Despite a profound concern for the epistemological, ontological and ethical conditions for being-at-home-in-the-world, G.W.F. Hegel published very little on a particularly serious threat to being-at-home: mental illness and disorder. The chief exception is found in Hegel'sEncyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences(1830). In this work, Hegel briefly provides an ontology of madness (Verrücktheit), wherein madness consists in the inward collapsing of subjectivity and objectivity into the individual's unconscious and primordial feeling soul. While there has been an increasing number of studies on Hegel's (...) conception of madness, I propose that there is another overlooked way to understand madness in Hegel's system: as social pathology. I argue in this article that Hegel offers a compelling social account of madness in thePhenomenology of Spirit(1807), which arises at the elevated, self-reflective and community level of spirit. This sociality of madness, as I call it, occurs when spirit is unable to reconcile two contradictory yet equally essential aspects of its reality, resulting in spirit's structural homelessness. I argue that by examining this overlooked sociality of madness, we may read Hegel's political-philosophical project in a new light: on the one hand, the ethical life (Sittlichkeit) presented in thePhilosophy of Right(1821) becomes understood as a political therapeutic. On the other hand, if the ethical life fails to live up to the demand of being an adequate spiritual therapeutic, then the traditional reading of thePhilosophy of Rightas a reconciliatory hermeneutic becomes problematized, opening up new avenues for the proliferation of social pathology. (shrink)

William Tait is one of the most distinguished philosophers of mathematics of the last fifty years. This volume collects his most important published philosophical papers from the 1980's to the present. The articles cover a wide range of issues in the foundations and philosophy of mathematics, including some on historical figures ranging from Plato to Gdel.

In this book, William H. F. Altman considers the pedagogical connections behind the post-Republic dialogues from Timaeus to Theaetetus in the context of their Reading Order.

How is a legitimate state possible? Obedience, coercion and intrusion are three ideas that seem inseparable from all government and seem to render state authority presumptively illegitimate. This book exposes three fallacies inspired by these ideas and in doing so challenges assumptions shared by liberals, libertarians, cultural conservatives, moderates and Marxists. In three clear and tightly argued essays William Edmundson dispels these fallacies and shows that living in a just state remains a worthy ideal. This is an important book (...) for all philosophers, political scientists and legal theorists as well as other readers interested in the views of Rawls, Dworkin and Nozick, many of whose central ideas are subjected to rigorous critique. (shrink)

Desires often come to us unbidden and unwanted, and they can have a dramatic impact, sometimes changing the course of our lives. In On Desire, William B. Irvine takes us on a wide-ranging tour of our impulses, wants, and needs, showing us where these feelings come from and how we can try to rein them in. Irvine spices his account with engaging observations by both ancient and modern writers, philosophers, and religious leaders. Irvine also looks at what modern science (...) can tell us about desire--such as what happens in the brain when we desire something--and advances a new theory about how desire evolved. Irvine concludes that the best way to attain lasting happiness is not to change the world around us or our place in it, but to change ourselves. If we can convince ourselves to want what we already have, we can dramatically enhance our happiness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:That St(r)ain Again:Blood, Water, and Generic Allusion in Horace's Bandusia OdeGottfried MaderAbstractHorace's vivid picture of the blood sacrifice to the spring of Bandusia has left many readers feeling somewhat uneasy, for while animal sacrifices appear elsewhere in the Odes,1 none matches this for its pathos or detail:O fons Bandusiae, splendidior vitro,dulci digne mero non sine floribus, cras donaberis haedo, cui frons turgida cornibusprimis et venerem et proelia destinat.frustra: nam (...) gelidos inficiet tibi rubro sanguine rivos lascivi suboles gregis.(Carm. 3.13.1-8)O spring of Bandusia, brighter than glass, worthy of sweet wine and flowers: tomorrow you will be presented with a kid whose forehead, swelling with first horns, destines him for both love and battles—but in vain, for to honour you the offspring of the wanton herd will dye your icy waters with his crimson blood.Hence the protest or surprise expressed at this allegedly offensive intrusion of blood into an otherwise idyllic scene: "Who wants a drink out of the fountain of Bandusia after that?" (Campbell 1924, 2); "[Horace] visualizes with aesthetic relish the mingling of the cool water and the red blood.... [His] behaviour was strange even by ancient criteria" (Nisbet 1962, 198); "somewhat macabre" (Williams 1969, 89); "the scandal of the sacrificial kid, whose death is dwelt upon... with a cruel brilliance quite out of proportion to any decorative needs" (Wilson 1968, 289).2 Others [End Page 51] have attempted to domesticate the sacrifice, urging that the ancients were less sentimental in these matters and justifying the description as rustic realism.3 But neither view accounts adequately for the densely suggestive detail or the perceptible emphasis on the blood offering—in a word, for the poetic intensity of these lines.The sacrifice begins to make sense when we explore its metaphorical possibilities and integrate it into the ode's thematic and intellectual design.4 Recent criticism has emphasized the metapoetic dimension of 3.13, interpreting Horace's homage to the spring as a tribute to the poetry which secures it a place among the celebrated fountains of Greek and Roman literature: "fies nobilium tu quoque fontium / me dicente cavis inpositam ilicem / saxis, unde loquaces / lymphae desiliunt tuae " (13-16; "you too will take your place among the famous springs when I celebrate the ilex set upon the hollow rocks, from which your clear-voiced waters come cascading down"). Further, since springs and water have a long metaphorical association with poetry (cf. below, note 12), the literal shades off easily into the literary, and the fons reflects the ideals and aspirations of Horace's own lyric art.5 From this perspective, the blood sacrifice too acquires a metaphorical nuance. Here is Steele Commager: "Readers have often been repelled by the details of the kid's sacrifice (6-8). Perhaps the description is not there for its realistic effect alone. Destined for love and battle, the 'offspring of the wanton flock' epitomizes life's comprehensive vitality, and as his warm blood mingles with the lucid water it is easy to sense a suggestion of the transformation of life into art" (Commager 1962, 323-24). Ralph Hexter continues on this trajectory: "The image of the red blood of the goat staining the cold spring water reflects the transmutation of life into poetry.... I believe a close reading of the poem supports a further insight: that Horace means to show us how life is transferred to the water of poetry, and by showing us how it is, he shows us that it is."6 Most recently, Gregson Davis has suggested a further association: "Unmixed wine, flowers, and young animal constitute the sine quibus non of the banqueting apparatus.... Horace's fons is to be honored with the irreducible tokens of convivial [End Page 52] poetry. This ensemble of tokens, and not the presumed reference to an obscure festival, is what principally determines the speaker's choice of offerings." And once the choice of offerings has established the lyric orientation, the goat's death suggests to Davis also the mortality topos or the "dark background," typically a foil to the convivial motifs in the context of... (shrink)

