Argues for the primacy of the phylogenetic system as the general reference system in biology. This book, first published in 1966, generated significant controversy and opened possibilities for evolutionary biology.

From an informal group of a dozen faculty and graduate students at Temple University, the Jean Piaget Society grew in seven years to 500 members who have interests in the application of genetic epistemology to their own disciplines and professions. At the outset Piaget endorsed the concept of a society which bore his name and presented a major address on equilibration at the society's first symposium in May, 1971. Had he not done so the society would no doubt have remained (...) a small parochial group, like so many others throughout the country, interested in Piaget and his theory. With the encouragement of Genevans and the leadership of its first four presidents, Lois Macomber, Barbara Press eisen, Marilyn Appel, and John Mickelson, the society undertook a number of programs to collect and disseminate the results of scholarly work in genetic epistemology. Particular emphasis was placed upon applications of Piaget's theory to developmental psychology, philos ophy, and education. One of these programs was the publication of an annual series on the development of knowing, of which this volume is the first. In 1973, the society asked Hans Furth with the assistance of Willis Overton and Jeanette Gallagher to initiate and plan a series of yearbooks with the result that in addition to this volume, a second volume on education was commissioned, and a third one on the decalage issue was planned. (shrink)

_Spinoza’s Modernity _is a major, original work of intellectual history that reassesses the philosophical project of Baruch Spinoza, uncovers his influence on later thinkers, and demonstrates how that crucial influence on Moses Mendelssohn, G. E. Lessing, and Heinrich Heine shaped the development of modern critical thought. Excommunicated by his Jewish community, Spinoza was a controversial figure in his lifetime and for centuries afterward. Willi Goetschel shows how Spinoza’s philosophy was a direct challenge to the theological and metaphysical assumptions of (...) modern European thought. He locates the driving force of this challenge in Spinoza’s Jewishness, which is deeply inscribed in his philosophy and defines the radical nature of his modernity. (shrink)

"First Published in 1999, Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.".

Social screening of investments calls not only for investment policy and criteria, but also for information about companies, their policies, practices and performance. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and its June 2000 Sustainability Reporting Guidelines have the potential to significantly improve the usefulness and quality of information reported by companies about their environmental, social and economic impacts and performance. The GRI aims to develop a voluntary reporting framework that will elevate sustainability reporting practices to a level equivalent to that of (...) financial reporting in rigour, comparability, auditability and general acceptance. This will be a welcome and efficient supplement to the questionnaires, interviews, press releases, media reports and other sources of information traditionally used for screening in investment decision making - social/ethical and mainstream. The Dow Jones Sustainability Group Index, the Jantzi Social Index and the Innovest EcoValue'21 analytical platform, together with the SRI community, are all likely to benefit from GRI-style sustainability reports. One of the GRI's key challenges is to accommodate the broad variety of disclosure needs and expectations of a wide range of report users and company stakeholders. To maximize the usefulness of the GRI Guidelines, report users, including the SRI community, need to be engaged in the process of developing and refining the Guidelines over time. The GRI Guidelines are emerging as an important instrument in enabling companies to communicate with their stakeholders about performance and accountability beyond just the financial bottom line. (shrink)

Ethicists regularly turn to virtue in order to negotiate features of climate change that seem to overwhelm moral agency. Appeals to virtue in climate ethics differ by how they connect individual flourishing with collective responsibilities and by how they interpret Anthropocene relations. Differences between accounts of climate virtue help critique proposals to reframe global ecological problems in terms of resilience and planetary stewardship, the intelligibility of which depends on connecting what would be good for the species with what would be (...) good for an individual life. A pragmatic way of establishing that connection may need a strong role for respect of nature. (shrink)

