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Notizen: Miniaturized TE011 resonators using cylinders of commercial high dielectric constant materials yield up to 30×ESR sensitivity improvements for small samples.

Notizen: In asking me to talk about Hegel in your series on synoptic philosophies, I take it that you were anxious to discover whether there are any positive merits in Hegel's ideas. I need hardly remind you that such an approach to this particular philosopher is not a very common one in this country to-day. Indeed, of all those who have been thought, at one time or another, to have produced ideas of lasting philosophical importance, Hegel is at present easily the least in repute. Nor is it the case with him as with certain other writers (Spinoza, for instance, or some of the Scholastics) that his ideas are uninteresting or unintelligible to the present generation but are thought all the same to be likely to have an appeal and an importance at some future date when the general intellectual climate has changed; the common verdict on him is far less friendly than that. If opinions on the subject were canvassed among students of philosophy in Great Pritain to-day, there can be little doubt that the majority would write Hegel off as the supreme example of a philosopher who tried to construct an elaborate metaphysical system in the most blatantly a priori manner, and who succeeded in getting himself taken seriously only because of his adroitness in verbal tricks.

Notizen: In this paper I wish to discuss a problem which, though it has not in the recent past attracted the attention of many philosophers, nevertheless, in my opinion, belongs quite clearly to that branch of the subject which should rightly be called “philosophy of history”: the problem, namely, of history's intelligibility. Two main questions can be asked about this which it is important that philosophers should answer. The first is that of whether history is intelligible in the sense that we can find intelligible connections bètween all or any of its parts. The significance of this question is apparent enough; for has not one of the philosopher's most pressing problems since Hume's time been that of whether any such connections are traceable in the world of fact? It is true that almost every theory on this subject has been put forward after a consideration of the sphere of physical nature only; but because this procedure has been universally followed, it is not therefore to be accepted as right. For history too offers us facts, and it is at least possible that these differ in important ways from those to be met with in nature, with the result that we can discover other sorts of connection between them than those which the physical sciences recognize. The possibility would seem to be worth investigation, and it is with it that I shall be concerned in the first part of my paper. In the other half I deal with the second main question about historical intelligibility. Supposing that we can (as I argue we can) find some cases of historical events being intrinsically, i.e. intelligibly related, we can go on to ask whether history is intelligible in a more ultimate sense. Is history, we can now inquire, a thing which is essentially rational, or is the rationality we can find in it of a merely superficial character? To put the problem somewhat more fully, is the historian able to do more than see intrinsic connections between the events (or some of the events) which he investigates: can he go further and understand the course of history as a whole, so that he is able to say, in the popular phrases, that history “makes sense,” is “meaningful” and “has rhyme and reason” in it? It seems to me that this is a matter which certainly ought to be discussed by philosophers, if only for the assertion of history's rationality which some philosophers have made.