It’s a commonplace that Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke draws his policies from Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s A Monetary History of the United States. With that in mind, this article establishes five points. First, contrary to conventional wisdom, Friedman and Schwartz merely insinuate their claim the Fed caused the Depression in MH. Second, their criticisms of Fed policy during the Depression, which turn on its refusal to adopt open market purchases, repudiate Friedman’s famed libertarianism and market fundamentalism. Third, Friedman (...) and Schwartz don’t refute the practical objections of bankers who opposed OMPs in the 1930s. Consequently, Bernanke’s policies for addressing the financial crisis risk doing precisely what Friedman’s targets warned against—encouraging financial speculation without addressing problems of unemployment. Fourth, Friedman and Schwartz’s prescriptions entail a neoliberal, not a libertarian, state, one governed by technocrats and answerable to financial markets. Finally, what accounts for and unifies Friedman’s contradictions is the beneficiary—finance. (shrink)

Talent and Education was first published in 1960. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.The problem of identification, development, and utilization of talented young people is a matter of prime concern to all who are interested in the welfare of the individual and the future of the nation. This book, constituting a progress report on research related to the problem, will be of (...) particular value to educators, psychologists, social workers, community leaders, and others who are engaged in the effort to make the most of our human resources.The volume contains chapters by a number of contributors drawn from various fields in elementary, secondary, and higher education. The contributors include John E. Anderson, Robert H. Beck, Florence N. Brumbaugh, Walter W. Cook, Willis E. Dugan, Dale B. Harris, Arthur J. Lewis, Catherine Cox Miles, Mary Pilch, Maynard C. Reynolds, Anne Roe, Merrill F. Roff, Paul C. Rosenbloom, Audrey Shechtman, and E. Paul Torrance. Orville L. Freeman, governor of Minnesota, writes an indtroduction.Among the topics discussed are the nature and scientific measurement of talent, the effects of life experiences on the development of talent, the enrichment of school curricula, special grouping and acceleration in the schools, psychological aspects of some of the problems, and Russian methods of dealing with individual differences. The volume is based on papers from an Institute on Exceptional Children held at the University of Minnesota. (shrink)

“Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results” has long been recognized for the special place that it occupies in the history of American philosophy. In it, American pragmatism enters into a wider, popular consciousness for the first time, acquiring both its name and its lineage. In the course of a brief hour with George Holmes Howison’s Philosophical Union at Berkeley in August of 1898, in a gymnasium before an audience of eight hundred people, pragmatism also acquires its living voice as William James (...) introduces a new uniquely American philosophy based upon the innovative ideas of the then obscure Charles Peirce. After describing a new strategy for arriving at the meaning of an idea, he goes on to illustrate.. (shrink)

Abstract:The closing section of James's "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results" contains a surprisingly abrupt dismissal of Kant's philosophy. This paper suggests that James's real target is his host, George Holmes Howison, whose Philosophical Union had invited James to speak at Berkeley. James and Howison shared a common commitment to pluralism in opposition to the Absolute monism such as Josiah Royce was developing. Howison relies on Kant's account of the a priori as well as his moral ideal of a Kingdom of (...) Ends in order to fashion a pluralistic form of |idealism that would avoid the errors he found in Absolute monism while also countering the influential evolutionary philosophy of Herbert Spencer. While James shared Howison's opposition to monism, as well as his critical view of Spencer, he did not share his aversion to evolutionary ideas. Ultimately, the pragmatism that he announced at Berkeley would reply to Howison's Kantian approach by retaining a pluralism while building on the modern psychology growing out of evolution. James's position would test the alliance that they had forged against monism. In time, it would prove too fragile to withstand their growing differences until a final break came in the year before James's death. (shrink)

“…in every genuine metaphysical debate some practical issue, however conjectural and remote, is involved”By all accounts, William James was having an astonishing year in 1898. Robert D. Richardson describes him as “a man of unlimited energy” teaching a full load amid his crowded schedule of public lecturing. His writing was in full force; the Will to Believe had just appeared in print, and his Talks to Teachers series which was drawing appreciative audiences wherever he gave them were in preparation for (...) publication as well.1 An astonishing Walpurgisnacht encounter with the infinite while camping in the Adirondacks that July added stimulus to his preparation for the upcoming Gifford Lectures. Most importantly for... (shrink)

