Philosophical Necessity Research Articles

Intelligible Beauty

Abstract Arthur Danto argued from the premiss that artworks are essentially cognitive to the conclusion that they are incidentally aesthetic. I wonder why Danto, and the very many of us he persuaded, came to believe that the cognitive and the aesthetic oppose one another. I argue, contrary to Danto’s historical claims, that the cognitive and the aesthetic did not come into opposition until the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, and that they were brought into opposition for reasons of art-critical expediency rather than philosophical necessity. I conclude that a robustly cognitive notion of the aesthetic remains an option for us.

What Makes Free Will Free: The Impossibility of Predicting Genuine Creativity

In this paper I argue that Mill’s ‘Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity’ regarding the human will and action cannot apply on all cases, and that the human mind has potentially the capacity to create freely a will or action that, no matter what kind of knowledge we possess, cannot be predicted. More precisely, I argue against Mill’s attempt of conjunction between the freedom of the will and the ‘Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity’ while I attempt a comparison with the relevant Kantian approach. I then claim that a will cannot be free and be predicted at the same time, as both the elements of freedom and unpredictability of the will are founded on the very process of its formulation as an outcome of genuine creativity. I, thus, attempt to propose a more substantially free view of free will and action than the ones presented by the prominent conceptions.

Associationist Aesthetics: Priestley’s Materialism and the Radical Picturesque

ABSTRACT This article argues for the interest of Joseph Priestley’s theory of materialism, particularly as developed in two texts—Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (1777) and the lengthy set of epistolary exchanges with Richard Price, published in 1778 as A Free Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism, and Philosophical Necessity. Although these are, in my view, the two most significant and compelling pieces of Priestley’s metaphysical writings, they have not been a significant focus for scholars of Romanticism. Here, I urge our attention in their direction by arguing for their capacity to revise our understanding of picturesque aesthetics as well as for their general relevance to a contemporary critical moment in which an ontological question about the nature of physical matter is (once again) felt to have direct bearing on the nature of aesthetics.

The Metaphysical Society (1869–1880): Intellectual Life in Mid-Victorian England ed. by Catherine Marshall, Bernard Lightman, and Richard England

