In his recent article Should Trees Have Standing? Revisited" Christopher D. Stone has effectively withdrawn his proposal that natural objects be granted legal rights, in response to criticism from the Feinberg/McCloskey camp. Stone now favors a weaker proposal that natural objects be granted what he calls legal "considerateness". I argue that Stone's retreat is both unnecessary and undesirable. I develop the notion of a "de facto" legal right and argue that species already have de facto legal rights as statutory beneficiaries (...) of the "Endangered Species Act of 1973." I conclude that granting certain nonhuman natural entities legal rights is both more important and less costly that Stone and his critics have realized, and that it is not Stone's original proposal which needs rethinking, but the concept of interests at work in the Feinberg/McCloskey position. (shrink)

The greatest philosopher of the modern experience, G. W. F. Hegel, was deeply rooted in Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza, and he synthesized the riches of Kantian and post-Kantian idealism. He put dynamic panentheism into play in modern theology, and in some way he inspired nearly every great philosophical idea and movement of the past two centuries. Yet no thinker is as routinely misconstrued as Hegel, partly because his greatest work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, defies categorization and is notoriously hard to (...) understand. In the mid-1790s, while Immanuel Kant was elderly and fading and J. G. Fichte was prominent for amplifying Kant’s subjective ethical idealism, a group of youthful post-Kantian .. (shrink)

My central goal in this paper is to interpret what Quine says in his Kant lectures about the norms of epistemology and the doctrinal and conceptual tasks of epistemology—the tasks, respectively, of constructing good theories and of clarifying meanings—in light of what he says about these topics in several of his earlier and later works. I argue that despite one puzzling passage in the Kant lectures that misleadingly suggests otherwise, the norms of Quine’s epistemology are exclusively doctrinal, not conceptual.

Gary L. Francione is a law professor and leading philosopher of animal rights theory. Robert Garner is a political theorist specializing in the philosophy and politics of animal protection. Francione maintains that we have no moral justification for using nonhumans and argues that because animals are property—or economic commodities—laws or industry practices requiring "humane" treatment will, as a general matter, fail to provide any meaningful level of protection. Garner favors a version of animal rights that focuses on eliminating animal (...) suffering and adopts a protectionist approach, maintaining that although the traditional animal-welfare ethic is philosophically flawed, it can contribute strategically to the achievement of animal-rights ends. As they spar, Francione and Garner deconstruct the animal protection movement in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, and elsewhere, discussing the practices of such organizations as PETA, which joins with McDonald's and other animal users to "improve" the slaughter of animals. They also examine American and European laws and campaigns from both the rights and welfare perspectives, identifying weaknesses and strengths that give shape to future legislation and action. (shrink)

Since the 1970s Gary Watson has published a series of brilliant and highly influential essays on human action, examining such questions as: in what ways are we free and not free, rational and irrational, responsible or not for what we do? Moral philosophers and philosophers of action will welcome this collection, representing one of the most important bodies of work in the field.

_An expansive and ambitious intellectual history of democratic socialism from one of the world’s leading intellectual historians and social ethicists_ The fallout from twenty years of neoliberal economic globalism has sparked a surge of interest in the old idea of democratic socialism—a democracy in which the people control the economy and government, no group dominates any other, and every citizen is free, equal, and included. With a focus on the intertwined legacies of Christian socialism and Social Democratic politics in Britain (...) and Germany, this book traces the story of democratic socialism from its birth in the nineteenth century through the mid‑1960s. Examining the tenets on which the movement was founded and how it adapted to different cultural, religious, and economic contexts from its beginnings through the social and political traumas of the twentieth century, Gary Dorrien reminds us that Christian socialism paved the way for all liberation theologies that make the struggles of oppressed peoples the subject of redemption. He argues for a decentralized economic democracy and anti-imperial internationalism. (shrink)

Drawing heavily on recent empirical research to update R.M. Hare's two-level utilitarianism and expand Hare's treatment of "intuitive level rules," Gary Varner considers in detail the theory's application to animals while arguing that Hare should have recognized a hierarchy of persons, near-persons, & the merely sentient.

