At the beginning of the series, a dozen young women are introduced as potential mates for the eligible young bachelor. The audience accompanies the couples on their limo-escorted dates, meets the bachelor's family and friends, listens to their evaluation of the bride, and watches expectantly as the smiling Prince Charming singles out a few finalists for his attention. As the weeks pass by, one by one, tearful young women are dismissed from the show as the presentation of the final rose (...) that signifies singular devotion draws near. In the end, only two young women remain, and only one can receive…. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.2 (2002) 91-95 [Access article in PDF] From: A Symposium on Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture Jeffrey Walker For who does not know, except them, that the art of using letters is fixed and unchanging, so that we always use the same letters for the same purposes, but in the art of discourse the case is entirely the reverse? —Isocrates, Against the SophistsThe essays composing this (...) issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric are based on papers that originally were presented at a symposium on "Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture," sponsored by the Emory University Center for Teaching and Curriculum, Department of English, and Hightower Fund, in March 2001. The ostensible purpose of the symposium was to consider the double nature and status of rhetoric: on one hand, a hermeneutic/theoretical discipline with applications across the humanities (in the analysis of texts, events, culture, argumentative practices, ideologies, and so forth); and, on the other hand, a practical "art of discourse," a techne, whose central or distinctive application is the training of skilled writers and speakers. The former tends to be emphasized in contemporary rhetorical studies, while the latter is the most familiar (though not necessarily essential) characteristic of "classical" or ancient rhetoric. Likewise, we can connect these two orientations, respectively, with rhetorical cultural studies and with the teaching of writing, speaking, and communication in general. While the natural assumption is that these two orientations are mutually supporting, that is not always or necessarily the case. One can argue that the first pulls in the direction of "philosophy" (however that may be defined), while the second pulls in the direction of sheer technique—and at one time or another, each has been [End Page 91] open to criticism for its lack of attention to the other: philosophers are ineffective rhetoricians, and cannot intervene in the public sphere; orators are superficial thinkers, and practice an irresponsible, demagogic art of manipulation and domination. This tension goes all the way back to the first critiques of the sophists, and plays out through the entire history of rhetoric. The symposium's speakers, then, were asked to reflect, in any way that seemed suitable to them, on either or both aspects of rhetoric's double nature, and/or the relationships between them.A symposium, inevitably, as a rhetorical event, always takes its own somewhat unpredictable trajectory, as papers are produced and presented, and as the ensuing discussion unfolds. And the four essays presented here—Steven Mailloux on Frederick Douglass and the nineteenth-century American debate over slavery; Susan Wells on "double consciousness" in S. Weir Mitchell's account of the case of Mary Reynolds and W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk; James L. Kastely on the discontinuity between the "philosophical" and "technical" halves of Plato's Phaedrus;and Richard Doyle on the strange intersection between the emergence of LSD and the evolution of biotechnological understandings of DNA—are all revisions and expansions of the original presentations, reflecting the contingencies of their invention and reinvention. Nevertheless, the original motives of the symposium are still in evidence.As different as these essays are, it can be said that one or two underlying themes run through them, and provide a reply to the original topic proposed for the symposium. Perhaps the keynote is what Mailloux describes as "rhetorical paths of thought": that is, the "migration" and "evolution" of topoi, figures, lines of arguments, bits of narratives, and rhetorical traditions themselves (or fragments of them?) "from one community to another... [and] from one cultural moment to the next," as Frederick Douglass takes in the rhetorical traditions, practices, tropes and arguments exemplified in the Columbian Orator, as well as Aristotle's arguments on slavery, and as they become enabling parts of his own rhetorical repertoire in the debate on abolition. In Wells's essay, this appears as the "refunctioning" or reworking of topoi, as the notion of "double consciousness" is adapted as part of a "new logic of scientific authority" in Mitchell's account of "split personality," and also as a way of understanding and performing public discourse and identity in... (shrink)

It seems like people have character traits that explain a good deal of their behavior. Call a theory character realism just in case it vindicates this folk assumption. Recently, Christian Miller has argued that the way to reconcile character realism with decades of psychological research is to adopt metaphysical reductivism about character traits. Some contemporary psychological theories of character and virtue seem to implicitly endorse such reductivism; others resist reduction of traits to finer-grained mental components or processes; and still others (...) remain silent on the metaphysics of traits. In this paper we argue that character realists do not have to, and in fact should not, be reductivists. We introduce a theoretical dilemma for reductivist character realism. Then we explain how nonreductivists can meet the standards for empirical adequacy laid out by Miller and others. Further, we argue, hylomorphic nonreductivism avoids the theoretical dilemma that threatens reductivism. It also fits nicely the major commitments of recent models of virtue in psychology. Thus, character realists should not be reductivists. (shrink)

