New York Post Best Book of 2016 We often think of our capacity to experience the suffering of others as the ultimate source of goodness. Many of our wisest policy-makers, activists, scientists, and philosophers agree that the only problem with empathy is that we don’t have enough of it. Nothing could be farther from the truth, argues Yale researcher Paul Bloom. In AGAINST EMPATHY, Bloom reveals empathy to be one of the leading motivators of inequality and immorality in society. (...) Far from helping us to improve the lives of others, empathy is a capricious and irrational emotion that appeals to our narrow prejudices. It muddles our judgment and, ironically, often leads to cruelty. We are at our best when we are smart enough not to rely on it, but to draw instead upon a more distanced compassion. Basing his argument on groundbreaking scientific findings, Bloom makes the case that some of the worst decisions made by individuals and nations—who to give money to, when to go to war, how to respond to climate change, and who to imprison—are too often motivated by honest, yet misplaced, emotions. With precision and wit, he demonstrates how empathy distorts our judgment in every aspect of our lives, from philanthropy and charity to the justice system; from medical care and education to parenting and marriage. Without empathy, Bloom insists, our decisions would be clearer, fairer, and—yes—ultimately more moral. Brilliantly argued, urgent and humane, AGAINST EMPATHY shows us that, when it comes to both major policy decisions and the choices we make in our everyday lives, limiting our impulse toward empathy is often the most compassionate choice we can make. (shrink)

Paul Guyer presents the first in-depth examination of the lifelong intellectual relationship between two of the greatest figures of the European Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant and Moses Mendelssohn. He explores their influence on each other and their disagreements, with particular focus on metaphysics, religion, and aesthetics.

The book integrates decades of multidisciplinary research, but its clear explanations and humor make it accessible to the general reader.

The Ethics of Agricultural Intensification: An Interdisciplinary and International Conversation Paul B. Thompson and John Otieno Ouko* Global agriculture faces a number of challenges as the world approaches the second decade of the third millennium. Predictions unilaterally indicate dramatic increases in world population between 2010 and 2030, and a trend in developing countries toward greater consumption of animal products could multiply the need for prod- tion of basic grains even further. Although global food production in 2000 was estimated to (...) be adequate for the existing population, hunger and malnutrition are persistent problems that have led decision makers to recognize that increasing food production in specific regions may be the most effective way to address food se- rity for impoverished peoples. At the same time, there will need to be policy adju- ments that improve poor people’s access to current food supplies without simultaneously undercutting the ability of local producers to obtain needed cash income. What is more, the uncertain effects of global climate change on agricultural ecosystems complicate planning for this process, while poorly understood processes of globa- zation create additional unknowns from the side of social systems. In short, despite surpluses in many parts of the developed world, finding ways to increase food p- duction on both selected regional and a total global basis remains a priority for many farmers, policy makers and agricultural researchers. (shrink)

"Ecological catastrophes are ony terrifying for civilians. For the military, they are but a simulation of chaos, an opportunity to justify an art of warfare which is the more autonomous as the political State dies out. At this point, all civilian populations are helpless victims of the scam, of this ransacking of the world's resources.".

The Theaetetus is one of the most widely studied of any of the Platonic dialogues because its dominant theme concerns the significant philosophical question, what is knowledge? In this book Paul Stern provides a full-length treatment of its political character in relationship to this dominant theme. He argues that this approach sheds significant light on the distinctiveness of the Socratic way of life, with respect to both its initial justification and its ultimate character. More specifically, he argues that Socrates' (...) revolutionary decision to subject political life to philosophic reflection, the decision that leads directly to his trial and execution, is based on his awareness of the elusiveness of comprehensive knowledge and the implications of that elusiveness for the validity of philosophic inquiry. This view of Socrates' rationale has important consequences for our understanding of political philosophy and of the validity of the life of reason itself. (shrink)

