This is the first in-depth study of a female audience that shows how and why women went to the theater in Restoration England. Robert challenges the assumption that a "ladies' faction" played an important part in encouraging the playhouses to present a more moral, less bawdy or "satirical" style of comedy, thus changing the course of English drama. He shows that there is no evidence of this faction, and that "sentimental" comedies really did cater to the interest of their female (...) audience by incorporating the fashionable concern for women's rights. Drawing on many sources, including the life of Elizabeth Pepys, the book investigates just who these "ladies" were, what determined their theater-going, how often they went, what they liked and did in the theater, and the role of patronage at the court of three Restoration queens. (shrink)

Death in the Clinic fills a gap in contemporary medical education by explicitly addressing the concrete clinical realities about death with which practitioners, patients, and their families continue to wrestle. Visit our website for sample chapters!

The article examines Adorno and Heidegger's contrasting conceptions of art and myth in relation to their reading of western history since the Greeks and to German thinking on the relation between nature and history since Kant. In Part I Adorno's lecture `The Idea of Natural History' (1932), which draws on Lukács's Theory of the Novel and Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama and is conceived as a response to Heidegger's fundamental ontology in Being and Time, serves as focus for (...) the interrelation between myth, origin and repetition in western history, construed as the forgetting of nature (Adorno) or the forgetting of Being (Heidegger). In Part II, the question of the remythologization or the demythologization of art in Benjamin, Heidegger and Adorno is examined in the context of aesthetic modernism. (shrink)

The ipsilesional arm of stroke patients often has functionally limiting deficits in motor control and dexterity that depend on the side of the brain that is lesioned and that increase with the severity of paretic arm impairment. However, remediation of the ipsilesional arm has yet to be integrated into the usual standard of care for upper limb rehabilitation in stroke, largely due to a lack of translational research examining the effects of ipsilesional-arm intervention. We now ask whether ipsilesional-arm training, tailored (...) to the hemisphere-specific nature of ipsilesional-arm motor deficits in participants with moderate to severe contralesional paresis, improves ipsilesional arm performance and generalizes to improve functional independence. We assessed the effects of this intervention on ipsilesional arm unilateral performance [Jebsen–Taylor Hand Function Test ], ipsilesional grip strength, contralesional arm impairment level [Fugl–Meyer Assessment ], and functional independence [Functional independence measure ]. Intervention occurred over a 3 week period for 1.5 h/session, three times each week. All sessions included virtual reality tasks that targeted the specific motor control deficits associated with either left or right hemisphere damage, followed by graded dexterity training in real-world tasks. We also exposed participants to 3 weeks of sham training to control for the non-specific effects of therapy visits and interactions. We conducted five test-sessions: two pre-tests and three post-tests. Our results indicate substantial improvements in the less-impaired arm performance, without detriment to the paretic arm that transferred to improved functional independence in all three posttests, indicating durability of training effects for at least 3 weeks. We provide evidence for establishing the basis of a rehabilitation approach that includes evaluation and remediation of the ipsilesional arm in moderately to severely impaired stroke survivors. This study was originally a crossover design; however, we were unable to complete the second arm of the study due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We report the results from the first arm of the planned design as a longitudinal study. (shrink)

Robert Brandom's latest book, the product of his John Locke lectures in Oxford in 2006, is a return to the philosophy of language and is easily read as a continuation and development of the views defended in Making it Explicit. The text of the lectures is presented much as they were delivered, but it contains an ‘Afterword’ of more than 30 pages which responds to questions raised when he gave the lectures, and also when they were subsequently delivered in Prague (...) the following year. The published text also contains relatively technical appendices to two of the lectures.The individual lectures engage with some important and difficult issues, often ones that were explored in detail in the earlier book. However, these discussions are located within a broader meta-philosophical context, and it says something about the abstract and difficult character of these views that they provide the main subject matter of the Afterword. This framework affects how we should understand the relations between this book and Making It Explicit too. Although most of the detailed discussions happily belong within the general project of the earlier book, they are offered as illustrations of a framework that is independent of this project. Indeed, Brandom suggests that defenders of the semantic views of David Lewis, for example, could embrace his main message as well as those who favour Brandom's own form of pragmatism.Neo-pragmatist philosophers such as Brandom's teacher, Richard Rorty, often present themselves as rejecting the analytic tradition in philosophy. When Brandom describes the ‘pragmatist challenge’ to the ‘classical project of analysis’, he appeals to the criticisms found in the work of Wittgenstein and Sellars that are often appealed to by the critics of the analytic tradition. The message of the new book is that the views he has built on this …. (shrink)

Since his death in 1997, Isaiah Berlin's writings have generated continual interest among scholars and educated readers, especially in regard to his ideas about liberalism, value pluralism, and "positive" and "negative" liberty. Most books on Berlin have examined his general political theory, but this volume uses a contemporary perspective to focus specifically on his ideas about freedom and liberty. Isaiah Berlin and the Politics of Freedom brings together an integrated collection of essays by noted and emerging political theorists that commemorate (...) in a critical spirit the recent 50th anniversary of Isaiah Berlin's famous lecture and essay, "Two Concepts of Liberty." The contributors use Berlin's essay as an occasion to rethink the larger politics of freedom from a twenty-first century standpoint, bringing Berlin's ideas into conversation with current political problems and perspectives rooted in postcolonial theory, feminist theory, democratic theory, and critical social theory. The editors begin by surveying the influence of Berlin's essay and the range of debates about freedom that it has inspired. Contributors' chapters then offer various analyses such as competing ways to contextualize Berlin's essay, how to reconsider Berlin's ideas in light of struggles over national self-determination, European colonialism, and racism, and how to view Berlin's controversial distinction between so-called "negative liberty" and "positive liberty." By relating Berlin's thinking about freedom to competing contemporary views of the politics of freedom, this book will be significant for both scholars of Berlin as well as people who are interested in larger debates about the meaning and conditions of freedom. (shrink)

Abstract Orthodox decision theory presupposes that agency is invested in individuals. An opposing literature allows team agency to be invested in teams whose members use distinctive modes of team reasoning. This paper offers a new conceptual framework, inspired by David Lewis's analysis of common reasons for belief, within which team reasoning can be represented. It shows how individuals can independently endorse a principle of team reasoning which prescribes acting as a team member conditional on assurance that others have endorsed (...) the same principle. It argues that there can be such assurance even when no individual has an obligation to act on team reasoning. *This paper originated in a lecture that I gave at a Colloquium on Collective Intentions at Erasmus University Rotterdam. I thank participants, and particularly Govert den Hartogh, for comments. The analysis presented in this paper is an offshoot of a larger project, which uses David Lewis's work as the starting point for a reconstruction of the foundations of game theory. That project is joint work with Robin Cubitt. The specific idea of using this approach to analyse team reasoning grew out of a discussion with Michael Bratman. My work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust. (shrink)