Reviewed by: The Metaphysical Society (1869–1880): Intellectual Life in Mid-Victorian England ed. by Catherine Marshall, Bernard Lightman, and Richard England Elizabeth A. Huddleston The Metaphysical Society (1869–1880): Intellectual Life in Mid-Victorian England EDITED BY CATHERINE MARSHALL, BERNARD LIGHTMAN, AND RICHARD ENGLAND Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. xii + 282 pages. Hardcover: $90. ISBN: 9780198846499. Just five years ago in 2015, Oxford University Press, under the editorial guidance of Catherine Marshall, Bernard Lightman, and Richard England, published a three-volume critical edition of the Papers of the Metaphysical Society.1 An essential [End Page 113] volume for the study of nineteenth-century British intelligentsia, the critical edition of the Papers of the Metaphysical Society opened the door for a more complete scholarly explication of the topics of interest for some of the foremost thinkers in Britain during Newman's lifetime. Some such thinkers include William George Ward, William Gladstone, Henry Sidgwick, Arthur Balfour, and Thomas Huxley. While Newman abnegated the invitation to participate in the Metaphysical Society, meaning he never participated himself, many of his frequent correspondents were active members, including Henry Manning, Father Dalgairns, Thomas Mozely, and James Anthony Froude. Many ideas presented in the Metaphysical Society papers themselves were also present in the conversations that Newman had with his correspondents. More importantly for historical research today, one is able to explore more fully the philosophical milieu in which Newman was a part, even if only tangentially. This compilation of essays is divided into three parts. The first part, "Society and the Politics of Engagement," includes three essays, all of which focus in some way on the societal, political, and social nature of the Metaphysical Society, as well as its response to the societal and cultural climate of the late Victorian intellectual atmosphere. The first essay, penned by Bruce Kinzer, entitled "The Personalization of Intellectual Combat: James Fitzjames Stephen and the Metaphysical Society," discusses how the Metaphysical Society "gave [James Fitzjames] Stephen one more forum in which to crush intellectual adversaries whose views he deemed flawed and obnoxious" (19). The second essay by Catherine Marshall entitled, "The Editors of the Metaphysical Society, or Disseminating the Ideas of the Metaphysicians," demonstrates that "the study of the journalistic contributions of the Metaphysicians can help reinterpret the place of their ideas in late Victorian England" (42). The third and final essay in this section, "Liberalism and the Metaphysical Society" by Andrew Vincent, investigates the diverse nature of the papers of the Metaphysical Society in their response "to the political, social, religious, and scientific changes of their era" and asks specifically if "the papers of the Society [were] simply a constellation of incommensurable arguments talking past each other, or was there an underlying theme which allowed these diverse arguments to cohere in some manner" (63). Whereas the first part investigates sociological themes to help situate the Metaphysical Society within its proper cultural context, the second part begins an investigation on some of the philosophical themes important to the Metaphysicians. Part two, entitled "Miracles, Unseen Universes, and Natural Causes," is comprised of four essays. The first essay by Gowan Dawson entitled, "'The Cross-Examination of the Physiologist': T. H. Huxley and the Resurrection," places Huxley's [End Page 114] controversial paper on resurrection within the context of other discussions on the subject. Dawson argues, "Huxley's focus on biblical resurrection was hardly unprecedented at the Metaphysical Society, and his paper was part of a suite of contributions on the vexed question of miracles, and it was these together, rather than Huxley's alone, that prompted the innovation of an extra session of discussion" (93). The second essay by Richard England entitled, "Cause, Nature, and the Limits of Language: Martineau and Maurice on the Philosophical Necessity of Theism," introduces the ideas of Anglican Frederick Denison Maurice (1805–1872) and Unitarian James Martineau (1805–1895) in order "to show how their views had developed from old philosophical controversies, and to explain why their contributions did not change the minds of their naturalist opponents" who saw themselves as divided between a "school of experience (empiricists)" and the "school of intuition" (120). In the third essay, "Expertise in the Miracles Debate," Anne Dewitt explores the cultural...

Heidegger, Catholicism and the History of Being

ABSTRACT This paper aims to rebuild the relationship between the Seinsfrage and Catholicism in Heidegger’s meditation and to shed light on his critique to Christianity (in terms of Christentum) as a philosophical necessity rooted in his broader critique of modernity in the context of the Black Notebooks. In order to reach these purposes, this contribution will be articulated in two parts: in the first one, I will rebuild Heidegger’s relationship to Catholicism and in the second one, I will focus on Black Notebooks as important tools in understanding Heidegger’s critique to Catholicism, a critique that is built on three levels: historical, speculative and political. The essay will show how the Schwarze Hefte illuminate Heidegger’s attempts to answer the question of Being in an incessant tension with the coeval seven major treatises on the Seinsgeschichte, in which Christianity, metaphysics and nihilism are inextricably tied together.

Man as \u2018aggregate of data\u2019

Since the emergence of the innovative field of artificial intelligence (AI) in the 1960s, the late Hubert Dreyfus insisted on the ontological distinction between man and machine, human and artificial intelligence. In the different editions of his classic and influential book What computers can’t do (1972), he posits that an algorithmic machine can never fully simulate the complex functioning of the human mind—not now, nor in the future. Dreyfus’ categorical distinctions between man and machine are still relevant today, but their relation has become more complex in our increasingly data-driven society. We, humans, are continuously immersed within a technological universe, while at the same time ubiquitous computing, in the words of computer scientist Mark Weiser, “forces computers to live out here in the world with people” (De Souza e Silva in Interfaces of hybrid spaces. In: Kavoori AP, Arceneaux N (eds) The cell phone reader. Peter Lang Publishing, New York, 2006, p 20). Dreyfus’ ideas are therefore challenged by thinkers such as Weiser, Kevin Kelly, Bruno Latour, Philip Agre, and Peter Paul Verbeek, who all argue that humans are much more intrinsically linked to machines than the original dichotomy suggests—they have evolved in concert. Through a discussion of the classical concepts of individuum and ‘authenticity’ within Western civilization, this paper argues that within the ever-expanding data-sphere of the twenty-first century, a new concept of man as ‘aggregate of data’ has emerged, which further erodes and undermines the categorical distinction between man and machine. This raises political and ethical questions beyond the confines of technology and artificial intelligence. Moreover, this seemingly never-ending debate on what computers should (or should not) do provokes the philosophical necessity to once again define the concept of what it is to be ‘human.’

