Greene, Science. (shrink)

Rawlsian justice as fairness is neither fundamentally luck egalitarian nor relational egalitarian. Rather, the most fundamental idea is that of society as a fair system of cooperation. Collective pensions provide a case study which illustrates the fruitfulness of conceiving justice in these latter terms. Those who have recently reached the age of majority do not now know how long they will live in retirement or how well any investments they try to save up for their retirement would fare. From the (...) perspective of the beginning of their working lives, it is therefore rational for each to enter into an agreement with others, who also do not yet know their fates, that, if one turns out to be among the unfortunate whose private pension pots would not have yielded enough for one’s retirement, one will receive much more in retirement, whereas those whose pension pots would have overflowed their retirements will receive somewhat less. These terms are to each person’s expected advantage, which is made possible by a fair sharing of the fruits of social cooperation which arise through the efficiencies reaped by the pooling of the risk of outliving what one could save for one’s retirement on one’s own. It is rational for each to agree to share one another’s fates by pooling risks across both space and time, on fair terms of social cooperation for mutual advantage. Even when collective pensions arise from, and are proportional to, a baseline of unequal income, they can be defended on grounds of reciprocity involving regard for one another as equals. (shrink)

I focus on three preoccupations of recent writings on proof. -/- I. The role and possible effects of empirical reasoning in mathematics. Do recent developments (specifically, the computer-assisted proof of the 4CT) point to something essentially new as regards the need for and/or effects of using broadly empirical and inductive reasoning in mathematics? In particular, should we see such things as the computer-assisted proof of the 4CT as pointing to the existence of mathematical truths of which we cannot have a (...) priori knowledge? -/- 2. The role of formalization in proof. What are the patterns ofinference according to which mathematical reasoning naturally proceeds? Are they of 'local' character (i.e. sensitive to the subject-matter of the reasoning concerned) or 'global' character (i.e. invariant across all subject-matters)? Finally, what if any relationship is there (a) between the patterns of inference manifest in a proof and its explanatory capacity and (b) between explanatory capacity and rigor? -/- 3. Diagrams and their role in mathematical reasoning. What essentially is diagrammatic reasoning, and what is the nature and basis of its usefulness? Can it play a justificative role in the development of mathematical knowledge and, more particularly, in genuine proof? Finally, does the use of diagrammatic reasoning force an adjustment either in our conception of rigor or in our view of its importance? (shrink)

Leibniz states that 'metaphysics is natural theology', and this is especially true of his metaphysics of modality. In this book, Michael V. Griffin examines the deep connection between the two and the philosophical consequences which follow from it. Grounding many of Leibniz's modal conceptions in his theology, Griffin develops a new interpretation of the ontological argument in Leibniz and Descartes. This interpretation demonstrates that their understanding God's necessary existence cannot be construed in contemporary modal logical terms. He goes on (...) to develop a necessitarian interpretation of Leibniz, arguing that Leibniz, like Spinoza, is committed to the thesis that everything actual is metaphysically necessary, but that Leibniz rejects Spinoza's denial of God's moral perfection. His book will appeal to scholars of early modern philosophy and philosophers interested in modal metaphysics and the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

The desire for a meaningful life is ubiquitous, yet the ordinary concept of a meaningful life is poorly understood. Across six experiments (total N = 2,539), we investigated whether third-person attributions of meaning depend on the psychological states an agent experiences (feelings of interest, engagement, and fulfillment), or on the objective conditions of their life (e.g., their effects on others). Studies 1a–b found that laypeople think subjective and objective factors contribute independently to the meaningfulness of a person’s life. Studies 2a–b (...) found that positive mental states are thought to make a life more meaningful, even if derived from senseless activities (e.g., hand-copying the dictionary). Studies 3a–b found that agents engaged in morally bad activities are not thought to have meaningful lives, even if they feel fulfilled. In short, both an agents’ subjective mental states and objective impact on the world affect how meaningful their lives appear. (shrink)

