Contrary to Vaesen's argument that humans are unique with respect to nine cognitive capacities essential for tool use, we suggest that although such cognitive processes contribute to variation in tool use, it does not follow that these capacities arenecessaryfor tool use, nor that tool use shaped cognition per se, given the available data in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral biology.

Moving from viruses, vaccines, and copycat murder to gay panics, xenophobia, and psychopaths, _Transforming Contagion_ energetically fuses critical humanities and social science perspectives into a boundary-smashing interdisciplinary collection on contagion. The contributors provocatively suggest contagion to be as full of possibilities for revolution and resistance as it is for the descent into madness, malice, and extensive state control. The infectious practices rooted in politics, film, psychological exchanges, social movements, the classroom, and the circulation of a literary text or meme on (...) social media compellingly reveal patterns that emerge in those attempts to re-route, quarantine, define, or even exacerbate various contagions. (shrink)

Surviving School Stress provides the reader with fundamental components of different types of stress, stressors, and strategies for interventions. In Part I, Dr. Lebrun breaks down the individual components of each type of stress and provides readers with a clear understanding of the key concepts and essential questions needed to be able to effectively intervene with children and adolescents within a school or home setting. Part II of the book provides a framework for educators to use to guide small and (...) large group lessons in a school setting. Each lesson can be individually presented. The small group lessons are meant to guide students in a very focused direction. The general classroom lessons can be adapted depending on the needs of the group within that particular classroom. This resource is suitable for all special education teachers, general classroom teachers at the K-12 levels, behavior consultants, and school mental health counselors. (shrink)

Eric Nelson has recently argued that John Rawls’ interpretation of the maxim to respect persons as ends in themselves which grants priority to our least-advantaged citizens violates the liberal commitment to neutrality towards each person’s capability to choose her or his conception of the good. This violation is revealed by the sectarian character of Martha Nussbaum’s list of capabilities, her Aristotelian extension of Rawls’ distributive ethics. I argue that Nelson advances an elitist interpretation of the non-violability of persons, in (...) which the capabilities of oneself are set in opposition to those of an other. He thus overlooks for his purposes the anti-sacrificial telos of the Rawlsian principles of justice which articulates the capabilities of oneself as another. Nelson’s elitism may itself be traced to Nussbaum’s rejection of Rawls’ distributive figuration of capability, the Aristotelian heritage of which is developed by Paul Ricoeur and which underwrites civic phronēsis on societal norms of reciprocity. (shrink)

One of the deepest and longest-lasting debates in ethics concerns a version of the Euthyphro question: are choiceworthy things choiceworthy because agents have certain attitudes toward them or are they choiceworthy independent of any agents’ attitudes? Reasons internalists, such as Bernard Williams, Michael Smith, Mark Schroeder, Sharon Street, Kate Manne, Julia Markovits, and David Sobel answer in the first way. They think that all of an agent’s normative reasons for action are grounded in facts about that agent’s pro-attitudes (e.g., her (...) desires, valuing states, normative judgments). According to the most popular brand of internalism, idealizing internalism, an agent’s reasons are grounded, not in her actual pro-attitudes, but rather in what her pro-attitudes would be in suitably idealized conditions. Idealizing internalists presuppose that, for any agent with an irrational set of attitudes, there is one uniquely rational set that that agent would have if she were to undergo the relevant idealizing process. I argue that this assumption is false and that it raises two puzzles for idealizing internalism: one about the existence of practical reasons and another about their normative weight. I argue that idealizing internalists have an adequate solution to the first puzzle but not the second. Indeed, when they try to solve the second puzzle, they confront a dilemma. This second puzzle and the associated dilemma thus constitutes a powerful, but so far unnoticed, difficulty for idealizing internalism. (shrink)

