Mark Heller

Romania in Transition. Edited by Lavinia Stan xviii + 218 pp. £39.50 cloth. Early Greek Political Thought from Homer to the Sophists. Edited by Michael Gagarin and Paul Woodruff lvi + 324 pp. $59.95/£40.00 cloth, $18.95/£14.95 paper. Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes. Edited by Natalie Zemon Davis and Arlette Farge. Vol. 3 of A History of Women in the West, general editors, Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot x + 595 pp. $29.95 cloth, $16.95 paper. The Cross and the Pear Tree: A Sephardic Journey. By Victor Perera 282 pp. n.p.g. Open the Social Sciences. Edited by Immanuel Wallerstein et al. Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences 105 pp. £8.95 paper, £25.00 cloth. Music & Culture in Eighteenth‐Century Europe: A Source Book. By Enrico Fubini, translated by Wolfgang Freis, Lisa Gasbarrone, Michael Louis Leone, translation edited by Bonnie J. Blackburn x + 421 pp. £43.95, $63.25 cloth £16.75/$24.25 paper. La Modernité. By Alexis Nouss 128 pp. n.p.g. Florentine Drama for Convent and Festival. Seven Sacred Plays. By Antonia Pulci, annotated and translated by James Wyatt Cook, xxx + 281 pp. $33.00 cloth/$15.00 paper. The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500–1800. By J. G. A. Pocock, Gordon J. Schochet, and Lois G. Schwoerer x + 373 pp. £40.00/$59.95 cloth, £14.95 paper. Heidegger and French Philosophy: Humanism, Antihumanism and Being. By Tom Rockmore xx + 250 pp. £40.00 cloth, £14.99 paper. One King, One Faith: The Parlement of Paris and the Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth Century. By Nancy Lyman Roelker xiii + 543 pp. $65.00/£50.00 cloth. The Rabin Memoirs. By Yitzhak Rabin, with an afterword by Yoram Peri 435 pp. $40.00 cloth, $16.95 paper. On Voluntary Servitude. False Consciousness and the Theory of Ideology. By Michael Rosen xi + 289 pp. $35.00 cloth. Dante: Monarchy. Edited and translated by Prue Shaw xlviii + 121 pp. £30.00/$39.95 cloth, £10.95/$14.95 paper. Liberalism after Communism. By Jerzy Szacki, translated by Chester P. Kistel VII + 216 pp. £35.00 cloth, £12.99 paper. Oscar Wilde: Myths, Miracles, and Imitations. By John Stokes xiv + 216 pp. £30.00/$49.95 cloth. Volksgeist as Method and Ethic. Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition. History of Anthropology Series. Edited by George W. Stocking, Jr. 349 pp. £25.00 doth. The Life of a Painter. By Gino Severini, translated by Jennifer Franchina 310 pp. n.p.g. James Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus's Nightmare. By Robert Spoo xii + 195 pp. Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth‐Century England. By Dennis Todd 339 + xvii pp. £41.50 doth/£14.25 paper. Nationalism in Europe, 1815 to the Present: A Reader. Edited by Stuart Woolf vi + 215 pp. £11.99 paper. In Defense of Decadent Europe. By Raymond Aron, translated by Stephen Cox, with a new introduction by Daniel J. Mahoney and Brian C. Anderson $24.95 paper. Why Movements Succeed or Fail: Opportunity, Culture, and the Struggle for Woman Suffrage.. By Lee Ann