A comprehensive introduction to current research on the psychology of concept formation and use.

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.

Social media offers a platform for diffused stakeholders to interact with firms—alternatively praising, questioning, and chastising businesses for their CSR performance and seeking to engage in two-way dialogue. In 2014, 163,402 public messages were sent to Fortune 200 firms’ CSR-focused Twitter accounts, each of which was either shared, replied to, “liked,” or ignored by the targeted firm. This paper examines firm reactions to these messages, building a model of firm response to stakeholders that combines the notions of CSR communication and (...) stakeholder salience. Our findings show that firm response to a stakeholder on social media is positively and most significantly associated with what we refer to as the stakeholder’s connective power but negatively associated with the firm’s own connective power. To a lesser extent, firm response is positively associated with the stakeholder’s normative power but negatively associated with the firm’s own normative power. Firm response is also shown to be positively associated with stakeholder urgency in terms of both the originality of a stakeholder message and the expression of positive sentiment. (shrink)

This introduction to modern work in analytic philosophy uses the example of the proper name to give a clear explanation of the logical theories of Gottlob Frege, and explain the application of his ideas to ordinary language. McCulloch then shows how meaning is rooted in the philosophy of mind and the question of intentionality, and looks at the ways in which thought can be "about" individual material objects.

This volume examines the diversity of new scientific theories of religion, by outlining the logical and causal relationships between these enterprises.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Neurology of Culture, or How We Move From Rage to Ritual in the Process of HominizationGregory J. Lobo (bio)The most (or rather the only) effective form of reconciliation—that would stop this crisis, and save the community from total self-destruction—is the convergence of all collective anger and rage towards a random victim, a scapegoat, designated by mimetism itself, and unanimously adopted as such.—René Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 64.INTRODUCTIONHow do (...) we move from rage to ritual? How do we become human? The work of René Girard would seem to offer an answer to this question. In this brief essay I want to simply add some evolutionary and neuroscientific details to Girard's theory, which flesh out while also corroborating the basic components of it. [End Page 255]To do this I need to draw a distinction between religion and culture. I mention this from the outset because the main source upon which I draw to represent Girard's thinking is the book Evolution and Conversion. Dialogues on the Origins of Culture, with Pierpaolo Antonello and João Cezar de Castro Rocha, published in 2008. I use this particular source because, as Girard's interlocutors say in their foreword to it, this book "is intended as a reassessment of Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 30 years on,"1 and it evidences the "ways in which, over 30 years, mimetic theory has matured, and its fruitfulness become more apparent, even since the initial excitement of Girard's groundbreaking works in the 1970s."2 I highlight my need to distinguish between culture and religion due to the fact that in Evolution and Conversion Antonello and Castro Rocha state forthrightly that for Girard (and, one might presume, for Girardians), culture and religion "amount to the same thing."3 But it is not totally clear that this holds. For as Girard, in the same book, says, "religion, as an institution, comes into being through the scapegoat mechanism."4 Thus, the question arises as to what it is that allows humans to have institutions in the first place. Surely the answer is the capacity for culture as such, understood as the very capacity for symbolic thought, for the manipulation of mental images and their combination into new ones. Hopefully, in the discussion that follows, my insistence on the need to analytically distinguish between culture and religion will be born out. For now, I simply ask the reader to play along. If the reader is game, I can restate my purpose: What is the neurology of culture, such that we can become human, or move from blind rage to deliberate ritual?THE MIMETIC MECHANISMGirard, we should recall, insists that we start "from a purely naturalistic standpoint."5 With this injunction in mind, I will give an account of the "mimetic mechanism," an expression that "describes the whole process, beginning with mimetic desire, which then becomes mimetic rivalry, eventually escalating to the stage of a mimetic crisis and finally ending with the scapegoat resolution"6 that strives for naturalistic representation. Therefore, I will avoid terms like "community" or even "group," which already suggest the existence of something like cultural realities. A naturalistic standpoint, which I take to be a scientific standpoint, must strive to circumvent begging the question by using terms like these, for they refer exactly to the phenomena we are trying to explain: a self-conscious sense of belonging and community. [End Page 256]For those familiar enough with its presuppositions about the human nature that underlies, or is the foundation of, human culture, the mimetic mechanism can be presented in a somewhat straightforward fashion. This presentation relies on Chapter 2 of Evolution and Conversion.The desire of Homo sapiens is in essence mimetic. That is, an individual member of the species desires what its proximal conspecifics—its models—desire. That two conspecifics should desire the same thing leads, inevitably, to two intermediate outcomes. First, the desire for what the other desires intensifies, due to the effects of mimesis; second, this drives the two now mutual models almost inevitably into conflict, as they become doubles. This is conflictual mimesis. The conflict can turn violent and... (shrink)

