The idea that deep brain stimulation (DBS) induces changes to personality, identity, agency, authenticity, autonomy and self (PIAAAS) is so deeply entrenched within neuroethics discourses that it has become an unchallenged narrative. In this article, we critically assess evidence about putative effects of DBS on PIAAAS. We conducted a literature review of more than 1535 articles to investigate the prevalence of scientific evidence regarding these potential DBS-induced changes. While we observed an increase in the number of publications in theoretical neuroethics (...) that mention putative DBS-induced changes to patients’ postoperative PIAAAS, we found a critical lack of primary empirical studies corroborating these claims. Our findings strongly suggest that the theoretical neuroethics debate on putative effects of DBS relies on very limited empirical evidence and is, instead, reliant on unsubstantiated speculative assumptions probablyin lieuof robust evidence. As such, this may reflect the likelihood of a speculative neuroethics bubble that may need to be deflated. Nevertheless, despite the low number of first-hand primary studies and large number of marginal and single case reports, potential postoperative DBS changes experienced by patients remain a critical ethical concern. We recommend further empirical research in order to enhance theoretical neuroethics work in the area. In particular, we call for the development of better instruments capable of capturing potential postoperative variations of PIAAAS. (shrink)

What are words? What makes two token words tokens of the same word-type? Are words abstract entities, or are they (merely) collections of tokens? The ontology of words tries to provide answers to these, and related questions. This article provides an overview of some of the most prominent views proposed in the literature, with a particular focus on the debate between type-realist, nominalist, and eliminativist ontologies of words.

ABSTRACT The idea that two words can be instances of the same word is a central intuition in our conception of language. This fact underlies many of the claims that we make about how we communicate, and how we understand each other. Given this, irrespective of what we think words are, it is common to think that any putative ontology of words, must be able to explain this feature of language. That is, we need to provide criteria of identity for (...) word-types which allow us to individuate words such that it can be the case that two particular word-instances are instances of the same word-type. One solution, recently further developed by Irmak, holds that words are individuated by their history. In this paper, I argue that this view either fails to account for our intuitions about word identity, or is too vague to be a plausible answer to the problem of word individuation. (shrink)

While there seems to be much evidence that perceptual states can occur without being conscious, some theorists recently express scepticism about unconscious perception. We explore here two kinds of such scepticism: Megan Peters and Hakwan Lau's experimental work regarding the well-known problem of the criterion -- which seems to show that many purported instances of unconscious perception go unreported but are weakly conscious -- and Ian Phillips' theoretical consideration, which he calls the 'problem of attribution' -- the worry that many (...) purported examples of unconscious perception are not perceptual, but rather merely informational and subpersonal. We argue that these concerns do not undermine the evidence for unconscious perception and that this sceptical approach results in a dilemma for the sceptic, who must either deny that there is unconscious mentality generally or explain why perceptual states are unique in the mind such that they cannot occur unconsciously. Both options, we argue, are problematic. (shrink)

In recent years, many philosophers of modern physics came to the conclusion that the problem of how objectivity is constituted (rather than merely given) can no longer be avoided, and therefore that a transcendental approach in the spirit of Kant is now philosophically relevant. The usual excuse for skipping this task is that the historical form given by Kant to transcendental epistemology has been challenged by Relativity and Quantum Physics. However, the true challenge is not to force modern physics into (...) a rigidly construed static version of Kant's philosophy, but to provide Kant's method with flexibility and generality. In this book, the top specialists of the field pin down the methodological core of transcendental epistemology that must be used in order to throw light on the foundations of modern physics. First, the basic tools Kant used for his transcendental reading of Newtonian Mechanics are examined, and then early transcendental approaches of Relativistic and Quantum Physics are revisited. Transcendental procedures are also applied to contemporary physics, and this renewed transcendental interpretation is finally compared with structural realism and constructive empiricism. The book will be of interest to scientists, historians and philosophers who are involved in the foundational problems of modern physics. (shrink)

