In this book, first published in 1984, Joel Weinsheimer advocates revitalizing the practice of imitating literature as a mode appropriate for literary critics as well as artists. The book is not only about imitation; it is itself an imitation, specifically of Samuel Johnson. As both the focus and mode of presentation, imitation is presented not merely as a kind of poetry that once flourished in the eighteenth century but also as a kind of criticism particularly relevant today. Applying (...) arguments from philosophy of science, deconstruction, psycho-analysis, literary theory, semiotics and hermeneutics, Weinsheimer shows that the three main currents of thought responsible for forcing imitation underground were empiricism, originalism and historicism. The three central chapters of the book concentrate on their representatives: John Locke, Edward Young and Thomas Warton. The author then applies Johnsonian arguments – supported by those of Gadamer Peirce – to challenge those objections and re-establish imitation as an intellectually defensible mode of writing. (shrink)

Disturbed by these acrimonious arguments, the authors - former colleagues and university-press board members - embarked on an ambitious project to reexamine a number of major literary and philosophical works dealing with the liberal arts and education. With their discussions ranging from Plato to Rousseau, from Cicero to Vico, from Erasmus to Matthew Arnold, Sousa and Weinsheimer offer not a history of education philosophy but an examination of the present.

Since the publication of Wahrheit und Methode in 1960 (Tfibingen), Gadamer's hermeneutics has called forth a varied and fruitful response from the Continent, without receiving anything near the same attention from the English-speaking world. Though E. D. Hirsch thought Gadamer sufficiently important in 1965 to merit an early rebuttal and rehabilitation (Validity in Interpretation [New Haven, Conn., 1967], pp. 245-64), Wahrheit und Methode remained unread in England and America, partly because a translation was not available until 1975 (Truth and Method, (...) ed. Garrett Barden and John Cumming [New York]). Even after that date, Gadamer's influence on Anglo-American debate has been largely secondhand, filtering in through such figures as Paul Ricoeur and Jiurgen Habermas. But a renewed interest in the question of what we are to make of tradition, no doubt spurred in large measure by deconstruction's effort to unmake it, has lent Gadamer a new pertinence. One sign that his stock is on the rise is the publication of Joel Weinsheimer's Gadamer's Hermeneutics, a much needed and admirably written introduction to Truth and Method that should push its value even higher. -- JSTOR (June 12, 2012.). (shrink)

In this lucid and elegantly written book, Joel Weinsheimer discusses how the insights of Hans-Georg Gadamer alter our understanding of literary theory and interpretation. Weinsheimer begins by surveying modern hermeneutics from Schleiermacher to Riocoeur, showing that Gadamer’s work is situated in the middle of an ongoing dialogue. Gadamer’s hermeneutics, says Weinsheimer, is specifically philosophical for it explores how understanding occurs at all, not how it should be regulated in order to function more rigorously or effectively. According (...) to Weinsheimer, Gadamer views understanding as an effect of history, not an action but a passion, something that happens to the interpreter. Gadamer offers a new model of historical understanding that is based on metaphor: it fuses the different into the same but, like metaphor, does not repress difference. Similarly, Gadamer’s critique of the semiotic conception of language redresses the balance between difference and sameness in the relation of word and world. The common thread in the contributions of philosophical hermeneutics to literary theory is the multifaceted tension between the one and the many, between sameness and difference. This appears in metaphor and application, in the complex dialogue between the past and present, and between the interpretation and the interpreted generally. In the final chapter of the book, “The Question of the Classic,” Weinsheimer explores the implications of this analysis of Gadamer’s hermeneutics for the current debate concerning the study of the canon and the classic. (shrink)

In the years shortly before and after the publication of his classic _Truth and Method_, the eminent German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer returned often to questions surrounding religion and ethics. In this selection of writings from _Gesammelte Werke_ that are here translated into English for the first time, Gadamer probes deeply into the hermeneutic significance of these subjects. Gadamer raises issues of importance to ethicists and theologians as well as students of language and literature. In such outstanding essays as "Kant and (...) the Question of God," "Thinking as Redemption: Plotinus between Plato and Augustine," and "Friendship and Self-Knowledge: Reflections on the Role of Friendship in Greek Ethics," Gadamer discusses the nature of moral behavior, ethics as a form of knowing, and the hermeneutic task of mediating ethos and philosophical ethics with one another. (shrink)