Scientific debates about the nature of light have nothing to do with the philosophical problem of evil if you focus on the subject matter of those debates, but quite a bit to do with it if you focus on the structure of the reasoning in those debates. Some theories of light have been shown to be improbable, at least other evidence held equal, by comparing them to incompatible theories, both with respect to how well they fit certain data and (at (...) least implicitly) with respect to how probable they are intrinsically. Similarly, (a popular form of) theism can be shown to be improbable, at least other evidence held equal, by comparing it to the incompatible theory that physical reality is the source of mental reality. This theory of “source physicalism” fits a variety of data about good and evil much better than theism does. Further, primarily because of its modesty, source physicalism is many times more probable intrinsically than theism. It follows that, other evidence held equal, theism is very probably false. (shrink)

In this book, Paul Moser explores Jesus' role as God's filial inquirer and clarifies a method of inquiry regarding Jesus, one that offers a compelling explanation regarding his experiential impact and his audience's response. Moser's method values the roles of history and moral/religious experience in inquiry about him, and it saves inquirers from distorting biases in their inquiry. His study illuminates Jesus' puzzling features, including his challenging question for inquirers of him, his distinctive experience of God as father, his (...) reference to himself as 'the son of man', his attitude toward his suffering and death, his unique role in the kingdom of God, and his understanding of his allegedly miraculous signs and of his parables and good news. The book also makes sense of evidence for the reality and the main purpose of Jesus. (shrink)

The German theologian examines the philosophical foundations of the religions practiced by Western man.

Despite the importance of extrapair copulation (EPC) in human evolution, almost nothing is known about the design features of EPC detection mechanisms. We tested for sex differences in EPC inference-making mechanisms in a sample of 203 young couples. Men made more accurate inferences (φmen = 0.66, φwomen = 0.46), and the ratio of positive errors to negative errors was higher for men than for women (1.22 vs. 0.18). Since some may have been reluctant to admit EPC behavior, we modeled how (...) underreporting could have influenced these results. These analyses indicated that it would take highly sex-differentiated levels of underreporting by subjects with trusting partners for there to be no real sex difference. Further analyses indicated that men may be less willing to harbor unresolved suspicions about their partners’ EPC behavior, which may explain the sex difference in accuracy. Finally, we estimated that women underreported their own EPC behavior (10%) more than men (0%). (shrink)

Diotima at the Barricades argues that the debates that emerged from the burgeoning of feminist intellectual life in post-modern France involved complex, structured, and reciprocal exchanges on the interpretation and position of Plato and other ancient texts in the western philosophical and literary tradition. Paul Allen Miller shows how individual works of Anglo-American figures such as Toril Moi, Judith Butler, and Kaja Silverman, as well as movements such as queer theory, are rooted in feminist theoretical debates that began in (...) the sixties in France and have continued right up to the present day. (shrink)

This new book offers a clear and accessible exposition of Hayden White's thought. In an engaging and wide-ranging analysis, Herman Paul discusses White's core ideas and traces the development of these ideas from the mid-1950s to the present. Starting with White's medievalist research and youthful fascination for French existentialism, Paul shows how White became increasingly convinced that historical writing is a moral activity. He goes on to argue that the critical concepts that have secured White's fame – trope, (...) plot, discourse, figural realism – all stem from his desire to explicate the moral claims and perceptions underlying historical writing. White emerges as a passionate thinker, a restless rebel against scientism, and a defender of existentialist humanist values. This innovative introduction will appeal to students and scholars across the humanities, and help develop a critical understanding of an increasingly important thinker. (shrink)

Critics and artists claim the title of 'interpreter' for themselves. Scientists do not so readily describe themselves in this way. But is the formulation of explanatory hypotheses in science so different from the interpretive work of artists? Making Sense recognizes that whenever interpretation occurs there may be a plurality of competing successful interpretations. It offers a philosophical theory that views the interpretive enterprise as an attempt to make sense of things by representing them in ways that can be accommodated within (...) various significance-systems. (shrink)

Moore's autobiography.--Descriptive and critical essays on the philosophy of G. E. Moore.--The philosopher replies.--Bibliography of the writings of G. E. Moore (to November, 1942) compiled by Emerson Buchanan and G. E. Moore (p. 679-689).