The natural name theory, recently discussed by Johnson (2018), is proposed as an explanation of pure quotation where the quoted term(s) refers to a linguistic object such as in the sentence ‘In the above, ‘bank’ is ambiguous’. After outlining the theory, I raise a problem for the natural name theory. I argue that positing a resemblance relation between the name and the linguistic object it names does not allow us to rule out cases where the natural name fails to resemble (...) the linguistic object it names. I argue that to avoid this problem, we can combine the natural name theory with a type-realist metaphysics of language, and hold that the name is natural because the name is an instance of the kind that it names. I conclude by reflecting on the importance of the metaphysics of language for questions in the philosophy of language. (shrink)

The effects in a quantum-mechanical system form a partial algebra and a partially ordered set which is the prototypical example of the effect algebras discussed in this paper. The relationships among effect algebras and such structures as orthoalgebras and orthomodular posets are investigated, as are morphisms and group- valued measures (or charges) on effect algebras. It is proved that there is a universal group for every effect algebra, as well as a universal vector space over an arbitrary field.

It is generally believed that the uncertainty relation Δq Δp≥1/2ħ, where Δq and Δp are standard deviations, is the precise mathematical expression of the uncertainty principle for position and momentum in quantum mechanics. We show that actually it is not possible to derive from this relation two central claims of the uncertainty principle, namely, the impossibility of an arbitrarily sharp specification of both position and momentum (as in the single-slit diffraction experiment), and the impossibility of the determination of the path (...) of a particle in an interference experiment (such as the double-slit experiment). (shrink)

Building on a well-developed philosophy of language, Shibles proposes a theory of metaphor. Whereas one philosophy of language may regard metaphor as an inadequate or fallacious form of reasoning, another may consider it to be the very foundation of language. Shibles’ views lie in the latter direction, and he employs Wilbur Urban’s philosophy of language, presented in his Language and Reality, to develop his theory. Urban’s importance lies in his avoidance of reducing the philosophy of language to symbolic logic and (...) recognition of the importance of metaphor, symbol, and analogy. Also significant for a theory of metaphor is the fact that Urban saw a "high evaluation" of language as being more adequate than a "low evaluation" of language. (shrink)

Public health communications often attempt to persuade their audience to adopt a particular belief or pursue a particular course of action. To a large extent, the ethical defensibility of persuasion appears to be assumed by public health practitioners; however, a handful of academic treatments have called into question the ethical defensibility of persuasive risk- and health communication. In addition, the widespread use of persuasive tactics in public health communications warrants a close look at their ethical status, irrespective of previous critiques. (...) In this article, we review some ethical objections previously advanced against the use of persuasion in public health communications, and also consider some novel but potentially relevant objections. We conclude that persuasion is ethically problematic in some circumstances and attempt to clarify what these circumstances are. However, whereas persuasion may be ethically problematic in some circumstances, it need not be viewed as intrinsically problematic. (shrink)

A four dimensional approach to Newtonian physics is used to distinguish between a number of different structures for Newtonian space-time and a number of different formulations of Newtonian gravitational theory. This in turn makes possible an in-depth study of the meaning and status of Newton's Law of Inertia and a detailed comparison of the Newtonian and Einsteinian versions of the Law of Inertia and the Newtonian and Einsteinian treatments of gravitational forces. Various claims about the status of Newton's Law of (...) Inertia are critically examined including these: the Law of Inertia is not an empirical law but a definition; it is not a law simpliciter but a family of schemata; it is a convention and gravitational forces exist only by convention; it is (or is not) redundant; the concepts it embodies can be dispensed with in favor of operationally defined entities; it is unique for a given theory. More generally, the paper demonstrates the importance of space-time structure for the philosophy of space and time and provides support for a realist interpretation of space-time theories. (shrink)

Business theory and management practices are outgrowths of basic economic principles. To evaluate the proper place of ethics in business, the meaning of ethics as defined by economic theory must be assessed. This paper contends that classical economic thought advocates a nonethical decision-making context and is not functional for a modern complex, interdependent environment.