There has recently been a considerable amount of research into the influence of 18th century British philosophy--particularly into the thinking of David Hume on Continental philosophy and Kant. The aim of this collection is to provide some of the key texts which illustrate the impact of Kant's thought together with two important 20th century monographs on aspects of Kant's early reception and his influence on philosophical thought. Contents: Immanuel Kant in England 1793-1838 [1931] Rene Wellek 328 pp The Early (...) Reception of Kant's Thought in England 1785-1805 [1990] Giuseppe Micheli 114 pp A General and Introductory view of Professor Kant's Principles [1796] F. A. Nitsch 234 pp Text-Book to Kant [1881] (with a biographical sketch) James Hutchison Stirling 576 pp The Development from Kant to Hegel [1882] Andrew Seth 178 pp Lectures on the Philosophy of Kant [1890] Thomas Hill Green 155 pp On the Philosophy of Kant [1879] Robert Adamson 270pp A Sketch of Kant's Life and Writings [1854] H. G. Henderson 80 pp Inquisitio Philosophica [1866], An Examination on the Principles of Kant and Hamilton M. P. W. Bolton 286 pp Philosophy of the Unconditioned [1829] William Hamilton 38 pp On the Philosophy of Kant [1856] Henry L. Mansel 45 pp The aim of this collection is to provide some of the key texts which illustrate the impact of Kant's thought together with two important 20th century monographs on aspects of Kant's early reception and his influence on philosophical thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The World as I Found It:Possibilities and Peculiarities about Speech and ConversationDavid WemyssIn November 2002, a series of tutorials was advertised within the University of Cambridge. Neville Critchley—a lecturer in philosophy with a reputation for preferring literature—placed advertisements on college notice boards saying he wanted to hear from students not just philosophically or intellectually intrigued by language but literally made unwell by it. Four young people replied, one (...) of whom subsequently provided me with an account of what passed in Room C28 at Emmanuel College. Almost thirteen years afterwards, the account was published under the title "The Weighing of Our Words."1Richard Salisbury, who had prepared the account, died in September 2016. His later piece, "A Report on Experience,"2 was published in October 2018—and that was believed to be the last literary production connected with the 2002 tutorials. However, it transpires that Richard's wife, Carole, who had organized the publication of "A Report on Experience," was also in possession of an intriguing recording from June 2016—just months before Richard's death. Carole discovered an audio recording, on a set of old-fashioned, reel-to-reel tapes, of a meeting in the Bedford Hotel in Bloomsbury, London, between her husband and Neville Critchley—fourteen years after they had last met. The conversation was [End Page 210] clearly intended to be transcribed and published, and I remain grateful to Carole for her help and friendship in arranging this.INeville Critchley and Richard SalisburyBedford Hotel, Southampton Row, LondonJune 2016Neville Critchley:Sitting here in Bloomsbury, I'm remembering the story about T. S. Eliot hiding in the lavatory at Faber and Faber to avoid small talk with colleagues as they left the office together in the evenings.Richard Salisbury:I think quite a lot of people do things like that. But I'm a good bit worse.NC:You have some remarkable illustrations of how much worse.RS:Before moving to Edinburgh (where I met David Wemyss, of course) I had a brief but enjoyable stay in Oxford, doing legal work for the city council there. One day, it was announced that my entire team, from senior executives down to administrative assistants, and one or two hangers-on, had been invited to Westminster for an "exchange of ideas" with civil servants there who were interested in a project I'd set up—to do with parking charges, of all things! Anyway, the plan was to go through to London by luxury coach as a day trip, but I could only think of the fragmented conversation on the journey—especially the conducting of conversations looking over my shoulder or half-standing up, or perhaps getting stuck for too long with one of my less-congenial colleagues. Carole found the answer: if I took the day before the visit as a holiday, and the day after too, I could be in London for the professional appointment but avoid the bus completely. I needed a reason, of course, but London being London I knew I'd easily find a concert that would sound like a convincing explanation for wanting to combine personal and professional objectives. Bruckner 8 did the trick. I needed a couple of nights in a hotel—here at the Bedford actually!—but it was well worth it. I'm never reluctant to have a day or two in Bloomsbury, having stayed here for six months, but the real motivation was the desperation to avoid my colleagues outside the carefully premeditated conversational tramlines I usually had in place. [End Page 211]NC:And that's just one of the many—quite different—ways in which you would characterize why you, like Eliot, would hide in a lavatory to avoid talking to people! But to an everyday, well-adjusted person, that would sound monstrous. Claustrophobically intropunitive—or narcissistic. There's even a case for suppressing the transcript of this interview, or destroying it altogether—but I don't think you'd like that! You assume completely that I'll bring it into existence. It'll be a middlebrow literary accomplishment—a literary coup that marshals the chaos of your experience... (shrink)

Offers philosophical and psychological reflections on cruelty and tenderness. The Cudgel and the Caress explores the enduring significance of tenderness and cruelty in a range of works across philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature. Divided into two parts, the book initially focuses on tenderness, with David Farrell Krell delivering original readings of Homer’s Iliad, Sophocles’s Antigone, and writings by Hölderlin, Hegel, Freud, and Derrida that deal with the importance of tenderness and the tragic consequences of its absence. Part One concludes with (...) an extended reading of Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities, in which Krell analyzes the tender relationship between Ulrich and Agathe. In Part Two, Krell begins by examining Otto Rank’s Birth Trauma, which reflects on the tenderness of gestation in the womb and the cruel necessity of birth. He then turns to an examination of cruelty in general, focusing on Derrida’s challenge to contemporary psychoanalysis, his opposition between Kant and Nietzsche, and his analysis (and indictment) of the death penalty. Groundbreaking and insightful, the book provides a rare philosophical treatment of subjects vital to the world we live in. David Farrell Krell is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University and Brauer Distinguished Visiting Professor of German Studies at Brown University. (shrink)

This volume assembles ten studies of the life and work of Thomas Harriot (1560-1621). These are based on lectures that have been given annually at Oriel College, Oxford since 1990, by such authorities as Hugh Trevor Roper, David Quinn and John D. North. The contributions to Thomas Harriot. An Elizabethan man of science shed new light on all the main aspects of Harriot's life and stand as an important contribution to the re-evaluation of one of the most gifted and (...) intriguing figures in early modern British science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Ethics of Salomon Maimon (1753-1800) DAVID BAUMGARDT* SALOMON MAIMON is now generally considered the most acute mind among the earliest critics of Kant. Kant himself had praised his acumen,1 though later qualifying his regard decisively.2 Johann Gottfried Herder called * We have just learned of the death of the author. David Baumgardt, born in Germany on April 20, 1890, studied in Vienna and in Berlin and (...) taught philosophy at the University of Berlin from 1924 to 1935 as Privatdozent, Extraordinarius and Ordinarius, until he was forced by Germany's racial laws to resign, but after the end of the war the Free University of Berlin appointed him honorary professor. From 1935 to 1939 he taught at the University of Birmingham; after his arrival in the United States he first joined the staff of the Pendle Hill School and, from 1941 to 1954, he served with the Library of Congress as a consultant in the field of philosophy. In 1955-56 he was Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Columbia. After his retirement he continued to publish and at present there are five publications by him in the press. The number of books and articles written by him probably well exceeds two hundred. Just in the last months of his life he was presented with a Festschri[t (Horizons of a Philosopher), indicative of a wide range of friends, students, and fellow-scholars who wanted to express their appreciation of the man and his work. On the continent Baumgardt was perhaps best known for two books: Franz yon Baader (1927) and Der Kampf um den Lebenssinn unter den Vorliiufern der Modernen Ethik (1933). The former threw full light on an important but unduly neglected figure of the German romantic school of philosophy; the latter confronts Kant's rationalistic ethics with the irrationalism of a Herder, Hemsterhuis, and Jacobi. In the United States he published, among others, Bentham and the Ethics of Today (1952) and Great Western Mystics (1961), originally delivered as Matchette Lectures, but enriched, for publication, by voluminous notes containing a wealth of information on mystics, some of whom, especially Jewish ones, are familiar only to the expert. At the time of his death he was working on a book which would probably have become his opus magnum: an attempt to reconcile what he called the ethics of force with the ethics of love. Baumgardt described his own philosophic position as that of a Benthamian hedonist, asserting that only hedonism, when carried to its conclusions, would permit such a reconciliation. Systematic, ethical and religious problems underlay all his historic research; thus his loss will be felt keenly and widely. (PHILIP MERLAN) t See Kant's Gesammelte Schri[ten, ed. K6nig. Preuss. Akad. Wissenschaften, Vol. XI, Abt. II, Kant's Briefwechsel (1900), Vol. II, p. 49, letter to Marcus Herz, May 26, 1789: "Nicht allein" hat "niemand yon meinen Gegnern reich und die Hauptfrage so wohl verstanden, sondern nur wenige... mochten zu dergleichen tiefen Untersuchungen so viel Scharfsinn besitzen... als Hr. Maymon." 2See ibid., p. 476, letter to Carl Leonhard Reinhold, March 28, 1794: "Was aber z. B. ein Maimon mit seiner Nachbesserung der critischen Philosophie... eigentlich wolle," habe ich "nie recht fassen k6nnen." The noticeable change in Kant's judgment of Maimon's work is hardly due to the fact that his praising remarks were addressed to a Jewish friend and the disapproving ones to a gentile disciple. The reason for this shift in his evaluation of Maimon's later writings 099] 200 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Maimon's Versuch iiber die Transzendentalphilosophie "profound" and "comprehensive.''~ Even Goethe and Schiller mentioned him with esteem in their correspondence;~ and Johann Gottlieb Fichte explicitly' warned that coming centuries would ridicule us bitterly for disregarding this "immensely great talent." It may, therefore, not be out of place if, even more than 150 years after Maimon's death, some attention is paid to his generally neglected criticism of Kant's categorical imperative. Maimon's acute critical observations on Kant's ethics may claim to be of interest even to the analysis of some basic issues of contemporary moral philosophy. In an autobiography, culturally of general interest, edited by the psychologist and esthetician Karl... (shrink)