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 249 Girolamo Balduino: Ricerche sulla logica della Scuola di Padova nel Rinascimento. By Giovanni Papuli. (Bark Lacerta, Universith di Bari, Pubblicazioni dell'lstituto di filosofia, 12, 1967. Pp. 313. no price.) The philosophers at the University of Padua during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance arc attracting much renewed interest. This study makes accessible again the logical philosophy of Girolamo Balduino, professor at Padua during the second quarter (...) of the sixteenth century. Like other thinkers of his period, 13alduino follows the logic of Aristotle, and looks for progress within the ancient and mediaeval tradition, not for radically new doctrines. He continues the traditional interpretation of Aristotle by Averroes, for whom logic is only an instrumental habitus, a tool or method of demonstration. About the final contribution of the school of Padua to the improvement of Aristotelian logic was the doctrine of regressive demonstration, where demonstration terminates in or discloses the definition. Zabarella's well-known teaching on this point seems to be derived entirely from Balduino. Contrary to the interpretation of Cassirer, followed by Randall, this regressive demonstration is not a universal method of inquiry and is not at all like, and not the historical source of, the new method of Galileo. Papuli's book is solidly based on the original Latin texts, in notes, which are of great value in view of the fact that Balduino's works have been out of print since 1573. Not all of Papuli's interpretations are beyond criticism (e.g., p. 296), but he has done a service in enabling us to reestablish contact with one of the last significant commentators on Aristotle's logic. PAUL J. W. MILLER University of Colorado Documents sur la vie de Jules-Cdsar Vanini de Taurisano. By Emile Namer. (Bari: Adriatica Editrice, n.d.=Univcrsith degli Studi di Bari, Pubblicazioni delFIstituto di Filosofia, II serie, Testi e Documenti, I. Pp. 196+22 facsimile illustrations) Giulio Cesare Vanini (1585-1619) ranks with Giordano Bruno as a modern hero of freedom of philosophical expression. He was tortured and then burned at the stake in Toulouse at the age of thirty-four, because of the unorthodoxy of his views. For this reason, he has drawn more attention than is perhaps deserved on the basis of his rather mediocre writings, which are little more than a tissue of plagiarisms culled from Pomponazzi, Cardano, J. C. Scaliger, and others. In this volume, Emile Namer has collected the scattered documents dealing with Vanini's life and activities. This is a valuable service, for it should enable scholars to disentangle fact from fiction and reality from myth. There has been so much heated discussion regarding Vanini that it is now time that someone should attempt to establish the precise facts and to reevaluate Vanini's place in intellectual history. In the past, writings about him have been governed more often by emotion than by reason. Namer prints documents from Naples, London, Paris, Simancas, and Toulouse. Some of these have been printed before in various journal articles, but it is valuable to have them all together in a single volume. In addition, he prints relevant excerpts concerning--as one of them put it--le douzi~me apostre de Satan, including material from Mersenne, Garasse, and others. He also includes a series of facsimiles of sample pages from the documents which he prints. All in all Namer's work is competently 250 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY done, though perhaps a bit more annotation to put the documents in historical perspective would have been desirable. In any case this little volume must be one of the bases for any future serious biographical or interpretative studies dealing with Vanini. Moreover, it shouM also be useful for scholars dealing with more general questions of seventeenth-century intellectual, religious, and social history. Unfortunately, there is no index, nor bibliography of earlier literature on Vanini, and the Introduction is perhaps too brief to orient the reader who has little previous knowledge of Vanini. CHARLES B. SCHMITT University oJ Leeds Tommaso Campanella: Renaissance Pioneer o[ Modern Thought. By Bernardino M. Bonansea. (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1969. Pp. xi 421. $14.50) This excellent critical study of the life and... (shrink)

Introduction -- Creative experience as the birthplace of the transcendent -- On refinding God during chemotherapy -- Reflections on moments of grace -- On the quiet virtue of humility -- Summoned to courage -- Maintaining personal dignity in the face of the mass society -- On fidelity and betrayal in love relationships -- The kiss.

