The collection by Sparrow and Hutchinson gathers together philosophers and sociologists to discuss the ever fascinating yet surprisingly underplayed theme of habit: its history and place in the western philosophical tradition, from the ancients to the contemporary scene. A collection such as this has been long overdue, and surprisingly so, given the centrality of habits in our understanding and organization of ourselves and of the world. We human beings are in fact complex bundles of habits embodied in practices. Hence, our (...) limits and possibilities are at least partially governed by the way in which we habituate, dishabituate, and re-habituate ourselves. Although their presence is widely... (shrink)

Jeremy Carrette is one of the most interesting contemporary scholars writing on James’s philosophy of religious experience. In the present volume the author expands and deepens the scope of his previous researches by investigating the epistemological and metaphysical dimensions of James’s work on religion. The resulting interpretation is an sophisticated and ambitious one: Carrette argues that most accounts of James’s writings on religion—and of his thought as a whole—have been vitiated by a “disciplinary closure” which conceals James’s unbroken effort to (...) “sustain a conversation across the disciplinary spaces of philosophy, psychology and the study of religion” . Contrary to this approach, Carrette claims how .. (shrink)

The editors of this collection aim to fill a notable gap in the scholarship on Gilles Deleuze, pragmatism, and their reciprocal relations. This task is approached along two main lines, corresponding roughly to the volume’s two parts: on the one hand, by reconstructing Deleuze’s direct or potential engagements with classical pragmatism, while on the other hand by investigating the real or virtual exchanges between Deleuze’s rich philosophical production and most contemporary varieties of pragmatism. As the editors explain in their useful (...) stage-setting introduction to the volume, it is a telling fact that, despite Deleuze’s deep interest in pragmatism and an overlapping of concerns and themes, no work has yet... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Le etiche della virtù. La riflessione contemporanea a partire da Hume by Alessio VaccariSarin MarchettiAlessio Vaccari. Le etiche della virtù. La riflessione contemporanea a partire da Hume. Firenze : Le Lettere, 2012. Pp. 320. ISBN 9788860876324, Paper, €29.00.Alessio Vaccari’s volume represents a major achievement in Hume scholarship as well as in contemporary reflection on philosophical ethics. Le etiche della virtù. La riflessione contemporanea a partire da Hume (Virtue (...) Ethics: From Hume Onwards) will be of much value to both historians of moral philosophy and contemporary ethicists who are versed in the ongoing discussions over the nature and point of moral thought. In an intellectual landscape dominated by a legalistic conception of ethics, Vaccari’s investigation is a historiographically committed and theoretically inspired inquiry into (and re-evaluation of) the health of and current regard for the paradigm of the virtues. On the one hand, the author is interested in challenging the influential narrative—voiced by Elizabeth Anscombe (1958) and Alasdair MacIntyre (1981)—according to which modern moral philosophy has been characterized by the most unfortunate eclipse of the language of the virtues; on the other, he aims at reconstructing an effective, viable understanding of virtue ethics along those Humean lines best suited to address the distinctive difficulties facing our contemporary progressive societies. (The challenge of environmental sustainability and future generations is taken as exemplary.) Against Anscombe and MacIntyre, and following the lesson of Jerome B. Schneewind (1990 Jerome B. Schneewind (1998), Vaccari argues that in the post-Enlightenment moral debate, we have not paid enough attention to distinctively modern articulations of the central features of [End Page 123] virtue ethics, including the cultivation of one’s character as a prime moral goal, an enriched understanding of the qualitative dimension and intrinsic value of human happiness, and the acknowledgement of the moral significance of both personal and social relationships for the realization of the good.These historiographical and theoretical concerns represent two sides of the same coin, as Vaccari compellingly argues that the oversight (if not disregard) of the typically modern conception of the virtues finely elaborated by Hume in his works—partly reprised and further refined by John Stuart Mill—deprives us of precious analytical resources to resolve some general impasses that are features of contemporary moral reflection (for example, the demandingness of duty based ethics and the limits of impartial accounts of moral principles) as well as the tensions internal to virtue ethics, especially of neo-Aristotelean and neo-Kantian sorts, (for example, their conflicting pictures of the virtuous agent and the experiential unsoundness of their accounts of the stabilization of moral responses). Humean virtue ethics is depicted, in the first instance, as a radical approach to—and style of—moral philosophy: descriptive and yet normative, explicative without being prescriptive. It is thus Vaccari’s claim that by re-discovering neglected and yet central aspects of Hume’s practical philosophy, illuminated by Mill’s romantic utilitarianism and contrasted to both Kant’s rationalism and (partly) Nietzsche’s perfectionism, we would gain access to a fresh conceptual possibility about how best to reflect on the moral life. This operation also opens up a fertile space for a metaphilosophical investigation of the very character and stakes of moral thought itself, whose lack of reflexivity upon its philosophical credentials is often at the basis of the aforementioned difficulties.The two tasks are brilliantly coordinated, resulting in a volume that is a gold mine of both historical and speculative details that provide a critical store of intellectual resources for thinking through these issues. Besides firmly mastering the primary sources, Vaccari digests an impressive body of secondary literature, which is clearly explained and skillfully assessed. Targeted at scholars of Hume and virtue ethics, Le etiche della virtù is highly recommended for advanced undergraduate courses as well as for graduate seminars both on the history of modern moral philosophy and on contemporary meta-ethics and normative ethics. An English translation of the volume would surely widen its audience and boost its circulation.The volume comprises a preface, five chapters, and an exhaustive bibliography. In the preface, Vaccari sets the stage for his defense of a sentimentalist version of virtue... (shrink)

