Status Of Philosophy Research Articles

Counseling for Positive Mental Health A Philosophical Statement

Counseling for Positive Mental Health A Philosophical Statement

Apie filosofinio pažinimo prigimtį

Straipsnis skirtas filosofijos ir filosofinio mąstymo savitumui aptarti. Teigiama, kad specifinė filosofinio pažinimo ypatybė yra sintetinis filosofijos pobūdis: ji negali būti apribota nei grynai formaliais, nei turiningais, nei formalizuotais mokslo elementais, nes filosofija ima iš jų tai, kas būtina, ir jungia į vientisą struktūrą. Bet kurios filosofinės sistemos pradiniai teiginiai sąlygoja jos, kaip visumos, pagrindimo būdus, argumentavimo formas, vidinę logiką ir kt., todėl svarbiausia filosofijos, kaip sistemos, ypatybė – ontologinio, metodologinio, loginio ir gnoseologinio aspektų vienybė. Filosofinio pažinimo specifiką sąlygoja tai, kad jo pradiniai principai ir teiginiai yra universalios kategorijos. Filosofija pati susikuria sau būtiną loginį instrumentarijų. Tiesos kriterijus filosofijoje yra praktika pačiomis įvairiausiomis jos pasireiškimo formomis. Filosofija atlieka ir pasaulėžiūrinę funkciją – filosofinė pasaulėžiūra yra bet kokios pasaulėžiūros teorinis pagrindas. Ši funkcija sąlygoja kai kurias filosofinio pažinimo ypatybes – vertinamąjį ir kritinį aspektus.

Mokslo raidos problema filosofijoje

Straipsnyje aiškinamas mokslo raidos problemos filosofinis statusas, susiejant šią problemą su konkrečių mokslų diferenciacija. Pagrindinis dėmesys skiriamas mokslo raidos sampratos marksistinėje filosofijoje aptarimui ir patikslinimui. Dialektinio mąstymo nuoseklumas reikalauja pripažinti pačios dialektikos metodologinę prigimtį – tai leidžia pagristi jos metodologinę funkciją bei mokslinio tyrimo išskirtinę filosofinę reikšmę. Kritiškai apžvelgiami tarybinėje filosofinėje literatūroje aptinkami bandymai ontologiškai pagrįsti mokslo raidos problemos filosofinį statusą. Tokios prieigos loginiai sekmenys yra požiūris į mokslo raidą kaip į grynai ontologinę savybę bei filosofijos ir konkretaus mokslinio tyrimo problematikos atskyrimas. Daroma išvada, kad mokslo raidos filosofinė prasmė pagrįsta filosofijos metodologine prigimtimi ir todėl ši problema filosofijoje visada yra konkretaus istorinio (ir galutinai neapibrėžiamo) pobūdžio. Filosofija atlieka savo metodologinę funkciją, kiek jos metodologinis turinys slypi konkrečiuose mokslo raidos tyrinėjimo rezultatuose ir kiek jos santykinai apibrėžtas turinys įgyja istoriškai sąlygotą mokslo tyrimo rezultatų kalbą.