Hilbert’s unpublished 1917 lectures on logic, analyzed here, are the beginning of modern metalogic. In them he proved the consistency and Post-completeness (maximal consistency) of propositional logic -results traditionally credited to Bernays (1918) and Post (1921). These lectures contain the first formal treatment of first-order logic and form the core of Hilbert’s famous 1928 book with Ackermann. What Bernays, influenced by those lectures, did in 1918 was to change the emphasis from the consistency and Post-completeness of a logic to its (...) soundness and completeness: a sentence is provable if and only if valid. By 1917, strongly influenced by PM, Hilbert accepted the theory of types and logicism -a surprising shift. But by 1922 he abandoned the axiom of reducibility and then drew back from logicism, returning to his 1905 approach of trying to prove the consistency of number theory syntactically. (shrink)

Scientists must sometimes choose between competing definitions of key terms. The degree to which different definitions facilitate important discoveries should ultimately guide decisions about which terms to accept. In the short run, rules of thumb can help. One such rule is to regard with suspicion any definition that turns a seemingly important empirical matter into an a priori exercise. Several prominent definitions of ecological “stability” are suspect, according to this rule. After evaluating alternatives, I suggest that the faulty definitions resulted (...) from an overemphasis on population dynamics in community ecology. Machine metaphors of nature may have given rise to a related problem of experimental design. (shrink)

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Five experiments investigated how people use categories to make inductions about objects whose categorisation is uncertain. Normatively, they should consider all the categories the object might be in and use a weighted combination of information from all the categories: bet-hedging. The experiments presented people with simple, artificial categories and asked them to make an induction about a new object that was most likely in one category but possibly in another. The results showed that the majority of people focused on the (...) most likely category in making inductions, although there was a group of consistently normative responders who used information from both categories (about 25% of our college population). Across experiments the overall pattern of results suggests that performance in the task is improved not by understanding the underlying principles of bet-hedging but by increasing the likelihood that multiple categories are in working memory at the time of the induction. We discuss implications for improving everyday inductions. (shrink)

In _C. S. Lewis’s Christian Apologetics: Pro and Con_, ten articulate defenders and critics of Lewis’s apologetics square off and debate the merits of Lewis’s central arguments for Christian belief.

Foundations of a Free Society brings together some of the most knowledgeable Ayn Rand scholars and proponents of her philosophy, as well as notable critics, putting them in conversation with other intellectuals who also see themselves as defenders of capitalism and individual liberty. United by the view that there is something importantly right—though perhaps also much wrong—in Rand’s political philosophy, contributors reflect on her views with the hope of furthering our understandings of what sort of society is best and why. (...) The volume provides a robust elaboration and defense of the foundation of Rand’s political philosophy in the principle that force paralyzes and negates the functioning of reason; it offers an in-depth scholarly discussion of Rand’s view on the nature of individual rights and the role of government in defending them; it deals extensively with the similarities and differences between Rand’s thought and the libertarian tradition (to which she is often assimilated) and objections to her positions arising from this tradition; it explores Rand’s relation to the classical liberal tradition, specifically with regard to her defense of freedom of the intellect; and it discusses her views on the free market, with special attention to the relation between these views and those of the Austrian school of economics. (shrink)

It was commonly accepted in Goethe’s time that plants were equipped both to propagate themselves and to play a certain role in the natural economy as a result of God’s beneficent and providential design. Goethe’s identification of sexual propagation as the “summit of nature” in The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) might suggest that he, too, drew strongly from this theological-metaphysical tradition that had given rise to Christian Wolff’s science of teleology. Goethe, however, portrayed nature as inherently active and propagative, itself (...) improvising into the future by multiple means, with no extrinsically pre-ordained goal or fixed end-point. Rooted in the nature philosophy of his friend and mentor Herder, Goethe’s plants exhibit their own historically and environmentally conditioned drives and directionality in The Metamorphosis of Plants. In this paper I argue that conceiving of nature as active productivity—not merely a passive product—freed Goethe of the need to tie plants’ forms and functions to a divine system of ends, and allowed him to consider possibilities for plants, and for nature, beyond the walls of teleology. (shrink)

The first part of the book investigates Nietzsche's knowledge and understanding of specific disciplines and the influence of particular scientists on Nietzsche ...

