Rogers suggests that human spirituality comprises the interplay of three foundational human dynamics: suffering, interconnecting, and valuing. The spiritual orientations that result from these clusters of dynamics are primarily integrating or disintegrating. The dominant spiritual orientation in this country has been disintegrating; and this orientation has characterized the attitude of the majority population toward African Americans since the beginning of slavery, fostering radical separation, displacing the suffering of the majority onto a minority, and defining the experience and perspectives of the (...) majority as normative without regard for the minority. Rogers explores the effects of this disintegrating spiritual orientation in terms of the dynamics of oppression using the ideas of 'being' and 'non-being'. The key to ameliorating oppression is to recognize the liberating capacity of suffering as potentially subversive within ever-enlarging contexts addicted to increasing material consumption and sensual gratification. ;Chapter 1 is a general introduction to the dissertation. ;Chapter 2 provides an overview of the primary methodology for research in 'formation theory' as developed by Adrian van Kaam. Using issues from the philosophy of science, the chapter also discusses the basis for divergence from the standard methodology based in the anomalous character of the researcher's 'formative event' and perspective relative to concerns that have been researched using formation theory. ;Chapter 3 considers a conceptualization of spirit as questing for meaningfulness, which provides the experiential ground for relating spirituality and liberation: Since oppression precipitates meaninglessness through disintegration, the reaffirmation of an integrative spirituality provides the ground for meaningfulness, which in turn grounds liberation, or transcendence. ;Chapter 4 presents the construct of human spirituality using the three foundational foci of spiritual formation: suffering, relating, and valuing. ;Chapter 5 concludes the dissertation using the two principle laws of thermodynamics to develop an analogous understanding for the necessity of suffering in maintaining an integrative and liberating spirituality. It also considers implications of the dissertation for liberation of oppressed peoples, the development of science and social policy, and formation theory. (shrink)

Twelve writers (health care professionals, ethicists, pastors, and teachers) address some of the difficult issues in health care. Individuals and families are often forced to face medical crises alone. This book will help Christians better understand how to apply their faith to areas of medical crisis and to become more helpful and effective caregivers to people around them who face tough situations. Thought-provoking study questions at the end of each chapter assist a discussion group or Sunday school class in dealing (...) with the pertinent issues in an educational manner. (shrink)

Like the word of resurrection uttered at the mouth of Jesus' tomb, preaching is the proclamation of a word from beyond ourselves, a word of God's invincible grace and steadfast love.

The obligation of a court to follow the law of a superior court is commonly taken to be stronger than the obligation of the higher court to respect its own precedent. The Supreme Court has recently asserted this stronger obligation in the most forceful terms. What follows is an attempt to demonstrate that this is wrong as a matter of policy and as a matter of law.

Written in an outstandingly clear and lively style, this 1969 book provokes its readers to rethink issues they may have regarded as long since settled.

Published in 1897, this was the first complete edition of Roger Bacon's influential thirteenth-century encyclopedia of science.

Essays on philosophy and intellectual history, focusing in particular on John Locke.

This is a formal and systematic study of the logical foundations of speech act theory. The study of speech acts has been a flourishing branch of the philosophy of language and linguistics over the last two decades, and John Searle has of course himself made some of the most notable contributions to that study in the sequence of books Speech Acts, Expression and Meaning and Intentionality. In collaboration with Daniel Vanderveken he now presents the first formalised logic of a (...) general theory of speech acts, dealing with such things as the nature of an illocutionary force, the logical form of its components, and the conditions of success of elementary illocutionary acts. The central chapters present a systematic exposition of the axioms and general laws of illocutionary logic. (shrink)

John Searle's Speech Acts made a highly original contribution to work in the philosophy of language. Expression and Meaning is a direct successor, concerned to develop and refine the account presented in Searle's earlier work, and to extend its application to other modes of discourse such as metaphor, fiction, reference, and indirect speech arts. Searle also presents a rational taxonomy of types of speech acts and explores the relation between the meanings of sentences and the contexts of their utterance. (...) The book points forward to a larger theme implicit in these problems - the basis certain features of speech have in the intentionality of mind, and even more generally, the relation of the philosophy of language to the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Contains an introductory essay by the editor on the ten contemporary articles selected and on the questions which they raise.