Advertised by Cornel West as “the best philosophical treatment of the great William James in this generation,” Alexis Dianda’s The Varieties of Experience: William James after the Linguistic Turn meets the reader with high expectations, which it indeed fulfills. Her volume is a seminal contribution to Jamesian scholarship in its defense of some of the most puzzling aspects of James’s conception(s) of experience for us readers past the linguistic turn. The task has been attempted before, with...

Covers the major aspects of James's thought, from his early influences to his legacy, with over 40 chapters by an outstanding roster of international contributors. An indispensable resource for anyone studying and researching James's philosophy.

It is not uncommon, when reading and writing about philosophical traditions, to be highly selective. Especially so when the tradition under review has been contested among its friends and foes alike since its very beginning. This has surely been, and still is, the case with pragmatism, where depending on the narrative spun we would have very different figures foregrounded or rather eclipsed. One might well speak of pragmatisms in the plural, as the Peirceans, the Jamesians, the Deweyeans, and...

Focuses on a neglected aspect of the Heidegger controversy: the question of Martin Heidegger's relationship to the industrialization of death as symbolized by Auschwitz. Contributors seek to comprehend the meaning of Heidegger's post-war silence about the Holocaust, as well as the meaning of his several explicit references to the Extermination, in the light of his preoccupation with the nihilism that he believed to be the hallmark of our technological world. Essays reflect the editors' concern to avoid both censorship and partisanship (...) in their selections—resulting in a wide diversity of viewpoints, and the full spectrum of views, that have arisen in the course of the ongoing Heidegger debate. (shrink)

William James is a philosopher who gets under your skin. Easily. While, to a large degree, this has to do with his understanding of philosophy as a live (and lively) experiment in self-interrogation and conduct, an activity one might find herself performing while engaged in his work and because of it, further evidence of the mesmeric force upon the reader lies in the personal tone of his voice as well as in his ability to read through his times and foresee (...) ours. Despite being the most famous... (shrink)

This new volume of the first critical edition of Bergson’s Oeuvres [2007-], directed by Frédéric Worms for the prestigious series Quadrige/Grand Textes of the Presses Universitaires de France, will be of particular interest for James’ scholars. Stéphane Madelrieux, who assembled together and edited the materials included in the volume, offers us the whole body of Bergson’s writings on James, and much more. In fact, besides the most famous introduction that le magicien Parisien wrote in 1911 f...