Post-Kantian German idealism is an important influence on such contemporary approaches to philosophy as phenomenology, existentialism, and pragmatism, and because of this Seidel has undertaken an investigation of the related notions of activity and ground as they appear and develop in Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Common to all three thinkers is an emphasis on activity as conscious, free, and functioning as the ground or source of meaning for being. Each thinker in his own way also accepts the notion of a (...) dialectical interaction between the self and the world in which subject and object reciprocally influence one another. (shrink)

Cohen states in the last sentence of his book that his analysis in no way presupposes the controversial labor theory of value. For him, the contradictions of capitalist production result from the fact that its function is to create exchange value. The statements themselves and the fact that they come very late in the book illustrate two distinctive characteristics of the work. First, Cohen espouses what he calls a technological interpretation of Marx. For him, the driving force of history is (...) the steady increase in the capacity of productive forces. Capitalism supersedes feudalism because of its ability to produce more. This technological interpretation of Marx is a theory of history because only certain production relations allow for the development and expansion of productive forces. For example, the levels of production attained by capitalism would be unthinkable within the context of lord and serf. Secondly, it is not really clear that Cohen is defending a theory of history until he formulates the primacy thesis in chapter 6 and elaborates upon it and the rise of capitalism in chapter 7. The primacy thesis states that the production relations of society are explained by the level of development of its productive forces. Cohen seems to dispense with what is often thought of as the philosophy of history in his discussion of the Hegelian roots of Marxism in the first chapter. He proceeds to analyze the distinction between productive forces and production relations and its consequences for the phenomenon of fetishism in chapters 2-5. These first chapters, and some later ones as well, seem to have the property of belaboring at great length elementary problems raised by the preface to the Critique of Political Economy, and Capital as well. For example, in his distinction between productive forces and production relations, Cohen says that the two must not be confused because relations hold between objects while forces are properties of objects. He says that a soldier who guards peasants tilling the soil is not part of the labor power because he fulfills a social rather than an economic need. Then he presents and elaborates upon a list of production relations. Cohen might have avoided the need for such involved analysis if he had clearly delineated the methodological import of his work in the introduction or the first chapter. I refer to his theory of functional explanation. It is, however, only after he has discussed the problem of base and superstructure in chapter 8 that he comes to examine functional analysis in chapters 9 and 10. Since functional explanation is the crux of his defence of Marxism as a theory of history, the reader deserves a more thorough preparation for it in an introduction. (shrink)

In his last major work, the posthumously published Crisis of European Sciences, Husserl presented what he described as a new path into transcendental phenomenology: the path through the "life-world" on which objective science is founded. To make objective science intelligible, Husserl held, we must inquire back into the world of everyday involvement and experience from which it emerges; this inquiry leads in turn to a thematization of the subjective structures through which the always "pre-given" life-world is itself constituted. Husserl’s demand (...) for a return to the life-world has been the subject of much discussion in the twenty-five years since the publication of the Crisis. Yet debate over the precise sense and ultimate significance of the demand continues. In this most recent contribution, E. Ströker has gathered ten essays originally presented at a 1978 conference of prominent German and American scholars. At least some of the essays should prove helpful to Husserl specialists and others interested in Husserl’s concept of the life-world. (shrink)

The injection of modality and strict implication into philosophical logic traditionally has invoked a common objection: conceptual gains achieved by introducing modal notions just aren't outweighed by the technical complexities of modality. For example, it is often pointed out that modal notions are introduced to eliminate the paradoxical aspects of material implication only to lead in turn to "paradoxes of strict implication.".

In the last of this set of ten essays, "How do Realism, Material and Dialectics Fare in Contemporary Science?," Professor Bunge invites his audience to join him in developing a philosophy he chooses to call logical materialism. This philosophy presupposes mathematical logic and includes a critical realist epistemology wherein scientific theories are symbolic, partial representations of things out there, and a dynamical materialist ontology wherein every existent is an ever changing system situated in emerging multiple levels of complexity and organization (...) the behavior of which is lawful, both of which are seen as programmatic. In arriving at this program, Bunge is both critical of and shares important points with the dominate Anglo-American approaches to philosophy of science. For example, with the tradition of logical positivism-empiricism he shares the heavy use of formal logic, semantics, and axiomatization, as a way to understanding scientific theories. At the same time he applauds the historico-philosophical tradition for its careful attention to the history of science and he insists that real science must be the object of analysis in philosophy of science, rather than what he considers to be unilluminating examples like green emeralds or black ravens. (shrink)