The doctrine of promissory fraud holds that a contractual promise implicitly represents an intent to perform. A promisor's conditional intent to perform poses a problem for that doctrine. It is clear that some undisclosed conditions on the promisor's intent should result in liability for promissory fraud. Yet no promisor intends to perform come what may, so there is a sense in which all promisors conditionally intend to perform. Building on Michael Bratman's planning theory of intentions, this article provides a theoretical (...) account of the distinction between “foreground” and “background” conditions on intentions in general and then explains why foreground conditions on a promisor's intent to perform are likely to result in material promissory misrepresentation, while background conditions are not. The difference between foreground and background conditions lies in whether the agent accepts the satisfaction of the condition for the purposes of her practical reasoning. A promisor's nonacceptance of a condition on her intent to perform is material because it is likely to affect her preperformance deliberations and investment in the transaction, as well as her willingness to seek agreement with the promisee on how to fill contractual gaps. (shrink)

Households and banks have increasingly displaced non-financial businesses and governments as the primary debtors in modern capitalist economies, resulting in more severe economic cycles, increased inequality, and external macroeconomic imbalances. Yet while the trend is nearly universal among developed economies, its intensity varies a great deal from country to country. This article highlights the common international causes behind the global expansion of household and financial sector debt; the divergent national approaches to household credit that cause household and financial sector indebtedness (...) to vary from country to country; and the likely causes of these disparate approaches. National approaches to interest rate restrictions, property transfer taxation, high loan-to-value mortgages, mortgage interest taxation, and secondary markets for consumer debt can either encourage or mitigate household and financial sector borrowing. Whether a country encourages or mitigates such credit is determined by an idiosyncratic mix of institutional, political, and ideational factors. Especially important are the size of domestic pension funds, banks’ preferred business models, the political power of financial firms, and whether policymakers are more sensitive to the gains promised by a credit-fueled expansion or to the risks posed by an overleveraged collapse. (shrink)

The November–December issue of the Hastings Center Report features a set of essays on the ethics of writing stories of patient care. The Report regularly features such stories, but some ways of telling them would be plainly unacceptable, and some in bioethics have suggested that the bar for acceptability is very high. Tod Chambers takes that position in this essay set. Drawing on the work of the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, he proposes that case studies should be “polyphonic”—meaning that they (...) contain “a diversity of voices that are unmediated and distinct.” In effect, he calls for a kind of coauthoring of stories about patients. In a second essay, Arthur Frank also calls for including the patient’s voice, but he builds on Bakhtin’s call for “dialogic” storytelling, in which the author seeks to represent the characters in the story as having their own voices and their own lives: “they can talk back.” A third essay, by Philip Rosoff, is concerned about the problem of harm and patient anonymity, which in the contemporary media environment has become harder to address. (shrink)

Reflections on the tradition of Republicanism -- Initial reflections on political philosophy -- Who was Cicero? -- Cicero on the nature of philosophy -- Cicero on cosmology and natural philosophy -- Cicero on natural theology -- Cicero on ethics -- Cicero on oratory and the language arts -- Cicero on politics -- A brief reflection on Nietzsche -- Political philosophy and the Republican future.

The emergence of de‐extinction is a study in technological optimism. What has already been accomplished in recovering ancient genomes, recreating them, and reproducing animals with engineered genomes is amazing but also has a long ways to go to achieve “de‐extinction” as most people would understand that term. Still, with some caveats in place, creating a functional replacement for an extinct species may sometimes be doable, and given the right goals, might sometimes make sense. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (...) guidelines for de‐extinction do a reasonable job of keeping the caveats in place and clarifying the goals. In fact, given the right caveats about what de‐extinction can accomplish, we should pay a lot of attention to the technology and should think carefully about the goals. Not only has the technology been advancing, but our environmental standards have been getting looser and more flexible, providing less guidance for implementing the technology. The guiding ideals for conservation are often explained as a choice between John Muir, founder of The Sierra Club, and Gifford Pinchot, who helped create the U.S. Forest Service. Muir argued for preserving some places in the world in their natural state because of their great value and beauty. Pinchot, by contrast, was bluntly utilitarian. He argued for trying to keep some natural places more or less undamaged so that we could use them later. There has long been dissatisfaction with this choice, and in the last couple of decades, a number of prominent voices have proposed a “gardening ethic” as a new standard that combines elements of Muir and Pinchot. A gardening ethic is supposed to both celebrate the land and declare that it must now be managed. But what would good gardening mean when it comes to de‐extinction? (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Vasconcelos and Essentialist Conceptions of Mestizaje Gloria Anzaldúa: The New Mestizaje María Lugones: Mestizaje and Hybridity The New Mestizaje and Race Mestizaje and Pan‐Hispanic Identity References Further Reading.

