Within the past two decades Alasdair MacIntyre has emerged as one of the most important moral philosophers in the English-speaking world. Through a series of works, After Virtue, Whose Justice, Which Rationality?, First Principles, Final Ends and Contemporary Philosophical Issues, and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, he has brought moral discourse back to earth from an abstract, idealized realm in which philosophers limited themselves to the analysis of language and formal arguments or invented imaginary situations which presumably gave direction (...) to affairs in the real world. (shrink)

Confessional rigidity between Roman Catholics and Protestants is not adequately explained by doctrinal disagreement alone. This study argues that the persistence and intensity of confessional antagonism arise from a deeper convergence of psychological needs, anthropological patterns, sociological pressures, and theological commitments that shape how individuals and communities hold their beliefs. Fear, insecurity, and unresolved trauma, both individual and collective, often transform doctrinal claims into mechanisms of identity protection rather than instruments of discernment. Through the TAPS framework, together with original analytical (...) constructs such as R.I.G.I.D., S.A.F.E., and the developmental sequence of Fear to Fixation to Ferocity, the analysis demonstrates how ritual, symbol, communal memory, attachment disruptions, and group threat responses interact to produce defensive and inflexible confessional postures. Catholic and Protestant traditions each contain healthy orientations that can become distorted under conditions of perceived threat, particularly when trauma constricts cognitive and emotional flexibility. The study concludes that spiritual maturity, characterized by grounded identity, humility, interpretive charity, and ecumenical openness, provides a constructive path toward healing and enables believers to move from defensive identity fortressing toward a more integrated, compassionate, and dialogical form of Christian engagement. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that subjective character, if it is phenomenologically substantial, conflicts with the transparency of perceptual experience. More specifically, if subjective character accompanies all conscious states, then it should exist in unreflective perceptual states. These states, however, appear transparent and there is no room for self-referential phenomenology on the unreflective level. I end the chapter by considering an empirical argument for the existence of subjective character based on depersonalization, and I argue that the best interpretation of patient (...) reports is consistent with a lack of subjective character. (shrink)

Jude Edeh ABSTRACT: The challenge faced with the proliferation of various kinds of cognitivism is the difficulty of providing a straightforward characterization of moral realism and antirealism. In light of this tension, I identified a problem in Sayre-McCord’s way of specifying the criteria of moral realism. Furthermore, I provided a framework that characterized the moral ….

In this study I investigate the metaphysical, logical, and epistemological tensions generated by the classical doctrine of transubstantiation, focusing especially on the Thomistic claim that in the Eucharist the sensible accidents of bread and wine remain without their natural subject. I identify this configuration as the “inverse” of divine simplicity whereas God is “a substance without accidents,” the Eucharist presents “accidents without a subject.” I further examine whether the classical framework of substance and accident, act and potency, immutability and simplicity (...) can coherently sustain such an inversion or whether it requires conceptual exceptions that exceed the limits of metaphysical explanation. Methodologically, the study employs comparative metaphysics, textual‑historical analysis of patristic and scholastic sources, and cross‑tradition theological comparison (e.g., Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Reformed, and Zwinglian). This is further supplemented by contemporary logical evaluation, scientific‑philosophical critique, and biblical analysis of the sensory, public pattern of miracles in Scripture. These methods allow assessment of both the internal coherence of the Thomistic model and its external plausibility in light of modern metaphysical and empirical expectations. The study also evaluates Aquinas’s proposal that dimensive quantity serves as a metaphysical “placeholder” enabling accidents to persist without a subject. It considers whether this resolves or simply relocates the logical problem, especially when contrasted with biblical miracles that engage the senses in ways the Eucharistic change does not. I further aim to clarify the conceptual architecture of the doctrine and to evaluate its defensibility across philosophical, scientific, and ecumenical contexts. The goals are to produce a clearer account of the commitments required to affirm transubstantiation, the tensions inherent in sustaining accidents without a subject, the comparative strengths of alternative Eucharistic models, and the epistemic reasons the doctrine persists as a “mystery of faith.” Ultimately, I argue that while transubstantiation is internally coherent within its Aristotelian‑Thomistic framework, it remains the most metaphysically demanding model of real presence, and therefore, one whose acceptance depends less on demonstrative reason than on one’s epistemic position toward ecclesial authority, metaphysical realism, and the theological logic of trust. (shrink)

