This article shows how Buddhist philosophies are consistent with the rational counseling approach of Logic-Based Therapy (LBT), as presented in Elliot D. Cohen’s book, The New Rational Therapy: Thinking Your Way To Serenity, Success, and Profound Happiness. It presents many Buddhist insights as pathways to the “transcendent” or guiding virtues of LBT, and, accordingly, as philosophical antidotes to its eleven “cardinal fallacies.” It therefore helpfully adds to the repertoire of philosophies that can be used by LBT counselors in helping counselees (...) address their problems of living. (shrink)

This book aims to pinpoint the connection feelings have with behaviour - a connection that, while clear, has never been fully explained. Following William James, Laird argues that feelings are not the cause of behavior but rather its consequences; the same goes for behaviour and motives and behaviour and attitudes. He presents research into feelings across the spectrum, from anger to joy to fear to romantic love, that support this against-the-grain view. Laird discusses the problem of common sense, self-perception (...) theory, the association between feelings and higher cognitive processes, and also the literature on facial expression, posture, and gaze. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:TOWARD A GENERAL THEORY OF FICTION by James D. Parsons When nelson Goodman writes, "All fiction is literal, literary falsehood," he seems to be disregarding at least one noteworthy tradition.1 The tradition I have in mind includes works by Jeremy Bendiam, Hans Vaihinger, Tobias Dantzig, Wallace Stevens, and a host ofother writers in many fields who have been laboring for more man two centuries to clear the ground (...) for a general theory of fiction. Such a general dieory would, if its exponents are right about its relevemce, be situated at the very heart of die law, literature, religion, science, mathematics — in fact, of humem life itself. Fiction dien would be no neirrow litereiry falsehood, but a kind of pressure, eis Wedlace Stevens said, which die imagination exerts "against die pressure of reality," and which "helps us to live our lives,"2 or, in Hans Vaihingens metaphor, "a scaffolding afterwards to be demolished" 3 — that is, elfter it heis served its constructive purpose. A fiction is a vitally useful creation of die mind corresponding to nothing in the real world. Most people eire aware of some of these fictions, from the perfect geometric figures of Euclid to the black box of contemporary axiomatics. There are many odiers. The notion diat all human beings are equal before die law is a fiction that can serve opposing purposes: it can work as an instrument for securing greater justice in the courts and in society, or it can function as ceimouflage, helping to perpetuate em unjust legal system and em oppressive social order — emd probably in any actual situation it serves both purposes at once. In die science of mechanics the idea of a pure vacuum, in which moving objects meet with no resistance, was for some centuries a useful fiction diat made possible the exact mathematiced analysis of motion in memy forms — another useful fiction. The notion of normality in psychology — mat diere is a universal standard of reference for human behavior — is stdl utilized by clinical and laboratory workers in the field, in spite of the metssive sociological emd ethnographic criticisms that have been leveled against it. In science generally, the idea that 92 James D. Parsons93 diere is a community of experts who by dieir combined influence decide what the trudi is in every field is a fiction diat seems to have come to the end of its usefulness, diough some philosophers have written about it as if it were a reality and not a fiction at edl. The fictions I have cited so far are none of them literary, nor être diey fedse in the ordinetry meaning of the word. They are simply not true; they describe nothing mat exists, except in die mind, emd cem be considered false only if one forgets what they eire emd tries, illegitimately, to apply tests of trudi to them in a direct way. Among the fictions mat might be called literary are the fictions derived from mydis. Now, a myth is a story told in answer to a question or a series of questions that has never been asked, eidier about the real world or (most likely) about the perennial performance of a ritual. The mydi is designed to forestall the questioning, because the questions that might be raised would be too embarrassing or because questions about some aspects of reality ceuinot be formulated without distorting our relation to them. These are the aspects of reedity that can be viewed only out of die corner of the eye, that disappear when we focus our gaze upon diem, and mat can be identified only indirectly.4 The more explicitly fictional devices, too, of poetry, drama, and the novel develop out of the attempt to achieve some sort of cognizeuice of the seune aspects of reality that are related in mydis. I do not meetn to imply that literature, of which mydi is a part, is concerned only with such disconcerting or evanescent aspects of reality. Literature, like all the great realms of culture, is concerned with the whole of reality. It has to be, omerwise its more passionate, its more ediereed concerns would have no lodging place, no environment in which to maintain... (shrink)

