Modern Philosophies of Human Nature

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Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 9789024733705
Total Pages : 282 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (337 download)

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Book Synopsis Modern Philosophies of Human Nature by : P. Langford

Download or read book Modern Philosophies of Human Nature written by P. Langford and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1986-07-31 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: General Argument My aim is to survey some of the most influential philosophical writers on human nature from the time that Augustine codified Christian belief to the present. During this period philosophical opinions about human nature underwent a transformation from the God-centered views of Augustine and the scholastics to the human-centered ideas of Nietzsche, Freud and Sartre. While one aim has simply been to provide a handy survey, I do have three polemical purposes. One is to oppose the notion that the modernism of more recent writers was produced by methodological innovations. According to both Freud and Sartre, as well as other key figures like Lacan and Heidegger, their views were the product of new methods of investigating human nature, namely those of psychoanalysis and the phenomenological reduction. Psych,oanalysis claimed to use the interpretation of both dreams and the relationship between analyst and patient to penetrate the unconscious. Phenomenology has claimed that trained philosophers are able to obtain a privilege;d view of consciousness by a special act of thought called the phenomenological reduction which enables them to view consciousness without preconceptions. On many issues my sympathies are with Nietzsche rather than with Freud or phenomenology. This is also the case regarding methodology. Nietzsche saw quite clearly that the possibility of popularising the views he himself held came from the decline of ChristianitY. My rejection of exclusive reliance upon the methodologies of psychoanalysis and phenomenology is based on two lines of argument.

Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference

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Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691176345
Total Pages : 309 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (911 download)

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Book Synopsis Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference by : Justin E. H. Smith

Download or read book Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference written by Justin E. H. Smith and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People have always been xenophobic, but an explicit philosophical and scientific view of human racial difference only began to emerge during the modern period. Why and how did this happen? Surveying a range of philosophical and natural-scientific texts, dating from the Spanish Renaissance to the German Enlightenment, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference charts the evolution of the modern concept of race and shows that natural philosophy, particularly efforts to taxonomize and to order nature, played a crucial role. Smith demonstrates how the denial of moral equality between Europeans and non-Europeans resulted from converging philosophical and scientific developments, including a declining belief in human nature's universality and the rise of biological classification. The racial typing of human beings grew from the need to understand humanity within an all-encompassing system of nature, alongside plants, minerals, primates, and other animals. While racial difference as seen through science did not arise in order to justify the enslavement of people, it became a rationalization and buttress for the practices of trans-Atlantic slavery. From the work of François Bernier to G. W. Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, and others, Smith delves into philosophy's part in the legacy and damages of modern racism. With a broad narrative stretching over two centuries, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference takes a critical historical look at how the racial categories that we divide ourselves into came into being.

On Human Nature

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Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691183031
Total Pages : 159 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (911 download)

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Book Synopsis On Human Nature by : Roger Scruton

Download or read book On Human Nature written by Roger Scruton and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brief, radical defense of human uniqueness from acclaimed philosopher Roger Scruton In this short book, acclaimed writer and philosopher Roger Scruton presents an original and radical defense of human uniqueness. Confronting the views of evolutionary psychologists, utilitarian moralists, and philosophical materialists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, Scruton argues that human beings cannot be understood simply as biological objects. We are not only human animals; we are also persons, in essential relation with other persons, and bound to them by obligations and rights. Scruton develops and defends his account of human nature by ranging widely across intellectual history, from Plato and Averroës to Darwin and Wittgenstein. The book begins with Kant’s suggestion that we are distinguished by our ability to say “I”—by our sense of ourselves as the centers of self-conscious reflection. This fact is manifested in our emotions, interests, and relations. It is the foundation of the moral sense, as well as of the aesthetic and religious conceptions through which we shape the human world and endow it with meaning. And it lies outside the scope of modern materialist philosophy, even though it is a natural and not a supernatural fact. Ultimately, Scruton offers a new way of understanding how self-consciousness affects the question of how we should live. The result is a rich view of human nature that challenges some of today’s most fashionable ideas about our species.

A Short History of Modern Philosophy

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134792093
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (347 download)

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Book Synopsis A Short History of Modern Philosophy by : Roger Scruton

Download or read book A Short History of Modern Philosophy written by Roger Scruton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-09-11 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Short History of Modern Philosophy is a lucid, challenging and up-to-date survey of the philosophers and philosophies from the founding father of modern philosophy, René Descartes, to the most important and famous philosopher of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Roger Scruton has been widely praised for his success in making the history of modern philosophy cogent and intelligible to anyone wishing to understand this fascinating subject. In this new edition, he has responded to the explosion of interest in the history of philosophy by substantially rewriting the book, taking account of recent debates and scholarship.