The stated aim of this investigation is to clarify and critically examine the philosophical concepts inherent in the cosmological argument: he aspires to investigate the argument rather than to either refute critics or support defenders. He treats both the thirteenth century versions of Aquinas and Duns Scotus and the eighteenth century versions developed by Samuel Clarke and Leibniz, but attaches greater importance and spends more time with the latter, finding them both more sophisticated and more fruitful for investigation. The eighteenth (...) century forms make no use of "what many philosophers would regard as a strange and perhaps nonexistent kind of causal series" and, according to the author, are more relevant because modern objections, e.g. those of Hume and Russell, aim at the eighteenth century forms. (shrink)

Fekete, describing his study as a "theoretical critique" of "modern critical theory in the Anglo-American tradition," sets out to "discover and elucidate... the historical interests" behind "bourgeois critical theory" and to show how this theory militates against human freedom. Fekete contends that modern critical theory, particularly as embodied in the work of Marshall McLuhan, has become the "theoretical face" of neocapitalism and that it has become absorbed into neocapitalist society. The Critical Twilight, designed to reveal the social causes and bias (...) of modern critical theory, grew out of the student unrest of the nineteen-sixties, when Fekete discovered the power of neocapitalist culture. (shrink)

Six essays loosely organized around varieties of interpretation and the cultural and social situations that elicit interpretation. The first essay, "Interpretation and Its Occasions," treats the nature of interpretation and its relation to the world of external reality; the pervasiveness of interpretation, even in the sciences, in contemporary intellectual life; and the necessity of interpretation in our pluralistic world. In "Style as Interpretation," Mazzeo views style, broadly defined, not so much as an esthetic matter, but as a reflection of the (...) ways people view reality. "New Wine in Old Bottles: Reflections on Historicity and the Problem of Allegory" and "The Platonic Debate over Myth, Truth, and Virtue" are "case histories" of interpretations designed to "save the texts" of the Bible and classical literature, when interpreters have recurrently found elements of these texts repugnant to their moral or philosophical ideas. "Interpretation, Humanistic Culture, and Cultural Change" draws parallels between biological and cultural evolution and focuses on the role of interpretation as a mediator between old meanings and new, between stability and innovation in a culture. In his final essay, "Myth and Science in the Theology of Rudolph Bultmann," Mazzeo discusses "the most ambitious and instructive interpretive effort of our time," Bultmann’s efforts to demythologize the Bible. (shrink)

Primitives are both important and unavoidable, and which set of primitives we endorse will greatly shape our theories and how those theories provide solutions to the problems that we take to be important. After introducing the notion of a primitive posit, I discuss the different kinds of primitives that we might posit. Following Cowling (2013), I distinguish between ontological and ideological primitives, and, following Benovsky (2013) between functional and content views of primitives. I then propose that these two distinctions cut (...) across each other leading to four types of primitive posits. I then argue that theoretical virtues should be taken to be meta-theoretical ideological primitives. I close with some reflections on the global nature of comparing sets of primitives. (shrink)

Much ink has been spilt in consideration of the once pervasive reliance on military metaphors to depict the relationships between science and religion in the nineteenth century. This has resulted in historically sensitive treatments of secularization; and the realization that the relationship between science and religion was not a bloody war between intellectual nation states, but a protracted divorce of former partners. Moreover, historians of science have been encouraged to throw off the yoke of the internalism–externalism debate, and to explore (...) the cultural boundaries that impinged upon practitioners of a natural knowledge of the world. Within the historiography of nineteenth-century science, this has resulted in many new perspectives on science and natural knowledge in relation to cultural control and authority. (shrink)

Covers all the important theories from the period 1250-1400, including "maiores" as well as "minores," and issues in a discussion of Marsilius of Inghen (d. ...

We discuss in the paper the following problem: Given a function in a given Baire class, into "how many" (in terms of cardinal numbers) functions of lower classes can it be decomposed? The decomposition is understood here in the sense of the set-theoretical union.

Over the last two decades, Dutch courts have left room for euthanasia. Although a crime under the Penal Code, euthanasia will usually not result in prosecution and conviction if it is committed by a physician according to rules of careful medical practice ; if the patient's request is voluntary, well-considered, and enduring; and if there is unacceptable and hopeless suffering and there are no other solutions to the patient's situation.