J. N. (Jitendra Nath) Mohanty (1928–2023). -/- Professor J. N. Mohanty has characterized his life and philosophy as being both “inside” and “outside” East and West, i.e., inside and outside traditions of India and those of the West, living in both India and United States: geographically, culturally, and philosophically; while also traveling the world: Melbourne to Moscow. Most of his academic time was spent teaching at the University of Oklahoma, The New School Graduate Faculty, and finally Temple University. Yet his (...) preeminent work in Husserlian phenomenology developed alongside his eminent work in Indian philosophy: describing his interests as “a fusion of disparate horizons.” -/- J. N. Mohanty was born September 26, 1928, in Cuttack (Odisha, East India). After graduating from high school, he went on to study both Indian and Western philosophy in Calcutta, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees. There he read Whitehead and Kant’s First Critique; although he wanted to include mathematics in his curriculum, he was led instead to include Indian philosophy and Sanskrit. On the shelves of his teacher, Ras Vihar Das, he came upon a copy of the English translation (Ideas I, 1931) of Edmund Husserl’s classic Ideen I (1913), which presented Husserl’s ground-breaking conception of phenomenology. In 1952–1954 he left India for the first time, reaching Göttingen to study mathematics and philosophy, which earned him a doctorate in mathematics and “philosophy of mathematical sciences” (in his own words). In Göttingen, Mohanty found the powerful mathematical world that Husserl himself had earlier interacted with, where several Husserl students had formed the Göttingen school of phenomenology. During these years Mohanty studied primarily mathematics, alongside Kant and also Vedic Sanskrit. From his friend Günter Patzig, interpreter of Aristotle and Frege, Mohanty was drawn to Frege in relation to mathematical logic. He attended lectures of Heidegger, intrigued by his ontological thinking. Yet, despite the Husserlian legacy, Mohanty was completely self-taught in his studies of Husserl (as he has reported). With a doctorate in mathematics, and ideas from Kant and Frege in his philosophical background, Mohanty set about crafting his own conception of philosophy grounded in phenomenology, drawing on Husserl’s extensive work, critically sifting through Husserl’s texts and their emerging concepts of intentionality, meaning, subject, intersubjectivity, and world. In between he wrote his first book-length study: on phenomenological insights in Nicolai Hartmann and A. N. Whitehead (1958). -/- Over many decades Mohanty formulated and argued, in analytical detail, for a conception of phenomenology and its place in philosophy, later presented in a clear and concise book titled Transcendental Phenomenology: An Analytic Account (1989). Over these very decades the same scholar explored classical and recent Indian philosophy, thinking through kindred ideas of consciousness, self, and knowledge drawn from the Indian philosophical contexts. While writing on Nyāya theory of truth, he also pondered whether the world and finite individual are illusory or real, and whether Marx, Arendt, Gandhi (whom he heard speak in Calcutta), or Vinoba Bhave (with whom he marched across India for the land-grant movement) could best navigate post-Independent India’s social and svarāj or self-rule reforms. The two Mohantys, thinking through a vision of self and world, turned out to be “non-different” or “non-dual” as they each practiced critical phenomenology from both inside and outside the respective philosophical and cultural traditions. Numerous students, fellows, and colleagues or collaborators have benefited immensely from this infusion and unified approach to diversity in philosophical thought. In the 2000s, moving into retirement, Mohanty wrote two long books devoted to his understanding of Husserl and phenomenology and the calling of philosophy itself. This two-volume study shows Mohanty himself thinking through Husserl, critically, in The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl: A Historical Introduction (2008), and Edmund Husserl’s Freiburg Years: 1916–1938. As Mohanty worked on Husserl, he carefully indicated where he agreed and where he rejected or changed ideas, all part of his practice in phenomenology of “description and interpretation.” It was the same pattern he used in addressing the thought of Husserl vis-à-vis Kant or Frege or even Quine. -/- As Mohanty developed his understanding of phenomenology over the years, he wrote books on theory of meaning and the concept of intentionality, developing a model of ideal meaning and its foundation in intentionality, drawing on Husserl’s results. He followed these with the book Husserl and Frege (1982), linking the thought of those foundational figures for the “continental” and “analytic” traditions, respectively, in twentieth-century Western philosophy. Over his long career Mohanty addressed both traditions in his clear and accessible writing style. While developing his views on phenomenology, Mohanty regularly looked to “Husserl and his others,” evaluating views in Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and then Derrida and others in the wake of Husserl. With his background in Kant, Mohanty also looked toward Heidegger and Hegel in relation to Husserl’s later work in the Crisis (1935–38). Similarly, he looked to contemporary analytic philosophers, adjudicating his own, oft-wise Husserlian views in relation to Frege, Nagel, and others. Amid his active scholarly career, Mohanty co-founded the journal Husserl Studies, and was editorial advisor to Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, Philosophy East & West, Journal of Indian Philosophy, Sophia, among others. -/- Yet all this while Mohanty was also thinking and writing about Indian philosophy and its relation to phenomenology. In his own retrospective, Indian philosophy is “the permanent background” of his Husserlian thinking, while Kant is the recurrent Western background of his Husserlian phenomenology. Mohanty’s form of “transcendental phenomenology” evolved, in his own perspective, against the background of his studies of Navya-Nyāya on logic and Vedānta on consciousness, in Indian philosophy, and against the background of Kant’s First Critique on the transcendental, in Western philosophy. Accordingly, Mohanty’s study of logical form and of the intentionality of consciousness seeks a fusion of East and West in the conception of transcendental phenomenology. (Cf. Mohanty’s apt response to critics in The Empirical and the Transcendental (2000).) Even in the context of North American Husserl scholarship, Mohanty has exercised an earnest fusion of East and West. For the so-called East Coast and West Coast interpretations of Husserl’s crucial notion of noema both find a sympathetic spirit in J. N. Mohanty’s careful and nuanced interpretation of Husserlian transcendental phenomenology. With Mohanty the two faces of the noema are the logical (Fregean) and the phenomenal (Kantian), and these views of intentional structure join in consciousness—in a way resonant with Indian thought. -/- - David Woodruff Smith (UC Irvine) and Purushottama Bilimoria (SFSU, San Francisco; University of Melbourne) -/- For photo of Prof Mohanty visit APA online memorial_minutes2023 Courtesy of APA Memorial Minutes (& Proceedings) 2023 . (shrink)