Eighteenth-Century Dissent and Cambridge Platonism: Reconceiving the Philosophy of Religion by Louise Hickman

Reviewed by: Eighteenth-Century Dissent and Cambridge Platonism: Reconceiving the Philosophy of Religion by Louise Hickman Martha K. Zebrowski Louise Hickman. Eighteenth-Century Dissent and Cambridge Platonism: Reconceiving the Philosophy of Religion. Routledge Studies in the Philosophy of Religion 16. New York: Routledge, 2017. Pp. x + 212. Cloth, $140.00. Plato and Platonism held a significant place in British intellectual inquiry in the eighteenth century. Louise Hickman enters this largely unexplored territory with a valuable study of select elements in the theological and political arguments of certain British divines. She is particularly concerned to expose the limitations of familiar and narrowly-rational arguments that in the eighteenth century supported natural religion and theology, and to bring to the fore a countervailing rational theology that discovers in and for the human mind the eternal and immutable truth that is divine. The principal figure in Hickman’s study is Richard Price, rational dissenting minister, friend of liberty and America, and author of The Review of the Principal Questions in Morals (1758; important third edition, 1787). With Plato in hand, Price put forward an argument for the existence of a divine first principle that is Mind, or truth itself, and an explanation of the power of the human mind to know this truth. Hickman explores Price in relation to a variety of figures engaged with theology, literature, and politics. Price had interests in common with the seventeenth-century theologians known as the Cambridge Platonists, and he comfortably drew ideas on moral epistemology from one in particular, Ralph Cudworth, author of The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) and A Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (1731). With the Latitudinarian theologian Samuel Clarke, author of A Discourse concerning the Being and Attributes of God (1705) and A Discourse concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion (1706), Price shared an understanding that the divine first principle acts not in accordance with mere power and will, but solely in accordance with unalterable truth. In A Free Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism, and Philosophical Necessity (1778), Price debated his friend Joseph Priestley, the religious and political radical with whom he disagreed about the material and spiritual aspects of the universe and the human mind, and about the value of Plato. And he befriended Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), who inclined toward Plato and, like Price himself, insisted that moral value is fundamental to the cosmos. Hickman certainly adds to scholarly understanding of the history of the Platonic tradition. Yet, it is important to recognize that, indebted to Plato though they were, the figures she studies had a quite narrow interest in and understanding of Plato and Platonism. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, no one in Britain took up Plato as an historical philologist or historian of the Platonic tradition. When Thomas Stanley put together The History of Philosophy (1655), rather than explain Plato’s complete system, he simply and uncritically included the mid-second century Didaskalikos of Alcinous as a precis. With little attention to the entirety of Plato’s philosophy, or awareness of the generations of Platonic successors and the variety of their own ideas, Cudworth, Clarke, and Price drew loosely from the Phaedrus, Euthyphro, Theaetetus, Republic, and Laws, and also from the Didaskalikos. In fact, Price’s conception of Mind, the divine first principle, owes more to the reflections of Alcinous on the Timaeus than to Plato himself. British Platonists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who worked in the tradition of Platonism were Platonists in a strictly limited sense. They embraced Plato as a forebear and authority, but they were strategic and selective in what they took from him. There is much to appreciate in this study. Hickman’s explanation of eighteenth-century arguments for the existence of God that claimed the status of scientific proof and justified belief in God on just such scientific grounds is useful. So, too, is her exposure of the often unrecognized political contexts and implications of theological inquiry that entailed the endorsement of both divine and secular power and will as the source and foundation of moral right and order. Clarke and Price offered the clear alternative of...

