That Complex Whole

Our understanding of the evolution of human behavior has grown enormously over the past few decades, and an increasing number of behavioral and social scientists are making use of evolutionary theory in their work to shed light on issues ranging from marriage and parenting to the study of mental illness. The success of this research program is thre

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The author traces the history and theory of visual culture asking how and why visual media have become so central to contemporary everyday life. He explores a wide range of visual forms, including painting, sculpture, photography, television, cinema, virtual reality, and the Internet while addressing the subjects of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, the body, and the international media event that followed the death of Princess Diana.

"Culture" is a term we commonly use to explain the differences in our ways of living. In this book Michael A. Elliott returns to the moment this usage was first articulated, tracing the concept of culture to the writings -- folktales, dialect literature, local color sketches, and ethnographies -- that provided its intellectual underpinnings in turn-of-the-century America. The Culture Concept explains how this now-familiar definition of "culture" emerged during the late nineteenth century through the intersection of two separate endeavors that shared a commitment to recording group-based difference -- American literary realism and scientific ethnography. Elliott looks at early works of cultural studies as diverse as the conjure tales of Charles Chesnutt, the Ghost-Dance ethnography of James Mooney, and the prose narrative of the Omaha anthropologist-turned-author Francis La Flesche. His reading of these works -- which struggle to find appropriate theoretical and textual tools for articulating a less chauvinistic understanding of human difference -- is at once a recovery of a lost connection between American literary realism and ethnography and a productive inquiry into the usefulness of the culture concept as a critical tool in our time and times to come.

What is possible and why? What is the difference between the merely possible and the actual? In Kants Modal Metaphysics Nicholas Stang examines Kants lifelong engagement with these questions and their role in his philosophical development. This is the first book to trace Kants theory of possibility all theway from the so-called pre-Critical writings of the 1750s and 1760s to the Critical system of philosophy inaugurated by the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. Stang argues that the key to understanding both the change and the continuity between Kants pre-Critical and Critical theory of possibility is his transformation of the ontological question about possibility-what is it for a being to be possible?-into a question in transcendental philosophy-what is it to represent an object as possible? The first half of Kants Modal Metaphysics explores Kants pre-Critical theory of possibility, including his answer to the ontological question about the nature of possibility, his rejection of the traditional ontological argument for the existence of God, and his own argument that God must exist to ground all possibility. The second half examines why Kant reoriented his theory of possibility around the transcendental question, what this question means, and how Kant answered it in the Critical philosophy. Stang shows that, despite this reorientation, Kants basic scheme for thinking about possibility remains constant from the pre-Critical period through the Critical system. What had been an ontological theory of possible being is reinterpreted, in the Critical system, as a theory of how we must represent possible objects, given the nature of our intellect.

An individual who is physically unsubscribed to the world attempts to understand what it means to be human.

The broad range of interdisciplinary concerns which are encompassed by the philosophy of science have this much in common: (I) they arise from reflection upon the fundamental concepts, the formal structures, and the methodology of the sciences; (2) they touch upon the characteristically philosophical questions of ontology and epistemology in a unique way, bringing to traditional conceptions the analytic apparatus of modern logic, and the new content and conceptual models of active scientific investigations. These sources are reflected in the present volume, which consists of the major portion of the papers presented to the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science in the academic year 1961-1962. There is no central theme nor any dominant approach in this colloquium. Initiated in 1960 as an inter-university interdisciplinary faculty group, the Colloqnium is intended to foster creative and regular exchange of research and opinion, to provide a forum for professional discussion in the philosophy of science, and to stimulate the development of academic programs in philosophy of science in the colleges and universities of metropolitan Boston. The base of the Colloquium is our philosophic and scientific community, as broad and heterodox as the academic, cultural and techno logical complex in and about this city. The Colloquium has been supported in its first full year, as an inter-institutional cooperative association, by a generous grant to Boston University from the U. S. National Science Foundation. We are most grateful for this help.