Previous ed. by : Lord Lloyd of Hampstead and M.D.A. Freeman.

Moral leadership matters. As world politics enters a new and dangerous era, judgment, constancy, moral purpose, and a willingness to overcome partisan politicking are essential for America's leaders. Tempered Strength finds the alternative standard of leadership that Americans are seeking in the classical philosophy of prudence. Ethan Fishman's new work brings together leading American political scientists—including Ronald Beiner, Kenneth L. Deutsch, and George Anastaplo—to discuss the evolution of a standard of prudential leadership both reasonable in nature and practical in scope. (...) Section One studies the meaning of prudence and its evolution in the history of political science from Aristotelian phronesis to Xenophon, Thomas Aquinas, Edmund Burke, and Michael Oakeshott. Section Two demonstrates how the theory of prudential leadership can be applied to practical political issues. (shrink)

Responding to volatile criticisms frequently leveled at Leo Strauss and those he influenced, the prominent contributors to this volume demonstrate the profound influence that Strauss and his students have exerted on American liberal democracy and contemporary political thought. By stressing the enduring vitality of classic books and by articulating the theoretical and practical flaws of relativism and historicism, the contributors argue that Strauss and the Straussians have identified fundamental crises of modernity and liberal democracy.

This essay examines the funeral sermon given by the Baptist theologian Andrew Fuller (1754–1815) for his friend and deacon Beeby Wallis in 1792 as a vantage-point from which to pursue reflection on Fuller’s concept of heaven and the beatific vision. The sermon has two main themes: the rest and rewards of those who die in Christ. The essay examines how Fuller interprets both of these phrases and then, looking at the rest of Fuller’s corpus, notes that ultimately God himself is (...) the believer’s reward. (shrink)

Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) was an eminent theorist across the fields of philosophy, physical chemistry and economics. Elected to the Royal Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, his contributions to research in the social sciences, and his theories on positivism and knowledge, are of critical academic importance. The three lectures included in this comprehensive volume, first published in 1959, argue for Polanyi’s principle of ‘tacit knowing’ as a fundamental component of knowledge. They were intended to accompany Polanyi’s (...) earlier work, Personal Knowledge , and as a tribute to the philosophical and educational work of Lord A. D. Lindsay. (shrink)

That the immediate forebears of Descartes, the "Father of Modern Philosophy," were not the victims of parricide is generally acknowledged. It is a disputed question, however, whether Descartes's fatherhood amounts in its essentials to a continuation of the bloodline of late scholasticism. The traditional view is that Descartes's is a thoroughgoing but also somewhat mediated modernity, as D'Alembert's "Discours préliminaire" to the Encyclopédie attests. D'Alembert, speaking for several generations of readers, had no doubts about Descartes's debt to scholastic theology. However, (...) he also argued that it was Francis Bacon who was the true "father of lights." Rousseau, for all his differences with D'Alembert, seems to have agreed with him on that point at least. Against those who would downplay the novelty of modernity, and in keeping with this traditional assessment of its origin, Robert Faulkner urges a careful reconsideration of the work of philosophy's only Lord Chancellor. Faulkner's intention is not merely to set the historical record straight, however. As he states at the outset, he hopes more generally "to contribute to efforts at prudent discrimination and philosophic rethinking" of modernity as we now live it. Reading Bacon is for Faulkner an exercise in self-understanding. (shrink)

This paper attempts to present a 'time line' of the increasing levels of doubt and anxiety about the path of 'Progressive Civilization' from the heyday of Victorian liberalism in the early 19th Century to the rise of postmodernism in our day. It does so by tracking a line of thought through John Stuart Mill, Lord Bryce, Matthew Arnold, Henry Adams, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Walter Lippmann. It uses the quip coined by the Yippie leader Abbie Hoffmann in the (...) 1960's as a symbolic phrase for the terminus to which the "Idea of Progess" has led us in the 21st Century. The argument is that over the time period covered the most serious observers became increasingly aware of the disappearance from modern society's horizon of any idea of a transcendent meaning within which it could explain and justify to itself its own deepest purposes. The necessity for a persuasive 'metaphysics' which could show why the modern western experiment is a good thing became increasingly evident in inverse proportion to its philosophical availability. Note: This paper was delivered at the University of Maine on April 27, 2009 under the auspices of the Program in Western Civilization and American Liberty directed by Michael J.Palmer the Abraham Lincoln Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Political Science at the University of Maine. (shrink)

