Fields of enquiry. Rome Harré on What is social science -- Toby Miller on Cultural studies -- Lawrence Sherman on Criminology -- Jonathan Haidt on Moral psychology -- Robert J. Shiller on Behavioural economics -- Births, deaths and human population. Sarah Franklin on the Sociology of reproductive technology -- Ann Oakley on Women's experience of childbirth -- Sarah Harper on the Population challenge for the 21st century -- Steven Pinker on Violence and human nature -- Social science through different (...) lenses. Gregory Clark on Names -- Robin Dunbar on Dunbar numbers -- David Goldblatt on the Sociology of football -- Trevor Marchand on Craft -- Bruce Hood on the Supernatural -- Doreen Massey on Space -- Politics and social science. Craig Calhoun on Protest movements -- Danny Dorling on Inequality -- Kate Pickett on the Case for equality. (shrink)

Rejoinders to Robert Bishop, John Smythies, and Edmond Wright concerning my paper Phenomenology in Absentia: Dennett's Philosophy of Mind. The untoward social and moral consequences of Daniel Dennett's heterophenomenology are documented. Rhetorical methodology, fallacious reasoning, and lack of empirical support for a philosophical abolition of consciousness and phenomenology are exposed. Consciousness denial by Dennett is shown to proceed by the same fallacious method involved in his phenomenological nihilism. Additional arguments are adduced against the presumed nonexistence of veridical and non-veridical (...) percepts, as interpreted by elementary science of perception, and as this implicates a more general critique of naive realism and its applications to such hypothetical scenarios as our actual existence within cranial vats and the so-called inverted spectrum argument devolved from Locke. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

This book sets the record straight about the greater influence of Dilthey than Husserl in Heidegger’s initial formulation of his conception of phenomenology. Scharff shows how, in Heidegger’s early lecture courses, phenomenology is presented as a genuine philosophical alternative, and explores our own current need for a phenomenological philosophy.

Jean-Paul Fitoussi needs no introduction as one of the world's foremost Macroeconomists of his generation. This celebration of his work includes contributions from Nobel Prize - winning economists Robert W. Clower and Robert Solow as well as Olivier Blanchard and leading economic theorist, Edmond Malinvaud.

This paper considers recent heated debates led by Jerry A. Coyne andMichael J. Wade on issues stemming from the 1929–1962 R.A. Fisher-Sewall Wrightcontroversy in population genetics. William B. Provine once remarked that theFisher-Wright controversy is central, fundamental, and very influential.Indeed,it is also persistent. The argumentative structure of therecent (1997–2000) debates is analyzed with the aim of eliminating a logicalconflict in them, viz., that the two sides in the debates havedifferent aims and that, as such, they are talking past each other. (...) Given aphilosophical analysis of the argumentative structure of the debates,suggestions supportive of Wade's work on the debate are made that areaimed, modestly, at putting the persistent Fisher-Wright controversy on thecourse to resolution. (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 3, Page 18-29, May–June 2022.

In a recent article, Iris Marion Young raises several challenges to deliberative democracy on behalf of political activists. In this paper, the author defends a version of deliberative democracy against the activist challenges raised by Young and devises challenges to activism on behalf of the deliberative democrat. Key Words: activism • deliberative democracy • Discourse • Ideology • public sphere • I. M. Young.

Expressions of gratitude abound. Hardly a book is published that does not include in its preface or acknowledgments some variation on, “I am grateful to…for…” Indeed, most achievements come to be only through the help of others. We value the benevolence of others, and when we—or our loved ones—are the recipients of benevolence, our emotional response is often one of gratitude. -/- But, are we bound to the requirement of ‘repaying’ our benefactors in some way? If we are, and there (...) are—as ordinary language suggests—debts of gratitude, what kind of debts are these? Does the appropriateness of my gratitude require that my benefactor in fact intended to benefit me (in just the way she did)? Is there a difference between feeling grateful and being grateful? Is a precondition of my being grateful to another that I respect her? Do we owe a special sort of gratitude to those who have shaped us into the persons we are? What are the psychological and normative relations between gratitude the emotion, and gratitude the virtue? -/- These are among the questions carefully addressed in The Moral Psychology of Gratitude. This volume provides readers with the state-of-the-art in research on gratitude. It does so in the form of sixteen never-before published articles on the emotion by leading voices in philosophy and the sciences of the mind. (shrink)

Obwohl Husserl und Deleuze ihre Philosophien unter den Leitbegriff des Transzendentalen stellen, scheint es schwer, sie in ein konstruktives Gespräch miteinander zu bringen. Zu einer solchen produktiven Konfrontation soll hier der Versuch unternommen werden, indem die von der Mathematik des 19. Jahrhunderts inspirierte Idee der Mannigfaltigkeit als zentraler Operator bei Deleuze wie auch bei Husserl identifiziert wird. In dieser kritischen Auseinandersetzung schärfen sich auch der Sinn und die Aufgabenstellung der Phänomenologie als einer Philosophie reiner Immanenz, deren grundlegende metaphysische Dimension die (...) Zeit sein muss. (shrink)

