A comprehensive history of the human sciences -- psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science -- from their precursors in early human culture to the present.This erudite yet accessible volume in Norton's highly praised History of Science series tracks the long and circuitous path by which human beings came to see themselves and their societies as scientific subjects like any other. Beginning with the Renaissance's rediscovery of Greek psychology, political philosophy, and ethics, Roger Smith recounts how the human (...) sciences gradually organized themselves around a scientific conception of psychology, and how this trend has continued to the present day in a circle of interactions between science and ordinary life, in which the human sciences have influenced and been influenced by popular culture. (shrink)

A growing literature testifies to the persistence of place as an incorrigible aspect of human experience, identity, and morality. Place is a common ground for thought and action, a community of experienced particulars that avoids solipsism and universalism. It draws us into the philosophy of the ordinary, into familiarity as a form of knowledge, into the wisdom of proximity. Each of these essays offers a philosophy of place, and reminds us that such philosophies ultimately decide how we make, use, and (...) understand places, whether as accidents, instruments, or fields of care. (shrink)

This collection - assembled by the author in 1995 - includes all his articles then published that he thought worthy of preserving. Contents. 1. Hutcheson, Hume and the Ontology of Morals. (1985) - A critique of David Norton's 1982 book David Hume - Common Sense Moralist, Sceptical Metaphysician. 2. Hume, Spencer and the Standard of Morals. (1983) 3. Egoism and Rigorism: Spencer's Resolution of a Moral Paradox. (1995) - not previously published. 4. On distinguishing between Love and Lust. (1977) (...) 5. Love and Lust revisited: Intentionality, Homosexuality and Moral Education. (1988) - A critique of aspects of Roger Scruton's 1986 book Sexual Desire. 6. In Defence of Gay Lessons. (1988) 7. Homosexuality and Education: a reply to Jim Ferguson. (1990) 8. The Two Minds of Roger Scruton. (1991) 9. Public Schools, Private Privilege and Common Sense. (1985) - A defence of independent education. 10. Was Hume's Natural History of Religion inspired by Mandeville's Fable of the Bees Part II? (1995). The clear textual parallels here noted were not noticed by Tom Beauchamp in his 2007 text of NHR for the Clarendon Edition of Hume's works. (shrink)

This paper pursues two tasks: first, to criticize a number of prominent contemporary interpretations of the Pyrrhonism of Sextus Empiricus, especially Jonathan Barnes’s; and second, to outline an alternative interpretation of Sextus that (a) reconciles the opposing sides of the long-standing dispute over the scope of Pyrrhonian suspension of judgment, and (b) suggests a sympathetic alternative to some of the most influential accounts of the Pyrrhonian way of life.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Remembering Herb FingaretteMichael Nylan (bio)Over the years, several people have remarked to me that Herb "disappeared" or "disengaged" after his retirement. His standing, at the time of his retirement, was beautifully captured in the 1999 volume Rules, Rituals, and Responsibility: Essays Dedicated to Herbert Fingarette, edited by his student Mary Bockover.But remembering Herb Fingarette, I recall the first two times I spoke with him, by email and eventually in (...) person. I wrote, while preparing the Norton Critical Edition of the Analects, the brief sketch I had devised, mainly on the basis of Confucius: The Secular as Sacred, in which I described him as a New Confucian and a pragmatist. He promptly wrote back to deny both philosophical affiliations. (Hans Sluga's remarks below suggest that Herb did not see himself as a joiner or partisan.) But I got the rest right, apparently, as my sketch of him circled around the opening to his book, a work that changed many people's lives, including those of two friends of mine, Henry Rosemont and Roger Ames:When I began to read Confucius, I found him to be a prosaic and parochial moralizer. … Later, and with increasing force, I found him a thinker with profound insight and with an imaginative vision of man equal in its grandeur to any I know. … Confucius can be a teacher to us today—a major teacher, not one who merely gives us a slightly exotic perspective on the ideas already current. He tells us things not being said elsewhere; things needing to be said. He has a new lesson to teach.1Herb's contribution in that book lay mainly in his willingness to rethink Confucius from the ground up, "to make him new." To the day before he died, that was Herb, still evolving and reformulating his thoughts. One glimpses this in "Being Ninety-Seven," the documentary about Herb that his grandson Andrew Hasse directed and edited, one short clip of which has drawn no fewer than five million views on YouTube, under the title "The Meaning of Life: A Ninety-Seven Year Old Philosopher Looks at Life."I finally met Herb on a fine spring day in 2010, some three years after he had moved to Berkeley, when Henry Rosemont, Jr. happened to be in town. Henry insisted I meet Herb, and he was plainly immensely proud of being the first to write a good review of Herb's work, which so many [End Page 857] Click for larger view View full resolutionHerbert Fingarette, 1921–2018. Photo © Thomas H. Hahn.eminent Sinologists had panned (Herb being outside the field; Herb saying something that might force a change in their ways of thinking; Herb being so clear about his ideas that there was no academic obfuscation). Herb had always been one of the few gods in my academic pantheon, and I was frankly a bit scared to meet him and sound stupid. But Henry had a genius for bringing people together, and by the end of the first meeting Herb and I were well on our way to becoming fast friends. (It didn't hurt that Herb's only child, Ann Hasse, was about to marry one of the Berkeley colleagues whom I most esteem, Erich Gruen.)A few years later, after his wife Leslie died, I asked him, after a decent interval, whether writing so powerfully about the philosophy of dying had helped him when he was confronting it in the case of Leslie, his beloved wife and astute editor. He said quietly, "Not one bit," and from then on I knew I could absolutely trust him. For such a complex man, he was also a person who embraced radical honesty and full engagement, which meant that Herb, nearly always exquisitely polite, could on rare occasions burst forth with a snarky comment, when particularly frustrated with the world or its inhabitants. He was a human being keenly aware of the responsibility that survival brought, despite the frailties encountered when going through life. One felt always that one was conversing with a lifelong seeker after truths large and small, with the result that many a time he was impatient with my tendency... (shrink)