Written in the 1960s, TRUTH AND METHOD is Gadamer's magnum opus. Looking behind the self-consciousness of science, he discusses the tense relationship between truth and methodology. In examining the different experiences of truth, he aims to "present the hermeneutic phenomenon in its fullest extent.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Joel Weinsheimer HISTORY AND THE FUTURE OF MEANING In "meaning and Significance Reinterpreted," E. D. Hirsch, Jr. offers what he calls a "new and different theory" of meaning, one which radically reduces the role of the mens auctoris as the normative principle defining validity in literary interpretation.1 Clearly this essay marks a noteworthy shift in Hirsch's own thought, though in the history of hermeneutics such a reduction (...) is of itself hardly new. More interesting are the arguments Hirsch offers for this "correction" of his views, and in particular his thesis that in the process of application "responsible interpreters can adjust old concepts to new beliefs" and still say that they "have not really changed the text's meaning. They can properly say this, first of all, on grounds that... the original speech-intent subsumes new contents in the way that a concept subsumes examples, whether or not the examples were available to the original speaker. But in addition to this, the provisionality of speech sanctions a degree of adjustment in the original concepts as well" (p. 223). Application does not alter meaning if the new example can be subsumed under the original concept or if the original concept is itself originally provisional and adjustable. Thus Hirsch now concurs with Gadamer that application belongs to meaning and yet still dissents from Gadamer's thesis that application to situations unlike those the author envisioned necessarily changes the meaning. If determinacy of meaning is to be preserved, the essential question is, how far can sameness be unlike without becoming difference? Hirsch replies, "It appears... that meaning can tolerate a small revision in mental content and remain the same — but not a big revision.... In our ordinary talk about language, our judgment of sameness of meaning is based on our ad hoc judgment about the closeness of two contents" (p. 221). 139 140Philosophy and Literature Since I (and, I think, Gadamer) agree in great part with this conclusion, Hirsch's theory in my view does not need to be refuted and replaced with something new and different. Rather, in the spirit of his essay, I propose to adjust and build on it — by showing first that the development of Hirsch's argument rehearses Kant's movement from the first Critique to the third, second that the result of merging the two Critiques is unacceptable, and finally that Gadamer's reading of Kant anticipates and refines Hirsch's new theory while avoiding its unacceptable consequences. "The first amendment I must make in my original explanation of the distinction between meaning and significance is to reject my earlier claim that future applications of meaning, each being different, must belong to the domain of significance" (p. 210). In this first phase of his argument, Hirsch argues that the details of literary texts exemplify concepts that are themselves broader than the particulars that exemplify them. In Shakespeare 's sonnet 55, "marble" exemplifies what will last long but not forever. Just as the sonnet itself offers additional instances of this concept, so also the interpreter can find still other, more modern examples of it. Even if Shakespeare did not mention these modern examples and could not be said to have had them in mind, yet they too belong to the poem's self-same meaning if they can be subsumed under the original concept and thus belong to its extension. We can always find more examples, then, and in Hirsch's view this means that through its applications a poem can always become fresh again without altering its meaning. But here's the rub: if new instances are always to be found and thus no instance ever exhausts a concept, then no instance ever fully exemplifies a concept. Every example is a bad example, and Shakespeare would have done better to stick to conceptual language in the first place. If this conclusion is unacceptable, then we can reverse it. When the purpose is only to exemplify a concept, the difference between two examples (say, marble and steel) can be ignored as irrelevant. But it is nonetheless real. Certain elements of the particular example must be eliminated before it can be used to exemplify the general concept. But... (shrink)