Banaszak xiii + 291 pp. $49.50/£40.00 cloth, $19.95/£15.95 paper. Conflicting Visions of Reform: German Lay Propaganda Pamphlets, 1519–1530. By Miriam Usher Chrisman. Studies in German Histories xiii + 208 pp. $60.00 cloth. Nicholas of Cusa: The Catholic Concordance. Edited by Paul. E. Sigmund xlvii + 326 pp. £16.95/$24.95 paper. Towards a New Europe: Stops and Starts in Regional Integration. Edited by Gerald Schneider, Patricia A. Weitsman, and Thomas Bernauer xiv + 224 pp. n.p.g. Irish Politics Today. 3rd edition. By Neil Collins and Terry Cradden x + 165 pp. £35.00 doth/ £9.99 paper. Paradoxes of Peace. By Alice Holmes Cooper 331 pp. $52.50 cloth. Modernism and Revolution: Russian Literature in Transition. By Victor Erlich $45.00 cloth. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. By Bruce Fink xvii + 219 pp. $35.00 cloth/$ 15.95 paper. The European Economy Between the Wars. By Charles H. Feinstein, Peter Temin and Gianni Toniolo xi + 233 pp. £14.99 paper. Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life. By Sheldon Garon xvii + 311 pp. $24.95/£19.95 cloth. Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England. By Richard Helgerson xi + 350 pp. £12.75/$18.25 paper. The Pilgrimage of Grace: A Study of the Rebel Armies of October 1536. By Michael Bush xviii + 436 pp., £55.00 cloth. A Concise Historical Atlas of Eastern Europe. By Dennis P. Hupchick and Harold E. Cox 120 pp. $45.95 cloth, $17.95 paper. Mass Media and Media Policy in Western Europe. By Peter J. Humphreys ix + 349 pp. £45.00 cloth, £17.99 paper. Spies Without Cloaks: The KGB's Successors. By Amy Knight xiii + 318 pp. $24.95/£16.95 cloth. The Origins of the State in Italy, 1300–1600. Edited by Julius Kirshner 212 pp. $27.95 cloth, $15.95 paper. Aristocracy, Antiquity & History: Classicism in Political Thought. By Andreas A. M. Kinneging. xii + 348 pp. n.p.g. The Great Powers, Imperialism, and the German Problem, 1865–1925. By John Lowe x + 257 pp. £10.99 paper. Environment and the Nation State: The Netherlands, the European Union and Acid Rain. Issues in Environmental Politics. By Duncan Liefferink xiv + 225 pp. £40.00 cloth. Twentieth‐Century Irish Drama: Mirror up to Nation. By Christopher Murray x + 278 pp. £35.00 cloth, £12.99 paper. To the Other Shore: The Russian Jewish Intellectuals Who Came to America. By Steven Cassedy, xxiii + 197 pp. $29.95/£25.00 cloth. The Politics of Punishment: Prison Reform in Russia 1863–1917. By Bruce F. Adams viii + 237 pp. $32.00 cloth. The East in the West. By Jack Goody x + 295 pp. £37.50/$54.95 cloth, £13.95/$18.95 paper. Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought from David Hume to the Present. Edited by Jerry Z. Muller xvi + 450 pp. n.p.g. Enlightenment and Religion. Rational Dissent in Eighteenth‐Century Britain. Edited by Knud Haakonssen, Ideas in Context, xi + 348 pp. £40.00/ $59.95 cloth. Reassessing Anglo‐Saxon England. By Eric John xii + 204 pp. £35.00 cloth/£12.99 paper. On or About December 1910: Early Bloomsbury and its Intimate World. By Peter Stansky x + 289 pp. $27.95 cloth.

