For much of the twentieth century, philosophy and science went their separate ways. In moral philosophy, fear of the so-called naturalistic fallacy kept moral philosophers from incorporating developments in biology and psychology. Since the 1990s, however, many philosophers have drawn on recent advances in cognitive psychology, brain science, and evolutionary psychology to inform their work. This collaborative trend is especially strong in moral philosophy, and these three volumes bring together some of the most innovative work by both philosophers and psychologists (...) in this emerging interdisciplinary field. The contributors to volume 2 discuss recent empirical research that uses the diverse methods of cognitive science to investigate moral judgments, emotions, and actions. Each chapter includes an essay, comments on the essay by other scholars, and a reply by the author of the original essay. Topics include moral intuitions as a kind of fast and frugal heuristics, framing effects in moral judgments, an analogy between Chomsky's universal grammar and moral principles, the role of emotions in moral beliefs, moral disagreements, the semantics of moral language, and moral responsibility. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is Professor of Philosophy and Hardy Professor of Legal Studies at Dartmouth College. Contributors to volume 2: Fredrik Bjorklund, James Blair, Paul Bloomfield, Fiery Cushman, Justin D'Arms, John Deigh, John Doris, Julia Driver, Ben Fraser, Gerd Gigerenzer, Michael Gill, Jonathan Haidt, Marc Hauser, Daniel Jacobson, Joshua Knobe, Brian Leiter, Don Loeb, Ron Mallon, Darcia Narvaez, Shaun Nichols, Alexandra Plakias, Jesse Prinz, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Russ Shafer-Landau, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Cass Sunstein, William Tolhurst, Liane Young. (shrink)

Adamson argues that Marxism "teaches us how to interpret social and historical reality, and to relate that interpretation to our current political concerns.".

Helmut Fleischer has distinguished three different approaches to history in the development of Marx's thinking: the "anthropological" , the "pragmatological" , and the "nomological" . However, these represent a less continuous and coherent development than Fleischer claims. The 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse can be instanced as a fourth view, more focused than the others on historiography, and at variance with what Marx says elsewhere. The sequence and overlapping of these four views call into question both the interpretation of Marx's (...) development as smoothly continuous and the interpretation of his development as "ruptured" into "early" and "late.". (shrink)

In this radical reinterpretation of Aristotle's Metaphysics, Walter E. Wehrle demonstrates that developmental theories of Aristotle are based on a faulty assumption: that the fifth chapter of Categories is an early theory of metaphysics that Aristotle later abandoned.

The 1986 Cold Spring Harbor Symposium was on the subject of human genetics; it was the first symposium at Cold Spring Harbor on this topic since 1964. In the opening remarks for the conference, Walter F. Bodmer first summarized the progress in this field since 1964. He then described what is presently known about the functional complexity of the human genome and discussed the case for a definitive characterization and sequencing of the human genome. The following is an abridged (...) and slightly adapted version of this talk; it is reproduced courtesy of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory © 1987. (shrink)

How can Africans escape the control of the complex power relationships established during Colonization and successfully achieve self-development? More importantly, and the primary concern of this book, can African female characters ever hope to arrive at such individuation given the dual challenges of the power structures defined and enforced by European colonizers and the patriarchal structures that contort issues related to gender? Tracing Personal Expansion reads late 20th Century works by African female novelists Buchi Emecheta, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Calixthe Beyala (...) as modern Bildungsromane, novels of self-development, to reveal the dynamics, complexities, and challenges the characters and authors experience. By exploring the possibility of self-development in African female protagonists, this engrossing work augments existing feminist critiques that have analyzed the possibilities and potentials for the individuation of mostly Western, mostly European female characters. (shrink)

Professor Kenneth J. Arrow is one of the most distinguished economic theorists. He has played a major role in shaping the subject and is honoured by the publication of three volumes of essays on economic theory. Each volume deals with a different area of economic theory. The books include contributions by some of the best economic theorists from the United Stated, Japan, Israel and Europe. This second volume is entitled Equilibrium Analysis and is divided into sections on general equilibrium and (...) on the microfoundations of macroeconomics. (shrink)

Hobbes is commonly treated as a foundational figure for liberalism. This familiar view relies on emphasizing his account of the relationship between rights bearing individuals and state power. By contrast, this essay centers the practical question of how to govern, and develops this perspective to both question Hobbes's supposed liberalism and to demonstrate the utility of construing liberalism as more than a set of philosophical arguments regarding subject-state relations. In particular, understanding liberalism in terms of political technique offers a new (...) perspective on the relationship between liberalism and republicanism. (shrink)

Presently, there are two views of human history vying for our allegiance. The one is grounded in the Enlightenment and insists that history is a closed process whose course is determined by the dictum that “might makes right.” The other view is that of supernaturalism, which regards every event in history as a direct act of God. Challenging both of these views is the prophetic construal of history. This construal dares to identify extraordinary human events—the promise of Isaac to Abraham (...) and Sarah, the exodus, the pronouncements of Israel's great prophets, and the ministry of Jesus—as acts of God. Such extraordinary events have the power to free us to speak of God as enacting “newness” also in our time. (shrink)

The author defends the anti-representationalist claim that the formation of the proper names (and as a consequence – scientific terms or notions) cannot happen through certain ostensive pointing at some objects given here and now (like in B. Russell’s theory) or through perceptions which are generalized inductively or by means of Kantian apperception or Anschauung. In order to answer the question about the concepts formation we have to take into account the historical and socio-cultural background of the genesis of proper (...) names which form the foundation and boundary of all classifications including the scientific ones. The author claims that there is an important difference between a personal belief or propositional knowledge and some implicit or background knowledge of the language community in its historical development. The first one could be evaluated on its truth / falseness. The second one however – being the foundation for the first one – cannot be evaluated in this manner. It simply is as it is. (shrink)

I present two logical systems to show the “analogy of proportionality„ common to several interpretations: modality (necessity and possibility), quantification, truth-functional relations, moral attitudes (deontic logic), states of knowledge (epistemic logic), and states of belief (doxastic logic). To display the two underlying analogical relations, I call upon the originally Scholastic convention, recently put to use again, of using squares, hexagons, and octagons “of opposition„. A combined epistemic–deontic logic happens to be found in the traditional “probabilist„ theory of the “good conscience„, (...) and I shall then briefly explain how this is so. (shrink)