Knauff and Gazzo Castañeda argue as much in support of revised mental model theory (RMMT) as they argue against talk of a new paradigm caused by the probabilistic approach in the psychology of reasoning. They claim that RMMT is not essentially different from classical mental model theory (CMMT) and not essentially different from the probabilistic approach. There are many serious questions to ask about RMMT. But RMMT is a massive modalization of aspects of the extensional CMMT, and it follows the (...) probabilistic approach in having an intensional focus that justifies talk of a new paradigm. (shrink)

Richard Rorty was one of the most controversial and influential philosophers of the late twentieth century. Known primarily for his attacks on truth and the idea that knowledge is a ‘mirror of nature’, his contribution as a humanist and a great moralist has been overlooked by recent scholarship. McClean re-evaluates Rorty’s work in the light of his liberal cosmopolitan outlook, showing how it can be applied to a range of social and political issues, including international terrorism, religious fundamentalism, neo-liberalism, sexual (...) politics and business culture. (shrink)

Educational policy and discussion, in Britain and the USA, are increasingly dominated by the confused ideology of egalitarianism. David E. Cooper begins by identifying the principles hidden among the confusions, and argues that these necessarily conflict with the ideal of educational excellence - in which conflict it is this ideal that must be preserved. He goes on to criticize the use of education as a tool for promoting wider social equality, focussing especially on the muddles surrounding 'equal opportunities', 'social (...) mix' and 'reverse discrimination'. Further chapters criticize the 'new egalitarianism' favoured, on epistemological grounds, by various sociologists of knowledge in recent years and 'cultural egalitarianism' according to which standard criteria of educational value merely reflect parochial and economic interests. (shrink)

Characterizations of philosophy abound. It is ‘the queen of the sciences’, a grand and sweeping metaphysical endeavour; or, less regally, it is a sort of deep anthropology or ‘descriptive metaphysics’, uncovering the general presuppositions or conceptual schemes that lurk beneath our words and thoughts. A different set of images portray philosophy as a type of therapy, or as a spiritual exercise, a way of life to be followed, or even as a special branch of poetry or politics. Then there is (...) a group of characterizations that include philosophy as linguistic analysis, as phenomenological description, as conceptual geography, or as genealogy in the sense proposed by Nietzsche and later taken up by Foucault. (shrink)

This two volume work is a comprehensive reader in modern philosophical and theological hermeneutics. David E. Klemm has selected essays representing acknowledged classics in hermeneutics and the best modern hermeneutical thinkers. Volume One collects essays on the hermeneutics of texts. Volume Two collects works on the hermeneutics of existence. Each essay is preceded by an informative contextualizing introduction. Included in Volume One are works by: F.D.E. Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Rudolf Bultmann, Martin Heidegger, Paul Tillich, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gerhard Ebeling, Paul (...) Ricoeur, Norman Perrin, and Robert P. Scharlemann. (shrink)

David Brink’s new book, Fair Opportunity and Responsibility delivers an important and erudite contribution to the under theorised notion of ‘fair opportunity’ in our culpability determinations. Bri...

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

I shall not try to deal with all of the interesting points Mr. R. S. Downie raises against my paper, Collective Responsibility . I shall deal with a matter of clarification, one of the lesser issues between us, and the major issue between us. . On one point, surely, Downie has simply misunderstood what I said. He claims that my criticisms do not work against the common view that Responsibility is analytically tied to blameworthiness; but only apainst the claim that (...) Responsibility is analytically tied to the efficacy of blame. Well, I hope so. For it was meant to be clear that I was only attacking the view, to be found in Nowell-Smith's Ethics , that Responsibility is to be analysed in terms of the efficacy of blame and punishment. Far from attacking the view that Responsibility is analytically tied to blameworthiness , I quoted, with full approval, a passage from Brandt, according to which Responsibility entails the “fittinsness” of blaming and praising attitudes. (shrink)

Buddhism, one increasingly hears, is an 'eco-friendly' religion. It is often said that this is because it promotes an 'ecological' view of things, one stressing the essential unity of human beings and the natural world. Buddhism, Virtue and Environment presents a different view. While agreeing that Buddhism is, in many important respects, in tune with environmental concerns, Cooper and James argue that what makes it 'green' is its view of human life. The true connection between the religion and environmental thought (...) is to be found in Buddhist accounts of the virtues - those traits, such as compassion, equanimity and humility, that characterise the life of a spiritually enlightened individual. Central chapters of this book examine these virtues and their implications for environmental attitudes and practice. Buddhism, Virtue and Environment will be of interest not only to students and teachers of Buddhism and environmental ethics, but to those more generally engaged with moral philosophy. Written in a clear and accessible style, this book presents an original conception of Buddhist environmental thought. The authors also contribute to the wider debate on the place of ethics in Buddhist teachings and practices, and to debates within 'virtue ethics' on the relations between human well-being and environmental concern. (shrink)

