Gordon Graham

_The Internet: A Philosophical Inquiry_ develops many of the themes Gordon Graham presented in his highly successful radio series, _The Silicon Society_. Exploring the tensions between the warnings of the Neo-Luddites and the bright optimism of the Technophiles, Graham offers the first concise and accessible exploration of the issues which arise as we enter further into the world of Cyberspace. This original and fascinating study takes us to the heart of questions that none of us can afford to ignore: how does the Internet affect our concepts of identity, moral anarchy, censorship, community, democracy, virtual reality and imagination? Free of jargon and full of stimulating ideas, this is essential reading for anyone wishing to think clearly and informatively about the complexities of our technological future.

'It's all in the genes'. Is this true, and if so, _what_ is all in the genes? _Genes: A Philosophical Inquiry_ is a crystal clear and highly informative guide to a debate none of us can afford to ignore. Beginning with a much-needed overview of the relationship between science and technology, Gordon Graham lucidly explains and assesses the most important and controversial aspects of the genes debate: Darwinian theory and its critics, the idea of the 'selfish' gene, evolutionary psychology, memes, genetic screening and modification, including the risks of cloning and 'designer' babies. He considers areas often left out of the genes debate, such as the environmental risks of genetic engineering and how we should think about genes in the wider context of debates on science, knowledge and religion. Gordon Graham asks whether genetic engineering might be introducing God back into the debate and whether the risks of a brave new genetic world outweigh the potential benefits. Essential reading for anyone interested in science, technology, and philosophy, _Genes: A Philosophical Inquiry_ is ideal for those wanting to find out more about the ethical implications of genetics and the future of biotechnology.

Art and pleasure -- Hume on taste and tragedy -- Collingwood on art as amusement -- Mill on higher and lower pleasures -- The nature of pleasure -- Art and beauty -- Beauty and pleasure -- Kant on beauty -- The aesthetic attitude and the sublime -- Art and the aesthetic -- Gadamer and art as play -- Art and sport -- Art and emotion -- Tolstoy and everyday expressivism -- Aristotle and Katharsis -- Expression and imagination -- Croce and 'intuition' -- Collingwood's expressivism -- Expression versus expressiveness -- Art and understanding -- Hegel, art and mind -- Art, science and knowledge -- Aesthetic -- Cognitivism, for and against -- Imagination and experience -- The objects of imagination -- Art and the world -- Understanding as a norm -- Art and -- Human nature -- Music and sonic art -- Music and pleasure -- Music and emotion -- Music as language -- Music and representation -- Musical vocabulary and musical grammar -- The uniqueness of music -- Music and beauty -- Music as the exploration of sound -- Sonic art and digital technology -- The visual arts -- What is representation? -- Representation and artistic value - Art and the visual -- Visual art and the non-visual -- Film as art -- Montage versus Longshot -- Talkies -- The 'auteur' in film -- The literary arts -- Poetry and prose -- The unity of form and content -- Figures of speech -- Expressive language -- Poetic devices -- Narrative and fiction -- Literature and understanding -- The performing arts -- Artist, audience, and performer -- Painting as the paradigm of art -- Nietzsche and the birth of tragedy -- Performance and participation -- The art of the actor -- Architecture as an art -- The peculiarities of architecture -- Form and function and 'the decorated -- Shed' façade, deception, and the 'Zeitgeist' -- Functionalism -- Formalism and 'space' -- Architectural expression -- Architecture and understanding -- Modern art -- The break with tradition -- Experimental art and the avant-garde - The art of the readymade -- Conceptual art -- The market in art -- Art and leisure -- The aesthetics of nature -- The objectivity of aesthetic evaluation -- The artist's intention -- The intentionalist -- 'Fallacy' -- Natural beauty -- Environmentalism and the aesthetics of nature -- Theories of art -- Defining art -- Art as an institution -- Sociology and the marxist theory of art - Lukacs and realism -- Levy-Strauss and structuralism -- Derrida and deconstruction -- Hegel and Schopenhauer : normative theory of art.

This chapter discusses the first of specific types of the construction of grand narrative, that is ‘progress’. The desire for, and belief in, historical progress has always been found in human societies. This reached its height in the 19th century in the thoughts of thinkers as diverse a Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill. In the 19th century the progressivism was often accompanied by additional contentions about the superiority of European culture and the Christian religion, and for this reason it also came to be associated with the justification of imperialism. Progressivism, however, does not necessarily has to invoke anything in the way of a teleology or grand design.

The study of history with the aim to understand the human past with some sense of detachment is a recent intellectual trend. In the past, a knowledge of history was aimed at ascertaining within history some hidden meaning: cosmic significance, general direction, or providential purpose. This chapter gives an overview of both the religious and secular philosophy of history including looking at Jewish, Christian, Hegelian, and Marxist ideas, and Idealism and Realism. The belief in historical development conceived as a philosophical history provides substantial material for conceptual elaboration and examination. The chapter evaluates the attitude of continental and analytical philosophical traditions toward the concept of grand historical narrative. The combination of the continental and analytical techniques for the purpose of philosophical history is still rare.