You recognize when you know something for certain, right? You "know" the sky is blue, or that the traffic light had turned green, or where you were on the morning of September 11, 2001--you know these things, well, because you just do. In On Being Certain , neurologist Robert Burton challenges the notions of how we think about what we know. He shows that the feeling of certainty we have when we "know" something comes from sources beyond our control and (...) knowledge. In fact, certainty is a mental sensation, rather than evidence of fact. Because this "feeling of knowing" seems like confirmation of knowledge, we tend to think of it as a product of reason. But an increasing body of evidence suggests that feelings such as certainty stem from primitive areas of the brain, and are independent of active, conscious reflection and reasoning. The feeling of knowing happens to us; we cannot make it happen. Bringing together cutting edge neuroscience, experimental data, and fascinating anecdotes, Robert Burton explores the inconsistent and sometimes paradoxical relationship between our thoughts and what we actually know. Provocative and groundbreaking, On Being Certain , will challenge what you know (or think you know) about the mind, knowledge, and reason. ROBERT BURTON, M.D. graduated from Yale University and University of California at San Francisco medical school, where he also completed his neurology residency. At age 33, he was appointed chief of the Division of Neurology at Mt. Zion-UCSF Hospital, where he subsequently became Associate Chief of the Department of Neurosciences. His non-neurology writing career includes three critically acclaimed novels. He lives in Sausalito, California. Visit his website at http://www.rburton.com/ “What do we do when we recognize that a false certainty feels the same as certainty about the sky being blue? A lesser guide might get bogged down in nail-biting doubts about the limits of knowledge. Yet Burton not only makes clear the fascinating beauty of this tangled terrain, he also brings us out the other side with a clearer sense of how to navigate. It's a lovely piece of work; I'm all but certain you'll like it. “ --David Dobbs, author of Reef Madness; Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral “Burton has a great talent for combining wit and insight in a way both palatable and profound.” --Johanna Shapiro PhD, professor of Family Medicine at UC Irvine School of Medicine “A new way of looking at knowledge that merits close reading by scientists and general readers alike.” -- Kirkus “This could be one of the most important books of the year. With so much riding on ‘certainty,’ and so little known about how people actually reach a state of certainty about anything, some plain speaking from a knowledgeable neuroscientist is called for. If Gladwell's Blink was fascinating but largely anecdotal, Burton's book drills down to the real science behind snap judgments and other decision-making.” -- Howard Rheingold, futurist and author of Smart Mobs “A fascinating read. Burton’s engaging prose takes us into the deepest corners of our subconscious, making us question our most solid contentions. Nobody who reads this book will walk away from it and say ‘I know this for sure’ ever again.” --Sylvia Pagán Westphal, science reporter, The Wall Street Journal “Burton provides a compelling and though-provoking case that we should be more skeptical about our beliefs. Along the way, he also provides a novel perspective on many lines of research that should be of interest to readers who are looking for a broad introduction to the cognitive sciences.” -- Seed Magazine. (shrink)

I remember being a child, wondering where I would be—wondering who I would be—when the year 2000 arrived. I hoped I would live that long. I hoped I would be in reasonable health. I would not have guessed I would have a white collar job, or that I would live in the United States. I would have laughed if you had told me the new millennium would find me giving a public lecture on the meaning of life. But that is (...) life, unfolding as it does, meaning whatever it means. I am grateful to be here. I also am simply amazed. I am forty-four. Not old, but old enough that friends and family are beginning to provide more occasions for funerals than for weddings. Old enough to love life for what it is. Old enough to see that it has meaning, even while seeing that it has less than I might wish. I am an analytic philosopher. Analytic philosophers are trained to spot weaknesses in arguments. Unfortunately, that sort of training does not prepare us for questions about life’s meaning. A perfect argument, Robert Nozick suggests in jest, would leave readers with no choice but to agree with the conclusion.1 When we think about life’s meaning, though, we are not trying to win a debate. Success in grappling with the question is less like articulating and defending a position and more like growing up.2 Perhaps that is why academics have written so little on the meaning of life, despite it being arguably the central topic of philosophy.3 Speaking to analytic philosophers about life’s meaning would be like stepping into a boxing ring in search of a dance partner. Or so we fear. Perhaps there is no excuse for venturing into an area where we cannot meet our usual standards. More likely, one way of respecting philosophical standards is by not trying to apply them when they are not apt, thus refusing to let them become a straitjacket—a caricature of intellectual rigor. So, I do not here seek the kind of argumentative closure that we normally think of as the hallmark of success in analytic philosophy.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.1 (2003) 40-53 [Access article in PDF] Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Analysis David E. W. Fenner The "raw data" that aesthetics is meant to explain is the aesthetic experience. People have experiences that they class off from other experiences and label, as a class, the aesthetic ones. Aesthetic experience is basic, and allother things aesthetic — aesthetic properties, aesthetic objects, aesthetic attitudes — (...) are secondary in their importance to aesthetic experiences. 1Considering aesthetic experience as the raw data that philosophical aesthetics seeks to explain is a relatively recent phenomenon. This was certainly not the focus in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Aesthetic judgment was the focus of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and Kant: "How do we make meaningful judgments (hopefully real ones) about the aesthetic quality of (certain) objects and events?" But with George Santayana, John Dewey, and Jerome Stolnitz, the focus changes. Now the interest is in the aesthetic experience: what makes those experiences we label "aesthetic" special? Why do we separate those experiences from others?The movement from the Taste Theories to those focused on aesthetic experience is not a movement that is over and done with — far from it. There is still (and I think there will always be) a tension between these two very basic aspects of philosophical aesthetics. And, although I claim that aesthetic experience is the most basic thing that aesthetics studies, I recognize that this is challengeable and only true from a certain temporal viewpoint.I recently taught the most rewarding undergraduate course in aesthetics. The reason that it was so rewarding was that the students carried the class with deep and insightful discussions, and they were not shy about challenging what was coming out of my mouth. One of the challenges that informed our entire semester focused on the tension between experience and judgment. I lectured comfortably about aesthetic experience as our "raw data," and I lectured equally comfortably about how taking an aesthetic view of an object or event meant focusing primarily, if not exclusively, on [End Page 40] what is available to us through simple sensory acquaintanceship with the object. "Aesthetics," I said, "is about the sensuous aspects of our experiences." And so we could, for instance, take an aesthetic view of a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph which precluded our experiences being mired in the themes that the more famous Mapplethorpe photos take as their content. "Mapplethorpe is a great photographer," I argued, "and one can see this if one is willing to focus strictly on what meets your eye when you look at the picture." In short, I held the position that the aesthetic view is the formal one.Without saying more, what I did was conflate two different things. On the one hand, I argued that aesthetic experience is a natural part of life that aesthetics seeks to explore. On the other, I argued that appreciating something aesthetically was to appreciate its formal qualities, those qualities that one could access simply through looking, hearing, touching, for example. But these really are two different things.Aesthetic experiences, if we are to treat them as "raw data," must be explored without pre-conception, prejudice, or limitation. And, truly enough, the vast majority of aesthetic experiences are not focused exclusively, in terms of their contents, on formal or simple-sensory matters. Aesthetic experiences are, first, experiences. They are complex things, having to do with things as tidy as the formal qualities of the object under consideration and with things as messy as whether one had enough sleep the night before, whether one just had a fight with his roommate, whether one is carrying psychological baggage that is brought to consciousness by this particular aesthetic object. Later in this essay, I want to explore some of this complexity.The other side of what was happening in my class, the formal focus on the sensory as the basis for an aesthetic viewing, is not the substance of "aesthetic experience" per se. It is rather the basis of what we might call "aesthetic analysis." Aesthetic analysis has to do with separating out from our... (shrink)

Organized around eight themes central to aesthetic theory today, this book examines the sources and development of Kant's aesthetics by mining his publications, correspondence, handwritten notes, and university lectures. Each chapter explores one of eight themes: aesthetic judgment and normativity, formal beauty, partly conceptual beauty, artistic creativity or genius, the fine arts, the sublime, ugliness and disgust, and humor. Robert R. Clewis considers how Kant's thought was shaped by authors such as Christian Wolff, Alexander Baumgarten, Georg Meier, Moses Mendelssohn, Johann (...) Sulzer, Johann Herder, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Edmund Burke, Henry Home, Charles Batteux, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Voltaire. His resulting study uncovers and illuminates the complex development of Kant's aesthetic theory and will be useful to advanced students and scholars in fields across the humanities and studies of the arts. (shrink)