An international line-up of fourteen distinguished philosophers present new essays on topics relating to well-being and morality, prominent themes in contemporary ethics and particularly in the work of James Griffin, White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, in whose honour this volume has been produced. Professor Griffin offers a fascinating development of his own thinking on these topics in his replies to the essays.

Reid thought that testimony possesses positive epistemic value. Epistemic autonomy is not necessarily the royal road to truth; nor is credulity a systematic epistemic fault and indeed, it can be an intellectual virtue. Even though the notion of epistemic virtue does not explicitly appear in Reid’s epistemology, it seems inherent to his views that what will give a heteronomous agent exercising the social operations of the mind the best chance to acquire and develop true beliefs is the epistemic virtues that (...) permit her to recognize reliable authorities. This is why it seems to me possible to associate Reid with to the virtue epistemology tradition. (shrink)

Manipulation cases are usually seen as a problem for compatibilists, and a strength for incompatibilist theories. I present a new case of indirect manipulation, which I claim does not interfere with the manipulated agent's freedom under libertarian criteria. I argue that the only promising libertarian response to my case would undermine Widerker's response to Frankfurt cases, which I take to be the best libertarian strategy for dealing with Frankfurt-type manipulation. I outline a satisfactory compatibilist explanation of my case.

My essay argues that neoliberal forms of government emerged through the shifting political trajectory of the therapeutic ethos in the postwar period in Anglo-American societies. In the postwar era, the therapeutic ethos attracted the attention of conservative cultural critics who described it as a destructive force on communal obligation. Initially, the therapeutic ethos appeared to align naturally with New Left ideas of democratization in the workplace and private sphere. However, I argue that the New Right was subsequently able to sever (...) the therapeutic ethos from its alignment with social democratization by imbuing it with an alternative set of meanings centered on the ideas of market freedom and the entrepreneur. The result was the construction of the new, neoliberal forms of power, which, I argue, take the form of the management of subjectivity. Finally, I outline the two major social pathologies of the neoliberal era, namely, the consequences of its contractualized notion of citizenship and the explosion of social inequality, both of which are traceable to the influence of therapeutic notions of the self. (shrink)

When young children first begin to ask 'why?' they embark on a journey with no final destination. The need to make sense of the world as a whole is an ultimate curiosity that lies at the root of all human religions. It has, in many cultures, shaped and motivated a more down to earth scientific interest in the physical world, which could therefore be described as penultimate curiosity. These two manifestations of curiosity have a history of connection that goes back (...) deep into the human past. Tracing that history all the way from cave painting to quantum physics, this book sets out to explain the nature of the long entanglement between religion and science: the ultimate and the penultimate curiosity. (shrink)

_Ideas of Human Nature_ presents twelve of the most influential Western thinkers on the topic of human nature. Roger Trigg examines the thinkers in their historical context and discusses their relevance to contemporary controversies.

A beautifully illustrated reminder that God paints his love on every face he creates.

Descartes’ distinction between infinite and indefinite is important for his philosophy, but poorly understood. Various commentators have offered conflicting interpretations of it; some have even questioned ist importance. In this paper I wish to investigate Descartes’ various discussions of the distinction and to use my investigation to shed light on the related question of the authority of the "Conversation with Burman". I believe that the distinction is treated differently in the "Conversation" than it is in the Cartesian corpus proper and (...) that the difference of treatment is paradigmatic of other differences between that work and the works which come from Descartes’ own hand. I divide my discussion into two parts: first, on the reliability of the "Conversation" and Ferdinand Alquié’s critique of it; and second, on the distinction between the infinite and indefinite. (shrink)