The formulation and implementation of policies addressing the need to adapt to climate change can be difficult due to the long-term, uncertain nature of localised climate change impacts and associated vulnerabilities. Difficulties are intensified because policy interventions can involve high costs, foregone opportunity and changes to people's way of life. Factors such as these can spur an uncritical, or reflexive, negativity regarding efforts to address the projected impacts of climate change. Such reflexive negativity is often trivialised in pejorative terms, such (...) as ‘Nimbyism’. However, stakeholder reluctance to accept the need for adaptation planning may be strongly influenced by self-perceptions that are resistant to change. People's sense of self and sense of place may contribute to an ‘imaginative intangibility’ with respect to climate adaptation, blocking thoughtful reflection and deliberation regarding alternative approaches and providing rationales for cheating the system once implemented. If acknowledged and addressed in a sensitive manner, it may be possible to manage these self-perceptions to elevate public discourse about climate change and help create situationally appropriate adaptation policy regimes. (shrink)

Unreasonable expectations about the nature and character of scientific knowledge support the widespread political assumption that predictive scientific assessments are a necessary precursor to environmental decision making. All too often, the practical outcome of this assumption is that scientific uncertainty becomes a ready-made dodge for what is in reality just a difficult political decision. Interdisciplinary assessments necessary to address complex environmental policy issues invariably result in findings that are inherently contestable, especially when applied in the unrestrained realm of partisan politics. (...) In this article, the authors argue that predictive scientific assessments are inherently limited in the extent to which they can guide policy development and that rigorous scientific assessments can be much more valuable in the role of ex post policy evaluation than they can in the context of ex ante policy formulation. (shrink)

This article examines the study of mind and behavior at the University of Chicago through the career of Charles Judson Herrick, neuroanatomist and psychobiologist. Herrick’s views on human nature, education, and social control are discussed in the context of the progressive evolutionism pervading the university in the early twentieth century. The religious background of Herrick’s work is important to understanding the service ethos that permeated his science, which was also the basis of his interest in pragmatism (...) and of his opposition to certain tenets of behaviorism. Herrick was dedicated to interdisciplinary collaboration, which he thought crucial to the development of psychobiology. His relationship with Karl S. Lashley in the 1920s is analyzed. Their disagreements about the relationship between science and humanism, as revealed in their views on behaviorism, did not prevent them from working together to articulate a holistic theory of brain function and learning. (shrink)

Familiarity with Charles Darwin's treatise on evolution is essential to every well-educated individual. One of the most important books ever published--and a continuing source of controversy, a century and a half later--this classic of science is reproduced in a facsimile of the critically acclaimed first edition.

Charles Taylor has been one of the most original and influential figures in contemporary philosophy: his 'philosophical anthropology' spans an unusually wide range of theoretical interests and draws creatively on both Anglo-American and Continental traditions in philosophy. A selection of his published papers is presented here in two volumes, structured to indicate the direction and essential unity of the work. He starts from a polemical concern with behaviourism and other reductionist theories (particularly in psychology and the philosophy of language) (...) which aim to model the study of man on the natural sciences. This leads to a general critique of naturalism, its historical development and its importance for modern culture and consciousness; and that in turn points, forward to a positive account of human agency and the self, the constitutive role of language and value, and the scope of practical reason. The volumes jointly present some two decades of work on these fundamental themes, and convey strongly the tenacity, verve and versatility of the author in grappling with them. They will interest a very wide range of philosophers and students of the human sciences. (shrink)

"Charles Taylor presents a fundamental challenge to neoliberal apologists for the new world order--but not only to them.

Charles Taylor has been one of the most original and influential figures in contemporary philosophy: his 'philosophical anthropology' spans an unusually wide range of theoretical interests and draws creatively on both Anglo-American and Continental traditions in philosophy. A selection of his published papers is presented here in two volumes, structured to indicate the direction and essential unity of the work. He starts from a polemical concern with behaviourism and other reductionist theories (particularly in psychology and the philosophy of language) (...) which aim to model the study of man on the natural sciences. This leads to a general critique of naturalism, its historical development and its importance for modern culture and consciousness; and that in turn points, forward to a positive account of human agency and the self, the constitutive role of language and value, and the scope of practical reason. The volumes jointly present some two decades of work on these fundamental themes, and convey strongly the tenacity, verve and versatility of the author in grappling with them. They will interest a very wide range of philosophers and students of the human sciences. (shrink)

Charles Mills makes visible in the world of mainstream philosophy some of the crucial issues of the black experience.

While the accumulation and increased circulation of genomic data have captured much attention over the past decade, privacy risks raised by the diversification and integration of omics have been la...

