First published in 1946, History of Western Philosophy went on to become the best-selling philosophy book of the twentieth century. A dazzlingly ambitious project, it remains unchallenged to this day as the ultimate introduction to Western philosophy. Providing a sophisticated overview of the ideas that have perplexed people from time immemorial, it is 'long on wit, intelligence and curmudgeonly scepticism', as the New York Times noted, and it is this, coupled with the sheer brilliance of its scholarship, that has made (...) Russell's History of Western Philosophy one of the most important philosophical works of all time. (shrink)

You live your entire waking life immersed in your inner experiences – private phenomena created by you, just for you, your own way. Despite their intimacy and ubiquity, you probably do not know the characteristics of your own inner phenomena; neither does psychology or consciousness science. Investigating Pristine Inner Experience explores how to apprehend inner experience in high fidelity. This book will transform your view of your own inner experience, awaken you to experiential differences between people and thereby reframe your (...) thinking about psychology and consciousness science, which banned the study of inner experience for most of a century and yet continued to recognize its fundamental importance. The author, a pioneer in using beepers to explore inner experience, draws on his 35 years of studies to provide fascinating and provocative views of everyday inner experience and experience in bulimia, adolescence, the elderly, schizophrenia, Tourette's syndrome, virtuosity and more. (shrink)

Russell's classic examination of the relation between individual experience and the general body of scientific knowledge. It is a rigorous examination of the problems of an empiricist epistemology.

ExcerptThe high-water mark of globalization has passed. New competitions continue to emerge in a decidedly multipolar international system. As the United States views China and Russia as strategic competitors or worse, an array of mid-level powers—Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, India, the BRICS, and so forth—try to navigate this complex system and pursue their national interests. Meanwhile, no matter how much the United States and the European Union both believe themselves part of a single “West,” divergent interests tend to (...) drive them apart, even as tensions within the EU itself have grown sharper. In order to describe part of this increasingly competitive environment, an analytic distinction between so-called “civilizational states” and “liberal empires” seems to provide a framework to analyze international political processes in starkly contrasting terms.1 To some extent, the two terms repackage the terminology of the Cold War era that contrasted closed and open societies, and if we are indeed entering a new Cold War, the return of these categories is arguably appropriate. Yet more is surely at stake than a repetition of the historical competition between Communism and democracy, and the focus on the contrast between allegedly civilizational states and liberal empires may be missing a key part of the picture. Let’s take a closer look at the two concepts and then ask whether this binary provides an adequate toolkit to understand, for example, the conflict in Ukraine. To anticipate the conclusion: those who celebrate Russia as a “civilizational state” doing battle with the evil “liberal empire” of the West miss the key point in the conflict, the will of the Ukrainian people to assert their autonomy as a nation and to resist foreign occupation. (shrink)

Rosalind Hursthouse wrote in 1999 (On Virtue Ethics, pp. 5-7) of a gap in virtue ethics in the shape of the virtue of justice. Many years on, that gap persists. Our aim is to make a beginning on that virtue, but here we find an obstacle in its treatment by Aristotle, whose thinking about the virtues we otherwise find so rich. Whereas Aristotle took the virtue of justice to be concerned exclusively with one’s treatment of others, we begin instead with (...) the idea that justice also concerns how one treats oneself. Like Hursthouse, we think virtues are corrective of human failings. We argue, first, that being unjust to oneself is a failing that is not only perilous but all too frequent in human experience. The idea that justice is strictly other-regarding gets going only on the assumption that the way humans are prone to fail in their dealings with others is in taking too much interest in their own welfare. Taking inspiration from the work of Jean Hampton, we argue that a pernicious type of self-abnegation—what Hampton called “the loss of self”—is also a common failing among humans, both in their relations with others and in their own practical reasoning about their lives. This failing—a failing of giving persons their due—is a failing for the virtue of justice to correct. We then examine Aristotle’s rejection of the possibility of being unjust to oneself, in Nicomachean Ethics V. Aristotle’s arguments rest on demonstrating the impossibility of committing injustice against oneself in any of the forms characteristic of strictly interpersonal injustice. Rather than arguing that Aristotle begs the question, though, we argue that his approach rests on its starting assumption that the failings for the virtue of justice to correct are failures to give others their due. But considering the human proneness also to self-abnegation, we heirs of Aristotle’s should hope for an understanding of the virtue of justice that is rich enough to include giving oneself one’s due as well. Lastly, we outline the virtue of justice understood as correcting the failure of not giving persons their due, including oneself. Our approach centers on the idea of advocacy, focusing on the duty that parents have to advocate for the fair treatment of their children and, as those children mature, the transference of this duty to those children to be advocates for themselves. We conclude by exploring the extent to which such an account would fit an otherwise broadly Aristotelian approach: the sense in which such a virtue is a “mean,” the emotions and desires with which it is concerned, and its status as a particular virtue as opposed to virtue as a whole. We hope to honor Rosalind Hursthouse by continuing in her philosophical spirit, confronting Aristotle where we are surprised to find ourselves disagreeing considerably with a philosopher we generally find insightful, on an issue we find deeply important. -/- . (shrink)

