Ainslie argues that our responses to the threat of our own inconsistency determine the basic fabric of human culture. He suggests that individuals are more like populations of bargaining agents than like the hierarchical command structures envisaged by cognitive psychologists. The forces that create and constrain these populations help us understand so much that is puzzling in human action and interaction: from addictions and other self-defeating behaviors to the experience of willfulness, from pathological over-control and self-deception to subtler forms of (...) behavior such as altruism, sadism, gambling, and the 'social construction' of belief. This book integrates approaches from experimental psychology, philosophy of mind, microeconomics, and decision science to present one of the most profound and expert accounts of human irrationality available. It will be of great interest to philosophers and an important resource for professionals and students in psychology, economics and political science. (shrink)

Global Economy, Global Justice explores a vital question that is suppressed in most economics texts: "what makes for a good economic outcome?" Neoclassical theory embraces the normative perspective of "welfarism" to assess economic outcomes. This volume demonstrates the fatal flaws of this perspective--flaws that stem from objectionable assumptions about human nature, society and science. Exposing these failures, the book obliterates the ethical foundations of global neoliberalism. George DeMartino probes heterodox economic traditions and philosophy in search of an ethically viable (...) alternative to welfarism. Drawing on the work of Amartya Sen, DeMartino proposes the egalitarian principle of the "global harmonization of capabilities" to guide economics. This principle provides a basis for resisting oppression the world over while nevertheless demanding respect for cultural diversity. DeMartino puts this principle to work adjudicating contemporary debates over global policy regimes, and completes thebook with a set of deeply egalitarian global policies for the year 2025. Global Economy, Global Justice 's engaging prose will appeal to those seeking to understand the intersection between economics and political philosophy. Its focus on the normative foundations of contemporary policy disputes makes it unique in the literature on globalization. (shrink)

This is the first book-length defence of liberalism on the basis of value pluralism, complementing and extending the work of Berlin and others.

George Wright - Curley and Martinich in Dubious Battle - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.4 461-476 Curley and Martinich in Dubious Battle George Wright the division of opinion as to the place of religion in the thought of Thomas Hobbes figures today as perhaps the key facet of a general rift in understanding the philosopher's thought and work. A recent conference at University College, London, confirms this observation, but readers (...) of this journal had some time before witnessed an encounter between Edwin Curley, University of Michigan, and A. P. Martinich, University of Texas, which laid out lines of argument that continue to figure in the debate. When two highly accomplished and learned philosophers divide on fundamental points, the result must be of interest. But here the theme itself also compelled attention: Hobbes's theology. Had these dry bones risen? If so, could the dancing angels be far to seek, and what then of the filioque? While there were gestures of accommodation and agreement throughout the exchange, the essentials that divided the two at the beginning largely remained at the end. What assumptions underlay this disagreement and determined its rather unsatisfying conclusion? In answer, I would draw the reader's attention to the peculiarities of the contested concept, that of authorial sincerity: Martinich tenaciously ascribing it to Hobbes's theologus; Curley steadfastly withholding.. (shrink)

An attractor network was trained to compute from word form to semantic representations that were based on subject‐generated features. The model was driven largely by higher‐order semantic structure. The network simulated two recent experiments that employed items included in its training set (McRae and Boisvert, 1998). In Simulation 1, short stimulus onset asynchrony priming was demonstrated for semantically similar items. Simulation 2 reproduced subtle effects obtained by varying degree of similarity. Two predictions from the model were then tested on human (...) subjects. In Simulation 3 and Experiment 1, the items from Simulation 1 were reversed, and both the network and subjects showed minimally different priming effects in the two directions. In Experiment 2, consistent with attractor networks but contrary to a key aspect of hierarchical spreading activation accounts priming was determined by featural similarity rather than shared superordinate category. It is concluded that semantic‐similarity priming is due to featural overlap that is a natural consequence of distributed representations of word meaning. (shrink)