1. Introduction; Elisabeth A. Lloyd and Eric Winsberg.- Section 1: Confirmation and Evidence.- 2. The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change: How Do We Know We’re Not Wrong?; Naomi Oreskes.- 3. Satellite Data and Climate Models Redux.- 3a. Introduction to Chapter 3: Satellite Data and Climate Models; Elisabeth A. Lloyd.- Ch. 3b Fact Sheet to "Consistency of Modelled and Observed Temperature Trends in the Tropical Troposphere"; Benjamin D. Santer et al..- Ch. 3c Reprint of "Consistency of Modelled and Observed Temperature (...) Trends in the Tropical Troposphere"; Benjamin D. Santer et al..- 4. The Role of ’Complex’ Empiricism in the Debates about Satellite Data and Climate Models; Elisabeth A. Lloyd.- 5. Reconciling Climate Model/Data Discrepancies: The Case of the Trees That Didn’t Bark; Michael Mann.- 6. Downscaling of Climate Information; Linda O. Mearns et al..- Section 2: Uncertainties and Robustness.- 7. The Significance of Robust Model Projections; Wendy S. Parker.- 8. Building Trust, Removing Doubt? Robustness Analysis and Climate Modeling; Jay Odenbaugh.- Section 3: Climate Models as Guides to Policy.- 9. Climate Model Confirmation: From Philosophy to Predicting Climate in the Real World; Reto Knutti.- 10. Uncertainty in Climate Science and Climate Policy; Jonathan Rougier and Michel Crucifix.- 11. Communicating Uncertainty to Policy Makers: The Ineliminable Role of Values; Eric Winsberg.- 12. Modeling Climate Policies: A Critical Look at Integrated Assessment Models; Mathias Frisch.- 13. Modelling Mitigation and Adaptation Policies to Predict their Effectiveness: The Limits of Randomized Controlled Trials; Alexandre Marcellesi and Nancy D. Cartwright. (shrink)

In his Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Robert Musil has the character Clarisse comment on a debate between her husband, Walter, and Ulrich, the “man without qualities,” about the “impossible” relation between art and life. “‘Ich find das doch sehr wichtig,’ sagte sie, ‘daß in uns allen etwas Unmögliches ist. Es erklärt so vieles. Ich habe, wie ich zuhörte, den Eindruck gehabt, wenn man uns aufschneiden könnte, so würde unser ganzes Leben vielleicht wie ein Ring aussehen, bloß so rund um etwas.’ (...) Sie hatte schon vorher ihren Ehering abgezogen und guckte nur durch seine Öffnung gegen die belichtete Wand. ‘Ich meine, in seiner Mitte ist doch nichts, und doch sieht er genau so aus, als ob es ihm nur darauf ankäme.’” The English translation is even stronger: “There is nothing inside, and yet it looks as though that were precisely what matters most.” This essay interrogates this “nothing” that matters most in relation to the crown of royal authority, the “hollow crown,” as Richard II calls it in Shakespeare’s play. I further flesh out the matter and materiality of this bit of nothing in relation to the struggle between Creon and Antigone in Sophocles’ play about the foundations of royal authority. The queen in the former play and Antigone in the latter are presented as being too much sad, as manifesting a grief that pertains to this nothing, to an indeterminate loss they both “encyst” (upon) in their subjective stances. (shrink)

Between 1933 and 1938, Eric Voegelin published four books that brought him into increasingly open opposition to the Hitler regime in Germany. As a result, he was forced to leave Austria in 1938, narrowly escaping arrest by the Gestapo as he fled to Switzerland and later to the United States. Twenty years later, he was invited to Munich to become Director of the new Institute of Political Science at Ludwig-Maximilian University. In 1964, Voegelin gave a series of memorable lectures (...) on what he considered "the central German experiential problem" of his time: Adolf Hitler's rise to power, the reasons for it, and its consequences for post-Nazi Germany. For Voegelin, these questions demanded a scrutiny of the mentality of individual Germans and of the order of German society during and after the Nazi period. _Hitler and the Germans,_ published here for the first time, offers Voegelin's most extensive and detailed critique of the Hitler era. Voegelin interprets this era in terms of the basic diagnostic tools provided by the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, Judeo-Christian culture, and contemporary German-language writers like Heimito von Doderer, Karl Kraus, Thomas Mann, and Robert Musil. Responding to publications on National Socialist Germany, Voegelin discusses the historian Percy Schramm's "Anatomy of a Dictator," along with studies of the churches and the legal profession. His inquiry uncovers a historiography that was substantially unhistoric: a German Evangelical Church that misinterpreted the Gospel, a German Catholic Church that denied universal humanity, and a legal process enmeshed in criminal homicide. While most of the lectures deal with what Voegelin called his "descent into the depths" of the moral and spiritual abyss of Nazism and its aftermath, they also point toward a restoration of order. His lecture "The Greatness of Max Weber" shows how Weber, while affected by the culture within which Hitler came into power, has already gone beyond it through his anguished recovery of the experience of transcendence. _Hitler and the Germans_ provides a profound alternative approach to the topic of the individual German's entanglement in the Hitler regime and its continuing implications. This comprehensive reading of the Nazi period has yet to be matched. (shrink)