Studies of hermeneutics have rarely dealt with eighteenth-century British thought, yet during this period debates over the interpretation of texts plagued and invigorated religious, intellectual, and political life in England. This important book is the first to deal with hermeneutical issues in British scriptural, legal, historical, political, and literary interpretation. Examining the work of Swift, Locke, Toland, Bolingbroke, Hume, Reid, Blackstone, and Burke, Joel C. Weinsheimer discusses common philosophical problems of understanding, concentrating especially on their theories about the (...) application of taste to discern interpretive truth. Weinsheimer's approach is primarily philosophical. In each area of hermeneutic endeavor, he asks such questions as why it is necessary to interpret, what it means to interpret, what does not need interpreting, what constitutes the signs of right understanding, and what accounts for the multiplicity of interpretations. He concludes that hermneutics in eighteenth-century England became the site of a contest and possible reconciliation between reason and history. Driven by the need to escape rationalist formalism as well as an opposite though equally sterile antiquarianism, interpretation offered a new way of thinking about truth, as belonging to reason and history together. (shrink)

In the preface to the Yale edition of Samuel Johnson’s poems, the editors remark that “for a modern reader who can recreate the situation in which [“London”] was written, it may still be exciting enough. But to one with less imaginative capacity or historical knowledge, its appeal lies in Johnson’s skillful handling of the couplet.”2 To assist us in re-creating the milieu of 1738, the editors supply the usual notes identifying various historical personages and events which are no longer in (...) the domain of common knowledge. In this respect they follow Johnson’s lead. “London” is manifestly an occasional poem; and its occasion—in part, Walpole’s timidity abroad and corruption at home—like all occasions, passed.3 Indeed it passed so quickly that Johnson himself felt called upon in the fifth edition to annotate, for instance, his mention of “the Gazetteer”: “the paper which at that time contained apologies for the Court.” By 1750 Walpole was long out of court, the Gazetteer extinct, and “London” as outdated as yesterday’s newspaper.For poems like “London” whose contents are neither au courant nor immortal but rather historical or simply dead, the Yale editors suggest two avenues of resuscitation: the reader may either restore the background by means of historical imagination or, failing that, admire Johnson’s couplet art, which perhaps has a better chance at perennial appeal. Either content or form, either history or art—both options require a sacrifice on our part, and that sacrifice is our occasion, our need. Even assuming that the poem’s context could be exhumed and that we could participate once again in all the rage of the “patriot” opposition to Walpole, Why would we want to? The problem is that not only “London” but the Walpole regime itself is now defunct. Yet the same question must be asked of the poem’s art, even and especially if it is eternal. Why are we interested in the aesthetic knowledge of couplets that have been drained of all substance? Is understanding “London” in either case an end in itself? The pure content of the poem is too concrete, its pure form too abstract, to answer our occasions. Thus to understand the poem as either history or art demands a leisure that has no exigencies and is therefore free for the bygone and ethereal.42. E.L. McAdam, Jr. and George Milne, eds., Poems, vol. 6, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson , p. xvii.3. For a detailed exposition of the social and political background of “London,” see Donald Greene, The Politics of Samuel Johnson , pp. 88-92, and James Clifford, “London,” Young Sam Johnson , pp. 175-94.4. John Locke explains the infinite leisure we can take in understanding the obscurities of ancient authors in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, 2 vols. , 2:110:There being no writings we have any great concernment to be very solicitous about the meaning of, but those that contain either truths we are required to believe, or laws we are to obey, and draw inconveniences on us when we mistake or transgress, we may be less anxious about the sense of other authors; who, writing but their own opinions, we are under no greater necessity to know them, than they to know ours. Our good or evil depending not on their decrees, we may safely be ignorant of their notions: and therefore in the reading of them, if they do not use their words with a due clearness and perspicuity, we may lay them aside. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging historical introduction to philosophical hermeneutics, Jean Grondin discusses the major figures from Philo to Habermas, analyzes conflicts between various interpretive schools, and provides a persuasive critique of Gadamer's view of hermeneutic history, though in other ways Gadamer's _Truth and Method_ serves as a model for Grondin's approach. Grondin begins with brief overviews of the pre-nineteenth-century thinkers Philo, Origen, Augustine, Luther, Flacius, Dannhauer, Chladenius, Meier, Rambach, Ast, and Schlegel. Next he provides more extensive treatments of such major nineteenth-century (...) figures as Schleiermacher, Böckh, Droysen, and Dilthey. There are full chapters devoted to Heidegger and Gadamer as well as shorter discussions of Betti, Habermas, and Derrida. Because he is the first to pay close attention to pre-Romantic figures, Grondin is able to show that the history of hermeneutics cannot be viewed as a gradual, steady progression in the direction of complete universalization. His book makes it clear that even in the early period, hermeneutic thinkers acknowledged a universal aspect in interpretation—that long before Schleiermacher, hermeneutics was philosophical and not merely practical. In revising and correcting the standard account, Grondin's book is not merely introductory but revisionary, suitable for beginners as well as advanced students in the field. (shrink)