This new book by Michael Slote argues that Western philosophy on the whole has overemphasized rational control and autonomy at the expense of the important countervailing value and virtue of receptivity. Recently the ideas of caring and empathy have received a great deal of philosophical and public attention, but both these notions rest on the deeper and broader value of receptivity, and in From Enlightenment to Receptivity, Slote seeks to show that we need to focus more on receptivity if (...) we are to attain a more balanced sense and understanding of what is important to us. -/- Beginning with a critique of Enlightenment thinking that calls into question its denial of any central role to considerations of emotion and empathy, he goes on to show how a greater emphasis on these factors and on the receptivity that underlies them can give us a more realistic, balanced, and sensitive understanding of our core ethical and epistemological values. This means rejecting post-modernism's blanket rejection of reason and of compelling real values and recognizing, rather, that receptivity should play a major role in how we lead our lives as individuals, in how we relate to nature, in how we acquire knowledge about the world, and in how we relate morally and politically with others. (shrink)

This paper offers a defense of a much-maligned Leibnizian argument for the Principle of Sufficient Reason, the principle according to which whatever is has a sufficient reason or explanation. While Leibniz’s argument is widely thought to rely on a question-begging premise, the paper offers a wholly original and non-question-begging defense of that premise, a defense that Leibniz did not anticipate. The paper does not present this defense of Leibniz's argument as an interpretation of Leibniz; rather, the paper—more modestly in one (...) way, less modestly in another—simply claims that this argument succeeds. (shrink)

After outlining why the notion of conscious control of action matters to us and after distinguishing different challenges to that notion, the contribution focuses on the challenge posed by the literature on unconscious goal pursuit. Based on a conceptual clarification of the notion of consciousness, I argue that the understanding of consciousness in that literature is too restricted. The hypothesis that the behaviors reported can be accounted for by nonconceptual forms of consciousness, such as emotions and motor experiences, rather than (...) by—conscious or unconscious—conceptual level intentions tends to be disregarded, even though it promises to be empirically fruitful. (shrink)

The type of completeness Whitehead and Russell aimed for in their Principia Mathematica was what I call descriptive completeness. This is completeness with respect to the propositions that have been proved in traditional mathematics. The notion of completeness addressed by Gödel in his famous work of 1930 and 1931 was completeness with respect to the truths expressible in a given language. What are the relative significances of these different conceptions of completeness for traditional mathematics? What, if any, effects does incompleteness (...) of the type Gödel had in mind have for the evaluation of the Principia Mathematica project and other projects like it? (shrink)

In a rich and thought-provoking paper, Lambros Malafouris argues that taking material culture seriously means to be ‘systematically concerned with figuring out the causal efficacy of materiality in the enactment and constitution of a cognitive system or operation’ (Malafouris 2004, 55). As I understand this view, there are really two intertwined claims to be established. The first is that the things beyond the skin that make up material culture (in other words, the physical objects and artefacts in which cultural networks (...) and systems of human social relations are realized) may be essential to the enactment of, and be partly constitutive of, certain cognitive systems or operations. The consequence of establishing this claim is supposed to be that we have a mandate to recast the boundaries of the mind so as to include, as proper parts of the mind, things located beyond the skin. Thus, in talking about the contribution of the world to cognition, Malafouris (2004, 58) concludes that ‘what we have traditionally construed as an active or passive but always clearly separated external stimulus for setting a cognitive mechanism into motion, may be after all a continuous part of the machinery itself; at least ex hypothesi’. This is the position that, in philosophical circles, is known increasingly as the extended mind hypothesis (Clark & Chalmers 1998; Menary forthcoming). Henceforth I shall refer to this hypothesis as EM. A stock example will help bring the idea into view. Rumelhart et al. (1986) note that most of us solve difficult multiplication problems by using ‘pen and paper’ as an external resource. This environmental prop enables us to transform a difficult cognitive problem into a set of simpler ones, and to temporarily store the results of certain intermediate calculations. For the fan of EM, the distributed combination of this external resource and certain inner psychological processes constitutes a cognitive system in its own right. (shrink)