Publication date: 11 June 2018 Source: Author: Jude Nwafor Eze, Umar Aliyu, Abdulmalik Alhaji-Baba, Muhammad Alfa This research evaluates the farmers’ vulnerability to climate change in Niger State. Strategies for reducing the effect of climate change have regularly been made without experimental foundations and adequate information on farmers’ vulnerability to climate change in the study area. Thus, integrated farmers’ vulnerability assessment approach was employed by classifying socioeconomic and biophysical indicators of vulnerability into adaptive capacity, sensitivity and exposure to determine (...) the farmers’ vulnerability to climate change. This is based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s definition of vulnerability. The study adopted a survey design and the method utilized for the study was questionnaire administered to 400 households in the study area. The results indicate that the farmers’ vulnerability was low in zone A with a mean index of 2.86, very low in zone B with a mean index of 3.74, and high in zone C with a mean index of 1.95. It is recommended that measures should be taken to integrate climate change adaptation into Niger State development process. These measures should include improvement in adoption of good agricultural practices. (shrink)

Publication date: 15 October 2018 Source: Author: Jude Nwafor Eze, Coleen Vogel, Philip Audu Ibrahim Flood is known to cause devastating livelihood impacts, suffering and economic damages. To reduce the impact of floods, it is very important to identify and understand the socio-economic factors that determine people’s ability to cope with stress or change. Consequently, the study assesses the social vulnerability of the households to floods in Niger State, in order to provide the empirical evidence necessary for flood adaptation (...) policies and strategies in the state. The data for the research were obtained from the household survey and Dartmouth Flood Observatory. The data obtained were analysed using descriptive and statistical analysis. The results show that flood events in the study area were caused by heavy rainfall, compounded by the opening of the Shiroro dam gate to release the excess flood in the reservoir. Moreover, results of Student “t” test and One-Way Analysis of Variance on socio-economic characteristics show that households’ major economic activities, educational status, household size, income distribution, and membership of cooperative society were significant at p 10, do not belong to cooperative society and earn less that N21000 per month have higher mean frequency, thus, the predominant households were, therefore, farmers, illiterate, have large family size, poor, and have no access to loan. Thus, the socio-economic characteristics of the households in the study area contribute to their vulnerability to floods by reducing their coping capacity. Based on the results of the assessment, it is recommended that measures are taken to mainstream flood adaptation into the development process. (shrink)

Becoming What We Are is a collection of essays and reviews written in the last decade by the late Jude Dougherty, which covey a perspective on contemporary events and literature, written from a classical and Christian perspective. These essays convey a worldview much in need of restating when, according to Dougherty, Western society seems to have lost its bearings, in its legislative assemblies and in its judicial systems as well. Dougherty writes as a philosopher, specifically as one who has (...) devoted most of his life to the study of metaphysics. (shrink)

In Wretched Aristotle: Using the Past to Rescue the Future, Jude P. Dougherty offers an intriguing reexamination of this crisis in contemporary times. Situating his argument in the context of ongoing debate concerning the nature of the public philosophy that underpins ideas of freedom, Dougherty identifies the essential features of Western culture through a series of interrelated essays. Each essay reinforces the idea that modernity cannot be understood apart from its break with classical antiquity.

Without doubt the Galileo affair is one of the most studied events in the history of Western culture. The past four centuries have produced vast amounts of commentaries, countless interpretations and evaluations advanced by physicists, astronomers, theologians, philosophers, churchmen, historians, and even playwrights. Although the literature on the original affair is enormous, the story of the aftermath, says Finocchiaro, has never been told: “The reflective commentary has never been systematically examined, and the subsequent controversy has never been anchored in the (...) textual sources.”. (shrink)

Part of a multi-part series, Revelation and Reason: How Logic Illuminates the Coherence of Theology, this study argues that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is logically coherent when interpreted through the metaphysical distinctions developed in the patristic and scholastic traditions. Focusing on the claim that God is one in essence and three in persons, the paper contends that the doctrine does not violate the law of non-contradiction, nor does it collapse into tritheism, modalism, or ontological subordination. Instead, its apparent (...) difficulty arises largely from category confusion, semantic imprecision, and the tendency to treat divine being as if it were analogous to creaturely individuality. Drawing on Scripture, classical theology, and selected insights from philosophy, psychology, sociology, and anthropology, the study proposes that Trinitarian doctrine is best understood as a disciplined extension of reason under revelation. The paper first surveys biblical foundations for Trinitarian thought in both the Old and New Testaments, showing how canonical readings of Scripture disclose patterns of divine plurality, relational distinction, and unity. It then examines key theological formulations from the Cappadocian Fathers, Augustine, Aquinas, Karl Rahner, and Karl Barth in order to clarify the distinction between essence and person, the ontological and economic Trinity, eternal generation and spiration, and the relation between divine hiddenness and revelation. Special attention is given to modern objections concerning dependency, subordination, and logical inconsistency. The conclusion maintains that, when articulated with conceptual precision, the doctrine of the Trinity is neither irrational nor contradictory, but rather a coherent theological judgment arising from Scripture, refined through tradition, and capable of rational defense within classical Christian thought. (shrink)