In recent years, we have seen a new concern with ethics training for research and development professionals. Although ethics training has become more common, the effectiveness of the training being provided is open to question. In the present effort, a new ethics training course was developed that stresses the importance of the strategies people apply to make sense of ethical problems. The effectiveness of this training was assessed in a sample of 59 doctoral students working in the biological and social (...) sciences using a pre-post design with follow-up and a series of ethical decision-making measures serving as the outcome variable. Results showed not only that this training led to sizable gains in ethical decision making but also that these gains were maintained over time. The implications of these findings for ethics training in the sciences are discussed. (shrink)

Ethical decision making measures are widely applied as the principal dependent variable used in studies of research integrity. However, evidence bearing on the internal and external validity of these measures is not available. In this study, ethical decision making measures were administered to 102 graduate students in the biological, health, and social sciences, along with measures examining exposure to ethical breaches and the severity of punishments recommended. The ethical decision making measure was found to be related to exposure to ethical (...) events and the severity of punishments awarded. The implications of these findings for the application of ethical decision making measures are discussed. (shrink)

Using Canada as a case study, this article argues that regulating biotechnology and nanotechnology is made unnecessarily complex and inherently unstable because of a failure to consult the public early and of-ten enough. Furthermore, it is argued that future regulators (and promoters) of nanotechnology may learn valuable lessons from the mistakes made in regulating biotechnology.

This paper explores analyzing criminal responsibility from the Humean position that blame is for character traits. If untoward acts indicate undesirable character traits, then the agent is blameworthy; if they do not, then the actor is not blameworthy — he has an excuse. A distinctive feature of this approach is that that voluntariness of acts is irrelevant to determining blameworthiness.This analysis is then applied to a variety of issues in criminal law. Mens supports inferences to character traits, and the Humean (...) approach provides a reason for rejeting strict criminal liability. The Humean approach also helps resolve a number of issues about attempts, such as punishment for impossible attempts and the defense of abandonment. It also supports the broad outlines of the defense of mistake and provides a third alternative in the Wooton-Hart debate over punishment and treatment. (shrink)

Recounts the works of Immanuel Velikovsky and the controversies surrounding it, discussing his influence on the counterculture and debates with such luminaries as Carl Sagan.

This study examined the role of key causal analysis strategies in forecasting and ethical decision-making. Undergraduate participants took on the role of the key actor in several ethical problems and were asked to identify and analyze the causes, forecast potential outcomes, and make a decision about each problem. Time pressure and analytic mindset were manipulated while participants worked through these problems. The results indicated that forecast quality was associated with decision ethicality, and the identification of the critical causes of the (...) problem was associated with both higher quality forecasts and higher ethicality of decisions. Neither time pressure nor analytic mindset impacted forecasts or ethicality of decisions. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

We have seen that despite Feferman's results Gödel's second theorem vitiates the use of Hilbert-type epistemological programs and consistency proofs as a response to mathematical skepticism. Thus consistency proofs fail to have the philosophical significance often attributed to them.This does not mean that consistency proofs are of no interest to philosophers. We know that a ‘non-pathological’ consistency proof for a system S will use methods which are not available in S. When S is as strong a system as we are (...) willing to entertain seriously then a consistency proof for it will yield no epistemological gain. But in other cases philosophers might argue that the proof uses methods which are merely different rather than stronger than those available in the system in question. This claim has been made, for example, in the case of the constructive consistency proofs for elementary number theory. Similar philosophical investigations can be made on relative consistency proofs, since these differ from each other in the principles they employ. For example, most relative consistency proofs can be carried out within elementary number theory, but without using the theory of real numbers, no one has been able to prove the consistency of Quine's ML relative to that of his NF.What about the consistency of all mathematics or of some strong system for set theory? How do we answer the skeptic? Since here a convincing proof is not possible, we have established that the skeptic demands too much. We cannot be certain that our axioms are free from contradiction and must treat them as hypotheses which may be abandoned or modified in the face of further mathematical experience. This attitude is taken by many foundational workers who also go on to voice opinions about thelikelihood that various systems are consistent. Since these opinions are variously supported by appeals to the clarity of the mathematical concept formalized, the existence or non-existence of ‘weird’ models for the system and actual empirical experience with the system, this is surely a fruitful area for philosophical research. (shrink)