Radical ecology typically brings to mind media images of ecological activists standing before loggers' saws, staging anti-nuclear marches, and confronting polluters on the high seas. Yet for more than twenty years, the activities of organizations such as the Greens and Earth First! have been influenced by a diverse, less-publicized group of radical ecological philosophers. It is their work—the philosophical underpinnings of the radical ecological movement—that is the subject of _Contesting Earth's Future_. The book offers a much-needed, balanced appraisal of radical (...) ecology's principles, goals, and limitations. Michael Zimmerman critically examines the movement's three major branches—deep ecology, social ecology, and ecofeminism. He also situates radical ecology within the complex cultural and political terrain of the late twentieth century, showing its relation to Martin Heidegger's anti-technological thought, 1960s counterculturalism, and contemporary theories of poststructuralism and postmodernity. An early and influential ecological thinker, Zimmerman is uniquely qualified to provide a broad overview of radical environmentalism and delineate its various schools of thought. He clearly describes their defining arguments and internecine disputes, among them the charge that deep ecology is an anti-modern, proto-fascist ideology. Reflecting both the movement's promise and its dangers, this book is essential reading for all those concerned with the worldwide ecological crisis. (shrink)

Responsible citizens are expected to combine ethical judgement with judiciously exercised social activism to preserve the moral foundation of democratic society and prevent political injustice. But do they? Utilizing a research model integrating insights from rational choice theory and cognitive developmental psychology this book carefully explores three exemplary cases of morally inspired activism: Jewish rescue in wartime Europe, abortion politics in the United States, and peace and settler activism in Israel. From all three analyses a single conclusion emerges: the most (...) politically competent individuals are, most often, the least morally competent. This is the central paradox of political morality. These findings cast doubt on strong models of political morality characterized by enlightened moral reasoning and concerted political action while affirming alternative weak models that fuse activism with sectarian moral interests. They provide empirical support to further upend the liberal vision of democratic character, education, and society. (shrink)

The usage of sorts in first-order automated deduction has brought greater conciseness of representation and a considerable gain in efficiency by reducing the search spaces involved. This suggests that sort information can be employed in higher-order theorem proving with similar results.

Although Aristotle's Poetics is the most frequently read of his works, philosophers and political theorists have, for the most part, left analysis of the text to literary critics and classicists. In this book Michael Davis argues convincingly that in addition to teaching us something about poetry, Poetics contains an understanding of the common structure of human action and human thought that connects it to Aristotle's other writings on politics and morality. Davis demonstrates that the duality of Poetics reaches out (...) to the philosopher, writer, and political theorist and shows the importance of the ideal in our imaginings of and goals for the future. (shrink)

In his engaging essay, “Deconstructing the Mind” (1996: 3-90), Stephen Stich raises some very good questions and gives some pretty good answers. My aim in this paper is to give some answers of my own, drawing on earlier work, and to compare these answers with Stich’s.

Michael Schippan legt mit seiner Studie die erste umfassende deutschsprachige Darstellung der russischen Aufklarung (prosvescenie) vor. Vor allem in der zweiten Halfte des 18. Jahrhunderts nahm das Russische Zarenreich teil an der europaischen Emanzipationsbewegung des "Siecle des Lumieres", eignete sich durch Ubersetzung und Spracherwerb das Gedankengut des "lateinischen Europa" an und formte es den Bedurfnissen des euro-asiatischen Landes entsprechend um. Unter prosve'enie wurden sowohl Bildung, Zivilisation, Europaisierung und menschliche Selbstvervollkommnung als auch die Teilhabe an der europaischen Geistesbewegung der Aufklarung (...) verstanden. Zwei herausragende Herrscher gaben entscheidende Anstosse: Zar Peter I., der nach 1700 vor allem aus militarischen Grunden heraus umfassende Reformen einleitete, und Katharina II., die zum inneren Zirkel der aufgeklarten europaischen Monarchen gezahlt wurde. Nicht nur in den beiden "Hauptstadten" St. Petersburg und Moskau, sondern auch in einigen Gouvernementszentren Zentralrusslands sowie in Sibirien wurde ein reges kulturelles und geistiges Leben begrundet.Schippan untersucht in institutions- und personengeschichtlicher Perspektive, welche neuen weltlichen Bildungs- und Wissenschaftseinrichtungen geschaffen wurden und wie zunehmend private Vereinigungen gebildeter Adliger und Vertreter anderer Stande entstanden. Zudem werden zentrale Debatten der Aufklarung in Russland in ihrer Wechselwirkung mit den Diskursen der europaischen "Republique des lettres" beleuchtet, so die Diskussionen uber Russland und Asien, Krieg und Frieden, okonomische Landeserschliessung und Aufhebung der Leibeigenschaft, Theologie und Religion sowie Geschichtsschreibung. (shrink)