This collection is the first extended investigation of the relation between time and memory in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thought as a whole as well as the first to explore in depth the significance of his concept of institution. It brings the French phenomenologist’s views on the self and ontology into contemporary focus. Time, Memory, Institution argues that the self is not a self-contained or self-determining identity, as such, but is gathered out of a radical openness to what is not self, and (...) that it gathers itself in a time that is not merely a given dimension, but folds back upon, gathers, and institutes itself. Access to previously unavailable texts, in particular Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on institution and expression, has presented scholars with new resources for thinking about time, memory, and history. These essays represent the best of this new direction in scholarship; they deepen our understanding of self and world in relation to time and memory; and they give occasion to reexamine Merleau-Ponty’s contribution and relevance to contemporary Continental philosophy. This volume is essential reading for scholars of phenomenology and French philosophy, as well as for the many readers across the arts, humanities, and social sciences who continue to draw insight and inspiration from Merleau-Ponty. Contributors: Elizabeth Behnke, Edward Casey, Véronique Fóti, Donald Landes, Kirsten Jacobson, Galen Johnson, Michael Kelly, Scott Marratto, Glen Mazis, Caterina Rea, John Russon, Robert Vallier, and Bernhard Waldenfels. (shrink)

Philosophers have almost always relegated the topic of revision to the sidelines of their discipline, if they have thought about it at all. This book contends that acts of revision are central and indispensable to the project of philosophizing and that philosophy should be construed essentially as a practice of rereading and rewriting. The book focuses chiefly on Heidegger's highly influential interpretation of Nietzsche, conducted in lectures during the 1930s and 1940s and published in 1961. The author closely analyzes the (...) rhetorical means by which Heidegger repositions Nietzsche's thinking within a broad history of metaphysics, even as Heidegger positions his own reinterpretation as that history's more 'proper' reading. In addition to being the first book-length published study of Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche, the book also examines the work of Hans-Robert Jauss, Harold Bloom, and other critics of revision. (shrink)

Saul Kripke did more than anyone else to bring possible worlds into the contemporary philosophical discourse, first with his more formal work on the model theory for modal logic in the 1960s, and then with his more philosophical lectures on reference and modality, delivered in January 1970, that used the possible worlds apparatus informally to clarify the relations between semantic issues about names and metaphysical issues about individuals and kinds. Possible worlds semantics have been widely applied since then, both in (...) philosophy and in other fields such as linguistic semantics and pragmatics, theoretical computer science, and game theory. Kripke’s work, along with that of David Lewis, stimulated an ongoing debate about the nature and metaphysical status of possible worlds. Kripke himself has had little to say about the issues raised in this debate, in print, beyond what he said in Naming and Necessity and in brief remarks in a preface to a later edition of the lectures, published in 1980. But there is a clear view of the nature of possible worlds, and of the status of an explanation of modality in terms of possible worlds, implicit in the lectures and the preface. -/- The central focus of the post–Naming and Necessity debate about possible worlds has been a contrast between David Lewis’s modal realism and various versions of actualism. On this general issue, it is clear enough where Kripke stands: His criticisms of what he describes as the “other countries” picture of possible worlds are an explicit rejection of Lewis’s realism about possible worlds. But the rejection of modal realism raises a range of further questions: What exactly are possible worlds (or possible states of the world, which Kripke suggests would be less misleading terminology)? What contribution do they make to the explanation of modal discourse, and of the distinctive facts that modal discourse is used to state? Does the slogan “necessity is truth in all possible worlds” provide, or point to, a reductive analysis of necessity? Are possible worlds, in some sense, prior to modal operators and modal auxiliaries? If not, in what sense are they explanatory? How are possible worlds, or counterfactual situations, specified? How do they contribute to our understanding of specific meta- physical questions about the relations between particular individuals and their qualitative characteristics, the kinds to which they belong, and the matter of which they are constituted? How are we to understand the possible existence of individuals that do not actually exist? What is the status of the domains of individuals in merely possible worlds? -/- My aim in this chapter is to spell out the views about some of these foundational questions that are expressed or at least implicit in Kripke’s lectures. In Section 2, I discuss the general contrast between modal realism and actualism and questions about the kind of explanation that possible worlds provide for modal discourse and modal facts. In Section 3, I look at Kripke’s views about how possible worlds are specified, in particular at the role of individuals in specifying possible worlds. In Section 4, I consider the problems about merely possible individuals. (shrink)

La narration de l’histoire du problème des universaux souffre d’une importante lacune : on ne sait rien du traitement que ce problème a reçu de la part de ceux qui faisaient profession de philosopher à l’Université de Paris entre 1230 et 1260. C’est à ce deficit de savoir que le présent ouvrage s’attaque. Il se déploie en trois dimensions. En premier lieu, nous offrons une édition critique et une traduction française sectorielles d’un commentaire latin sur l’Isogoge de Porphyre ayant pour (...) auteur un dénommé Robertus Anglicus qui, comme nous le montrons, fut magister artium à Paris aux alentours de 1250. En deuxième lieu, nous sondons l’architectonique de ce texte et des écrits parallèles que rédigèrent des philosophes contemporains, nommément Jean le Page, Nicolas de Paris et Robert Kilwardby. Finalement, par l’entremise d’une étude comparative qui met à profit des œuvres inédites de ces artiens, nous explicitons, interprétons et évaluons les schèmes de lecture, les séquences argumentatives et les composantes doctrinales qui forment la “moelle” philosophique du commentaire isagogique de Robertus Anglicus. (shrink)

Philosophy is an exciting and accessible subject, and this engaging text acquaints students with the core problems of philosophy and the many ways in which they are and have been answered. Introducing Philosophy: A Text with Integrated Readings, Eighth Edition, insists both that philosophy is very much alive today and that it is deeply rooted in the past. Accordingly, it combines substantial original sources from significant works in the history of philosophy and current philosophy with detailed commentary and explanation that (...) help to clarify the readings. The selections range from the oldest known fragments to cutting-edge essays in feminism, multiculturalism, and cognitive science. At the end of each chapter is a summary, a list of review questions, a glossary, and a bibliography with suggestions for further reading. Important philosophical terms are carefully introduced in the text and also summarized at the end of each chapter, and brief biographies of the philosophers are provided at the end of the book. New to the Eighth Edition: Addressing the needs of a new generation of students, Robert C. Solomon has included for the first time more than 300 study and review questions. Appearing throughout the text and at the end of each chapter, these questions require immediate feedback from students. They encourage students to articulate the central ideas of what they have just read, instead of just "passing through" on the way to the next reading . New selections expand and update the chapters on religion, knowledge, mind and body, freedom, ethics, justice, and beauty. The selections include work by Charles Hartshorne, Cory Juhl, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Sextus Empiricus, Edmund L. Gettier, David Braddon-Mitchell and Frank Jackson, Colin McGinn, Daniel Dennett, Harry Frankfurt, Gilbert Harman, Emma Goldman, and Arthur C. Danto. A companion website at www.oup.com/us/solomon8e features 300 study and review questions (100 multiple-choice, 100 true-or-false, and 100 fill-in-the-blank), discussion questions, chapter overviews and summaries, topical links, suggestions for further reading, and PowerPoint lecture aids. (shrink)

