And his writing captures the best of his speaking. In this book we have: . Hippocrates and his Oath validated anew for modern times, . Luke the Physician, .

In American Nietzsche, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen delves deeply into Nietzsche's philosophy, and America’s reception of it, to tell the story of his curious appeal.

On n'a pas assez reconnu l'importance du livre de John Dewey qui parut en 1888, Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding: A Critical Exposition. Dewey voit Leibniz comme représentant du Rationalisme a priori, en contraste avec l'Empirisme de Locke. Du point de vue néo-hégélien, Dewey trouve Leibniz coupable de certaines erreurs philosophiques, mais partage ses critiques de Patomisme psychologique de Locke et sa conception organique de la nature et de l'homme. Leibniz renforce chez Dewey des concepts fondamentaux d'organisme, de (...) continuité, et de l'unité rationelle du monde, idées qui jouent un rôle important plus tard dans la formation de la philosophie deweyenne. (shrink)

The sub-title of this essay might very well be: “A Study in the Biology and Mechanics of Historical Research and Interpretation”. A study in biology because historians can be divided into two classes: invertebrates and vertebrates. The invertebrate historians are those who have inarticulate major premises; the vertebrate historians are those having articulate major premises. A study in mechanics because analysis of historical thought reveals that the principle of least action holds literal sway so far as many historians' critical awareness (...) of their assumptions is concerned. (shrink)

Drawing on a variety of discourses, from religion, philosophy, and political thought, to cultural criticism, social theory, and the arts,The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History shows how ideas have been major forces in American history, driving movements such as transcendentalism, Social Darwinism, conservatism, and postmodernism.

International law informs, and is informed by, concerns for global justice. Yet the two fields that engage most with prescribing the normative structure of the world order – international law and the philosophy of global justice – have tended to work on parallel tracks. Many international lawyers, with their commitment to formal sources, regard considerations of substantive (and not merely procedural) justice as ultra vires for much of their work. Philosophers of global justice, in turn, tend to explore the moral (...) commitments of international actors without grappling with the international legal doctrine or institutions. In recent years, however, both disciplines have begun to engage with one another more. This discussion among international lawyers and philosophers addresses the promises of and challenges to interdisciplinary approaches to global justice. The contributors consider the added value of philosophical inquiry to issues facing international law practitioners or scholars, the salience of of international law for political philosophy, and the methodological distinctions between the two fields. The contributors also identify promising lines and examples of interdisciplinary scholarship. (shrink)

Naturalistic experiments of color perception are critically evaluated. The review concludes that they fail to confirm a natural determination of color perception. Rather than demonstrating universal sensitivity to focal colors, the experiments actually yielded enormous cultural variation in response. This variation is interpreted as supporting a sociohistorical psychological explanation of color perception.

In his article, “Saving Critical Realism,”Harre relates his revised philosophy of science to a social philosophy concerning the nature of society, and to a political philosophy regarding the nature of freedom and reform. I argue that his social philosophy and political philosophy rest upon an individualistic sense of society and freedom. I demonstrate that his individualism is factually and politically untenable. I counterpose an alternative social philosophy and political philosophy that are based on a structural model of society, freedom, and (...) social change.My critique demonstrates how social science can adjudicate claims of structuralist vs. individualist social and political philosophy. It also argues that social science must constitute the basis for formulating political ideals of freedom and social organization if these are to be viable. (shrink)

The codification of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, and the accession to those treaties by a large majority of states, does not at first glance seem to have any significant effect upon states' behavior in situations of crisis. Any understanding of the prospects for such law in these situations requires an appraisal of both the motivations of states in concluding these treaties and the pressures on them to ignore them. This paper analyzes those motivations and temptations through (...) the framework of precommitment theory, a component of rational choice theory, originally articulated by Jon Elster and Thomas Schelling. The metaphor of Ulysses offers a useful way to address three different dimensions of the purposes that states join treaties: beliefs, i.e., the state's attitude toward the norms in the treaty; predictions, the state's concerns about its own future behavior; and interactions, i.e., the extent to which the state is trying to influence or bind other states. And it permits linking those motivations to the propensity of states to comply at a later time. The paper offers a four-part typology for why states commit to such treaties, contrasting it with notions from contemporary international relations theories. It then explores the contrasting approaches of compliance theories and international law doctrine to the temptation of states to violate treaties and elaborates the contributions of the precommitment framework. Building upon that framework, it proposes a set of strategies that those concerned with compliance might explore for making international law more relevant when governments seem most inclined to discount it. (shrink)