Mario Bunge has provided a useful analysis of the phenomenon of ideology, dividing ideologies into religions and sociopolitical ideologies and showing how both can be analyzed into very similar elements. This approach illuminates why sociopolitical ideologies so often bear the trappings of religion, and how they can play a similar role in their adherents’ lives. Importantly, both contain cognitive content that includes one or another view of human nature. Science can threaten religions and sociopolitical ideologies by undermining their credibility and (...) their specific claims, though science can also inform sociopolitical ideologies in ways that are potentially beneficial. Unfortunately, ideologues often insist on an arrow of causation that goes from ideology to science, rather than from science to ideology. That is, ideologues make judgments about science by using their own partisan beliefs, procedures, and epistemic standards, rather than allowing scientific findings to inform the emergence of an ideology grounded in reason. In this respect, ideologies of all kinds can become enemies of free scientific inquiry. (shrink)

The prelims comprise: Half‐Title Page Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Acknowledgments.

This is introductory chapter of 50 Great Myths About Atheism offers readers some useful entry points into the long‐standing philosophical debate between theists and atheists. The attacks on atheism are often driven by strong emotions, perhaps because atheism threatens values associated with religion. The authors examine 50 myths, and in each case, they are convinced that something is being claimed that is, if not straightforwardly false, at least seriously and demonstrably misleading. The authors provide some historical perspective on the rise (...) of atheism, examine why the traditional arguments for the existence of God turned out so inconclusive when philosophers subjected them to scrutiny, and offer some deeper thoughts on the relationship between religion and science. (shrink)

Commentators on The Evolution of Moral Progress: A Biocultural Theory raise a number of metaethical and moral concerns with our analysis, as well as some complaints regarding how we have interpreted and made use of the contemporary evolutionary and social sciences of morality. Some commentators assert that one must already presuppose a moral theory before one can even begin to theorize moral progress; others query whether the shift toward greater inclusion is really a case of moral progress, or whether our (...) theory can be properly characterized as ‘naturalistic’. Other commentators worry that we have uncritically accepted the prevailing evolutionary explanation of morality, even though it gives short shrift to the role of women or presupposes an oversimplified view of the environment in which the core elements of human moral psychology are thought to have congealed. Another commentator laments that we did not make more extensive use of data from the social sciences. In this reply, we engage with all of these constructive criticisms and show that although some of them are well taken, none undermine the core thesis of our book. (shrink)

Heddendorf finds in sociological theories some 'hidden threads' - Christian principles woven into the fabric of society. This book is an examination and Christian critique of sociological theory, demonstrating appreciation for the richness of social life and holding in tension those theories that attempt to explain it.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

When we press the “A” key on our computer keyboard, an “a” appears on our screen almost simultaneously. In between those two points there are a number of layers of computer program which communicate with each other: the keyboard controller sends a message to the operating system which is interpreted by a word processor, which then returns a message to the operating system, which communicates with the video controller and the video board sends a message that it needs an “a” (...) and this is mapped as a group of pixels which light up on the screen. Except that none of this actually happens. At the level of physical reality, all that happens is the shifting of magnetic fields and the passing of electrons. The electrons orbiting atoms slide from one atom to the next along wires, among silicon and metal. Entities like computer programs and operating systems are. (shrink)

The programme of physicians and surgeons during the ‘late’ phase of the Paris Hospital incorporated efforts to codify the most efficient ways of defining disease. Those efforts involved reckoning the probability, the specificity, and most consistently, the localization of disease entities. One of the most frequently encountered of such entities was pleuritis. Pleuritis is therefore used here as a ‘marker’ through which to investigate how Auguste Chomel and others carried forward the programme of codification. A conspicuous feature of that programme (...) was a highly ritualized system of pedagogical organization in the clinique médicale. (shrink)