Some scholars have argued that CEOs may have excessive influence on their foundation's trustees to give away a portion of company profits to charitable causes in order to gain access to elite circles or support the CEO's personal causes. This may result in charitable contributions that ultimately serve the personal interests of the CEOs without regard to corporate interests or social needs. We examine the extent that CEOs appear to direct charitable giving to be compatible with their own personal interests, (...) and if CEO participation on the foundation board affects the relationship between CEO personal interests and charitable giving. Using a sample of 160 corporate foundations, our results showed that CEOs' interests, as measured by membership in different non-profit organizations, was associated with foundation charitable giving. This association decreased, but was not eliminated, when CEOs were absent from the foundation board. Implications of these findings for researchers and managers are discussed in regards to both agency theory and stewardship theory. (shrink)

Through an ambitious and critical revision of Michel Foucault's investigation of ethics, James Faubion develops an original program of empirical inquiry into the ethical domain. From an anthropological perspective, Faubion argues that Foucault's specification of the analytical parameters of this domain is the most productive point of departure in conceptualizing its distinctive features. He further argues that Foucault's framework is in need of substantial revision to be of genuinely anthropological scope. In making this revision, Faubion illustrates his program with (...) two extended case studies: one of a Portuguese marquis and the other of a dual subject made up of the author and a millenarian prophetess. The result is a conceptual apparatus that is able to accommodate ethical pluralism and yield an account of the limits of ethical variation, providing a novel resolution of the problem of relativism that has haunted anthropological inquiry into ethics since its inception. (shrink)

While supporting the cosmopolitan pursuit of a world that respects all rights and interests, James D. Ingram believes political theorists have, in their approach to this project, compromised its egalitarian and emancipatory principles. Focusing on recent debates without losing sight of cosmopolitanism's ancient and Enlightenment roots, Ingram confronts the philosophical difficulties of defending universal ideals and the implications for ethics and political theory. In morality as in politics, theorists have generally focused first on discovering universal values and second on (...) their implementation. Ingram argues that only by prioritizing the development and articulation of universal values through political action in the fight for freedom and equality can theorists do justice to these efforts and cosmopolitanism's universal vocation. Only by proceeding from the local to the global, from the bottom up rather than from the top down, on the basis of political practice rather than moral ideals, can we salvage moral and political universalism. In this book, Ingram provides the clearest, most systematic account yet of this schematic reversal and its radical possibilities. (shrink)

McCawley supplements his earlier book—which covers such topics as presuppositional logic, the logic of mass terms and nonstandard quantifiers, and fuzzy ...

It is argued that the \ cancellation model is a good proxy for discussions of finetuned cancellations in physical theories. XYCM is then analyzed from a statistical perspective, where it is argued that a finetuned point in the parameter space is not abnormal, with any such point being just as probable as any other point. However, landing inside a standardly defined finetuned region has a much lower probability than landing outside the region, and that probability is invariant under assumed ranges (...) of parameters. This proposition requires asserting also that the finetuned target region is a priori established. Therefore, it is surmised that a highly finetuned theory is generally expected to be highly improbable. An actionable implication of this moderate naturalness position is that the search for a non-finetuned explanation to supplant an apparently finetuned theory is likely to be a valid pursuit, but not guaranteed to be. A statistical characterization of this moderate position is presented, as well as those of the extreme pro-naturalness and anti-naturalness positions. (shrink)

In this paper, we study the relationship between the cofinalityc(Sym(ω)) of the infinite symmetric group and the minimal cardinality $$\underset{\raise0.3em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\thicksim}$}}{b} $$ of an unbounded familyF of ω ω.

"Cornell Paperback." Includes index. Bibliography: p. 163-165.