Jean Grondin’s starting point in his impressive book is what Hans-Georg Gadamer refers to as the universal claim of hermeneutics. Gadamer is better known for the limits his hermeneutics seems to place on universal claims. Against the reliance the Enlightenment placed on the insights of a reason common to humanity, Gadamer stresses the prejudiced and partial character of attempts to understand meaning. And against more contemporary attempts to ground Enlightenment conceptions in universal human competencies, he stresses the historicity and finitude (...) of human knowledge. Our attempts to understand the meaning of texts, conversations, historical events, and social actions and practices are conditioned by the horizon of our language, our own historical experiences, and our assumptions and expectations. Still, Gadamer ends his Truth and Method by stressing not only the linguistic character of understanding but the infinite capacity of all languages to find and express new dimensions of meaning. “Language,” he writes, “forestalls any objection to its jurisdiction. Its universality keeps pace with the universality of reason.”. (shrink)

The interconnections, common interests, and other linkages between the Jewish and Islamic traditions have long been a matter of interest to academics. Today the need to understand these relationships, and to emphasize commonalities rather than conflicts, is of the greatest public interest. The present volume of studies, likely the first such collection in the scholarly literature, explores the full range of interconnections between Jews and Muslims in all fields (intellectual history, religion, philosophy, social history, etc.) and in all periods, from (...) the Middle Ages till today. The essays have been written by some twenty distinguished scholars from North America, Europe, and Israel. The volume is dedicated to our esteemed colleague Joel L. Kraemer, John Barrows Professor Emeritus in the Divinity School and on the Committee on Social Thought of the University of Chicago. In the course of his distinguished career Professor Kraemer has made major contributions to our understanding of the intellectual and cultural history of the Jews in the Arabic world, Islamic and Jewish philosophy and their sources in ancient philosophy, the humanistic renaissance in Islam (on which he published two seminal monographs), and Maimonides (on which he has published many important papers and is completing a biography and a translation of Maimonides' letters, to appear in the Yale Judaica Series). (shrink)