This book considers how observations about the past influence future behaviour, as expressed in language. Focusing on information gathered from speech and other evidence sources, the author offers a model of how judgements about reliability can be made, and how such judgements factor into how people treat information they acquire via those sources.

Once again available in paperback, Plato is the first half of Eric Voegelin's Plato and Aristotle, the third volume of his five-volume Order and History, which ...

From Clouds to Corsair: Kierkegaard, Aristophanes, and Socrates -- The pure fool and the knight of faith: Wolfram's Parzival and the stages of existence -- From romantic aesthete to Christian analogue: Don Quixote's sallies in Kierkegaard's authorship -- Saying not quite "everything just as it is": Shakespeare on life's way -- "Sorrow's changeling": irony, humor, and laughter in Kierkegaard and Carlyle.

A new theory of ethnic cleansing based on the most terrible cases and cases of lesser violence. Murderous cleansing is modern, 'the dark side of democracy'. It results where the demos is confused with the ethnos. Danger arises where two rival ethno-national movements each claims 'its own' state over the same territory. Conflict escalates where either the weaker side fights because of aid from outside, or the stronger side believes it can deploy sudden, overwhelming force. Escalation is not simply the (...) work of 'evil elites' or 'primitive peoples'. It results from complex interactions between leaders, militants, and 'core constituencies' of ethno-nationalism. Understanding this complex process helps us devise policies to avoid ethnic cleansing in the future. (shrink)

This essay examines the connection between the concept of autonomy and the concept of an ideal, moral self in Kant’s practical philosophy. Its central thesis is that self-legislation does not rest on the capacity to exempt oneself from nature’s causal network. Instead, it rests on the practical capacity for identification with what Kant calls an individual’s “moral personality.” A person’s ability to identify with this morally ideal version of himself gives shape to his will, enabling him to decide how to (...) act on the basis of reasons that do not stem from desires or inclinations. It thus makes possible a form of volition that is autonomous rather than heteronomous. (shrink)

Offers a history of the philosophy of time and a comparison of the ways of conceiving the temporal, concentrating on European philosophy and its impact the connection between time and money in Western civilization.

In “A Short Refutation of Ethical Egoism,” Richmond Campbell purports to refute “the view that everyone ought to do what benefits him the most in a given situation.” This is the theory which is “sometimes called impersonal ethical egoism ” [249). Campbell takes the following proposition as fundamental to his refutation of IEE.I. If an agent ought to do something in a given situation and another agent ought to do something in the same situation, then it is not logically impossible (...) for them to do these things in that situation [250].Granted proposition I, Campbell's refutation would require only:II. There is a situation S where an agent M would benefit most from doing X and another agent N would benefit most from doing what would prevent M from doing X [251]. (shrink)

Assuming the position that takes properties to be tropes rather than universals and takes ordinary objects as bundles of tropes, the essay first argues that the Law of the Identity of Indiscernibles survives the challenge raised by Black's "two-sphere universe". It is because the Law of Indiscernibles becomes a trivialconsequence of the assumed trope ontology. The essay then considers four construals of the thesis of Uniqueness differing in strength. The construals are developed in terms of both the possibility that tropes (...) of an object may be transferred to another object and the possibility that objects may survive cross-worldproperty changes. Finally, the essay argues that a trilemma arises from three intuitively innocent claims: (1) that same world objects do not share tropes, (2) that cross world objects may share some (but not all) tropes, and (3) that objects may survive cross-world property changes. And, unfortunately, Indiscernibles plays a role in giving rise to one horn of the trilemma. The essay suggests "ultraessentialism" as a possible way out of the trilemma. (shrink)