The discussion of Kant's Practical Philosophy has been marred by viewing it as purely formalist and centered only on the categorical imperative. This important new study sets out a much more vivid account of the nature and range of Kant's concerns demonstrating his commitment to the notion of rational religion and including extensive discussion of his treatment of evil. Culminating with accounts of property, the nature of right and virtue, this work presents Kant as a vital revolutionary thinker.

Gary Hatfield examines theories of spatial perception from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century and provides a detailed analysis of the works of Kant and Helmholtz, who adopted opposing stances on whether central questions about spatial perception were fully amenable to natural-scientific treatment. At stake were the proper understanding of the relationships among sensation, perception, and experience, and the proper methodological framework for investigating the mental activities of judgment, understanding, and reason issues which remain at the core of philosophical (...) psychology and cognitive science. (shrink)

Since his pioneering application of economic analysis to racial discrimination, Gary S. Becker has shown that an economic approach can provide a unified framework for understanding all human behavior. In a highly readable selection of essays Becker applies this approach to various aspects of human activity, including social interactions; crime and punishment; marriage, fertility, and the family; and "irrational" behavior. "Becker's highly regarded work in economics is most notable in the imaginative application of 'the economic approach' to a surprising (...) breadth of human activity. Becker's essays over the years have inevitably inspired a surge of research activity in testimony to the richness of his insights into human activities lying 'outside' the traditionally conceived economic markets. Perhaps no economist in our time has contributed more to expanding the area of interest to economists than Becker, and a number of these thought-provoking essays are collected in this book."—Choice Gary Becker was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Science in 1992. (shrink)

Two leaders in the field offer a compelling analysis of the current state of the art and reveal the steps we must take to achieve a truly robust artificial intelligence. Despite the hype surrounding AI, creating an intelligence that rivals or exceeds human levels is far more complicated than we have been led to believe. Professors Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis have spent their careers at the forefront of AI research and have witnessed some of the greatest milestones in (...) the field, but they argue that a computer beating a human in Jeopardy! does not signal that we are on the doorstep of fully autonomous cars or superintelligent machines. The achievements in the field thus far have occurred in closed systems with fixed sets of rules, and these approaches are too narrow to achieve genuine intelligence. The real world, in contrast, is wildly complex and open-ended. How can we bridge this gap? What will the consequences be when we do? Taking inspiration from the human mind, Marcus and Davis explain what we need to advance AI to the next level, and suggest that if we are wise along the way, we won't need to worry about a future of machine overlords. If we focus on endowing machines with common sense and deep understanding, rather than simply focusing on statistical analysis and gatherine ever larger collections of data, we will be able to create an AI we can trust--in our homes, our cars, and our doctors' offices. Rebooting AI provides a lucid, clear-eyed assessment of the current science and offers an inspiring vision of how a new generation of AI can make our lives better. (shrink)

This book explores the relationship between romantic love and personal identity by examining work in both areas by philosophers in the continental and analytic traditions. Foster finds a promising connection between love and identity in the Sartrean influenced notion of embodied love.

Volume XXIX contains papers and commentaries presented to the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy during academic year 2012-13. The papers feature Plato's Republic and Timaeus, examine Aristotle on generation, analogy and method, and analyze Proclus on first principles.

Generically, “scientific methodology” denotes whatever generalized and systematically formulable procedures may be behind the successful pursuit of science. Since the ancient Greeks, people reflecting on science have been strongly attracted to the idea that there is a single comprehensive method employed in any genuinely scientific work. We will begin with this idealizing assumption, although we will later encounter ways in which it might be doubted.

Includes more than 100 photographs of views from overlooks and of inner-canyon sites by accalimed photographer Gary Ladd. In addition, this guide also features facts about dozens of inner-canyon rock formations and other features as well as a reader-friendly narrative concerning the geology, human history, prehistory, ecology, and weather patterns of one of the seven natural wonders of the world.

