Albert approaches critical rationalism as an alternative to other philosophical standpoints dominant in Germany: the conceptions of the Frankfurt School, hermeneutical thinking as represented by Gadamer, analytic philosophy, and logical empiricism. The author's purpose is to find a way out of the foundationalism of classical philosophy without falling back on the skeptical views so prevalent in today's philosophical thinking. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from (...) the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

This article explores emotions and their relationship to ‘somatic responses’, i.e., one’s automatic responses to sensations of pain, cold, warmth, sudden intensity. To this end, it undertakes a Husserlian phenomenological analysis of the first-hand experience of eight basic emotions, briefly exploring their essential aspects: their holistic nature, their identifying dynamic transformation of the lived body, their two-layered intentionality, their involuntary initiation and voluntary espousal. The fact that the involuntary tensional shifts initiating emotions are irreplicatable voluntarily, is taken to show that (...) all emotions have an innate core, a conclusion corroborated by their strong similarities to somatic responses in dynamics, hedonic tone, and topology. The fact that emotions may be culturally reworked, is shown to be explicable in terms of their complex nature: their dependence on belief, their voluntary espousal, and their ready social transmittability. Finally, it is argued that emotions may plausibly be deemed the evolutionary descendants of somatic responses. (shrink)

Most models of lexical access assume that bilingual speakers activate their two languages even when they are in a context in which only one language is used. A critical piece of evidence used to support this notion is the observation that a given word automatically activates its translation equivalent in the other language. Here, we argue that these findings are compatible with a different account, in which bilinguals “carry over” the structure of their native language to the non-native language during (...) learning, and where there is no activation of translation equivalents. To demonstrate this, we describe a model in which language learning involves mapping native language phonological relationships to the non-native language, and we show how it can explain the results attributed to automatic activation of translation equivalents. (shrink)

In this contribution the socalled Meno-Problem will be discussed. With respect to theories the problem is the following question: Why is it epistemologically more valuable to know a true theory than to simply believe it? A classical answer in reabilist accounts to this problem refers to the value of the operation which is used for gathering knowledge. But there is a gap in the argumentation as far as one is not allowed to derive from this assumption the conclusion that also (...) the result of the operation is valuable. We are going to show a difference between true theories which are just believed and theories which are also known to be true. This difference seems to allow one to close the mentioned gap. (shrink)

This report is about ethical thinking in the field of health and health care. But it is no abstract philosophical tract. It is designed to be of practical help to those struggling with the complex questions of allocating resources in health care and to encourage a wider involvement at all levels in health debates. The questions it raises stimulate new thinking about today's institutional structures. As we proceeded with our work, we became aware that it is easier to state problems (...) than to solve them. However, we were also aware of the opposite danger of oversimplification implicit in the view that there was a moral calculus to which decisionmakers could turn when they were confronted by an ethical problem in the allocation of resources, and which would yield mechanical solutions to human problems. (shrink)

The transfiguration reminds us that Christian worship is on the way to the cross. . . . We rise from it to resume the way to the cross in a world full of suffering. But we have seen who Jesus really is and he has shown us that we do not need to be afraid.

The President's Council on Bioethics has recently released a report supportive of the continued use of brain death as a criterion for human death. The Council's conclusions were based on a conception of life that stressed external work as the fundamental marker of organismic life. With respect to human life, it is spontaneous respiration in particular that indicates an ability to interact with the external environment, and so indicates the presence of life. Conversely, irreversible apnoea marks an inability to carry (...) out the necessary work of life, an inability which the Council considers an indicator of death. This conception has been conceived to circumvent criticisms of the previous model of loss of somatic integration, a model the Council admits that, in the presence of evidence of continuing functional integration in brain dead patients, was looking less than convincing. Nevertheless, by focusing on external work and ignoring the more essential work of integrative unity, the Council's conception of the nature of life is untenable, and of no assistance in supporting a relation of equivalence between the concepts of brain death and death. Consequently, the Council's conclusions do little to advance the definition of death debate, a potentially intractable debate that may necessitate the investigation of alternate ethical justifications for organ harvesting. (shrink)

