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The discussion begins with the issue of whether human beings have a right to be wrong in what they believe and in much of what they do (that doesn΄t inflict burdens on others). It moves on to a consideration of whether being wrong must always amount to something blameworthy or might it be innocent. Then the radical idea that everyone is mistaken, all of the time, as some extreme skeptics would have it, is examined. Next the matter of dealing with others who are wrong and what may and may not be done about them is considered. The oft-affirmed superiority of scientific thinking is then briefly discussed. What about philosophy–what if any role does the discipline have in these reflections? Finally the famous declaration of Socrates, that all he knows is that he knows nothing, is scrutinized. All this aims to make sense of the idea that others are wrong while one is right about innumerable matters, an idea that is quite problematic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses various aspects of Matsuo Bash¿'s travel writings. It explores the relationships between Bash¿ and his disciples, highlighting the varying degrees of dependence and changing dynamics over time. The article also addresses the question of genre and titles in Bash¿'s writings, with scholars debating the intended titles and the use of terms like "travel record." The author suggests that Bash¿'s writings can be considered as travel writings, but with a unique approach that focuses on narrating the meanings of natural and human encounters. Finally, the article mentions the challenge posed by Sora's Diary, a work that covers the same time period as The Narrow Road through the Hinterlands. [Extracted from the article]

Book IV, Chapter VI of the book "An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding," Volume II, 2nd Edition, by John Locke is presented. It focuses on the certainty and truth of universal propositions as part of the treatise of knowledge. It discusses the twofold of certainty, the certainty of truth and certainty of knowledge, and the propositions whose truth cannot be certain of. It explores the connexion between nominal essence gold and other simple ideas.

INTRODUCTION The Latin medical tradition was a long time in forming. Medicine remained Greek with Galen, and might have become Latin with Celsus, but the loss of the Western Empire a little over two centuries after Galen's death meant the end of any elaborate form of Roman medicine. All of Celsus and most of Galen remained unknown until the Middle Ages. Learned and rational medicine survived in a Greek form in the Eastern Empire, which lasted a thousand years longer than the Western. The Eastern Empire tried to recover the Western by establishing exarchates, for example in Italy, and it seems to have been in such places that some Greek medical works were translated into Latin. There were two main centres of teaching in the east, Constantinople and Alexandria; there was an Alexandrian medical tradition in the Salerno area in the sixth and seventh centuries, and it is known that the Abbey of Montecassino received a copy of the Aphorisms as a gift in the tenth century. In the mid-twelfth century there were schools in Salerno favoured by Jews; there were Greek monasteries in the area; and the political and economic growth of Salerno also favoured its cultural development. But in the seventh century Alexandria was taken over for a brief period by the Persians and then by the Islamic Arabs, who very rapidly swept through North Africa, up through Spain (beginning in 711) and into Occitania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moral philosophy during the period under review was marked by the dominance in England of a form of ethical intuitionism that arose in response to G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica (1903). By the mid-1930s this began to be challenged, both in England and in the United States, by various forms of emotivism. In some isolation from this debate, Dewey continued to write extensively on ethics. Intuitionism The intuitionist school consisted of H. A. Prichard, W.D. Ross, H.W. B. Joseph, and E. F. Carritt in Oxford and C. D. Broad and A. C. Ewing in Cambridge. Prichard should probably be considered the leader of the school, though he published the least; Broad called Prichard ‘a man of immense ability whom I have always regarded as the Oxford Moore’ (1971: 14). The intuitionists believed that rightness and goodness were distinct qualities, qualities that such things as people, actions, emotions, motives, intentions, and consequences could have. They were interested in the nature of and relation between these two qualities and in the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic forms of them, and in which things in fact have these properties. Ross, for instance, argued that there was no such thing as instrumental goodness, that is, value as a means (1930: 133, 1939: 257); but he insisted that there was such a thing as intrinsic value, and that it was distinct from intrinsic rightness. Further, nothing was capable of being both intrinsically good and intrinsically right (Prichard 1912: 5–6). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter three of the book "Poetics Before Plato: Interpretation and Authority in Early Greek Theories of Poetry," by Grace M. Ledbetter, is presented. It explores the poetic theory of Greek poet Pindar that flows from an innovative model including his revolutionary conception of poem as decoding of a divine message from the Muse. It notes that Pindar draws attention to himself as master of equivocal code that convey some divinely certified truth.