In Eli Hirsch’s clever and careful Dividing Reality he asks us to consider several strange languages. For example, in the Gricular language there is no word that applies to all and only green things and none that applies to all and only circular things, but there are the three words “gricular,” which applies to anything that is either green or circular, “grincular,” which applies to anything that is either green or not circular, and “ngricular,” which applies to anything that is either circular or not green. Griculese is but one of the strange languages Hirsch explores, but they are all alike in having the same descriptive content as English—anything that can be said in English can be said in the strange languages, and vice versa. For instance, to say that something is green, we can say “it is both gricular and grincular.” Our strong intuition is that these languages are strange—irrational or worse. The challenge is to ground this intuition in some particular feature of the language that makes it defective. The problem is that there seems no good response to this challenge. Hirsch examines many proposals, and rejects every one. Thus he finds himself reaching a conclusion even he finds it difficult to accept. The disturbing conclusion, division relativism by title, is that our strong intuition is misguided—the “strange” languages are just as reasonable as English.

Henry Mehlberg, an eminent philosopher educated in the best traditions of Polish logic, till his death professor at the University of Chicago, was for a long time interested in an interdisciplinary study of time, especially in its physical and philosophical aspects. "Mehlberg's command of the most recent relevant developments in theoretical physics was outstanding even within the relatively small circle of philosophers working in the foundations of physics, most of whom are better known than he". These are some of the reasons that compel us to go through two volumes of Mehlberg's studies with a special interest.

The best reason to believe in temporal parts is to avoid commitment to coincidence—roughly, two objects occupying exactly the same space at exactly the same time. Most anti-coincidence arguments for temporal parts are fission arguments. Gaining some notice, however, are vagueness arguments. One goal of this paper is to clarify the way a temporal-parts ontology avoids coincidence, and another is to clarify the vagueness argument, highlighting the fact that it too is an anti-coincidence argument. The temporal-parts alternative to coincidence has been challenged on the grounds that it leads to a kind of coincidence of its own. When something that is a temporal part of more than one person thinks about its future self, it must be thinking about a multitude of people. Thus, there must be many people thinking many thoughts in that region occupied by the thinking part. The third goal of this paper is debunking this attack on temporal parts.

This text is devoted to arguing for the thesis that our standard ontology of physical objects is not correct, and to offering a replacement for that ontology. None of the things that we normally take to exist really do exist. There are no animals, vegetables, or minerals. Nothing that I say against the specific physical objects of our standard ontology counts against the general claim that there are physical objects. In fact, I propose an ontology of physical objects that does not suffer from the defects of our standard ontology or from any other defect. What exist, according to the ontology that I propose, are four dimensional hunks of matter, and every filled region of spacetime is exactly filled by one such object. ;In chapter 1, I explain this proposed ontology of four dimensional hunks of matter, give some reason for preferring four dimensional objects over three dimensional ones, and answer some objections to such an ontology. In chapter 2 the ontology is developed in more depth, paying special attention to those features of an object that seem to be most tied to its identity--its persistence conditions and essential properties. It turns out that four dimensional hunks have their spatiotemporal boundaries essentially. I also begin my attack on the standard ontology, offering some reason to believe that they do not really exist, or at least that they do not have the persistence conditions and essential properties that we typically attribute to them. In chapter 3 I present my strongest argument against our standard ontology--a version of the Sorites paradox. I discuss all the possible ways of handling vagueness and show that the only acceptable one is the denial of our standard ontology. In chapter 4 I show that rejecting the standard ontology is not as extreme as it might first seem since another ontology can be offered in its place and a paraphrase can be set up, thereby showing that even our most important and effective utterances need not be committed to the standard ontology. This other ontology is that of four dimensional hunks of matter

This provocative book attempts to resolve traditional problems of identity over time. It seeks to answer such questions as 'How is it that an object can survive change?' and 'How much change can an object undergo without being destroyed'? To answer these questions Professor Heller presents a theory about the nature of physical objects and about the relationship between our language and the physical world. According to his theory, the only actually existing physical entities are what the author calls 'hunks', four-dimensional objects extending across time and space. This is a major contribution to ontological debate and will be essential reading for all philosophers concerned with metaphysics.

René Descartes, one of the dominant figures in the history of philosophy, has been accused of one of the most obvious mistakes in the history of philosophy — the so-called cartesian circle. It is my goal in this paper to arrive at an understanding of Descartes's work that attributes to him a theory that should be of philosophical interest to contemporary epistemologists, is consistent with, and suggested by, the actual text, and avoids the circle.I begin with a brief explanation of the supposed circle. In his search for absolute certainty Descartes requires that in order for a proposition to be an instance of knowledge it must be indubitable for the knower, and in order for it to be indubitable for the knower she must be able to eliminate any possibility of the belief's being false. It is to provide a means to satisfy this requirement that Descartes proposes the principle whatever is clearly and distinctly perceived cannot be false.And it seems that Descartes's defense of CD traps him in the circle.