Focusing on the debate between resource egalitarians and capability theorists, with particular attention to gender equality, this article rejects the prevailing assumption that the ‘capability approach’ to equality, as outlined by Amartya Sen, is better able to respond to important empirically identifiable inequalities than its resource egalitarian alternative, as developed by Ronald Dworkin. Developing and expanding upon the often overlooked Dworkinian ‘principle of independence’, the article contends that resource egalitarianism is capable of identifying and responding to a complex set of (...) structural inequalities that remain outside the purview of the capability approach. Key Words: capability approach • Dworkin • egalitarianism • equality • gender inequalities • Sen. (shrink)

If you are of a certain age, let us say, old enough to be a grandparent, you have seen it happen in your lifetime. You do not need this work to tell you that American public education at all levels has degenerated in the course of the past half century. Edmonson lays the blame on the unfortunate espousal in professional educational circles of John Dewey’s theory of education. Dewey’s emphasis on experience denigrates the inherited and the necessity to study ancient (...) and foreign languages in order to master the past. For him, the function of education is to challenge the received, to challenge Western civilization in its core beliefs. Dewey’s philosophy of education is, of course, only one aspect of his pragmatic naturalism, but more than that it is a political program. Dewey came to that position slowly. If one were to survey only his later atheistic and socialist writings, one would be surprised to find the newly created Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins lecturing to students at the University of Michigan on “Our obligation to know God.” That was when Dewey was still a convinced Hegelian and open to the transcendent. As Hegel came under fire by empiricists on both sides of the Atlantic for his failure to adequately account for method as actually practiced in the natural sciences, Dewey abandoned the idealism of his intellectual mentor in favor of British empiricism. He became a disciple of David Hume, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx, and subsequently embraced the social determinism of Emil Durkheim. (shrink)

Taking its title from its opposition to relativism, subjectivism, and skepticism, the book has two parts: the first seeks to determine the nature of morality, the second addresses the question, why should I be moral? "The core of morality," writes Rescher, "is benevolence". A moral code is a body of norms governing actions where the legitimate interests of others is concerned. It requires the moral agent to act in view of the genuine needs of others. These can be ascertained because (...) claims regarding moral matters are predominantly factual and objective in character. Reasons can be given for preferring one course of action over others. Thus morality is not just about actions, but about reasons and motivations as well. For an act to be moral, the moral agent must not only be aware of the needs of others but deliberate in his attempt to take them into consideration. Acting out of habit or from custom does not make an act moral. (shrink)

The thesis to be entertained here can be set forth simply. To address the question, “Is there Christian philosophy?”, it is necessary, first, to acknowledge that there is no such thing as “Christiainity.” As a sociological category “Christianity” may have some content. People the world over profess to be Christian. But, when we look to the content of belief we find so little in common between professed Christians that the designation becomes almost meaningless. Professed Christians subscribe to a multiplicity of (...) faiths with varying degrees of sophistication; they adhere to tenets many of which are contradictory, many irrational, many unexamined. Orthodox Christianity is difficult to define even within the Roman Catholic community where a premium is placed on universality, unity, and apostolic mandate. That is my first observation: the lack of unity in Christianity that might give meaning to the term ‘Christian philosophy’. (shrink)

This paper defends a normative basis for entrepreneurial ventures, and draws the conclusion that any enterprise, insofar as it is reasonable, has in final analysis to be a (free) gift to promote good. Building on Herbert Simon's idea of "satisficing" and developing it in line with axiological insights of the new classical natural law theory, this paper makes the argument that a choice to proceed reasonably in any entrepreneurial venture will be guided by rationality that is bounded. Bounded rationality entails (...) that the various end-values or goals of the venture will be incommensurable, and this implies that (1) the enterprise need not be locked in on promoting merely one value, such as profits, and (2) a choice to aim at one or more goals will be a personal (free) gift, which is ethically valuable. This paper has appeared in Spanish translation as El don personal en las empresas sanas: racionalidad limitada, valores incommensurables y agencia economica in Revista Empresa y Humanismo, Vol. XI no. 1 (2008), pp. 67-88, published by the Institute for Business and Humanism, University of Navarra, Spain. Permission granted to reproduce/publish the original English version here and elsewhere. (shrink)

Panichas presents Dostoevsky as a metaphysician whose ontology opens one to the transcendent. But more than that, he casts him in the mold of a Hebrew prophet, albeit one who is a Russian Orthodox Christian. Dostoevsky’s imagination, Panichas tells us, finds its wellsprings in a realistic metaphysics, crowned by a distinctive theological witness. One does not have to be of like mind to appreciate Dostoevsky’s insights, but there can never be any doubt with respect to their source.