"[The authors] artfully piece together important essays in educational policy and philosophy. . . . The book deals in detail with such issues as teacher professionalization, moral responsibility of public schools, accountability, and ethical codes of practice. Must reading for teachers, administrators, and professors in schools and departments of education." --Choice.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In Memoriam:John W. Yolton 1921-2005G.A.J. RogersJohn Yolton died a few days short of his eighty-fourth birthday. He was one of the most distinguished historians of philosophy of his generation. Early in his studies he had found Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding a challenging book that raised as many puzzles as it answered and it was his engagement with that work that dominated his intellectual enquires from his MA (...) studies until his latest book, published last year, The Two Intellectual Worlds of John Locke. Man, Person, and Spirits in the "Essay." It was his fifteenth authored book. His first book was his Oxford D. Phil. Thesis, John Locke and the Way of Ideas, published nearly fifty years ago in 1956. If Locke and Ideas were to dominate his writings, they were not exclusive of other interests. His second book was The Philosophy of A.S. Eddington. Others, not Locke-centered, were to follow. In later years he has focussed especially on the problem for all readers of Locke and other early modern philosophers including Descartes, Berkeley and Hume, as to the nature of their commitment to ideas. Did they really hold that ideas are objects that intervene between the perceiving mind and the outside world, or is the standard reification of ideas simply a mistaken reading of their argument? Yolton, since at least the early 1980s, has argued that to reify ideas in the standard way is based on a false reading of the texts. His reading has not always been accepted by historians of philosophy but there are signs that that might be changing and some books and articles published in the last five years or so reveal distinct signs of a Yolton influence.John Yolton was not only a prolific writer he was also a highly regarded editor, not only of Locke texts but also of important collections of papers such as John Locke: Problems and Perspectives (1969) and The Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment (1992) to which he contributed [End Page 419] a prodigious number of entries. But perhaps as important as his writing was Yolton's teaching. Nobody who sat in on one of his classes could not but be impressed with the way in which he was able to hold a class's attention to a text of Descartes, Locke or Hume and engage first year or graduate students in a scrutiny of the text, perhaps only a paragraph or even a sentence long, teasing out its ambiguities and its place in an argument, to the obvious enlightenment of students who until then had found early modern philosophical prose dull and uncaptivating. It is no surprise to find that he supervised a large number of scholars of the early modern period who have gone on to make important contributions to the history of philosophy and intellectual history.John Yolton was always enormously generous with his time. His graduate students became extensions of the Yolton family. So also did younger scholars. Any book or paper sent him was always to receive careful attention and detailed comment, always fair but never patronising. He was also very active as a member of many editorial boards, including the Journal of the History of Ideas and the Clarendon Locke Board. John was appointed to the Board of Consulting Editors of the JHI in 1977. At the beginning of 1987 he was elected to the Board of Editors and he was still a member of that Board at the time of his death. During his membership on both boards he provided an enormous amount of editorial help, evaluating scores of submitted papers. He was especially active during the years that the Journal's editorial office was located at Rutgers University. In 1991 John was elected vice president of the Board of Directors, the governing body of the JHI. He served as vice president until the summer of 1998. He was chairman of the Clarendon Locke Board for nine years as well as, at the same time, being its general editor.John Yolton and his wife, Jean, a Locke scholar in her own right, were regular participants at conferences, but in recent years their travelling... (shrink)

Three hundred years after his major publications, John Locke remains one of the most potent philosophical influences in the world today. His epistemology has become embedded in our everyday presumptions about the world, and his political theory lies at the heart of the liberal democratic state. This collection by a distinguished international group of scholars looks both at core areas of Locke's philosophy and political theory and at areas not usually discussed--the links between Locke's philosophy and his religious and (...) political thought, the effects and implications of Locke's works in the world at the time, and the manifestation of those effects in the present day. Drawing on material not available until recently--on both the modern texts of the Clarendon Edition of Locke's works and on unpublished manuscripts, this book is the first original collection of Locke's scholarship in some years. (shrink)

This six volume Routledge Library Edition set is dedicated to the work of key nineteenth-century German thinker, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose hugely influential work in the field of philosophy continues to be felt to this day. The six volumes, published between 1948 and 1988, represent a truly wide-ranging analysis of Nietzsche’s life and work, offering an excellent overview of the cannon of critical analysis and interpretation on Nietzsche in the twentieth century. The collection covers Nietzsche’s perspectives and influence upon a variety (...) of sociological and philosophical debates, as well as placing his work in the context of contemporaries such as Richard Wagner, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Max Stirner. (shrink)

Much of Thomas Hobbes's work can be read as historical commentary, taking up questions in the philosophy of history and the rhetorical possibilities of written history. This collection of scholarly essays explores the relation of Hobbes's work to history as a branch of learning.

To find more information on Rowman & Littlefield titles, please visit us at www.rowmanlittlefield.com.

The American Constitution held out the hope that ordinary people were capable of deciding their own fates, and in doing so it immeasurably elevated the dignity of common people. The organization and interplay of the parts that comprise the whole American government exist to provide people the opportunity to govern themselves and, at the same time, reveal the limits of democratic self-rule. The forgetting of these limits is not only destructive to the constitution but the nation as a whole.

No single text could be considered more important in the history of philosophy than Descartes' Meditations. This unique collection of background material to this magisterial philosophical text has been translated from the original French and Latin. The texts gathered here illustrate the kinds of principles, assumptions, and philosophical methods that were commonplace when Descartes was growing up. The selections are from: Francisco Sanches, Christopher Clavius, Pierre de la Ramee, Francisco Suárez, Pierre Charron, Eustachius a Sancto Paulo, Scipion Dupleix, Marin Mersenne, (...) Pierre Gassendi, Jean de Silhon, François de la Mothe le Vayer, Charles Sorel, and Jean-Baptiste Morin. (shrink)

Evolutionary theories of schizophrenia must account for the maintenance of putative alleles in past and present populations despite reduced fitness among the affected. Such models must also account for extant intersex and population-level variability in the expression of schizophrenia. We argue that genetic balanced-polymorphism hypotheses remain the most robust in terms of modeling and testing these processes in populations.