PHIL and DAVID

PHIL and DAVID By BILL BEST "These guineas will start laying as soon as white oak leaves are about the size of a mouse's ear." So Phil told David the other day as we tried to close up some cracks in the barn so that our chickens and guineas wouldn't suffer too much from the snow and record breaking cold weather. Phil then hopped down from the tier poles and we gathered our eggs. Phil chuckled as he noticed that his hens were still out laying mine noting that he seemed to have a touch that I didn't have. David is my thirteen year old eighth grade son who doesn't like school much. Phil is my fifty-eight year old next door neighbor who lives on our place and who has never been to school. David learns from Phil and values him highly as a friend and teacher. I, too, learn from Phil and value him as a friend and teacher. Almost every morning and late afternoon when I go to the barn to feed, Phil is there feeding his chickens, guineas, ducks, and hogs. He always has some comments about the weather, some friends of his who are ahead or behind in their work, andusually has a philosophical statement or two which serve to pull things together out of the clutter and to re-order the world for the day. He is very philosophical and would feel very muchat home with Socrates, Kierkegaard, or Sartre, but would have difficulty with Plato, Marx, or Henry Kissinger. Phil is not ashamed of his feelings and talks freely about them just as he talks freely about his thoughts. He is very much at home with metaphors and similes and uses both frequently and poetically. He has had a hard life but his life is full of meaning—meaning that he understands and is willing to share. One attribute of his which I especially admire is his approach to problem solving. When a piece of our vintage farm equipment breaks down, Phil's first question to himself is: "How can I fix it?" Only in unusual circumstances will he concede to getting help from a welder or mechanic. He has a profound understanding of mechanical processes and is very inventive and creative. He also has a keen intuitive knowledge of the needs of plants and animals and is constantly rearranging the inside of my barn to accomodate cows ready to calve, sows ready to farrow, freshly hatched broods of chickens, or the tobacco crop which takes up so much space from September through December. He never has to consult a "How To" book but simply draws from his own fertile imagination and his seemingly endless string of experiences. The following example is illustrative: For some years my children, wife and I have had a family project of growing vegetables for the Farmer's Market in Lexington. One of the vegetables in which we specialize is the tomato. I have always kept up with the latest cultural practices and also »do experimenting of my own. In order to produce both high quality and quantity, the tomato must be staked in such a way as 52 to keep the fruit off the ground, provide shade for protection against sunburn, and avoid damage to the plant. Phil solved the problem last summer by devising a way of drilling holes in the stake at sufficient intervals to allow proper tying of the plant so as to accomplish effectively all three objectives . His method is superior to any I have seen developed by university experiment stations or state departments of agriculture and will probably appear in their pamphlets some years from now. Phil has taught David how to drive our '52 Ford tractor, to do several mechanical operations on the tractor, and will soon be helping him restore to running condition an old pick-up truck. He intuitively knows where David is and "communicates" with him in the best sense of that much abused word. David is receiving an education, in skills, attitudes, feelings, and values that should serve him well for a lifetime. But this education, which is probably more important than his...

The Status of Philosophy in the Two-Year College

The Status of Philosophy in the Two-Year College

Apie filosofinius vertybių teorijos pagrindus

Straipsnyje apžvelgiamos tos filosofijos raidos tendencijos, dėl kurių atsirado santykinai savarankiška filosofijos disciplina – aksiologija, arba vertybių teorija. Išskiriamos dvi su šiuo atsiradimu susijusios filosofinės problemos: teorinio tikrovės įsisavinimo prigimties problema ir su ja susijęs filosofijos statuso pasaulio pažinime klausimas. Apžvelgiamos I. Kanto, gyvenimo filosofijos atstovų, Badeno mokyklos neokantininkų požiūris į vertybių problemą. Teigiama, kad marksistinė metodologija yra pateikusi aksiologijos problemos sprendimo principus anksčiau, negu ši problema filosofijoje įgavo savarankišką reikšmę. Marksizmas pats neplėtoja vertybių teorijos, jis tik pagrindžia vertybinį požiūrį į pasaulį ir nustato jo vietą pažinimo struktūroje, tuo pačiu formuluodamas principus, kuriais turi remtis pats vertybių, jų prigimties ir esmės tyrimas. Vertybė visada gali būti racionaliai paaiškinta teorinėje sistemoje, kuri atstato jos ryšį su praktinės veiklos sąlygomis. Vertybių teorija priklauso socialinės metodologijos sričiai, nes vertybės, kaip ryškiausi žmogaus visuomeniškumo fenomenai, gali būti moksliškai tiriamos tik įvairiais teoriniais lygmenimis rekonstruojant jų ryšį su socialinėmis struktūromis.

TEACHING ANTHROPOLOGY AT THE COLLEGE LEVEL

This section of the Quarterly is devoted to an exchange of ideas on the teaching of anthropology. Course descriptions, philosophical statements, reactions, and comments are welcome. Persons with material to contribute are requested to send them to the editor, Jamestown Community College, Jamestown NY 14701.