The subtitle of this work better indicates its content than the lead title itself. The author is more interested in those social and political structures which promote the common good than he is in the concept itself, although the text is not lacking in philosophical analysis. In a first chapter Cicero is allowed to frame the issues which Miller subsequently explores in the thought of Pitt, Abercromby, Pownall, Rutherforth, Brown, Priestley, Locke, Hume, Price, and in the thought of many others. (...) Liberty, law, security, patriotism, colonization, toleration, and the role of religion in promoting the common good are topics frequently addressed by the eighteenth century authors considered. The level of political discourse in eighteenth century Britain is shown to be serious, achieving a depth rivaling ancient Rome itself. (shrink)

The picture he paints is not a pretty one. “Societies,” he writes in the first section of the volume, “do not decay and fall into ruin because of what happens to them from the outside but rather as a result of an internal process.” One of the most important indicators of social decadence, Tonsor thinks, is the breakdown of traditional political forms, which is itself the result of the decay of aristocratic norms and republican virtue. The contemporary secular, anti-Christian culture (...) promoted by our academic and media elites, in Tensor’s judgment, has replaced its traditional calling of providing uplifting intellectual and artistic standards. In providing evidence of decadence, Tonsor hardly needs to call attention to the breakdown of the family, the dissolution of conventional morality, the increase in crime and use of addictive drugs, and a declining birth rate. Troubling, he thinks, is the transformation of the army from a citizen body to a professional army of paid mercenaries and the propensity of the government to radiate its power outward to world conquest and domination. Above all, Tonsor is concerned about the nation’s loss of the moral tradition represented in the country’s founding documents. Can a civilization survive, he asks, without the unity provided by a common core of values? The crisis of Western civilization, detected early in the last century and addressed by philosophers as different as Husserl, Heidegger, and Santayana, remains. The denial of the Christian and classical sources of Western civilization and the cultural hostility to religion as found among our governing elites has created a moral vacuum. When a consensus with respect to the desired goals of society disappears there is no basis for an ordered civic life. Tonsor fears that absent virtue in the people, it is inevitable that a dictator or authoritarian regime will arise to impose order from without. Tonsor tries to avoid the outright pessimism of Spengler and Toynbee by pointing out that man is not fated but chooses his own life. There is, he believes, a parallel between the personal and the social. Of the twenty-six essays collected for the volume, only three in the first part are devoted to the topic of “decadence.” Others are organized under such headings as “Equality,” “Historiography,” “Intellectual History,” and “Politics.” Throughout the volume we find a highly informed, philosophical mind at work, one fully equipped to address the pressing issues of the day. (shrink)

When Etienne Gilson died in 1978 at the age of 94 he was regarded as one of the twentieth century's most distinguished historians of medieval philosophy. It was his scholarship and his reputation as a great teacher that attracted hundreds of students to the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies which he founded in 1929 as part of St. Michael's College of the University of Toronto. A Gilson school emerged as students of the Institute carried his thought to many parts of (...) the globe. Gilson's intellectual biography is well known. A student of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, he found that he could only understand Descartes against the backdrop of medieval philosophy. Once enmeshed in medieval scholarship he found it hard to leave. He produced major studies of Augustine, Bonaventure, Scotus, Aquinas, and Dante. Though he remained always a historian of medieval philosophy, Gilson was eventually to adopt the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, making it the basis of his own. Being and Some Philosophers established Gilson as a metaphysician in his own right. It was said by a student that Gilson would do research on anything at the drop of a hat. Some of his most charming work was the seemingly philosophically irrelevant studies he made and published under titles such as Choir of Muses, Heloise and Abelard and Dante et Béatrice. The Gifford Lectures given at the University of Aberdeen in 1932 and published as The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy and the William James Lectures given at Harvard University in 1936-37 and published as The Unity of Philosophical Experience remain, perhaps, Gilson's best known and most frequently translated works. His Painting and Reality, the 1955 A. W. Mellon Lectures of the National Gallery of Art, is still a widely used volume. (shrink)