Given the radical theocentrism of Malebranche's philosophy-in which God is the only “true” good and “true” cause, in which “we see all things in God,” in which God “moves our arm” on the occasion of our willing it, in which existence is only “continual creation” by God, and in which nature is “nothing but the general laws which God has established” (TNG, Ist Illustration, iii, OC 5:148; R 196)-it is to be expected that a theodicy (“the justice of God”) will be the central and governing moral-political notion, in an almost Leibnizian way, and that this quasi-Theodicee will then shape (say) the meaning of Christian love, the Pauline notion that “the greatest of these is charity” (I Corinthians xiii). This expectation is borne out: For Malebranche a “love of union” should be reserved for God alone (the true good, the true cause) while finite creatures should receive only a “love of benevolence.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malebranche was the master of an elegant and accessible style of writing. As well as writing treatises, he popularized his philosophy by presenting it in dialogue form. Moreover, he also taught what many thinking people wished to believe, that the “modern” philosophy of Descartes could, after all, be reconciled with traditional Christian beliefs. As a result, he had a considerable following among lay people of the leisured classes, at the Academy of Sciences in Paris, as well as among those, like some of the clergy, who made philosophy part of their profession. His aristocratic admirers included the Palatine Princess Elizabeth - noted as a correspondent of Descartes - and Mile. Nicole-Genevieve de Vailly, who assembled a company of Malebranchistes in her salon each week. His disciples included some other Oratorians, such as Bernard Lamy, whose influence helped to mediate Malebranche to the philosophes of the French Enlightenment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The topic of theodicy looms large in Malebranche's thought. His distinctive views on the subject form the basis of one of his most famous books, the Treatise on Nature and Grace (1680), and occupy a prominent place in important later works such as the Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion (1688). Embracing issues of the relation of the divine will to creation and our knowledge of that will, Malebranche's theodicy is inextricably linked to his signature doctrines of occasionalism and vision in God. Together, they form a single comprehensive theory that attempts to explicate the existence and nature of the world, and the special place of human beings within it, in relation to God as creator. What has come to be called the problem of theodicy signifies a cluster of issues, some of which any theological explanation of the world's existence must confront, others of which are specifically associated with the tenets of Christian theology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malebranche was deeply committed to the position that human beings have “freedom of indifference.” However, he was equally committed to occasionalism, according to which God, and God alone, is the true cause of everything real outside of Himself. As Malebranche put it, “It is God who does all in all things [fait tout en toutes choses)” (TNG, OC 5:148; R 196). It is hard to see how these two positions are compatible. Malebranche touched upon freedom of indifference and its relation to causality in all of his major works, and in the process worked out an unusual position on human freedom. Although there is reason to disagree with Jean Laporte's judgment that this position is “coherent in all its parts” it continues to deserve the attention of philosophers and theologians for at least two reasons. First, it shows one way in which seventeenth-century dualism influenced discussion of freedom of will. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main theses of Malebranche's philosophy are well-known today. The theory of vision in God of ideas, the doctrine of occasionalism, the philosophy of will, the function of intelligible extension, as well as the relationship of Malebranche's thought to Descartes' or Leibniz's have all been carefully studied. Very little work, however, in either France or the United States, has explicitly investigated the status and the function of metaphysics in the work of the Oratorian. The question of the definition and the role of a Malebranchian metaphysics gives rise to two distinct but inseparable lines of investigation. First, is it legitimate to search for a definition and systematic use of the word metaphysique in Malebranche? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few periods are more important in the philosophy of mind than the seventeenth century. The new mechanical picture of the physical world confronted many philosophers with an exciting challenge,- they needed to formulate theories of the mind and its place in nature, which were not only more philosophically defensible but also better adapted to the needs of Christian theology than their traditional Aristotelian-Scholastic rivals. Although many of the theories that were advanced are widely rejected today, there is no doubt that they left a decisive mark on subsequent thinking; indeed, they helped to define the contemporary agenda in the philosophy of mind. For instance, current debates over the merits of dualism and materialism are often clearly of seventeenth-century inspiration. Other thinkers in the period may have had a more direct impact on modern philosophy of mind, but few, if any, are more interesting than Malebranche. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the great philosopher, scientist and mathematician Rene Descartes died in 1650, some of his most vehement opponents - and there were many - must have hoped that would be the end of his philosophy as well. Little did they suspect that Cartesianism would be the dominant philosophical paradigm for the rest of the century. In France, the most important Cartesian - perhaps, in fact, the most important philosopher - of this period was a Catholic priest from a prominent and well-connected family in Paris. Nicolas Malebranche was widely recognized by his philosophical and theological contemporaries across seventeenth-century Europe as an intellectual force to be reckoned with, a bold and unorthodox synthesizer of the thought of St. Augustine and Descartes and a systematic thinker of the first rank. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kepler: Unity as Mathematical Metaphysics In the Mysterium cosmographicum Johannes Kepler claimed that it was his intention to show that the celestial “machine” was not a kind of divine living being, but a kind of clockwork insofar as the multiplicity of motions depends on a single, quite simple magnetic and corporeal force, just as all the motions of a clock depend upon a simple weight. And I also show that this physical cause can be determined numerically and geometrically. (Kepler 1938, xv:232) His research began with a specification of certain astronomical hypotheses based on observation; that was followed by a specification of geometrical hypotheses from which the astronomical ones would follow or could be calculated. Those geometrical hypotheses were grounded in the idea that God created the solar system according to a mathematical pattern. Given that assumption, Kepler attempted to correlate the distances of the planets from the sun with the radii of spherical shells that were inscribed within and circumscribed around a nest of solids. The goal was to find agreement between the observed ratios of the radii of the planets and the ratios calculated from the geometry of the nested solids. Although unsuccessful, Kepler remained convinced that there were underlying mathematical harmonies that could explain the discrepancies between his geometrical theory and ratios calculated from observations. Part of Kepler's unfaltering reliance on mathematical harmonies or hypotheses was based on their direct relationship to physical bodies. He considered a mathematical hypothesis to be physically true when it corresponded directly to physically real bodies. What “corresponding directly” meant was that it described their motions in the simplest way possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter discusses a study which explored the development of proof construction in adolescents. As predicted, the findings of this study support the general conclusion that there is a developmental progression from inductive to deductive approaches to the construction of logical proofs. Further, this development is related to the acquisition of a formal level of reasoning competence. The findings demonstrate that individuals who lack formal reasoning competence tend to construct proofs using a confirmatory strategy, whereas those who have an available formal reasoning competence tend to construct proofs using an eliminatory strategy. The fit between formal reasoning competence and a deductive approach to proof construction is, of course, not perfect. A few false positives with respect to a necessary and sufficient proof and formal reasoning did occur. As would be expected on the basis of chance selection of highly informative covers in the proof task, a few scores suggest an integrated concept of necessity and sufficiency without the prerequisite formal reasoning. The findings of the study provide strong evidence of an association between formal reasoning competence and approaching a problem-solving task in a deductive style. However, the evidence is essentially in the form of convergent validity. What is needed in future studies, is not only further convergent validity, but also evidence that will increase the divergent validity of this measure. An unexpected finding was the gender difference on the number of moves to solution and the number of possibilities eliminated per move. The present study also points to the importance of distinguishing between a logically necessary conclusion and the experience of certainty. Originally, it was expected that deductive and inductive reasoners would express different degrees of certainty regarding solutions.

