I argue that general constraints on how humans think about humans produce universal features of the concept of mind. Some of these constraints determine how we imagine other people's thinking and action through our own. I formulate this in opposition to what I call the "theory theory". I believe this was the first use of this terminology, and this work was an early version of what has come to be called the simulation theory.

This is a reply to de Sousa's 'Emotional Truth', in which he argues that emotions can be objective, as propositional truths are. I say that it is better to distinguish between truth and accuracy, and agree with de Sousa to the extent of arguing that emotions can be more or less accurate, that is, based on the facts as they are.

Machine generated contents note: ARISTOTELIAN AND CARTESIAN LOGIC AT HARVARD -- by Rick Kennedy -- I. Introduction --II. Religiously-Oriented, Dogmatically-Inclined Humanistic Logics from the Renaissance to the Seventeenth Century -- A. Melanchthon and Aristotelianism 01 -- B. Richardson and Ramism 16 -- C. Aristotelianism, Ramism, and Schematic Thinking 25 -- D. Puritan Favoritism From Ramus to Descartes 32 -- E. Cartesian Logic and Christian Skepticism 37 -- F. The Religious and Dogmatic Orientation of The Port-'Royalfogic 42 -- G. Cartesian Logic (...) in British Textbooks 52 -- III. Charles Morton and c A; logick System -- A. Charles Morton 62 -- B. Morton's cAfogick System 78 -- IV. William Brattle and the Compendium of logick -- A. Intellectual Reform in the Puritans' Collapsing World 91 -- B. The Compendium ofJogick 93 -- c. Brattle: Tutor and Unofficial Professor of Divinity 108 -- V. Epilogue: Later Constituencies of Religious Logics and 133 -- The Separation of Logic and Divinity at Harvard. (shrink)

A compelling account of evil in which Adam Morton draws on fascinating examples as diverse as Augustine and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Exciting and thought-provoking, On Evil is essential reading for anyone interested in a topic that attracts and.

A Quake in Being: An Introduction to Hyperobjects Part I. What Are Hyperobjects? Viscosity Nonlocality Temporal Undulation Phasing Interobjectivity Part II. The Time of Hyperobjects The End of the World Hypocrisies The Age of Asymmetry.

The view of teleology sketched in the above remarks seems to me to offer a piece of candy to both the critics and guardians of teleology. The critics want to defend against a number of things: the importation of unverifiable theological or metaphysical doctrines into the sciences; the idea that goals somehow act in favor of their won realization; and the view that biological systems require for their study concepts and patterns of explanation unlike anything employed in the physical sciences. (...) An important part of their defense has been the contention that teleological language can be eliminated without loss from the sciences. I have argued that this is true: any phenomenon that can be described in teleological language can be described otherwise.On the other hand, eliminability does not mean translatability. I have suggested—I do not see how to prove it—that the teleological character of a sentence is so fundamental that it would be preserved under translation. Teleological character is conferred on a sentence by the manner in which it fits into a conceptual scheme designed for the description of certain classes of systems possessing net-like organization. The elimination of teleological language thus involves a conceptual shift, and involves a different method of classifying the elements of a system.The guardians of teleology—myself among them—have insisted that teleological language is perfectly legitimate. This conclusion is plain if my account of “appropriateness” is correct. Indeed, the development of conceptual schemes which render functional ascriptions appropriate is seen to be just a special case of a general scientific procedure: the designing of languages aimed at bringing to light those causal relations which are most interesting to us. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.3 (2005) 257-259 [Access article in PDF] Atrocity, Banality, Self-Deception Adam Morton Keywords evil, self-deception, banality, atrocity, motivation When talking about evil we must make a fundamental choice about how we are to use the term. We may use it as half of the contrast "good versus evil," in which case it covers everything that is not good. That includes moral incompetence, lack of (...) imagination, willingness to follow orders, overreactions, and a host of other reasons why people who do not have personalities that we would call evil do things that are wrong, often very wrong. Call this the weak reading of evil: evil as wrongdoing. Or we may use it with the meaning suggested by "evil person," "really evil act," "the evil lurking in all of us," and other such idioms. If we do this, we focus on a particular class of actions, and the motives and people that produce them, that arouse a particular moral revulsion in us. Call this the strong reading of evil: evil as atrocity (for more on this contrast see Morton [2004] and Card [2002]).Kubarych, following Peck, thinks of evil in the strong way. Most of the time at any rate: Some of the philosophers, such as Kant, that he draws on are thinking of evil in the weak way, and some of his quotations are from the German, where good/bad/evil distinctions are not drawn in the same way as in English. He explores a general explanation of evil that seems to be targeted at the psychology of extremely abhorrent actions. But, I argue, his account is in danger of collapse in either of two directions. Depending on how we interpret Kubarych's account, it could turn out that it describes all wrongdoing as evil, or, making some different choices, it could turn out that there are no really evil people.The strong reading of evil is definitely the most interesting and potentially fruitful. After all, we have no shortage of satisfying explanations of why people lie to get out of unwelcome appointments, steal to support their children or their drug habits, or defraud investors to become rich. But we do feel deeply puzzled by those who commit torture, serial murder, or genocide. We ask of these people not so much "Why did he do it?" as "How could he do it?" We feel the need of a philosophical or psychological theory that can give us even a slight handle of these people and their deeds. There are two risks associated with the project of explaining atrocity, though. The first is the risk of accepting unsatisfactory accounts, just because they purport to explain what we desperately want to understand. The second is the risk of supposing that there is a single explanation when the causes of the phenomenon are in fact too varied. On other topics these two risks have often combined to make people believe what seem to us now to be evident falsehoods. Humans have often for example wanted to know the causes of disease, and as a result have accepted blanket explanations, in terms of [End Page 257] evil spirits or lack of faith, that seem ludicrous to us now that we have a better grasp of the variety of factors that can cause our bodies to misfunction. So before asking naively "Why and how can people do these awful things?" we should ask "Is there a deeper causal unity here, beyond the fact that we react to these acts with horror?"My suspicion is that there is not much unity, that it is asking too much to want a common profile to the psychology of serial killers, or of proponents of genocide, let alone a profile that applies across these and other categories. What we can do, I believe, is describe our concept of evil in such a way that we can leave some parameters to be filled in by a large variety of objective psychological factors. Even this runs the risk that the really relevant factors cannot be forced into the role that the philosophical account requires. In... (shrink)