The models of internal self-control that have recently been proposed by behavioral economists do not depict motivational interaction that occurs while temptation is present. Those models that include willpower at all either envision a faculty with a motivation (“strength”) different from the motives that are weighed in the marketplace of choice, or rely on incompatible goals among diverse brain centers. Both assumptions are questionable, but these models’ biggest problem is that they do not let resolutions withstand re-examination while being challenged (...) by impulsive alternatives. The economists’ models all attempt to make a single equilibrium preference predictable from a person’s prior incentives. This was the original purpose of these models’ hyperboloid (“β–δ”) delay discount functions, which have been widely justified by the assumption that a person’s intertemporal inconsistency (impulsiveness) can be accounted for by the arousal of appetite for visceral rewards. Although arousal is clearly a factor in some cases of intertemporal inconsistency, it cannot be blamed for others, and furthermore does not necessarily imply hyperboloid discounting. The inadequacy of β–δ functions is particularly evident in models of internal self-control. I have reviewed several of these models, and have argued for a return to pure hyperbolic discount function as originally proposed, the relatively high tails of which can motivate a recursive process of self-prediction and thereby the formation of self-enforcing intertemporal contracts. Such a process does not require a separately motivated faculty of will, or incompatible goals among brain centers; but it also does not permit the prediction of unique preferences from prior incentives. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that African-American philosophy emerges from a socio-existential context where persons of African descent have been faced with the absurd in the form of white racism (This paper is a substantially revised version on an earlier article. See Yancy, G. (2011). African-American Philosophy through the Lens of Socio-Existential Struggle. Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 37: 551–574). The concept of struggle, given the above, functions as both descriptive and heuristic vis-à-vis the meaning of African American philosophy. Expanding (...) upon Charles Mills’ concept of non-Cartesian sums, I demonstrate the inextricable link between Black lived experience, struggle, and the morphology of meta-philosophical assumptions and philosophical problems specific to African-American philosophy. Because of the philosophical pretensions of white Western philosophy, with it claims to universal truth and objective knowledge, the particularity of African-American philosophical concerns with questions of embodiment and race is often deemed ersatz or non-philosophical. In this article, I argue that whiteness as the transcendental norm is productive of a form of ignorance endemic to Western philosophical practices that are myopic and hegemonic. Finally, African-American philosophy is theorized as a gift, as a critical counter-narrative that can be deployed to fissure Western philosophy’s narcissism. (shrink)

This volume reflects the breadth of Alexy's philosophy, identifies new areas of inquiry and offers a new impetus to the discourse theory of law.

This commentary argues that business-society scholars are seriously disconnected from nature. This is problematic because our theorizing about nature largely happens as a mental exercise, thereby restricting our bodies and emotions as power means of transcending the human–nature dualism. As a solution, I offer practical ways for business-society scholars to develop a “deep nature connection.”.

The paper argues that the question of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms has been largely misconceived. Referencing comparable devices such as anonymity, noms de plume, and heteronyms, and drawing on Heidegger’s discussion of Kierkegaardian pseudonymity in the lectures on Parmenides, the paper further distinguishes between fictional characters (e. g. the Seducer and Assessor Vilhelm), noms de plume (H.H.), fictional editors, and pseudonyms proper. It is argued that in the first authorship only Constantin Constantius and Johannes Climacus approximate to the criteria Kierkegaard himself lays (...) down for pseudonymity. Furthermore, Kierkegaard’s anxieties regarding the form of publication of his works in the late 1840s reveals the whole project of pseudonymity collapsing into incoherence. By means of a comparison with Nietzsche, it is argued that Kierkegaard’s work is less a manifold of different literary personalities and more a play of revealing/concealing voices. In these voices there is nevertheless a literary watermark that makes Kierkegaard’s work as a whole distinctively Kierkegaardian. (shrink)

Current psychological research on causal inference is dominated by two basic approaches: the covariation approach and the mechanism approach. This article reviews these two approaches, evaluates the contributions and limitations of each approach, and suggests how these approaches might be integrated into a more comprehensive framework. Covariation theorists assume that cognizers infer causal relations from conditional probabilities computed over samples of multiple events, but they do not provide an adequate account of how cognizers constrain their search for candidate causes and (...) relevant evidence. Mechanism theorists assume that cognizers use their knowledge of potential mechanisms to infer the causes of individual events, but they do not account for the origins of this kind of knowledge. Theorists might integrate these approaches into a framework that overcomes these limitations by (1) examining important relations between cognizers' beliefs about the nature of causality, the logic of causal inference, and the processes cognizers use to make causal inferences, and (2) providing a more complete account of cognizers' conceptions of causality and the origins of those conceptions. (shrink)

"Cotkin provides a gracefully written and consistently intelligent defense of James and pragmatism that deserves a wide audience among intellectual historians and their students."--Robert C. Bannister, American Historical Review.