In an essay entitled “Public Policy and Philosophical Critique: The William James and Theodore Roosevelt Dialogue on Strenuousness” Patrick Dooley examines the public discourse concerning the ebb and flow of moral energy that took place in America during twilight years of the nineteenth century. In it, he discusses how a diverse “community of investigators,” James and Roosevelt prominent among them, articulated a “common agenda of problems” in a cultural conversation concerning the benefits, moral as well as political, of the strenuous (...) life of energetic moral exertion.1This problem of moral energy rose to prominence in the waning decades of nineteenth century. This post-Civil War era proved to be an “especially... (shrink)

Vital to libraries, teachers, and undergraduate students and their writings, this anthology offers contemporary analysis of American culture in new essays written exclusively for this book by leading anthropologists. The new essays are set against the perspective of several renowned anthropologists (Malinowski, Eric Wolf, Marvin Harris, Marshall Sahlins, etc.) to offer a uniquely anthropological perspective on the most challenging issues of our time, from immigration to job exportation to the recent financial meltdown.

Die Entstehung des Gewissens.--Materie.--Das Kausalgesetz--Die Eitelkeit.--Gedanken über verschiedene Gegenstände der Philosophie.

Doctor Stephen Strange was a renowned neurosurgeon in his “previous life”, but after his time in Kamar‐Taj he is mostly associated with his mastery of the mystic arts. In Doctor Strange people learn that mastery of physical skills is critical for mastery as a mystic. In addition to the physical skills of martial arts, the portrayal of Doctor Strange is reminiscent of many aspects of Eastern philosophical traditions. Ironically, the reason that Strange originally gave for seeking the elixir is that (...) he swore the Hippocratic Oath, which requires him to prescribe medical treatments for the good of his patients. One problem with applying the Hippocratic Oath to Strange's choice is that it's meant to apply to the doctor‐patient relationship. Perhaps Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, the creators of Doctor Strange, meant to show that, by losing his skill as a surgeon, Strange finally learned what it means to be a good physician. (shrink)

Paul E. Griffiths argues that most research on the emotions has been as misguided as Aristotelian efforts to study "superlunary objects" - objects...

Appears to give the first model-theoretic account of both "must" and "ought" (without conflating them with one another). Some key pre-theoretic semantic and pragmatic phenomena that support a negative answer to the main title question are identified and a conclusion of some significance is drawn: a pervasive bipartisan presupposition of twentieth century ethical theory and deontic logic is false. Next, an intuitive model-theoretic framework for "must" and "ought" is hypothesized. It is then shown how this hypothesis helps to explain and (...) predict all the pre-theoretic phenomena previously observed. Next, I show that the framework hypothesized possesses additional expressive and explanatory power (e.g. derivatively predicting the existence of supererogatory and permissibly suboptimal alternatives), thus adding further confirmation that it is on the right track. (shrink)

Recent work in the history of philosophy of science details the Kantianism of philosophers often thought opposed to one another, e.g., Hans Reichenbach, C.I. Lewis, Rudolf Carnap, and Thomas Kuhn. Historians of philosophy of science in the last two decades have been particularly interested in the Kantianism of Reichenbach, Carnap, and Kuhn, and more recently, of Lewis. While recent historical work focuses on recovering the threatened-to-be-forgotten Kantian themes of early twentieth-century philosophy of science, we should not elide the differences between (...) the Kantian strands running throughout this work. In this paper, I disentangle a few of these strands in the work of Reichenbach and Lewis focusing especially on their theories of relativized, constitutive a priori principles in empirical knowledge. In particular, I highlight three related differences between Reichenbach and Lewis concerning their motivations in analyzing scientific knowledge and scientific practice, their differing conceptions of constitutivity, and their relativization of constitutive a priori principles. In light of these differences, I argue Lewis’s Kantianism is more similar to Kuhn’s Kantianism than Reichenbach’s, and so might be of more contemporary relevance to social and practice-based approaches to the philosophy of science. (shrink)

The acknowledgement that something is complex, it is argued, implies that our knowledge of it will always be limited. We cannot make complete, absolute or final claims about complex systems. Post-structuralism, and specifically deconstruction, make similar claims about knowledge in general. Arguments against deconstruction can, therefore, also be held against a critical form of complexity thinking and a defence of the view from complexity (as presented here) should take account of them. Three of these arguments are investigated: that deconstruction and (...) complexity-thinking lead to relativism, that they are subject to the performative contradiction and that their claims are vague. It is shown that these critiques are not really effective and it is suggested that a responsible approach to complexity has to be provisional, i.e. modest, without being vague or relativistic. (shrink)

We all know what Kant means by autonomy: “the property of the will by which it is a law to itself ” , or, since any law must be universal, the condition of an agent who is “subject only to laws given by himself but still universal” . Or do we know what Kant means by autonomy? There are a number of questions here. First, Kant's initial definition of autonomy itself raises the question of why the property of the will (...) being a law to itself should be equivalent to its independence from any property of objects of volition. It is also natural to ask, how does autonomy as Kant conceives it relate to more familiar notions of freedom. For example, consider Locke's conception of freedom as the condition of a person “to think, or not to think; to move, or not to move, according to the preference or direction of his own mind,” rather than according to the preference or direction of any other person. What is the relation between autonomy and this traditional conception of freedom as the liberty of an agent? And what is the relation of autonomy to the traditional conception of freedom of the will; that is, the condition that obtains, as G. E. (shrink)

Three theories contend as explanations of perpetrator behavior in the Holocaust as well as other cases of genocide: structural, intentional, and situational. Structural explanations emphasize the sense in which no single individual or choice accounts for the course of events. In opposition, intentional/cutltural accounts insist upon the genocides as intended outcomes, for how can one explain situations in which people ‘step up’ and repeatedly kill defenseless others in large numbers over sustained periods of time as anything other than a choice? (...) Situational explanations offer a type of behavioral account; this is how people act in certain environments. Critical to the situational account as I discuss it is the ‘Asch paradigm’, i.e. experimentally attested conditions for eliciting conformityof behavior regardlesss of available evidence of prior beliefs. In what follows, I defend what I term above a version of situational explanations of perpetrator behavior. Moreover, I maintain that the factors that explain provide an understanding as well. While not committed to the complete irrelevance or exclusion of cultural or structural factors, nonetheless situational analyses can account both for what happened and why. A cardinal virtue of this version of situational explanations consists in showing how shallow the problem of understanding turns out to be for such cases. (shrink)

made with any ambitions for ontological reduction (e.g. denying that there are pains but only states of having pain). So I'm afraid that Tye's objections deriving from attributing to me such a view and pointing out that Representationalism is needed to capture, amongst other things, the fact that we experience pains in phantom limbs are all beside the point. Instead, the question is entirely a matter of whether the inferences mentioned in my original paper and Tye's reply fail because, although (...) the 'in'. (shrink)

The paper defends Functionalism against the charge that it would make mental properties inefficacious. It outlines two ways of formulating the doctrine that mental properties are Functional properties and shows that both allow mental properties to be efficacious. The first (Lewis) approach takes functional properties to be the occupants of causal roles. Block [1990] has argued that mental properties should not be characterized in this way because it would make them properties of the ?implementing science?, e. g. neuroscience. I show (...) why this is not a problem. The second way of formulating the doctrine takes functional properties to be causal role properties. I claim that mental properties so understood would only be inefficacious if a law-centred rather than a property-centred approach is adopted to the introduction of efficacy into the world. I develop a property-centred account that explains how mental properties can be efficacacious without introducing systematic overdetermination. At the close, I provide a better characterization of the difference between these two approaches and offer an explanation as to why my way of resolving the problems has been missed. (shrink)

This undergraduate textbook introduces some fundamental issues in philosophy of science for students of philosophy and science students. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 deals with knowledge and values. Chap. 1 presents the classical conception of knowledge as initiated by the ancient Greeks and elaborated during the development of science, introducing the central concepts of truth, belief and justification. Aspects of the quest for objectivity are taken up in the following two chapters. Moral issues are broached in (...) Chap. 4, which discusses some aspects of the use and abuse of science, taking up the responsibilities of scientists in properly conducting their business and decision-makers in their concerns with the import of science for society. Part 2 contrasts the view of scientific progress as the rejecting of old hypotheses and theories and replacing them with new ones, represented by Karl Popper, with the conception of progress as accumulating knowledge, saving as much as possible from older theories, represented by Pierre Duhem. A concluding chapter defends the natural attitude of taking the theories of modern science to be literally true, i.e. realism, in the face of arguments drawn partly from the history of scientific progress in criticism of this stance. (shrink)

Classical mereology (CM) is usually taken to be formulated in a tenseless language, and is therefore associated with a four-dimensionalist metaphysics. This paper presents three ways one might integrate the core idea of flat plenitude, i.e., that every suitable condition or property has exactly one mereological fusion, with a tensed logical setting. All require a revised notion of mereological fusion. The candidates differ over how they conceive parthood to interact with existence in time, which connects to the distinction between endurance (...) and perdurance. Similar issues arise for the integration of mereology with modality, and much of our discussion applies to this project as well. (shrink)

This paper provides a new framework for formalizing conditional obligations in natural language: it pairs a unary deontic operator with trivalent semantics for the indicative conditional and Kratzer's idea that the antecedents of conditionals restrict the scope of modals in the consequent. Combining these three ideas, we obtain a fully compositional theory of "if" and "ought'" that validates plausible principles for deontic reasoning. Moreover, it resolves classical challenges such as the "if A then ought A" problem, the paradox of the (...) miners and the modeling of contrary-to-duty obligations (e.g., Chisholm's quartet). All in all, our proposal is attractive from a logical point of view and squares well with general theories of natural language reasoning. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur was one of the foremost interpreters and translators of Edmund Husserl's philosophy. These nine essays present Ricoeur's interpretation of the most important of Husserl's writings, with emphasis on his philosophy of consciousness rather than his work in logic. In Ricoeur's philosophy, phenomenology and existentialism came of age and these essays provide an introduction to the Husserlian elements which most heavily influenced his own philosophical position.

We investigate uncountable maximal antichains of perfect trees and of splitting trees. We show that in the case of perfect trees they must have size of at least the dominating number, whereas for splitting trees they are of size at least \\), i.e. the covering coefficient of the meager ideal. Finally, we show that uncountable maximal antichains of superperfect trees are at least of size the bounding number; moreover we show that this is best possible.

Political liberals typically hold that reasonable citizens should not form political associations (e.g. political parties) with unreasonable citizens. This is because unreasonable citizens are unlikely to conform to the duty of civility—the duty to be able, and willing, to use public reasons in their public political deliberations. Here I argue that a general prohibition on political associations with the unreasonable can undermine the fair value of their political liberties. This is because unreasonable citizens can grow up in epistemic environments that (...) make it difficult to be reasonable, and so to direct citizens to not associate with them can deprive citizens from certain social backgrounds the equal opportunity for political influence. I propose instead that political liberals should distinguish between unreasonable citizens who are disposed to support de re publicly justifiable laws and policies and unreasonable citizens who support illegitimate laws and policies. Reasonable citizens may form political associations with the former group, but not the latter group. (shrink)

The etiological approach to ‘proper functions’ in biology can be strengthened by relating it to Robert Cummins' general treatment of function ascription. The proper functions of a biological trait are the functions it is assigned in a Cummins-style functional explanation of the fitness of ancestors. These functions figure in selective explanations of the trait. It is also argued that some recent etiological theories include inaccurate accounts of selective explanation in biology. Finally, a generalization of the notion of selective explanation allows (...) an analysis of the proper functions of human artifacts. (shrink)

Robert M. Adams behauptet, daß Leibniz' zwei Konzeptionen der Körper als bloße Phänomene und als Aggregate von Substanzen konsistent und somit Bestandteile einer einzigen Theorie der Phänomene seien. Dagegen möchte ich hier zeigen, daß Adams' Strategie, Körper als intentionale Objekte der Perzeption zu verstehen - als objektive Realität von Ideen im kartesischen Sinn - nicht vereinbar damit ist, sie als Aggregate von Substanzen aufzufassen. Mit Adams stimme ich insofern überein, als Aggregate von Monaden sich nur im Geist als Einheit finden, (...) ich bestreite jedoch, daß nur im Geist die Aggregate dann auch sind. (shrink)

The Internet provides access to a global space of information assets and computational services. It also, however, serves as a platform for social interaction (e.g., Facebook) and participatory involvement in all manner of online tasks and activities (e.g., Wikipedia). There is a sense, therefore, that the Internet yields an unprecedented form of access to the human social environment: it provides insight into the dynamics of human behavior (both individual and collective), and it additionally provides access to the digital products of (...) human cognitive labor (again, both individual and collective). Such access is interesting from the standpoint of research into machine intelligence, for the human social environment looks to be of crucial importance when it comes to the evolutionary and developmental origins of the human mind. In the present paper, we develop a theoretical account that sees the Internet as providing opportunities for online systems to function as socially-situated agents. The result is a vision of machine intelligence in which advanced forms of cognitive competence are seen to arise from the creation of a new kind of digital socio-ecological niche. The present paper attempts to detail this vision with respect to the notion of socially-scaffolded cognition. It also describes some of the forms of machine learning that may be required to enable online systems to press maximal cognitive benefit from their new-found informational contact with the human social world. (shrink)

Some ‘naturalist’ accounts of disease employ a biostatistical account of dysfunction, whilst others use a ‘selected effect’ account. Several recent authors have argued that the biostatistical account offers the best hope for a naturalist account of disease. We show that the selected effect account survives the criticisms levelled by these authors relatively unscathed, and has significant advantages over the BST. Moreover, unlike the BST, it has a strong theoretical rationale and can provide substantive reasons to decide difficult cases. This is (...) illustrated by showing how life-history theory clarifies the status of so-called diseases of old age. The selected effect account of function deserves a more prominent place in the philosophy of medicine than it currently occupies. _1_ Introduction _2_ Biostatistical and Selected Effect Accounts of Function _3_ Objections to the Selected Effect Account _3.1_ Boorse _3.2_ Kingma _3.3_ Hausman _3.4_ Murphy and Woolfolk _4_ Problems for the Biostatistical Account _4.1_ Schwartz _5_ Analysis versus Explication _6_ Explicating Dysfunction: Life History Theory and Senescence _7_ Conclusion. (shrink)

Androphilia refers to sexual attraction and arousal to adult males, whereas gynephilia refers to sexual attraction and arousal to adult females. In Independent Samoa, androphilic males, most of whom are effeminate or transgendered, are referred to as fa’afafine, which means “in the manner of a woman.” Previous research has established that fa’afafine report significantly higher avuncular tendencies relative to gynephilic men. We hypothesized that Samoan fa’afafine might adopt feminine gender role orientations with respect to childcare activity. If so, then the (...) fa’afafine’s femininity might be a proximate mechanism for promoting their elevated avuncular tendencies. Our analyses indicated that fa’afafine had significantly higher willingness to assist in the childcare of nieces and nephews than childless women, mothers, or men, none of whom differed from each other on this measure. Thus, femininity does not appear to explain the fa’afafine’s pattern of avuncular tendencies, nor the women’s pattern of materteral (i.e., aunt-like) tendencies, relative to gynephilic men. We discuss how the fa’afafine “third” gender status might influence the expression of their elevated avuncular tendencies. (shrink)

In set theory without the Axiom of Choice, we investigate the set-theoretic strength of the principle NDS which states that there is no function f on the set ω of natural numbers such that for everyn ∈ ω, f ≺ f, where for sets x and y, x ≺ y means that there is a one-to-one map g : x → y, but no one-to-one map h : y → x. It is a long standing open problem whether NDS implies (...) AC. In this paper, among other results, we show that NDS is a strong axiom by establishing that ACLO ↛ NDS in ZFA set theory. The latter result provides a strongly negative answer to the question of whether “every Dedekind-finite set is finite” implies NDS addressed in G. H. Moore “Zermelo’s Axiom of Choice. Its Origins, Development, and Influence” and in P. Howard–J. E. Rubin “Consequences of the Axiom of Choice”. We also prove that ACWO ↛ NDS in ZF and that “for all infinite cardinals m, m + m = m” ↛ NDS in ZFA. (shrink)

there is a substantial range of C1, C2, … of different not-too- distant alterations of C and a range E1, E2, of alterations of E, at least some of which differ, such that if C1 had occurred, E1 would have occurred, if C2 had occurred, E2 would have occurred and so on (Lewis 2000).