Vitalism, from its early modern to its Enlightenment forms (from Glisson and Willis to La Caze and Barthez), is notoriously opposed to intervention into the living sphere. Experiment, quantification, measurement are all ‘vivisectionist’, morally suspect and worse, they alter and warp the ‘life’ of the subject. They are good for studying corpses, not living individuals. This much is well known, and it has disqualified vitalist medicine from having a place in standard histories of medicine, until recent, post-Foucauldian maneuvers have sought (...) to change the situation (but for unrelated, contextualist reasons). What is perhaps more suprising is that if we consider the emergence of medical ‘theory’ as a whole, from Harvey through to Locke and Sydenham, is the presence of a sustained anti-experimentalist line of argument, and this from the ‘empiricist’ (not Cartesian or Boerhaavian rationalist) side. It would seem then that ‘empiricks’, medical empiricists and other protagonists of an ‘embodied empiricism’ are not Boylean experimentalists who seek to map out Nature in its transparency, but deliberately archaic, Hippocratic observers of living bodies. (shrink)

Embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended theorists do not typically focus on the ontological frameworks in which they develop their theories. One exception is 4E theories that embrace New Mechanism. In this paper, we endorse the New Mechanist’s general turn to ontology, but argue that their ontology is not the best on the market for 4E theories. Instead, we advocate for a different ontology: causal powers realism. Causal powers realism posits that psychological manifestations are the product of mental powers, and that (...) mental powers are empirically-discoverable features of individuals that account for the causal work those individuals do. We contend that causal powers realism provides a unifying framework for the central commitments of 4E theories, as well as additional resources for theorizing in a 4E framework. And while New Mechanism offers some of these resources as well, we argue that causal powers realism is ultimately the better of the two. (shrink)

Timothy Murphy has done those of us in the field of bioethics a great service by being forthright about how irreligious centers of power work against theology and theologians. This has opened the door to direct and honest conversation about some facts that were previously known but rarely discussed publicly. Now, eight years after Murphy’s important article appeared in the American Journal of Bioethics, there is room to engage the facts and arguments surrounding the role for theology in the field. (...) It is important, first of all, to agree that if theology is to be excluded while other normative traditions included this must be defended on the basis of a coherent set of defensible claims, not merely raw assertions and power plays. Once the field comes to terms with the fact that no coherent set of defensible claims exist which can justify excluding theology from the field, this will create the conditions for the possibility of the kind of intellectual solidarity which can transform bioethics into a field that is at once much more diverse and inclusive while also of its very nature interested in robust debate which includes references first principles and metaphysical foundations. (shrink)

In the conclusion to the first book of the Treatise, Hume's skeptical reflections have plunged him into melancholy. He then proceeds through a complex series of stages, resulting in renewed interest in philosophy. Interpreters have struggled to explain the connection between the stages. I argue that Hume's repeated invocation of the four humors of ancient and medieval medicine explains the succession, and sheds a new light on the significance of skepticism. The humoral context not only reveals that Hume conceives of (...) skepticism primarily as a temperament, not a philosophical view or system. It also resolves a puzzle about how Hume can view skepticism as both an illness and a cure. The skeptical temperament can, depending on its degree of predominance, either contribute to or upset the balance of temperaments required for proper mental functioning. (shrink)

The title analogy.--The child who conforms.--The child who varies.--Illumination.--The perception of the presence of God.--The lettered and the learned.--The turbulent bar.--Dark till Jesus comes.--Made-over garments.

Thèse. Sciences sociales. Sciences politiques. 1991.

I have two aims in this paper. In §§2-4 I contend that Moore has two arguments (not one) for the view that that ‘good’ denotes a non-natural property not to be identified with the naturalistic properties of science and common sense (or, for that matter, the more exotic properties posited by metaphysicians and theologians). The first argument, the Barren Tautology Argument (or the BTA), is derived, via Sidgwick, from a long tradition of anti-naturalist polemic. But the second argument, the Open (...) Question Argument proper (or the OQA), seems to have been Moore’s own invention and was probably devised to deal with naturalistic theories, such as Russell’s, which are immune to the Barren Tautology Argument. The OQA is valid and not (as Frankena (1939) has alleged) question-begging. Moreover, if its premises were true, it would have disposed of the desire-to-desire theory. But as I explain in §5, from 1970 onwards, two key premises of the OQA were successively called into question, the one because philosophers came to believe in synthetic identities between properties and the other because it led to the Paradox of Analysis. By 1989 a philosopher like Lewis could put forward precisely the kind of theory that Moore professed to have refuted with a clean intellectual conscience. However, in §§6-8 I shall argue that all is not lost for the OQA. I first press an objection to the desire-to-desire theory derived from Kripke’s famous epistemic argument. On reflection this argument looks uncannily like the OQA. But the premise on which it relies is weaker than the one that betrayed Moore by leading to the Paradox of Analysis. This suggests three conclusions: 1) that the desire-to-desire theory is false; 2) that the OQA can be revived, albeit in a modified form; and 3) that the revived OQA poses a serious threat to what might be called semantic naturalism. (shrink)

Three problems are raised for Nicholas Georgalis’s recent work: (1) a problem with regard to the supposed noninferential knowledge of minimal content, (2) a problem with the “necessary condition” Georgalis stipulates for the legitimate application of a first-person methodology to a science of the mind, and (3) a problem with regard to denying phenomenal content to intentional acts.