A subtitle for this paper might have been ‘The ugly face ofVerstehen’, for it asks whether the theory ofVerstehenhas, to switch metaphors, ‘dirty hands’. By the theory ofVerstehen, I mean the constellation of concepts—life, experience, expression, interpretative understanding—which, according to Wilhelm Dilthey, are essential for the study of human affairs, thereby showing that ‘the methodology of the human studies[Geisteswissenschafteri]is … different from that of the physical sciences’ :1 for in the latter, these concepts have no similar place. Even critics of (...) Dilthey tend to agree that his heart, if not his head, was in the right place: thatVerstehenwas designed as an antidote to ‘dehumanizing’ attempts by positivists to reduce the categories used in explaining human behaviour to just those equally operative in the physical sciences. As Dilthey himself put it, ‘there is no real blood flowing in the veins’ of human beings as examined by the positivists and their precursors: they do not treat of ‘the whole man’. The idea ofVerstehen, it seems, is doubly humane: a humanizing approach to the humane studies. (shrink)

Arguing that psychologists and their predecessors have invariably relied on metaphors in articulation, the contributors to this volume offer a new "key" to understanding a critically important area of human knowledge by specifying the major metaphors.

Visual Search without Selective Attention calls into question the necessity of a covert selective attention mechanism by implementing a formal model that includes basic visual mechanisms, saccades, and simple task strategies. Across three search tasks, the model accounts for response times as well as the proportion of errors observed in human participants, including effects of item crowding in the visual stimulus.

Throughout the twentieth century, aestheticians and art theorists declared the 'death' of beauty as a serious, meaningful concept for aesthetics and art practice. Such declarations are better understood as polemical provocations, making their obituarism premature. Careful attention to the writings of those cited testify to the persistence of beauty, albeit in new, 'difficult', 'challenging' forms. Beauty persists, taking on new forms and inflections.

This engaging volume explores and defends the claim that misanthropy is a justified attitude towards humankind in the light of how human beings both compare with and treat animals. Reflection on differences between humans and animals helps to confirm the misanthropic verdict, while reflection on the moral and other failings manifest in our treatment of animals illuminates what is wrong with this treatment. Human failings, it is argued, are too entrenched to permit optimism about the future of animals, but ways (...) are proposed in which individual people may accommodate to the truth of misanthropy through cultivating mindful, humble and compassionate relationships to animals. Drawing on both Eastern and Western philosophical traditions David E. Cooper offers an original and challenging approach to the complex field of animal ethics. (shrink)

There is much hype around the idea of bringing the Passenger Pigeon back from extinction. However, ‘de-extinction’ is a fantasy that is not grounded in science. The proposed plans for ‘de-extinction’ would create a new organism that is not likely to be viable in the wild. Thus, ‘de-extinction’ as proposed is unethical both because it could lead into the release in nature of a new genetically created organism and because it is not honest to claim that it would reverse the (...) extinction of the Passenger Pigeon. (shrink)

In my 1993 IJPS paper it was suggested that postmodernist verdicts on ‘the death of philosophy’ relied on a rejection of any ‘substantive’ or ‘metaphysical’ notion of truth. The present paper relates these verdicts to Wittgenstein’s alleged ‘philosophical quietism’. In both cases, for example, there is a rejection of ‘depth’. Various characterisations of Wittgenstein’s position are questioned, including the idea that his quietism consists in showing the impossibility of sceptical challenges to our ‘hinge’ propositions and beliefs. It is then argued, (...) however, that recognition of the groundlessness of beliefs (and practices), far from curing ‘vertigo’ or ‘Angst’, is apt to inspire it. In a final section, I propose that the ‘metaphysical horror’ at the impossibility of articulating grounds for our beliefs can be allayed only by the thought that these answer to a reality that cannot be articulated and must therefore remain a mystery. One role for philosophy might be to cultivate a sense of this mystery and trace its implications for how we should live. (shrink)

In Sacred Nature Jerome Stone gives us an informative, earnest introduction to religious naturalism with a focus on its relevance for environmentalism. Environmentalism today often dwells upon warnings about the dire consequences if certain prescribed actions are not taken. Stone takes a different tack. He quotes Aldo Leopold: “Prudence never kindled a fire in the human mind; I have no hope for a conservation born of fear.” Stone’s approach—an engaging one, in my view—is to connect environmentalism with the hope and (...) passion of religious feeling. But Stone’s religious vision does not entail belief in the personalistic, supernatural deity of traditional monotheism. Rather, a sense of the sacred is discovered within... (shrink)

A standard approach to indeterminacy treats ‘determinately’ and ‘indeterminately’ as modal operators. Determinacy behaves like necessity; indeterminacy like contingency. This raises two questions. What is the appropriate modal system for these operators? And how should we interpret that system? Ken Akiba has developed an account of ontic indeterminacy that interprets possible worlds as worldly precisifications. He argues that this account vindicates S4 as the logic of indeterminacy. In this paper I explore one significant and surprising consequence of this view. I (...) do this in two stages. First, I prove a technical result, which I call the Infinite Indeterminacy Theorem. Roughly put, this theorem states that, at any given precisification w, either every instance of indeterminacy admits of never-ending higher-order indeterminacy, or else there's indeterminacy in an infinite amount of distinct atomic formulas. In slogan form: either all indeterminacy is infinitely ascending or else there's infinitely wide indeterminacy. Second, I unpack the metaphysical consequences of this technical result (under its intended interpretation) and assess their plausibility. I conclude that these consequences commit Akiba's theory to highly contentious – and arguably untenable – views about the metaphysics of indeterminacy and related matters. (shrink)