Against arealist background, the paper starts by demonstrating the horror of the very popular doctrine, “Worldmaking”, according to which a known world is partly constructed by our imposition of concepts. The rest of the paper aims to make worldmaking hard. (i) It rejects the usual episternological and semantic paths to Worldmaking arguing that they use the wrong methodology and proceed in the wrong direction. (ii) It considers the relation between Worldmaking and the response-dependency theory of concepts. Philip Pettit has proposed (...) a global version of that theory: all our concepts are response-dependent. The paper argues that this theory provides an example of the semantic path to Worldmaking and for that reason alone should be rejected. (shrink)

IN SECTION X OF "AN INQUIRY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING", DAVID HUME RAISES TWO QUESTIONS ABOUT MIRACLES AND THEIR RELATION TO TESTIMONY. FIRST, HE ASKS WHETHER IT COULD EVER BE REASONABLE TO BELIEVE ON THE BASIS OF TESTIMONY THAT NATURE DOES NOT FIT THE IMAGE OF OUR SCIENCE, AND, SECOND, HE ASKS WHETHER IT COULD EVER BE REASONABLE TO BELIEVE ON THE BASIS OF TESTIMONY THAT NATURE IS NOT UNIFORM. HUME’S ANSWER TO THE FIRST QUESTION IS ’YES’ AND HIS ANSWER TO (...) THE SECOND IS ’NO’. HUME THINKS THAT A ’NO’ TO THE SECOND QUESTION SHOWS THAT BELIEF IN THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION IS LESS REASONABLE THAN A BELIEF IN MODERN SCIENCE. HOWEVER, HUME’S ’NO’ SEEMS TO OPPOSE HIS EMPIRICISM AND HIS BELIEF THAT THERE ARE NO NECESSARY TRUTHS ABOUT ANY MATTER OF FACT OR EXPERIENCE. THE POINT OF THIS PAPER IS TO SHOW THAT HUME CAN PROVE THAT THERE CAN BE NO TESTIMONY OF SUCH A QUANTITY OR QUALITY TO MAKE IT REASONABLE TO BELIEVE THAT NATURE IS NOT UNIFORM AND, AS RESULT, NO TESTIMONY TO MAKE IT REASONABLE TO. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE CURRICULAR ROLE OF RUSSELl?S SCEPTICISM MICHAEL J. ROCKLER Interdisciplinary Studies in Education / National-Louis Universiry Evanston, 1L 60201, USA I n The Prospects of IndustriaL CiviLization, written in collaboration with his wife Dora, Bertrand Russell wrote: The governors of the world believe, and have always believed, that virtue can only be taught by teaching falsehood, and that any man who knew the truth would be wicked. I (...) disbelieve this, absolutely and entirely. I believe that love of truth is the basis of all real virtue, and that virtues based upon lies can only do harm.· This passage reflects Russell's views on scepticism and education; he sought an educational system that would avoid indoctrination and would produce sceptical students. Scepticism, a central aspect of much of Russell's philosophic work, was a primary organizing principle of his writings on education. Russell, a major contributor to educational theory, produced two volumes on education that continue to have considerable relevance for teaching and learning in contemporary society. The first, Education and the Good Life (1926),2 inspired by the births of John and Katharine, focused on the education of young children. In Education and the Good Life, Russell identified the aims of education. These included the development ofvitality, the promotion of courage (which entails the absence of fear), sensitiveness and intelligence. When schools accomplish these ends, they produce young men and women of character who are able to contribute to the well-being of society. 1 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1923), p. 252. 