Over the last generation, the womanist idea--and the tradition blooming around it--has emerged as an important response to separatism, domination, and oppression. Gary L. Lemons gathers a diverse group of writers to discuss their scholarly and personal experiences with the womanist spirit of women of color feminisms. Feminist and womanist-identified educators, students, performers, and poets model the powerful ways that crossing borders of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation-state affiliation(s) expands one's existence. At the same time, they bear witness (...) to how the self-liberating theory and practice of women of color feminism changes one's life. Throughout, the essayists come together to promote an unwavering vein of activist comradeship capable of building political alliances dedicated to liberty and social justice. Contributors: M. Jacqui Alexander, Dora Arreola, Andrea Assaf, Kendra N. Bryant, Rudolph P. Byrd, Atika Chaudhary, Paul T. Corrigan, Fanni V. Green, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Susan Hoeller, Ylce Irizarry, M. Thandabantu Iverson, Gary L. Lemons, Layli Maparyan, and Erica C. Sutherlin. (shrink)

Purely parallel neural networks can model object recognition in brief displays – the same conditions under which illusory conjunctions (the incorrect combination of features into perceived objects in a stimulus array) have been demonstrated empirically (Treisman 1986; Treisman & Gelade 1980). Correcting errors of illusory conjunction is the “tag-assignment” problem for a purely parallel processor: the problem of assigning a spatial tag to nonspatial features, feature combinations, and objects. This problem must be solved to model human object recognition over a (...) longer time scale. Our model simulates both the parallel processes that may underlie illusory conjunctions and the serial processes that may solve the tag-assignment problem in normal perception. One component of the model extracts pooled features and another provides attentional tags that correct illusory conjunctions. Our approach addresses two questions: (i) How can objects be identified from simultaneously attended features in a parallel, distributed representation? (ii) How can the spatial selectional requirements of such an attentional process be met by a separation of pathways for spatial and nonspatial processing? Our analysis of these questions yields a neurally plausible simulation of tag assignment based on synchronizing feature processing activity in a spatial focus of attention. (shrink)

Gary Steiner argues that ethologists and philosophers in the analytic and continental traditions have largely failed to advance an adequate explanation of animal behavior. Critically engaging the positions of Marc Hauser, Daniel Dennett, Donald Davidson, John Searle, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, among others, Steiner shows how the Western philosophical tradition has forced animals into human experiential categories in order to make sense of their cognitive abilities and moral status and how desperately we need a new approach to animal (...) rights. Steiner rejects the traditional assumption that a lack of formal rationality confers an inferior moral status on animals vis-à-vis human beings. Instead, he offers an associationist view of animal cognition in which animals grasp and adapt to their environments without employing concepts or intentionality. Steiner challenges the standard assumption of liberal individualism according to which humans have no obligations of justice toward animals. Instead, he advocates a "cosmic holism" that attributes a moral status to animals equivalent to that of people. Arguing for a relationship of justice between humans and nature, Steiner emphasizes our kinship with animals and the fundamental moral obligations entailed by this kinship. (shrink)

Psychology considered as a natural science began as Aristotelian "physics" or "natural philosophy" of the soul, conceived as an animating power that included vital, sensory, and rational functions. C. Wolff restricted the term " psychology " to sensory, cognitive, and volitional functions and placed the science under metaphysics, coordinate with cosmology. Near the middle of the eighteenth century, Krueger, Godart, and Bonnet proposed approaching the mind with the techniques of the new natural science. At nearly the same time, Scottish thinkers (...) placed psychology within moral philosophy, but distinguished its "physical" laws from properly moral laws. British and French visual theorists developed mathematically precise theories of size and distance perception; they created instruments to test these theories and to measure visual phenomena such as the duration of visual impressions. By the end of the century there was a flourishing discipline of empirical psychology in Germany, with a professorship, textbooks, and journals. The practitioners of empirical psychology at this time typically were dualists who included mental phenomena within nature. Accordingly, psychology as a natural scientific disciplines was not invented in the 18th and 19th centuries, but *remade* from the extant empirical psychology. (shrink)

_Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents_ is the first-ever comprehensive examination of views of animals in the history of Western philosophy, from Homeric Greece to the twentieth century. In recent decades, increased interest in this area has been accompanied by scholars’ willingness to conceive of animal experience in terms of human mental capacities: consciousness, self-awareness, intention, deliberation, and in some instances, at least limited moral agency. This conception has been facilitated by a shift from behavioral to cognitive ethology, and by attempts to (...) affirm the essential similarities between the psychophysical makeup of human beings and animals. Gary Steiner sketches the terms of the current debates about animals and relates these to their historical antecedents, focusing on both the dominant anthropocentric voices and those recurring voices that instead assert a fundamental kinship relation between human beings and animals. He concludes with a discussion of the problem of balancing the need to recognize a human indebtedness to animals and the natural world with the need to preserve a sense of the uniqueness and dignity of the human individual. (shrink)

With its unique combination of depth, clarity, and humor that has enchanted millions, this beloved classic by bestselling author Gary Zukav opens the fascinating world of quantum physics to readers with no mathematical or technical background. "Wu Li" is the Chinese phrase for physics. It means "patterns of organic energy," but it also means "nonsense," "my way," "I clutch my ideas," and "enlightenment." These captivating ideas frame Zukav's evocative exploration of quantum mechanics and relativity theory. Delightfully easy to read, (...) The Dancing Wu Li Masters illuminates the compelling powers at the core of all we know. (shrink)

In preparation for examining the place of introspective evidence in scientific psychology, the chapter begins by clarifying what introspection has been supposed to show, and why some concluded that it couldn't deliver. This requires a brief excursus into the various uses to which introspection was supposed to have been put by philosophers and psychologists in the modern period, together with a summary of objections. It then reconstructs some actual uses of introspection (or related techniques, differently monikered) in the early days (...) of experimental psychology. It distinguishes broader and narrower conceptions of introspection and argues that recent critics have tended to misdescribe how introspection was supposed to work. Drawing upon the broader conception of introspection, it argues that introspective reports are ineliminable in perceptual psychology. It concludes with some examples of such ineliminable uses of introspective reports in both earlier and recent perceptual psychology. (shrink)

Nevertheless, when we cannot specify how a statement may actually be false it has a special methodological status for us, according to Putnam—it is contextually a priori . In these circumstances, he suggests, it is epistemically reasonable for us to accept the statement without evidence and hold it immune from disconfirmation.

If humans are sanctified by a triune God, part of the success of spiritual formation depends on understanding how one’s agency depends upon the Trinity. Some sanctifying actions require causal notions like “obedience,” “yielding,” “participation,” and “cooperation.” So, how is a Christian going to understand them? The purpose of this paper, then, is twofold: develop a model of agency that provides an adequate account of understanding how one’s agency depends upon the Trinity; and explain how this model can increase the (...) reliability of one’s perceptual capacities to perceive one’s agency cooperating with the Trinity in acts of sanctification. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss full-blooded Platonism as a response to the skeptical problem in the philosophy of mathematics as to how empirical beings can cognize non-empirical mathematical objects. I then attempt to develop an analogous position regarding the applicability of concepts to reality in response to the skeptical problem regarding how we can cognize an objective reality through human-constructed concepts. If all concepts meeting certain minimal conditions structure reality under some aspect, then objective knowledge is possible, regardless of how (...) these concepts arose historically. (shrink)

In “Cogito and the History of Madness,” Derrida maintains that crisis is endemic to philosophy rather than being, as Husserl forcefully argued, a temporary condition that can and must be overcome through the resources of reason. A reflection on the place of madness in Descartes's Meditations serves as the point of departure for demonstrating that Derrida has done an injustice to philosophy; and a comparison of Derrida's views with the thought of Husserl, Heidegger, and Nietzsche reveals that Derrida's position in (...) “Cogito and the History of Madness” entails a sacrifice of the notion of responsibility that lies at the center of meaningful historical action. (shrink)