What roles do women play in world politics? Who are these women, and what impact do they have on international relations? D'Amico and Beckman have assembled a diverse array of contributors who provide a variety of answers. Some contributors consider women as national leaders and profile Chamorro, Gandhi, Thatcher, and Aquino as examples. Autobiographical essays and interviews describe the experiences of Margaret Anstee, Benazir Bhutto, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Golda Meir. Other contributors analyze international women's movements, the roles of women (...) in the Green Movement and in the revolutionary movements in Cuba and Nicaragua, and the work of Jane Addams in the peace movement. Some analyze the attitudes and beliefs of America's leading opinion makers on the subject of women and men in leadership roles. Written for beginning students in comparative politics and international relations, their work is both fundamental as an introductory text and pioneering in scope and conception. (shrink)

The Description for this book, The Analysis of Knowing: A Decade of Research, will be forthcoming.

In “Conditions and Analyses of Knowledge”, Robert Shope focuses on the conditions that must be satisfied for a person to have knowledge, specifically knowledge that something is so. Traditionally, knowledge has been analyzed in terms of justified true belief. Shope addresses philosophers’ disagreements concerning the truth and belief conditions. After introducing the justification condition, he presents challenges that have provoked several attempts to replace or to supplement the justification condition for knowledge. Shope presents and assesses several of (...) these, including early causal theories, the nonaccidentality requirement, reliable process and conditional analyses, the reliable‐indicator analysis, the conclusive reasons analysis, defeasibility analyses, analyses in terms of cognitive or intellectual virtues, and proper functionalism as well as his own account of knowledge. (shrink)

A passionate indictment of the major political parties in Britain today for their failure to face the biggest issues on the British political agenda. -/- These are issues of survival / not just of ourselves or our families, not just of the immediate environment or of our own country, but of the world itself. Politicians of every tradition have let us down, They offer the superficial appeal of a temporary prosperity. They make no promise for the future. -/- This book (...) brings together prominent people from socialist, liberal and green traditions together with those from whose experience lies in pressure groups. What they have in common is more remarkable than what divides them despite the fact that they have been candidates for opposing political parties. The empty rhetoric of the twentieth century politics has proved of no worth. This book explores the opportunities for a new and green parliamentary politics which will take us beyond the politics of Thatcher and Kinnock and into the 21st century. (shrink)

Shope presents a unified perspective on meaningfulness, spanning such varied topics as the meaningfulness of linguistic expressions and conventional signs, Freud's conception of the meaningfulness of various mental phenomena and instances of behavior, a person's meaning to do something, meaning in the arts, and even life's having a meaning. Shope's perspective is based upon a 'constitutive' analysis of what it is for one item to represent another. Criticizing the views of philosophers who attempt to analyze such representing in (...) causal terms, or merely in epistemological terms, he shows that a successful analysis needs to invoke both types of considerations. (shrink)

Philosophers, psychiatrists, and social scientists would welcome clarification of the distinction between rational and irrational desires. It may be proper to say that rational desires are those which manifest rationality. But since this seems a rather unilluminating characterization, philosophers sometimes offer definitions of what constitute such manifestations of rationality. I shall consider definitions provided by John Rawls and Richard Brandt. Their definitions are unsatisfactory mainly because they include subjunctive conditionals. An alternative approach, which avoids conditionals, is attractive. But it encounters (...) so many additional problems that I shall conclude that we are not now in a position to define rationality in this area and must treat it as a state or disposition which to date has only been partially characterized. Thus, if we want a definition of the difference between rational and irrational desires, we must at present settle for the rather unexciting one mentioned above. (shrink)

Those who recognize the type of knowledge acquisition that involves what Peter D. Klein calls ‘a useful false belief’ face the problem of defining appropriate boundaries for such a belief. Klein’s own proposal encounters counterexamples and should be replaced by a definition inspired by a position that may be called ‘circumstantialism,’ which emphasizes certain circumstances belonging to the knower’s situation. The revised definition also offers a solution to ‘The False Lemma Problem’ of distinguishing cases involving useful false beliefs from classic (...) Gettier-type cases involving a false lemma in the reasoning underlying the inferential process. (shrink)

Psychoanalysis regards many previously inexplicable phenomena as wish?fulfilments, which have meaning inasmuch as they express the person's wishes or affects. This might appear to make such psychoanalytic explanations rather like ordinary explanations of conduct and to enlarge the area of intentional and possibly that of responsible behavior. But a critique of these psychoanalytic accounts will show that they are very unlike accounts in terms of ordinary notions of fulfilling or expressing wishes and that the psychoanalytic concept of wish?fulfilment differs sufficiently (...) from the ordinary one for it to be difficult to determine how to test psychoanalytic hypotheses concerning wish?fulfilment by merely considering the way in which we assess claims utilizing the ordinary notion. In fact, such a critique will show that for a certain type of claim regarding wish?fulfilments, psychoanalysts have not indicated ways of confirming or disconfirming such claims ? in the sense that they have not shown how to find any evidence which would support these claims to a higher degree than contrary or contradictory claims. After offering the first part of this critique, which is a comparison of psychoanalytic and ordinary notions of fulfilling and expressing wishes, some considerations concerning a second part of the critique are presented regarding the connection between the construct of psychic energy and that of wish?fulfilment. (shrink)