Modern Philosophies of Human Nature

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9789024723447
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (234 download)

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Book Synopsis Modern Philosophies of Human Nature by : Peter E. Langford

Download or read book Modern Philosophies of Human Nature written by Peter E. Langford and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Hume's Philosophy of Human Nature (Routledge Revivals)

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 131795078X
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (179 download)

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Book Synopsis Hume's Philosophy of Human Nature (Routledge Revivals) by : John Laird

Download or read book Hume's Philosophy of Human Nature (Routledge Revivals) written by John Laird and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-02 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essence of Hume’s eighteenth-century philosophy was that all the sciences were ‘dependent on the science of man’, and that the foundations of any such science need to rest on experience and observation. This title, first published in 1932, examines in detail how Hume interpreted ‘the science of man’ and how he applied his experimental methodology to humankind’s understanding, passions, social duties, economic activities, religious beliefs and secular history throughout his career. Particular attention is paid to the English, French and Latin sources that shaped Hume’s theories. This is a full and fascinating title, of particular relevance to students with an interest in the philosophy of Hume specifically, as well as the philosophy of human nature and the methodologies applied to its study more generally.

Arguing about Human Nature

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Publisher : Arguing About Philosophy
ISBN 13 : 9780415894401
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (944 download)

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Book Synopsis Arguing about Human Nature by : Stephen M. Downes

Download or read book Arguing about Human Nature written by Stephen M. Downes and published by Arguing About Philosophy. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This text is a collection of recent research in the philosophy of human nature. It includes research in Anthropology, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and other areas where there are fertile discussions about human nature"-- Provided by publisher.

Ten Theories of Human Nature

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Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Ten Theories of Human Nature by : Leslie Stevenson

Download or read book Ten Theories of Human Nature written by Leslie Stevenson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1998 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A superb introduction to the timeless struggle to understand human nature, this book compresses into a small volume the essence of such thinkers as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Jean Paul Sartre, B.F. Skinner, and Plato.

The Sublime in Modern Philosophy

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107276268
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (72 download)

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Book Synopsis The Sublime in Modern Philosophy by : Emily Brady

Download or read book The Sublime in Modern Philosophy written by Emily Brady and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-12 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature, Emily Brady takes a fresh look at the sublime and shows why it endures as a meaningful concept in contemporary philosophy. In a reassessment of historical approaches, the first part of the book identifies the scope and value of the sublime in eighteenth-century philosophy (with a focus on Kant), nineteenth-century philosophy and Romanticism, and early wilderness aesthetics. The second part examines the sublime's contemporary significance through its relationship to the arts; its position with respect to other aesthetic categories involving mixed or negative emotions, such as tragedy; and its place in environmental aesthetics and ethics. Far from being an outmoded concept, Brady argues that the sublime is a distinctive aesthetic category which reveals an important, if sometimes challenging, aesthetic-moral relationship with the natural world.

Experience Embodied

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190086130
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (9 download)

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Book Synopsis Experience Embodied by : Anik Waldow

Download or read book Experience Embodied written by Anik Waldow and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-02 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anik Waldow develops an account of embodied experience that extends from Descartes' conception of the human body as firmly integrated into the causal play of nature, to Kant's understanding of anthropology as a discipline that provides us with guidance in our lives as embodied creatures. Waldow defends the claim that during the early modern period, the debate on experience not only focused on questions arising from the subjectivity of our thinking and feeling, it also foregrounded the essentially embodied dimension of our lives as humans. By taking this approach, Waldow departs from the traditional epistemological route dominant in treatments of early-modern conceptions of experience. She makes the case that reflections on experience took center stage in a debate that was moral in nature, because it raised questions about the developmental potential of human beings and their capacity to instantiate the principles of self-determined agency in their lives. These questions emerged for many early modern authors since they understood that the fact that humans are embodied entailed that they are similarly responsive and causally-determined like other non-human animals. While this perspective made it possible to acknowledge that humans are part of the causal dynamics of nature, it called into question their ability to act in accordance with the principles of free, rational agency. Experience Embodied reveals how early modern authors responded to this challenge, offering a new perspective on the centrality of the concept of experience in comprehending the uniquely human place in nature.