In the decades since his death in 1924, Conrad has elicited analyses and commentaries from some of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, including T. S. Eliot, Henry James, George Orwell, and Virginia Woolf. George Panichas, a distinguished professor of comparative literature at the University of Maryland, is second to none in his appreciation of Conrad for both his prose and his moral vision. One cannot put this book down without wanting to reread Conrad’s greatest novels or enjoy (...) them firsthand if somehow they have escaped the reader’s attention. (shrink)

Not even the subtitle of this work hints at its richness. Redpath begins with Descartes, making it clear that it is not without reason that Descartes is called “the father of modern philosophy.” Although Descartes is his starting point, Redpath quickly moves to an analysis of the work of Leibniz, Spinoza, and Malebranche. He contrasts these Cartesians with the “more hard-headed empiricists,” Hobbes, Newton, Locke, and Hume. Berkeley’s critique of Locke is examined in detail; so too is Rousseau’s Emile, but (...) the bulk of the volume is devoted to Kant and Hegel. (shrink)

Always stimulating, Robinson brings to his several topics a wealth of empirical data, philosophical insight, and plain common sense. His is an attempt to understand the nature of psychology from a philosophical perspective. There are chapters on scientific explanation, the use of models in psychological inquiry, the varieties of determinism, and the reciprocity between ethics and psychology. Though a psychologist, Robinson himself fits into no ready mold. This book and previous works, such as Psychology and Law: Can Justice Survive Social (...) Science, provide examples of a learned mind, one steeped in classical as well as modern and contemporary thought patterns, exploring pressing social problems as well as more removed and abstract professional issues. (shrink)

Catholic University Of America, Philosophical Series, No 197, Abstract No. 47.

About seventy-five years ago, philosophers and literary intellectuals as diverse as Edmund Husserl, George Santayana, and Paul Valéry, aware of the declining influence of Christianity on Western culture, spoke of “the crisis of Western civilization.” Santayana observed: “The present age is a critical one and interesting to live in. The civilization characteristic of Christendom has not disappeared, yet another civilization has begun to take its place. We still understand the value of religious faith.... On the other hand, the shell of (...) Christendom is broken.” All three pinned their hopes for the future of the West, not so much on a revived influence of a divided Christendom, but on the revival of the classical sources of Western culture, and Valéry insisted on an acknowledgment of the West’s debt to Roman law and Roman Catholicism. (shrink)

An ambitious work, based on a lifetime of reading and research, Science, Language and the Human Condition provides a strong defense of a realist theory of knowledge, opposing various forms of contemporary positivism and subjectivism. Kaplan identifies with the pragmatic tradition of Peirce, James, and Dewey, and acknowledges a particular intellectual debt to Morris Cohen. He views that tradition as fundamentally Aristotelian in orientation, as one that recognizes a plurality of methods of inquiry as well as the open-ended character of (...) science. Encyclopedic in his treatment of contemporary figures and movements, Kaplan calls for a synoptic view of the world and the recognition of objective moral values in that world. He affirms the possibility of knowledge both of nature and of the moral order. But as he puts it, knowledge is not a seamless whole. Knowledge is pragmatically constructed in terms of multiple purposes and levels of certainty. While our knowledge of the world is objective, no single way of knowing yields absolute certainty. Thus Kaplan is equally critical of those positivists who would adhere to the model of mathematical physics as the only source of reliable knowledge and of those system builders such as Hegel and Marx whose global vision is inevitably obscurantist. He is just as harsh in dealing with Derrida and with the deconstructionist movement. (shrink)

Although this book bears a copyright date of 1980, it is obviously the fruit of a lifetime of reflection. One does not have to share the author's perspective or concur in every judgment to recognize the wisdom, both speculative and practical, that is manifest throughout. The first part of the book develops a theory of positive law and its place in the natural order. The last part examines the place of law in the social order and the role of legal (...) action as one form of the social control. (shrink)

Early on in the volume, Elders acknowledges the methodological difficulty of talking about the moral philosophy of Aquinas, given that St. Thomas is first of all a theologian. Yet, as a theologian in addressing moral issues, Thomas works within the framework of natural reason, much in the manner of Aristotle and the Stoics. Elders finds it impossible to render faithfully the ethics of Aquinas without delving into his philosophical anthropology, and even deeper into his metaphysics.

