In an attempt to discover that which makes man distinctively human Wilson takes as his starting point two opposing accounts of what distinguishes man from inanimate objects and indicates why both of them are invalid. The Cartesian concept maintains that man is distinct from the inanimate by virtue of his consciousness, the neo-Wittgensteinian views the distinction as one of behavior and interaction explicable in terms of reason and motives. Wilson agrees that emotion and behavior constitute the primary difference between man (...) and the inanimate but that this human type of activity is analyzable in causal terms. He refutes certain anti-causal arguments that posit a non-contingent connection between an emotion and its object. Wilson rightly points out that a necessary proposition is one that is necessarily true, but a relation cannot be true or false, and therefore cannot be necessarily or contingently true or false. In order to prove his thesis that the emotion-object relationship is one of causality the term "object" is restricted to that which has existential status. Emotions referable to non-existent objects are malfounded emotions and not causally connected. Wilson proposes that the problem does not lend itself to a logico-grammatical analysis of statements that assign objects to emotions, but that the approach requires a study in the philosophy of mind. Such an inquiry discloses that emotion is caused by a mental state, i.e., attention to the object in which a thought or belief about the object causes a certain feeling or reaction. After a rather complicated analysis of the emotion-object relationship in which he considers the questions of materialism, free will intentionality, and rationality, Wilson returns to his original concern and concludes that "a person’s action and his end of action make sense and form a coherent whole because they are rooted in a complex network of feelings and attitudes." This is what makes man distinctively human.—K. R. M. (shrink)

This is a systematic and critical account of Berkeley’s philosophy of science. Brook’s intention is to evaluate Berkeley’s analysis of significant scientific concepts, his general theories in optics, physics, and mathematics, and finally Berkeley’s own interpretation and criticism of Newton’s principles. That Berkeley’s writings are pervaded with ambiguities, inconsistencies, and misinterpretations of Newton seems to be the conclusion that Brook reaches, although he does distinguish in the writings the areas in which he feels Berkeley is on target. Berkeley conceived the (...) purpose of science to be the practical mastery of nature, and his philosophy is indicative of a phase in the evolution of a "new" science that had its roots as far back as Galileo who envisioned a universe that could be read off in terms of mathematical relationships. This view entailed the overthrow of traditional physics and its concern with substantial forms and qualitative changes. As Brook points out, the object of physics for Berkeley is a phenomenal order that can at best display only uniformities, efficient causality belongs to the realm of metaphysics. Brook does not go into the metaphysical or historical foundations of Berkeley’s philosophy of science, but his first chapter on the theory of signification presents sufficient background for the more detailed and complex chapters that deal with his theory of vision, philosophy of physics and mathematics. This is not an easy book to read, and the chapter on Berkeley’s mathematics may prove to be especially difficult to those who lack an orientation to this field. Yet Brooks could hardly do better than he does considering the obscurities and obfuscatory trappings that are to be found in the primary sources from which he is working. A good bibliography is included that should serve to facilitate a reading of this book. Brook’s study is the only work to date that takes into account Berkeley’s scientific works as a whole and not just some aspects.—K.R.M. (shrink)

Peter Geach brings the same careful attention to logical detail to these studies in the philosophy of religion and philosophy of mind as he has brought to other philosophical works. Some of the topics discussed here, however, will surprise some readers of Geach's earlier works, e.g., reincarnation, immortality, creation, praying for things to happen, and worshipping the right God. There are separate chapters on these topics as well as chapters on thought, form and existence, and the moral law. It should (...) be noted for readers who may not share Geach's interest in some of these topics that each of the chapters makes important points about issues which go beyond the topics of immediate interest. For example, Geach's two chapters on reincarnation and immortality are very interesting commentaries on the problem of personal identity, and the chapter on praying for things to happen is an interesting essay on time. The chapters on existence and thought pick up themes from Geach's earlier writing on Aquinas and Frege and mental acts. The Aristotelian roots of Geach's thought are clear in these essays from his account of existence and thought to his denial of clear sense to the idea of an immortality of a separate soul or its reincarnation. There is a helpful analytical index.--R. H. K. (shrink)