2 Published in Britain as On Education: Especially in Early Childhood. The CurricuLar Role ofRusselL's Scepticism 51 Russell, who once stood for Parliament as suffragist candidate, believed in equality of education for both men and women. This position was well advanced for its time; it still encounters resistance today. As the Russells' children approached school age, he and Dora confronted the problem of their education. Russell did not want John and Katharine to experience the loneliness of education by tutors that he had faced as a child. He and Dora also wished to avoid conventional public schools because they wanted their children to be educated in a manner consistent with their sense of scepticism about society and about religion. Russell felt that exposure to any kind of traditional learning would cause his children to be indoctrinated with patriotic and religious points of view. On the other hand, he felt that the progressive schools that were available-including A. S. Neill's Summerhill-lacked intellectual rigour. As a result of these feelings and because of Dora Russell's interest in education, the Russells leased the estate of Bertrand's brother at Telegraph House in Sussex and founded what came to be known as Beacon Hill School in September 1927. With his experience at Beacon Hill in mind, Russell published a second book on education in I932-Education and the Modern WorLd.3 It argued against the notion of progressive educators that schooling should simply allow for natural growth. Russell rejected Rousseau's approach to teaching and learning, and he distanced himself from some of Dewey's early work as well. In Education and the Good Life, and in other early essays on learning theory, Russell had seemed impressed by the growing role of behaviourism in education. However, his experience at Beacon Hill and his reading ofpsychoanalytic literature weakened his acceptance of behaviourism. In Education and the Modern World Russell called for more awareness of the role of emotion in learning as well as an examination of the way in which repressed feelings affect action. Russell argued that conditioning cannot effectively develop character. Education and the Modern World ends on a discouraging note. Russell concludes that schools can only provide for full individual development if the state identifies its own interest with that of the 3 Published in Britain as Education and the Social Order. russell: the Journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives M.Masrer University Libraty Press n.s. 12 (summer 1992): 50-60 ISSN 0036-01631 52 MICHAEL J. ROCKLER child. Russell was pessimistic about this possibility. For this to take place, a number of things had to occur. First, farge scale wars had to be eliminated. Second... (shrink)

This leading scholar draws on extensive research from four plurinational states - the United Kingdom, Spain, Belgium, and Canada - to provide a radical rethink of the very nature of sovereignty and the state. This innovative account demonstrates how transnational integration and other demands on the nation-state have broken the automatic link between state and nation, and goes on to provide a major new analysis of the subsequent challenges of recognition of nationality and democracy.

Dyson explores the fate of pride from Christain theology to the social responsibilities of self-regard and regard for the society as a whole. Also discusses pride in black communities.

Following the success of Hong Kong Corner Houses, German photographer Michael Wolf continues his collaboration with Hong Kong University Press to produce Small God, Big City. Wolf again uses his creative eye to draw attention to overlooked objects in the visually rich urban environment of Hong Kong. This time the object is the Earth God shrine, found commonly by the doorways of shops and homes throughout Hong Kong. Through his visually stimulating and thought-provoking photographs, Wolf challenges our sensitivity to (...) seemingly familiar everyday things. An interpretative text for the photographs is authored by two familiar names: Lee Ho Yin and Lynne DiStefano, who are well-known academics and practitioners of heritage conservation in Hong Kong. The text is a highly readable curatorial essay that leads readers to a better understanding of the topic and the meaning behind Wolf 's photographs of Earth God shrines in urban Hong Kong. The topic of this book is timely, given the vulnerability of traditional beliefs and practices in an increasingly urbanized Hong Kong. It is hoped that Small God, Big City will provoke deeper thoughts on who we are and what we believe in this modern world. (shrink)