TEACHING ANTHROPOLOGY AT THE COLLEGE LEVEL

This section of the Quarterly is devoted to an exchange of ideas on the teaching of anthropology. Course descriptions, philosophical statements, reactions, and comments are welcome. Persons with material to contribute are requested to send them to the editor, Jamestown Community College, Jamestown NY 14701.

The New Paradigm: Subjective or Transactive?

AM MOST GRATEFUL to the editor for asking me to comment on Professor David Bleich's bold, wide-ranging paper. And thank you, David Bleich, for laying it on the line to literary critics in general as you laid it on the line in June 1971 to this literary critic in particular. As you know, the shift in perspective you then proposed led me to a profound turn in my own thinking about objectivity. 1 I hope it does the same now for other critics and theorists of literature, for, as a group, we have a way to go before we can say we have fully absorbed the world view established by developments in early twentieth-century physics, mid-century biology, the philosophical statements that have accompanied them or, I would add, the growth of the social (human) sciences since the late nineteenth century. I am thinking of psychoanalysis, of course, but also of the relativism implicit in cultural anthropology, the linguistic demonstrations (by Whorf and Sapir) that language shapes our perceptions, and, in particular, the nearly-a-century of powerful research by psychologists of (transactional psychology), all leading to an overwhelming demonstration that perception is a constructive act. At the moment, however, my impression is that many, perhaps most, literary critics clutch the old paradigm and the illusion of objectivity like a security cloth. Is it our fig leaf that we hang onto it so tightly and so obviously? The experimental psychologists show the same tenacity for a nineteenth-century model of science, but they need that supposed respectability, I suspect, more than we do-now. I think once we required New or formalist criticism as a corrective to a long period of critical selfindulgence in impressionism and naive applications of history. Now, however, we can afford to recognize that even the strictest textual criticism expresses, willy-nilly, the critic's characteristic style. We can go on to the next steps, like learning how to think and write in this new mode or evaluating structuralist and semiotic developments as to the degree to which they accommodate the omnipresence of individual styles of creation and re-creation.

Existentialism, Idealism, and Fichte's Concept of Coherence

Existentialism, Idealism, and Fichte's Concept of Coherence WALTER E. WRIGHT EXISTENTIALPHILOSOPHERS 1 HABITUALLYACCUSEIDEALISMof deserting the human perspective for the perspective of the absolute, and of losing the concrete richness of life in the barren abstractions of thought. For them, idealism is a form of ideology, alienated from its roots in rived experience. Fichte's philosophical writings present a particularly baroque and unappetizing exterior . His contorted grammar and artificialities of vocabulafly surround all the versions of his system with an air of mystification.2 Even the order of exposition followed in the most widely studied version of his Science oJ Knowledge veils its true significance. 3 Written as an outline for lectures on the system delivered at Jena, this book often defies clear interpretation. The difficultyof Fichte's style, more than anything else, is responsible for his relative obscurity. But in the final analysis Fichte's Science of Knowledge is not so remote as it appears. The underlying motive of the Wissenschcqtslehre is Lebenslehre. If it is to be understood, and if it is to communicate something of value to us, then his system must be read as an analysis of human finitude. The central problematic of Fichte's thinking is the question of the sense and aim of man's existence. Impressed by the irreconcilable conflict of idealistic and realistic accounts of knowledge, Fichte sought in the practical sphere for a reconciling principle which could illuminate man's moral destiny. This search for reconciliation dominates both his theoretical and his practical philosophy. That human existence enjoys the central place in Fichte's thought which I have assigned to it can be shown by examining the problem of philosophical evidence. This issue can be approached as a special case of the general problem of providing support for our claims to knowledge. For the most part we are not confused about what sorts of things and activities ought to count as evidence. In order to decide whether his new move in the Meran Variation is sound, the chess player tries it in tournament games. To discover whether a film is worth seeing, I read reviews or consult with people of whose tastes I approve. Only rarely in the conduct of life do we face questions about evidence which present difficulties in principle. Not surprisingly, the situation is different in philosophy. Philosophical questions are characteristically "framework" questions. They have to do with the most pervasive and x Kierkegaard and Marcel are two notable examples. 2 Whilehispopular booksare lessobscure, their "purple" passagesare almost equally offensive. s Grundlage der Gesamten WL als Handschrift fiir Seine Zuh6rer (1794). Translated in John Lachs and Peter Heath, Fichte: Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre) (NewYork: Century Philosophy Source Books, 1970). Specificreferences to Fichte's works will be to the Gesamtausgabe of I. H. Fichte (1834-1846), Siimmtliche Werke (SW).Works not translated by Laths and Heath are my own versions. [37] 38 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY elemental features of our experience. Hence, whether we view philosophical statements as reflective of the structure of language, or of "the way things are," or in some other way, such statements do not usually allow of direct confirmation or disconfirmation. Instead, they define the context within which all other confirmations and disconfirmations can occur. Since most philosophers agree that philosophical statements, whatever else they are, are not factual statements, some account must be provided of how we know them to be true. Whether a philosopher appeals to reasoned argument, phenomenologieal description, the facts of language, or perhaps even denies the possibility of any evidence in philosophy, the way he settles the problem of evidence for philosophical claims will be diagnostic for the content of his own views. Idealism, both as a critique of perception and as the belief in "the presence of rational system in the cosmos,TM usually incorporates a rationalistic account of philosophical evidence. The rationalist theory of evidence is by no means simple, and I do not propose to unravel all its mysteries here. For my purposes it will suffice to point out two of its chief forms: the Cartesian doctrine of the "clara et distincta perceptio" and the ideal of coherence. The first form of rationalism seeks to ground knowledge...

