v. 1. General introduction to the study of Newman's philosophy.--v. 2. The text.

The Origin and Development of Early Indian Contemplative Practices. Edward Fitzpatrick Crangle. Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden 1994. xiii, 314 pp. DM 148.

Summary Edward Cocker was a well-known writing master and engraver during his lifetime, but is chiefly remembered for his posthumous arithmetic textbook, immortalized in the saying ?According to Cocker?. The book proved popular, being right for its time, and it remained in use for a century. It unexpectedly became the subject of controversy when Augustus De Morgan pronounced it to be the produce of its editor, John Hawkins. Research now shows that there is little doubt that it was (...) really Cocker's work. (shrink)

This addition—hence the title Mantissa—to the rich vein of information about Constantine Samuel Rafinesque is in fact a supplement to Charles Boewe's own revised and enlarged edition of Thomas J. Fitzpatrick's book Rafinesque .The details of the peripatetic life of Rafinesque, one of America's most original yet undisciplined naturalists, are too well known to bear repeating here. Suffice it to say that because of the vicissitudes of his life—his perpetual wandering between and within Europe and frontier America, his impecunious (...) circumstances that forced him to find different ways of making a living—finding and identifying his publications is a bibliographer's nightmare. Even now, more than 160 years after his death and with the benefit of serious studies by Fitzpatrick and Boewe, as well as by Richard E. Call and Elmer D. Merrill, among others, we can only approximate the number of his publications, including both original titles and republications. Probably we will never have a complete list of Rafinesque's publications because he published regularly in newspapers, broadsides, sales catalogues, privately printed journals, and other ephemera that are infrequently archived. Even his own references to “published” works cannot be trusted as, to him, this term included papers that he sent to journals but were never published. On the other hand, Rafinesque complained to one correspondent that he never knew whether some of these manuscripts were ever published or he learned only years later that they had been. The total number has been estimated at about a thousand, but, as Boewe points out, this number is based on Fitzpatrick's faulty numbering system in which each version of a paper or volume of a multivolume work was given a number. Thus Fitzpatrick's system, continued by Boewe, represents serial numbers, not individual titles. Rafinesque's own estimate was 220, a number Boewe now thinks is a reasonable guess.The Mantissa is an important addition to Rafinesquiana. It lists twenty hitherto‐unrecorded publications by Rafinesque, thirty‐three new translations or reprints, and more than two hundred newly listed secondary references. For the first time we have a list of every manuscript letter written by Rafinesque that is known to exist, and Boewe provides a documented discussion of Rafinesque publications still remaining to be discovered. Several titles known to me, however, are missing from Mantissa, but Boewe's book represents a learned guide for the next scholar willing to take up the challenge and carry on the search. The newly listed manuscript letters will doubtless be particularly helpful in providing leads to undiscovered publications and other facets of Rafinesque's still not completely understood life. Among his correspondents were fellow naturalists such as John James Audubon, Joseph Banks, Benjamin Barton, Charles Bonaparte, Alexandre Brongniart, Augustin de Candolle, Georges Cuvier, Amos Eaton, Asa Gray, William Jackson Hooker, Muhlenberg, Ord, Paolo Savi, James Edward Smith, William Swainson, and John Torrey, as well as prominent leaders of the day, including John Adams, De Witt Clinton, Eleuthère Irénée du Pont, George IV, Thomas Jefferson, and Joel Roberts Poinsett. A total of 346 letters are listed.More important, Boewe has given us the benefit of his many years of scholarly searching and thinking about Rafinesque in his discussions entitled “Hints about Unlisted Titles,” “Letters as a Source of Leads,” and “Hints in Publications.” We learn, for example, that Rafinesque signed some of his papers simply as “Constantine” or “Linneus.” The Mantissa makes it abundantly clear why arriving at a complete account of Rafinesque's writings is an elusive goal, but Boewe shows us that the attempt still offers an exciting trail to follow. (shrink)

