Essentially a collection of letters from Santayana strung together with narrative about the activities of Santayana, C. A. Strong and Cory himself. Other figures come and go: Walter Lippman, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound. Some of the flavor of Santayana's thought comes through and a good deal of his personality. The letters cover the years 1927-1952: a period of great productivity for Santayana, embracing the Realms of Being, The Last Puritan, Persons and Places and Dominions and Powers. As long (...) as Cory keeps Santayana the center of focus, the book is captivating and brilliantly effective—like Santayana at his best. Unfortunately, the latter half of the book covers a period when Cory was generally somewhat independent and at a distance from Santayana: there are not so many letters and the narrative becomes longer, more autobiographical and much less interesting. Only Santayana's death refocuses the book. But by then the work is irremediably flawed.—W. G. E. (shrink)

I do not want to be misunderstood as saying that the cultural situation I describe here caused Reagan, or that it typifies Reaganism, or that everything about it can be ascribed or referred back to the personality of Ronald Reagan. What I argue is that a particular situation within the field we call "criticism" is not merely related to but is an integral part of the currents of thought and practice that play a role within the Reagan era. Moreover, I (...) think, "criticism" and the traditional academic humanities have gone through a series of developments over time whose beneficiary and culmination is Reaganism. Those are the gross claims that I make for my argument.A number of miscellaneous points need to be made here. I am fully aware that any effort to characterize the present cultural moment is very likely to seem quixotic at best, unprofessional at worst. But that, I submit, is an aspect of the present cultural moment, in which the social and historical setting of critical activity is a totality felt to be benign , uncharacterizable as a whole and somehow outside history. Thus it seems to me that one thing to be tried–out of sheer critical obstinacy–is precisely that kind of generalization, that kind of political portrayal, that kind of overview condemned by the present dominant culture to appear inappropriate and doomed from the start.It is my conviction that culture works very effectively to make invisible and even "impossible" the actual affiliations that exist between the world of ideas and scholarship on the one hand, and the world of brute politics, corporate and state power, and military force, on the other. The cult of expertise and professionalism, for example, has so restricted our scope of vision that a positive doctrine of noninterference among fields has set in. This doctrine has it that the general public is best left ignorant, and the most crucial policy questions affecting human existence are best left to "experts," specialists who talk about their specialty only, and–to use the word first given wide social approbation by Walter Lippman in Public Opinion and The Phantom Public–"insiders," people who are endowed with the special privilege of knowing how things really work and, more important, of being close to power1.1. See Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century , pp. 180-85 and 212-6. (shrink)

With his customary incisiveness, W. V. Quine presents logic as the product of two factors, truth and grammar--but argues against the doctrine that the logical truths are true because of grammar or language. Rather, in presenting a general theory of grammar and discussing the boundaries and possible extensions of logic, Quine argues that logic is not a mere matter of words.

W E Andersen; Education and the Ethical Concept of a Person or Willie, and the Redoubtable Mr. Chips, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 2, Issue 1, 30.

A non-epistemological history of historical epistemology Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9501-5 Authors W. R. Albury, School of Humanities, University of New England, Armidale, NSW 2351, Australia Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

Knowledge about moral development and elderly persons is very limited. A hermeneutical interpretative study was conducted with healthy elderly persons in order to explore and describe their moral orientation based on the paradigms of justice and care . The types of moral reasoning, dominance, alignment and orientation were determined. All but one participant included both types of reasoning when discussing an ethical conflict. None of the men’s moral reasoning was dominated by caring, but justice dominated the reasoning of four women. (...) The implications for ethical decision-making and future research are discussed. (shrink)

In the case of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen problem und Bell's proof it is shown how, contrary to Kuhn and Lakatos, a "purely metaphysical" thesis became falsifiable and falsified by an "crucial" experiment in the strict sense so that the followers of an older paradigma changed their opinion on rational grounds and not by an "experience of conversion" or by "dying out".