128 female Ss were asked to make 4 judgments about a young woman after reading her "job application portfolio." Five characteristics of the young woman were manipulated orthogonally. Ss were asked to report how each of the 5 manipulated factors had influenced each of their judgments. "Observer Ss," who had access only to very impoverished descriptions of each of the 5 factors, were asked to predict how each of the factors would influence each of the judgments. Results show (...) that S reports about the effects of the factors on the judgments were in general highly inaccurate; observer predictions were extremely similar to S reports; for the single judgment for which Ss showed substantial accuracy, observer predictions were as accurate as S reports. Results indicate that whatever introspective access to cognitive processes may exist, it is not sufficient to produce generally accurate reports about such processes, nor even to produce reports that differ much from those of poorly informed outside observers. (shrink)

Do the rich descriptions and narrative shapings of literature provide a valuable resource for readers, writers, philosophers, and everyday people to imagine and confront the ultimate questions of life? Do the human activities of storytelling and complex moral decision-making have a deep connection? What are the moral responsibilities of the artist, critic, and reader? What can religious perspectives—from Catholic to Protestant to Mormon—contribute to literary criticism? Thirty well known contributors reflect on these questions, including iterary theorists Marshall Gregory, James Phelan, (...) and Wayne Booth; philosophers Martha Nussbaum, Richard Hart, and Nina Rosenstand; and authors John Updike, Charles Johnson, Flannery O'Connor, and Bernard Malamud. Divided into four sections, with introductory matter and questions for discussion, this accessible anthology represents the most crucial work today exploring the interdisciplinary connections between literature, religion and philosophy. (shrink)

This volume presents six lively conversations with Hans-Georg Gadamer, one of the twentieth century’s master philosophers. Looking back over his life and thought, Gadamer takes up key issues in his philosophy, addresses points of controversy, and replies to his critics, including those who accuse him of having been in complicity with the Nazis. A genial and direct conversationalist, Gadamer is here captured at his best and most accessible. The interviews took place between 1989 and 1996, and all but one appear (...) in English for the first time in this volume. The first three conversations, conducted by Heidelberg philosopher Carsten Dutt, deal with hermeneutics, aesthetics, and practical philosophy and the question of ethics. In a fourth conversation, with University of Heidelberg classics professor Glenn W. Most, Gadamer argues for the vital importance of the Greeks for our contemporary thinking. In the next, the philosopher reaffirms his connection with phenomenology and clarifies his relation to Husserl and Heidegger in a conversation with London philosopher Alfons Grieder. In the final interview, with German Nazi expert Dörte von Westernhagen, Gadamer describes his life as a struggling young professor in Germany in the 1930s and refutes accusations of his complicity with the Nazis. These conversations are a lucid introduction for readers new to the philosopher’s thought, and for experts they present an invaluable commentary on Gadamer’s most important themes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 369-396 [Access article in PDF] Worlds or Words Apart?The Consequences of Pragmatism for Literary Studies:An Interview with Richard Rorty Richard Rorty, with E. P. Ragg ER: I WANTED TO ASK YOU first about holism. Clearly holism doesn't just mean being interdisciplinary. Nor, as you argue in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, is it merely a question of antifoundationalist polemic. Rather, you (...) say it marks "a distrust of the whole epistemological enterprise." 1 Could you explain what you mean by that?RR: If you weren't some kind of foundationalist you wouldn't bother to get into epistemology. Epistemology only looks attractive if you think that there is a topic called knowledge whose nature can be studied. The idea is that once you have learned its nature, you might get more of it than you had before. Only someone who thinks that knowledge has foundations located in sense perception, or pure reason, or divine revelation, or something, would take the idea of studying knowledge, its nature and limits, seriously. I think of holism as just the view that people change their beliefs in such a way as to achieve coherence with their other beliefs, to bring their beliefs and desires into some sort of equilibrium—and that that is about all there is to be said about the quest for knowledge. There are no rules for which beliefs you sacrifice in order to accommodate other beliefs, or which desires you change to accommodate changed beliefs. Because there aren't any rules, there aren't any methods you can study in order to improve the way you achieve equilibrium. The whole idea of studying how belief is changed is pretty hopeless. It's just too holistic a process to be an appropriate topic of study. [End Page 369]ER: Holism is obviously a natural corollary of pragmatism because pragmatists urge bringing as many different useful vocabularies to discussion as we can. This reminds me of your definition of "literariness." In Contingency, irony, and solidarity you describe literary skill as the ability to effect "surprising gestalt switches by making smooth rapid transitions from one terminology to another." 2 Would it be fair to say, then, that thinking holistically is, to some degree, literary?RR: No, I don't think so. It would be more appropriate to say thinking holistically, in the sense of not being limited to a given context or disciplinary framework, is a matter of thinking imaginatively. Politicians and theologians and engineers think imaginatively just as much as literary people do. To call it literary would be unduly to privilege literature.ER: Would you say that, as a writer, your own work has been treated holistically: first in the sense that your texts are seen as a growing body of thought—that is, that there is a difference between the writer of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and the author of Contingency, irony, and solidarity—and, second, in the sense that people have thought holistically about your ideas, have brought them to bear on literature, philosophy, social science, the very demarcations you want to transcend?RR: I think that the stuff I do is more interesting to people outside of philosophy than those inside it. This is an example of the same phenomenon that led Kuhn to be much more read by people outside the hard sciences than by people within them. My stuff, like Kuhn's, debunks certain views that various earlier philosophers, especially the positivists, had tried to impose on the culture. My readers are people who are looking for a way out from the view they absorbed, without much liking it, when they were young. People inside of philosophy, however, often regard all this debunking as endangering the problems to the solution of which they have devoted their lives. They do not want the problems dissolved, because that would dissolve their solutions as well. So they welcome it less than do outsiders.ER: One of the markers of your... (shrink)