Rationing of healthcare resources is a strategy for crisis-aversion or crisis-prevention with its ethical roots in the theory of distributive justice. It exemplifies, the simplistic notion of conse...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dogs and MonstersObservations on the Evacuation of Afghanistan and the Intersection of Human Rights and the AnthropoceneK. M. Ferebee (bio)On August 28, 2021, former Royal Marine and charity worker Pen Farthing was evacuated from Afghanistan with almost two hundred dogs and cats that his Kabul animal charity, Nowzad Dogs, had rescued. The role of the British government in this evacuation remains hotly contested: At the time, the British Ministry (...) of Defence tweeted (Fig. 1) that Farthing's escape had been assisted by the British military, but Farthing later disputed this claim and argued that his rescue was not the result of high-level intervention in the British government. In January 2022 controversy erupted around the emergence of documents suggesting that Prime Minister Boris Johnson had lied to Parliament about the personal role that he played in just such an intervention. Notably, Nowzad's Afghan staff members were not evacuated alongside Farthing and the animals, though they would eventually escape to Pakistan. Following Farthing's escape, the British government failed to evacuate hundreds of British citizens and residents (Merriman and Ghouri), as well as many more Afghans who had worked on behalf of British forces. The Nowzad Dogs evacuation became a site of symbolic struggle over Britain's respect (or lack thereof) for human rights. "What a story to tell the world: Britain values dogs more than Afghan people," the headline of an opinion piece in the Guardian (Hinsliff) read.The story of Nowzad Dogs is interesting to me not only as a tale of human-nonhuman relations, but also because I was, at the time it occurred, volunteering within the Afghan aid community to assist relatives of a friend, British Afghans who had been visiting Kabul when the government [End Page 52] collapsed. The family repeatedly asked for assistance from the British Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office—assistance that never appeared. Ultimately, due to the generosity of donors and the coordination of a volunteer team, the family was able to flee to Pakistan, where they boarded a commercial flight to London. This case was a particularly stark and powerful illustration of the negotiations of rights and value that took place during and following the evacuation. It seemed nonsensical, in August 2021, to suppose that British citizens, including British children (the family I worked with included a six- and an eleven-year-old who were British citizens), would be abandoned while Afghan dogs had their rights prioritized. As I hope to demonstrate here, however, such an incident becomes comprehensible and even logical when it is understood as part of a specifically Anthropocene manifestation of subjectivity.Upendra Baxi suggests that 1948's Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) marks a broad shift from the era of "modern" (42) human rights (which began with the American and French Revolutions) to the era of "contemporary" (42) human rights. His periodization links these eras in human rights to shifts in the ideology of capitalism and empire. The "modern" era of human rights, he writes, "signals a whole variety of ideological 'justifications' for colonization and world domination" and "provides a register of major development in industrial capitalism" (42), while the "contemporary" era of human rights "is based on the premise of radical self-determination" (46). Such a periodization also brings human rights into close alignment with the Anthropocene, which is rooted in the capitalist-colonial Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, yet often dated most concretely to the circa-1950 shift that some (such as J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke) label the "Great Acceleration." Indeed, one could reasonably appropriate Baxi's terms and speak of "modern" and "contemporary" Anthropocenes mapped identically onto the global timeline.I propose to use the 2021 Afghan evacuation as a site from which to explore how human rights and the Anthropocene have together coproduced certain forms of subjectivity that are essential for the continued smooth functioning of world-ecological capitalism. These new forms of subjectivity are necessary to sustain the important fiction of individual [End Page 53] agency and value and conceal the ways in which the Anthropocene moment renders this fiction meaningless. Ultimately, I paint a picture of an Anthropocene without any human agency at all. I want... (shrink)

In the article three tragedies: ‘The Battle of Arminius‘ by Christian Dietrich Grabbe, ‘Nibelungs‘ by Friedrich Hebbel, ‘The Ring of the Nibelung‘ by Richard Wagner are considered. The aim of this paper is to investigate how history reception and mythological material correlates with the idea of national identity. The comparative-historical, typological and historical-genetic methods are applied in this publication. The genres of historical, philosophical and mythological tragedy became the most popular genres in the socio-political conditions in the 30s of the (...) 19th century in Germany. Grabbe underlines the idea of the presence of the ‘local‘ regional history within the framework of the ‘big‘ and significant one. Grabbe paid attention to the historical process and historical figures, not to any particular historical event. In his last work, tragedy ‘The Battle of Arminius‘, Grabbe showed his understanding of the country’s historical origins and the creation of a national myth. F. Hebbel and R. Wagner comprehend the images and motifs of Norse mythology as a universal model of human existence. While interpreting the story of Nibelungs, F. Hebbel notes not only its national roots but its universal source; he models the image of the world through the prism of the microcosm of Burgundians/Nibelungs. Wagner’s tetralogy is not so much an interpretation as a creation of the ‘new myth‘. The images of Arminius and Siegfried have the features of the archaic primal forefather, ‘cultural hero‘ of the nation, who intimately related with Nature and home ground. Myth and mythological history are not only the tools of attainment of national identity but the means of reversion the modern man to the lost harmony of the Universe, which pertains to the mythological mind. (shrink)