This volume presents human rights in action, focussing on their effectiveness as legal tools designed to benefit human beings. By combining conceptual analysis with an emphasis on procedures and mechanisms of implementation, it provides a multidimensional overview of human rights. Beginning with an analysis of the historical and conceptual foundations of human rights, the volume then focusses upon the different mechanisms which may be employed in translating human rights from a promise into a reality. Special emphasis is placed upon the (...) United Nations procedures available to achieve this end. (shrink)

Two strands of the Vygotskian sociohistorical school of psychology are compared to better understand the nature of cultural variation in cognitive processes. The "relativist" strand maintains that cognitive processes are culturally variable. The "universalist" strand maintains that these processes manifest essential cultural uniformity despite apparent differences in performance. A review of the evidence concludes that the relativist position is more tenable.

The legal regime regulating cross-border investment gives key rights to foreign investors and places significant duties on states hosting that investment. It also raises distinctive moral questions due to its potential to constrain a state’s ability to manage its economy and protect its people. Yet international investment law remains virtually untouched as a subject of philosophical inquiry. The questions of international political morality surrounding investment rules can be mapped through the lens of two critiques of the law – that it (...) systemically takes advantage of the global South and that it constrains the policy choices of states hosting investment. Each critique contains certain moral and empirical assumptions that deserve further attention. The distributive justice implications of international investment rules are also relevant to scholars of global distributive justice. The aim of the analysis is to develop an interdisciplinary agenda – among law, philosophy, and social science – for inquiry into the justice of investment law and reform of its unjust elements. (shrink)

Academic freedom re-visited, by T. V. Smith.--Human rights under the United Nations Charter, by B. V. Cohen.--The absolute, the experimental method, and Horace Kallen, by P. H. Douglas.--Some tame reflections on some wild facts, by J. Frank.--Some central themes in Horace Kallen's philosophy, by S. Ratner.--Cultural relativism and standards, by G. Boas.--The philosophy of democracy as a philosophy of history, by S. Hook.--The rational imperatives, by C. I. Lewis.--From Poe to Valéry, by T. S. Eliot.--Events and the future, by (...) J. Dewey.--Teleological explanation and teleological systems, by E. Nagel.--Chʻan (Zen) Buddhism in China: its history and method, by H. Shih.--Reconsideration of the origin and nature of perception, by A. Ames.--Horace M. Kallen: A bibliography (p. 275-277). (shrink)

International law and ethics share a common goal of helping us understand the norms and institutions needed to promote a just world order. Yet each of the two fields has approached this shared task with little regard for the insights of other, and interdisciplinary collaboration is now imperative. This essay shows the complementary nature of inquiries in political and moral philosophy, on the one hand, and international law, on the other, by examining the so-called New Haven School (or policy-oriented jurisprudence), (...) an international law method that explicitly considers values as both inputs and outputs of the process of making law. It finds that the School’s sociological orientation does not adequately integrate ethical inquiries essential to prescribing law, in particular questions about the scope of duties that individuals and states owe those abroad. Using the current legal debate over the extraterritorial application of human rights as an example, the paper shows how approaches from moral and political philosophy can help provide a rigorous and principled basis for the prescription of law, as well as link seemingly unrelated questions of international law to each other. (shrink)