Robert M. Adams has written a fairly short book, but into it he has packed a lifetime of rigorous analytic thought, and, what is rarer, deep insight into the nature of things. The book expands and recasts Gifford Lectures that Adams delivered in 1999, as well as other lectures and papers, and though it addresses difficult issues, Adams's clear style, retaining the informality of lectures, considerably eases the task of the reader; and the book is not without an occasional touch (...) of humour, e.g. ‘As metaphysicians we may wish to assign a certain oomph to one side or the other in such lawgoverned relations; but it is not clear that the concept of oomph is at home in fundamental physics’ (p. 12).I cannot cover all the many and various topics in the book, but I shall endeavour in what follows to present a central thread of argument in it, the distinction between what is and what is in itself (the centrality of which is indicated by its presence in the book's title) and to show how this distinction leads to the theistic and idealist metaphysics to which the author is inclined. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Formless SelfNewman Robert GlassThe Formless Self. By Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. 174 pp.For the past seven years I have been deeply involved in a worldwide experiment in global education. Students in the Comparative Religion and Culture (CRC) Program study the world's great religions for ten-week terms in each of East Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East, totaling one academic year (...) in all. Recent programming has taken place in Taiwan, Thailand, India, Nepal, and Turkey, with stops in Rome and Athens. Students have met with Buddhist and Christian teachers in Kyoto, Sojiji, Eiheiji, Taiwan, Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Bylakuppe, Dharmsala, Jerusalem, Rome, Athens, Ankara, and Istanbul. As part of their academic work, students write responses to each encounter and engage in term-end and year-end reflections on their own work. The program brings to light, in a very powerful way, some of the fundamental questions in cross-cultural study and interreligious dialogue. How do we come to understand a religion or culture other than our own? In analyzing their own work, students find themselves using terms from a Jain teacher's talk in Sravanabelagola to frame their response to the Dalai Lama's talk in New Delhi, and terms from the Dalai Lama's talk to understand and respond to the audience with the Pope in Rome. As the students become more sophisticated in understanding issues in interpretation, new questions are posed: How many people (other than ourselves) do we unknowingly bring to understanding an encounter with an other? When we use the Dalai Lama's talk in interpreting the Pope, does this enlarge our understanding of Catholicism, diminish or distort the Pope's message, or create something new altogether? What do we gain and what do we lose?Joan Stambaugh's The Formless Self is "an attempt to present Eastern ideas, or at least oneWestern interpretation of Eastern ideas, toWestern readers in a meaningful way" (p. x). The most referenced names in the index are Heidegger, Nietzsche, Plato, Keirkegaard, Descartes, and Meister Eckhart. These, then, are the key figures Stambaugh brings with her as she enters into conversation with the three Buddhist thinkers Dogen, Hisamatsu, and Nishitani. The latter two figures are themselves well known for their conversations withWestern thinkers. Stambaugh's book is best located within the larger body of work within and about the Kyoto School, that school of Japanese philosophy identified primarily with Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime, and Nishitani Keiji, and more recently with Abe Masao. In the United States, this school of philosophy reached its zenith of popularity in the late 1980s, culminating in an American Academy of Religion (AAR) award to Abe Masao's Zen and Western Thought and a series of annual AAR dialogues between Abe and John Cobb. Abe's presence hovers over Stambaugh's book as well, from an acknowledgment in the preface (p. x) to a reference in the index that seems to encompass the whole book. The Formless Self is a good short introduction to key beginning texts [End Page 300] in this larger field: Dogen's Genjokoan, the Hisamatsu-Tillich dialogues, and Nishitani's Religion and Nothingness.Stambaugh has in print translations of a substantial number of Heidegger's texts, including a recent translation of Being and Time. As might be expected, she seems to have a special affinity for Dogen's Uji (Being-Time; see especially pp. 31-40), and makes a creative contribution to the different understandings of these difficult concepts. Stambaugh also makes a brave attempt to work with Dogen's discussions of fire turning to ashes, fish in water, and mountains walking/ranging (pp. 39-48) in a productive way. Stambaugh's middle section on Hisamatsu may be the best place to begin, centering as it does on the dialogues with the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich. In 1957, the Zen Buddhist teacher and scholar Shin'inchi Hisamatsu was a visiting professor at Harvard lecturing on his recently published book Zen and the Fine Arts. Though Tillich's aesthetic approach to "ultimacy" made for a fine series of dialogues with Hisamatsu, the numerous difficulties in the dialogue serve as a warning... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Taking Wittgenstein at his Word: A Textual StudyDavid SternRobert J. Fogelin. Taking Wittgenstein at his Word: A Textual Study. Princeton-Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2009. Pp. xviii + 181. Cloth, $35.00.This is an excellent book, which should be read widely. It is a short, lucid, and accessible introduction to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, written by a leading expert. It is the ideal sequel to Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and (...) Private Language on a short list of required readings for a course on Wittgenstein. Part 1 concerns rule following and the conceivability of a private language, while part 2 discusses three topics in his philosophy of mathematics: the status of mathematical expressions, Wittgenstein’s treatment of Cantor on transfinite cardinals, and his approach to logical consistency. There is very little discussion of the secondary literature on any of these topics. Instead, apart from a few prefatory methodological [End Page 147] passages, almost all of the book is devoted to extensive quotations from Wittgenstein’s writing and to close reading of what he says there.Fogelin’s chief aim, to take Wittgenstein at his word, is in a sense a very modest one. Wittgenstein insisted throughout his career that he was not presenting philosophical theses, and that philosophy should not be a matter of defending theses. Indeed, Fogelin explicitly acknowledges that in taking Wittgenstein at his word, he is not presenting “a novel—hitherto unrecognized—way of understanding Wittgenstein’s later philosophy” (xii–xiii). Nevertheless, most interpreters have read Wittgenstein as failing to follow his own methodological precepts, and their interpretations have focused on the theses that they attribute to him. Instead, Fogelin lets “Wittgenstein speak for himself” (xi), not only quoting at length from his writings, but also from Wittgenstein’s “self-commentaries” (xi), passages where Wittgenstein helps us appreciate the philosophical significance he assigns to his words. Crucially, these quotations are held together by a close reading that provides a lucid and perceptive statement of what Wittgenstein is saying there and why, highlighting the intimate connection between Wittgenstein’s philosophical methods and his treatment of key topics in the philosophy of language and mathematics.A leading theme in Fogelin’s book is what he calls Wittgenstein’s “defactoist” approach to rule following. While he does not define this neologism, he does say that it involves “the rejection of appeals to rational processes where philosophers typically have attempted to find or supply them” (41). Furthermore, Fogelin connects it with the central role Wittgenstein gives to natural responses and training, the fact that the kind of training a creature can undergo depends on its natural or instinctive responses and Wittgenstein’s “rejection of the idea that training is merely an external device intended to induce in the trainee a grasp of the correctness, the legitimacy, of what he has been trained to do” (35–36).Although Fogelin never explicitly addresses the crucial question of which texts to draw on in taking Wittgenstein “at his word,” in practice he makes use of a wide range of publications from every stage of Wittgenstein’s career. The Tractatus, written during the First World War, is treated as belonging to an earlier stage of his thought, and some similarities to and differences from his later work are discussed. No such distinctions are drawn between material written in the early 1930s, editors’ reconstruction of lecture notes from the early 1930s and late 1930s, passages from the Philosophical Investigations, assembled in the mid-1940s, the different parts of the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, from the mid-1930s to early 1940s, and selections from On Certainty, dating from the late 1940s and early 1950s. While Fogelin acknowledges that there was some development in Wittgenstein’s views during these years, he puts great weight on passages taken from manuscripts and student lecture notes from the 1930s. For instance, in his crucial opening chapter on rule following, he relies heavily on the words with which Wittgenstein first formulated his paradox of interpretation in the early 1930s (20–21) and on his statement of the connection between meaning and rules in his 1932 lectures (17). While these passages are attractive precisely because they... (shrink)

This collection of essays investigates the obligations we have in respect of future persons, from our own future offspring to distant future generations.