‘Poor Borelli!’ exclaimed Alexandre Koyre at the end of his wonderful and by now classic study of Borelli's ‘celestial mechanics’. Koyre frankly admitted that Borelli lacked Newton's genius and intellectual audacity. However, in his story Borelli deserved a place between Kepler and Newton for his ‘imperfect but decisive’ unification of terrestrial and celestial physics. This framework finds a powerful justification in Borelli's extensive usage of Keplerian astronomy and in Newton's references to Borelli's work on the Medicean planets, Theoricae mediceorum planetarum (...) , both in his correspondence with Edmond Halley, with regard to a controversy with Robert Hooke, and in Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica . Newton's own copy of Borelli's work with signs of his reading – the famous dog-earings – is preserved in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. The magnitude of Newton's achievement has haunted Borelli's work ever since Principia mathematica appeared in print. For example, although Christiaan Huygens was sent a copy of Borelli's book by Prince Leopold in 1666, his marginal annotations in his own copy of the book were written after he had read Newton's masterpiece, as if Huygens had felt the need to read the book again after 1687. From then onwards Borelli's work has almost inevitably appeared in a new light that has coloured its subsequent readings.My ambition in this paper is to provide a fresh reading of Borelli's work by reconstructing its circumstances of composition, establishing a comparison with a relevant strictly contemporary source, and attending to the immediate reception of Theoricae. Borelli's work was written with an eye to a composite audience including Roman Jesuits, Sicilian intellectual circles and Leopold de' Medici's correspondents across the Alps, such as the Copernican astronomer Ismael Boulliau in Paris. Borelli was aware that his Sicilian readers were likely to have different concerns from those of Roman Jesuits or the Medici. Thus the task of charting the reception of his work is a formidable one. For a variety of reasons, including availability of sources, limitations of space, taste and competence, my analysis of Borelli's work on the Medicean planets is limited to a few themes and is not only no less partial than Koyre's, but in many respects it relies on it. If readers feel stimulated to re-read Koyre's text, one of the aims of this paper will have been fulfilled. (shrink)

Positions taken in the current debate over free will can be seen as responses to the following conditional: If every action is caused solely by another event and a cause necessitates its effect, then there is no action to which there is an alternative. The Libertarian, who believes that alternatives are a requirement of free will, responds by denying the right conjunct of C’s antecedent, maintaining that some actions are caused, either mediately or immediately, by events whose effects could be (...) different, even if they were to recur under identical circumstances. We have here a denial of Laplacian Determinism (LD), according to which the condition of the world at any instant makes only one state possible at any other instant.¹ One prominent defender of this view, Robert Kane, holds that unless an agent’s neural mechanisms operated indeterministicly in forming her character she is not responsible for its manifestations.² This requirement is entailed by the principle of “ultimate responsibility” (UR) according to which an act is freely willed only if (a) its agent is personally responsible for its performance in the sense of having caused it to occur by voluntarily doing something that was avoidable and (b). (shrink)

Against several recent interpretations, I argue in this chapter that Immanuel Kant's support for enlightened absolutism was a permanent feature of his political thought that fit comfortably within his larger philosophy, though he saw such rule as part of a transition to democratic self-government initiated by the absolute monarch himself. I support these contentions with (1) a detailed exegesis of Kant’s essay "What is Enlightenment?" (2) an argument that Kantian republicanism requires not merely a separation of powers but also a (...) representative democratic legislature, and (3) a demonstration that each stage of a democratic transition can potentially be in an absolute monarch’s short-run self-interest. (shrink)

This article traces the evolution by which in the context of 1930s South Africa the liberal philosopher Alfred Hoernlé came to recognize the inability of classical liberalism to address the problems of a society in which a racial hierarchy had become deeply entrenched. Although he must be criticized for his patriarchal approach and for the pessimism that led him to take White attitudes toward Black South Africans as an unchangeable part of the situation that simply had to be accepted, his (...) insight into the limits of liberalism still resonates. While most White commentators were still thinking of racism in terms of beliefs and attitudes, he already understood that the problem lay in the systemic adoption of “techniques of domination” or what we today might call institutional racism. Although his proposal in 1939 that “Total Separation” was “a legitimate application of sound liberal ideas” was deeply problematic in context and might well have had a serious negative impact, it should be understood that it was intended to highlight the fundamental paradox into which liberalism fell when attempting to solve the problems it had helped to create by its belief in a civilizing mission that began with violence. (shrink)