This book is a comprehensive and unique text and reference in medical ethics. By far the most inclusive set of primary documents and articles in the field ever published, it contains over 100 selections. Virtually all pieces appear in their entirety, and a significant number would be difficult to obtain elsewhere. The volume draws upon the literature of history, medicine, philosophical and religious ethics, economics, and sociology. A wide range of topics and issues are covered, such as law and medicine, (...) truth-telling by the physician, research, population policy, genetics, abortion, dying, and individual rights in medical care. The selections span the centuries, beginning with material from the works of Hippocrates, continuing through Thomas Percival, John Stuart Mill, and Claude Bernard, down to modern commentators like Henry K. Beecher, Walsh McDermott, David L. Bazelon, Paul Freund, H. L. A. Hart, John Rawls, Paul Ramsey, Richard McCormick, Rashi Fein, and Bernard Barber. The text has eight major divisions, beginning with sections on the ethical dimensions of the physician-patient relationship in history; the moral bases of medical ethics; and regulation, compulsion, and protection of the consumer in clinical medicine and public health. Each of these sections includes key essays that appear for the first time. All of the book's major divisions contain primary documents: codes such as the Hippocratic Oath, Medieval Law for the Regulation of Medicine, and the first as well as the most recent code of the American Medical Association; court decisions, including those on Karen Quinlan and on abortion in the United States and West Germany; government documents such as the statement of the National Commission on the Protection of Human Subjects, the Tuskegee Syphilis Report, the British Parliamentary debate on euthanasia, and the Council of Europe on rights of the sick and dying; and various published guidelines such as the Harvard Medical School brain death criteria, the American Hospital Association on patient's rights, and Pope Pius XII on the prolongation of life. Cases that illustrate moral dilemmas are provided for discussion purposes. Each section is preceded by a succinct editor's introduction. The documents and essays are of practical value for practitioners and students in medicine, law, ethics, and counselling, and for individual patients and groups concerned with medical care. Through encompassing divergent viewpoints, the essays and primary documents were selected to encourage humane practices and deepen understanding of the multiple traditions that shaped and do shape the development of medicine. (shrink)

I find it more than merely suggestive that we call many different kinds of pictures "realistic." As a category label, "realistic" is remarkably elastic. We cheerfully place into the category pictures that are made in strict accordance with the rules of linear perspective, pictures that are at slight variance with those rules but that nonetheless look perfectly "correct" , and pictures made in flagrant contravention of perspective geometry . We accept as realistic pictures that are made in strict accordance with (...) the rules of perspective construction that we could never judge as being similar to anything we might or could ever see . We accept as realistic pictures that are in sharp disagreement with what we now take to be the facts of vision . . . There is something charming and yet nasty about the belief in the special relation of picture to world. It is charming because it allows us to "enter" with ease into pictures and allows them to "extend" into our world. It allows us to think of pictures as "true to life," to use [Ernst] Gombrich's beguiling term, to look at a picture and ask questions of it, as if we were looking at the world through a window. It allows us to treat pictures as substitutes for the objects they represent and so, for example, to buy clothing from an illustrated catalogue, or to analyze architectural styles from pictures of buildings. In brief, it allows us to feel proximity to what is depicted and urges us to conclude that in certain important respects looking at a picture is equivalent to looking at what is pictured. Joel Snyder, associate professor of humanities and of art and design at the University of Chicago, teaches aesthetics, and theory and history of photography. A practicing photographer, he is currently completing a monograph on the photographer Timothy H. O'Sullivan. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Photography, Vision, and Representation" and "Reflexions on Las Meninas: Paradox Lost", written with Ted Cohen in the Winter 1980 issue. (shrink)

Suitable for advanced undergraduates and graduate students from diverse fields and varying backgrounds, this self-contained course in mathematical logic features numerous exercises that vary in difficulty. The author is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin.

The thesis that numbers are ratios of quantities has recently been advanced by a number of philosophers. While adequate as a definition of the natural numbers, it is not clear that this view suffices for our understanding of the reals. These require continuous quantity and relative to any such quantity an infinite number of additive relations exist. Hence, for any two magnitudes of a continuous quantity there exists no unique ratio. This problem is overcome by defining ratios, and hence real (...) numbers, as binary relations between infinite standard sequences. This definition leads smoothly into a new definition of measurement consonant with the traditional view of measurement as the discovery or estimation of numerical relations. The traditional view is further strengthened by allowing that the additive relations internal to a quantity are distinct from relations observed in the behaviour of objects manifesting quantities. In this way the traditional theory can accommodate the theory of conjoint measurement. This is worth doing because the traditional theory has one great strength lacked by its rivals: measurement statements and quantitative laws are able to be understood literally. 1 This paper was completed in 1990-1. while the author was a visiting scholar at the Irvine Research Unit in Mathematical Behavioral Sciences. University of California. Irvine. The author wishes to thank the Director. Professor R. D. Luce, for the generous provision of space and facilities within the Unit and for his critical comments upon some of the ideas expressed herein: Professor L. Narens. for his trenchant criticisms: and the University of Sydney, for granting Special Study Leave and financial assistance to make the visit possible. (shrink)