TEACHING ANTHROPOLOGY AT THE COLLEGE LEVEL

It is with some anticipation that I begin the responsibilities as editor of this section of the Quarterly. I have been concerned for some time with the methods we use as teachers of anthropology. Correspondence with other anthropologists in the past year or so has proven to me that there is a great deal of interest in teaching across the country. This section of the Quarterly will be devoted to an exchange of ideas on the teaching of anthropology. Course descriptions, philosophical statements, reactions, and comments are welcome. Persons with material to contribute are requested to send them to the editor, Jamestown Community College, Jamestown NY 14701.

The Liver and Its Diseases

This is a festschrift to celebrate the 70th birthday of Dr. Hans Popper, a highly impressive and beloved leader in hepatology and the founder of two of the world's major liver societies. Thirty-three brief excerpts and reviews of the status of work and recent developments in liver fields, plus three philosophical statements are provided by Dr. Popper's international array of hepatic friends. No new data are presented, and many of the brief sections are highly fragmentary. However, from this miscellaneous hodgepodge does emerge a satisfactory rapid survey of the kinds of important studies liver workers are currently engaged in. A very few chapters do succinctly review topics rather comprehensively. Especially welcome are statements on "Controlled Clinical Trials in Hepatology" (Tygstrup and Juhl, Copenhagen), "Epidemiology of Hepatitis B Antigen" (Wewalka, Vienna), "Drug Induced Hepatic Injury" (Klatskin, New Haven), and "Alcoholic Hepatitis" (Galambos, Atlanta). The usefulness of this pleasant volume is quite

Johnstone on the Truth of Philosophical Statements

Johnstone on the Truth of Philosophical Statements

Marx and the origin of dialectical materialism1

Dialectical materialism was born in 1857, when Marx returned to studying Hegel. In opposition to Hegel, Marx adopted a realist epistemology. Abandoning the pragmatist ambiguities of his Economic‐Philosophical Manuscripts, he became a materialist in the traditional sense of that word. Influenced by Hegel, Marx simultaneously attempted a dialectical proof for the labor theory of value. Abandoning his positivist critique in The Holy Family, he started using dialectic to discover beneath appearances an otherwise inaccessible reality. But his dialectic was incompatible with his materialism. The identification of reality with Praxis, rejected at the level of philosophical statement, was retained at the level of economic argument. Turning Hegel upside down proved harder than Marx thought.

