The first work to seriously and successfully bridge twentieth century economics and philosophy. Subroto Roy draws these two disciplines together and examines the intellectual roots of economics.

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

SummaryThis article surveys recent scholarship on the early history of British geology. It finds that many of the developments called for a decade ago by Dr Eyles and Dr Rappaport have not yet been realized. However, there has been progress in the broader understanding of geological ideas in their historical context, and a start has been made on the social history of the science. Some suggestions are offered as to a field of problems for the future, and a selective bibliography (...) of secondary materials, thematically arranged, is appended. (shrink)

The Enlightenment has often been written about as a sequence of disembodied 'great ideas'. The aim of this book is to put the beliefs of the Enlightenment firmly into their social context, by revealing the national soils in which they were rooted and the specific purposes for which they were used. It brings out the regional divergences of the Enlightenment experience, shaped by different local intellectual and economic priorities. At the same time it also shows how central concerns were shared (...) everywhere, and how the writings of certain key areas came to be influential elsewhere. The thirteen essays, each written by a historian specialising in the particular country, examine national contexts from Sweden to Italy, from Russia to North America. As well as focusing attention on the interplay of thought and action, ideology and society, the book offers important insights into the place of the intelligentsia in the modern world. (shrink)

Today, economic theory is a mathematical theory, but that was not always the case. Major changes in the ways economists presented their arguments to one another occurred between the late 1930s and the early 1950s; over that period the discipline became mathematized. Professor Weintraub, a noted scholar of the modern history of economic thought, argues that those changes were not merely cosmetic: The mathematical forms of the arguments significantly altered the substance of the arguments. Stabilizing Dynamics is particularly concerned with (...) the ways in which the rich and confusing talk of the 1930s evolved, over a fifteen-year period, into technical analysis of some mathematical structures. The author describes the context for the history of that change, locating it in the broader intellectual currents, and shows how the history of modern economics can be seen as a confluence of several disparate traditions. Historiographically, this book offers one of the first constructivist accounts of modern economic analysis. (shrink)

This book surveys the major thinking about Christian ethics as found in books published or distributed in the United States from the mid-sixties to the end of the seventies. In the first half of the book, Professor Long updates the analysis he first expounded in 1967 in his widely praised study, A Survey of Christian Ethics. Part one examines the literature dealing with moral reasoning, thinking about laws and codes, and ethics done in terms of situations and relationships. Part two (...) examines published work that stress the importance of institutions, politics in operational terms, and efforts to think of Christian fidelity as expressed in special communities outside or opposed to the civic mainstream. In part three Professor Long examines works concerned with the nature and function of the moral agent, covering such topics as attention to virtue and character, the nature and role of conscience, and thinking about the implications of moral development theory. Part four describes three new frameworks for doing ethics that have been developed during the last fifteen years: vocational ethics and policy studies; liberation theology; and comparative religious ethics. (shrink)

Roy Bayfield, well-known for exploring the Googlemaps non-place Argleton, here writes about his three-year-long walk home from northwest England to his home town near Brighton. Using the book 'Mythogeography' as his guide, he describes a postmodern, post-psychogeography pilgrimage through wormholes, hospital, faultlines and Z-Worlds.

A blindspot is a consistent but inaccessible proposition. For instance, I cannot know 'The test is on Friday but I do not know it'. No contradiction follows from the supposition that you know my blindspot. But could you know my blindspot if we are epistemic peers? Epistemic peers have the same evidence and reasoning ability. So either both peers know a proposition or both are ignorant. Since I cannot know my blindspot, neither can my peer. Thus the formal ignorance associated (...) with blindspots spreads to my peers. This contagion is used to improve a solution to the blindspot solution to the surprise test paradox. (shrink)