In this collection, white women philosophers engage boldly in critical acts of exploring ways of naming and disrupting whiteness in terms of how it has defined the conceptual field of philosophy. Focuses on the whiteness of the epistemic and value-laden norms within philosophy itself, the text dares to identify the proverbial elephant in the room known as white supremacy and how that supremacy functions as the measure of reason, knowledge, and philosophical intelligibility.

John Gray claims that ‘value pluralism’, or the plurality and incommensurability of basic values, undermines any attempt to make a reasoned case for the superiority of liberalism (or any other ideology) over its rivals. Incommensurable values, he says, cannot be subjected to a rational ranking, except in particular cases, yet liberalism appears to advocate the promotion of certain values rather than others in general terms. I argue that Gray’s critique has force against some traditional justifications of liberal politics, but that (...) he exaggerates its reach against other, more recent forms of liberal theory. In particular, Gray’s view of liberalism as merely one form of life among others, with no rational claims to precedence, rests on a mistaken understanding of the implications of value pluralism. The incommensurability of values does not imply the absolute incommensurability of forms of life, such as those of liberal and non‐liberal cultures. Far from being incompatible with the reasoned advocacy of liberalism, value pluralism may itself provide liberalism with a rational grounding. (shrink)

This challenge combines metaphysical and moral criticisms of theological ethics. The moral criticisms are made upon the basis of belief in the autonomy of ...

Emotions have long been seen as suspect because of their power to overwhelm us. Fear of negative consequences is a great motivator. An argument that appeals to force or fear attempts to make the audience feel fear at the threat or possibility of harm in order to get them to accept a conclusion. This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy: appeal to force or fear. Sometimes evoking fear in, or threatening, another can be a legitimate (...) part of arguing, particularly if emotion is part of what is at issue. However, often appeals to fear or force are irrelevant to the point at issue and are fallacious attempts to convince an audience to accept one's argument/position. Thus, a central problem in regard to appeals to force or fear arguments is figuring out when such appeals are legitimate and when they are fallacious. The chapter addresses this by employing several critical questions. (shrink)

This paper explores Richard Tuck's account of Grotius as the key innovator in the history that leads to the invention both of the free individual, protective of his or her rights, and of the modern liberal state, respectful of individuals' rights. Contextualism as a method for dealing with texts is discussed by way of a recent interview given by Tuck's teacher, Quentin Skinner. The attempt is made to see contextualism in context.

Black Men from Behind the Veil bears witness to anti-Black male violence and does so from the perspective of Black male scholars who disclose their fears and what it means to suffer as Black men, courageously marking the deep material, institutional, and epistemic structures that amplify that fear and suffering.

The Routledge Handbook of Military Ethics is a comprehensive reference work that addresses concerns held in common by the military services of many nations. It attempts to discern both moral dilemmas and clusters of moral principles held in common by all practitioners of this profession, regardless of nation or culture. Comprising essays by contributors drawn from the four service branches as well as civilian academics specializing in this field, this handbook discusses the relationship of ethics in the military setting to (...) applied and professional ethics generally. Leading scholars and senior military practitioners from countries including the US, UK, France, China, Australia and Japan, discuss various national cultural views of the moral dimensions of military service. With reference to the responsibilities of professional orientation and education, as well as the challenges posed by recent technological developments, this handbook examines the difficulties underpinning the fundamental framework of military service. This book will be of much interest to students of military studies, war theory, ethics philosophy, sociology, war and conflict studies, and security studies. (shrink)

The book does not address speculations about the neurophysiological/brain bases of consciousness, arguing that these are premature, and it is highly critical of ...