This paper is a response to particularist critics of the normative force of moral principles. The particularist critique, as I understand it, is a rejection not only of principle‐based accounts of moral deliberation and justification, but also of accounts of character in which principles play a central role. I focus on the latter challenge and counter it with a view I call character‐principlism. I begin by discussing in a general way what motivates the particularity objection to principles and then contrast (...) two views – both of which insist on the importance of attentiveness to particularity – about the relative normative status of principles and particular cases. I present some reasons for believing that we need a more normatively robust conception of the role of moral principles than the particularists provide. In the main portion of the paper, I discuss how character‐principlism sees principles functioning in our lives and the lives we lead with others. I contrast this with some other accounts of desirable character that particularists can embrace, and argue that these are seriously flawed because, unlike character‐principlism, they cannot satisfactorily explain how a person could possess the constancy of character that moral integrity requires. (shrink)

Lewis signaling games illustrate how language might evolve from random behavior. The probability of evolving an optimal signaling language is, in part, a function of what learning strategy the agents use. Here we investigate three learning strategies, each of which allows agents to forget old experience. In each case, we find that forgetting increases the probability of evolving an optimal language. It does this by making it less likely that past partial success will continue to reinforce suboptimal practice. The learning (...) strategies considered here show how forgetting past experience can promote learning in the context of games with suboptimal equilibria. (shrink)

The modern practice of organ donation after cardiocirculatory death (DCD) emerged in the 1990s as a response to the alarmingly wide gap between the number of transplantable organs available through organ donation after neurological death and the urgent organ transplantation needs of persons in end-organ failure. Various important ethical dimensions of DCD have been considered and debated by prominent organ donation/transplantation theorists and clinicians.In this article, consideration of some of these ethical elements provides a foundation for a proposed set of (...) ethically informed, pragmatic conditions that could assist in the development of health policies to guide the practice of organ donation after cardiocirculatory death. (shrink)

We consider the efficacy of various forms of reinforcement learning with punishment in evolving linguistic conventions in the context of Lewis-Skyrms signalling games. We show that the learning strategy of reinforcement with iterative punishment is highly effective at evolving optimal conventions in even complex signalling games. It is also robust and can be easily extended to a self-tuning variety of reinforcement learning. We briefly discuss some of the virtues of reinforcement with iterative punishment and how it may be related to (...) learning in nature. (shrink)

The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes offers a new interpretation of Thomas Hobbes's response to the English Revolution. By focusing on his religious thought, it debunks the standard view of him as a royalist, and recovers his sympathies with the religious projects of the 1640s and 1650s. This reinterpretation culminates with an exploration of Hobbes's surprising sympathies with Oliver Cromwell and his supporters. By placing Thomas Hobbes within fresh contexts, Professor Collins offers a new angle of vision on the religious significance (...) of the English Revolution itself. (shrink)

It is often claimed (1) that levels of nature are related by supervenience, and (2) that processes occurring at particular levels of nature should be studied using dynamical systems theory. However, there has been little consideration of how these claims are related. To address the issue, I show how supervenience relations give rise to ‘supervenience functions’, and use these functions to show how dynamical systems at different levels are related to one another. I then use this analysis to describe a (...) graded approach to non-reductive physicalism, and to critically assess Davidson’s arguments for psychological anomaly. I also show how this approach can inform empirical research in cognitive science. (shrink)

Despite the relative scarcity of references to Hegel in Strauss’s published work, one can begin to get a sense of how Strauss regarded Hegel. This paper deals with Strauss’s views concerning the Hegelian construal of faith and God. For Strauss, Hegel’s construal of divine personality as subject rather than substance amounts to something like a rejection of the divine personality.

Justice requires giving people what they deserve. Or so many philosophers – and according to many of those philosophers, everyone else – thought for centuries. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, however, perhaps under the influence of Rawls’s (1971) desert-less theory, desert was largely cast out of discussions of distributive justice. Now it is making a comeback. In this chapter I consider recent research on the concept of desert, arguments for its requital, and connections between desert and other distributive ideals. I (...) suggest that desert-sensitive theories of distributive justice, though they face obstacles, have a promising future. (shrink)

This chapter talks about “Super Best Friends,” where the kids are seduced by illusionist David Blaine and his growing cult, and Jesus and the Super Best Friends must come to the rescue. It reviews important philosophical questions the episode raises, including miracles and the difference between the natural and supernatural. More generally, the chapter also talks about the nature of religious pluralism—the co‐existence of many different claims to religious authority—and how faith relates to reason in a world of diverse beliefs.

There is good reason to suppose that our best physical theories are false: In addition to its own internal problems, the standard formulation of quantum mechanics is logically incompatible with special relativity. There is also good reason to suppose that we have no concrete idea concerning what it might mean to claim that these theories are approximately or vaguely true. I will argue that providing a concrete understanding the approximate or vague truth of our current physical theories is not a (...) task for traditional epistemology; rather, this is only possible in the context of ongoing empirical inquiry. [Note #1]. (shrink)

_Explores how the thought of Leo Strauss amounts to a model for thinking about the connection between philosophy, Jewish thought, and history._.

