Our understanding of Schelling’s internal critique of German idealism, including his late attack on Hegel, is incomplete unless we trace it to the early “Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism,” which initiate his engagement with the problem of systematicity—that judgment makes deriving a system of a priori conditions from a first principle necessary, while this capacity’s finitude makes this impossible. Schelling aims to demonstrate this problem’s intractability. My conceptual aim is to reconstruct this from the “Letters,” which reject Fichte’s claim (...) that the Wissenschaftslehre is an unrivalled system. I read Schelling as charging Fichte with misrepresenting a system’s livability or commensurability with our finitude. My historical aim is to provide a framework for understanding Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift, which argues that a system’s liveability depends on its incompleteness or limitation by our finitude. On my reading, Schelling is early and continually committed to systematicity within the bounds of human finitude. (shrink)

Der hier erstmals ver]ffentlichte Briefwechsel zwischen dem Psychiater C.G. Jung und dem Nobelpreistr{ger der Physik Wolfgang Pauli ist ein geistesgeschichtliches Dokument ersten Ranges. Ein privates Schicksal hat sie zusammengef}hrt, und daraus ist ein vorwissenschaftlicher Dialog erwachsen, in dem versucht wird, naturwissenschaftliches und psychologischesDenken zu vereinheitlichen. Die Briefe verdeutlichen, da~ es weder f}r den Psychologen zul{ssig ist, die methodischen Einsichten der Physik, noch f}r den Physiker, die Erfahrungen im Umgang mit dem Psychischenzu vernachl{ssigen.

Property and political obligation are central issues of Locke's Two Treatises of Government. It is agreed that obligation is somehow contingent upon the government's protecting the property of its members. But ‘property’ in the Two Treatises had two meanings — in the state of nature usually referring to material possessions but in civil society meaning ‘life, liberty and estate’ — and its relationship to political obligation is complex. This complexity results from Locke's varying accounts of the movement from the state (...) of nature to civil society: he combined a traditional natural law justification of ownership with a legalist and semi-Aristotelian conception of the ends of and limitations on the state; he failed to provide a full account of the obligation of landless residents; he left unsettled difficulties inherent in the concept ‘property’ itself. Locke's notions of ‘trust’ and the ‘public good’ pointed to solutions to be worked out by future generations. (shrink)

After an outline of the macrorealistic solutions to the difficulties of the measurement theory, a new paradox is proposed and then discussed in the light of three different interpretations of quantum mechanics.

By means of a Clebsch representation which differs from that previously applied to electromagnetic field theory it is shown that Maxwell's equations are derivable from a variational principle. In contrast to the standard approach, the Hamiltonian complex associated with this principle is identical with the generally accepted energy-momentum tensor of the fields. In addition, the Clebsch representation of a contravariant vector field makes it possible to consistently construct a field theory based upon a direction-dependent Lagrangian density (it is this kind (...) of Lagrangian density that may arise when developing the Finslerian extension of general relativity). The corresponding field equations are proved to be independent of any gauge of Clebsch potentials. The law of energy-momentum conservation of the field appears to be covariant and integrable in a rather wide class of direction-dependent Lagrangian densities. (shrink)

Hibbing et al. argue that the liberal–conservative continuum is (a) universal and (b) grounded in psychological differences in sensitivity to negative stimuli. Our commentary argues that both claims overlook the importance of context. We review evidence that the liberal–conservative continuum is far from universal and that ideological differences are contextually flexible rather than fixed.

The analysis of a previous paper (see Ref. 1), in which the possibility of a Finslerian generalization of the equations of motion of gravitational field sources was demonstrated, is extended by developing the Finslerian generalization of the gravitational field equations on the basis of the complete contractionK = K lj lj of the Finslerian curvature tensorK l j hk (x, y). The relevant Lagrangian is constructed by the replacement of the directional variabley i inK by a vector fieldy i (x), (...) so that the notion of osculation may be regarded as the key concept on which the approach is based. The introduction of the auxiliary vector fieldy i (x) is shown to be of physical significance, for the field equations refer not only to the proper field variables but also to a special coordinate system associated withy i (x) through the Clebsch representation of the latter. The status of the conservation laws proves to be similar to that in the theory of the Yang-Mills field. By choosing a special Finslerian metric function we elucidate in detail the structure of the field equations in the static case. (shrink)

The author's purpose "is to examine the concept of intuition and to determine what part, If any, It should play in christian philosophy." (staff).

This volume presents new texts of Cicero's dialogues on political philosophy, De Re Publica and De Legibus, together with corrected versions of the editor's previously published editions of Cato Maior de Senectute and Laelius de Amicitia. The texts are based on a full reconsideration of the manuscript evidence and are presented in a clear and readable form.

The idea that cybernetics can throw light on problems connected with thinking and learning is now a familiar one. Psychologists who are concerned with these problems often make use of cybernetic analogies, and some cyberneticians claim that their science provides an answer to philosophical problems about the nature of thought. On this last topic a great deal has been written recently; but it is comparatively seldom that it is suggested that cybernetics can be applied to problems of aesthetics. On the (...) face of it, the mere idea of such an application might well seem absurd. Cybernetics, it will be said, is by definition the study of certain types of machines, and what light can possibly be thrown by such a study on questions which concern the nature of art? But even the strangest-sounding questions can prove enlightening, and in a recent broadcast talk Dr. F. H.George thought it worth while to ask whether a machine could create a work of art. This paper isdevoted to the development, and criticism, of some of the points which he made. (shrink)