Surrender and Catch

Surrender and Catch
Author: K.H. Wolff
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 438
Release: 1976-12-31
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9789027707581

Su"ender and catch: give so you can receive, where the giving is your whole self, in a total experience. This is scarcely new on the American scene, and it is ancient knowledge, East and West. The fears of total surrender, the fears of self-revelation and of total abandon, although genuine, are likewise not new. Yet Kurt H. Wolff does attempt something new here, an epistemologi cal essay with the help of this old idea: his subtitle is 'experience and inquiry today'. He tries to formulate an integrated view which incorporates in the theory of total experience not only the accepted component- esthetics, religion, the recent American experience - but also a metaphysics, a phenomenology, a theory of perception, a social philosophy and a methodology of the social sciences, even a philosophy of history and psychopathology. Phenomenology (especially Alfred Schutz), the critical Frankfurt school (especially Adorno and Marcuse), sociology (especially Georg Simmel), and existentialism (especially Camus) are tied in together. It all looks topsy-turvy at first. We have here scraps of a diary, fragments of correspondence, a stray adolescent love letter, notes on notes on field work, and notes and comments on tutorial seminars plus long excerpts from students' essays, a stray paper in a learned journal summarizing the core of the book, comments piled on comments and a web of self-references, literary criticisms, and pieces of poetry, plus a rich scholarly apparatus.

Dialectics of the Concrete

Dialectics of the Concrete
Author: K. Kosík
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9401015201

Kosik writes that the history of a text is in a certain sense the history of its interpretations. In the fifteen years that have passed since the fust (Czech) edition of his Dialectics of the Concrete, this book has been widely read and interpreted throughout Europe, in diverse centers of scholarship as well as in private studies. A faithful English language edition is long overdue. This publication of KosIk's work will surely provoke a range of new interpretations. For its theme is the characterization of science and of rationality in the context of the social roots of science and the social critique which an appropriately rational science should afford. Kosik's question is: How shall Karl Marx's understanding of science itself be understood? And how can it be further developed? In his treatment of the question of scientific rationality, Kosik drives bluntly into the issues of gravest human concern, not the least of which is how to avoid the pseudo-concrete, the pseudo-scientific, the pseudo-rational, the pseudo historical. Starting with Marx's methodological approach, of "ascending from the abstract to the concrete", Kosik develops a critique of positivism, of phenomenalist empiricism, and of "metaphysical" rationalism, counter posing them to "dialectical rationalism". He takes the category of the concrete in the dialectical sense of that which comes to be known by the active transformation of nature and society by human purposive activity.

Ancient Logic and Its Modern Interpretations

Ancient Logic and Its Modern Interpretations
Author: J. Corcoran
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9401021309

During the last half century there has been revolutionary progress in logic and in logic-related areas such as linguistics. HistoricaI knowledge of the origins of these subjects has also increased significantly. Thus, it would seem that the problem of determining the extent to which ancient logical and linguistic theories admit of accurate interpretation in modern terms is now ripe for investigation. The purpose of the symposium was to gather logicians, philosophers, linguists, mathematicians and philologists to present research results bearing on the above problem with emphasis on logic. Presentations and discussions at the symposium focused themselves into five areas: ancient semantics, modern research in ancient logic, Aristotle's logic, Stoic logic, and directions for future research in ancient logic and logic-related areas. Seven of the papers which appear below were originally presented at the symposium. In every case, discussion at the symposium led to revisions, in some cases to extensive revisions. The editor suggested still further revisions, but in every case the author was the finaljudge of the work that appears under his name.

Juan Luis Vives Against the Pseudodialecticians

Juan Luis Vives Against the Pseudodialecticians
Author: R. Guerlac
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9400993730

The humanist treatises presented here are only peripheral to the history of logic, but I think historians of logic may read them with interest, if perhaps with irritation. In the early sixteenth century the humanists set about to demolish medieval logic based on syllogistic and disputation, and to replace it in the university curriculum with a 'rhetorical' logic based on the use of topics and persuasion. To a very large extent they succeeded. Although Aris totelian logic retained a vigorous life in the schools, it never again attained to the overwhelming primacy it had so long enjoyed in the northern universities. It has been the custom to take the arguments of the humanists at face value, and the word 'scholastic' has continued to have pejorative overtones. This is easy to understand, because until recently our knowledge of the high period of medieval logic has been slight, and the humanists' testimony as to its decadent state in the sixteenth century has, for the most part, been accepted uncritically. Within the past two decades important work on medieval logic has recovered the brilliant achievement of thirteenth and fourteenth century logicians, philosophers, and natural scientists. New studies are constantly appearing, and the logico-semantic system of the terminists has become fruitful territory not only for historians of logic but also for students of modern linguistics and semiotics.

Problems of Semantics

Problems of Semantics
Author: L. Tondl
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9400983646

Ladislav Tondl's insightful investigations into the language of the sciences bear directly upon some decisive points of confrontation in modern philos ophy of science and of language itself. In the decade since his Scientific Procedures was published in English (Boston Studies 11), Dr Tondl has enlarged his original monograph of 1966 on the promise, problems and achievements of modern semantics: the main topic of his later work has been semantic information theory. A Russian translation, considerably expanded as a second edition, was published in 1975 (Moscow, Progress Publishers) with an appreciative critical commentary, in the form of a conclusion, by Professor Avenir I. Uemov of Odessa. Indeed many Soviet studies in the problems of the semantics of science show the same sort of philosophical curiosity about the relationship of meanings in scientific language to pro cedures in scientific epistemology that characterizes Tondl's work, as in the work of Mirislav Popovich (Kiev) and Vadirn Sadovsky (Moscow) and their colleagues. But we know that interest in these matters is world-wide, ranging from such classical topics as sense and denotation, empiricist reduction, vagueness and denotational opacity, to the new and equally exciting topics of the semantics of non-unique preference choices, the nuances of informational synonymity, and the semantics of a picture shape (so briefly but beautifully sketched in Tondl's dense and promising last chapter). We are pleased to have had Tondl's kind cooperation in producing this English edition, actually a third edition, of his research about semantics.