Surely [John R.] Searle must rely on a stable, formal conception of the point of view. He sets Las Meninas on a par with the antimony of the liar and the paradoxes of set theory. But nothing is an antimony or a paradox just because it seems so or just because it is confusing or difficult, even if it seems so to everyone. To deserve such a description, a thing must be, so to speak, intrinsically intractable, not merely resistant when (...) looked at in a particular way. If a man says "I do not believe I am alive," that would be odd, and it would be hard to understand just what he means, and it may even be hard or impossible to believe that he is telling the truth; but there is no antimony. If a man says "I am lying," then we have a primitive version of the antimony of the liar. Given the meaning of this utterance—and nothing else—there is no way to get a grip on it. If what the man says is true, then it's false; if what he says is false, then it's true. Joel Snyder, a practicing photographer, is associate professor of humanities and of art and design at the University of Chicago. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Photography, Vision, and Representation," written with Neil Walsh Allen , and "Picturing Vision" . Ted Cohen, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, has written on language, aesthetics, and taste. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy," appeared in the Autumn 1978 issue. (shrink)

Between the 1930s and the mid 1970s, it was commonly believed that in 1880 Karl Marx had proposed to dedicate to Charles Darwin a volume or translation of Capital but that Darwin had refused. The detail was often interpreted by scholars as having larger significance for the question of the relationship between Darwinian evolutionary biology and Marxist political economy. In 1973–4, two scholars working independently—Lewis Feuer, professor of sociology at Toronto, and Margaret Fay, a graduate student at Berkeley—determined simultaneously (...) that the traditional story of the proposed dedication was untrue, being based on a long-standing misinterpretation of the relevant correspondence. Between the two, and among several other scholars who became their respective allies, there developed a contest of authority and priority over the discovery. From 1975 to 1982, the controversy generated a considerable volume of spilled ink in both scholarly and popular publications. Drawing on previously unexamined archival resources, this article revisits the ‘case’ of the so-called ‘Darwin–Marx correspondence’ as an instance of the phenomenon of ‘multiple discovery’. A familiar occurrence in the natural sciences, multiple discovery is rarer in the humanities and social sciences. The present case of a priority dispute in the history of ideas followed patterns familiar from such disputes in the natural sciences, while also diverging from them in ways that shed light on the significance of disciplinary norms and research infrastructures. (shrink)

It is ironic that, with few exceptions, the now vast body of critical literature about Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas fails to link knowledge to understanding—fails to relate the encyclopedic knowledge we have acquired of its numerous details to a convincing understanding of the painting as a whole. Las Meninas is imposing and monumental; yet a large portion of the literature devoted to it considers only its elements: aspects of its nominal subjects, their biographies, and their roles in the household of (...) the queen or the king. Niceties of court etiquette; concerns about clothing, and shoes , and the small cup of water offered to the Infanta Margarita .This increasingly intimate discussion of the painting’s details is not altogether beside the point; some of this information deserves to be integrated into descriptions of the painting as a whole. But a reader of these descriptive accounts soon begins to suspect they are offered in the hope that some new details might provoke an understanding of the entire painting, might prove to be the key to our comprehension of it. In fact, Las Meninas invites such analysis. Some nineteenth-century critics called it “photographic” in its naturalism , in the profusion of its detail, and in the alleged “snapshot” quality of its composition.1 The underlying motive of this understanding ought not to be dismissed, even thought the photography analogy is clearly grotesque, in terms both of history and visual sensibility. Although we know a great deal about the contention, in seventeenth-century Spanish art theory, that a major function of art is the perfecting of nature according to ideal standards, Las Meninas nonetheless is most commonly taken to be a pure spectacle memorializing an incidental moment, seemingly explicable solely in terms of what is apparent in it. 1. Gustav Waagen, paraphrased in Carl Justi, Diego Velazquez and His Times , p. 419; William Stirling-Maxwell, quoted in ibid. Joel Snyder is associate professor of humanities and of art and design and is chairman of the Committee on General Studies in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is currently working on a book about the foundations of perspective. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Photography, Vision, and Representation,” written with Neil Walsh Allen , “Picturing Vision” , and “Reflexions on Las Meninas: Paradox Lost,” written with Ted Cohen. (shrink)