“The object of this book,” writes William C. Dowling in his preface, “is to make the key concepts of Paul Ricoeur’s _Time and Narrative_ available to readers who might have felt bewildered by the twists and turns of its argument.” The sources of puzzlement are, he notes, many. For some, it is Ricoeur’s famously indirect style of presentation, in which the polarities of argument and exegesis seem so often and so suddenly to have reversed themselves. For others, it is (...) the extraordinary intellectual range of Ricoeur’s argument, drawing on traditions as distant from each other as Heideggerian existentialism, French structuralism, and Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Yet beneath the labyrinthian surface of Ricoeur’s _Temps et récit_, Dowling reveals a single extended argument that, though developed unsystematically, is meant to be understood in systematic terms. __Ricoeur on Time and Narrative_ _presents that argument in clear and concise terms, in a way that will be enlightening both to readers new to Ricoeur and those who may have felt themselves adrift in the complexities of _Temps et récit,_ Ricoeur’s last major philosophical work. Dowling divides his discussion into six chapters, all closely involved with specific arguments in _Temps et récit_: on mimesis, time, narrativity, semantics of action, poetics of history, and poetics of fiction. Additionally, Dowling provides a preface that lays out the French intellectual context of Ricoeur's philosophical method. An appendix presents his English translation of a personal interview in which Ricoeur, having completed _Time and Narrative, _looks back over his long career as an internationally renowned philosopher. __Ricoeur on Time and Narrative___ _communicates to readers the intellectual excitement of following Ricoeur’s dismantling of established theories and arguments—Aristotle and Augustine and Husserl on time, Frye and Greimas on narrative structure, Arthur Danto and Louis O. Mink on the nature of historical explanation—while coming to see how, under the pressure of Ricoeur’s analysis, these ideas are reconstituted and revealed in a new set of relations to one another. "The scholarship in William C. Dowling's __Ricoeur on Time and Narrative____ __is impeccable; Dowling knows Ricoeur inside out. He highlights Ricoeur's most important arguments, presents them in a limpid, concise language, and links them to the relevant nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical developments. Dowling's book provides us with a lucid, intelligible version of Ricoeur's major work, one that will be of considerable significance to philosophers, historians, and literary theorists." —_Thomas Pavel, Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor of French Literature, and the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago_ "William C. Dowling's __Ricoeur on Time and Narrative___ _is a subtle and remarkably well-sustained piece of work. It provides a detailed introduction to a major work of philosophy and narrative theory—already a considerable achievement, given the difficulty of Ricoeur's text. However, Dowling also shows us, sometimes explicitly, sometimes simply through the way he conducts his argument, why we should bother with Ricoeur—what we have to gain from knowing him better than we do, however well we may think we know him." —_Michael Wood, Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Princeton University _. (shrink)

[This download contains the introductory chapter.] People confabulate when they make an ill-grounded claim that they honestly believe is true, for example in claiming to recall an event from their childhood that never actually happened. This interdisciplinary book brings together some of the leading thinkers on confabulation in neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, and philosophy.