Peter Marshall has done what all those concerned with manuscripts dream of doing: he has turned up a substantial lost portion of an ancient text. His discovery is related, with great modesty, in an article in Manuscripta 37 , 3–20, where he prints for the first time Tiberius Claudius Donatus' commentary on Virgil, Aeneid 6.1–157, edited from a gathering written in the sixteenth century and now bound into Vaticanus Latinus 8222 ff. 2r–9v. We offer here some emendations to the text (...) he prints; we are grateful to Prof. M. D. Reeve and Dr S. J. Heyworth for their suggestions, which we have incorporated in what follows. The bold figures represent the lines of Aeneid 6. (shrink)

In this first English translation the author has included all of the original text and has added new footnotes, preface, and 150 more pages of text. The new material is conveniently starred. A monumental work which develops the view Popper calls "deductivism" --the theory of the deductive method of testing.--J. E. M.

Children in the pediatric intensive care unit are indisputably in a vulnerable position, dependent on nurses to acknowledge their needs. It is assumed that children should be approached from a holistic perspective in the caring situation to meet their caring needs. The aim of the study was to unfold the meaning of nursing care through nurses’ concerns when caring for children in the pediatric intensive care unit. To investigate the qualitative aspects of practice embedded in the caring situation, the interpretive (...) phenomenological approach was adopted for the study. The findings revealed three patterns: medically oriented nursing—here, the nurses attend to just the medical needs, and nursing care is at its minimum, leaving the children’s needs unmet; parent-oriented nursing care—here, the nursing care emphasizes the parents’ needs in the situation, and the children are viewed as a part of the parent and not as an individual child with specific caring needs; and smooth operating nursing care orientation—here, the nursing care is focused on the child as a whole human being, adding value to the nursing care. The conclusion drawn suggests that nursing care does not always respond to the needs of the child, jeopardizing the well-being of the child and leaving them at risk for experiencing pain and suffering. The concerns present in nursing care has been shown to be the divider of the meaning of nursing care and need to become elucidated in order to improve the cultural influence of what can be seen as good nursing care within the pediatric intensive care unit. (shrink)

In reading Wittgenstein one can, and for the most part perhaps should, treat the expression ‘language-game’ as a term of art, a more or less arbitrarily chosen item of terminology meaning something like ‘an actual or possible way of using words’. It would then be a fairly routine task to work out answers to such questions as what features of the ways a word is used are emphasized by this term of art, what philosophical purposes are served by the description (...) of primitive language-games or of variations on actual language-games, or in exactly what way those purposes are supposed to be served. (shrink)

The current research investigates a combination of two instructional approaches, tutored problem solving and worked examples. Tutored problem solving with automated tutors has proven to be an effective instructional method. Worked‐out examples have been shown to be an effective complement to untutored problem solving, but it is largely unknown whether they are an effective complement to tutored problem solving. Further, while computer‐based learning environments offer the possibility of adaptively transitioning from examples to problems while tailoring to an individual learner, the (...) effectiveness of such machine‐adapted example fading is largely unstudied. To address these research questions, one lab and one classroom experiment were conducted. Both studies compared a standard Cognitive Tutor with two example‐enhanced Cognitive Tutors, in which the fading of worked‐out examples occurred either in a fixed way or adaptively. Results indicate that the adaptive fading of worked‐out examples leads to higher transfer performance on delayed posttests than the other two methods. (shrink)

At Theaetetus 163d-164b Socrates objects to the thesis that knowledge is perception by pointing out that a man who has seen something can still remember it, and so has knowledge of it; but this is impossible, if knowledge is perception, since he is no longer perceiving it.To this Protagoras is made to reply with two sentences at 166b 1–4: .Cornford translates ‘ For instance, do you think you will find anyone to admit that one's present memory of a past impression (...) is an impression of the same character as one had during the original experience, which is now over? It is nothing of the sort’.Cornford understands this as the suggestion that the memory and the original perception are of different things: ‘ All that the objection in fact established was that “ perception” must be stretched to include awareness of memory images’. So too Lee: ‘Protagoras’ “way out”… appears to be to say that what we now know is not properly X but rather our memory trace of X - some present πά θ ο ς quite distinct from X and very different from that ’. McDowel. (shrink)

