A distinguished group of scholars met at the State University of New York at Buffalo to share their thoughts on the nature of humans as rational animals. The result is this compelling collection of essays and commentaries titled "Naturalism and Rationality". We are affected by all sorts of stimuli that influence our beliefs and actions. How does our understanding of what it means to be rational affect our interpretation of the world around us? What problems arise as a result of our attempts to analyse rationality within the scope of naturalism? These essays offer fascinating discussion about the nature and extent of rationality - its content, focus, and the intrinsic guidelines for using the term "rational" when describing persons or actions.

Although a succession of fashions swept the American philosophical scene, C. J. Ducasse was throughout his long career an effective practitioner of analytic philosophy in the classic tradition. As he explained in 1924 " i]t is only with truths about such questions as the meaning of the term 'true', or 'real', or 'good', and the like . . . that philosophy is concerned. " Such truths are to be discovered inductively by comparing and analyzing concrete cases of the admittedly proper u/le . . . The pressing problems of philosophy are thus in my view primarily problems of def'mition, and moreover, problems of framing def'mitions which must be in formal terms, under penalty of not being otherwise understandable by or acceptable to one or another philosophical school, since the formal elements of thought and tp. ey only are common to all schools. These def'mitions, of course are not to be arbitrary; their relation to the facts of admittedly meaningful linguistic usage is the same as exists between any scientific hypothesis and the facts which it attempts to 1 construe.

"Some Problems of Philosophy," William James's last book, was published after his death in 1910. For years he had talked of rounding out his philosophical work with a treatise on metaphysics. Characteristically, he chose to do so in the form of an introduction to the problems of philosophy, because writing for beginners would force him to be nontechnical and readable. The result is that, although this is James's most systematic and abstract work, it has all the lucidity of his other, more popular writings. Step by step the reader is introduced, through analysis of the fundamental problems of Being, the relation of thoughts to things, novelty, causation, and the Infinite, to the original philosophical synthesis that James called radical empiricism.

This is the seventh volume to be published in The Works of William James, an authoritative edition sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies.

Before Margaret Mead, even before Ruth Benedict, it was Elsie Clews Parsons who paved the way as the first woman president of the American Anthropological Association. Born into a prominent New York family in 1874, Parsons showed early determination to be free of social constraints. Everything she did until her death in 1941 stemmed from her concern for the ways in which expression of personality is affected by social conventions. Her proposal of "trial marriage" in 1906 and even her pacifism in World War I (in association with Randolph Bourne) derived from that concern.Parson's personality was fascinating in its tensions and complexity. She was a feminist who admitted to prejudice against her own sex and seldom enjoyed the companionship of other women. She was devoted to her politically prominent husband from whom she never concealed her relationships with other men. However, her husband's companionship with another woman tormented her. Her publications ranged from iconoclastic propaganda to technical science. She loved rugged adventure in the wild, yet thrived on scholarly work. Though her convictions were passionately held, her voice was never raised.