Ethics in the anthropocene -- Atmospheric powers: climate change and moral incompetence -- Christian ethics and unprecedented problems -- Global ethics: moral pluralism and planetary problems -- Sustainability science and the ethics of wicked problems -- Toxic wombs and the ecology of justice -- Impoverishment and the economy of desire -- Intergenerational risk and the future of love -- Sustaining grace.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Descartes's Conception of Perfect Knowledge WILLIS DONEY IN THEFIFTHMEDITATION, after presenting his a priori argument for the existence of God, Descartes compares the certainty of his conclusion with the c~rtainty of conclusions of mathematical demonstrations. In stating the view that Descartes expresses here, I shall use letters: D for the conclusion of his a priori argument, ttamely, that there is a God, and R for an example that he (...) gives of a conclusion that he has reached in mathematics, that is, the proposition that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles. Concerning the certainty of D and R, he maintains in the Fifth Meditation that he is as certain of D as of "anything else that seems most certain," implying that D is for him as cea-tain as R; and he goes on to make what is clearly intended to be a stronger claim: I also observe that the certainty of other things so depends on this that without it nothing can ever be perfectly known,x This claim is repeated, by way of a conclusion, in the next to the last sentence of the Meditation: And so I clearly see that the certainty and truth of all knowledge depends on an apprehension of the true God, in such a fashion that, before I knew him, I could have no perfect knowledge of anything else.2 i AT VII, 69; HR I, 183. "AT" stands for the edition of Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, (Euvres de Descartes (Paris: L~.opold Cerf, 1897-1913); "'HR" for the English translation by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, The Philosophical Works of Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931). In quotations I have departed from HR to avoid infeficities or inaccuracies. The Latin locution translated "perfec0y known" is perfecte sciri; in the French translation, sfauoir parfaitement is used (AT IX, 55). This is the first occurrence of this locution in the Meditations. 2 AT VII, 71; HR I, 185. The Latin locution in the last clause is perfecte scire; the F~-ench is, again, s~auoir parfaitement (AT IX, 56). In HR there is vacillation in the translation of scientia. In these passages in the Fifth Meditation, scientia and cognitio are both rendered "knowledge"; whereas, in the Replies to the Second Set of Obj~cttons, vera scientia is "true science" (AT VII, 141; HR II, 39). For scientiae certitudinem & veritatem, I have used "certainty and truth of knowledge," and "apprehension of the true God" for veri dei cognitione. [3S7] 388 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY In these sentences, Descartes does not limit his claims about certainty and perfect knowledge to propositions Like R, and one of his contemporaries, taking him to be asserting that, unless a person has knowledge of God's existence, he cannot be certain of anything else, raised the objection that, earlier in the Meditations, Descartes claimed to be certain of his own existence as a thinking thing prior to having proved the existence of God) In his reply, Descartes accused his critic of misreading what he had written in the Fifth Meditation. The claim that he made there was not about all propositions---about principles and evident propositions, such as ego cogito, ergo sum and sum res eogitans, as well as propositions like Rmbut specificaUy and exclusively about propositions like R.* Whether, when confronted with his critic's objection, Descartes retracted or modified a view expressed in the Meditations is a question on which sides have been taken. In my paper I have something to say about this question, but I shall be concerned primarily with a problem of interpretation that arises whether or not we take Descartes at his word; that is, whether we take the claim that he makes in the Fifth Meditation to be exclusively about propositions like R or, contrary to Descartes's reply to his critic, to be about other propositions as well. The problem arises when we try to make sense of what he says in the Fifth Meditation in support of this claim. In the first part of my paper, I shall pose the problem, pointing out that, on a very tempting and prima facie... (shrink)

Willie Thompson offers a clear, jargon-free introduction to postmodernist theory and its significant impact on the study of history. This is a hotly-debated topic, and much of the literature is both polemical and inaccessible to the novice. Thompson, however, presents key ideas in a straightforward way, making these debates relevant to students' own work.

The fields of environmental ethics and of religion and ecology have been shaped by Lynn White Jr.'s thesis that the roots of ecological crisis lie in religious cosmology. Independent critical movements in both fields, however, now question this methodological legacy and argue for alternative ways of inquiry. For religious ethics, the twin controversies cast doubt on prevailing ways of connecting environmental problems to religious deliberations because the criticisms raise questions about what counts as an environmental problem, how religious traditions change, (...) and whether ethicists should approach problems and traditions with reformist commitments. This article examines the critiques of White's legacy and presents a pluralist alternative that focuses religious ethics on the contextual strategies produced by moral communities as they confront environmental problems. (shrink)