This paper concerns two composite Lewis-Skyrms signaling games. Each consists in a base game that evolves a language descriptive of nature and a metagame that coevolves a language descriptive of the base game and its evolving language. The first composite game shows how a pragmatic notion of truth might coevolve with a simple descriptive language. The second shows how a pragmatic notion of probability might similarly coevolve. Each of these pragmatic notions is characterized by the particular game and role that (...) it comes to play in the game. (shrink)

Husserl is well known for his critique of the “mathematizing tendencies” of modern science, and is particularly emphatic that mathematics and phenomenology are distinct and in some sense incompatible. But Husserl himself uses mathematical methods in phenomenology. In the first half of the paper I give a detailed analysis of this tension, showing how those Husserlian doctrines which seem to speak against application of mathematics to phenomenology do not in fact do so. In the second half of the paper I (...) focus on a particular example of Husserl’s “mathematized phenomenology”: his use of concepts from what is today called dynamical systems theory. (shrink)

Scientists’ identities and social locations influence their work, but the content of scientific work can also influence scientists. Theory from feminist science studies, autoethnographic accounts, interviews, and experiments indicate that the substance of scientific research can have profound effects on how scientists are treated by colleagues and their sense of belonging in science. I bring together these disparate literatures under the framework of professional cultures. Drawing on the Survey of Earned Doctorates and the Web of Science, I use computational social (...) science tools to argue that the way scientists write about sex in their research influences the future gender ratio of PhDs awarded across 53 subfields of the life sciences over a span of 47 years. Specifically, I show that a critical paradigm of “feminist biology” that seeks to de-essentialize sex and gender corresponds to increases in women’s graduation rates, whereas “sex difference” research—sometimes called “neurosexism” because of its emphasis on essential, categorical differences—corresponds to decreases in women’s graduation rates in most fields. (shrink)

Recent developments, both in the cognitive sciences and in world events, bring special emphasis to the study of morality. The cognitive sciences, spanning neurology, psychology, and computational intelligence, offer substantial ad- vances in understanding the origins and purposes of morality. Meanwhile, world events urge the timely synthesis of these insights with traditional ac- counts that can be easily assimilated and practically employed to augment moral judgment, both to solve current problems and to direct future action. The object of the following (...) paper is to present such a synthesis in the form of a model of moral cognition, the ACTWith model of conscience. The purpose of the model is twofold. One, the ACTWith model is intended to shed light on personal moral dispositions, and to provide a tool for actual human moral agents in the refinement of their moral lives. As such, it relies on the power of personal introspection, bolstered by the careful study of moral exemplars available to all persons in all cultures in the form of literary or religious fig- ures, if not in the form of contemporary peers and especially leadership. Two, the ACTWith model is intended as a minimum architecture for fully func- tional artificial morality. As such, it is essentially amodal, implementation non-specific and is developed in the form of an information processing control system. There are given as few hard points in this system as necessary for moral function, and these are themselves taken from review of actual human cognitive processes, thereby intentionally capturing as closely as possible what is expected of moral action and reaction by human beings. Only in satisfying these untutored intuitions should an artificial agent ever be properly regarded as moral, at least in the general population of existing moral agents. Thus, the ACTWith model is intended as a guide both for individual moral develop- ment and for the development of artificial moral agents as future technology permits. (shrink)

This forward-thinking collection presents new work that looks beyond the division between the analytic and continental philosophical traditions—one that has long caused dissension, mutual distrust, and institutional barriers to the development of common concerns and problems. Rather than rehearsing the causes of the divide, contributors draw upon the problems, methods, and results of both traditions to show what post-divide philosophical work looks like in practice. Ranging from metaphysics and philosophy of mind to political philosophy and ethics, the papers gathered here (...) bring into mutual dialogue a wide range of recent and contemporary thinkers, and confront leading problems common to both traditions, including methodology, ontology, meaning, truth, values, and personhood. Collectively, these essays show that it is already possible to foresee a future for philosophical thought and practice no longer determined neither as "analytic" nor as "continental," but, instead, as a pluralistic synthesis of what is best in both traditions. The new work assembled here shows how the problems, projects, and ambitions of twentieth-century philosophy are already being taken up and productively transformed to produce new insights, questions, and methods for philosophy today. (shrink)

Imaginary worlds are not a consequence of humans' exploratory tendencies as argued in the target article but a recent spinoff of a strong human tendency to create imaginary realities, that is, versions of how the world works that are fabricated (although we believe they are real) in order to allow us to believe we understand it and can control it.