Young traces the evolution of the term information from its general linguistic use into the mainstream of modern science, proposing an entirely new definition of information as a mass-energy phenomenon. He demonstrates that: information is in all cases a form phenomenon; both form and information are mass-energy rather than abstract phenomena; mind can be viewed as a mass-energy rather form-manipulating process; form constitutes a mechanism immanent in the physical universe via which mass-energy systems can communicate informationally and control their own (...) energetic activities. (shrink)

_Messiahs and Machiavellians_ is an innovative exploration of “modern evil” in works of early- and late-modern theatre, raising issues about ethics, politics, religion, and aesthetics that speak to our present condition. Paul Corey examines how theatre—which expressed a key political dynamic both in the Renaissance and the twentieth century—lays open the impulses that instigated modernity and, ultimately, unparalleled levels of violence and destruction. Starting with Albert Camus’ _Caligula_ and Samuel Beckett’s _Waiting for Godot_, then turning to Machiavelli’s _Mandragola_ and (...) Shakespeare’s _Measure for Measure_, Corey traces the emergence of two dominant, intertwining features of modern evil: an unrestrained pursuit of power and the utopian desire for perfection. Corey’s imaginative and convincing readings of these plays, based on detailed textual analysis, move beyond the accounts usually offered by literary critics. Drawing on political, theological, and philosophical sources—a combination as fertile as it is unusual—Corey’s methodology allows him to make keen and subtle arguments about the eschatological nature of modern politics. “Corey’s lucid, compelling treatise argues for a radical reconsideration of the role of tragedy in dealing with the shifting metaphysical and metatheatrical sands of the contemporary era. While the study begins with an examination of mid-20th Century French existentialism—and the dramatic work of Beckett and Camus in particular—the book soon takes the reader on a fascinating voyage back into the ‘problem’ comedies of the Italian and English Renaissance theatre, and beyond that, into Greek tragedy to understand the evolving concept of ‘evil’ in the Western philosophical, theological, and dramatic tradition. Ending with a reflection on the new ‘theatre’ of terrorism entering the 21st Century, Corey poses the intriguing suggestion, that far from being irrelevant to the post-modern era, a ‘new tragic sensibility’ may become key to our gaining a ‘lucid awareness of our current situation […] the limits of politics, the indelible nature of violence, our inescapable mortality, and a need for prudence’ ” —_Moira Day, University of Saskatchewan_ “A sensitive examination of the problem of evil in Renaissance and 20th century drama. Corey provides fascinating analyses of individual plays, and makes a compelling argument for restoring a tragic vision of good and evil in the face of modern expediency and utopianism.” —_Mary P. Nichols, Baylor University_ _ _ “In _Messiahs and Machiavellians_, Paul Corey delivers insights both numerous and profound. His work is a serious and important contribution to contemporary political science while also offering analyses of interest to scholars in literature, religious studies, theology, and ethics.” —_Barry Cooper, University of Calgary_. (shrink)