The statement below is an outgrowth of a retreat at Tomales Bay,California, December 3-6, 1992, at which fifteen scientists and philosophersattempted to explore the question of an appropriate epistemology for consciousness research. Contributions were made by the scholars listed below and others; the final synthesis was performed by Willis Harman. The statement is submitted to the broader scientific community, and to the concerned public, to stimulate dialogue about a long-standing question, and to foster interest in an ever-deepening scientific study of (...) human consciousness. Basically, the question is: How does it happen that our powerful methods of scientific enquiry appear so ill-suited to the study of consciousness? If understanding our own consciousness is so central to understanding anything else, will we not have to take this question more seriously than has been the case so far? (shrink)

Informed consent may be unobtainable in online contexts. This article examines the difficulties of obtaining informed consent online through a Facebook case study. It is proposed that there are at least two ways informed consent could be waived in research: first, if the data are public, and second, if the data are textual. Accordingly, the publicness of the Facebook News Feed is considered. Taking account of the wide availability of Facebook users’ data, and reflecting on how public those users perceive (...) their information to be, this paper argues that some Facebook data are properly viewed as public to semi-public in nature. A second issue is whether the Facebook News Feed data collection ought to be classified as document-based or human subjects research. Since the Facebook News Feed involves social interaction that may elicit ‘ethically important moments’, this paper proposes that observing it may constitute human subjects research. While informed consent is desirable for human subjects research, it is suggested that Facebook News Feed observations are comparable to observational research in a public space, and thus waiving informed consent in this online setting could be justifiable. (shrink)

In this study, we argue that contemporary nursing care has been overtaken by new public management strategies aimed at curtailing budgets in the public hospital sector in Australia. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 15 nurses from one public acute hospital with supporting documentary evidence, we demonstrate what happens to nursing work when management imposesroundingas a risk reduction strategy. In the case study outlined rounding was introduced across all wards in response to missed care, which in turn arose as a result (...) of work intensification produced by efficiency, productivity, effectiveness and accountability demands. Rounding is a commercially sponsored practice consistent with new public management. Our study illustrates the impact that new public management strategies such as rounding have on how nurses work, both in terms of work intensity and in who controls their labour. (shrink)

Laudato si' attempts simultaneously to disrupt prevailing global environmental discourse and to reorient central concepts in Catholic moral tradition by requalifying the meaning of dominion and by ecologically expanding human dignity. The image of Earth crying out to humans from within a kinship relation plays a central role in both arguments. However, the political consequences of those shifts remain vague because the “voice” of Earth remains silent in crucial loci of the encyclical's argument.

Within the context of employee rights and management social responsibility, this paper identifies and explores three ethical dimensions of downsizing. Using ANOVA and Scheffe post-hoc statistical techniques, groups involved in the downsizing decision making process were compared with groups affected by the process on each ethical dimension. Results indicated that those affected by the process attached greater ethical significance to these dimensions than those who were involved in formulating and implementing/communicating downsizing decisions.

Despite acknowledgment that performance failure among new salespeople is a prevalent issue for organizations, researchers do not fully understand the consequences of repetitive periods of failure on new salespeople’s unethical selling behaviors. Further, little is known about how a sales force’s reward structure and managerial attempts to intervene following failure affect new salespeople’s behavior. Combining an experiment with longitudinal growth models, we show that repetitive periods of failure increase unethical behaviors, and interventions intended to remind the salesperson to behave in (...) the customer’s best interests attenuate this effect under a non-contingent reward structure. However, counter to managerial assumptions, under a contingent reward structure these customer-oriented interventions actually backfire by amplifying the original relationship between repetitive failure and unethical behaviors. The results have potentially important managerial implications for those who manage new salespeople learning how to sell or during other failure-prone periods. (shrink)

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

In March 2010, Professor Tom Devine, widely acknowledged as the leading academic historian of Scotland, presented a plenary lecture for the Royal Society of Edinburgh's yearly symposium, "Connections between Scotland and Slavery." Publicly advertised as a reply to the question "Did Slavery Make Scotland Great?" Devine's talk was eagerly anticipated by the group of international scholars gathered at the University of Edinburgh. His answer, however, may have been more controversial than the audience anticipated. Devine said that the economic transformation of (...) eighteenth-century Scotland was a direct result of capital produced by slave labor, disproportionately financed and largely managed by Scots. The notion that... (shrink)

The following paper explores the foundations of phenomenology, and seeks to provide those new to the discipline with ways of understanding its claims to assist knowers to attend to 'the things themselves'. Practical applications of this mode of inquiry are linked to adult education practice which is the author's field of practice but most of the ideas are readily applicable to social events and practices such as nursing, social work, recreation, history and the like. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume (...) 1, Edition 1 April 2001. (shrink)