"Blau not only charts how the American government's embrace of laissez-faire ideology has wreaked havoc...he tells us what can be done to undo the damage. Must reading for anyon who cares about what's happening to the average American."--Charles Noble, Professor of Political Science, CSU Long Beach.

While completing a PhD in literature with a focus on the practices of physical and linguistic spaces, I was also working and sleeping at a dilapidated house in a poorer part of Bristol in case I was needed by one of five paranoid or clinically psychotic residents. I gave out medication in the morning, then went home to study in a small rented room. I began to see ritual everywhere - in my professors' routines; my own habits; the behaviours of (...) the mentally ill patients. This paper is the story of a number of madnesses and the problems with reading ritual performance in everything we do. (shrink)

In his masterly article, “Sir Arthur Eddington and the Physical World,” which appeared in the January 1934 issue of Philosophy, Dr. Stace has brought out a number of interesting points on which I should like to comment. However, as the main issues between Professor Stace and Professor Eddington are with regard to the physical world and reality, these will form the main topics of my remarks.

In the beginning I was the typical academic philosophy professor and teacher, whose stock in trade was argumentative essays about abstract issues. It puzzled, or bemused, even distressed me, therefore, when I would sometimes hear my students refer to the assigned readings in my courses as "stories." I attributed this inappropriate nomenclature to their inexperience with anything other than fiction and literature prior to their first philosophy course. But the shoe is now on the other foot. I myself have (...) become the purveyor of stories: I write them, I assign them as reading, and I ask my students to write their own. (shrink)

This is the first book to offer the best essays, articles, and speeches on ethics and intelligence that demonstrate the complex moral dilemmas in intelligence collection, analysis, and operations. Some are recently declassified and never before published, and all are written by authors whose backgrounds are as varied as their insights, including Robert M. Gates, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency; John P. Langan, the Joseph Cardinal Bernardin Professor of Catholic Social Thought at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, (...) Georgetown University; and Loch K. Johnson, Regents Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia and recipient of the Owens Award for contributions to the understanding of U.S. intelligence activities. Creating the foundation for the study of ethics and intelligence by filling in the gap between warfare and philosophy, this is a valuable collection of literature for building an ethical code that is not dependent on any specific agency, department, or country. (shrink)

Interpretations of Poetry and Religion is the third volume in a new critical editionof the complete works of George Santayana that restores Santayana's original text and providesimportant new scholarly information.Published in the spring of 1900, Interpretations of Poetry andReligion was George Santayana's first book of critical prose. It developed his view that "poetry iscalled religion when it intervenes in life, and religion, when it merely supervenes upon life, isseen to be nothing but poetry." This statement and the point of view (...) it espoused contributedsignificantly to the debate between science and religion at the turn of the century, and itseloquence and clearsightedness continue to have an impact on current discussions about the nature ofreligion.Interpretations of Poetry and Religion affronted Santayana's peers with its assault onliterary and religious pieties of the cultivated classes. William James called its philosophy ofharmonious and integral ideal systems nothing less than "a perfection of rottenness."In hisinsightful introductory essay, Joel Porte observes that while Santayana's theory of correlativeobjects, his espousal of the "ideal" - the normal human affinity for abstraction - and exaltation ofthe imagination may have offended some at Harvard, these ideas had a significant influence on otherHarvard scholars T.S. Eliot and Santayana's "truest disciple," Wallace Stevens.Herman J. Saatkamp,Jr., heads the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at Texas A & M University. William G.Holzberger is a Professor of English at Bucknell University. Joel Porte is Whiton Professor ofAmerican Literature at Cornell University. (shrink)