There is a growing literature in philosophy dealing with the phenomenon of inner speech, that is, the activity of speaking to oneself in one’s mind. This paper highlights a feature of inner speech which has not yet been noticed in this literature: that there is something distinctive that it is like to make a sincere assertion in inner speech. The paper then traces out two implications of this observation. The first relates to the question of how we should characterise inner (...) speech; the second relates to the question of how inner speech may play a role in self-attributions of belief. (shrink)

Dieser Bericht enthält zunächst eine Skizze der Entwicklung der Wissenschaftsgeschichtsschreibung in den USA und Canada. Sodann werden die Aktivitäten der History of Science Society of North America besonders vorgestellt. Schließlich betrachtet der Bericht besonders wichtige Publikationen im einzelnen. Im Anhang finden sich Übersichten über die jährlichen Versammlungen, eine vergleichende Statistik der Forschungsschwerpunkte der amerikanischen und internationalen Tätigkeit auf den einzelnen Gebieten sowie eine Liste der Forschungsstätten und der "Grading Programs".

John Henry Newman was a discerning critic of the dominant social values and cultural features of England in the Victorian era that revolved around the sovereign self. Insofar as many of these features—individuals as their own masters, wealth and celebrity, the arbitrariness of answers about faith and meaning, and the character of higher education in the absence of theology—also characterize American society and culture in the early twenty-first century, Newman’s critique of his own time and society also applies to ours. (...) This essay was first delivered as the 2014 Newman Legacy Lecture, sponsored by the National Institute for Newman Studies, at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on April 3, 2014. (shrink)

Should there be limits to the human alteration of the natural world? Through a study of debates about the environment, agricultural biotechnology, synthetic biology, and human enhancement, Gregory E. Kaebnick argues that such moral concerns about nature can be legitimate but are also complex, contestable, and politically limited.

The use of contingent valuation methods for estimating the economic value of environmental improvements and damages has increased significantly. However, doubts exist regarding the validity of the usual willingness to pay CV methods. In this article, we examine the CV approach in light of recent findings from behavioral decision research regarding the constructive nature of human preferences. We argue that a principal source of problems with conventional CV methods is that they impose unrealistic cognitive demands upon respondents. We propose a (...) new CV approach, based on the value-structuring capabilities of multiattribute utility theory and decision analysis, and discuss its advantages and disadvantages. (shrink)

This book presents an original and creative enactment of a confrontation between Heidegger and Plato. Gregory Fried outlines a new approach to ethics and politics combining skeptical idealism and what he calls polemical ethics, and goes on to apply polemical ethics to the crucial questions around fascism and racism.

The nineteenth century was seemingly a period of great progress. Huge advancements and achievements were made in science, technology and industry that transformed life and work alike. But a growing pride in modernity and innovation was tainted by a sense of the loss of the past and the multiple threats which novelty posed. The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century Thought provides an impressive survey of the period's major ideas and trends. Leading scholars explore some of the most influential concepts and debates (...) within philosophy, history, political thought, economics, religion and the social sciences, as well as feminism and imperialism. Some of these debates continued into the following century and many still remain relevant in the present day. This Companion is an excellent tool for readers seeking to understand the genesis of modern discourse across a range of humanities and social science subjects. (shrink)

Ben Jonson, writing before 1641 in Discoveries, observed that nature intends us no courtesies. The rivers carry our boats, the winds favour our sails, and the sunlight warms our bodies, by necessary motions that contain no kindliness. This represented, or expressed, though perhaps unwittingly and certainly without scientific precision, the mechanical version of physical nature that steadily prevailed during the seventeenth century.