What were Shakespeare's final thoughts on history, tragedy, and comedy? Shakespeare's Last Plays focuses much needed scholarly attention on Shakespeare's "Late Romances." The work--a collection of newly commissioned essays by leading scholars of classical political philosophy and literature--offers careful textual analysis of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, All is True, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. The essays reveal how Shakespeare's thought in these final works compliments, challenges, fulfills, or transforms previously held conceptions of the playwright (...) and his political-philosophical views. (shrink)

FOREWORD. Gilbert Gottlieb and the Developmental Point of View. I. INTRODUCTION. 1. Developmental Systems, Nature-Nurture, and the Role of Genes in Behavior and Development: On the Legacy of Gilbert Gottlieb. 2. Normally Occurring Environmental and Behavioral Influences on Gene Activity: From Central Dogma to Probabilistic Epigenesis. II. THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS FOR THE DEVELOPMENTAL STUDY OF BEHAVIOR AND GENETICS. 3. Historical and Philosophical Perspectives on Behavioral Genetics and Developmental Science. 4. Development and Evolution Revisited. 5. Probabilistic Epigenesis and Modern Behavioral and Neural (...) Genetics. 6. The Roles of Environment, Experience, and Learning in Behavioral Development. 7. Contemporary Ideas in Physics and Biology in Gottlieb’s Psychology. III. EMPIRICAL STUDIES OF BEHAVIORAL DEVELOPMENT AND GENETICS. 8. Behavioral Development during the Mother-Young Interaction in Placental Mammals: The Development of Behavior in the Relationship with the Mother. 9. Amniotic Fluid as an Extended Milieu Interieur. 10. Developmental Effects of Selective Breeding for an Infant Trait. 11. Emergence and Constraint in Novel Behavioral Adaptations. 12. Nonhuman Primate Research Contributions to Understanding Genetic and Environmental Influences on Phenotypic Outcomes across Development. 13. Interactive Contributions of Genes and Early Experience to Behavioural Development: Sensitive Periods and Lateralized Brain and Behaviour. 14. Trans-Generational Epigenetic Inheritance. 15. The Significance of Non-Replication of Gene-Phenotype Associations. 16. Canalization and Malleability Reconsidered: The Developmental Basis of Phenotypic Stability and Variability. IV. APPLICATIONS TO DEVELOPMENT. 17. Gene-Parenting Interplay in the Development of Infant Emotionality. 18. Genetic Research in Psychiatry and Psychology: A Critical Overview. 19. On the Limits of Standard Quantitative Genetic Modeling of Inter-Individual Variation: Extensions, Ergodic Conditions and a New Genetic Factor Model of Intra-Individual Variation. 20. Songs My Mother Taught Me: Gene-Environment Interactions, Brain Development and the Auditory System: Thoughts on Non-Kin Rejection, Part II. 21. Applications of Developmental Systems Theory to Benefit Human Development: On the Contributions of Gilbert Gottlieb to Individuals, Families, and Communities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:William Thomas Jones 1910–1998Charles M. YoungWilliam Thomas Jones, a friend and supporter of this journal since its inception, died on September 30, 1998, in Claremont, California, at the age of eighty-eight. Born in Natchez, Mississippi, Will was educated at Swarthmore, Oxford (as a Rhodes scholar), and Princeton. After a legendary teaching career spanning nearly fifty years, thirty-four at Pomona College and another fifteen at the California Institute of Technology, (...) Will retired in 1985. He published a host of articles and books, among them the highly regarded five-volume A History of Western Philosophy, now in its fourth edition. Will received numerous awards and honors, including Lippincott, Procter, Ford Faculty, and Guggenheim Fellowships; he was also a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, and twice a Resident Scholar with the Rockefeller Foundation at Villa Servelloni. In 1969–70, he was President of the American Philosophical Association’s Pacific Division.In 1961, Will joined Karl Aschenbrenner, John D. Goheen, Paul O. Kristeller, Oskar Piest, Benson Mates, Ernest Moody, Richard H. Popkin, Herbert W. Schneider, and E. W. Strong (as chair) to form the Executive Committee (now Board of Directors) of the Journal of the History of Philosophy. The first issue of the JHP appeared some two years later. Will provided much valuable