What's Left of Human Nature?

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262549689
Total Pages : 335 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis What's Left of Human Nature? by : Maria Kronfeldner

Download or read book What's Left of Human Nature? written by Maria Kronfeldner and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against dehumanization, Darwinian, and developmentalist challenges. Human nature has always been a foundational issue for philosophy. What does it mean to have a human nature? Is the concept the relic of a bygone age? What is the use of such a concept? What are the epistemic and ontological commitments people make when they use the concept? In What's Left of Human Nature? Maria Kronfeldner offers a philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against contemporary criticism. In particular, she takes on challenges related to social misuse of the concept that dehumanizes those regarded as lacking human nature (the dehumanization challenge); the conflict between Darwinian thinking and essentialist concepts of human nature (the Darwinian challenge); and the consensus that evolution, heredity, and ontogenetic development result from nurture and nature. After answering each of these challenges, Kronfeldner presents a revisionist account of human nature that minimizes dehumanization and does not fall back on outdated biological ideas. Her account is post-essentialist because it eliminates the concept of an essence of being human; pluralist in that it argues that there are different things in the world that correspond to three different post-essentialist concepts of human nature; and interactive because it understands nature and nurture as interacting at the developmental, epigenetic, and evolutionary levels. On the basis of this, she introduces a dialectical concept of an ever-changing and “looping” human nature. Finally, noting the essentially contested character of the concept and the ambiguity and redundancy of the terminology, she wonders if we should simply eliminate the term “human nature” altogether.

Human Nature

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Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 1444351516
Total Pages : 344 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (443 download)

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Book Synopsis Human Nature by : P. M. S. Hacker

Download or read book Human Nature written by P. M. S. Hacker and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-07-22 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major new study by one of the most penetrating and persistent critics of philosophical and scientific orthodoxy, returns to Aristotle in order to examine the salient categories in terms of which we think about ourselves and our nature, and the distinctive forms of explanation we invoke to render ourselves intelligible to ourselves. The culmination of 40 years of thought on the philosophy of mind and the nature of the mankind Written by one of the world’s leading philosophers, the co-author of the monumental 4 volume Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations (Blackwell Publishing, 1980-2004) Uses broad categories, such as substance, causation, agency and power to examine how we think about ourselves and our nature Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of human nature are sketched and contrasted Individual chapters clarify and provide an historical overview of a specific concept, then link the concept to ideas contained in other chapters

Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521001892
Total Pages : 516 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (18 download)

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Book Synopsis Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature by : Robert Pasnau

Download or read book Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature written by Robert Pasnau and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major new study of Aquinas and his central project: the understanding of human nature.

Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy

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Publisher : SIU Press
ISBN 13 : 0809330806
Total Pages : 401 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy by : John Dewey

Download or read book Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy written by John Dewey and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2012-05-16 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 800x600Normal0falsefalsefalseEN-USX-NONEX-NONEMicrosoftInternetExplorer4 In 1947 America’s premier philosopher, educator, and public intellectual John Dewey purportedly lost his last manuscript on modern philosophy in the back of a taxicab. Now, sixty-five years later, Dewey’s fresh and unpretentious take on the history and theory of knowledge is finally available. Editor Phillip Deen has taken on the task of editing Dewey’s unfinished work, carefully compiling the fragments and multiple drafts of each chapter that he discovered in the folders of the Dewey Papers at the Special Collections Research Center at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He has used Dewey’s last known outline for the manuscript, aiming to create a finished product that faithfully represents Dewey’s original intent. An introduction and editor’s notes by Deen and a foreword by Larry A. Hickman, director of the Center for Dewey Studies, frame this previously lost work. In Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy, Dewey argues that modern philosophy is anything but; instead, it retains the baggage of outdated and misguided philosophical traditions and dualisms carried forward from Greek and medieval traditions. Drawing on cultural anthropology, Dewey moves past the philosophical themes of the past, instead proposing a functional model of humanity as emotional, inquiring, purposive organisms embedded in a natural and cultural environment. Dewey begins by tracing the problematic history of philosophy, demonstrating how, from the time of the Greeks to the Empiricists and Rationalists, the subject has been mired in the search for immutable absolutes outside human experience and has relied on dualisms between mind and body, theory and practice, and the material and the ideal, ultimately dividing humanity from nature. The result, he posits, is the epistemological problem of how it is possible to have knowledge at all. In the second half of the volume, Dewey roots philosophy in the conflicting beliefs and cultural tensions of the human condition, maintaining that these issues are much more pertinent to philosophy and knowledge than the sharp dichotomies of the past and abstract questions of the body and mind. Ultimately, Dewey argues that the mind is not separate from the world, criticizes the denigration of practice in the name of theory, addresses the dualism between matter and ideals, and questions why the human and the natural were ever separated in philosophy. The result is a deeper understanding of the relationship among the scientific, the moral, and the aesthetic. More than just historically significant in its rediscovery, Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy provides an intriguing critique of the history of modern thought and a positive account of John Dewey’s naturalized theory of knowing. This volume marks a significant contribution to the history of American thought and finally resolves one of the mysteries of pragmatic philosophy.