Sergio Franzese (1963-2010) has been one among the most active and interesting scholars of William James in Europe. His intellectual biography is in fact shaped by an ongoing dialogue with the thought and writings of James, which guided both his incursions into the work of Nietzsche as well as the examinations of the conversations between pragmatism, Darwinism and phenomenology. Besides many fine books – both authored and edited – on James, he was also the translator and editor of the Italian...

1. In his compelling article American Pragmatism: The Conflict of Narratives, Richard Bernstein quotes a perceptive line by Alasdair MacIntyre that goes [A] tradition not only embodies the narrative of an argument, but is only recovered by an argumentative retelling of that narrative which will itself be in conflict with other argumentative retellings. Bernstein, in the essay mentioned, works through MacIntyre’s passage in order to “engage in the ‘argumentative retelling’ of a metanarrative –...

In this article I address a number of issues raised by Colin Koopman, Alex Livingston, and Michael Slater to my reading of James’s ethics as defended in my 2015 book having to do with, in turn, the relationship between ethics and politics, ethics and psychological types, and ethics and religion. In accounting for these charges, I vindicate and further qualify my interpretation of James as a moral therapist.

In what follows I shall investigate how the notions of truth and invention inform our moral life. In particular, I will show how this idea has been explored by William James in his seminal essay The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life (MPML), by far his most clear-cut piece of moral philosophy. I will claim that the dialectics of the essay cannot be apprehended independently from the understanding of the moral psychology and epistemology James elaborates in his writings on pragmatism (...) and the philosophy of mind. In fact, once framed in the relevant perspective, the essay conveys a very different and more radical position that the one usually acknowledged. In MPML James engages in an inquiry into the nature of moral thought and its ability to meet the difficulties of the moral life it should address. The essay criticizes a certain image of moral reflection by questioning its underlying assumptions about the nature of mindedness and the place of truth in the moral life. I shall thus articulate the discussion of James’ essay along two directions, one methodological and one substantive. They are, respectively, the anti-foundational and anti-theoretical character of moral reflection, and the rethinking of the relationship we have with our interiority that is relevant for ethics as informed by the notion of truth. (shrink)

Because of his unwavering commitment to fight disciplinary and mental closure, William James is an author who has invited scholars from the most disparate fields to review aspects of his eclectic and far-reaching body of work. Not only philosophers, psychologists, historians of medicine and religion, but also artists, political theorists, and social activists have productively engaged James’s rich and variegated writings with the goal to reconstructing seminal portions of our intellectual, cu...

What happens when an entire group of human beings is excluded from the definition of humanity? How is the power of language used to distort reality? What happens when a comprehensive economic plan is based on theft, brainwashing, slave labor, and murder? These and other philosophical questions about the Holocaust are contemplated in Contemporary Portraits of Auschwitz. In 1988, a group of philosophers who had survived the Holocaust, or had known people at the Auschwitz death camp, decided to found an (...) organization that would examine the philosophical implications of Shoah: the Society for the Philosophic Study of Genocide and the Holocaust. Noting that the history and the personal horror stories had been told and retold, SPSGH's founders Sander Lee, Berel Lang, and Alan Rosenberg argued that too little study had been so far devoted to the philosophy of Hitler's final solution and other genocides. Auschwitz problematized the Enlightenment concept of humanity, and other concepts. The perfection of state-sponsored and -administered mass death issued in new forms of language, moral indifference, and forgetting. Philosophy often even fails to mention the Holocaust in discussions of National Socialism. And the disaster of Auschwitz has been largely neutralized by the normalization of a "ruined" language. This volume includes essays in several areas: Witnesses and Testimonies; Morality and Ethics; Art and Poetry; History and Memory; and The Crisis of Representation. Contributors are Karyn Ball, Eve Bannet, Debra Bergoffen, James Bernauer, Klaus Dorner, Jennifer N. Fink, Roger Fjellstrom, Ruth Liberman, Burkhard Liebsch, Alan Milchman, Raj Sampath, Paul Sars, Hans Seigfried, Thomas W. Simon, Dan Stone, Peter Strasser, Frans van Peperstratten, Erik M. Vogt, Andrew Weinstein, and others. (shrink)