I argue that descartes' doubting of the external world does not rest on doubting the truth of clear and distinct ideas. in fact, he denies that we clearly and distinctly perceive the "existence" of material things. thus, their existence is not established through the validation of such ideas and we can understand why descartes' argument for their existence takes the form it does. i suggest that dreams lead him to conclude that the existence of material things is not clearly perceived (...) and to doubt their existence. (shrink)

The beginning of Jayaratha’s commentary on Ruyyaka’s Alaṃkārasarvasva contains a long digression on the nature of the goddess Parā Vāc, “Highest Speech,” referred to in Ruyyaka’s benedictory verse. This is an unusual choice in a text on poetics, and attention to Jayaratha’s religious context reveals that the digression is based closely on Abhinavagupta’s Parātrīśikāvivaraṇa, a tantric commentary. Jayaratha models his opening passage on this text in order to bolster an argument he wants to make about poetry, namely that poetry is (...) the appearance of the goddess Highest Speech, who has split herself into both poet and reader in order to blissfully interact with herself. He does this, I suggest, in order to mark the discussion that will follow—an extremely detailed and polemical analysis of the nature and mechanisms of various rhetorical figures, with very little explicit theology—as a discussion that takes place squarely within a Śaiva universe, one which can only be fully understood in Śaiva terms even though, or perhaps precisely because, the language of theology is not necessary for analyzing any individual rhetorical figure. (shrink)

This essay constructs an argument for a dialectic between the scientific and clinical aspects of medicine using the hermeneutical approach of Paul Ricoeur as a theoretical and philosophical guide. Additionally, the relationship between this dialectic and narrative case histories is examined as a way of expressing this abstract and theoretical concept in more concrete terms.

The centrally recognized theoretical achievement that enabled the Higgs boson discovery in 2012 was the hypothesis of its existence, made by Peter Higgs in 1964. Nevertheless, there is a significant body of comparably important theoretical work prior to and after the Higgs boson hypothesis. In this article we present an additional perspective of how crucial theory work was to the genesis of the Higgs boson hypothesis, especially emphasizing its roots in Landau's theory of phase transitions and subsequent theoretical work on (...) superconductivity. A detailed description is then given of the opposition to the Higgs boson hypothesis by many researchers, giving evidence to its speculative nature. And finally, it is discussed the importance of theory work in the decades after the hypothesis in order to make possible the experimental discovery of the Higgs boson. (shrink)

How do we establish the relevance of a moral consideration when doing so is problematic? How are conflicts among relevant considerations properly resolved? James D. Wallace maintains that a successful ethical theory should be able to answer these important questions. Nevertheless, he argues, the leading contemporary moral theories do not satisfactorily address them. In this book, Wallace criticizes the standard philosophical accounts of how we should resolve problems of moral relevance and moral conflict. He proceeds by looking at such (...) accounts as utilitarianism, Kantian moral theory, and intuitionism, and by providing an extended evaluation of Henry Sidgwick's moral epistemology. According to Wallace, these approaches pose difficulties because they all assume that there exist fixed, unchanging standards, rules, or methods that give us explicit directions for the solution of such problems. He then goes on to develop his own, "contextualist," approach, which combines elements of both Aristotelian and pragmatic views. To solve new problems, he asserts, we must adapt what we have learned from past problems to novel circumstances, sometimes appreciably changing our ways of dealing with certain kinds of issues. In adapting our ways of dealing with these issues to unprecedented problems, and in dealing with the conflicts that arise from unprecedented juxtapositions of considerations, we alter and even reform morality. (shrink)

Despite being an established and accepted scientific theory for 150 years, repeated public polls show that evolution is not believed by large numbers of people. This essay examines why people do not accept evolution and argues that its poor representation in some science textbooks allows misconceptions, established and reinforced in early childhood, to take hold. There is also a lack of up‐to‐date examples of evidence for evolution in school textbooks. Poor understanding by science graduates and teachers of the nature of (...) science and incorrect definitions by them of key terminology, serve only to undermine efforts to improve public understanding of evolution. This paper has several recommendations, including the introduction of evolution to primary age children and a call to bring evolution back as the central tenet of biology. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