Conscience and Conscientious Objection of Health Care Professionals Refocusing the Issue Content Type Journal Article Pages 351-364 DOI 10.1007/s10730-009-9113-x Authors Natasha T. Morton, The University of Western Ontario Ontario Canada N6A 5B9 Kenneth W. Kirkwood, Arthur and Sonia Labatt Health Sciences Building London Ontario Canada N6A 5B9 Journal HEC Forum Online ISSN 1572-8498 Print ISSN 0956-2737 Journal Volume Volume 21 Journal Issue Volume 21, Number 4.

I classify emotions in the family of regret, remorse, and so on, in such a way that it is easy to see how there can be further emotions in this family, for which we happened not to have names in English. I describe some of these emotions.

_A Philosopher’s Story_ is the autobiography of a prominent philosopher whose interactions with other leading thinkers and experiences at major institutions of higher learning over a period of time of more than fifty years make this an informative introduction to the intellectual life of late twentieth century America. During his academic career, Morton White has been involved in a number of controversies that have raised profound issues. One concerned the role of religion at Harvard in the 1950s; another was (...) precipitated by the student rebellion at Harvard in the 1960s; and a third surrounded the question of academic governance at the Institute of Advanced Study during the 1970s. Throughout his academic career he has been an intellectual bridge-builder who has tried to avoid the pitfalls off wooliness and obscurity while uniting his widely spread interests. This is a professor’s story with many distinguishing features. Like other examples of the author’s writing, it reflects many different aspects of American thought and society during the twentieth century. (shrink)

I argue that the contrast between models and theories is important for public policy issues. I focus especially on the way a mathematical model explains just one aspect of the data.

This chapter contrasts moral motivation, as a problematic thing, with the apparently straightforward motives of self‐interest. It also contrasts moral dilemmas, in which one has to find an acceptable action in the midst of conflicting responsibilities and obligations, with practical or prudential dilemmas, in which the problem is getting as much as he/she can of what he/she want. The problem is that these contrasts are all different. They cut in different directions. For any two of the contrasts there are situations (...) which link the 'moral' side according to one contrast with the 'non‐moral' or merely self‐interested side according to the other. Thus in the case of the ageing addict self‐interest as getting what you want and self‐interest as getting a better life conflict. The chapter also gives the example that combines the plots of two famous novels (George Eliot's Silas Marner, and Balzac's novel Le Pe're Goriot), each clearly making a quasi‐moral point. (shrink)

The essay draws on two case studies from the photographic archive of British social anthropologist Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1902-73) on a fieldwork expedition to Kenya and South Sudan in 1936. The case studies reveal how connections can be made within an archive to articulate new narratives around often well-known photographs. The case studies explore the relationship between two different practices of looking: that involved in the act of photography, and that of looking at archival photographs as historical sources. Whilst the (...) abundance of visual information in the archive reveals photography's endless potential for recodability, the essay argues that the photographic archive is also characterised by obscurity and limitation, and that the small dramas that are sometimes fleetingly glimpsed in the photographic hinterland will for the most part remain partial, unintelligible, and unarticulable by historians. Although there is a visual abundance in the photographic archive with which we might engage, what is shown to us is not abundantly clear. The essay argues that the important historical connections between the concepts of visibility and knowledge in a discipline such as anthropology often break down when the archive is recalcitrant, revealing its own limits as much as its bounty. (shrink)

This article examines responses from Lutheran pastors, theologians, and physicians to the arguments given by Johann Weyer in 1563 that those women who confessed to a pact with the devil suffered from melancholy and were thus not responsible for their acts. Weyer’s conception of melancholy was a medical one, yet among Lutheran pastors and theologians the concept of a spiritual form of melancholy emerged that came from religious sources. The article clarifies the difference between the concepts of medical and spiritual (...) melancholy within Lutheranism and reviews the respective roles they played in the debates over Weyer’s arguments. (shrink)

Poverty has traditionally been conceived of as a state of deprivation. To be poor is to lack something essential to human flourishing. How that something is understood—in terms of welfare, resources, or capabilities—and how it is measured—in absolute terms or relative to a social standard—has been the subject of much debate within the development literature. In this paper, I put forward an account of poverty rooted in the philosophy of action. I argue that poverty essentially involves being in a context (...) in which a reasonable agent’s future-directed agency is systemically undermined. Centering this dimension of poverty allows us to attend to aspects of poverty that are easily overlooked on existing accounts. (shrink)

Demonstrates the way in which the principles of analytic philosophy can be used in solving problems in contemporary American life.