New Philosophy of Human Nature

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Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 0252092317
Total Pages : 355 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (52 download)

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Book Synopsis New Philosophy of Human Nature by : Oliva Sabuco

Download or read book New Philosophy of Human Nature written by Oliva Sabuco and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a critical edition of the 1587 treatise by Oliva Sabuco, New Philosophy of Human Nature, written during the Spanish Inquisition. Puzzled by medicine’s abject failure to find a cure for the plague, Sabuco developed a new theory of human nature as the foundation for her remarkably modern holistic philosophy of medicine. Fifty years before Descartes, Sabuco posited a dualism that accounted for mind/body interaction. She was first among the moderns to argue that the brain--not the heart--controls the body. Her account also anticipates the role of cerebrospinal fluid, the relationship between mental and physical health, and the absorption of nutrients through digestion. This extensively annotated translation features an ample introduction demonstrating the work’s importance to the history of science, philosophy of medicine, and women’s studies.

Philosophy of Nature

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Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 0745694764
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (456 download)

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Book Synopsis Philosophy of Nature by : Paul K. Feyerabend

Download or read book Philosophy of Nature written by Paul K. Feyerabend and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-09-26 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosopher, physicist, and anarchist Paul Feyerabend was one of the most unconventional scholars of his time. His book Against Method has become a modern classic. Yet it is not well known that Feyerabend spent many years working on a philosophy of nature that was intended to comprise three volumes covering the period from the earliest traces of stone age cave paintings to the atomic physics of the 20th century – a project that, as he conveyed in a letter to Imre Lakatos, almost drove him nuts: “Damn the ,Naturphilosophie.” The book’s manuscript was long believed to have been lost. Recently, however, a typescript constituting the first volume of the project was unexpectedly discovered at the University of Konstanz. In this volume Feyerabend explores the significance of myths for the early period of natural philosophy, as well as the transition from Homer’s “aggregate universe” to Parmenides’ uniform ontology. He focuses on the rise of rationalism in Greek antiquity, which he considers a disastrous development, and the associated separation of man from nature. Thus Feyerabend explores the prehistory of science in his familiar polemical and extraordinarily learned manner. The volume contains numerous pictures and drawings by Feyerabend himself. It also contains hitherto unpublished biographical material that will help to round up our overall image of one of the most influential radical philosophers of the twentieth century.

The Future of Human Nature

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Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 074569411X
Total Pages : 136 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (456 download)

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Book Synopsis The Future of Human Nature by : Jürgen Habermas

Download or read book The Future of Human Nature written by Jürgen Habermas and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-10-15 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent developments in biotechnology and genetic research are raising complex ethical questions concerning the legitimate scope and limits of genetic intervention. As we begin to contemplate the possibility of intervening in the human genome to prevent diseases, we cannot help but feel that the human species might soon be able to take its biological evolution in its own hands. ‘Playing God’ is the metaphor commonly used for this self-transformation of the species, which, it seems, might soon be within our grasp. In this important new book, Jürgen Habermas – the most influential philosopher and social thinker in Germany today – takes up the question of genetic engineering and its ethical implications and subjects it to careful philosophical scrutiny. His analysis is guided by the view that genetic manipulation is bound up with the identity and self-understanding of the species. We cannot rule out the possibility that knowledge of one’s own hereditary factors may prove to be restrictive for the choice of an individual’s way of life and may undermine the symmetrical relations between free and equal human beings. In the concluding chapter – which was delivered as a lecture on receiving the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade for 2001 – Habermas broadens the discussion to examine the tension between science and religion in the modern world, a tension which exploded, with such tragic violence, on September 11th.