Dan Zahavi has questioned whether the use of a transcendental phenomenological epoché is essential for phenomenological psychology. He criticizes the views of Amedeo Giorgi by asserting that Husserl did not view the transcendental reduction as needed for an entrance into phenomenological psychology and that, if one thinks so, phenomenological psychology would be in danger of being absorbed within transcendental phenomenology. Thirdly, rather than envisioning transcendental phenomenology as a purification for phenomenological psychology, Zahavi recommends a dialogue between transcendental phenomenologists and psychologists. (...) However, the two disciplines are closer for Husserl who also conceives phenomenological psychology as a self-standing science, and Giorgi is not as rigid on the necessity of transcendental phenomenology for phenomenological psychology. Alfred Schutz, following Husserl’s “Nachwort,” develops his own distinctive phenomenological psychology that appreciates disciplinary convergences and respects boundaries, while also articulating a wider understanding of epoché as an anthropological fact operative beyond the limits of transcendental phenomenology. (shrink)

This paper argues against Logical Realism, in particular against the view that there are facts of matters of logic that obtain independently of us, our linguistic conventions and inferential practices. The paper challenges logical realists to provide a non-intuition based epistemology, one which would be compatible with the empiricist and naturalist convictions motivating much recent anti-realist philosophy of mathematics.

The life–mind continuity thesis is difficult to study, especially because the relation between life and mind is not yet fully understood, and given that there is still no consensus view neither on what qualifies as life nor on what defines mind. Rather than taking up the much more difficult task of addressing the many different ways of explaining how life relates to mind, and vice versa, this paper considers two influential accounts addressing how best to understand the life–mind continuity thesis: (...) first, the theory of autopoiesis (AT) developed in biology and in enactivist theories of mind; and second, the recently formulated free energy principle in theoretical neurobiology, with roots in thermodynamics and statistical physics. This paper advances two claims. The first is that the free energy principle (FEP) should be preferred to the theory of AT, as classically formulated. The second is that the FEP and the recently formulated framework of autopoietic enactivism can be shown to be genuinely continuous on a number of central issues, thus raising the possibility of a joint venture when it comes to answering the life–mind continuity thesis. (shrink)

We develop a truism of commonsense psychology that perception and action constitute the boundaries of the mind. We do so however not on the basis of commonsense psychology, but by using the notion of a Markov blanket originally employed to describe the topological properties of causal networks. We employ the Markov blanket formalism to propose precise criteria for demarcating the boundaries of the mind that unlike other rival candidates for “marks of the cognitive” avoids begging the question in the extended (...) mind debate. Our criteria imply that the boundary of the mind is nested and multiscale sometimes extending beyond the individual agent to incorporate items located in the environment. Chalmers has used commonsense psychology to develop what he sees as the most serious challenge to the view that minds sometimes extend into the world. He has argued that perception and action should be thought of as interfaces that separate minds from their surrounding environment. In a series of recent papers Hohwy has defended a similar claim using the Markov blanket formalism. We use the Markov blanket formalism to show how both of their objections to the extended mind fail. (shrink)

Verbs of mental states or activity constitute a subject of considerable interest to both Cognitive Linguistics and Linguistic Typology. They promise to open a window on the invisible workings of the mind, while at the same time displaying a wide variety of historical sources across languages. In this book Michael Fortescue presents an innovative approach to the semantics and diachronic source of cognitive verbs across a representative array of the world's languages. The relationship among the cognitive verbs of individual (...) languages is essentially one of metonymy, and the book investigates in detail the specific metonymic relationships involved, as revealed largely by the polysemous spread of word meanings. The data is projected against a circular 'map' of interrelated cognitive categories. (shrink)