Every year, the Vietnamese people reportedly burned about 50,000 tons of joss papers, which took the form of not only bank notes, but iPhones, cars, clothes, even housekeepers, in hope of pleasing the dead. The practice was mistakenly attributed to traditional Buddhist teachings but originated in fact from China, which most Vietnamese were not aware of. In other aspects of life, there were many similar examples of Vietnamese so ready and comfortable with adding new norms, values, and beliefs, even contradictory (...) ones, to their culture. This phenomenon, dubbed “cultural additivity”, prompted us to study the co-existence, interaction, and influences among core values and norms of the Three Teachings –Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism–as shown through Vietnamese folktales. By applying Bayesian logistic regression, we evaluated the possibility of whether the key message of a story was dominated by a religion (dependent variables), as affected by the appearance of values and anti-values pertaining to the Three Teachings in the story (independent variables). Our main findings included the existence of the cultural additivity of Confucian and Taoist values. More specifically, empirical results showed that the interaction or addition of the values of Taoism and Confucianism in folktales together helped predict whether the key message of a story was about Confucianism, β{VT ⋅ VC} = 0.86. Meanwhile, there was no such statistical tendency for Buddhism. The results lead to a number of important implications. First, this showed the dominance of Confucianism because the fact that Confucian and Taoist values appeared together in a story led to the story’s key message dominated by Confucianism. Thus, it presented the evidence of Confucian dominance and against liberal interpretations of the concept of the Common Roots of Three Religions (“tam giáo đồng nguyên”) as religious unification or unicity. Second, the concept of “cultural additivity” could help explain many interesting socio-cultural phenomena, namely the absence of religious intolerance and extremism in the Vietnamese society, outrageous cases of sophistry in education, the low productivity in creative endeavors like science and technology, the misleading branding strategy in business. We are aware that our results are only preliminary and more studies, both theoretical and empirical, must be carried out to give a full account of the explanatory reach of “cultural additivity”. (shrink)

R K Elliott; Versions of Creativity, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 5, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 139–152, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1971.

For those to whom John Bowring's name means anything, the most likely association with it is the complex and question-begging term ‘Benthamite’. Contemporaries certainly used the term, particularly when they wanted to suggest that his actions were narrowly ideological or theoretical. But to some of Bowring's contemporaries another association served hostile intent almost as well: his Unitarianism.

R K Elliott; The Concept of Development: A Reply to Professor Hamlyn, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 9, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 40–48, https://d.

R K Elliott; Education and Justification, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 11, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 7–27, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1.

R K Elliott; The Concept of Creativity, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 5, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 97–104, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.19.

In this paper an attempt is made to provide an analysis of the meaning of the term function and related terms as they are used by R. K. Merton in the first chapter of his book Social Theory and Social Structure. Several problems are suggested which must be solved if statements about functions are to be considered scientifically adequate. Secondly the term functionalism is defined and several of Merton's functionalist explanations of social phenomena are stated and criticized.

R K Elliott; Louis Arnaud Reid: a remembrance, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 20, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 3–6, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-97.

R K Elliott; Education, Love of One’s Subject, and the Love of Truth, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 8, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 135–153, https:/.

Psychopaths continue to be demonised by the media and estimates suggest that a disturbing percentage of the population has psychopathic tendencies. This timely and controversial new book summarises what we already know about psychopathy and antisocial behavior and puts forward a new case for its cause - with far-reaching implications. Presents the scientific facts of psychopathy and antisocial behavior. Addresses key questions, such as: What is psychopathy? Are there psychopaths amongst us? What is wrong with psychopaths? Is psychopathy due to (...) nature or nurture? And can we treat psychopaths? Reveals the authors' ground-breaking research into whether an underlying abnormality in brain development leaves psychopaths with an inability to feel emotion or fear. The resulting theory could lead to early diagnosis and revolutionize the way society, the media and the state both views and contends with the psychopaths in our midst. (shrink)

R K Elliott; Aestheticism, Imagination and Schooling: a reply to Ruby Meager, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 15, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 33–42.

R K Elliott; D. W. Hamlyn on Knowledge and the Beginnings of Understanding, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 14, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 109–116.

R. K. Elliott; VIII—Aesthetic Theory and the Experience of Art, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 67, Issue 1, 1 June 1967, Pages 111–126, https:/.

This article is concerned with examining Kant's derivation of the various formulae of his Categorical Imperative. It is in agreement with Paton in maintaining that Kant actually mentions five formulae. But it is not in agreement with him, and some others, in maintaining that they are ultimately reducible to three. Nor is it in agreement with those who maintain that they are ultimately reducible to just one. According to the present article, they are ultimately reducible to two: that about a (...) moral law being a universal law; and that about a moral law involving treating human beings as ends in themselves. (shrink)