An outline is given of the proof that the consistency of a κ⁺-Mahlo cardinal implies that of the statement that I[ω₂] does not include any stationary subsets of Cof(ω₁). An additional discussion of the techniques of this proof includes their use to obtain a model with no ω₂-Aronszajn tree and to add an ω₂-Souslin tree with finite conditions.

"--David Ruelle, author of "Chance and Chaos" "This is an important book, one that should cause an epoch-making change in the way we think about mathematics.

Scientific models may be more useful for false assumptions they make than true ones when one is interested not in the fit of the model, but in the form of the residuals. Modeling Darwin’s “blending” theory of inheritance shows how it illuminates features of Mendelian theory. Insufficient understanding of it leads to incorrect moves in modeling population structure. But it may prove even more useful for organizing a theory of cultural evolution. Analysis of “blending” inheritance gives new tools for recognizing (...) population structure for culture and for understanding differences between biological and cultural inheritance. (shrink)

Efforts to bare the psychonomic nature of the semantic reference (representation) relation have been remarkably scanty; in fact, the only contemporary account developed with any care is the one proposed by Osgood. However, not even Osgood has looked deeply at the difficulties that beset any attempt to analyze reference in terms of common effects appropriately shared by a symbol and its significate.

Some recent work in formal epistemology shows that “witness agreement” by itself implies neither an increase in the probability of truth nor a high probability of truth—the witnesses need to have some “individual credibility.” It can seem that, from this formal epistemological result, it follows that coherentist justification (i.e., doxastic coherence) is not truth-conducive. I argue that this does not follow. Central to my argument is the thesis that, though coherentists deny that there can be noninferential justification, coherentists do not (...) deny that there can be individual credibility. (shrink)

The Sustained Attention to Response Task is a Go–No-Go signal detection task developed to measure lapses of sustained conscious attention. In this study, we examined the impact global interference and spatial uncertainty has on SART performance. Ten participants performed either a SART or a traditionally formatted version of a global–local stimuli detection task with spatially certain and uncertain signals. Reaction time in the SART was insensitive to global interference and spatial uncertainty, whereas reaction time in the low-Go task was sensitive. (...) Spatial uncertainty increased errors of omission in the SART, which was not expected if the SART measures mindlessness. There was a high correlation between participants’ errors of commission rate and their reaction time in the SART. The results, overall, support the view that the SART is a better measure of response strategy than lapses in sustained attention or mindlessness. (shrink)

Trends of recent demographical development show that the world's population is aging at its fastest clip ever. In this paper, I ask whether adult children should support the life of their chronically ill parents as long as it takes, and I analyze the matter with regard to the doctrine of Confucianism. As the virtue of filial piety plays a central role in the ethics of Confucianism, adult children will face stringent demands while giving care to their chronically ill parents. In (...) this paper, I argue that because of the extreme moral demands Confucians impose on adult children, Confucianism is an objectionable moral theory. I also argue that if Confucianism allows these agents to opt out of the caregiving tasks, it may cause conflict with its own doctrines. For these reasons, I conclude that Confucianism cannot provide a defensible response to the problem of long-term caregiving. (shrink)

Frege begins his exposition of the symbol system employed in his Begriffsschrift by introducing the sign ⟝, whereby, he says, “[a] judgment is always to be expressed”.[The judgment sign] stands to the left of the sign or complex of signs in which the content of the judgment is given. If we omit the little stroke at the left of the horizontal stroke, then the judgment is to be transformed into a mere complex of ideas; the author is not expressing his (...) recognition or nonrecognition of the truth of this. (shrink)