The present chapter offers a review and analysis of studies of children's understanding of certainty and uncertainty. It proceeds first by proposing requisite skills needed for insight into uncertainty. Additional skills needed for specific inferences are then considered. It is argued that discrepancies in the literature regarding the apparent age of onset of the ability to discriminate certain from uncertain inferences are partly due to the fact that different inferential skills are tapped by different tasks. The acquisition of a key skill, the withholding of judgment in insufficient-information contexts, is argued to derive from children's ability to form equivalence classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section provides references to articles regarding safety, featured in Searching for Safety--Studies in Social Philosophy & Policy.

Explores the possibilities of a psychotherapeutic intervention in which the search for an explanation is not dominant and confidence in a unified theory is wanting. Importance of clarity and consistency in psychotherapy; Nature of a psychotherapist's job; Ways of dealing with uncertainties in psychotherapy.

This article presents information related to thinking critically. The most fundamental idea in critical thinking is the principle of contradiction: A statement cannot be both true and false at the same time under the same circumstances. The principle of contradiction keeps one mindful that ideas are seldom of equal quality-so-that solutions to problems range from the practical to the impractical, beliefs from well-founded to ill-founded, opinions from informed to uninformed, arguments from logical to illogical and that only by conscientious research and analysis can be separated the more worthy from the less and, ultimately, identify the best. In short, the principle of contradiction is a spur to excellence in critical thinking. Critical thinking complements creative thinking by evaluating the ideas produced in that phase. Creative thinking, as noted earlier, is divergent, widening our field of vision to encompass all possibilities. Critical thinking, however, is convergent, narrowing the possibilities first to probabilities and finally to the most reasonable choice, the view of the issue that is most defensible in light of the evidence. An effective strategy for critical thinking is to determine the most reason able view, construct the argument for that view and assess the logic of that argument.

This article presents information related to thinking creatively. As was noted in one of the chapters, thinking process has three stages. Reflective thinking is the ongoing phase in which curiosity is applied to observation and experience to discern interesting and worthwhile issues. When one of those issues is selected for closer examination, creative thinking and critical thinking are used to resolve it. The three kinds of thinking are distinguished mainly by the purposes for which they are used: reflective to identify issues, creative to produce ideas for resolving an issue and critical to evaluate those ideas. They also differ in other ways. Creative thinking, for example, employs imaginativeness to a greater extent than reflective or critical thinking does. In addition, creative thinking is also divergent, seeking to gather all relevant evidence and all possible viewpoints and interpretations. Critical thinking, in contrast, is convergent, narrowing possibilities to probabilities and, where possible, probabilities to certainties.