Philosophical systems of weighting clinical performance in nursing

The purpose of this study was to make a study of the philosophical themes from nursing schools' philosophies in relation to their method of weighting grades for theory and clinical nursing practice to decide on the percentage boundaries that could be used for a reasonable scoring of course grades. Questionnaires were sent to thirty accredited schools of nursing, randomly chosen and of equal ratio, that is, ten questionnaires were sent to diploma schools, ten to associate degree programmes and ten to baccalaureate programmes. Twenty-three schools responded, and twenty of these schools sent their school bulletins together with their answered questionnaires. The returns were 76·66 per cent. As expected different nursing programmes utilized varied philosophical threads as aims in producing the kind of graduates that they respectively desired, hence bringing out differences among the graduates of these different kinds of programmes. This supported the findings of this study wherein three categories of philosophical threads or themes pertaining or involving evaluation and weighting of course grades were identified as follows: (1) skill oriented; (2) transitional from skill-oriented to leadership oriented; and (3) leadership oriented. This also further supported the finding which affirmed that the shift in the conceptual framework defined a boundary of nursing practice. The main conclusion that was drawn from the study was that the technical schools of nursing stated their philosophy in a more concrete form and therefore were able to make a more precise connection between their philosophical statements and the grading system. By contrast the baccalaureate programmes, having greater orientation to theoretical abstraction and intellectualization of concepts, had more tenuous connections between their philosophical statements and the quantification required by their grading system. The three-year programmes, being transitional, fell between the two extremes cited above.

Alexander, his Teacher and his Status of Philosophy in Plutarch of Chaeronea: an Inquiry into the Meaning of a Certain Exchange of Letters

The principal focus of the present article is the exchange of letters quoted by Plutarch of Chaeronea, celebrated teacher and Middle-Platonist of the first century CE, in his equally famous bios Alexandrou, a work describing the life and deeds of the great Macedonian as juxtaposed with those of his Roman counterpart, Caesar. My aim is simple enough: to evaluate the function and meaning of said exchange in the framework of the bios, its possible cultural and moral import, and thus, its contribution to the Plutarchean portrayal of Alexander and his attitude toward philosophy. As for the authenticity of the exchange, the issue is of limited relevance in the present essay, since Plutarch very clearly considers the letters in question as authentic – for clarity’s sake, however, one may add that Hadot dismisses them as a Hellenistic apocryph, intended to bolster the standing of Andronicus’ redaction of Aristotelian Metaphysics2. As far the more general issue of Plutarch’s employment of letters in Alexander’s biography is concerned, the Aristotle letter is hardly a unique instance of such an occurrence – much in keeping with his predilection for the anecdotal, Plutarch does occasionally invoke the testimony of correspondence: as private means of communication letters are a valuable testimony to man’s character and customs: thus, in the later parts of the bios, we find quotations (some paraphrased) from Alexander’s correspondence with his mother,Olympias (mentioned in Alex. 39.5) or from letters exchanged between him and various officials: hence, the appearance of the Aristotle letters conforms to the more general Plutarchean usage.

Marshall McLuhan and Meaning in Music

popular and scholarly press. His press rating was rivaled only by Jacqueline Kennedy's. Some even read his principal books (The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962, and Understanding Media, 1964). From his base of operations at the University of Toronto, McLuhan will probably spend the rest of his life explaining what he really meant in Understanding Media and denying the implications that lesser scholars and philosophers have derived from his work. Nevertheless, as one of those lesser men, I feel compelled to come to grips with McLuhan's basic ideas, especially his ideas on meaning. I suspect McLuhan offers a philosophical statement that deals with the problem of meaning in music more significantly than that of any other philosopher or musician.