The role of mechanistic evidence tends to be under-appreciated in current evidencebased medicine (EBM), which focusses on clinical studies, tending to restrict attention to randomized controlled studies (RCTs) when they are available. The EBM+ programme seeks to redress this imbalance, by suggesting methods for evaluating mechanistic studies alongside clinical studies. Drug approval is a problematic case for the view that mechanistic evidence should be taken into account, because RCTs are almost always available. Nevertheless, we argue that mechanistic evidence is central (...) to all the key tasks in the drug approval process: in drug discovery and development; assessing pharmaceutical quality; devising dosage regimens; assessing efficacy, harms, external validity, and cost-effectiveness; evaluating adherence; and extending product licences. We recommend that, when preparing for meetings in which any aspect of drug approval is to be discussed, mechanistic evidence should be systematically analysed and presented to the committee members alongside analyses of clinical studies. (shrink)

Collective memory is thought to be something “more” than a conglomeration of personal memories which compose it. Yet, each of us, each individual in every society, remembers from a personal point of view. And if there is memory beyond personal experience through which collective identities are configured, in what “place” might one legitimately situate it? In addressing this question, this article examines the political significance of the distinction between two levels of what are often lumped together under the term of (...) “collective memory”: memories that are retained through the direct experience of groups or associations of a limited size and those that are rarely the object of direct experience constituting the events marking the identities of mass societies. (shrink)

Claude Welch, the distinguished historian of nineteenth‐century religious thought, once declared that Samuel Taylor Coleridge ‘may be seen as the real turning point into the theology of the nineteenth century’ and that he ‘was as important for British and American thought as were Schleiermacher and Hegel’.2 Still, Coleridge remains largely marginalized in the annals of church history and theology despite his unwavering prominence throughout much of the nineteenth century. Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that Coleridge's posthumously published (...) Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit , with its rejection of the verbal infallibility of Scripture and elevation of the importance of the individual in rightly discerning the truths of the Christian faith, has often been misread as an attestation of the primacy of the individual subject over the biblical text. It has been treated alternately as a document that signals the emergence of German higher criticism in England,3 a Romantic appeal to the fundamental importance of the subjective in religion,4 and an early form of reader‐oriented literary criticism.5 In this article I suggest that the attention devoted to Coleridge's denial of the verbal inspiration of Scripture, epitomized by the phrase that biblical inspiration is constituted by ‘whatever finds me’, has overshadowed his equally significant attention to the authority of church tradition in that same document. More specifically, rather than arguing for subjectivism in biblical interpretation, Coleridge equally emphasizes the objective sources of revelation expressed in Scripture and the church traditions handed over from the apostles. Rather than proposing a model of biblical inspiration that is wholly individualistic, Coleridge maintains a vision of Christianity that affirms the vitality of both the authority of the church and that of the believer. Thus, Coleridge's theological contribution to religious history is not that of an aberrant, absent‐minded poet, but rather that of a central participant engaged in an ongoing and pivotal debate in the history of England: the relationship between Scripture and church traditions.In order to draw out this important, though neglected, strand of thought in those ‘Letters on the Scriptures’, the name by which the Confessions is sometimes identified,6 I begin by briefly clarifying the nature of the idea of tradition both in relation to Coleridge and English theology in the nineteenth century. I then summarize the argument of the Confessions as a whole and turn more particularly to those sections of the Confessions that suggest the role Coleridge assigns to church tradition in relation to Scripture. Finally, after assessing the authority of the church in relationship to the divine Word, I turn to Coleridge's earlier works and his notes on the Works of William Chillingworth in order to demonstrate that his views on the respective authority of both the individual and the church were consistently held since near the time of his conversion to Trinitarian Christianity. I conclude that Coleridge's conception of the relationship between Scripture and church traditions calls for a reevaluation of his place in the history of religious thought in England. (shrink)

La présente étude se consacre à un examen du concept de la mémoire collective en s'interrogeant sur l'interprétation que Paul Ricœur propose de ce concept dans son ouvrage La mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli. L'auteur présente une lecture critique de l'interprétation de la mémoire collective chez Ricœur là ou Ricœur tente de comprendre ce phénomène par analogie avec la mémoire personnelle et risque, selon cette lecture, d'occulter les dimensions de la mémoire collective qui échappent à un tel rapport analogique. L'auteur tente alors (...) de dépasser le cadre de cette analogie par une analyse des sources symboliques et métapersonnelles de la mémoire collective. This study examines the concept of collective memory through an investigation of Paul Ricœur's interpretation of this concept in his work, La mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli. In presenting a critical reading of the analogy Ricoeur establishes between collective and personal memory, the author argues that this analogy risks excluding those dimensions of collective memory which cannot be comprehended through such an analogy. The attempt is then made to surmount this difficulty through an analysis of collective memory in relation to its symbolic and metapersonal sources. (shrink)