Providing empirically supportable instances of ontological emergence is notoriously difficult. Typically, the literature has focused on two possible sources. The first is the mind and consciousness; the second is within physics, and more specifically certain quantum effects. In this paper, I wish to suggest that the literature has overlooked a further possible instance of emergence, taken from the special science of linguistics. In particular, I will focus on the property of truth-evaluability, taken to be a property of sentences as created (...) by the language faculty within human minds (or brains). The claim will not be as strong as to suggest that the linguistic data and theories prove emergence. Rather the dialectical aim here is to say that we have some good reasons (even if not conclusive reasons) to think that the property is emergent. (shrink)

Kaplan ([1990]. “Words.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 64: 93–119; [2011]. “Words on Words.” The Journal of Philosophy 108 (9): 504–529) argues that there are no unspoken words. Hawthorne and Lepore ([2011]. “On Words.” The Journal of Philosophy 108 (9): 447–485) put forward examples that purport to show that there can be such words. Here, I argue that Kaplan is correct, if we grant him a minor variation. While Hawthorne and Lepore might be right that there can be unspoken words, (...) I will argue that they fail to show that there can be uninstantiated words. (shrink)

This paper studies the problem of the arrow of time from the scientific and philosophical perspective. The scientific section (Castagnino) poses the topic according to the instruments of measuring employed in physical theories, specially when they are applied to dynamic chaotic systems in which a temporal asymmetry is shown. From the analysis of “two schools” (epistemological and ontological), the conclusion is favorable to the reality (both ontological and epistemological) of the difference between past and future, with the recourse to Reichenbach’s (...) notion of global system. In the philosophical section (Sanguineti) the content of the scientific part of the article is presented in a qualitative way. The role of some philosophical choices in the scientific field is stressed, taking into account the diversity of a positivistic and realistic view. (shrink)

The limitation of act by potency, central in the metaphysics of Thom as Aquinas, has its origins in Plotinus. He transforms Aristotle ’s horizontal causality of change into a vertical causality of participation. Potency and infinity are not just un intelligible lack of limit, but productive power. Form determines matter but is limited by recepti on into matter. The experience of unity begins with sensible things, which always have parts, so what is really one is incorporeal, without division and separation. (...) Unity is like the esse of Thomas, since it is the act that makes a thing what it is and has its fullness in God. (shrink)

This lecture is divided, roughly, into three parts. First, there is a general and perhaps rather simple-minded discussion of what are the ‘facts’ that social anthropologists study; is there anything special about these ‘facts’ which makes them different from other kinds of facts? It will be useful to start with the common-sense distinction between two kinds or, better, aspects of social facts; first—though neither is analytically prior to the other—and putting it very crudely, ‘what people do’, the aspect of social (...) interaction, and second, ‘what—and how—people think’, the conceptual, classifying, cognitive component of human culture. Now in reality, of course (and perhaps not so ‘of course’; people do tend to think of them as separate ‘things’), these two aspects are inextricably intertwined. But it is essential to distinguish them analytically, because each aspect gives rise to quite different kinds of problems of understanding for the social anthropologist. We shall see that the problem of how to be ‘objective’, and so to avoid ethnographic error, arises in both contexts, but in rather different forms in each. (shrink)

Many people seem to find it quite impossible to doubt that if a person did not do something freely, then he can be neither praised nor blamed for doing it. This assumption is shared by people with very different views about freedom, determinism and moral responsibility. It is held by most ‘libertarians’, who, to preserve moral responsibility, reject determinism. It is held by ‘hard determinists’, who accept determinism and therefore reject moral responsibility; and it is held by ‘soft determinists’, who (...) accept determinism, but argue that determinism does not exclude any kind of freedom that is relevant to whether a person may be held responsible. (shrink)