A realistic study of man’s primary di­mensions and roles that breaches custo­mary bounds to the consideration of man to draw closer to the quintessence of man than ever before. Paul Weiss moves beyond the point where psychologists, psychiatrists, ethi­cists, and physiologists usually stop to make evident how man is at once pri­vate and public, with an I, a me, native rights, and responsibility, able to be and to function together with others in so­ciety and in the cosmos. He examines (...) the you we come to know as we confront other men, show­ing this to be both accountable and re­sponsible, with distinctive values and powers, maintained from within and ap­proached from without. You is con­trasted and compared with the me, what is publicly available to each alone, known and sustained by a radically private I. In opposition to contemporary thought, Weiss shows that I has a being, nature, and power of its own, able to make use of the self and mind, and to sustain the you and the me. These explorations pre­pare the way for a novel examination of different types of we—those that govern men, those with which they interplay, and those that, together with them, con­stitute the groups, societies, and states in which men live together. His final section deals with the dif­ference and relations between the they and the others in which he provides a fresh examination of the way men and their lived-in bodies both stand apart from and fit in the cosmos. In discussing these pivotal notions he extends our comprehension of such central topics as the difference between freedom and lib­erty, the nature of self-consciousness, the rights of the subhuman, the nature of the physical world, abortion, behav­iorism, mental health, biography, fic­tion, and the differences between men, animals, and things. (shrink)

The cuticular surface of Drosophila is decorated by parallel arrays of polarized structures such as hairs and sensory bristles; for example, on the wing each cell produces a distally pointing hair. These patterns are termed [tissue polarity]. Several genes are known whose activity is essential for the development of normal tissue polarity. Mutations in these genes alter the orientation of the hair or bristle with respect to neighboring cells and the body as a whole. The phenotypes of mutations in these (...) genes allows them to be placed in three phenotypic groups. Based on their behavior in genetic mosaics, it has proved possible to determine that individual genes are required either for the generation of an intercellular polarity signal and/or the transduction of that signal to the cytoskeleton. (shrink)

Paul Helm examines some of Stephen Hawking's scientific arguments concerning God, and finds them unpersuasive.

This volume contains the previously unpublished manuscripts of the lectures Philosophy of History and Social Pedagogy which the theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich delivered at the University of Frankfurt am Main in the winter semester ...

The articulation of critical dialects of psychology has typically involved a questioning of the foundational assumptions of the so-called mainstream. This has included critiques in the name of more adequate scientific foundations, but more recently these have been accompanied by critiques in the name of an absence of foundations altogether, and critiques that suggest a rethinking of the concept of foundation. These latter versions are usually influenced by the great 20 th Century non-foundational philosophies of figures such as Bergson, Whitehead, (...) Wittgenstein and Heidegger, or by related thinkers such as Deleuze, Serres, Luhmann, Butler and Stengers. In foregrounding themes of process and multiplicity such thinkers provide potent tools for critically rethinking psychological questions. Less positive has been a tendency amongst critical psychologists to polarise natural and social scientific issues and to associate the former with negative images (all that is static, mechanistic, essentialist and conservative). This can lead to a formulaic criticality in which arguments for nature are bad, and those for culture are good. Deconstruction comes to appear simply as an assertion of ‘the discursive construction of’ whatever phenomenon is under scrutiny. To counteract this trend, the proposed paper will discuss a process approach to ontology that welcomes contributions from the natural sciences as well as the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

Vorrangig als der "strengste Methodenfanatiker und Logizist" der Marburger Schule des Neukantianismus bekannt, trat Natorp jedoch genau an diesem Punkt mit der selbständigen Form seines späten Philosophierens hervor: der Überschreitung der Methode in der Idee einer allgemeinen Logik. Unter allgemeiner Logik versteht er die streng einheitliche logische Grundlegung der Gegenstandssetzung, ja aller irgendwie logisch erfaßlichen Setzung. Damit war ein Zugang geschaffen zu der von Natorp angestrebten Erkenntnis des Geistigen in seiner Ureinheit, aus der erst die Besonderungen hervorgehen.

This book is about you. How does your brain work and where do your thoughts and dreams come from? How can you harness their creative power? Ableman posits a crucial relationship between language and memory and thus between language and self-awareness. Most startlingly he maintains that the human 'person' is essentially the language component of a large-brained animal. Ableman has researched his theory using existing data derived from the malfunctioning mind as manifested in schizophrenia, sleepwalking, autism, 'out of body' experiences (...) and nightmares. His revolutionary claims constitute an exciting and persuasive theory of mind which orthodox science could - and should - test. (shrink)