counsel and support in the turbulent early years of the JHP, helping in particular in securing much needed financial support from the Claremont Colleges. We join Will’s family, friends, colleagues, and students in mourning the loss of a fine historian, philosopher, and teacher.Copyright © 1999 Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:86 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY he solved the problem of his own existence, this picture of an erudite scholar systematically and unemotionally peeling off the foibles of the learned world as the only solution for the perplexing problems of the life, seems credible and direct. Since the essay presenting it is brilliantly written, with some of Bayle's own penetrating analyses, we can be sure that it will have its day (...) in court. Is it out of place to announce with this review that the Soc/$tg Arigdoise des science, lettres, e$ arts has purchased the house where Bayle was born at Carla-Bayle, and plans to make it into a monument-museumhonoring the philosopher? The house is in bad repair and there is a great need for funds; gifts of any size may be sent to the Socigtd, C.C.P. Toulouse 114-19, France. I presume that they are deductible. JoH~ B. WOLF University o] Illinois, Chicago Circle Entretiens sur les sciences. By Bernard Lamy. Edition critique pr~sent~e par FranCois Girbal & Pierre Clair. (u 5 of the series Le mouvement des idJes au XVII ~ si~cle) (Paris, 1966.Pp. 448. F 36.--) Father Bernard Lamy, 1640-1715, an Oratorian who was a contemporary of Malebranche, wrote his Entreticns sur les sciences not for the savants but for young gentlemen of the time who might have wanted to enter into the intellectual world. The work was first written be= tween 1676-80, and published by 1684. It developed through three stages in Lamy's lifetime, and was a popular exposition of modem learning throughout the eighteenth century. (It was last published in French in 1768, and in Spanish in 1800.) Drs. Clair and Girbal have provided a most useful edition of this minor classic, giving the variants from the different versions done by Lamy. The editors, who know the Oratorian and Jansenist currents of the time well, have included lots of informative notes. In these they have stressed the possible influence of Lamy's text on two of its important readers, Montesquieu and Rousseau, providing many clues to be followed out. The editors have also republished in their introduction the original review of Lamy's work by Pierre Bayle from the Nouvells de la R$publique des Lettres of August, 1684. The Entretien8 should be of interest to anyone concerned with late seventeenth-century thought. Although Lamy was not a particularly original thinker, his presentation of what was known provides an important picture of the world of learning of his time. Lamy was a Malebranchist first of all, tremendously impressed by the metaphysics and epistemology of his colleague, by the relevance of this philosophy to mathematical and scientific studies, and by the religious orientation of Malebranche's scientific thought. Lamy was also a Cartesian with re= gard to method and logic, greatly influenced by Amauld's and Nicole's Port-Royal Logic. But Lamy was also an eclectic who saw merit in the empirical work of his time, admiring Gassendi's efforts as well as those of Galileo, Boyle and of the Royal Society. For Lamy there should be no conflict between science and religion. A good deal of the Entreticns is devoted to explaining what mathematics and the sciences are about, and how they should be studied. Lamy was a great advocate and popularizer of the 'new science', the mechanistic approach from Galileo down to Malebranche and Newton. For him scientific study should lead to a better understanding of the Divine World. "Nous lotions la Science... lots qu'elle est plac6es dans une gme qui aime Dieu, qui est la v6rit6, & par consequent le v6ritable objet de la Science" (p. 47). In a world in which it is alleged that science was at war with religion, Lamy along with his hero Malebranche, and the philosophical Jansenists, sought not only for a harmony of the 'new science' and a Christian world view, but for the religious use of this science in a religious understanding of the world. Lamy's presentation, in an unexciting dialogue form, reveals many interesting facets of both his own outlook as well as of that of his contemporaries. Lamy's Cartesian methodology clearly shows the... (shrink)