William Wordsworth and Philosophical Necessity

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Hazlitt both testified that William Wordsworth in his radical years believed in the doctrine of philosophical necessity. Prompted by that testimony, this essay undertakes a detailed reconstruction of Wordsworth’s necessitarianism. Wordsworth was most probably converted to necessity by his reading of William Godwin’s Political Justice . As a convert to the doctrine in its Godwinian formulation, Wordsworth would have accepted several ideas implicated in the necessitarian infrastructure of Political Justice : the human mind’s deterministic obligation to reasoned preference, the principle of universal benevolence, a marginalization of human agency and guilt, a prospective approach to ethical questions, and the inevitable triumph of reason and social reform. Wordsworth apparently believed in this complex of ideas only briefly, for the moral pessimism of Adventures on Salisbury Plain intimates a lapsing of the poet’s Godwinism, including his loss of faith in necessity, by late 1795. By 1797, however, Coleridge allowed Wordsworth to reclaim his necessitarianism by introducing him to an alternate version of the doctrine indebted to Hartleyan associationism and freed from its objectionable Godwinian features. Wordsworth grandly expounds this new version of philosophical necessity in 1798 poetry written for The Recluse , but then suddenly seems to lose interest in the idea. In concluding, the essay invokes both Coleridge’s 1799 dissatisfaction with necessity and Wordsworth’s later writing, especially The Excursion , to speculate about the poet’s reasons for finally rejecting the doctrine of philosophical necessity in late 1798.

Relativism and Human Rights - Introduction

Can human rights principles admit degrees of contextual variations? Are our cultures condemned to a formally rigid standard of universalist hegemony? This work provides an innovative contribution to the legal-philosophical understanding of human rights theory. While advancing a post-metaphysical reconstruction for the notion of human rights, it defends an original perspective on the relation between universal validity and cultural pluralism. By rejecting the challenges of relativism and classical abstract universalism, this model reinterprets discursive theory in the light of dialectical recognition and judgmental exemplarity. The result is an enriched substantive notion of universalism oriented to the safeguard of situated authenticity. Pluralistic universalism considers that, while formal filtering criteria constitute unavoidable requirements for the production of potentially valid arguments, the exemplarity of judgmental activity, in its turn, provides a pluralistic and retrospective reinterpretation for the fixity of such criteria. While speech formal standards grounds the thinnest possible presuppositions we can make as humans, the discursive exemplarity of judgments defends a notion of validity which is both contextually dependent and "subjectively universal". According to this approach, human rights principles are embedded within our linguistic argumentative practice. It is precisely from the intersubjective and dialogical relation among speakers that we come to reflect upon those same conditions of validity of our arguments. Once translated into national and regional constitutional norms, the discursive validity of exemplar judgments postulates the philosophical necessity for an ideal of legal-constitutional pluralism, challenging all those attempts trying to frustrate both horizontal (state to state) and vertical (supra-national-state-social) on-going debates on human rights.

Affirmation of a developmental systems approach to genetics

More than 40 years ago, Gilbert Gottlieb and like-minded scholars argued for the philosophical necessity of approaching genetic contributions to development through a multilevel, bidirectional systems perspective. Charney's target article builds on this heritage in significant ways, offering more recent examples of the interactions of biology and context, as well as the diversity of developmental mechanisms, and reaffirming a way forward for genetic research.

Afinal, para que serve Filosofia Medieval?

The study of Medieval Philosophy, instead of an object of erudition, understands itself as the history of the intellectual conditions of possibility of Modern Philosophy. The philosophical necessity of modern positions, particularly that of Kant, becomes more evident with the correct understanding of ancient Physics’ and Metaphysics’ aporias as reworked by medieval Scholastics.