Epistemological issues associated with Cantorian set theory were at the center of the foundational debates from 1900 onward. Hermann Weyl, as a central actor, saw this as a smoldering crisis that burst into flames after World War I. The historian Herbert Mehrtens argued that this “foundations crisis” was part of a larger conflict that pitted moderns, led by David Hilbert, against various counter-moderns, who opposed the promotion of set theory and trends toward abstract theories. Among counter-moderns, L.E.J. Brouwer went (...) a step further by proposing new foundational principles based on his philosophy of intuitionism. Meanwhile, Felix Hausdorff emerged as a leading proponent of the new modern style. In this essay, I offer a reassessment of the foundations crisis that stresses the marginal importance of the various intellectual issues involved. Instead, I offer an interpretation that focuses on tensions within the German mathematical community that led to a dramatic power struggle for control of the journal Mathematische Annalen. (shrink)

R. S. Peters has not only been the major philosopher of education in Britain during second half of the twentieth century, but by common consent, he has transformed the subject and brought it into the mainstream of contemporary philosophy. The ten essays in this book attest to his influence whether by critical examination of his ideas or by original treatment of topics in which has has inspired a new interest.

This two-volume work is a comprehensive reader in modern philosophical and theological hermeneutics. David E. Klemm has selected essays representing acknowledged classics in hermeneutics and the best modern hermeneutical thinkers. Volume One collects essays on the hermeneutics of texts. Volume Two collects works on the hermeneutics of existence. Each essay is preceded by an informative contextualizing introduction. Volume Two includes essays by: F. Schleiermacher, W. Dilthey, E. Husserl, M. Heidegger, R. Bultmann, P. Tillich, P. Ricoeur, J. Habermas, H-G. Gadamer, (...) and R. Scharlemann. (shrink)

This paper defends the description of Buddhism—by Schopenhauer and many other nineteenth-century figures—as pessimistic. Pessimism, in the relevant sense, is a dark, negative judgment on the psychological, social, and moral condition of humankind and the prospects for its amelioration. After discussing texts in the Pali canon that provide prima facie support for the charge of pessimism, two familiar responses are considered. One emphasizes the positive aspects of the human condition recognized by the Buddha; the other emphasizes the prospect held out (...) by him for the cessation of dukkha. It is argued that neither response is persuasive—not least because of a failure to appreciate the gulf between ordinary “worldling” existence and that of the arahant or enlightened person. A final section discusses the description of the arahant as “transcending the world” and the human condition. If correct, this supports the charge of pessimism. This is because pessimism is a claim about the human condition, about our being-in-the-world, and cannot therefore be refuted by the prospect of a mode of being that transcends this condition. (shrink)

Most of the literature on phase one trials has focused on ethical and safety issues in research on patients with advanced cancer, but this article focuses on healthy, adult subjects. The article makes six specific recommendations for protecting the rights and welfare of healthy subjects in phase one trials: 1) because phase one trials are short in duaration (usually 1 to 3 months), researchers should gather more data on the short-term and long-term risks of participation in phase one studies by (...) healthy subjects; 2) researchers should develop strict inclusion/exclusion criteria that exclude unhealthy or vulnerable subjects, such as decisionally impaired people, in phase one studies; 3) subjects should not participate in more than one phase one study at the same time and should wait at least 30 days between participating in different studies; 4) researchers should develop a database to keep track of phase one participants; 5) subjects should be guaranteed a minimum wage equivalent to the equivalent type of unskilled labor, but there should be no upper limits on wages; and 6) subjects should be allowed to engage in collective bargaining with research sponsors. *Disclaimer: The ideas and opinions expressed in this article are the authors' personal views and do not represent the views of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the National Institutes of Health, or the United States government. (shrink)

The informal business sector has made enormous contributions to Nigeria's economic growth and development, but this sector is not given the necessary attention to transforming these businesses toward sustainability. This study explores the depth of informal business sector practices in Nigeria. It underscores the inputs of stakeholders in the transformation of businesses in the Nigerian informal sector to increase tax remittances and employment generation for job security in the Nigerian economy. Also, it underpins value chain performances to transform the informal (...) sector and rescue it from liquidation through voluntary company arrangements, administration, merger, takeover, and acquisition schemes. The study adopts a conceptual review. The research relies on extant literature relating to the antecedence of informal business sector activities in Nigeria. It relies on reports from tertiary data sources such as academic articles, books, newspapers, the Internet, and website sources. It further explores the views of researchers, covering the informal sector development and the support of the provisions of the social services in Nigeria. There is the absence of a model for the transformation and sustainability of the informal sector enterprises in Nigeria. This study recommends a model approach to address informal sector enterprises' issues and challenges necessary to transform the businesses into a formal status while supporting their sustainability and resilience. (shrink)