Individuals of some animal species have been taught simple versions of human language despite their natural communication systems failing to rise to the level of a simple language. How is it, then, that some animals can master a version of language, yet none of them deploy this capacity in their own communication system? I first examine the key design features that are often used to evaluate language-like properties of natural animal communication systems. I then consider one candidate animal system, bird (...) song, because it has several of the key design features or their precursors, including social learning and cultural transmission of their vocal signals. I conclude that although bird song communication is nuanced and complex, and has the acoustic potential for productivity, it is not productive – it cannot be used to say many different things. Finally, I discuss the debate over whether animal communication should be viewed as a cooperative information transmission process, as we typically view human language, or as a competitive process where signaler and receiver vie for control. The debate points to a necessary condition for the evolution of a simple language that has generally been overlooked: the degree of to which the interests of the signaler and receiver align. While strong cognitive and signal production mechanisms are necessary pre-adaptations for a simple language, they are not sufficient. Also necessary is the existence of identical or near-identical interests of signaler and receiver and a socio-ecology that requires high-level cooperation across a range of contexts. In the case of our hominid ancestors, these contexts included hunting, gathering, child care and, perhaps, warfare. I argue that the key condition for the evolution of human language was the extreme interdependency that existed among unrelated individuals in the hunter-gatherer societies of our hominid ancestors. This extreme interdependency produced multiple prosocial adaptations for effective intragroup cooperation, which in partnership with advanced cognitive abilities, set the stage for the evolution of language. (shrink)

Stephen Darwall's The Second-Person Standpoint converges with Emmanuel Levinas's concern about the role of the second-person relationship in ethics. This paper contrasts their methodologies (regressive analysis of presuppositions versus phenomenology) to explain Darwall's narrower view of ethical experience in terms of expressed reactive attitudes. It delineates Darwall's overall justificatory strategy and the centrality of autonomy and reciprocity within it, in contrast to Levinas's emphasis on the experience of responsibility. Asymmetrical responsibility plays a more foundational role as a critical counterpoint to (...) 'mean-spirited' reciprocity than Darwall's laudable distinction between accountability and revenge, and responsibility even founds this distinction. The experience of being summoned to asymmetrical responsibility amplifies the meaning of 'authority', which is a presupposition for Darwall. Finally, asymmetrical responsibility helps develop decentred reasoning, invites risk beyond the boundaries of reciprocity at moments when autonomy appears endangered, reconciles respect and care at the experiential level, and presses to extend the scope of moral obligation. (shrink)

This article demonstrates the potential of using hierarchical Bayesian methods to relate models and data in the cognitive sciences. This is done using a worked example that considers an existing model of category representation, the Varying Abstraction Model (VAM), which attempts to infer the representations people use from their behavior in category learning tasks. The VAM allows for a wide variety of category representations to be inferred, but this article shows how a hierarchical Bayesian analysis can provide a unifying explanation (...) of the representational possibilities using 2 parameters. One parameter controls the emphasis on abstraction in category representations, and the other controls the emphasis on similarity. Using 30 previously published data sets, this work shows how inferences about these parameters, and about the category representations they generate, can be used to evaluate data in terms of the ongoing exemplar versus prototype and similarity versus rules debates in the literature. Using this concrete example, this article emphasizes the advantages of hierarchical Bayesian models in converting model selection problems to parameter estimation problems, and providing one way of specifying theoretically based priors for competing models. (shrink)

If one were to prioritise the most important contributions of John Wesley, within that list would be the contribution of his Doctrine of Christian Perfection. The development of this doctrine was a life-long project for Wesley, who always held the core belief that the telos of perfection was love for God and one's neighbour. Wesley's Doctrine of Christian Perfection found its most comprehensive outline in his 1743 manuscript, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection. This article will argue that Wesley's ethics, (...) as found in his teaching and the work of the Methodist movement, are built on the view that the life of the Christian should be a journey of an ever-growing love for God and love for neighbour. This article will explore Thoughts upon Slavery as a critical text in the Wesley corpus to see how the Doctrine of Christian Perfection influenced Wesley's thoughts on slavery. Finally, this article offers a way of doing Wesleyan ethics today. Wesleyan ethics are communally understood in that all holiness is social holiness, and Wesleyan ethics have as their primary concern Wesley's charge to do no harm, do good, and stay in love with God. (shrink)

An axiom set is given which purports to formalize the notion of a "theory involving measurement." The abstract objects satisfying these axioms are examined, and some candidates for measures of complexity are considered. This framework allows us to discuss some forms of a degree of confirmation. Both "complexity" and "degree of confirmation" appear to be intimately bound up with geometrical aspects of these "theories" which derive from measurement considerations, suggesting that the concepts may be inapplicable to more "general theories." The (...) view is taken throughout that the well known paradoxes indicate inadequacies of the linguistic apparatus and that the axiomatization here presented is an attempt to construct an adequate language for the relevant portion of the world. This position is not defended in the paper. (shrink)