The concept of community of persons, which focuses on both persons and the whole, helps understand solidarity. The latter is based on the social nature of persons. Community of persons and solidarity seems to be able to move away from the individualist perspective or the individualism-collectivism dichotomy. Using autopraxeography in a pragmatic constructivism epistemological paradigm, this article aims to explore how organizations can develop solidarity in a workplace. The experience presented takes place in a bank. It shows that communities of (...) persons with employees and customers are both ethical and financially efficient. These communities build a dialogue between persons and organizations. Nevertheless, it is impossible to force solidarity because it could generate derision that is contrary to the wished goal. Finally, while this model is based on solidarity, it focuses solely on internal solidarity. (shrink)

This paper develops the pragmatic “atheoreticism” of Quine and Rorty. A position I dub “postpragmatism”—paralleling the post phases of modernism and humanism—my purpose here is to bring to a culmination what Quine and Rorty started decades before. By doing so, I argue, it becomes possible for Quine, and more so Rorty, to avoid the most common critiques of their atheoretic form of pragmatism. Chief among them, that it is mired in self-contradiction. Rather than rely upon theory to justify atheoreticism—the very (...) stuff of their self-contradiction—I rely instead upon Rorty’s own insouciance, syncretism, and eclecticism to shift the ground of debate from concern with what is justified to concern with what is interesting. (shrink)

Contemporary discussions of gender and nature are likely to suffer from two vexations, the conflict of constructivism and naturalism and the conflict ofnativism and rationalism. As a solution to the first I propose postmodern realism and as a remedy for the second a notion of careful scholarship. With the solutions laid out, I will illustrate and test them by discussing friendship and fidelity within the scope of gender and nature.

The figure of Alexander inevitably dominates the history of his reign. Our extant sources are centrally focussed upon the king himself. Accordingly it is his own military actions which receive the fullest documentation. Appointments to satrapies and satrapal armies are carefully noted because he made them, but the achievements of the appointees are passed over in silence. The great victories of Antigonus which secured Asia Minor in 323 BC are only known from two casual references in Curtius Rufus, and in (...) general all the multifarious activities in the empire disappear from recorded history except in so far as they impinge upon court life in the shape of reports to Alexander and administrative decisions made by him. Moreover, the sources we possess originate either from high officers of Alexander's court, such as Ptolemy and Nearchus, or from Greek historians like Callisthenes and Cleitarchus, whose aims were literary or propagandist and whose interests were firmly anchored in court life. Inevitably Alexander bestrides that narrow world like a colossus and monopolises the historical picture. But even the figure of Alexander is far from fully fleshed. No contemporary history survives, and for continuous narratives of the reign we are dependent upon late derivative writers who saw Alexander through the filter of centuries of rhetoric and philosophy. The king had long been a stock example of many contradictory traits; he was at once the conqueror and the civiliser, the tyrant and the enlightened king. Cicero and Seneca saw him as the type of unbridled license, Arrian as the paradigm of moderation. The result is that the sources present a series of irreconcilable caricatures of Alexander but no uniform or coherent picture. (shrink)

This article provides an account of a body of sociological studies recently published which claim to adopt a pragmatist approach. It discusses the validity of this claim through highlighting the similarity between some principles of pragmatism and of sociology (the primacy of practice, the decisive nature of context, the importance of uncertainty, the temporality of action, the sociality of normativity). It eventually argues that a sociological pragmatist-oriented approach should endorse a radically fallibilist perspective and take into account the openness and (...) contingency of inquiry as topics to be empirically investigated as essential aspects of action in common. This would entail paying particular attention to the ingenious ways in which three features of action in common are overcome in practical activities: indeterminacy (descriptions are never complete and individuals have constantly to make sense by themselves of the unavoidable shortcomings of communication); contextuality (renouncing any kind of essentialism and adhering to Wittgenstein’s ordinary grammar perspective); and emergence (apprehending action in common from the point of view of its actual and sequential accomplishment). (shrink)