This is the 1992 Marquette Aquinas lecture, the fifty-third in a distinguished series sponsored by the Wisconsin Alpha Chapter of Phi Sigma Tau. Though presented as a lecture, it is clearly the outline of a project that draws upon Ernan McMullin's considerable knowledge of the history of the philosophy of science and his realistic assessment of contemporary scientific inquiry. His is a large canvas and he admittedly paints with wide brush strokes. His major thesis, contra the positivism that lingers in (...) some quarters, is that nothing other than a realist philosophy of science will enable one to make sense of contemporary natural science. A very literal reading of Aristotle leads him to distance himself from the Stagirite in certain respects, but McMullin's is fundamentally an Aristotelian analysis of science. To have science is not merely to know what is given in experience and codified in laws of nature, but to have an explanation of the given in terms of its proper causes. It is not enough to know that copper is malleable, conducts electricity, takes on a certain hue under such and such circumstances, and has a melting point of 1083 degrees centigrade. To have scientific knowledge of a material which has been used since antiquity is to know why it has these properties. Such knowledge is not obtained by simple observation, but is gained by the inference which leads to the postulation of an unobserved structure. McMullin believes that empiricists in the tradition of Bacon, Hume, and Mill are hard pressed to explain the inferential leap from observed effect to inferred cause. In passing he notes, "Though Bacon is trying very hard to separate himself from the Aristotelian tradition, one can still catch echoes of [Aristotle's] epagoge". Reviewing Mill's logic of science, McMullin observes that at the same time Mill was writing that causal relations hold only between observables, "the growing reliance of natural scientists on non-inductive inference to and from observables was leading to dramatic advances in fields like optics, chemistry and theory of gases". (shrink)

In an erudite philosophical and sociological analysis, Kaufmann provides an extended illustration for anyone who needs to be reminded of the fact that ideas have consequences. If the United States once possessed an ethnic core, one may say, an Anglo-Protestant soul, sometime between 1920 and 1970, it lost that soul, succumbing to a liberal virus that sapped its inner strength. Coupled with an immigration policy which led to the relative demographic decline of the once-dominant WASP, the Anglo-Protestant doctrinal retreat has (...) produced a different America from that of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The causes are multiple, but Kaufmann focuses on cultural and ideological changes originating within the Anglo-Protestant intellectual community as mainline Protestantism moved from its early New England moorings to a left-liberal egalitarian phase. Kaufmann chronicles the decline, beginning in the period 1905– 18 to its culmination in 1970, presenting the decline as the inevitable result of the alliance of liberal Protestants with the New York intellectuals of the Village Renaissance period. (shrink)

This is a small but rewarding volume consisting of four essays, two each by Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur, essays which were originally delivered as lectures at Columbia University in the late 1960s. The profundity and breadth of learning in both authors is evident as they consider the intellectual and moral role of religion in society.

Dougherty investigates the classical roots of Western culture and its religious sources in an effort to define its underlying intellectual and spiritual...

William Dean Howells has long been recognized as the chief spokesman for post-1880s American Realism. Most of his writing appeared in popular magazines, however, and has been lost to us. This collection brings together for the first time his most significant essays about American drama written between 1875 and 1919 and a full bibliography of his writings on drama and theatre. The essays have been generously annotated and provide production and publication information on the plays Howells reviewed and biographical notes (...) on the playwrights and actors whose work he described. Howells’s commentary, the most literate treatment of American theatre of the time, defines and defends his theory of the evolutionary development of realism in modern drama. Because he reviewed more than on hundred fifty productions, which represent the full range of theatre that was available to him, his insights are based on invaluable first-hand knowledge of both self-consciously literary drama and the popular forms of performance that were central to America’s entertainment before World War I. Howells’s essays had a powerful influence on the serious playwrights and theatre practitioners who came of age at the turn of the century, and whose work in turn enabled playwrights like Eugene O’Neill and Susan Glaspell to develop a new realism during the teens. The essays in this volume are the core of Howells’s theory of dramatic realism and will be interesting to scholars, students, and teachers of theatre history and literary criticism. (shrink)

Robert J. Howell offers a new account of the relationship between conscious experience and the physical world, based on a neo-Cartesian notion of the physical and careful consideration of three anti-materialist arguments. His theory of subjective physicalism reconciles the data of consciousness with the advantages of a monistic, physical ontology.

Freedom and the subject in Jean-Paul Sartre -- Freedom and necessity in Jacques Derrida -- Freedom and the subject in contemporary philosophy and theory -- Theorizing pathologies and therapeutics of freedom.