… We learn from anatomy, that the immediate object of power in voluntary motion, is not the member itself which is moved, but certain muscles, and nerves, and animal spirits, and, perhaps, something still more minute and more unknown, through which the motion is successively propagated, ere it reach the member itself whose motion is the immediate object of volition. Can there be a more certain proof, that the power, by which the whole operation is performed … is, to the (...) last degree, mysterious and unintelligible?Recent metaphysical theories, which stress the importance of an agent as a sort of cause, raise again the question of where and how in the chain of events involved in voluntary motion the human agent “immediately” exerts his influence. The matter is still every bit as mystifying as Hume suggests. We know that when a human being moves voluntarily, there are events in his central nervous system which are causes of the motion. Of course, nothing whatever need be known about these events in order to move voluntarily. Either human agents produce these events or they do not. (shrink)

In Quandaries and Virtues, Edmund Pincoffs maintains that we observe a multiplicity of moral norms. A common life in which we participate supplies a context in which many virtues play diverse functional roles. He suggests, without developing the idea, that such a common life provides us with a structure for organizing and harmonizing the many moral norms we attempt to pursue. This essay explores that idea. Bodies of shared practical knowledge, such as medicine and scientific research, provide examples of empirically (...) grounded practices in which people simultaneously observe a plurality of norms that guide them in right practice. The essay develops the idea that morality is in important ways Iike these bodies of technical practical knowledge. It maintains that the origin and source of authority of moral norms is appreciably Iike that of technical norms and that the motivation for observing such norms is fundamentaIly similar. (shrink)

Jean-Francois Lyotard was one of the most influential European thinkers in recent decades. He was a leading participant in debates about post-modernism and the decline of Marxism, and he made important contributions to ethics, aesthetics and political philosophy. In this authoritative introduction, Williams tracks the development of Lyotard's thought from his early writings on the libidinal economy to his more recent work on the post-modern condition. Williams argues that despite the wide-ranging character of Lyotard's writings, they are animated by a (...) long-standing concern to develop a new theory of political action. Lyotard's productive use of avant-garde art and the aesthetics of the sublime are interpreted within this context. In the final chapters some of the main criticisms that have been levelled at Lyotard's work are outlined and assessed. A challenging but also accessible book, it will be welcomed by students and researchers in continental philosophy, literary theory and the humanities generally. (shrink)

Agency and Imagination in the Films of David Lynch: Philosophical Perspectives offers a sustained philosophical interpretation of the filmmaker’s work in light of classic and contemporary discussions of human agency and the complex relations between our capacity to act and our ability to imagine.

In his article “On Mechanical Recognition” R. J. Nelson brings to bear a branch of mathematical logic called automata theory on problems of artificial intelligence. Specifically he attacks the anti-mechanist claim that “[i]nasmuch as human recognition to a very great extent relies on context and on the ability to grasp wholes with some independence of the quality of the parts, even to fill in the missing parts on the basis of expectations, it follows that computers cannot in principle be programmed (...) to recognize or learn to recognize all patterns”, p. 24). Nelson proposes, contrary to this claim, that “gestalt recognition is not beyond digital automata”. in particular, he claims, he will establish by what he calls “Turing machine arguments” that the following four theses are true: automata can recognize different pattern types in one and the same set of instances;automata can recognize the “same” pattern in different sets of instances;automata can recognize incomplete, degraded patterns having missing or indeterminate parts;automata can recognize family resemblances. (shrink)

William James’s theory of emotion has been controversial since its inception, and a basic analysis of Cannon’s critique is provided. Research on the impact of facial expressions, expressive behaviors, and visceral responses on emotional feelings are each reviewed. A good deal of evidence supports James’s theory that these types of bodily feedback, along with perceptions of situational cues, are each important parts of emotional feelings. Extensions to James’s theory are also reviewed, including evidence of individual differences in (...) the effect of bodily responses on emotional experience. (shrink)