THIS ARTICLE ARGUES THAT WEAK SUPERVENIENCE IS\nSUFFICIENTLY STRONG TO ESTABLISH A REASONABLE AND PLAUSIBLE\nMATERIALISM. SUPERVENIENCE IS A RELATION BETWEEN FAMILIES\nOF PROPERTIES, SUCH THAT, ROUGHLY SPEAKING, FAMILY A\nSUPERVENES ON FAMILY B IF ANY OBJECTS WHICH ARE\nINDISCERNIBLE WITH RESPECT TO B ARE THEREBY INDISCERNIBLE\nWITH RESPECT TO A. WEAK SUPERVENIENCE IS SUPERVENIENCE\nRESTRICTED TO ONE POSSIBLE WORLD; STRONG SUPERVENIENCE IS A\n"NECESSARY" SUPERVENIENCE EXTENDING ACROSS SOME PRINCIPLED\nSET OF POSSIBLE WORLDS. THESE NOTIONS ARE MADE SOMEWHAT\nMORE RIGOROUS FOLLOWING JAEGWON KIM'S DEVELOPMENT OF THEM.\nKIM HAS ARGUED THAT ONLY (...) STRONG SUPERVENIENCE CAN GROUND A\n'ROBUST' MATERIALISM, SO THE ARTICLE BEGINS BY CRITICIZING\nHIS ARGUMENTS FOR THIS POSITION. IT ARGUES THAT ANY FORM OF\nSTRONG SUPERVENIENCE IS IN FACT TOO STRONG TO CHARACTERIZE\nMATERIALISM AS IT IS NORMALLY CONCEIVED, FOR MATERIALISM IS\nNEITHER LOGICALLY NOR PHYSICALLY NECESSARY. BUT THE DAY IS\nSAVED AS WEAK SUPERVENIENCE CAN BE SHOWN TO BE JUST\nSUFFICIENTLY STRONG TO GROUND MATERIALISM. IN PARTICULAR,\nIT IS SHOWN THAT SUPERVENIENCE CAN SUPPORT COUNTERFACTUALS\nWITHOUT REQUIRING ANY NOTION OF "NECESSARY"\nSUPERVENIENCE. (shrink)

The European election which took place on June 17, 1984 must be seen in a more national than European context. Compared with previous general elections, the turn-out was generally lower and individual candidates polled a larger number of votes. Ought the Christian Democrats and Liberals, who make up the ruling coalition, be pleased about their respective results? A careful approach is required to answer that question. For the country as a whole, thefour governing parties lost 2.45 % of their share (...) of the vote in relation to the 1981 general election. This cannot be seen either as a massive repudiation or as a very satisfactory result. After two and a half years in power, this can be regarded as an average performance. However, if one takes a closer look at it, the result cannot be said as being very satisfying. In Flanders, the Liberals suffered a severe setback whereas the level of support for the Christian Democrats was only fractionally higher than in 1981. Between them, the two governing parties lost 6.72 % of the votes. In Brussels, the four ruling parties gained 9.89 %. This is partly due to two factors: the votes polled by Mr. Nols and, more importantly, the fact that no UDRT candidate stood in the election. It is not at all certain that a similar result would be recorded at a general election. Finally, in Wallonia, the two governing parties put up a good fight and gained 1.37 % of the votes whereas the Socialists and the Green movement made gains not because the ruling parties suffered a defeat but because of the considerable losses both by the Communist Party and by the nationalist parties. (shrink)

Organized only two years after the previous genera! elections, the 1987 poll, characterized by a great stability of the electorale, wilt probably have a deep political impact on the country's future.If the rate of external mobility suitably gauges the extent of the citizens' shifts in votes, the 1987 elections will have ranged among the four most stable general elections out of the twenty-two that have taken place since universal suffrage has been introduced. And yet, because of the decline of the (...) outgoing coalition, on the one hand, which is mainly due to the loss suffered by the CVP, and because of the change of majority within the Walloon Regional Council and the French-speaking Community Council, on the other, the political situation appears very different after the 13th December 1987 elections. The observer can only be struck by the asymmetrical behaviour of the voters in the northern and southern parts of the country. In Flanders, the main party is on the decline white all other parties are winning votes.However, everything seems to show that the motivation of the voters who did not vote twice for the same party in 1985 and 1987, but who, as we said, are not very numerous, was an economic and social motivationrather than a language or community-related one. The gains of Agalev, the PVV and the SP in the face of the Volksunie's status quo cannot be explained otherwise. The gains of the Vlaams Blok, notably in Antwerp, are probably due to social rather than community-linked motivations too. In the W alloon Region, on the contrary, the main party is registering an obvious gain, white the other parties are declining or stagnating. In this case, the motivations seem to be numerous : they have a social and economic background on the part of voters who trusted the main opposition party, but they are also community linked and inspired by considerations that have to do with the relationships between the Walloon and Flemish people in the Belgian State under transformation.The political prospects then appear uncertain. This is even more true that two other elections are to take place in the next eighteen months.These concern the opposite levels of the elected Assemblies: the municipal Council and the European Parliament. (shrink)

Sutton Elbert Griggs wrote the first major African-American political novel, Imperium in Imperio. Imperium is a utopian novel and the first novel to represent the New Negro, a figure that Alain Locke popularized a quarter of a century later. Griggs used the term New Negro to refer to a generation of educated black Americans born after emancipation, a multiplicity of voices that demanded equality at the turn of the twentieth century. The 1890s are often described as the nadir of race (...) relations in the United States, for blacks were disfranchised, legally segregated, and subject to terrorist mob violence in the form of lynching and burning alive. Race war was in the air.Sutton Griggs was born... (shrink)