Rochester Studies in Philosophy - Böcker

A collection of essays dealing with the history of the Scottish Enlightenment, its connection with the European Enlightenment in general, such major figures as Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, and David Hume, and the making of theScottish identity.A collection of ten specially commissioned essays addressing five themes central to any study of the Scottish Enlightenment: one, the place [both physical and cognitive] of science and medicine in the Scottish Enlightenment; two,the institutionalization of enlightenment in the universities; three, the cultivation of the different branches of "the science of man" in the Scottish Enlightenment; four, the national and international contexts of enlightenmentthought in Scotland; and five, the historiography of the Scottish Enlightenment.Taking up these themes, the editor and contributors explore facets of enlightened culture in Scotland which have not been given their due in the literature, and reassess current interpretations of various aspects of the Scottish Enlightenment specifically and its relation to the European Enlightenment in general. Special emphasis is given to such major Scottish thinkersas Francis Hutcheson, George Campbell, Thomas Reid, and David Hume.

An attempt, by a close reading of three Platonic dialogues, the Symposium, Lysis, and the Phaedrus, to discover the true nature of the object of Eros and especially to understand the mystery of its birth.This work is an attempt to understand the nature of the object of Eros in Plato's writings. In the first chapter certain considerations based on a passage in Plato's Symposium lead to a discovery and characterization of thenature of that object and several of its features. Then it is realized that the chief problem or mystery about the nature of the object of Eros is how it arises. The book then explores the Lysis and the Phaedrus, which both address how the object arises, in two different ways, the Socratic and the Platonic.Alfred Geier is associate professor of religious and classical studies, University of Rochester.

A thorough examination of the role which David Hume's writings played upon the founders of the United States.This book explores the reception of David Hume's political thought in eighteenth-century America. It presents a challenge to standard interpretations that assume Hume's thought had little influence in early America. Eighteenth-century Americans are often supposed to have ignored Hume's philosophical writings and to have rejected entirely Hume's "Tory" History of England. James Madison, if he used Hume's ideas in Federalist No. 10, it is commonly argued, thought best to do so silently -- open allegiance to Hume was a liability. Despite renewed debate about the impact of Hume's political ideas in America, existing scholarship is often narrow and highly speculative. Were Hume's works available in eighteenth-century America? If so, which works? Where? When? Who read Hume? To what avail?To answer questions of that sort, this books draws upon a wide assortment of evidence. Early American book catalogues, periodical publications, and the writings of lesser-light thinkers are used to describe Hume's impact on the social history of ideas, an essential context for understanding Hume's influence on many of the classic texts of early American political thought. Hume's Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, was readily available, earlier, and more widely, than scholars have supposed. The History of England was read most frequentlyof all, however, and often in distinctive ways. Hume's History, which presented the British constitution as a patch-work product of chance historical developments, informed the origins of the American Revolution and Hume'ssubsequent reception through the late eighteenth century. The 326 subscribers to the first American edition of Hume's History (published in Philadelphia in 1795-96) are more representative of the History's friendlyreception in enlightened America than are its few critics. Thomas Jefferson's latter-day rejection of Hume's political thought foreshadowed Hume's falling reputation in nineteenth-century America.MARK G. SPENCER is Associate Professor of History at Brock University where he holds a Chancellor's Chair for Research Excellence. His books include Hume's Reception in Early America (2002), Utilitarians and Their Critics in America, 1789-1914 (2005),and Ulster Presbyterians in the Atlantic World (2006).

A defense of the social operation of thinking, with an emphasis on testimony and authority.This book describes a lost tradition that can be called reasonableness. The tradition began with Aristotle, was recommended to Western education by Augustine, flourished in the schools of the Renaissance through the nineteenth century, then got lost in the academic and philosophic shuffles of the twentieth century. Representative of the tradition is John Locke's story of a King of Siam who rejected reports of the existence of ice. The King would have hadto risk too much trust in another man whom he did not know too well -- a Dutch ambassador -- in order to believe that elephants could walk on cold water. John Locke presented the story to encourage his readers to think about theresponsibilities and risks entailed in what he called 'the gentle and fair ways of information.' The art of thinking is largely social. Popular textbook writers such as Quintilian, Boethius, Philipp Melanchthon, John of St.Thomas, Antoine Arnauld, Thomas Reid, Isaac Watts, Richard Whately, William Hamilton, L. Susan Stebbings, and Max Black taught strategies of belief, trust, assent, and even submission as part of reasonableness. For over two thousand years testimony and authority were at the center of lively discussions about teaching the art of thinking. In the twentieth century the tradition faltered largely due to Immanuel Kant's insistence that there should be no distinction between handling testimony and personal experience. This book recounts the history of a lively educational tradition and hopes to encourage its revival.Rick Kennedy, whose previous books and articles have beenabout Colonial American logic, mathematics, and science, is Professor of History at Point Loma Nazarene University.