Aha! ……. apoptosis: means to an end

Aha! ……. apoptosis: means to an end

“My Soul in Agony”: Irrationality and Christianity in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

“My Soul in Agony”: Irrationality and Christianity in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Christopher Stokes (bio) Christopher Stokes National University of Ireland, Maynooth Christopher Stokes Christopher Stokes is Assistant Lecturer at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and author of Coleridge, Language and the Sublime (2011). Footnotes 1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Lucraria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 2:6. 2. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1972), 24–31. 3. Coleridge: The Critical Heritage, ed. J. R. de J. Jackson (London: Routledge, 1970), 52. 4. Jackson, Critical Heritage, 53. 5. David Chandler, “Southey’s ‘German Sublimity’ and Coleridge’s ‘Dutch Attempt,’ ” Romanticism on the Net 32–33 (2003–4), http://www.erud1t.0rg/revue/ron/2003/v/1132–33/009257ar.html. 6. Jackson, Heritage, 439. One might argue that the polarized judgments are simply a matter of the changing historical context, in that Lockhart had the benefit of two decades of hindsight and a less hysterical political climate. However, this would be mistaken, for the Monthly Review—also in 1819—reviewed the poem in an anti-German and anti-gothic vein very reminiscent of the negative reviews from the 1790s. 7. Lawrence Kramer, “That Other Will: The Daemonic in Coleridge and Wordsworth,” Philological Quarterly 58 (1979): 306. 8. References to Coleridge’s poetry are taken from The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997) and are cited by line number. Initially, I shall be working from the 1798 text. 9. The Book of Common Prayer (London: John Jarvis, 1791), B6V, in Eighteenth Century Collections Online (Gale Group), CW12358033, galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/ECCO. 10. A lucid exposition can be found in Joseph Priestley, The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated (London: J. Johnson, 1777), 1–8. 11. Graham Davidson, Coleridge’s Career (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 54, 69–73. 12. For instance, David S. Miall, “Guilt and Death: The Predicament of The Ancient Mariner,” Studies in English Literature 24 (1984), and Leah Richards-Fisher, “Where There’s a Rime, Is There a Reason? Defining the Personae in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Coleridge Bulletin 20 (2002). 13. Raimonda Modiano, “Words and ‘Languageless’ Meanings: Limits of Expression in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Modern Language Quarterly 38 (1977). 14. The classic one life reading is Robert Penn Warren, “A Poem of Pure Imagination: an Experiment in Reading,” in Selected Essays (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964), 198–305. 15. See Warren, and G. Wilson Knight, The Starlit Dome: Studies in the Poetry of Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941), 84–90. A Christian tradition of interpretation still continues. Graham Davidson foregrounds the themes of charity and mediation in Coleridge’s Career, 45–73. Peter Kitson considers The Rime as the representation of the inner, moral revolution, “a personal millennium” (206), that might precede a political one—see “Coleridge, the French Revolution, and ‘The Ancient Mariner’: Collective Guilt and Individual Salvation,” Yearbook of English Studies 19 (1989). Thomas Dilworth argues for the poem’s moral integrity through a spatial pattern of verbal echoes that centers on the blessing of the water- snakes in “Symbolic Spatial Form in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the Problem of God,” Review of English Studies 58 (2007). 16. Edward Bostetter, “The Nightmare World of The Ancient Mariner,” SiR 1 (1961–62): 243. 17. Modiano, “Limits of Expression,” 41. 18. Miall, “Guilt and Death,” 635. 19. Anne Williams, “An I for an Eye: ‘Spectral Persecution’ in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” PMLA 108 (1993): 1125. 20. Williams, 1124. 21. Richards-Fisher, “Defining the Personae,” 63. 22. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1795. On Politics and Religion, ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 105. 23. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71), 1:213. Subsequent references to this text will be indicated by the abbreviation CL. 24. On Coleridge's passage from Unitarianism to Anglicanism, see Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 169...

Socio-legal studies and the humanities – law, interdisciplinarity and integrity

This paper was delivered as a plenary lecture, designed to respond to the one-day special conference focus upon links between socio-legal studies and the humanities.1The paper focuses in particular upon the relationship between law and the humanities. It may be argued that the role of empirically sourced socio-legal research is well accepted, given its tangible utility in terms of producing hard data which can inform and transform policy perspectives. However, scholarly speculation about the relationship between law and the humanities ranges from the indulgent to the hostile. In particular, legal scholars aligning themselves as ‘black letter’ commentators express strong opinions about such links, suggesting that scholarship purporting to establish links between the two fields is essentially spurious, bearing in mind the purposive role of law as a problem-solving mechanism. The paper sets out to challenge such assertions, indicating the natural connections between the two fields and the philosophical necessity of continued interaction, given the fact that certain aspects of human experience and nature cannot be plumbed by doctrine or empiricism or even by combinations of the two. Law must be understood to stand at the nexus of human experience, in a relationship of integrity, where the word is understood to mean both morally principled and culturally integrated. In particular, the development of human qualities, of character and moral sensibility informing normative values – and, ultimately, engagement with the world of law – is a process of subtle cultural as well as psychological significance, and may benefit from interrogation deriving from the wider fields of human discourse.