Rationality and the Structural Analysis of Myth

These comments are intended not as criticism of Steven Lukes' conclusions, with which I mainly agree, but to raise some questions about their further implications and suggest some answers to these questions (1).The questions arise when we stand back and look at the entire set of positions on the matter of rationality represented by Lukes' five paradigms and his own argument. They fall easily into two groups, composed of the first four and the last two, counting Lukes' position as the sixth. The first group consists of the views of practising anthropologists primarily concerned with understanding and explaining certain quite specific sorts of peculiar beliefs. In approaching their task they make various assumptions about rationality, about the relation of modern scientific thought to primitive magico-religious thought, and about the type of attitude towards these alien forms of mentality which is appropriate to the scientific endeavour. The second group contains the views of philosophers reflecting on the methods and theories of anthropologists, emphasising the philosophical character of the problems they take up out of this reading, and which they treat with the techniques of linguistic or logical analysis. They are less interested in the specific peculiarities of certain primitive beliefs than with the formal criteria by which any different sets of beliefs can be logically classified and compared. And they are less concerned with understanding and explanation than with the assumptions made about the philosophical status of, and typical relations between, different sets and sorts of beliefs when understanding and explanation are seen as problematic. Thus the second group concentrates more exclusively on a higher-order inquiry than that with which the first group was centrally concerned (despite the fact that Lukes has successfully isolated this level of inquiry out of the less focussed methodological reflections of the anthropologists). The question can therefore be raised, how far the positions on rationality are detachable from the various explanatory methods and theories which are associated with them in the first group, and what implications for understanding and explanation, if any, follow from the positions on rationality adopted by the second group.

Experience and Conceptual Activity: A Philosophical Essay Based Upon the Writings of A. N. Whitehead.

Burgers's purpose is to outline a system of thought in which notions or values can find a place along with the ideas of causal relationships that are applied in the physical sciencesThis important philosophical statement by an eminent scientist is written with such clarity and directness, and derives from so broad a humanistic perspective, that the thoughtful reader will find it as rewarding as it is instructive. author's purpose in this undertaking is to ... outline a system of thought in which notions of values can find a place along with the ideas of casual relationships that are applied in the physical sciences. essential doctrine of this system, which is taken from the metaphysical picture developed by Alfred North Whitehead... is the assumption that, in every act occurring in the universe, experience derived from that which has gone before is integrated with conceptions concerning possibilities in the future.Analyzing and extending Whitehead's picture, Dr. Burgers argues that the physical view of causality in itself is too restrictive for a general description of the universe, and is valid only for those phenomena where values are irrelevant. His concern is to introduce the entire panorama with its complementary physical and conceptual aspects in such a way that a wider view of causality is obtained, whereby an opening is found for the explanation of life.The author points out that the concept of organism implies purpose, and is thus not amenable to complete description in the terms of molecular biology. Although most evolutionary steps are the result of unplanned chance effects, the recognition and conception of future possibilities are factors in the evolutionary trend. The existence of matter is the result of persistent repetition of certain patterns. Matter is a set of habits of the universe; it is these habits which are studied in physics. [But] life is more than habit: it is the coordination of spontaneity... a struggle against mere randomness. It is the key of the philosophy here presented to consider expectations and valuations not as accidental by-products of physical states of matter, but as essential forms of functioning.

Franklin Bobbitt and the "Science" of Curriculum MakingHow to Make a Curriculum. Franklin Bobbitt

tific study of education had survived its infancy; the survey movement was well into its adolescence. Thorndike and Judd had, through their work, established themselves as leaders in scientific education; the innovations and methods which were initiated twenty years earlier were beginning to bear fruit. Yet despite the growing abundance of new tools and methods, few people were ready or willing to take on what is perhaps the most complex educational task of all, the systematic and scientific development of curriculum. Dewey's The Child and the Curriculum,2 published in 1902, was a philosophical statement, persuasive and insightful to be sure, but was not easily translatable into practical terms. Kilpatrick's The Project Method3 dealt with a piece of the curriculum problem but left out much that the practical schoolman wanted and needed to reconstruct curriculums. While a few men, such as Frederick Bonser,4 W. W. Charters,5 and David Snedden,6 had made important beginnings in applying scientific principles to solve curriculum problems, for the most part the task of constructing curriculums was a mixture of practical know-how and tradition. The goal of developing a scientific system of curriculum construction was yet to come. Charles H. Judd describes the state of affairs in 1922 this way: