In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Rhetoric and PluralismAndrea A. LunsfordRhetoric and Pluralism, ed. Frederick J. Antczak; xii & 336 pp. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1995, $59.50.In his (non)conclusion to this volume’s witty Afterword, Wayne Booth remarks on the need to “improve our inquiry into how we inquire together” (p. 307). The fifteen essays collected in Rhetoric and Pluralism are enthusiastically engaged in this project. Although often strikingly different in their methodologies and (...) assumptions, keeping company with Wayne Booth has allowed the contributors to practice—and to try to improve—what inquiry they would preach. Frederick J. Antczak opens with a brief introduction that previews the five sections to come: “Situating Booth”; “Ethics and Fictions”; “Rhetoric and Politics”; “Booth across Disciplines”; and “Booth, Assent, and Argument.” Booth’s Afterword is followed by Lee Artz’s bibliography of Booth’s work.For readers primarily interested in rhetoric, Walter Jost’s “Teaching the Topics: Character, Rhetoric, and Liberal Education” provides a thoughtful exploration of Booth’s contributions to a theory of special topics as well as a strategy for using this theory as a means of integrating liberal education. Those more interested in philosophy may turn first to Alan Brinton’s rereading of Booth’s Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Assent against Brinton’s own understanding of the Cartesian tradition, or to James McOmber’s comparison of Booth, Richard Rorty, and Paul Feyerabend in “Rhetoric without Sophistry.” And those with a primary interest in teaching should be pleased to find that [End Page 276] subject given strong treatment here in Francis-Noel Thomas’s use of Booth’s practice of criticism, and its relationship to the work of all teachers of English, in taking on advocates of a narrowly-conceived cultural literacy. Patsy Callaghan and Ann Dobyns use a Boothian ethics of argument to inform the teaching of first-year English classes.Literature, of course, is featured throughout. Monica Johnstone arrestingly reads Genet’s Querelle against the evaluative model Booth elucidates in The Company We Keep; Susan Shapiro tests Boothian ethical criticism in the case of Elie Wiesel’s post-Holocaust fiction; and Antczak discusses Martin Luther King’s “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence.” Two essays, one by Don Bialostosky and one by David Richter, relate Booth’s work to Bakhtinian principles, though with very different ends and effects. Finally, those who wonder whether Booth’s brand of pluralism shies too far away from a rigorous encounter with politics will gain from James Phelan’s careful and convincing extension of Booth’s evaluative criticism and from Barbara Foley’s insistence that Booth’s system of ethical criticism too often ignores or elides issues of class and race.The richest section of this text for me, however, focuses on “Booth across Disciplines.” In three remarkably provocative and highly readable discussions, Peter Rabinowitz, Donald McCloskey, and Eugene Garver take Booth on the road, applying or extending his work to an analysis of the ethics of music (Rabinowitz), the rhetoric of economics (McCloskey), and the significance of the implicit, of “What Goes Without Saying: in Francis Bacon’s Essays (Garver). One mark of important thinkers is surely that they enable creativity, that their thinking sparks the thoughts of many others. Throughout this volume, but particularly in this section, that mark of Booth’s influence is palpably evident.As I read through Rhetoric and Pluralism, and especially when I came to Booth’s playful and multivocalic Afterword, I kept wishing that someone had contributed a piece of oral history to this volume: Booth is still working, still working hard, and there are many more of his range of selves available to us in his spoken voice. Finally, I longed for a detailed analysis of some of Booth’s playful and ironic pieces, which come in for some mention here and there but are not featured in any essay. This openness to play, so much a part of the rhetorical tradition and so necessary to any ethics of postmodernity, is another of Booth’s gifts to all readers.Andrea A. LunsfordOhio State UniversityCopyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Introduction: situating Heidegger and the philosophy of technology -- Heidegger's philosophy of technology -- The historical-ontological priority of technology over science -- Deromanticizing Heidegger -- Interlude: the earth inherited -- Was Heidegger prescient concerning technoscience? -- Heidegger's technologies: one size fits all -- Concluding postphenomenological postscript: writing technologies.

Maps the future of phenomenological thought, accounting for how technology expands our means of experiencing the world.

In this book, a leading philosopher of technology explores the meaning of bodies in technology—how the sense of our bodies and of our orientation in the world is affected by the various information technologies.

Ihde's book breaks new ground and... makes an important debate accessible." —Robert Ackermann Instrumental Realism has three principal aims: to advocate a "praxis-perception" approach to the philosophy of science; to explore ways in which ...

Humans, more than any other species, have been altering their paths of development by creating new material forms and by opening up to new possibilities of material engagement. That is, we become constituted through making and using technologies that shape our minds and extend our bodies. We make things which in turn make us. This ongoing dialectic has long been recognised from a deep-time perspective. It also seems natural in the present in view of the ways new materialities and digital (...) ecologies increasingly envelop our everyday life and thinking. Still the basic idea that humans and things are co-constituted continues to challenge us, raising important questions about the place and meaning of materiality and technical change in human life and evolution. This paper bridging perspectives from postphenomenology and Material Engagement Theory is trying to attain better understanding about these matters. Our emphasis falls specifically on the human predisposition for technological embodiment and creativity. We re-approach the notion Homo faber in a way that, on the one hand, retains the power and value of this notion to signify the primacy of making or creative material engagement in human life and evolution and, on the other hand, reclaims the notion from any misleading connotations of human exceptionalism. In particular, our use of the term Homo faber refers to the special place that this ability has in the evolution and development of our species. The difference that makes the difference is not just the fact that we make things. The difference that makes the difference is the recursive effect that the things that we make and our skills of making seem to have on human becoming. We argue that we are Homo faber not just because we make things but also because we are made by them. (shrink)

Experimental Phenomenology has already been lauded for the ease with which its author explains and demonstrates the kinds of consciousness by which we come to know the structure of objects and the structure of consciousness itself. The format of the book follows the progression of a number of thought experiments which mark out the procedures and directions of phenomenological inquiry. Making use of examples of familiar optical illusions and multi-stable drawings, Professor Ihde illustrates by way of careful and disciplined step-by-step (...) analyses, how some of the main methodological procedures and epistemological concepts of phenomenology assume concrete relevance. Such formidable fare as epoche, noetic and noematic analysis, apodicticity, adequacy, sedimentation, imaginative variation, field, and fringe are rendered into the currency of familiar examples from the everyday world. (shrink)

more on the history of the Vienna Circle and its allies, see Coffa 1991; Friedman 1983; Hailer 1982, 1985; Kraft 1950; and Proust 1986, 1989). Without question, however, the crucial, formative, early intellectual experience of at least Schlick, Reichenbach, and Carnap, the experience that did most to give form and content to their emergent philosophies of science, was their engagement with relativity theory. Thus, after a few early writings on more general philosophical themes, Schlick first caught the attention of a (...) broader philosophical public with his 1915 essay, "Die philosophische Bedeutung des.. (shrink)

I distinguish between two styles of research that are both called . Neurocellular economics (NE) uses the modelling techniques and mathematics of economics to model relatively encapsulated functional parts of brains. This approach rests upon the fact that brains are, like markets, massively distributed information-processing networks over which executive systems can exert only limited and imperfect governance. Harrison's (2008) deepest criticisms of neuroeconomics do not apply to NE. However, the more famous style of neuroeconomics is behavioural economics in the scanner. (...) This is often motivated by complaints about conventional economics frequently heard from behavioural economists. It attempts to use neuroimaging data to justify arguments for replacing standard aspects of microeconomic theory by facts and conjectures about human psychology. Harrison's grounds for unease about neuroeconomics apply to most BES, or at least to its explicit methodology. This methodology is naively reductionist and illegitimately assumes that economics should not do what all successful science does, namely, model abstract aspects of its target phenomena instead of would-be complete and fully ecologically situated facsimiles of them. (shrink)

The essays in this collection step back to ask: Do the complex components of Dennett's work on intentionality, consciousness, evolution, and ethics themselves ...

Despite his well-known criticisms of popular religion, Hume refers in seemingly complimentary terms to ‘true religion’; in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, his character Philo goes so far as to express ‘veneration for’ it. This paper addresses three questions. First, did Hume himself really approve of something that he called ‘true religion’? Second, what did he mean by calling it ‘true’? Third, what did he take it to be? By appeal to some of his key doctrines about causation and probability, and (...) to some key features of the characters and content of the Dialogues, I argue, contrary to important recent interpretations by Immerwahr and Falkenstein, that Hume's ‘true religion’ is a doctrine, enunciated by Philo, that he regarded as true in an epistemic sense. (shrink)

What is Albert Einstein’s place in the history of twentieth-century philosophy of science? Were one to consult the histories produced at mid-century from within the Vienna Circle and allied movements (e.g., von Mises 1938, 1939, Kraft 1950, Reichenbach 1951), then one would find, for the most part, two points of emphasis. First, Einstein was rightly remembered as the developer of the special and general theories of relativity, theories which, through their challenge to both scientific and philosophical orthodoxy made vivid the (...) need for a new kind of empiricism (Schlick 1921) whereby one could defend the empirical integrity of the theory of relativity against challenges 1 coming mainly from the defenders of Kant. Second, the special and general theories of relativity were wrongly cited as straightforwardly validating central tenets of the logical empiricist program, such as verificationism, and Einstein was wrongly represented as having, himself, explicitly endorsed those same philosophical principles. As we now know, logical empiricism was not the monolithic philosophical movement it was once taken to have been. Those associated with the movement disagreed deeply about fundamental issues concerning the structure and interpretation of scientific theories, as in the protocol sentence debate, and about the overall aims of the movement, as in the debate between the left and right wings 2 of the Vienna Circle over the role of politics in science and philosophy. Along with such differences went subtle differences in the assessment of Einstein’s legacy to logical empiricism. Philipp Frank–himself a dissenter from central points of right-wing Vienna Circle doctrine–deserves.. (shrink)

Ever since Achterhuis designated American philosophy of technology “empirical” there has been a Continental “push-back” defending the first generation of European—mostly Heidegger’s essentialistic “transcendental”—philosophy of technology. While I prefer a “concrete” turn—to avoid confusing with British “empiricism”—in a belief that particular technologies are different from others—this is a quibble. I admit I was very taken by Richard Rorty’s “anti-essentialism” and “non-foundationalism” in his version of pragmatism, and have adapted much of that stance into postphenomenology. In this contribution I reply to (...) the comments of Lars Botin and Robert Rosenberger. (shrink)

Hermeneutics has become a major topic of debate throughout the scholarly community. What has been called the "interpretive turn" has led to interesting new approaches in both the human and social sciences, and has helped to transform divided disciplines by bringing them closer together. Yet one of the largest and most important social sciences economics has so far been almost completely left out of the transformation. Economics and Hermeneutics takes a significant step towards filling this gap by introducing scholars on (...) both sides of the divide to ways that hermeneutics might help economists address some of their most important problems. Among the topics addressed are entrepreneurship, price theory, rational expectations, monetary theory, welfare economics, and economic policy. The approaches to economics represented include the Austrian school, McCloskey's "rhetoric" approach, Marxian critical theory and institutionalism. (shrink)

Husserl’s Crisis argues that early modern science, exemplified in Galileo, separates the Lifeworld from a world of science by forgetting its origins in bodily perception on the one side, and the practices which found the science on the other. This essay argues that, rather, by overemphasizing mathematization and underemphasizing instruments or technologies which mediate perception, Husserl creates the division he describes. Positively, through the embodied use of instruments science remains thoroughly immersed in the Lifeworld.

Material Hermeneutics explores the ways that new imaging technologies and scientific instruments have changed our notions about ancient history. From the first lunar calendar to the black hole image, and from an ancient mummy in the Italian Alps to the irrigated valleys of Mesopotamia, this book demonstrates how revolutions in science have taught us far more than we imagined. Written by a leading philosopher of technology and utilising an interdisciplinary approach, this book has implications for many fields, including philosophy, history, (...) science and technology. It will appeal to scholars and students of the humanities, as well as anthropologists and archaeologists. (shrink)

It is generally recognized that descriptive and normative individualism are logically independent theses. This paper defends the stronger view that recognition of the falsehood of descriptive individualism is crucial to understanding the evolutionary and developmental basis of normative individualism. The argument given for this is not analytic; rather, it is based on empirical generalizations about the evolution of markets with specialized labor, about the nature of information processing in large markets, and about the socialization of human children.

Phronesis, a popular Aristotelian concept that emphasizes deliberation and moral action, should replace the phrase ‘research‐based practice’ as the guiding light for nursing practice. Knowledge from research is still essential, of course, but is insufficient by itself for practice. In this paper, the author describes assumptions behind the apparent superiority of research‐based knowledge, and offers a critique of this position. One critique is that by automatically accepting the superiority of research‐based knowledge other types of knowledge (e.g. intuitive, ethical, personal) are (...) devalued. A second critique is that undeliberated, indiscriminate use of research findings may lead to inappropriate nursing practice.Phronesisis then described, and its application to nursing. For example,phronesisrequires that the context of the situation be considered very carefully before acting. Aristotle stated that the goal of personalphronesisis to reacheudaimonia, or genuine happiness or ‘human flourishing’. Infusing nursing practice withphronesismeans that an anthropomorphized discipline'seudaimoniawould be theeudaimoniaof patients. That is, nursing practice would be guided by a desire for patients' genuine happiness or human flourishing. The final section of the paper offers rebuttals to potential criticisms. (shrink)

This collection of essays is a philosophical reflection on and critique of human experience from a clearly American perspective guided by phenomenological analysis. This book is divided into three parts.

One of us coined the notion of an “epistemology engine.” The idea is that some particular technology in its workings and use is seen suggestively as a metaphor for the human subject and often for the production of knowledge itself. In this essay, we further develop the conceptand claim that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological commitments, although suggestive, did not lead him to appreciate the epistemological value of materiality. We also take steps towards establishing how an understanding of this topic can provide the (...) basis for reinterpreting the history of phenomenology. (shrink)

In my essay, Why abortion is immoral, I criticised discussions of the morality of abortion in which the crucial issue is whether fetuses are human beings or whether fetuses are persons. Both argument strategies are inadequate because they rely on indefensible assumptions. Why should being a human being or being a person make a moral difference? I argued that the correct account of the morality of abortion should be based upon a defensible account of why killing children and adults is (...) wrong. I claimed that what makes killing us wrong is that our premature deaths deprive us of our futures of value, that is, the goods of life we would have experienced had we survived. This account of the wrongness of killing explains why killing is one of the worst of crimes and how killing greatly harms the victim. It coheres with the attitudes of those with cancer or HIV facing premature death. It explains why we believe it is wrong to kill infants. It does not entail that it wrongs a human being to end her life if she is in persistent vegetative state or if her future must consist only of unbearable physical suffering and she wants to die. This account of the wrongness of killing implies that abortion is immoral because we were fetuses once and we know those fetuses had futures of value. Mark Brown claims that this potential future of value account is unsound because it implies that we have welfare rights to what we need to stay alive that most people would reject. I argue that Brown is incorrect in two ways: a welfare right to what we need to stay alive is not directly implied by my account and, in addition, most of us do believe that dependent human beings have substantial welfare rights to what they need to stay alive. Brown argues that depriving us of a future of value of which we have mental representations both is a better explanation of the wrongness of killing and does not imply that abortion is immoral. I reply that if Brown's arguments against my view were sound, those arguments could be easily adapted to show that his view is unsound as well and Brown's view is both ambiguous and unsound on any interpretation. The most popular class of pro-choice argument strategies appeals to the view that some or all fetuses lack either a mental state or function or a capacity for a mental state or function necessary for possession of the right to life. Desires, interests, sentience, various concepts, moral agency, and rationality have all been suggested as candidates for this crucial mental role. Brown's analysis is one member of this class of strategies. I believe that it is possible to show that none of these strategies is reasonable. However, there are so many of these strategies that the required argument demands something more like a book and less like a short essay. The argument of the following essay is a piece of this larger argument. (shrink)

My impulse when I decided to collect into a single volume the essays on topics in logical theory and related subjects that I have written in the last fifteen years was to borrow from the title of a work by Sextus Empiricus, and call my collection "Against the Logicians." Although the essays address a variety of problems that interest me, the thread that runs through them is a scepticism about how logicians see things. So, the title appealed to me. However, (...) I had second thoughts and chose instead a title of one of my own essays, "In Defense of Informal Logic", which emphasizes my support for other approaches. Although my criticisms of logical theory are designed to cut deeply, I do not want to be unresponsive to the needs that it is supposed to satisfy. However, my position that we have adequate resources for critically analyzing a particular argument and 00 not need a theory of argumentation, will not completely satisfy those who think that there is a need for it. So, I want them to know that I am taking their concerns seriously. (shrink)

This paper suggests that the flaw in the enthymeme approach to argument analysis is in the requirement, as I come to formulate it, that an argument be restated as a premises-and-conclusion sequence. The paper begins by investigating how logicians show that there are problems with the enthymeme approach. That investigation reveals a failure on the part of logicians to appreciate the importance of the rhetorical context of an argument. This failure, it is argued, is a consequence of what I refer (...) to as the Premise-Conclusion Requirement. (shrink)

Most philosophical accounts of the foundations of economics have assumed that economics is intended to be an empirical science concerned with human behaviour, though they have, of course, differed over the extent to which it has been or can be successful as such an enterprise. A prominent source of dissent against this consensus is Alexander Rosenberg. In his recent book, Rosenberg summarizes and completes his statement of a position that he has been developing for some time. He argues that although (...) economists evaluate one another's work according to shared and rigorous standards of adequacy, these standards are strictly internal, like those of mathematics, instead of being derived from discoveries about contingent relationships between theoretical statements and empirical facts. Economics, that is to say, is essentially conceptual rather than empirical inquiry. In the following discussion, I will provide grounds for resisting Rosenberg's conclusion. The point of this criticism, however, is not mainly negative. Most of the historical preoccupations of the philosophy of economics, like those of the philosophy of science in general, have been epistemological. Careful attention to Rosenberg's argument, however, redirects our attention to ontological questions about the objects of economics, and this redirection, I will maintain, is to be welcomed. I will argue that while the majority of philosophers of economics is correct, as against Rosenberg, in regarding economics as an empirical science, the conventional view as to the identity of its empirical objects should be substantially revised under the pressure of Rosenberg's criticisms. My critical analysis of the implications of Rosenberg's work for the ontological commitments of economics is intended to furnish one line of argument towards my own conception of the objects of economics. This conception, which is still preliminary in many respects, will be briefly sketched toward the end of the present paper; a detailed account of it is given in Ross and LaCasse. (shrink)

According to Carson Strong, the future of value account of the wrongness of killing is subject to counterexamples. Ezio Di Nucci has disagreed. Their disagreement turns on whether the concepts of a future of value and a future like ours are equivalent. Unfortunately, both concepts are fuzzy, which explains, at least in part, the disagreement. I suggest that both concepts can be clarified in ways that seem plausible and that makes them equivalent. Strong claims that better accounts of the wrongness (...) of killing exist. I show that those alternative accounts are unsatisfactory. (shrink)

Here what I would like to accomplish is to set something of the stage from which the growing recognition of what I shall now term technoscience’s visualism —a term which can accommodate both sciences and engineering, and both imaging and design practices—takes its recognition. I shall very briefly look at the ‘godfathers and peers’ who help set this stage, and then proceed to an examination of a few moments in the development of visualism from da Vinci to computer assisted design (...) (CAD) and beyond. (shrink)

Three recent book-length studies in the philosophy of economics (Mirowski 2002, Davis 2003, Ross 2005) have drawn attention to the fact that mainstream economic theory has consistently avoided commitment to any particular model of the person. This is the most significant respect in which economics has kept aloof from part of psychology. The widespread belief, on the other hand, that economists’ attentiveness to the psychology of choice and decision had to wait for the Allais challenge and then for Kahneman and (...) Tversky is a myth. It is true that for a brief period after World War II economists led by Samuelson tried to operationalize choice as analytically derivative from observed consumer demand. This was a minor episode in the history of theory. Ross (2005) argues that, if anything, mainstream microeconomics has been more sensitive to theoretical fashions in the psychology of choice than has been good for it. (shrink)

This paper investigates an important aspect of mathematical practice: that proof is required for a finished piece of mathematics. If follows that non-deductive arguments — however convincing — are never sufficient. I explore four aspects of mathematical research that have facilitated the impressive success of the discipline. These I call the Practical Virtues: Permanence, Reliability, Autonomy, and Consensus. I then argue that permitting results to become established on the basis of non-deductive evidence alone would lead to their deterioration. This furnishes (...) us with a partial rational justification for mathematicians strict insistence on proof. (shrink)