In many learning or inference tasks human behavior approximates that of a Bayesian ideal observer, suggesting that, at some level, cognition can be described as Bayesian inference. However, a number of findings have highlighted an intriguing mismatch between human behavior and standard assumptions about optimality: People often appear to make decisions based on just one or a few samples from the appropriate posterior probability distribution, rather than using the full distribution. Although sampling-based approximations are a common way to implement Bayesian (...) inference, the very limited numbers of samples often used by humans seem insufficient to approximate the required probability distributions very accurately. Here, we consider this discrepancy in the broader framework of statistical decision theory, and ask: If people are making decisions based on samples—but as samples are costly—how many samples should people use to optimize their total expected or worst-case reward over a large number of decisions? We find that under reasonable assumptions about the time costs of sampling, making many quick but locally suboptimal decisions based on very few samples may be the globally optimal strategy over long periods. These results help to reconcile a large body of work showing sampling-based or probability matching behavior with the hypothesis that human cognition can be understood in Bayesian terms, and they suggest promising future directions for studies of resource-constrained cognition. (shrink)

What implications, if any, does evolutionary biology have for metaethics? Many believe that our evolutionary background supports a deflationary metaethics, providing a basis at least for debunking ethical realism. Some arguments for this conclusion appeal to claims about the etiology of the mental capacities we employ in ethical judgment, while others appeal to the etiology of the content of our moral beliefs. In both cases the debunkers’ claim is that the causal roles played by evolutionary factors raise deep epistemic problems (...) for realism: if ethical truths are objective or independent of our evaluative attitudes, as realists maintain, then we lose our justification for our ethical beliefs once we become aware of the evolutionary shaping of our ethical capacities or beliefs, which would not have disposed us reliably to track independent ethical truths; realism, they claim, thus saddles us with ethical skepticism. I distinguish and spell out various evolutionary debunking arguments along these lines and argue that they all fail: the capacity etiology argument fails to raise any special or serious problem for realism, and the content etiology arguments all rely on strong explanatory claims about our moral beliefs that are simply not supported by the science unless it is supplemented by philosophical claims that just beg the question against realism from the start. While the various debunking arguments do bring out some interesting commitments of ethical realism, and even raise some good challenges as realists develop positive moral epistemologies, they fall far short of their debunking ambitions. (shrink)

This paper presents a skill learning model CLARION. Different from existing models of mostly high-level skill learning that use a top-down approach (that is, turning declarative knowledge into procedural knowledge through practice), we adopt a bottom-up approach toward low-level skill learning, where procedural knowledge develops first and declarative knowledge develops later. Our model is formed by integrating connectionist, reinforcement, and symbolic learning methods to perform on-line reactive learning. It adopts a two-level dual-representation framework (Sun, 1995), with a combination of localist (...) and distributed representation. We compare the model with human data in a minefield navigation task, demonstrating some match between the model and human data in several respects. (shrink)

Following recent arguments that cultural practices in wild animal populations have important conservation implications, we argue that recognizing captive animals as cultural has important welfare implications. Having a culture is of deep importance for cultural animals, wherever they live. Without understanding the cultural capacities of captive animals, we will be left with a deeply impoverished view of what they need to flourish. Best practices for welfare should therefore require concern for animals’ cultural needs, but the relationship between culture and welfare (...) is also extremely complex, requiring us to rethink standard assumptions about what constitutes and contributes to welfare. (shrink)

Existing approaches to the relation of law and society have for a long time seen law as either autonomous or grounded in society. Drawing on untapped resources in social theory, Fitzpatrick finds law pivotally placed in and beyond modernity. Being itself of the modern, law takes impetus and identity from modern society and, through incorporating 'pre-modern' elements of savagery and the sacred, it comes to constitute that very society. When placing law in such a crucial position for modernity, (...) class='Hi'>Fitzpatrick ranges widely from the colonizations of the Americas, through the thought of the European Enlightenment, and engages finally with contemporary arrogations of the 'global'. By extending his previous work on the origins of modernity, this book makes a significant contribution to continuing developments in law and society, legal philosophy, and jurisprudence. (shrink)

This original book brings together some of the world's leading critics of economics orthodoxy to debate Lawson's contribution to the economics literature.