Let us now consider the third class of statements, those completely nonrestrictive. For example, "Something exists." Since this is the pure contradictory of the wholly restrictive, "Nothing exists," which we have found reason to regard as impossible, and since the contradictory of an impossible statement is necessary, we should expect "Something exists" to be necessarily true, a statement valid a priori. And we see that it excludes nothing from existence, except bare "nothing" itself. But the existence of bare nothing is (...) no existence. Further, "Something exists" is in no conceivable circumstances falsifiable, since the falsifying experience would have to exist, and it would also have to be the experience of something existing--at least if, as I should maintain, experience is essentially a relative term, requiring that to which it is relative, or of which it is the experience. But though "Something exists" is unfalsifiable, it is verified every moment. Could the verifiable but in any conceivable world absolutely unfalsifiable be false? I hold that the necessarily true must be knowable as true and only as true, and that, conversely, whatever is in principle verifiable though not falsifiable is thereby shown to be necessarily true. (shrink)

Yet this widespread agreement as to the contingency of fact conceals an important possibility of disagreement. For there is a common assumption by which the doctrine of the exclusiveness of factual truths is trivialized. This is the assumption that the excluded alternative can be merely negative. Thus: there are elephants, there might have been no elephants; there is a world, there might have been no world. What the positive fact necessarily excludes, then, is only a privation: in short it may (...) exclude literally nothing. But to exclude nothing is not really, I suggest, to exclude. Real transactions are not concerned with non-entity, and exclusion is in some sense a real transaction. If I am just here, I prevent you from being here. If elephants exist, then, in certain portions of the world at a given moment, other large animals cannot exist, for the space they might occupy is otherwise occupied. The non-being of wild elephants in North America is a partly positive fact, for it means that every portion of the land surface of that continent is covered either by some solid object different from an elephant, or by empty air. (shrink)

It has generally been assumed since the 1950s that the African elephant known to classical antiquity, and thus the one used, inter alia, by Carthage and Ptolemaic Egypt, is the forest elephant, which is even smaller in stature than the Asian or Indian elephant. Yet a recent scientific study using DNA evidence has asserted that it was the larger bush or savannah elephant that was used in antiquity. This study adduces literary sources pertaining to habitat and representational evidence to explore (...) the issue of the most likely species of African elephant known to the ancient Mediterranean world. (shrink)

The author explores recent cases involving Church closure, cancellation of historical figures, instructional materials in public schools, display of religious symbols on public land, and his current work defending the First Amendment rights of Christian bakers.

Shaw explores the concept of the ego and its role in human psychology and philosophy. He discusses different theories of the ego and its relationship to the self and society. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in psychology or philosophy. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly (...) other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In this essay I focus on two areas discussed in Michael Brady’s Emotion: The Basics, namely perceptual models of emotion and the relation between emotion and virtue. Brady raises two concerns about perceptual theories: that they arguably collapse into feeling or cognitive theories of emotion; and that the analogy between emotion and perception is questionable at best, and is thus not an adequate way of characterizing emotion. I argue that a close look at perception and emotional experience reveals a structure (...) of emotion that avoids these problems. I then explore other ways in which emotions can be operative in virtuous acts and virtue traits outside of their relation to motivation. The patterns of emotional response that we have can affect virtue because they affect the way in which we see and take-in information about the world, and the gravity that such perceptions have for us. In addition, emotions are critical to virtue because they maintain the level of importance that values have for us, and in doing so forestall axiological entropy, namely the fading of the importance that values have for us, and thus the virtues that are dependent on those values. (shrink)

Kant’s negative, distorted views on black Africans, human sexuality, and revealed religion led him to undervalue the case for racial equality, healthy sexual intimacy, and the virtues of Christianity as a revealed religion with its commending worship, prayer, and rites. Kantian anthropology and critique of revealed religion is contrasted with the more capacious approach of the Cambridge Platonists. Challenging Kant’s methodological bias is important in removing the obstacles facing a fair assessment of matters of race, sexuality, and the virtues of (...) Christianity as a religion based on revelation. (shrink)