What is film? Why are movies important? Why do we care about them in the way we do? How do we think of the connections between the projected image and what it is actually an image of? Most movie-goers assume that they are entitled to make jugments and come to conclusions about the movies they see--to evaluate how "good" they are, or what they "mean." But what do they base, or what should they base, their judgments on? In this thought-provoking (...) new book, Stanley Cavell, a professor of philosophy and aesthetics at Harvard who has long taken a lively interest in movies, looks closely at these and other questions concerning America's most popular art and the perceptions we make of, by, and through it. His answers are surprising and important--not only to our understanding of film and of ourselves, but to our expectations of life and art. Mr. Cavell's explorations of some of Hollywood's stars, directors, and most famous films--as well as his fresh look at Godard, Bergman, and other great European directors--will be of lasting interest to movie-viewers and intelligent people of all ages. (shrink)

Natural languages all contain constructions the interpretation of which depends upon the situation in which they are used. In Language and Context, Jason Stanley presents a series of essays which develop a theory of how the situation in which we speak interacts with the words we use to help produce what we say. The reason we can so smoothly operate with sentences that can be used to express very different items of information, Stanley argues, is that there are (...) linguistically mandated constraints on the effects of the situation on what we say. These linguistically mandated constraints are most evident in the cases of sentences containing explicit pronouns, such as "She is a mathematician", where interpretation of the information expressed is guided by the use of the pronoun "she". But even when such explicit pronouns are lacking, our sentences provide similar cues to allow our interlocutors to determine the information expressed. We are, in the main, confident that our interlocutors will smoothly grasp what we say, because the grammar and meaning of our sentences encodes these constraints. In defending this theory, Stanley pays close attention to specific cases of context-sensitive constructions, such as quantified noun phrases, comparative adjectives, and conditionals. Philosophers and cognitive scientist have appealed to the dependence of what is intuitively said by a sentence on the situation in which it is uttered to argue against the possibility of a systematic theory of meaning for natural language. The theory developed in this book is a vigorous defense of the possibility of a systematic theory of meaning for natural language against these influential tendencies. (shrink)

Combining exemplary scholarship and analytic precision, Stanley Rosen illuminates the underpinnings of post-modernist thought, providing valuable insight as he pursues two arguments: first, that post-modernism, which regards itself as an attack upon the Enlightenment, is in fact the penultimate stage of the Enlightenment itself; and second, that the extraordinary contemporary emphasis upon hermeneutics is the latest consequence of the triumph of history over mathematics within the unstable essence of the Enlightenment. Hermeneutics is consequently at bottom a political phenomenon. In (...) developing these arguments, Rosen demonstrates the paradigmatic status of Kant for a proper understanding of post-modernism, analyzes Derrida's influential critique of Platonism as well as his defense of writing, explains the political dimension of the quarrel between the ancients and moderns by studying the hermeneutics of Leo Strauss and Alexander Kojhve, and shows how the modern notion of "theory" is intrinsically relativized by the triumph of history over mathematics into the notion of interpretation. A wide-ranging exploration into current critical thinking, Hermeneutics as Politics will generate considerable debate among scholars interested in post-modernism, the Enlightenment, hermeneutics, the relation of philosophy and politics, deconstruction, and the history of philosophy. (shrink)

This is the first volume of a two-volume set containing the most important secondary literature on Hume on Religion (Volume 2, to be published in August 1996, deals with general remarks on Hume and Natural Religion). Focusing on responses to the Essay on Miracles , the material included in this volume ranges from 1751 to 1883. Authors include: T. Rutherford, William Adams, John Leland, George Campbell, Revd. S. Vince, John Hollis, Revd. James Somerville, Dr. Wately, Revd. A. C. L. D'Arblay, (...) Revd. Francis Kilvert, Malthus, Joseph Napier, Joseph Mazzini Wheeler, Sir Edmund Beckett, James McCosh, and Huxley. (shrink)