This review of recent work in the philosophy of science motivated by a commitment to 'naturalism' begins by identifying three key axioms and one theorem shared by philosophers thus self-styled. Owing much to Quine and Ernest Nagel, these philosophers of science share a common agenda with naturalists elsewhere in philosophy. But they have disagreed among themselves about how the axioms and the theorems they share settle long-standing disputes in the philosophy of science. After expounding these disagreements in the work (...) of Boyd, Giere, Laudan, and Kitcher, I argue that naturalism needs to look for more than mere consistency in its foundations. (shrink)

Review symposium of Alexander Rosenberg’s Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology [2006]. -/- Worry carries with it a connotation of false concern, as in ‘your mother is always worried about you’. And yet some worrying, including that of your mother, turns out to be justified. Alexander Rosenberg’s new book is an extended argument intended to assuage false concerns about reductionism and molecular biology while encouraging a loving embrace of the two.

The Philosophy of Right presents us with a vision of bureaucratic paternalism that is designed to check the excesses of free markets set in motion by the triumph of natural-law thinking, which abstracted the principles of private property and subjective freedom from the institutions that had tamed them and situated them in a stable context. Against these excesses Hegel pits the agricultural estate, which has not succumbed to natural-law thinking; and a “universal estate” of bureaucrats who are educated in Hegel’s (...) philosophy itself, freeing them of the natural-law conflation of human needs with arbitrary and endlessly expanding preferences. Taught by Hegel to look after the needs of the organic whole that is society rather than the gratification of their own preferences, the task of the bureaucrats of the universal estate is to curb the tendency of free markets to produce the social preconditions for an alienated “rabble” to bring down the system. (shrink)

The ‘explanation paradox’ due to Reiss can be resolved by recognizing that economic models that begin with assumptions of rational choice compel explanatory assent because they exploit a pattern of reasoning humans are hardwired to accept as explanatory: what cognitive scientists call the theory of mind. I review recent research in evolutionary anthropology, neuroscience and developmental psychology that substantiates the conclusion that explanations exploiting expectations and preferences (i.e. beliefs and desires) were hard wired into Hominins as the solution to (...) a design problem in early human evolution, and continue to drive our explanatory and predictive expectations even well beyond their domain of effective employment. Economic models employ this explanatory strategy outside the domain of the effective employment of rational choice models. This is the source of our conviction that they explain in spite of their failure to satisfy any reasonable criteria for scientific explanation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT We can best understand Marx’s economic thought by seeing it as implicitly relying upon and reworking a Hegelian philosophy of history, which was deeply salvific and soteriological in its basic structure. Hegel’s philosophy of history reworked the Christian narrative of man’s fall, his redemption through Christ’s atonement, and his return to a state of reconciliation with God in the life of the Christian church. Thus, the loss of the organic form of community found in the Greek polis was a (...) fall that was atoned for in the religious alienation found in both Judaism and Christianity, where man is treated as separated from a transcendent God. The reconciliation between man and God is found, finally, in the reconciliation of the modern, rational state. Early on Marx adopted Hegel’s philosophy of history, but its basic structure remains even in his mature economic work. There he envisions the loss of the organic unity of primitive communism, and the alienation of individuals from the larger social totality of feudalism and capitalism. Under communism, however, individuals are reconciled with the larger social whole through the collective mastery of the products of labor. (shrink)