A man on the point of making a decisive choice resembles a calculator doing a long addition. The one counts the figures, the other calculates the reasons. The man without resolution begins his addition again and again. The man of decision is pleased with the total sum, and proceeds on the soundness of his first calculation. In this book, I have asked my readers to follow me along an indirect path to the birth of Tocqueville's conviction that the study of history would release answers to the past and future of Western civilization. To plot the critical points that lead to Tocqueville's final gesture as a historian in L'Ancien Régime, I wove together several strands of Tocqueville's complex and rich themes. As I reach the end of my efforts, readers will doubtless discover that I have said both more and less than I intended. Almost from the beginning of Tocqueville's work as an observer of how rapidly Europe was experiencing change at many levels and on many fronts, many but not all of his contemporaries singled him out as an unusually gifted thinker. Many works on America were popular, but no other inquiry into the mechanisms of the new society across the Atlantic fascinated so many educated Europeans, who held up a mirror to his study of American democracy and found in it an image, however imperfect, of their own future. Many members of the upper classes recoiled from it, while others, thinking about their own experience with revolution and war, began to recognize that European civilization might not be immune from further change, even democratic change. Tocqueville was instrumental in alerting some minds to the kinds and gravity of the changes that lay ahead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complete equality eludes the grasp of the people at the very moment when they think they have grasped it, and “flies,” as Pascal says, “with an eternal flight”; the people are excited in the pursuit of an advantage, which is more precious because it is not sufficiently remote as to be unknown or sufficiently near as to be enjoyed. The full meaning of what drove Tocqueville's final assault on the “surprises” of the Revolution will be denied us unless we execute a last movement backward, from the 1850s, from 1848 and from 1836, to the period of Tocqueville's composition of the Democracy. By employing this strategy, we may pick up the threads – as we may imagine he retrieved them – of his fascination with the great changes in Western society that aroused his interest, and of how, in trying to account for those changes, his conception of history took on greater texture. He looked back on his evolution as a writer who, during a lifetime concerned with change, perceived his own intellectual changes. Intellectual growth, he said, is an emotional process in which “we … never stop bringing the ideas that we embrace into a struggle against those that we do not [embrace]; the ideas that we have had in our youth, with those suggested by the present condition of society and its opinions.” The Democracy may be seen as a youthful intellectual laboratory, but youthful only in the sense that Tocqueville was trying on his views of history that were to remain with him throughout his life even as he refined, elaborated and emended some of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Newness is the realm of the historian who, unlike the natural scientist concerned with ever-recurring happenings, deals with events which always occur only once. This newness can be manipulated if the historian insists on causality and pretends to be able to explain events by a chain of causes which eventually led up to it. He then, indeed, poses as the “prophet turned backward” … Causality, however, is an altogether alien and falsifying category in the historical sciences. Not only does the actual meaning of every event always transcend any number of past “causes” which we may assign to it …; this past itself comes into being only with the event itself. What the illuminating event reveals is a beginning in the past which had hitherto been hidden; to the eye of the historian, the illuminating event cannot but appear as an end of this newly discovered beginning. The path from the Souvenirs to L'Ancien Régime As Tocqueville composed his Souvenirs, he also thought of writing a new book. Musing in his solitude over the final shape of his recollections, he was led to renewed brooding over his own life's purposes. After ten years in the public arena, his regret, especially after the establishment of a presidential republic that claimed legitimacy in democratic forms, was tempered by some satisfaction of having gained an intimate knowledge of the actions of men in political life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Time is in flight; those who are clever have known this for a long time. Monstrous things have happened: the world has suffered great transformations silently and noisily, in the quiet pace of the day and in the storms and eruptions of revolution; monstrosities will occur, greater things will be transformed. What would be most original … would be … a freely ranging judgment on our modern societies and forecast of their probable future … I must find somewhere a solid and continuous basis for my ideas, which I can only find in writing history … But the difficulties are immense. The one which troubles my mind the most arises from [the problem] of blending history properly so called with the philosophy of history [la philosophic historique]. Recurrent themes in Tocqueville's major works The traditions of philosophy of history – for it is clear that Tocqueville's inversion of the words (“la philosophic historique”) was not intended to challenge their proper ordering – or the equally familiar legitimate subjects of inquiry for a histoire raisonnée or speculative history, had taken root in the eighteenth century, which had borrowed much from the seventeenth century's incipient interest in the travel literature and ethnographic studies of non-European cultures. But until the eighteenth century, history remained a series of stories, not related to other kinds of stories (of nature, the earth, space), or with humanist philology and the study, mainly by magistrates and lawyers, of laws and institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is brewing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. For I am convinced that though they (the French) had no inkling of this, they took over from the ancien régime not only most of its customs, conventions, and mode of thought, but even those very ideas which prompted our revolutionaries to destroy it; that, in fact, though nothing was further from their intentions, they used the debris of the old order for building up the new. Thus if we wish to get a true understanding of the Revolution and its achievement, it is well to disregard for the moment the France of today, and to look back to the France that is no more. Alexis de Tocqueville has achieved a certain kind of iconic power. He can bear the burden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If amazement is the mother of science, the continental lawyer's amazement when he is confronted with the English common law must be one of the most powerful factors in the scientific study of the law (to which, after all, the Goodhart professorship is devoted). I shall therefore begin with the presentation of ten legal institutions which exemplify the different approach by English and continental law and, in the course of so doing, present some historical explanations or at least considerations. Many more examples could have been selected, but, whether under the influence of the decimal system or because of reminiscences of the decalogue, ten seemed a fair and not absolutely fortuitous number. As befits a legal historian, I shall be concerned with the historic or classic common law without, however, ignoring altogether various recent changes that seem to be narrowing the gap between the common law and the ‘Roman-Germanic family’. Some readers may themselves be amazed at this amazement: is it not natural that every country has its own laws? In the United States every state enjoys and even guards its own laws, and in some cases even a code of laws! To this the reply can be made that the difference between England and the rest of Europe (including to a large extent even Scotland) goes much deeper than the differences among the continental countries and the states in North America: it is the whole approach to the law and the very way of legal thinking which is different, and not just the laws on divorce or the maximum speed on the highways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