It is given to few political thinkers to be at once as innovative and as self- contradictory as Jean Bodin. This paper examines the way in which a number of his ideas were developed in the seventeenth century, and attempts made, principally in Germany, the Netherlands and England, either to reconcile apparent contradictions within his thought or to exploit their ambiguity for political advantage. Elsewhere in Western Europe there was a more hostile response. In Counter-Reformation Spain Bodin was almost universally (...) disparaged as a politico, second only to Machiavelli in his alleged advocacy of the subordination of religion to political ends. His constructive ideas were taken rather more seriously in Counter-Reformation Italy, but there too there were attacks upon his secularism and negative criticism of his theory of sovereignty. In France itself Bodin was absorbed into the absolutist current, and since his reservations were weakened by the prevailing doctrine of divine right kingship, and his deviations generally forgotten, the problem of his legacy there is much less complex. (shrink)

Intended as a course for beginning students in philosophy, this anthology consists of three "Books": "The Search for Understanding," "Ethics," and "Practical Philosophy." The latter is a hodgepodge--largely of moral advice--with selections from Buddha and Christ, among others. Although the selections are representative of diverse positions, both old and new, they are too short to be informative, and some of them might easily be misleading.--J. E. M.

The author hurries through the classical mathematicians in short order, highlighting their most significant contributions and their indebtedness to other thinkers. Written in a restrained narrative, this book presupposes throughout a detailed knowledge of mathematical concepts and symbolism. Some curious biographical data are included.--J. E. M.

The naturalistic fallacy, properly understood, and the nature of ethical disagreement render classical ethical naturalism untenable. Emotive naturalism, furthermore, overlooks the "semantic dimension" of moral judgments, while logical naturalism fails "genuinely" to produce suppressed imperative premises or to explain away the apparently cognitive nature of the desires and attitudes which present imperatives. Hence, the author has been led by his critical study of naturalism to affirm nonnaturalism in ethics. An interesting final chapter in this resourceful work considers the metaphysical implications (...) of naturalism vis-a-vis nonnaturalism.--J. E. M. (shrink)

The author is concerned to show that Freud and Dewey were in agreement with regard to their basic psychological positions, and that because of their personal experiences they were led "to emphasize the opposite element in a relatively fixed equation ['the dynamic interaction between the individual and his environment']" with Freud placing more weight upon internal organization of the individual and Dewey on external events. In establishing similarities the author seems to have overlooked the fact that one difference, if important (...) enough, can minimize similarities. The "inner," "outer" difference seems to be a case in point. Hence, Dewey is generally associated with a social psychology and Freud with an individual psychology. --J. E. M. (shrink)

Addressed to the non-mathematician, this mainly historical work attempts to bring out the basic philosophical issues in the face of which mathematics exhibits that it has "'no corner on the market' of truth." The author's discussion of theory of numbers is quite good; the chapter on the infinite, however, with its concern for the infinity of God, is perhaps less mathematical or strictly philosophical than one has a right to expect.--J. E. M.

This book deals with many interesting topics in a provocative way. Of considerable interest in Kaufmann's vicious counterattack on Popper's treatment of Hegel. Unfortunately there is no over-all unifying theme. The author is obviously erudite and misses no opportunity for pointing this out.--J. E. M.

The author describes analyst and patient roles in group psycho-analysis with a view towards increasing among his colleagues the application of techniques based largely on Karen Horney's theories.--J. E. M.

The issues between naturalism and subjectivism are brought into sharp focus, mainly through a critical examination of Husserl's phenomenology, with the author defending not only naturalism, but the view that only by a pluralism of methods can an adequate philosophy of experience be attained. Farber criticizes Husserl for failing to recognize that his method, rather than experience itself, generates some of the problems he attempted to solve. The movement from subjectivism to "irrationalism,", is briefly accounted for by considering Heidegger, Jaspers, (...) Marcel and Sartre. An important book, occasionally sardonic and humorous.--J. E. M. (shrink)

According to the author, philosophical anthropology offers the key to better relations among nations, inasmuch as its objective, scientific view of men seen in their cultural contexts eliminates guesswork in the solution of problems arising among conflicting cultures. Brilliantly imaginative yet realistic, Prof. Northrop's theory takes note of the dependency of cultural institutions upon the epistemological orientation of a people towards the facts of physical science. His primary value being world peace, he advocates understanding other peoples through understanding their epistemology. (...) A rare combination of both social science and philosophy, this challenging work includes several reprinted essays.--J. E. M. (shrink)