In 1949, the Department of Philosophy at the University of Manchester organized a symposium “Mind and Machine” with Michael Polanyi, the mathematicians Alan Turing and Max Newman, the neurologists Geoff rey Jeff erson and J. Z. Young, and others as participants. Th is event is known among Turing scholars, because it laid the seed for Turing’s famous paper on “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, but it is scarcely documented. Here, the transcript of this event, together with Polanyi’s original statement and (...) his notes taken at a lecture by Jeff erson, are edited and commented for the fi rst time. Th e originals are in the Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago. Th e introduction highlights elements of the debate that included neurophysiology, mathematics, the mind-body-machine problem, and consciousness and shows that Turing’s approach, as documented here, does not lend itself to reductionism. (shrink)

An adequate approach to any of Aristotle's qualitative parts of tragedy must be grounded in an understanding of their hierarchical ranking within the Poetics. Any "whole" must present "a certain order in its arrangement of parts" ,1 and in a drama each part is "for the sake of" the one "above" it. Contrary to Rosenstein's formulation, for instance, the Aristotelian view is that character as a form "concretizes" and individualizes thought as matter. Rosenstein's question as to whether "these . . (...) . indeed form a genuine disjunction" should not even arise. By ignoring the hierarchy, and therefore collapsing it, Rosenstein weakens his otherwise sound assertion that tragedy is not philosophy. Such is the result, whether intended or not, of holding that "thought must also be some form or concretization of action, just as plot and character are" . This vocabulary seems to suggest in the end that a tragic work is organized by philosophical "themes." "To understand spoken thought as an object of imitation in this manner is to understand it not merely as a content or object being imitated . . . but as the supposedly valid expression of an interpretation of the doings of the aesthetically worked world generally. . . . Thought in this sense becomes theme" . · 1. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of Aristotle are from The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon . James E. Ford responds in this essay to Leon Rosenstein's "On Aristotle and Thought in the Drama" . An assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University—Hawaii Campus, he is currently writing on interpretative theory. See also: "Metaphor and Transcendence" by Karsten Harries in Vol. 5, No. 1. (shrink)

H.P. Grice is known principally for his influential contributions to the philosophy of language, but his work also includes treatises on the philosophy of mind, ethics, and metaphysics--much of which is unpublished to date. This collection of original essays by such philosophers as Nancy Cartwright, Donald Davidson, Gilbert Harman, and P.F. Strawson demonstrates the unified and powerful character of Grice's thoughts on being, mind, meaning, and morals. An introductory essay by the editors provides the first overview of Grice's work.

Bioethics has been subject to considerable social criticism in recent years. One criticism that has caused particular discomfort in the bioethics community is that bioethicists, because of the way their work is funded, are involved in profound conflicts of interest that undermine their title to be considered independent moral commentators on developments in biomedicine and biotechnology. This criticism draws its force from the assumption that bioethics is, or ought to be, a type of normative social criticism. Versions of this criticism (...) come from both the political left and right. For instance, such criticisms include allegations that bioethics is inherently socially conservative, that it is inherently “pro-technology”, that it lays spurious claims to moral and social authority and expertise, that its focus on autonomy links it to neoliberal theories of choice, and that it is an ideological mystification of real social relationships and political power. This commentary paper analyses the problem of bioethical conflict of interest, and argues that the types of conflict of interest facing bioethics are inherent to the role of “public intellectual” that bioethicists generally wish to assume. The paper defends this conception of the role of the bioethicist, arguing that bioethicists should be interested and openly so. (shrink)

The fitness of any evolutionary unit can be understood in terms of its two basic components: fecundity (reproduction) and viability (survival). Trade-offs between these fitness components drive the evolution of life-history traits in extant multicellular organisms. We argue that these trade-offs gain special significance during the transition from unicellular to multicellular life. In particular, the evolution of germ–soma specialization and the emergence of individuality at the cell group (or organism) level are also consequences of trade-offs between the two basic fitness (...) components, or so we argue using a multilevel selection approach. During the origin of multicellularity, we study how the group trade-offs between viability and fecundity are initially determined by the cell level trade-offs, but as the transition proceeds, the fitness trade-offs at the group level depart from those at the cell level. We predict that these trade-offs begin with concave curvature in single-celled organisms but become increasingly convex as group size increases in multicellular organisms. We argue that the increasingly convex curvature of the trade-off function is driven by the cost of reproduction which increases as group size increases. We consider aspects of the biology of the volvocine green algae – which contain both unicellular and multicellular members – to illustrate the principles and conclusions discussed. (shrink)