So far the past, and the questions when and why common law and civil law originated, and when and why judges, legislators or scholars dominated the legal scene, have been discussed. It has not been asked which of these approaches was the best – in other words, the discussion has not gone beyond value-free propositions. Many historians believe that this is only as it should be: the historian's task is to describe and, if possible, to explain what happened, not to tell his reader what lessons he should draw from the past. There are, indeed, innumerable books and articles describing the organisation of governments and courts in a multitude of countries and periods, but although they enter into the most minute details, the reader may be sure he will not be told how good that particular government was for the people concerned. That is a philosophical question, a subjective political decision and that is taboo in scholarly historical work. Although it is not difficult to see many good reasons for this attitude, it is a legitimate desire on the part of the layman that the historian, who presumably knows the past best, should also try to answer some questions about the lessons to be drawn from mankind's experiences. It is well known that the Historical School has been reproached by leading jurists with being ‘ultimately barren, because it could not consistently put any aim before men for which they should strive’ and that ‘in effect the historical method comes to the justification of what is, by simply asserting that it is’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SOME FACTS The historical facts are not difficult to summarise. Various European countries have seen the control of the law pass through various hands, i.e. those of the judiciary, the legislature, or the schools. This is not to say, of course, that there were periods or countries where one such controlled the law exclusively: there has always been some case law, some legislation and some writing about legal matters. Only the fully feudalised era of say the tenth and eleventh centuries on the continent was almost totally devoid of legislation and legal learning. Certain periods and countries, however, have witnessed so marked a preponderance of one of these groups of people that it could be considered the essential ‘maker of the law’. Thus it is clear that the common law was judge-made, that medieval and modern Roman law (which could be called the neo-Roman law of western Europe) was professor-made and that an enormous mass of French revolutionary law was legislator-made. The reader will notice that there is here a connection with the traditional theory of the ‘sources of the law’. These, as every undergraduate knows, are custom (as fixed and formulated by judgments), legislation and jurisprudence. However, ‘custom’ and ‘case law’, ‘legislation’ and ‘jurisprudence’ will not be treated as abstract intellectual entities, but investigated as the voices of certain groups of people expressing particular social and political forces in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Locke is the most influential philosopher of modern times. His Essay initiated the vigorous and lasting philosophical tradition that is known as British empiricism, but Locke's importance reaches far beyond the limits of what has since his time become recognized as the professional discipline of philosophy. His influence in the history of thought, on the way we think about ourselves and our relations to the world we live in, to God, nature and society, has been immense. His great message was to set us free from the burden of tradition and authority, both in theology and knowledge, by showing that the entire grounds of our right conduct in the world can be secured by the experience we may gain by the innate faculties and powers we are born with. God “commands what reason does” (W VII: n ) are the words that best reveal the tenor and unity of Locke's thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Locke's failures are sometimes as significant as his successes. His views on morality are a case in point. He published little on the subject, and what little he did publish raised more problems for his readers than it solved. Some of the difficulties contemporaries perceived in Locke's ethics are indicated in a retort by a critic, who was piqued by Locke's suggestion that the critic was part of a plot against him: 'As to the Storm you speak of, preparing against you, I know nothing of it . . .; yet I can blame none that desire such Principles of Humane Understanding as may give them Proofs and Security against such a System as this, Cogitant Matter, a Mortal Soul, a Manichean God (or a God without Moral Attributes,) and an Arbitrary Law of Good and Evil. . . . The ready way to prevent any such Storm, is to give such a plain Explication of your Principles, without Art or Chicane, as may cure and remove any Fears of this Nature.' (Burnet 1697: 11) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Locke's philosophy of religion is one of the great creative achievements in the history of philosophy of religion in the West. It has also proved powerfully influential; at least until recently, probably most modern Western intellectuals have thought about the interconnections among reason, responsibility, and religious conviction along Lockean lines. It should immediately be added, however, that in his day Locke was by no means alone in thinking about these matters as he did; genius though he was, Locke was not a solitary genius. The truth is that Locke articulated better than anyone else a philosophical way of thinking about religion that was gaining currency around the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century in northwest Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the course of its considerable length the Essay concerning Human Understanding deals with many topics; but its main theme and concern is knowledge and the capacity of the human understanding to acquire it. “[M]y Purpose” Locke tells us, is “to enquire into the Original, Certainty, and Extent of humane Knowledge; together, with the Grounds and Degrees of Belief, Opinion, and Assent” (E I.i.2: 43). What is knowledge and how is it acquired? Are there any limits to what we can know and, therefore, things about which we can have only beliefs and things about which we must be ignorant? What, indeed, is the difference between knowledge and belief? As its title indicates, the Essay intends these as questions more about the human knower and believer rather than about what is known and believed. What can we, with our minds, know? In setting out to inquire into knowledge Locke is setting out “to take a Survey of our own Understandings, examine our own Powers, and see to what Things they were adapted” (E I.i.7: 47). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter II of the third volume of the book "Emma," by Jane Austen is presented. It explores the event happened between Emma Woodhouse and Frank Churchill on the day after the ball. It stresses that Frank Churchill, in all the certainty of his own self, reached Randalls before dinner, and every thing was safe, but then no second meeting had there yet been between him and Emma.