Projective contents, which include presuppositional inferences and Potts's conventional implicatures, are contents that may project when a construction is embedded, as standardly identified by the FAMILY-OF-SENTENCES diagnostic. This article establishes distinctions among projective contents on the basis of a series of diagnostics, including a variant of the family-of-sentences diagnostic, that can be applied with linguistically untrained consultants in the field and the laboratory. These diagnostics are intended to serve as part of a toolkit for exploring projective contents across languages, thus (...) allowing generalizations to be examined and validated crosslinguistically. We apply the diagnostics in two languages, focusing on Paraguayan Guaraní, and comparing the results to those for English. Our study of Paraguayan Guaraní is the first systematic exploration of projective content in a language other than English. Based on the application of our diagnostics to a wide range of constructions, four subclasses of projective contents emerge. The resulting taxonomy of projective content has strong implications for contemporary theories of projection, which were developed for the projective properties of particular subclasses and fail to generalize to the full set of projective contents. (shrink)

On 18–19 May 2018, a symposium was held in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of Ronald W. Hepburn (1927–2008). The speakers at this event discussed Hepburn’s oeuvre from several perspectives. For this book, the collection of the revised versions of their talks has been supplemented by the papers of other scholars who were unable to attend the symposium itself. Thus this volume contains contributions from (...) eighteen notable scholars of different disciplines, ranging from contemporary aesthetics and art theory through to philosophical approaches to religion, education and social anthropology. It also includes a bibliography of Hepburn’s writings. The essays were first published in two special issues of the Journal of Scottish Thought, vols. 10–11 (2018–2019). -/- Ronald William Hepburn was born in Aberdeen on 16 March 1927. He went to Aberdeen Grammar School, then he graduated with an M.A. in Philosophy (1951) and obtained his doctorate from the University of Aberdeen (1955). His tutor at Aberdeen was Donald MacKinnon (1913– 1994), a Scottish philosopher and theologian, the author of A Study in Ethical Theory (1957) and The Problem of Metaphysics (1974). Hepburn taught as Lecturer at the Department of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen (1956–60), and he was also Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at New York University (1959–60). He returned from the United States as Professor of Philosophy at Nottingham University. In 1964, he was appointed as a Chair in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and between 1965 and 1968 he was also Stanton Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Cambridge. From 1975 until his retirement in 1996, he held the Professorship of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh. He died in Edinburgh on 23 December 2008. His philosophical interests ranged from theology and the philosophy of religion through moral philosophy and the philosophy of education to art theory and aesthetics. Notably, Hepburn is widely regarded as the founder of modern environmental and everyday aesthetics as a result of the influence of papers in the 1960s which pioneered a new approach to the aesthetics of the natural world. (shrink)

Why flawed logic puts us all at risk, and how critical thinking can save the world. It may seem a big claim, but knowing how to think clearly and critically has literally helped save the world. In September 1983, at the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union's early warning system showed five US missiles heading towards the country. Stanislaw Petrov knew his duty: he was to inform Moscow that nuclear war had begun, so that they could launch an (...) immediate and devastating response. Instead, he made a call to say the system was faulty. He'd assessed the situation and reasoned that an error was more likely than such a limited attack. We may not have to save the planet from nuclear annihilation, of course, but our ability to think critically has never been more important. In a world where fake news, mistrust of experts, prejudice and ignorance all too often hold sway, we can all too easily be misled. We live in an era where access to all the knowledge in the world is at our fingertips, yet that also means misinformation and falsehoods can spread further and faster than ever before. In The Irrational Ape, David Robert Grimes shows how we can be lured into making critical mistakes or drawing false conclusions, and how to avoid such errors. Given the power of modern science and the way that movements can unite to protest a cause via social media, we are in dangerous times. But fortunately, we can learn from our mistakes, and by critical thinking and scientific method we can discover how to apply these techniques to everything from deciding what insurance to buy to averting global disaster. This book, packed with fascinating case studies and examples, helps ensure we are ready for the modern world. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The problem of quantum nonlocality references instantaneous entanglements happening between particles at great distances, putting under question physical assumptions about time and local effects. Despite a wide range of proposed solutions in physics, the problem persists; however, due to the recent interest in panconsciousness and panpsychism in philosophy as well as numerous suggestions that consciousness and quantum physics are intimately related, I argue in favor of thinking strange quantum effects—and nonlocality as case in point—in lieu of conscious activity happening (...) at a universal scale. Drawing on the mind-brain problem or “the hard problem” as an intellectual resource and particularly pertinent metaphor in the case helps to illuminate the argument; briefly stated, I argue that a conscious universe eliminates the necessity of thinking distance as a problem needing to be resolved to comprehend disparate physical observations. In other words, I offer a speculative vision for quantum nonlocality and ultimately aim to encourage scholars to more carefully consider what it is like to be In, Of, and About a brain when thinking about the universe. (shrink)

This paper articulates a feminist poststructural philosophy of education by combining the work of Luce Irigaray and Michel Foucault. This acts as an underpinning for a philosophy of desire (McWilliam, 1999) in education, or as a minor philosophy of education where multiple movements of bodies are enacted through theoretical methodologies and research. These methods include qualitative analysis and critical discourse analysis; where the conjunction Irigaray-Foucault is a paradigm for dealing with educational phenomena. It is also a rigorous materialism (Braidotti, 2005) (...) that opens up the way in which we think about philosophical bodies in education with language. This simultaneously creates gaps in our thinking about the problems associated with philosophical bodies in education, where the imagination may intercede and Eros can do his work, ‘For if Eros possessed all that he desires, he would desire no more’ (Irigaray, 1993, p. 22). (shrink)

In Unsimple truths, Sandra D. Mitchell examines the historical context of current scientific practices and elaborates the challenges complexity has since posed to status quo science and policymaking. Mitchell criticizes models of science inspired by Newtonian physics and argues for a pragmatistic, anti-universalist approach to science. In this review, I focus on what I find to be the most important point of the book, Mitchell’s argument for the conceptual independence of compositional materialism and descriptive fundamentalism. Along the way, I provide (...) a description of Mitchell’s overall project and a road map of the book. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Sahotra Sarkar compares the Standard Dynamical interpretation of natural selection with the Information-Theoretic interpretation from Steven A. Frank. I address Sarkar’s three arguments against Frank’s interpretation. I show that Sarkar’s major argument that a key component of Frank’s account “does not have any natural biological interpretation” is premised on a contradiction stemming from a mathematical error. Consequently, Sarkar’s major argument is unsound. I also address Sarkar’s claim that a central equation in Frank’s interpretation is dynamically insufficient (...) and his claim that Frank’s interpretation uses nonintuitive parameters to simply rewrite familiar results. (shrink)

