George Reisch

From their commanding role in the so-called British Invasion of the early 1960s to their status as the elder statesmen of rock and roll, the Stones have become more than an evanescent phenomenon in pop culture. They have become a touchstone not only for the history of our times?their performance at the Altamont Raceway marked the "end of the sixties," while their 1990 concert in Prague helped Czechoslovakia and other eastern bloc nations celebrate their newfound freedom out from under Moscow's thumb. Because of their longevity, the music and career of the Stones?much more than The Beatles?stand as touchstones in the personal lives of even casual Stones fans. Everyone of a certain age remembers the Stones on Ed Sullivan, the death of founder Brian Jones, their favorite songs, concerts, or videos, and their stance in the classic?Beatles versus Stones” debates. In the wake of Keith Richards's bestselling autobiography, Life, many are now reliving these events and decades from the viewpoint of the band's endearing and seemingly death-defying guitarist. The chapters in The Rolling Stones and Philosophy celebrate the Stones' place in our lives by digging into the controversies, the symbols, and meanings the band and its songs have for so many. What might you mean by?sympathy for the Devil”? Did the Stones share any of the blame for the deaths at Altamont, as critic Lester Bangs charged they did in Rolling Stone magazine? What theories of ethics and personality lay behind the good-boy image of the Beatles and the bad-boy reputation the Stones acquired? If Keith Richards really had his blood replaced four separate times, does that make him a zombie? How do the Glimmer Twins help us refine our understanding of friendship? Written by a dozen philosophers and scholars who adore the Rolling Stones not only for their music, this book will become required reading for anyone seeking maximum satisfaction from "the world's greatest rock and roll band."

This dissertation examines the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, founded and edited by Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and Charles Morris in 1937. Topics treated include the ideal of unified science within the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle of philosophers, the birth of the Unity of Science Movement, the publication of the Encyclopedia by the University of Chicago Press, and the slow demise of the project during and after the 1940's. Neurath's, Carnap's, and Morris's conceptions of unified science and philosophy are examined individually and used to analyze aspects of their collaboration including disagreements over financial management, over topics and authors, and over the nature and role of semantics in philosophy and science. The dispute between Neurath and Carnap about Neurath's monograph "Foundations of the Social Sciences" is examined in detail. These disputes among the editors, and between the editors and some encyclopedists, are used to explain the failure of the Encyclopedia and, less directly, the demise of logical empiricism in the 1950's and 1960's. The ideals and goals driving the Encyclopedia are briefly compared with recent arguments for the disunity of science