Empirical studies of the social lives of non-human primates, cetaceans, and other social animals have prompted scientists and philosophers to debate the question of whether morality and moral cognition exists in non-human animals. Some researchers have argued that morality does exist in several animal species, others that these species may possess various evolutionary building blocks or precursors to morality, but not quite the genuine article, while some have argued that nothing remotely resembling morality can be found in any non-human species. (...) However, these different positions on animal morality generally appear to be motivated more by different conceptions of how the term “morality” is to be defined than by empirical disagreements about animal social behaviour and psychology. After delving deeper into the goals and methodologies of various of the protagonists, I argue that, despite appearances, there are actually two importantly distinct debates over animal morality going on, corresponding to two quite different ways of thinking about what it is to define “morality”, “moral cognition”, and associated notions. Several apparent skirmishes in the literature are thus cases of researchers simply talking past each other. I then focus on what I take to be the core debate over animal morality, which is concerned with understanding the nature and phylogenetic distribution of morality conceived as a psychological natural kind. I argue that this debate is in fact largely terminological and non-substantive. Finally, I reflect on how this core debate might best be re-framed. (shrink)

This paper considers the question of whether chimpanzees possess at least a primitive sense of normativity: i.e., some ability to internalize and enforce social norms—rules governing appropriate and inappropriate behaviour—within their social groups, and to make evaluations of others’ behaviour in light of such norms. A number of scientists and philosophers have argued that such a sense of normativity does exist in chimpanzees and in several other non-human primate and mammalian species. However, the dominant view in the scientific and philosophical (...) literature is that psychological capacities for social norms evolved uniquely in the human lineage, after our last common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos. After reviewing some of the existing evidence for normative capacity in chimpanzees, I defend the thesis of chimpanzee normativity against three key theoretical objections that have been presented in the literature, each of which have played a part in motivating the dominant sceptical position. I argue that, while we still have much to learn about the nature and extent of the normative capacities of other animals, there is strong prima facie evidence for social norms and normative evaluation in chimpanzees and the main theoretical objections to chimpanzee normativity are not at all compelling. (shrink)

This book provides the first comprehensive introduction to Simone de Beauvoir's philosophical thought. Beauvoir has long been recognized as the twentieth century's leading feminist writer, but the full extent of her significance as a philosopher is just coming into focus. This study examines the history of Beauvoir's development into one of the most original and influential thinkers of her era. The Fullbrooks begin with an account of Beauvoir's formation as a philosopher. They then explore her early writing on philosophical method (...) and the ways this shaped her fiction. The book traces the development of Beauvoir's central theories of embodied consciousness and intersubjectivity, and examines her concepts of the "individual" and the "social other". An analysis of Beauvoir's ethics of liberation leads to philosophical readings of her great works of applied ethics, The Second Sex and Old Age. Finally, Beauvoir's contribution to continuing debates about consciousness, the body, the self and the other is reassessed. The publication of this introduction to Beauvoir's philosophy is an important contribution to the current renaissance of Beauvoir studies. Clear, accessible and lively, this book is essential reading not only for students of Beauvoir but for anyone interested in the submerged record of women's impact on philosophy. (shrink)

Do we invent our moral absolutes in order to make society workable? Or are these enduring principles expressed to us by some transcendent or Godlike authority? Efforts to resolve this conundrum have perplexed, sometimes inflamed, our best minds for centuries, but the natural sciences are telling us more and more about the choices we make and our reasons for making them.

The purpose here is to explore metaphorical conceptions of the self in a fourth century B.C.E. Chinese text, the Zhuangzi, from the perspective of cognitive linguistics and the contemporary theory of metaphor. It is argued that the contemporary theory of metaphor provides scholars with an exciting new theoretical grounding for the study of comparative thought, as well as a concrete methodology for undertaking the comparative project. What is seen when the Zhuangzi is examined from the perspective of metaphor theory is (...) that conceptions of the self portrayed in this text are based on a relatively small set of interrelated conceptual metaphors, and that the metaphysics built into the Zhuangzi's classical Chinese metaphors resonates strongly with the (mostly unconscious) metaphysical assumptions built into the metaphors of modern American English. This should not be surprising, considering the claims of contemporary cognitive linguists that the metaphoric schemas making up the foundation of human abstract conceptual life are not arbitrarily created ex nihilo, but rather emerge from common embodied experience and are conceptual, rather than merely linguistic, in nature. (shrink)

(2013). Sickle Cell Disease and the “Difficult Patient” Conundrum. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 3-10. doi: 10.1080/15265161.2013.767954.