Das Buch "Der kleine Hobbit" gilt als Vorläufer der wichtigsten Fantasy-Bücher aller Zeiten - den drei Bänden von "Der Herr der Ringe". Mit diesem Buch über die Abenteuer des Hobbits Bilbo Beutlin, zusammen mit 13 Zwergen und dem Zauberer Gandalf, schuf J.R.R. Tolkien schon jene Fantasiewelt, die uns alle später beim "Herrn der Ringe" nachhaltig beeindruckte. Elben, Trolle, Orks und ein Drache halten kleine und große Leser schon seit Jahren in Atem. Man stelle sich folgende Geschichte vor: Ein Mensch wohnt (...) in einer Höhle und lebt dort ein ruhiges, geordnetes und unaufgeregtes Leben, das schon seit Geburt an in den gleichen Bahnen verläuft. Eines Tages verlässt der Mensch seine Höhle und geht hinaus in die Welt. Dort sieht und erfährt er Dinge, die ihn nachhaltig verändern und reifen lassen. Er wird nach dieser Reise nie wieder derselbe sein wie vorher. Es ist nicht ungewöhnlich, wenn das bekannt klingt: Es handelt sich dabei um Platons Höhlengleichnis - eines der wichtigsten Gleichnisse bzw. Beispiele der Philosophie, genauer der Erkenntnistheorie. Die Handlung passt aber auch genau auf die Geschichte eines anderen Autors: J.R.R. Tolkien und sein Buch "Der kleine Hobbit". Auch hier verlässt eine Person die sichere und geordnete Umgebung des Auenlandes und zieht in die Welt hinaus. Diese abenteuerliche Reise wird ihn verändern und - wie wir alle wissen - mit dem Fund des EINEN Ringes für Mittelerde weitere große Folgen nach sich ziehen. Es ergibt also Sinn, den "kleinen Hobbit" mit seinen Inhalten unter der philosophischen Linse zu betrachten. Es ist nicht nur eine Kindergeschichte, sondern eine Auseinandersetzung mit Werten wie Mut, Freundschaft, Demut, Gnade und Weisheit - um nur einige zu nennen. (shrink)

Much ink has been spilled on the claim that morality and religion have evolutionary roots. While some attempt to reduce morality and religion to biological considerations, others reject any link whatsoever. Any full account, however, must acknowledge the biological roots of human behavior while at the same time recognizing that our relatively unique capacity as cognitive agents requires orienting concepts of cosmic and human nature. While other organisms display quasi‐moral and proto‐moral behavior that is indeed relevant, fully moral behavior is (...) only possible for organisms that attain a higher level of cognitive ability. This, in turn, implies a significant role for religion, which has traditionally provided an orientation within which moral conduct is understood. (shrink)

This article compares the theory of Meinongian objects proposed by Edward Zalta with a theory of fiction formulated within an early Russellian framework. The Russellian framework is the second-order intensional logic proposed by Nino B. Cocchiarelly as a reconstruction of the form of Logicism Russell was examining shortly after writing The Principles of Mathematics. A Russellian theory of denoting concepts is developed in this intensional logic and applied as a theory of the "objects' of fiction. The framework retains the Orthodox (...) early Russellian ontology of existents, possible non-existents, and properties and relations in intension. This avoids the assumption, found in Meinongian theories, of impossible and incomplete objects. It also obviates the need to preserve consistency by distinguishing a new "mode of predication", or a "distinction in kinds of predicates". Thus, it is argued that an early Russellian theory forms a powerful rival to a Meinongian theory of objects. (shrink)

A comprehensive study of German materialism in the second half of the nineteenth century is long overdue. Among contemporary historians the mere passing references to Karl Vogt, Jacob Moleschott, and Ludwig Buchner as materialists and popularizers of science are hardly sufficient, for few individuals influenced public opinion in nineteenth-century Germany more than these men. Buchner, for example, revealed his awareness of the historical significance of his Kraft und Stoff in comments made in 1872, just seventeen years after its original appearance. (...) A philosophical book which has undergone twelve big German editions in the short span of seventeen years, which further has been issued in non-German countries and languages about fifteen to sixteen times in the same period, and whose appearance (although its author was entirely unknown up to then) has called forth an almost unprecedented storm in the press,... such a book can be nothing ordinary; the world-calling it enjoys at present must be justified through its wholly special characteristics or by the merits of its form and content. ' Vogt, Moleschott and Buchner explicitly held that their materialism was founded on natural science. But other materialists of the nineteenth century also laid claim to the scientific character of their own thought. It is likely that Marx and Engels would have permitted their brand of materialism to have been called scientific, provided, of course, that 'scientific' was understood in their dialectical meaning of the term. Socialism, Engels maintained, had become a science with Marx. (shrink)