"--Daniel Brudney, University of Chicago "The fund of information Geuss brings into his discussion of the ancients, and the verve and charm with which it is all presented, make the central chapters of this book particularly engaging.

This book explores how people's subjective, felt experiences of their bodies in action provide part of the fundamental grounding for human cognition and language. Cognition is what occurs when the body engages the physical and cultural world and must be studied in terms of the dynamical interactions between people and the environment. Human language and thought emerge from recurring patterns of embodied activity that constrain ongoing intelligent behavior. We must not assume cognition to be purely internal, symbolic, computational, and disembodied, (...) but seek out the gross and detailed ways that language and thought are inextricably shaped by embodied action. Embodiment and Cognitive Science describes the abundance of empirical evidence from many disciplines, including work on perception, concepts, imagery and reasoning, language and communication, cognitive development, and emotions and consciousness, that support the idea that the mind is embodied. (shrink)

This book states the opposing case in present controversies about the nature and existence of moral rights and the moral status of animals and it reaches conclusions which run strongly against contemporary opinion.

There is a world-wide debate at the moment about the appropriate role for the state in modern societies in the light of the world financial crisis. This book provides a comprehensive analysis and critique of Neo-liberal or economic liberal ideas on this issue.

The interdisciplinary framework for bringing humanistic management and service research together contained in “Humanistic Management of Social Innovation in Service : An Interdisciplinary Framework” is analyzed in this commentary. The humanistic management framework for social innovation in service that the authors propose is quite invigorating. The authors identify many new future service research opportunities.

There has been an extraordinary resurgence of interest in the enigma of human consciousness among neuroscientists, psychologists, and professional philosophers. Much work is aimed at accommodating consciousness within the currently dominant physicalist world picture. This book is a comprehensive and sometimes impassioned attack to "biologize" consciousness by explaining its origin in evolutionary terms and identifying mental phenomena with brain processes; to "computerize" it by identifying mind with the supposed computational activity of the brain; and to empty or eliminate it by (...) denying the reality of qualia. Raymond Tallis's critique concludes with a long look at man--"the explicit animal"--that makes the irreducible mystery of human consciousness impossible to overlook or deny. (shrink)

There need be no incompatibility between utopian thinking and a “realist” political philosophy, if “realism” in political theory means, as it properly should, only the rejection of specific forms of unreflective illusion. Three forms of such illusion – wishful thinking, ideology, and the purportedly self-evident unities that are the targets of Nietzschean genealogy – are briefly discussed. Utopian thinking itself, it is suggested, will benefit from avoidances of these illusions.

Some Christians do in fact think of the question euphemistically, like this. And some like to suppose, further, that when the children find that Hawaii is a bit like hell - it's far too hot and the locals are giving them a hard time - Father will relent and welcome them to his mansions on high.

John Dewey's early exposure to Hegel left a "permanent deposit" on his thinking. Dewey's Hegelian side does not emerge in the usual sense of someone predicting the march of Spirit through history. Rather it is as the complete philosopher seeking, above all else, to leave nothing out. Such a philosopher criticized reified abstractions, reinstated the centrality of relations, emphasized the importance of thinking ideas together with their history, and insisted on the interpenetration of individual and social. This Hegelian inheritance, when (...) passed through the filter of praxis, identifies, for some interpreters (I plead guilty) the strength of Dewey's philosophy.Coexisting with this dimension was another .. (shrink)

This study examines the relationship between procedural justice and employee job insecurity, and the boundary conditions of this relationship. Drawing upon uncertainty management theory and ethical leadership research, we hypothesized that procedural justice is negatively related to job insecurity, and that this relationship is moderated by ethical leadership. We further predicted that the moderating relationship would be more pronounced among employees with a low power distance orientation. We tested our hypotheses using a sample of 381 workers in Macau and Southern (...) China. The results support all of our hypotheses. The implications of these results for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

This book explores the pervasiveness of poetry's impact on philosophy and, conversely, how philosophy has sometimes resisted or denied poetry's influence.

When athletes make significant plays in sporting competitions, such as scoring a goal in soccer, a touchdown in American football, they often immediately express their joy by performing some bodily action for others to see and understand. Many sports celebrations are staged pantomimes that express metaphorical meanings as a part of athletes’ pretending to perform certain source-path-goal sequences of action from other competitive events. This article examines the possible metaphoricity in different sports celebrations and whether casual observers may understand these (...) actions as conveying metaphorical messages. Studies 1 and 3 present analyses of some of the important, possibly metaphorical, characteristics of a corpus of sports celebrations, both those that are performed by individual athletes (Study 1) and those where several athletes jointly enact some celebratory action (Study 3). Studies 2 (individual athletes) and 4 (group performances) investigated whether casual spectators interpret some celebrations as conveying metaphorical messages beyond simply expressing an athlete’s positive emotions. These studies demonstrate that many sports celebrations express metaphorical meanings where athletes provide bodily commentary on the significance of what they have just accomplished. (shrink)

These essays, written in the spirit of Goethe’s Epimetheus who "traces the quick deed to the dim realm of form-combining possibilities", display the depth and breadth of Tallis’s fascination with our lives. Whether discussing philosophical "hardy perennials" like time, or a mundane artefact like ink, Tallis challenges us to think differently about who we are and why we are. The first part of the book – Analysis – dives into the deep-end to explore some of the big questions in philosophy: (...) perception, knowledge and belief; time; the relationship between mathematics and reality; and probability and causation. The middle section – Tetchy Interludes – takes a wry look at some aspects of contemporary art; stupidity (including the author’s own); and Christmas. The third part – Celebration – is more experimental in both its subject matter and treatment. It celebrates the complexity of ordinary, everyday consciousness by contemplating the miracle of speech, artefacts that have transformed our lives (and what they reveal about our cognition) such as the wheel, the sail, and ink; and ‘snapshots’ of the author’s own consciousness on an ordinary day, of past consciousness, as captured in historical memory. Notwithstanding their diversity in theme and style, these essays share the common aim of discovering and celebrating the submerged riches in the "quick deeds" of our everyday lives and perceptions. (shrink)

An alternative to Aggleton & Brown's interpretation is presented suggesting that the perirhinal cortex and hippocampus mediate different attribute information, but use the same processes, supporting the idea of parallel processing based on attribute (visual object and spatial location) rather than process characteristics (item recognition and familiarity).

From the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries, European philosophers were preoccupied with using their newfound access to Aristotle’s metaphysics and natural philosophy to develop an integrated account, hospitable to Christianity, of everything that was thought to exist, including God, pure finite spirits, the immaterial souls of humans, the natural world of organic objects and inorganic objects. This account included a theory of human mentality. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, first in astronomy and then, later, in physics, the tightly (...) knit fabric of this comprehensive medieval world view began to unravel. The transition from the old to the new was gradual, but by 1687, with the publication by Isaac Newton of his Principia Mathematica, the replacement was all but complete. Modern physical science had fully arrived, and it was secular. God and angels were still acknowledged. But they had been marginalized. Yet, there was a glaring omission. Theorists had yet to expand the reach of the new science to incorporate human mentality. This venture, which initially was called “moral philosophy” and came to be called “the science of human nature,” became compelling to progressive eighteenth century thinkers, just as British empiricism began to seriously challenge an entrenched Cartesian rationalism. Rationalism and Empiricism. (shrink)