Two self-paced reading experiments investigated several factors that influence the comprehension complexity of singly-embedded relative clauses (RCs) in English. Three factors were manipulated in Experiment 1, resulting in three main effects. First, object-extracted RCs were read more slowly than subject-extracted RCs, replicating previous work. Second, RCs that were embedded within the sentential complement of a noun were read more slowly than comparable RCs that were not embedded in this way. Third, and most interestingly, object-modifying RCs were read more slowly than (...) subject-modifying relative clauses. This result contradicts one of the central tenets of complexity research: that nested sentences are harder to understand than their right-branching equivalents (e.g., Miller and Chomsky 1963). It is hypothesized that this result followed from a combination of two information-flow factors: (1) background information is usually presented early in a sentence; and (2) restrictive RCs—the form of the RCs in Experiment 1—usually convey background information. Experiment 2 tested this hypothesis by comparing restrictive and non-restrictive RCs— which generally provide new information—in both subject- and objectmodifying positions. The results of the experiment were as predicted by the information-flow account: Only restrictive RCs were read more slowly when modifying objects. It is concluded that both resource and information-flow factors need to be considered in explaining RC complexity effects. (shrink)

Anthropologist Gregory Bateson says that a sense of the fundamental unity of science was once achieved by successful specialist scientists expanding into borderline areas of research. I distinguish two ways in which this expansion can occur and note how one of these ways was, from Bateson’s perspective, troublesome for social anthropology.

I present a sense of the term “ideal theory” based on Joseph Raz’s response to the situation of a lifeguard faced with three drowning on one side and two on the other and unable to save all. From what is of value, such a theory builds up a conception of an ideal political state or an aspect of it which we have reason to realize, but ignoring whether it is possible for us to realize this.

Timothy Williamson objects that we do not have any reason to regard reflective equilibrium as a philosophical method, whether good or bad. In this paper, I propose a less demanding account of when a method is being described.

Morgan’s Canon is a very widely endorsed methodological principle in animal psychology, believed to be vital for a rigorous, scientific approach to the study of animal cognition. In contrast I argue that Morgan’s Canon is unjustified, pernicious and unnecessary. I identify two main versions of the Canon and show that they both suffer from very serious problems. I then suggest an alternative methodological principle that captures all of the genuine methodological benefits that Morgan’s Canon can bring but suffers from none (...) of its problems. (shrink)

This paper considers John Doris, Stephen Stich, Alexandra Plakias, and colleagues’ recent attempts to utilize empirical studies of cross-cultural variation in moral judgment to support a version of the argument from disagreement against moral realism. Crucially, Doris et al. claim that the moral disagreements highlighted by these studies are not susceptible to the standard ‘diffusing’ explanations realists have developed in response to earlier versions of the argument. I argue that plausible hypotheses about the cognitive processes underlying ordinary moral judgment and (...) the acquisition of moral norms, when combined with a popular philosophical account of moral inquiry—the method of reflective equilibrium—undercut the anti-realist force of the moral disagreements that Doris et al. describe. I also show that Stich's recent attempt to provide further theoretical support for Doris et al.'s case is unsuccessful. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a problem for regarding the reflective equilibrium and original position methods as consistent. I do not prove that there is an inconsistency, but there is a puzzle of how the two methods can be made consistent. The concern about inconsistency is because the former method allows for a kind of historical bias, as noted by T.H. Irwin, whereas the latter method seeks to guard against historical bias.

In this paper, I present some responses to an argument made by an economist in an online video: that when Britain leaves the European Union, it will be taking many high ranking universities with it, which will lead to an innovation deficit in the union. I present some responses by means of a pastiche of a widely read European fiction writer.

As organizational leaders worry about the appalling low percentage of people who feel engaged in their work, academics are trying to understand what causes an increase in engagement. We collected survey data from 231 team members from two organizations. We examined the impact of team members’ emotional intelligence (EI) and their perception of shared personal vision, shared positive mood, and perceived organizational support (POS) on the members’ degree of organizational engagement. We found shared vision, shared mood, and POS have a (...) direct, positive association with engagement. In addition, shared vision and POS interact with EI to positively influence engagement. Besides highlighting the importance of shared personal vision, positive mood, and POS, our study contributes to the emergent understanding of EI by revealing EI’s amplifying effect on shared vision and POS in relation to engagement. We conclude by discussing the research and practical implications of this study. (shrink)