Counterfactual thinking involves imagining hypothetical alternatives to reality. Philosopher David Lewis argued that people estimate the subjective plausibility that a counterfactual event might have occurred by comparing an imagined possible world in which the counterfactual statement is true against the current, actual world in which the counterfactual statement is false. Accordingly, counterfactuals considered to be true in possible worlds comparatively more similar to ours are judged as more plausible than counterfactuals deemed true in possible worlds comparatively less similar. Although Lewis (...) did not originally develop his notion of comparative similarity to be investigated as a psychological construct, this study builds upon his idea to empirically investigate comparative similarity as a possible psychological strategy for evaluating the perceived plausibility of counterfactual events. More specifically, we evaluate judgments of comparative similarity between episodic memories and episodic counterfactual events as a factor influencing people's judgments of plausibility in counterfactual simulations, and we also compare it against other factors thought to influence judgments of counterfactual plausibility, such as ease of simulation and prior simulation. Our results suggest that the greater the perceived similarity between the original memory and the episodic counterfactual event, the greater the perceived plausibility that the counterfactual event might have occurred. While similarity between actual and counterfactual events, ease of imagining, and prior simulation of the counterfactual event were all significantly related to counterfactual plausibility, comparative similarity best captured the variance in ratings of counterfactual plausibility. Implications for existing theories on the determinants of counterfactual plausibility are discussed. (shrink)

We construct a quantum logic which generates the usual quark states. It follows from this model that quarks can combine only in quark-antiquark pairs and quark (and antiquark) triples. The ground meson and baryon states are also generated and gluons are discussed.

Why has peace been often unjust, and why has justice been more belligerent than peaceful? Frequently, peace or armistice has served only to put a temporary end to violence, and has left some or all sides feeling dissatisfied. Peace has also been an imposition on the part of the victors of conflict to the end of some notion of order, thus leaving the affected common people to draw their own conclusions without ever being consulted. It is for this reason that (...) justice is often more properly envisioned as the image of a fighter with his sword rather than a balancing scale. In this chapter, Hoffman explores the complexity of how peace and justice might be wedded in international relations, and gives the reader sound starting points for thinking about this conceptual approach. (shrink)

The paper critically analyzes Hume’s view that human persons are "nothing but a bundle of different perceptions" in order to find out which one of the two possible interpretations of this view, the mentalistic or the physicalistic, is the more probable and free from serious difficulties. First, I examine Hume’s view of personhood from the mentalistic perspective only to discover that his all-important distinction between ideas and impressions is logically untenable. If ideas indeed resemble impressions, as Hume claims, then ideas (...) should be present to our mind at the same time as impressions so we could compare them in order to find out whether there is any resemblance between the two kinds of perceptions and whether the impressions are indeed more forceful or vivacious than the ideas corresponding to them. But this is logically impossible because by the time we have an idea, its impression is gone, and if we think that we are comparing an idea with its impression, we are in fact comparing an idea only with a memory of its impression. But a memory of an impression is, in Hume’s view, already an idea. So we are comparing only two ideas, not an idea with an impression. Second, since ideas and concepts have no logical standing, we are forced to interpret the realm of ideas as an extension of the realm of impressions, coping with various problems arising from this interpretation as best we can. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 5, Page 711-712, August 2012.

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 5, Page 710-711, August 2012.

According to Pierre Bourdieu, practices and habits are out the realm of rationality; this claim about their nature explains their peculiar resistance to rational revision. I argue that one can explain the fact that practices and habits are difficult to revise, without abandoning the view that they are within the space of reasons.

Liberal/conservative and modern/postmodern concepts define contemporary theological debate. Yet what if these categories are grounded in a set of assumptions about what it means to be the church in the world, presuming we must live as though God's existence does not matter? What if our theological discussion distracts us from the fact that the church is no longer able to shape the desires and habits of Christians? Hauerwas wrestles with these and similar questions constructing a theological politics necessary for the (...) church to be the church in the world. In so doing, he challenges liberal notions of justice and freedom. (shrink)

This paper develops a theory of quantum automata and their slightly more general versions, q-automata. Quantum languages and η-quantum languages, 0≤η<1, are studied. Functions that can be realized as probability maps for q-automata are characterized. Quantum grammars are discussed and it is shown that quantum languages are precisely those languages that are induced by a quantum grammar. A quantum pumping lemma is employed to show that there are regular languages that are not η-quantum, 0≤η<1.

“Copts” are Oriental Orthodox of Egypt. The people described in this article are Oriental Orthodox of Ethiopia. They would not want to be described as Copts, just as Armenian Orthodox would not be properly described as Copts. I suggest the use of the term “Ethiopian Orthodox” or an older term “Abyssinian Orthodox.”.

My purposes in this paper are to explain the constitutive-regulative distinction as set out by Kant in the Dialectic and Methodology, and to note its reappearance in contemporary philosophy.

Critical theorist Aronowitz (sociology, CUNY) contends that the centrality of cultural categories, as raised by the feminist, ecology, and racial freedom movements, among others, provides the crucial difference for the late industrial world, demanding a break from the dominant tendencies of Marxism to reduce causality to its economic features. Acidic paper. Paper edition (unseen), $14.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.