Prior to the democratic breakthrough in most Western countries, the right to vote was premised on a person’s economic contribution. No country today reserves voting rights exclusively to contributors, but economic contribution matters once again. It matters for immigrants’ access to citizenship and its associated political rights, and it matters for emigrants’ attempts to keep the right to vote in their ‘home country’. Economic contribution has attracted very little attention in the literature on democratic inclusion. The few scholars who have (...) discussed it have rejected it based on its expected implications, without going into detail about its different instantiations and normative underpinnings. This paper lays the foundation for a more thorough critique. Informed by historical practices, we distinguish between two main types of economic contributivist regulations: those that condition the right to vote on the size of the contribution, and those that condition it on compliance with legally required contributions. We suggest that contributivism can be based either on property rights or on reciprocity. We conclude the paper by contrasting contributivism with established principles of democratic inclusion (such as the all-affected principle), and by arguing that, unlike these other principles, contributivism is incompatible with the democratic ideal of self-rule. (shrink)

Halpern's Actual Causality is an extended development of an account of causal relations among individual events in the tradition that analyzes causation as difference making. The book is notable for its efforts at formal clarity, its exploration of "normality" conditions, and the wealth of examples it uses and whose provenance it traces. Unfortunately, the various normality conditions considered undermine the capacity of the basic theory to plausibly treat various cases Halpern considers, and the unalloyed basic theory yields implausible results in (...) simple cases of overdetermination, which are not remedied by Halpern's probabilistic version of his theory or unambiguously by the variety of normality conditions Actual Causality entertains. (shrink)

For many viruses, RNA is the holder of genetic information and serves as the template for both replication and translation. While host and viral proteins play important roles in viral decision‐making, the extent to which viral RNA (vRNA) actively participates in translation and replication might be surprising. Here, the focus is on flaviviruses, which include common human scourges such as dengue, West Nile, and Zika viruses, from an RNA‐centric viewpoint. In reviewing more recent findings, an attempt is made to fill (...) knowledge gaps and revisit some canonical views of vRNA structures involved in replication. In particular, alternative views are offered on the nature of the flaviviral promoter and genome cyclization, and the feasibility of refining in vitro‐derived models with modern RNA probing and sequencing methods is pointed out. By tracing vRNA structures from translation through encapsidation, a dynamic molecule closely involved in the self‐regulation of viral replication is revealed. (shrink)

The notion of “multistability” is a central fixture of the postphenomenological framework of thought, one of the central ideas that enables this perspective to avoid both shallow determinism and instrumentalism. While this notion has been put to use in numerous case studies and theoretical treatments, here I argue that the work of following out the philosophical implications of technological multistability has only just begun. Don Ihde’s new book, Husserl’s Missing Technologies, provides a helpful jumping off point as he provides a (...) leading-edge formulation of this idea. I continue with an attempt to sketch out the vast philosophical ground opened up by this concept, and review the contemporary work by postphenomenologists that is just starting to explore this new terrain. (shrink)

Richard J. Bernstein has left us on July 4, 2022. Tributes and events celebrating his life and thought continue a year on. Dick, as he encouraged people to address him, was a most humble, gifted, and generous scholar, and his teachings illuminated the minds of many generations. His civil passion as well as his love for life pervaded his writings, within and without philosophy. His need for understanding and intellectual curiosity were never an arid self-serving exercise, but rather the expres...

Editors’ Note: As a matter of policy, the editors believe that publishing several reviews of selected texts is a valuable exercise which will enable a cross-section of views to be aired.Copies of this report can be obtained from the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, 28 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3EG, U.K. . The report publishes the recommendation of a Working Party set up in January 1995. Following a wide public consultation, the Working Party prepared its report on xenotransplantation which has been (...) endorsed by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. (shrink)

These essays examine topics ranging from Heidegger's and Foucault's intellectual forebears to their respective understanding of the Enlightenment, modernity, and technology, to their conceptions of power and the political.