Michael Allen's latest work on the profoundly influential Florentine thinker of the fifteenth century, Marsilio Ficino, will be welcomed by philosophers, literary scholars, and historians of the Renaissance, as well as by classicists. Ficino was responsible for inaugurating, shaping, and disseminating the wide-ranging philosophico-cultural movement known as Renaissance Platonism, and his views on the _Sophist_, which he saw as Plato's preeminent ontological dialogue, are of signal interest. This dialogue also served Ficino as a vehicle for exploring a number of (...) other humanist, philosophical, and magical preoccupations, including the theme of man the artist and creator. (shrink)

The history of building automated theorem provers for higher-order logic is almost as old as the field of deduction systems itself. The first successful attempts to mechanize and implement higher-order logic were those of Huet [13] and Jensen and Pietrzykowski [17]. They combine the resolution principle for higher-order logic (first studied in [1]) with higher-order unification. The unification problem in typed λ-calculi is much more complex than that for first-order terms, since it has to take the theory of αβη-equality into (...) account. As a consequence, the higher-order unification problem is undecidable and sets of solutions need not even always have most general elements that represent them. Thus the mentioned calculi for higher-order logic have take special measures to circumvent the problems posed by the theoretical complexity of higher-order unification. In this paper, we will exemplify the methods and proof- and model-theoretic tools needed for extending first-order automated theorem proving to higherorder logic. For the sake of simplicity take the tableau method as a basis (for a general introduction to first-order tableaux see part I.1) and discuss the higherorder tableau calculi HT and HTE first presented in [19]. The methods in this paper also apply to higher-order resolution calculi [1, 13, 6] or the higher-order matings method of Peter [3], which extend their first-order counterparts in much the same way. Since higher-order calculi cannot be complete for the standard semantics by Gödel’s incompleteness theorem [11], only the weaker notion of Henkin models [12] leads to a meaningful notion of completeness in higher-order logic. It turns out that the calculi in [1, 13, 3, 19] are not Henkin-complete, since they fail to capture the extensionality principles of higher-order logic. We will characterize the deductive power of our calculus HT (which is roughly equivalent to these calculi) by the semantics of functional Σ-models. To arrive at a calculus that is complete with respect to Henkin models, we build on ideas from [6] and augment HT with tableau construction rules that use the extensionality principles in a goal-oriented way.. (shrink)

Rom und Romgedanke im Mittelalter.--Dantes Reichs-und Staatsidee.--Die Entwicklung der italienischen Früh-Renaissance.--Nikolaus von Cues und der Humanismus.--Wandlungen des humanistischen Lebensgefühls und Lebensstils.--Petrarca, das Urbild des Humanisten.--Konrad Celtis.--Ulrich von Hutten.--"Una religio in rituum varietate"; zur Religionsauffassung de Nikolaus von Cues.--Religiös-ethische Probleme des italienischen Humanismus.--Verzeichnis der LSchriften von Michael Seidlmayer (p.[295]-302)--Quellenverzeichnis. (p.[303]).

Written by well-known professor and author Michael Boylan, Morality and Global Justice is an accessible examination of the moral and normative underpinnings of ...

Everyday Utopias explores a topic that is vital but is too often overlooked by utopian scholars. It is best read in tandem with its 2013 predecessor, Weak Messianism: Essays in Everyday Utopianism, by Michael Gardiner. In a nutshell, Cooper, like Gardiner, argues that although utopian visions may be born in the brains of utopian thinkers, progress toward utopia is what counts, and it must be rooted in present patterns and possibilities. Lest my qualms with the book’s execution overwhelm its (...) value for readers, let me emphasize my enthusiastic support of its basic purpose and its promotion of the growing field of practical utopianism, using a strikingly diverse array of cases to stake... (shrink)