Vico believed in the historical importance of Divine Providence. His writings give considerable importance to theological conceptions and he himself was a religious person. The question of God's existence is crucial to the truth of most of the sacred histories because if He does not exist sacred histories are all false. Jewish and Christian sacred histories take it for granted that the Bible is the revealed word of God. Without this, the enterprise would appear to be baseless. Christian sacred history is the story of salvation. The Book of Job or the Psalms, for instance, though not wholly without historical overtones, are largely works of spiritual meditation and reflection.

This chapter is concerned with fundamental objections to the logical possibility of philosophical history. Philosophical history is a combination of two disciplines which are often conceived to be distinct. This results in the scepticism that the formulation of such a discipline is not plausible. Immanuel Kant was the most prominent philosopher who formulated the idea of a universal history. According to Kant, though, the empirical study of historical phenomena is essential to the understanding of the human past, in itself it is insufficient because the plans of individuals taken on their own cannot explain the emergence of developing forms of thought and civil association.

A distinction has long been drawn between the desire to have knowledge of the past entirely for its own sake and a more practical attitude which aims to uncover hidden meanings of relevance to the conduct of life. The idea that humanity might learn from its mistakes is an old one. The chapter also discuses views of Italian political theorist Machiavelli, and English philosopher David Hume. While it is necessary for historical narratives to be built out of fact, factuality is not a sufficient condition of a successful narrative, which must also operate with a principle or principles picking out of the mass of facts those that are relevant to the telos.

According to the philosopher Lurcretius, ‘Some races wax and other wane’. The history of the world, at any one point in its past, has seen remarkable civilizations of which there is hardly any trace left now. The 18th-century philosophers of history J. G. Herder's views on historical recurrence are also discussed in this chapter. According to him historical discontinuity means that it is inappropriate for one culture to pass judgment on another. The belief that the past consists of discrete cultural episodes does not exclude the possibility that these episodes have a common structure. The conception explored in this chapter is sometimes referred to as historical cycles.

The concept of decline has been a constant in the historical thinking of all societies. This chapter discusses this concept, the possible socio-psychological reasons for this concept, and the implications for the understanding of history. Though a belief in a Golden Age is often caused by and sustained by pessimism or nostalgia, it does not follow that there is no truth in such beliefs. The chapter presents some secular counterparts which also harbor same nostalgia for a remote past when everything was perfect. It is also not necessary to believe that the past was a period of absolute perfection in order to hold that the present is in important ways a period of decline.

The concept of collapse in history is one of the normative conceptions through which human past gets a shape. There is no necessary incompatibility between progress and decline, because the decline of some things can itself be interpreted as a mark of progress. This chapter provides an overview of philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Darwin on this issue. This chapter tries to illustrate through an example the differences between Christian morality and Nietzsche's concept of morality. Nietzsche claimed that the cultural dominance of the Christian ascetic ideal in which self-negation is cultivated at the expense of the aristocratic virtue of self-assertion has come to an end.

This is a revised and expanded version of the much praised short book _Universities: The Recovery of An Idea_. It contains chapters on the history of universities; the value of university education; the nature of research; the management and funding of universities plus additional essays on such subjects as human nature and the study of the humanities, interdisciplinary versus multidisciplinary study, information systems and the concept of a library, the prospects for e-learning, reforming universities, intellectual integrity and the realities of funding, and spiritual values and the knowledge economy.

This chapter investigates the question of how a “philosophy” of emerging technologies should be conceived. Part 1 distinguishes between prediction and explanation as the end goal of such a philosophy, and explores empirical social science and idealist philosophy as alternative approaches to explanation. It uses the basic ideas of actor network theory to uncover weaknesses in both. Part 2 sets out a third possibility, namely the empirical-cum-normative philosophical method that underlies the writings of two foundational figures in the history of the social sciences—the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson. Part 3 applies this method to the philosophy of technology, and introduces the concept of “transformative technologies.” Part 4 considers briefly the extent to which the “emergent media” of the present time could be regarded as transformative.

This chapter discusses four principal themes of Scottish aesthetics over the course of the eighteenth century. The first is the question of ‘taste’ and its relation to the perception and reality of beauty. Does beauty exist independently of its being perceived, or is it in some sense the product of our perception? The second is the matter of aesthetic criticism. Can aesthetic judgements be rational, and if so on what basis? The third main topic is the rhetorical use of language. Is oratory an art? If it is, how does rhetoric relate to literary and poetic language, to the expression of thought and the cogency of argument? Finally, is there something to be learned on these subjects from the study of the origins of language? On each of these topics, the Scottish philosophers had interesting, insightful, and in some cases enduringly important things to say.