This book is the first sustained inquiry into the ways in which postmodern thinkers have grappled with the historical bases, implications, and methodological problems of the Holocaust. The book examines the thinking of Arendt, Levinas, Foucault, Lyotard, and Derrida, all of whom have recognized the centrality of the Nazi genocide to the epoch in which we live. The essays written for this volume constitute a wide-ranging study of the efforts of postmodernism to articulate the Holocaust.

Questionable research practices are a well-recognized problem in psychology. Coding bias, or the tendency of review studies to disproportionately cite positive findings from original research, has received comparatively little attention. Coding bias is more likely to occur when original research, such as neuroimaging, includes large numbers of effects, and is most concerning in applied contexts. We evaluated coding bias in reviews of structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) studies of PCL-R psychopathy. We used PRISMA guidelines to locate all relevant original (...) sMRI studies and reviews. The proportion of null-findings cited in reviews was significantly lower than those reported in original research, indicating coding bias. Coding bias was not affected by publication date or review design. Reviews recommending forensic applications—such as treatment amenability or reduced criminal responsibility—were no more accurate than purely theoretical reviews. Coding bias may have contributed to a perception that structural brain abnormalities in psychopaths are more consistent than they actually are, and by extension that sMRI findings are suitable for forensic application. We discuss possible sources for the pervasive coding bias we observed, and we provide recommendations to counteract this bias in review studies. Until coding bias is addressed, we argue that this literature should not inform conclusions about psychopaths' neurobiology, especially in forensic contexts. (shrink)

Actualists who believe in possible worlds typically regard them as "abstract" objects of some special sort. For example, Alvin Plantinga takes worlds to be maximal possible states-of-affairs, all of which "exist", as actualism requires, but only one of which "obtains". Views like Plantinga's run into difficulty in the interpretation of statements of "iterated" modality, statements about what is "possible" for individuals that "could" exist but that do not actually exist. These statements seem to require the existence of "singular" states-Of-affairs that (...) have nonactual individuals as constituents, a requirement that is incompatible with actualism. One can try to avoid the troublesome singular states-of-affairs by introducing "unexemplified individual essences" and maintaining that these are the true constituents of the required states-of-affairs, rather than the nonactual possibles themselves. However, serious arguments are raised against this employment of individual essences. (shrink)

Rowlands defends environmentalism, that is, the conjunction of the ontological claim that cognitive processes are not located exclusively inside the skin of cognizing organisms and the epistemological claim that it is not possible to understand the nature of cognitive processes by focusing exclusively on what is occurring inside the skin of cognizing organisms. Chapter 3 is devoted to explaining how environmentalism differs from other forms of externalism about the mental. The crucial points are that the arguments to be presented for (...) the ontological claim do not turn on considerations about the content of mental states, that environmentalism implies a strong form of externalism, and that standard arguments for externalism, based on considerations about content, do not establish the strong form. (shrink)

According to John Tomasi's Free Market Fairness, there are serious constraints on what a liberal state may do to promote economic justice. Tomasi defends this claim by arguing that important economic liberties ought to be regarded as “basic” and given special priority over other liberal concerns, including those of economic justice. I argue that Tomasi's defense of this claim is unsuccessful. One problem takes the form of a dilemma: depending on how the claim is formulated more precisely, Tomasi's argument seems (...) either to be compatible with standard (e.g., Rawlsian) liberalism or to tell against even the minimal taxation that would be necessary to support the social safety net he supports. Second, granting “basic” status to economic liberties would in many cases defeat the goal, self-authorship, that Tomasi sees himself as sharing with other liberals. Third, contrary to Tomasi's suggestions, no inconsistency arises when liberals (such as Rawls) refuse to recognize the economic liberties as basic. Fourth and finally, the special significance that Tomasi attaches to agency does not provide any additional reason for accepting Tomasi's conclusions. (shrink)