Richard E. Aquila - Kant's Theory of A Priori Knowledge - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.2 267-268 Book Review Kant's Theory of A Priori Knowledge Robert Greenberg. Kant's Theory of A Priori Knowledge. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2001. Pp. ix + 278. Cloth, $45.00. This is one of the deepest and most carefully reasoned books on Kant I have read. It is a book for the scholar of the (...) first Critique, not the "educated layman," but it very much needs to be read by the former. Even for Kant scholars, it is not easy. Apart from demands imposed by the tightness of the reasoning, one may simply be uneasy with the fact that, as instanced in a relentless and detailed critique of the main species of the "customary" reading -- represented primarily by Allison and Guyer -- Greenberg is defending a radically new view of Kant's reasoning in the Critique. Typically, one either supposes Kant.. (shrink)

Husserl's marginal remarks in Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik clearly do not reflect the same intense effort to penetrate Heidegger's thought that we find in his marginal notes in Sein und Zeit. Merely in terms of length, Husserl's comments in the published German text occupy only one-third the number of pages.2 Pages 1-5, 43-121, and 125-1673 contain no reading marks at all-over half of the 236 pages of KPM. This suggests that Husserl either read these pages with no intention (...) of returning to the text or skipped large parts of the middle of the text altogether.4 His remarks often express frustration or a resigned recognition of the now unbridgeable, irrevocable gap between himself and Heidegger. (shrink)

A long-standing challenge to evolutionary theory has been whether it can explain the origin of complex organismal features. We examined this issue using digital organisms—computer programs that self-replicate, mutate, compete and evolve. Populations of digital organisms often evolved the ability to perform complex logic functions requiring the coordinated execution of many genomic instructions. Complex functions evolved by building on simpler functions that had evolved earlier, provided that these were also selectively favoured. However, no particular intermediate stage was essential for evolving (...) complex functions. The first genotypes able to perform complex functions differed from their non-performing parents by only one or two mutations, but differed from the ancestor by many mutations that were also crucial to the new functions. In some cases, mutations that were deleterious when they appeared served as stepping-stones in the evolution of complex features. These findings show how complex functions can originate by random mutation and natural selection. (shrink)

Reviews evidence which suggests that there may be little or no direct introspective access to higher order cognitive processes. Ss are sometimes unaware of the existence of a stimulus that importantly influenced a response, unaware of the existence of the response, and unaware that the stimulus has affected the response. It is proposed that when people attempt to report on their cognitive processes, that is, on the processes mediating the effects of a stimulus on a response, they do not do (...) so on the basis of any true introspection. Instead, their reports are based on a priori, implicit causal theories, or judgments about the extent to which a particular stimulus is a plausible cause of a given response. This suggests that though people may not be able to observe directly their cognitive processes, they will sometimes be able to report accurately about them. Accurate reports will occur when influential stimuli are salient and are plausible causes of the responses they produce, and will not occur when stimuli are not salient or are not plausible causes. (shrink)

As its subtitle 'Skepticism, Individuality and Chastened Politics' indicates, this book is an exploration of and a largely favorable engagement with salient elements in the thinking of a theorist who is widely regarded as the greatest Anglophone political thinker and among the top rank of philosophical writers generally. In emphazing Hobbes's skepticism, Richard Flathman goes against the grain of much of the literature concerning Hobbes. The theme of individuality is more familiar, particularly from the celebrated writings on Hobbes by (...) Michael Oakeshott, but the idea of a chastened politics challenges the widely influential view that Hobbes was not only an authoritarian but an incipient or proto-totalitarian. (shrink)

Charles Foster and Jonathan Herring are to be congratulated on their useful presentation of the roles played by concepts of personhood and identity in English medical law. 1 However, I fear that the project they have undertaken here is misconceived. It is an interesting and important misconception, which is widely shared in the literature on medical law and ethics; but a misconception it remains. The problem is this. What we call ‘the Law’ is in fact a complex assemblage of institutions, (...) rules, accredited persons, practices and systems. What it is not is a self-sufficient, integrated and self-interpreting system of doctrine. As such it does not have a clear structure which we can excavate and the idea that we can find concepts which explain and unify that structure at some deep level is thus quixotic. To approach ‘the Law’ in that way is to pursue a chimaera. We should instead... (shrink)