We examined the public interest reports of General Motors from 1971 to 1990 and presented the contents thereof herein. The principal areas disclosed by GM during those years that are discussed in this paper were minorities, women, and employment issues, energy and the environment, international operations, automotive safety, and philanthropic activity. The purpose of this study was to examine the public interest report as a vehicle through which a firm might disclose information in the public interest. We concluded that there (...) were at least three principal forces driving GM's disclosures. They included public attention focused on, potential costs associated with, and the relative subjectivity of an issue.In reading their public interest reports, it became clear that GM is socially responsive in matters of public interest. Whether they are socially responsible is a judgment not within the scope of this study. However, we do not preclude the possibility that the report may serve as a vehicle which would build a certain momentum in public responsibility, and thus partially drive decisions made by management in social issues. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Introduction:Remarks in Memory of David W. ChappellDonald K. SwearerOn December 8, 1996, David Chappell delivered the Bodhi Day lecture, titled "Bodhisattva in the Twenty-first Century," at the Hompa Hongwanji Temple in central Oahu. The lecture wasn't autobiographical—David was much too unassuming to have thought of himself in these terms—but those of us who loved David and who had the privilege of working with him over (...) many years have no such qualms. David's dedication, sincerity of spirit, generosity, and compassion were truly bodhisattva-like.In his lecture David contrasts the superficial, electronic Internet connectedness of our lives today with the common ground discovered at Awakening based on what David called "heart connection," an insight into the shared nature of all sentient beings that leads to empathy, compassion, and kindness. In contrast to enlightened heart connectedness, Internet interaction lacks the capacity of an intimacy with the varied phenomena of life at each moment. "The Internet," he observes, "allows us to ease our solitude by getting access to things that are compatible with our own interests. However, Buddhism considers that the achievement of enlightenment involves being able to be compatible and have empathy with things that may seem foreign or offensive or a threat to us by seeing them as connected and similar to ourselves. This involves not just new information, or a new perspective on things, but a new understanding of ourselves and our relationship to others at a level that touches what is beyond manipulation or even rational expression."I've quoted rather extensively from David's 1996 Bodhi Day talk because it reveals several dimensions of his bodhisattva-like nature: his sense of connectedness with those around him and a heart-to-heart intimacy with a wide network of friends, acquaintances, and even those at a greater personal distance. David's simpatico nature was manifested in many ways—from his body language to his dedication to peacemaking.On a visit to the United States during the Vietnam War, Thich Nhat Hanh was speaking to a large audience gathered in the auditorium of a large Midwestern church. Following the talk a middle-aged man jumped to his feet, shook his clenched [End Page 3] fist in anger, and shouted in a loud voice, "Well, Mr. Hanh, if you're so concerned about your fellow Vietnamese dying in the rice paddies, why are you here?! Why aren't you there with them?!" Thây stood silently for what seemed like minutes and then replied in calm, quiet tones, "I'm here because some of the roots of the war are here in the United States. When one waters a plant, it's insufficient to water the leaves. One has to water the roots." He then turned and walked slowly through the side door of the auditorium. Jim Forest, Thây's Catholic Peace Fellowship friend who was in the audience, sensed something was wrong and quickly followed him outside. There he found his friend bent over, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. Slowly Thây stood erect and, breathing normally, explained that in order not to respond in anger but with understanding and compassion he had entered into deep breathing; however, the state he had achieved had been too deep and left him short of breath. Jim Forest later observed in a memoir that for the first time in his life he realized the profound connection between breathing and one's actions.David's inner nature was expressed in an act as simple as breathing: his trademark bodhisattva-like smile. At the 1980 Oahu conference that launched the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies, convened by David and his colleague Bob Bobilin, there were more than just one or two frustrating logistical snafus. Whatever the crisis, however, David never lost his cool. He would smile and in his typically unhurried manner offer a helping hand or a word of calm advice, seemingly in the belief that good karma, compassionate Buddha nature, or God's grace would help rectify the situation.David stories abound—humorous, poignant, moving. Those who worked with him as colleagues in religious studies, the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies... (shrink)

As the federal government continues to expand upon and improve its data sharing policies over the past 20 years, complex challenges remain. Our interviews with U.S. academic genetic researchers (n=23) found that the burden, translation, industry limitations, and consent structure of data sharing remain major governance challenges.

Robert Brandom's latest book, the product of his John Locke lectures in Oxford in 2006, is a return to the philosophy of language and is easily read as a continuation and development of the views defended in Making it Explicit . The text of the lectures is presented much as they were delivered, but it contains an ‘Afterword’ of more than 30 pages which responds to questions raised when he gave the lectures, and also when they were subsequently delivered in (...) Prague the following year. The published text also contains relatively technical appendices to two of the lectures.The individual lectures engage with some important and difficult issues, often ones that were explored in detail in the earlier book. However, these discussions are located within a broader meta-philosophical context, and it says something about the abstract and difficult character of these views that they provide the main subject matter of the Afterword. This framework affects how we should understand the relations between this book and Making It Explicit too. Although most of the detailed discussions happily belong within the general project of the earlier book, they are offered as illustrations of a framework that is independent of this project. Indeed, Brandom suggests that defenders of the semantic views of David Lewis, for example, could embrace his main message as well as those who favour Brandom's own form of pragmatism.Neo-pragmatist philosophers such as Brandom's teacher, Richard Rorty, often present themselves as rejecting the analytic tradition in philosophy. When Brandom describes the ‘pragmatist challenge’ to the ‘classical project of analysis’, he appeals to the criticisms found in the work of Wittgenstein and Sellars that are often appealed to by the critics of the analytic tradition. The message of the new book is that the views he has built on this …. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:27 Franciscan Studies 63 (2005) FRANCISCAN INSTITUTE MEDAL HONOREES The Franciscan Institute Medal for 2005 was awarded to two scholars of international renown in the world of Franciscan studies: David Flood, OFM and David Burr. Both honorees are known throughout the world particularly for their scholarly work on Peter John Olivi – a friar of the late 13th century whose critical importance for Franciscan history has now (...) come to be appreciated largely thanks to the work of these two scholars. The Medals were conferred at an Academic Convocation in connection with the Feast of St. Bonaventure in July 2005. David Flood, OFM is the 17th recipient of the Franciscan Institute Medal. David Burr is the 18th recipient of the Franciscan Institute Medal. MICHAEL BLASTIC 28 DAVID E. FLOOD, OFM 17th Recipient of the Franciscan Institute Medal Official Citation It is both an honor and a joy for me to celebrate and recount some of the significant contributions of Brother David Flood, OFM, to Franciscan studies and life. Brother David has been a member of the St. Joseph Province of the Friars Minor in Montreal, Canada, since 1950. He received a B.A. in philosophy from Laval University, Quebec City, studied theology at the Friars Convent in Montreal, and was ordained in May, 1958. He also received a M.A. in English and Literature from the University of Montreal in 1959. From 1958 until 1961 he taught English Literature at St. Francis College in Biddeford, Maine, and while teaching he published studies on English topics including Keats and Beckett. Between 1961 and 1965 while residing in Cologne, Germany, he studied with Kajetan Esser, OFM, at Mönchengladbach, while reading philosophy and history at the University of Cologne. He received his doctorate from that university in 1965 with the dissertation Die Regula non Bullata der Minderbrüder (published in 1967 by Dietrich Coelde Verlag). Returning to Canada, he taught church history in Montreal from 1965-1966. In 1967-1968 he held a fellowship at the Institute for European History in Mainz, working on a critical edition of Peter Olivi’s Rule Commentary (published by Franz Steiner Verlag, 1972). During the 1970’s and 1980’s, David worked with various Franciscan groups, especially the Franciscan Federation, in North America while residing in Chicago, Illinois. From time to time during that period he returned to Mönchengladbach for Franciscan research and writing. After returning to Montreal in 1991, he began working with Gedeon Gál, OFM, in 1994, and visited the Franciscan Institute regularly as they worked together on the Chronicle of Nicholas Minorita (The Franciscan Institute, 1996). He also worked on the exegetical works of Peter Olivi with Gedeon, publish- FRANCISCAN MEDAL 29 ing a critical edition of Olivi’s Principles of Sacred Scripture, and Postilla ’s on Isaiah and 1 Corinthians (The Franciscan Institute, 1997). He became a permanent member of the Franciscan Institute in January, 1998, and continued working on editions of Olivi’s exegetical works, completing the Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles (The Franciscan Institute, 2001). David is presently completing work on the edition of Olivi’s Commentary on the Book of Genesis which he hopes to complete within a year. In addition to his work on textual editions and scholarly papers, David has lectured widely in North America and Europe, as well as in Africa. He just recently returned from a semester in Rome where he taught a course on the Regula non Bullata at the Scuola Superiore di Studi Medievali at the Antonianum. The bibliography of David’s publications number more than fifty entries and includes a significant number of critical text editions, each of which is recognized as a quality example of medieval text editing. In addition to his edition of the Early Rule and Olivi’s Rule Commentary, David also has published editions of the Rule commentaries of Hugh of Digne (1980), David of Augsburg (1993), and John of Wales (2002). In addition to the exegetical texts and the Rule Commentary of Olivi, David edited Olivi’s Quaestio de Mendicitate, and together with David Burr, his fellow honoree this evening, he published an edition of Olivi’s Sixteenth Question on Evangelical Perfection dealing with poverty... (shrink)