As good a place to begin as any is the meaning of the term ‘phenomenology’ itself. It is indeed a reasoned inquiry which discovers the inherent essences of appearances. But what is an appearance? The answer to this question leads to one of the major themes of phenomenology: an appearance is anything of which one is conscious. Anything at all which appears to consciousness is a legitimate area of philosophical investigation. Moreover, an appearance is a manifestation of the essence of (...) that of which it is the appearance. Surprising as it may sound, other philosophic points of view have refused to make this move. One can characterize phenomenological philosophy as centering on the following basic themes: a return to the traditional tasks of philosophy, the search for a philosophy without presuppositions, the intentionality of consciousness, and the rejection of the subject–object dichotomy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Medieval Troubadour Mobilized in the French Resistance *Roy RosensteinIntroduction: The Place of Poetry under VichyRien ne semblait plus anachronique que d’interroger, inter arma, le silence des Muses médiévales....Frank 1In Chantons sous l’occupation André Halimi details how raucously the band played on in wartime Paris. 2 If Vercors in 1941 advocated the practice of silence and Sartre in 1945 maintained that Paris had been dead for the four years (...) of the Nazi occupation, Halimi and others have shown that Parisians [End Page 499] sang, danced, and laughed during the Occupation as never before. 3 Rarely had so many plays been staged, so many movies been produced. 4 While in other Nazi-occupied countries the theaters and restaurants remained closed, thus preserving a modicum of national dignity in defeat, in France the arts thrived and la vie mondaine accelerated its pace. Journalist Henri Amouroux rightly explains how cinema and theater provided more than entertainment and why they were periodically the target of curfews. In these wartime performances a seemingly insignificant phrase could take on a rich contemporary context. Thus a line like “toute la fleur du royaume se trouve en prison” in Montherlant’s La reine morte invariably provoked applause. Whether the text was classical or contemporary in origin, the audience “seized upon all the passages that could be linked to the current situation.” 5 In this broad sense, Resistance literature came to include any “poetry written and/or distributed in France during the Occupation, and which the reader sees as implicitly or explicitly conveying hostility to Nazism and Collaboration.” 6Between 1940 and 1944 French audiences escaped their national misfortunes more through literature than through film and drama combined. “Never, perhaps, had literature played such a momentous part in the daily life of French readers,” wrote the late Henri Peyre in 1945. 7 As is often noted, the intellectual Resistance “fut surtout poétique.” 8 Every page of poetry, past or present, seemed to remind wartime readers of their current circumstances. One young poète résistant is categorical: “Never before had poetry played such a decisive role in history.” 9 Pierre Brunel of the Sorbonne is just as emphatic in confirming [End Page 500] the judgment of contemporary scholars and Resistance fighters alike: “During the war years, French poetry found a singleness of purpose and an audience that it had never enjoyed before.” 10In anticipation of more comprehensive treatments of French Resistance poetry sens large, the present study proposes a necessarily modest and certainly partial approach to the role of poetry in the French Resistance. Following the general groundwork of Seghers, Gaucheron, Higgins, and others, it undertakes to track, if only schematically, the reaction to France’s fall as polarized across three territories—in American exile, in Vichy France, and in German camps—through a focus on one exemplary twelfth-century troubadour. Concurrently with the “nouvelle floraison poétique” hailed by André Rousseaux in 1941, 11 Jaufre Rudel was one earlier poet who enjoyed a resurgence of interest during the war. With respect to this troubadour, to date only Dietmar Rieger has mentioned in passing an oblique reference to Rudel’s trademark distant love in Aragon’s “Pour un chant (national)”: “Jaufre’s love from afar is set against a love for France.” 12 This particular troubadour’s legend and lyrics assumed new dimensions through their immediate relevance not only for Aragon but for all French nationals, both imprisoned at home and exiled abroad. Literary historian René Dumesnil observed as early as 1941 with respect to pre-war French classics: “Present circumstances give them new depth and extend their range.” 13 Regarding France’s medieval literature, a modern critic has noted how “the troubadours, just as much as Tristan, Roland, Lancelot, Perceval, or even Yseult..., emerge as agents of unity, even of unanimity, around whom it is still possible to muster the French people in 1940.” 14 [End Page 501]As has been observed for centuries, “Frenchmen abroad seldom wholly give up the idea of going back to France some time or other.” 15 All French patriots and expatriates, wherever they found themselves after the Armistice in June 1940, whether... (shrink)