Walter Kaufmann's monumental study of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy, Nietzsche:Philosopher,Psychologist,Antichrist (1950) dramatically transformed Nietzsche interpretations in the postwar United States and rendered Kaufmann himself a dominant figure in transatlantic Nietzsche studies from 1950 until his death in 1980. While the longevity of Kaufmann's hegemony over postwar American Nietzsche interpretations in particular is remarkable, even more so is the fact that he revitalized the career of such a radical thinker in the conservative intellectual climate of the 1950s. Philosophers and historians typically credit (...) Kaufmann with rescuing Nietzsche from the Nazis, but argue that he did so by denaturing Nietzsche's philosophy of power and narrowly transforming him into an existentialist. By contrast, this essay argues that Kaufmann took a much more dramatic step by extending the scope of Nietzsche's philosophy, demonstrating how his ideas resonated with but also transcended the dominant philosophies of the day. Kaufmann presented Nietzsche as a philosopher uniquely poised to bridge the increasing mid-century rift between continental and analytic philosophies, as well as between the increasingly distinct moral worlds of academic philosophers and general readers. At a time when philosophical discourses within the university and beyond were pulling apart, Kaufmann put Nietzsche to work to bring them back together. By emphasizing Nietzsche's harmony with the range of scholarly and popular philosophical concerns of mid-century, he also established, for the first time in the United States, Nietzsche's role as a canonical thinker in the Western tradition. (shrink)

Despite a common agenda of normative analysis of the international order, philosophical work on international political morality and international law and legal scholarship have, until recently, worked at a distance from one another.The mutual suspicion can be traced to different aims and methodologies, including a divide between work on matters of deep structure, on the one hand, and practical institutional analysis and prescription, on the other. Yet international law is a key part of the normative practices ofstates, has a direct (...) effect on state behavior, and, as a meth-odological matter, can contribute to good theorizing onmatters of international ethics. Recently, philosophical workhas demonstrated a greater engagement with the moral aspects of international law. One strand of scholarship has treated the rules of international law as a proper subject for philosophical inquiry. Another has used international legal rules to support moral arguments about aspects of the international order. Future dialogue and cooperation would benefit both fields, in particular on the challenges to global cooperation from nationalism and on strategies for allocating responsibilities among global actors for rectifying global harms. (shrink)

This paper explores “the peopling of Europe through data practices” in relation to standardized testing of students in Denmark. Programme for International Student Assessment is a central component of Danish and European education infrastructures. In Denmark, mediocre PISA results spurred the introduction of national testing. With inspiration from Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, this paper analyzes how complementary Danish national test assessment scales make up population objects and student subjects and how these scales are aligned with European and transnational standards. (...) A norm scale, standardized against the European Credit Transfer System grading scale, enacts a population whose performance can be tracked over time. A criteria scale introduces categories describing skills and enacts a moving student subject whose progression can be tracked. This paper argues that the three assessment scales enact the student population as bound to the nation and as simultaneously constituted in relation to transnational European categories and imaginaries of competition. As part of this, this paper discusses how the national test and PISA are used to single out students of non-European background, anticipated to be low PISA achievers and nonparticipants in a European knowledge economy. (shrink)

If the history of civilization is to be an instrument for the advancement of civilization, historians must break new paths toward a wider and deeper understanding of human affairs. Despite the achievements of those who have explored the influence of technics, the power of nationalism, the rôle of mass-psychology, the economic factors in political and social life, our analyses of history are from a scientific standpoint still all too primitive. As John Dewey has said, “It is possible to study a (...) multitude of histories, and yet permit history, the record of the transitions and transformations of human activities, to escape us. Taking history in separate doses of this country and that, we take it as a succession of isolated finalities, each one in due season giving way to another, as supernumeraries succeed one another in a march across the stage. We thus miss the fact of history and also its lesson; the diversity of institutional forms and customs which the same human nature may produce and employ.“. (shrink)

Offering a new interdisciplinary approach to global justice and integrating the insights of international relations and contemporary ethics, this book asks whether the core norms of international law are just by appraising them according to a standard of global justice grounded in the advancement of peace and protection of human rights.

Pietraszewski asserts that social psychological research on groups is too vague, tautological, and dependent on intuitions to be theoretically useful. We disagree. Pietraszewski's contribution is thought-provoking but also incomplete and guilty of many of the faults he attributes to others. Instead of rototilling the existing knowledge landscape, we urge for more integration of new and old ideas.