Having an intention can be analyzed in terms of certain causal powers possessed by an instance of one’s having a thought of a certain state of affairs, where a certain preference is what causes those powers to be present. A suitable understanding of such a prcference emerges from a discussion of Wayne A. Davis’ analysis of intending. However, Davis’ emphasis on belief and desire rather than on instances of having a thought leads to difficulties for his analysis of intending. After (...) supplementing my own analysis with a sufficient condition of intentional action, I defend my approach by relating it to D.F. Gustafson’s Intention and Agency. (shrink)

Richard Rorty's eliminative materialism is an attack on dualism that has frequently been misrepresented and incorrectly criticized. By taking account of the mistakes that philosophers have made concerning eliminative materialism, a proper definition of the doctrine and a clarification of its relation to traditional materialism will emerge, as well as an understanding of its true strengths and weaknesses. The discussion centers around the original manner in which Rorty defended eliminative materialism by means of analogies to the elimination of talk about (...) demons and talk about macroscopic physical objects. (shrink)

A complex theory concerning powers, natures, and causal necessity has emerged from the writings of P. H. Hare, E. H. Madden, and R. Harré. In the course of rebutting objections that other critics have raised to the power account of causation, I correct three of its genuine difficulties: its attempt to analyze power attributions in terms of conditional statements; its characterization of the relation between something's powers and its nature; and its doctrines concerning conceptual necessity. The resulting interpretation of causal (...) modalities is then subsumed under a more general power account of modality, related at a number of points to considerations concerning powers, and further illustrating their philosophical importance. (shrink)

In light of recent technological innovations and discourses around data and algorithmic analytics, scholars of many stripes are attempting to develop critical agendas and responses to these developments. In this mutual interview, three scholars discuss the stakes, ideas, responsibilities, and possibilities of critical data studies. The resulting dialog seeks to explore what kinds of critical approaches to these topics, in theory and practice, could open and make available such approaches to a broader audience.

Causal analyses of one’s knowing that p have recently emphasized the involvement of cognitive virtues in coming to believe that p. John Greco suggests that in order to deal with Gettier-type cases, a virtue analysis of knowing should include a requirement that one’s knowing does not in a certain way involve abnormality. Yet Greco’s emphasis on statistical abnormality either renders his analysis subject to a generality problem or to objections regarding certain Gettier-type cases. When we instead consider abnormality in the (...) sense of a causally differentiating factor in relation to a causal contrast situation, the account remains unclear concerning its application to an interesting non-Gettier-type case concerning chance. The exploration of these shortcomings casts doubt on the epistemological usefulness of the schema, ‘If you know, then there is no abnormality in your being right. ’. (shrink)

When analyzing 'justified factual knowledge that h', we must speak of justified belief in h and also of h's being a justified proposition. Gettier-type problems can be dealt with by requiring that the belief in h be justified through its connection with a 'justification-explaining chain' related to h. The social aspects of knowledge can be encompassed by analyzing what it is for h to be a justified proposition in terms of h's relation to the rationality of an 'epistemic community'.The discussion (...) explains these analyses, and shows how to concept of a justification-explaining chain is related to Ernest Sosa's concept of a 'tree of knowledge'. The present account of justification is seen to be preferable.A rationale for appealing to justification-explaining chains emerges from Popper's concern with another type of knowledge, namely, sets of propositions embedded in systems used by epistemic communities in pursuit of epistemic goals.In conclusion, the present approach is related to a number of examples found in the literature concerning the social aspects of knowledge. (shrink)

Causal processes that are technically called deviant or wayward causal chains must be ruled out when analyzing various phenomena, including intentional action, perception, and the operation of causal mechanisms involved in the manifesting of causal powers. Irving Thalberg is incorrect in arguing that this problem does not arise when analyzing intentional action. After criticizing solutions proposed by Christopher Peacocke and David Lewis, I provide a general analysis of non-deviance. In application to intentional action, the account is seen to be preferable (...) to that of Michael H. Robins, and proves to be adequate to rule out what Alfred R. Mele calls cases of tertiary waywardness. (shrink)

When employing causal terminology in analyzing intentional action, and sometimes in analyzing additional phenomena, philosophers have required that relevant causal chains be free of what they call causal deviance or waywardness. But there is a wider type of deviance that needs to be excluded, of which causal deviance is only a species. Carl Ginet’s On Action considers examples of both types of deviance. A criticism of his treatment of such examples leads to a more satisfactory general analysis of nondeviant chains (...) in terms of the manifestations of powers and the occasions for such manifestations. (shrink)

In order to assess the tenacity of psychoanalysts in continuing to use a concept of psychic energy, it is advisable to consider whether, as they sometimes claim, the concepts of energy, force, and work in psychoanalysis are akin to those in the natural sciences. Strong disanalogies suggest that the psychoanalytic concepts are quite different and used equivocally even within psychoanalysis. However, they may not be subject to the objections which certain critical psychoanalysts have raised.