The red pencil: convictions from experience in education

This engaging and important book is a critique of American education wrapped in a memoir. Drawing on his fifty years as teacher, principal, researcher, professor, and dean, Theodore R. Sizer identifies three crucial areas in which policy discussion about public education has been dangerously silent. He argues that we must break that silence and rethink how to educate our youth. Sizer discusses our failure to differentiate between teaching and learning, noting that formal schooling must adapt to and confront the powerful influences found outside traditional classrooms. He examines the practical as well as philosophical necessity for sharing policy-making authority among families, schools, and centralized governments. And he denounces our fetish with order, our belief that the familiar routines that have existed for generations are the only way to bring learning to children. Sizer provides alternatives to these failed routines--guidelines for creating a new educational system that would, among other things, break with wasteful traditional practice, utilize agencies and arrangements beyond the school building, and design each child's educational program around his or her particular needs and potential.

Necessary Evils: Unitarian Theodicy in "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere"

What we have most to dread, is the almost irrecoverable debasement of our minds by looking off from God, living without him, without a due regard to his presence and providence, and idolizing ourselves and the world, considering other things as proper agents and causes; whereas, strictly speaking, there is but one cause, but one sole agent in universal nature. --Joseph Priestley, Illustrations of Philosophical Necessity NO QUESTION IN COLERIDGE STUDIES HAS RESISTED RESOLUTION MORE effectively than the question of the Christianity of The of the Ancyent Marinere. Contemporary readers often feel that no theological paradigm survives the nightmarish ironies of Coleridge's tale, of course, but that very feeling requires some assumption about the text's theological investments, so the issue of the poem's religious outlook remains a pertinent one. It is an issue that I will reconsider here by invoking Coleridge's Unitarianism. Critics tend to hurry the poet past his Unitarian period, convinced that the glib optimism of Joseph Priestley could accommodate neither Coleridge's visionary interests nor his responsiveness to injustice and suffering. I What troubles me about that conviction is that it seems so thoroughly at odds with the historical record. For in 1797-1798 Coleridge was still zealously engaged in the Unitarian cause: preaching to Unitarian congregations, corresponding with Unitarian ministers on theological questions, and revising his doctrinaire Religious Musings. He renounced his candidacy for the vacant ministry at Shrewsbury not on doctrinal grounds but simply because the Wedgwood legacy allowed him to act on his aversion to ministerial routine. (2) In turning from Coleridge to The moreover, we turn from a devout Unitarian to a conversion narrative organized around Christian motifs from the moment Coleridge introduces Crucifixion imagery into it. Is there no connection between the poet's religious beliefs and the poem's religious speculations? There is indeed, critics reply, but they defend the connection by denying or misrepresenting Coleridge's Unitarianism. For Robert Penn Warren, Coleridge's mythmaking reformulates the orthodox Fall occasioned by Original Sin, in the process ignoring Unitarian and Necessitarian doctrine. (3) For James Boulger, conversely, The Rime depends crucially on Necessity, but on a version of Necessity more reminiscent of Hume than Priestley. (4) Jerome McGann advocates reclaiming The Rime for historical understanding by looking not to Coleridge's Unitarianism but his interest in Higher Critical hermeneutics. (5) With William Empson, we at last encounter outright insistence on the Unitarianism of The thankfully. Yet we also encounter a reconstruction of Coleridge's Unitarian faith so tendentious as to create more problems than it resolves. My effort to negotiate these contending positions will appeal to the Unitarian convictions expressed in Coleridge's own letters and prose writings and Priestley's theological treatises. My essay will concede Warren's claim that The Rime celebrates the One Life, but then argue that the poem displays a typically Unitarian disinterest in Original Sin and the loss of Eden. I will agree with Boulger, against Warren, that the idea of Necessity shapes Coleridge's narrative profoundly, but I will also argue that Coleridge's conception of Necessity is providential rather than skeptical. While accepting McGann's case for a historicist Rime, with the Mariner as a figure of superstition, I will ignore the marginal glosses tie privileges arid concentrate instead on the 1798 text. My concern with The Rime as a Unitarian theodicy, finally, marks the divergence of my argument from Empson's reading. By looking narrowly at the poet's distaste for notions of a hereditary guilt demanding expiation, Empson concludes that Coleridge's Unitarianism disallowed the redemptive rationale of pain and evil--and there I cannot agree. …