This second part of a two-part article (the first part of which appeared in the Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2022) surveys the varying uses made of Kierkegaard’s writings by four twentieth- and, in two of their cases, also twenty-first-century contributors to Religionswissenschaft: Joachim Wach, Mircea Eliade, Wendy Doniger, and Bruce Lincoln, all four of whom happen to have taught at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Far from being irrelevant or being regarded as a theologically-inclined persona non grata by comparatists of (...) religion, Kierkegaard was embraced in three main capacities by these influential contributors to the field: as a datum (mostly in the history of theology and/or philosophy), as a theorist, and, in one case, as an existential soulmate. In Lincoln’s case, the reduction to memes—the memeification—of certain ideas ascribed to Kierkegaard comes under consideration. (shrink)

Though some influentially critical objections have been raised during the ‘classical’ pre-computational simulation philosophy of science tradition, suggesting a more nuanced methodological category for experiments, it safe to say such critical objections have greatly proliferated in philosophical studies dedicated to the role played by computational simulations in science. For instance, Eric Winsberg suggests that computer simulations are methodologically unique in the development of a theory’s models suggesting new epistemic notions of application. This is also echoed in Jeffrey Ramsey’s notions (...) of “transformation reduction,”—i.e., a notion of reduction of a more highly constructive variety. Computer simulations create a broadly continuous arena spanned by normative and descriptive aspects of theory-articulation, as entailed by the notion of transformation reductions occupying a continuous region demarcated by Ernest Nagel’s logical-explanatory “domain-combining reduction” on the one hand, and Thomas Nickels’ heuristic “domain-preserving reduction,” on the other. I extend Winsberg’s and Ramsey’s points here, by arguing that in the field of computational fluid dynamics as well as in other branches of applied physics, the computer plays a constitutively experimental role—supplanting in many cases the more traditional experimental methods such as flow-visualization, etc. In this case, however CFD algorithms act as substitutes, not supplements when it comes to experimental practices. I bring up the constructive example involving the Clifford-Algebraic algorithms for modeling singular phenomena in CFD by Gerik Scheuermann and Steven Mann & Alyn Rockwood who demonstrate that their algorithms offer greater descriptive and explanatory scope than the standard Navier-Stokes approaches. The mathematical distinction between Navier-Stokes-based and Clifford-Algebraic based CFD has essentially to do with the regularization features exhibited to a far greater extent by the latter, than the former. Hence, CACFD indicate that the utilization of computational techniques can be based on principled reasons, as opposed to merely practical. CACFD hence exhibit a new generative role in the field of fluid mechanics, by offering categories of experimental evidence that are optimally descriptive and explanatory—i.e., pace Batterman can be both ontologically and epistemically fundamental. (shrink)

For over one hundred and fifty years G.W.F. Hegel’s ghost has haunted theoretical understanding and practice. His opponents first, and later his defenders, have equally defined their programs against and with his. In this way Hegel’s political thought has both situated and displaced modern political theorizing. This book takes the reception of Hegel’s political thought as a lens through which contemporary methodological and ideological prerogatives are exposed. It traces the nineteenth century origins of the positivist revolt against Hegel’s legacy forward (...) to political science’s turn away from philosophical tradition in the twentieth century. The book critically reviews the subsequent revisionist trend that has eliminated his metaphysics from contemporary considerations of his political thought. It then moves to re-evaluate their relation and defend their inseparability in his major work on politics: the_ Philosophy of Right_. Against this background, the book concludes with an argument for the inherent metaphysical dimension of political theorizing itself. Goodfield takes Hegel’s reception, representation, as well as rejection in Anglo-American scholarship as a mirror in which its metaphysical presuppositions of the political are exceptionally well reflected. It is through such reflection, he argues, that we may begin to come to terms with them. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and readers of political theory and philosophy, Hegel, metaphysics and the philosophy of the social sciences. (shrink)