Book IV, Chapter XV of the book "An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding," Volume II, 2nd Edition, by John Locke is presented. It focuses on the demonstration of probability as the appearance of agreement or disagreement of two ideas and the bounds of human knowledge and certainty. It explores the degrees and grounds of probability, experience and testimony.

This article discusses the theme of certainty as proposed by Austrian philosopher Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein. In the Western tradition, philosophers have assumed that knowledge is based on fundamental items which must be take as self-evident. If this cannot be done, then the whole edifice of knowledge might be uncertain and total scepticism would reign.

Chapter Twenty-Eight of the book "Peace, Value, and Wisdom: The Educational Philosophy of Daisaku Ikeda" is presented. A fictional dialogue with Paulo Freire based on his "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" is offered to explore how Ikeda views the importance of humanizing the relationship of students and teachers to foster dialogue in the classroom, mentioning the state of Buddhahood as the trait of dialoguers.

The article focuses on the philosopher Bertrand Russell's search for understanding and certainty. He came to accept that reason was the best way to settle all sorts of problems, not just mathematical ones. It was a perspective he held for the rest of his life. In his quest for understanding and certainty, he sometimes found it in his work and sometimes looked for it in the form of a perfect human companion.

The article presents an encyclopedia entry for certainty equivalence. It is used to determine the attitudes of decision makers toward risk, that can be reflected in the shape of their utility functions. It can also be used to order a set of alternatives and elicit a preference order of a set of alternatives.