This collection of 15 essays on various aspects of the problem of evil brings together the opinions of well known authors from various disciplines [philosophy, theology, literary criticism, political science, etc].This collection brings together a variety of responses to the ancient questions of whether we are -- individually and collectively -- destined for evil. The history of the previous century brought this question into the open morepoignantly than perhaps any other before it. Not surprisingly, then, what you will find here is a wide spectrum of opinions concerning the mystery of evil formulated throughout the twentieth century and at the very threshold of the twenty-first, which has inherited all of its open wounds and nightmarish memories. The pieces included here come from diverse fields: philosophy, religious studies, psychology, history, political science, and art; they also assume a variety of forms: essays, treatises, stories, correspondence, and interviews. The reader should not expect that the pieces collected here offer proven recipes of how to eliminate evil from the world: rather, they present a compelling testimony of human struggles with an aspect of our lives we cannot afford to ignore.Contributors: Sharon Anderson-Gold, Hannah Arendt, Gil Bailie, Daniel Berrigan, Albert Camus, John P. Collins, Thomas Del Prete, Albert Einstein, Emil Fackenheim, Sigmund Freud, Philip Paul Hallie, Carl Gustav Jung, Michael Lerner, John Montaldo, Susan Neiman, Jeffrey Burton Russell, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Tzvetan Todorov, Leo Tolstoy, Michael True, Nicholas WolterstorffPredrag Cicovacki is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, where he served as director of Peace and Conflict Studies and editor-in-chief of Diotima: A Philosophical Review. His publications include Anamorphosis: Kant on Knowledge and Ignorance (1997), Between Truth and Illusion: Kant at the Crossroads of Modernity (2002), Essays by Lewis White Beck: Fifty Years as a Philosopher (1998), and Kant's Legacy: Essays in Honor of Lewis White Beck (2001).

The eight essays in Fire in the Dark frame and probe Pascal's underlying contention that the darkling, "hidden" God of Christian revelation, though Himself a profound mystery, especially in the matter of his justice towardsfallen mankind, can nonetheless be used to demystify questions that matter most to us.Pascal's Pensées afford a deeply penetrating view of the human condition [or predicament] as a prelude to a luminously reasoned defense of the Christian faith. His Provincial Letters are best remembered as a wickedly funny satire of "obliging and accommodating" Jesuit moral theologians who, guided by policy rather than piety, are willing to put virtue and salvation within the easy reach of all but the diabolical. Both works are landmarks ofFrench prose that have fascinated readers of all sorts from his day to ours. The eight essays in Fire in the Dark, two of which are new and four of which first appeared in French, frame and probe Pascal's underlying contention that the darkling, "hidden" God of Christian revelation, though Himself a profound mystery, especially in the matter of his justice towards fallen mankind, can nonetheless be used to demystify questions that matter most to us. But can the Supremely Obscure, like a dark lantern that is supremely dark, really illumine our whence, whither, and what now -- our nature, destiny and duties? "Watchman, what of the night?" The answers Pascal offers to Isaiah's query, whether they finally shed light on our world's chiaroscuro or not, can at least claim the authority of coming from out of the dark.Charles Natoli is a member of the Department of Philosophy and Classical Studies at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York. He is also the author of Nietzsche and Pascal on Christianity [1985].

The complete works of Joseph Butler, newly edited, with an introduction, notes, glossary, and an analytic index.This edition of Bishop Joseph Butler's [1692-1752] complete works is the first newly edited version to appear in a century, and is the only one to include a single, analytic index to the whole works. The editor's introduction presents Butler's ethics and philosophy of religion as a single, comprehensive system of pastoral philosophy and surveys the vast influence Butler exerted, especially in the nineteenth century.Included here are all fifteen published sermons from Butler's tenure as Preacher at the Rolls Chapel, the only sermons in English routinely studied by secular ethicists to this day; six additional sermons on the great public institutions; his Charge to the Clergy at Durham, controversial in its day for its defense of external religion; his youthful letters sent anonymously to Samuel Clarke, and the complete text of his Analogy of Religion, an apologetic tour de force, including the famous introduction on probability as the guide to life, the analogical defense of immortality, free will and the moral order of nature, as well as his famous rebuttal of deism and his dissertations on virtue and on personal identify.Butler's work is among the monuments of classical Anglican theology. He is a major source for work in ethical theory and philosophy of religion, as well as for the background of Victorian literature.David E. White teaches philosophy at St. John Fisher College and is an officer in the New York State Philosophical Association.

This narrative shows how the contours of moral and political philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were shaped by Kant's two distinct philosophical responses to the results of modern science.This history of early modern Western philosophy takes its inspiration from Kant's claim that the battle between the metaphysics of matter and that of spirit is the principal axis around which modern philosophy up to his time, in all its aspects, has revolved. The empiricist-materialist trend that dominates in England is first examined in the progressively unfolding works of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Adam Smith. A contrasting and competing dialectic develops in the rationalist/spiritualist trend in the continental philosophy of Descartes, Leibniz, and Rousseau. Framing this history is the background context of the philosophy and science of Aristotle and the challenges to the traditional paradigm presented by the revolutionary sciences of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton.James Lawler is Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo.