The Less Said The Better: Dewey, Neurath, and Mid-Century Theories of Truth

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
John Capps

Abstract John Dewey’s theory of truth is widely viewed as proposing to substitute “warranted assertibility” for “truth,” a proposal that has faced serious objections since the late 1930s. By examining Dewey’s theory in its historical context – and, in particular, by drawing parallels with Otto Neurath’s concurrent attempts to develop a non-correspondence, non-formal theory of truth – I aim to shed light on Dewey’s underlying objectives. Dewey and Neurath were well-known to each other and, as their writing and correspondence make clear, they took similar paths over the mid-century philosophical terrain. I conclude that Dewey’s account of truth is more principled, and more relevant to historical debates, than it first appears.

Genealogy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 68
Author(s):  
Ed A. Muñoz

While there has been an explosion of scholarly interest in the historical and contemporary social, economic, and political status of U.S. Latinx individuals and communities, the majority focuses on traditional Southwestern U.S., Northeastern U.S., and South Florida rural/urban enclaves. Recent “New Destinations” research, however, documents the turn of the 21st century Latinx experiences in non-traditional white/black, and rural/urban Latinx regional enclaves. This socio-historical essay adds to and challenges emerging literature with a nearly five-century old delineation of Latinidad in the Intermountain West, a region often overlooked in the construction of Latina/o identity. Selected interviews from the Spanish-Speaking Peoples in Utah Oral History and Wyoming’s La Cultura Hispanic Heritage Oral History projects shed light on Latinidad and the adoption of Latinx labels in the region during the latter third of the 20th century centering historical context, material conditions, sociodemographic characteristics, and institutional processes in this decision. Findings point to important implications for the future of Latinidad in light of the region’s Latinx renaissance at the turn of the 21st century. The region’s increased Latino proportional presence, ethnic group diversity, and socioeconomic variability poses challenges to the region’s long-established Hispano/Nuevo Mexicano Latinidad.


2015 ◽  
Vol 87 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-17
Author(s):  
Philip Richardson

Peter’s reference to ‘spiritual sacrifices’ in 1 Pet. 2:5 is unspecified and scholars have proposed a variety of possible solutions to identify their referent. In this paper, we shed light on this question by considering how the term may have been heard by the readers in their historical context. Most scholars consider the audience to be majority Gentile and clearly in a diaspora setting (1 Pet. 1:1). Philo, as a Hellenistic Jewish author writing to the diaspora, has much to say about spiritual sacrifices, connecting them with the rational soul of virtue, which is purified from the passions and issues in virtuous conduct. Returning to 1 Peter, we observe the wider context of 1 Pet. 2:5 emphasizes purity of heart and soul, a disciplined mind and a self-controlled avoidance of passion, which also issues in virtuous conduct. This framework would have helped the original readers to identify the spiritual sacrifices.


Author(s):  
Mona Pinchis-Paulsen

Today, there are an unprecedented number of disputes at the World Trade Organization (“WTO”) involving national security. The dramatic rise in trade disputes involving national security has resuscitated debate over the degree of discretion afforded to WTO Members as to when and how to invoke Article XXI, the Security Exception, of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (“GATT”), with binding effect. The goal of this article is to shed light on contemporary questions and concerns involving national security and international trade, particularly questions involving the appropriate invocation of Article XXI GATT, through careful attention to the article’s historical context. The article elucidates the diverse strategic and economic considerations that shaped the meaning of U.S. national security interests at the time when national delegations were drafting the post-war multilateral trade system, the ITO. It demonstrates how these interests, in turn, created the language, phrasing, and placement of the security exception within the ITO Charter, and details when and how this was adopted in the GATT. This article argues that analyzing internal U.S. practice into the making of Article XXI is relevant for current and future efforts to interpret the exception, thereby contributing to existing literature on Article XXI GATT. It provides the internal deliberations of U.S. officials who served as key architects of the multilateral trade system and of the ITO Charter’s security exception. Additionally, the article captures a fascinating story as to how different U.S. agencies competed to define U.S. foreign and economic policies at the time and shows how the compromises struck help to explain the making of article XXI GATT.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 369-380
Author(s):  
Zhanerke Shaygozova ◽  
Madina Sultanowa

The article analyzes the cultural and creative heritage of artists of Polish descent who found themselves in Kazakhstan for various reasons in the period from the middle of the 19th to the end of the 20th centuries. In addition to their unconditional artistic value, the results of their creative efforts are of great scientific importance for modern Kazakhstan as unique ethnographic sources and documentary evidence of the daily graft and life of the Kazakh steppe. Domestic historical science already has a certain reserve dedicated to various sociopolitical, cultural and economic aspects of Kazakh-Polish relations, where the deportation of Poles and the formation of Kazakhstan’s Polonia are of particular importance. However, the creative heritage of Polish artists in Kazakhstan fell into the field of vision of scientists extremely occasionally. While its cultural and art historical context is able to shed light on many facets of the history, ethnography and culture of the Kazakh people. During the research, retrospective, comparative-historical and formal-stylistic campaigns were used. The result of the research is a retrospective analysis of the works of some of the most prominent Polish artists, due to various factors, for whom the Great Steppe has become not only a home, but also a source of inspiration and strength.


2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-220
Author(s):  
María José Martínez Usó ◽  
Francisco J. Marco Castillo

Existing research dealing with astronomical observations from medieval Europe have extensively covered topics such as solar and lunar eclipses and sightings of comets and meteors, but no compilation of occultations of planets by the Moon has been carried out and, till now, the data have remained scattered in different publications. The main reasons for this are the small number of observations that has reached us, their limited use for calculation of parameters associated with the rotation of the Earth, and the fact that between the fifth and fifteenth centuries, the period that we consider, almost none of these observations were made scientifically, since they usually appear in narrative texts, be they chronicles or annals. Our purpose is to make a compilation of these phenomena, trying to shed light on some of the most controversial observations after examining them in their historical context. We will examine European sources, but, occasionally, we will also consider reports from other parts of the world to make comparisons, when necessary.


2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-43
Author(s):  
Jeffrey McDonough ◽  
Zeynep Soysal

This essay argues that, with his much-maligned “infinite analysis” theory of contingency, Leibniz is onto something deep and important – a tangle of issues that wouldn’t be sorted out properly for centuries to come, and then only by some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century. The first two sections place Leibniz’s theory in its proper historical context and draw a distinction between Leibniz’s logical and meta-logical discoveries. The third section argues that Leibniz’s logical insights initially make his “infinite analysis” theory of contingency more rather than less perplexing. The last two sections argue that Leibniz’s meta-logical insights, however, point the way towards a better appreciation of (what we should regard as) his formal theory of contingency, and its correlative, his formal theory of necessity.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-159
Author(s):  
Sara Pankenier Weld

An ‘enlightened despot’ who ruled the Russian empire as an absolute autocrat despite a tenuous claim to the throne, Catherine the Great embodied innumerable paradoxes during her long reign. This article examines the little-known fairy tales Catherine wrote for her grandsons to reveal the possible and impossible child she posits, envisions and instantiates through her writings for a young audience. Placing these works in a broader intellectual and historical context illuminates the paradoxes of the impossible infans she cultivates as part of an Enlightenment project and reveals how Catherine's writings for children (re)enact a kind of repossession of the child. Catherine's treatment of childhood within and without her texts reflects her ideological aims as a writer, ruler and matriarch. In addressing and attempting to instantiate an impossible child, whether an enlightened subject of her empire or an ideal absolute monarch of the future, Catherine reveals paradoxes that contrast with the reality of vulnerable young individuals in the historical record. These real children from the annals of Russian history offer an illuminating contrast for the impossibly idealised child protagonists constructed by Catherine's writings for children and shed light on the ideological context in which her treatment of childhood is embedded.


2022 ◽  
Vol 4 (40) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfons Gregori

As part of historically minorized culture, Catalan literature endured difficult periods, e.g., the Francoist regime. To imagine different worlds writing in this language was even more arduous in the 20th century because of the negative attitude towards the fantastic shared by two fundamental trends of Catalan literature up to the 1970s: Noucentisme and historical realism. Nonetheless, H.P. Lovecraft was an important reference in the Catalan non-mimetic fiction that had a certain revival in post-war times. As a step towards “normalization” of Catalan literature after Franco’s death, the writers’ collective Ofèlia Dracs published several collections of short-stories of “genre” fiction–among them Lovecraft, Lovecraft! (1981). On the one hand, this article inscribes this exceptional collection in its historical context and in the contemporary Catalan literary system; on the other, it aims to shed light on Lovecraft’s role in Ofèlia Dracs’ book, proving the projection of his extraordinary supernatural world onto it by the presence not only of Lovecraftian hypotexts in its different tales, but also of metafictional elements inherited mainly from Joan Perucho’s postmodernist writings.


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-67
Author(s):  
Gülistan Gürsel-Bilgin

This qualitative case study examines the Peace Case in its historical context and scrutinizes the complexities. Ms Butera, who became known as the ‘peace teacher’, had to deal with in the aftermath of her remark ‘I honk for peace’ in her classroom. Drawing from the fields of peace education and educational leadership and policy studies, the study aims to shed light to the dominant dynamics in the case, especially those that might be discouraging teachers to integrate the potentially controversial themes related to war and peace into their curricula. To this end, it first discusses peace education as a controversial issue and illustrates several facets of peace education that make it controversial. Following this, an analysis of a post-Garcetti case, which is known as the ‘Peace Case’, is presented. As this analysis sheds light on several implications regarding peace education as a controversial issue and teachers’ freedom of speech in the classroom, these implications are presented for teacher educators in the final section. While scrutinizing the challenging nature of present public schooling through Ms Butera’s struggles, the study uncovers the possibilities of peace education practices even in an oppressive system of schooling through robust teacher education programmes equipping teachers with powerful skills and capabilities required for transformative educators.


Philosophy ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 51 (195) ◽  
pp. 35-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanley Tweyman

William Wollaston, a leading British moral philosopher of the eighteenth century, has fallen into obscurity primarily, I believe, for two reasons. In the first place, it is usually supposed that Wollaston's moral theory was refuted by Hume in the opening section of the third book of the Treatise of Human Nature. Secondly, Wollaston's theory, or parts thereof, have been assigned pejorative labels such as ‘odd’ and ‘strange’, which create the impression that it is not a moral philosophy which can be taken seriously. In this paper I attempt to deal with the second of these reasons by setting forth what I take to be Wollaston's meaning in certain key sections of his work, The Religion of Nature Delineated, especially in so far as they help to shed light on his theories of truth and happiness, and the relation of these to his theory of obligation. Wollaston will be found to be a moral philosopher with important things to say, and therefore to be a moral philosopher with a theory worth taking seriously. If I am correct in my interpretation of Wollaston, then it can also be established that Hume has not refuted Wollaston in the opening section of Book III of the Treatise. But here my attention will be confined entirely to Wollaston's own moral theory.


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