On The Complement Of An Ambisidigraph

Abstract More than forty years ago, F. Harary raised the problem of defining the complement S c of a given signed graph S while discussing “structural duality” in general, arguing the concept to be a ‘philosophical necessity’ towards developing eventually a theoretical understanding of the structural dynamics of a social system. As we expect the concept to be of fundamental importance in probing dynamic states of structural stability of a social system arising in epochs of its evolution, here we continue the study of our recently introduced notion of the unary operation of obtaining the complement of a given sociogram , viz. , a selfloop-free signed multidigraph in which every pair of distinct vertices is joined by at most one arc of each sign in each direction or what we have preferred to call here an ambisidigraph . Particularly, we discuss the problem of determining self-complementary sociograms as also unavoidability , in a well-defined sense, of balanced cycles in certain special classes of sociograms. In particular, we find a very interesting connection between Heider's theory of social balance and the notion of complementation in social systems by showing that for any ambisidigraph S and for any positive integer k , either S and S c have no (2k+ 1)-cycle or at least one of them has a balanced (2k + 1)-cycle.

In Search of Aesthetic Space: Delaying Intentionality in Teaching/Learning Situations

Aesthetic considerations are qualitative, personal, and value laden and do not fit well into existing educational frameworks. Yet, I think greater aesthetic awarness is a pragmatic and philosophical necessity missing in much schooling. An aesthetic context calls for a rethinking and revaluing of what is educationally important. This paper explores such possibilities along with the concrete implications of taking aesthetic considerations seriously, within a school setting. Opened in September, 1997, the Creative Arts Centre, Milton Williams School, Calgary Board of Education, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, has chosen to value the creating process, primary to the arts, within the school curriculum as a whole. It seems an ideal situation in which to pursue connections between curriculum theory, practice, and the aesthetic.

The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards: A Study in Divine Semiotics.

PREFACE INTRODUCTION I. The Prospect of Semiotics The Invitation of Typology The Semiotic Context The Renaissance Episteme II. The Discourse of Typology The Vocabulary of Nature Two Texts: Nature and Scripture The Nature of Typological Relations III. The Logics of Creation The Stoicism of Ramist Logic The Ontology of Supposition Corporeality and Mentality as Rhetorical Placement IV. The Trinity and Creation The Logic of the Trinity Why God Creates V. The Ontology of Original Sin The Fall The Imputation of Subjectivity VI. Freedom and Moral Agency Intentionality of Will as Philosophical Necessity Divine Decrees and Foreknowledge Virtue as Consent VII. The Knowledge of Beauty Consent Knowledge and Grace Concluding Remarks: The Porpriety of Christ BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

Jonathan Edwards and the “American Difference”: Pragmatic Reflections on the “Sense of the Heart”

Early in Freedom of the Will Jonathan Edwards formulates a description of logical necessity that has important implications for the way we understand both his philosophical and theological method. He describes the principal forms of necessary meaning, delineating three modes of necessity: philosophical, moral and natural. Of these, the first is most important, for it indicates that, at the highest level, meaning is determined according to the structure of a proposition. Edwards states that “philosophical necessity is nothing different from certainty,” and the form of certainty, he tells us, “[is] nothing else than the full and fixed connection between the things signified by the subject and predicate of a proposition.”