We use the path integral form of quantum electrodynamics to show that a causal classical limit to QED can be derived by functionally integrating over the photon coordinates, starting from an initial photon vacuum and ending in a final coherent radiation state driven by the anticipated classical charged particle trajectories. The resulting charged particle transition amplitude depends only on particle coordinates. When the \ limit is taken, only those particle paths that are not constrained by the final radiation state are (...) varied. These results demonstrate that the collapse from an infinity of charged particle paths, a path integral description, to causally interacting classical trajectories, a stationary-action description, is critically dependent on including final coherent state radiation and maintaining the distinction between particle paths that are free to vary and those trajectories that can be monitored by the final state radiation. (shrink)

We identify a strategy for getting beliefs from fiction via three assumptions: a certain causal generality holds in the fiction and does so because causal generalities in fiction are carried over from what the author takes to be fact; the author is reliable on this topic, so what the author takes to be fact is fact. We do not question. While will, in particular cases, be doubtful, the strategy is vulnerable more generally to the worry that what looks like a (...) causal generality may be instead an authorial intervention of a kind from which no causal connection can be inferred; in such cases turns out to be false though it may seem at first sight to be true. In consequence we have extra reason for being careful in forming beliefs based on fictions. (shrink)

In Considerations on Western Marxism, released in 1976, Perry Anderson stated and vindicated an affiliation to the Trotskyist tradition long apparent from the pages of New Left Review under his editorship. Central to this tradition, in its orthodox forms, was a historico-political perspective which regarded the Soviet Union as ‘degenerate’ or ‘deformed’ ‘workers’ states’ – post-capitalist social formations whose complex character dictated rejection of Stalinism and anti-Sovietism alike. In Anderson's case, this orientation received a Deutscherite inflection: abroad, no less than (...) at home, Soviet power was a contradictory phenomenon, by turns reactionary and progressive. The potential regeneration of the Russian Revolution and its sequels, whether via ‘proletarian revolution’ from below, or bureaucratic reformation from above, remained an article of faith among Marxists of this observance to the end. Accordingly, the debacle of Gorbachevite perestroika proved a profoundly disorientating experience for many who lent little or no credence to the mendacious claims of ‘actually existing socialism'. Amid capitalist euphoria at Communist collapse, what was to be said – and done? Anderson's displaced answer was forthcoming in 1992 in ‘The Ends of History’. (shrink)

This paper draws on the social psychology of John Dewey to illustrate the importance of aporia, or confusion, to pragmatic pedagogywithin an ethics classroom. The strategic use of aporia solicits an appropriate expression of emotion within students. This emotional response involves dissatisfaction with the present; these dissatisfactions function as pragmatic ideals. Such ideals are not a refuge from the present, but enable students to critically and progressively reconstruct present experiences. Aporia is thus critically important for pedagogical success from a pragmatist (...) perspective. (shrink)

Although consensus appears to be on the horizon, the foundations of the theory of natural selection remain a matter of controversy. This paper looks at two recent challenges to the emerging "received view" of this theory. It argues that different views of the nature of scientific explanation are playing a pivotal role in the debates. Do explanations in biology fit the covering-law paradigm? What are the explanatory laws of biology like? Until agreement is reached on these fundamental questions, there is (...) little prospect for consensus on the foundations of the theory of natural selection. Furthermore, the three alternative positions identified in this paper each face serious challenges. (shrink)

Among the most interesting of the controversies in the recent history of parapsychology and related studies is the claim made in 1933 by the psychical researcher Harry Price that the medium Rudi Schneider had on one particular occasion produced his psychic effects by fraudulent means. The background to this event, and the controversy which followed it, are described in detail in this article, which draws on many hitherto unpublished materials. The issues involved range from the design of experiments in an (...) unusual area of science, through the relation between fringe and orthodox science, to the role of popularisers of science and the ethics of science. (shrink)

While he develops three different aspects of Lacan's “Real,” Slavoj Žižek does so only partially, in the end leaving an inconsistent and contradictory account. Here these three versions of the Real are outlined and clarified by showing their relation to Marx's account of capitalist exchange and socialist politics. This leads to a discussion of two other aspects of the Real that appear in Žižek's work: the pre-Symbolic Real and the “Sinthome.” Where the former is simultaneously the fear of a unified (...) working class and the fantasy of a world of “total enjoyment” without conflict, the latter is discussed here in terms of political struggle that takes on not only the form of a means to an end but also that of an end in itself. (shrink)

Georg Northoff employs a comparison with Parkinson's disease in an effort to tease apart the underlying pathophysiology of psychogenic catatonia. Northoff's extensive treatment of the subject is abetted by his own research as well as the research of others. Nevertheless, a number of points concerning basal ganglia/thalamocortical processing need to be raised, some adding support to his hypothesis and others detracting from it.