Stephen R. Palmquist

Bloom's now famous manifesto for the salvation of American academia ("Back to the classics!") is worthy of serious consideration. His appraisal of current trends, such as the tendency to move away from theoretical traditions and towards practical or technical degrees, is often penetrating. (A good example is his discussion of the MBA degree: the degree itself is unobjectionable; but the value modern society places on it is a reflection of the "values" of modern society -values which have a destructive side to them.)

       As is appropriate for an introductory text, Douglas Burnham’s book opens with a chapter providing general background information on Kant, a systematic overview of the whole Critical philosophy, a sketch of the basic issues dealt with in the third Critique, and an explanation of the overall structure of Kant’s book. Here and throughout Burnham’s book each section ends with a helpful summary, with diagrams and other convenient “lists†being supplied along the way for added clarity. For the most part, these summaries are reliable. The author’s interpretations, however, occasionally suffer from some rather unfortunate mistakes. For example, when contrasting the categories with the principles (p.14), Burnham cites the principle of non-contradiction as the primary example; yet Kant’s expressed reason for mentioning this “principle†in A150- 3/B189-93 is to contrast it with the principles that function as applications of the categories. Likewise, while Burnham’s catalogue of the four “parts of sensibility†(pp.13-14), composed by grouping imagination (reproductive and productive) together with sensation and pure intuition, makes for an intriguing interpretation, especially as applied to the third Critique, he does not inform his (unknowing) student reader that the position he presents is far from being expressed so unambiguously in Kant’s text.        The main content of Burnham’s book is divided into five chapters that follow a more or less predictable – though sometimes rather idiosyncratic – order. Chapter 1 explains three of the four “moments†of beauty, but does so in a manner that wholly neglects Kant’s own understanding of their architectonic unity. Burnham discusses the second moment (universality) first, the first moment (disinterestedness) second, and the fourth moment (necessity) third! Moreover, he then devotes the entirety of Chapter 2 to a discussion of the third moment (purposiveness)..

In a recent study of 1 Corinthians 12:7 11, the Hong Kong Monthly Meeting explored how Quakers might interpret Paul’s presentation of nine “spiritual gifts” (or “manifestations” phanerosis in Greek] of God’s spirit). The nine gifts can be neatly grouped into three categories, using Matthew 7:7 (“Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you”) as a basis: the three “vocal” gifts (the spirit’s manifestation in response to our asking) are tongues, interpretation, and prophecy; the three “visual” gifts (the spirit’s manifestation in response to our seeking) are knowledge, wisdom, and discernment; and the three “victorious” gifts (the spirit’s manifestation in response to our knocking) are faith, miracles, and healing. In a series of three post Meeting discussions, we examined how Quakers might recover some of the meaningfulness of these classical distinctions, which have often been merely cast aside as a result of the overly literal way they are often interpreted in some Christian denominations. During the Meeting for Worship prior to the first discussion, one participant read the whole of Acts 2 as a voice ministry. During the discussion, we came to realize that this chapter, where the gift of speaking in tongues is first mentioned in the Bible, is a profound statement of our need to express the language of love . This is where the church begins. Speaking in tongues has the effect of universalizing God’s Word by opening it up to all cultures and peoples. The gift breaks through the boundaries of human language, making “that of God in each of us” a living reality. Sadly, some Christians use this gift as a divisive tool to isolate and alienate one “special” group of believers (those who “know how to speak in tongues”) from all others. To do this is to miss the point. It is no accident that Peter’s sermon in Acts 2 reminds us that “whoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” (verse 21): asking is the doorway to spiritual understanding. Asking for guidance from God is often difficult because of our pride, and so the gift of a language we do not own or even understand can have the beneficial effect of humbling us..

This is the second in a two part series of articles that attempt to clarify the nature and enduring relevance of Kant's concept of a priori knowledge. (For Part I, see below.) In this article I focus mainly on Saul Kripke's critique of Kant, in Naming and Necessity. I argue that Kripke draws attention to a genuine defect in Kant's epistemological framework, but that he used definitions of certain key terms that were quite different from Kant's definitions. When Kripke's definitions are replaced by Kant's definitions, Kripke's account of the status of naming turns out to be a defense of analytic aposteriority as a significant classification of knowledge that Kant neglected. I also introduce here a new way of understanding such epistemological labels, as defining the perspective adopted by the knowing subject in a given situation, rather than an objective characteristic of certain propositions as such.

When I was a teenager growing up in the U.S.A., there was a popular little book entitled How To Be A Christian With­out Being Religious . It defined Christianity in terms of a living relationship of faith, arguing that Christians need not adopt any specific thoughts or actions that could be called "religious". Although the book deeply influ­enced me at the time, I have since come to see that it has some serious flaws. While it is true that Christianity is, or at least ought to be, pri­marily a living, personal relationship with the God Man, Jesus Christ, this does not negate the importance of "being religious", but rather heightens its value and significance