Problems that overwhelm moral agency challenge methods of ethics that prioritize social practices. This essay explains how climate change exceeds moral competencies, criticizes climate ethics for eliding the difficulties, and the attempts to vindicate a practice-based approach by arguing for the possibility of doing ethics from incompetent projects. However, because incompetence easily becomes the excuse of injustice, I illustrate the argument with an indigenous peoples' climate justice project that both exemplifies the creativity my approach needs and bears a strong critique (...) of its method. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Spirit and Politics: Some Thoughts on Margaret Watkins’s The Philosophical Progress of Hume’s “Essays”Andre C. Willis (bio)Margaret Watkins’s elegant text, The Philosophical Progress of Hume’s Essays (2019),1 is marked by a Humean approach: it fosters philosophical consideration of both the faculties of the mind and the affective features of experience in ways that bear on practical, moral issues. Ever-attentive to the meaning of Hume’s various nuances and strategic ambiguities, (...) Watkins’s even-handed approach guides us into a broad swath of Hume’s ideas and marches us through a trajectory of secondary interlocutors. It also establishes Watkins as an integral part of Hume’s lineage, in the sense that she understands that thoughtful writing itself is an intellectual virtue. Her “unusual sensitivity, not to life’s daily vicissitudes but to beauties and deformities” (193)2 richly textures her overall argument that positions Hume’s Essays as a filter for his vision of “true philosophy:” that reflective turn towards nature and common life that openly challenges abstruse reasoning, fluently embraces historicism and perspectivalism, and deftly foregrounds the usefulness of ideas over their logical certainty.As much as Watkins reveals Hume’s vision for philosophy, she also extends it; for, among other things, her consideration of Hume’s unique endeavor in philosophical literature (ultimately collected under the title Essays, Moral, Political and Literary [1758]), makes an important twofold contribution to Hume studies. It brings greater attention to Hume’s notion of “public spirit,” a distinct mode of human excellence that combines “benevolence” with “greatness of mind.” And, it aestheticizes some practical dimensions of human life (noted in chapter titles, for example, “Working,” [End Page 143] “Thinking,” “Loving”) without losing track of their socio-political valences. I shall return to these two main points below. As an introductory gesture, I want to note that Watkins’s writing both nicely elaborates Hume’s philosophical vision and thoughtfully broadens his literary insights. It does “the job of putting the audience into a responsive relation with the work of art,” what literary critic R. P. Blackmur identified as “the job of intermediary.”3Generally speaking, Watkins’s mediation filters salient themes and terms from Hume’s corpus through a particularly close reading of the Essays. Cast through her richly stylized analysis, Hume’s foundational ideas of “sympathy,” “convention,” “impressions,” “association,” “imagination,” “artifice,” the “passions” (and more) find fresh interpretive air. An example of this in her first chapter tracks Hume’s use of both “artifice” and “convention” from the Treatise through the second Enquiry to the Essays. For Watkins, a through-line for Hume is that “governing” can be thought of as repeated actions that bridge institutional policy to individual character. To think about governing in this way is to open ourselves to new ways of conceiving potential overlaps between nature and artifice (say, in the instance of a moral virtue like courage [50]). To link categories in the Essays back to their antecedent texts along the lines that Watkins does is to situate them in the context of Hume’s larger thought-project and, indirectly, confirm connections between the individual essays. These conjoinings, for Watkins, suggest Hume’s Essays can be treated together, without either blending their disparate themes or diluting their individual subject matter.4This point stands in opposition to Hume’s own semi-admonishment (1741) that “The Reader must not look for any connexion among these Essays but must consider each of them as a Work apart.”5 Watkins’s response—indicative of the graciousness of her overall tone—is to warmly acknowledge Hume’s reproach and affirm the distinctiveness of each of the essays. She proclaims: “The Essays are not unified” (5). Her thinking about them separately, however, reveals a common practical thread in their form. Watkins characterizes this form as serving “to promote public benefit” (4). I think about this form as being philosophical in the way that Richard Rorty conceives of philosophy as cultural criticism. Watkins, however, wants to emphasize the public character of Hume’s philosophy. She writes: “Hume seeks to benefit the public in two ways. First, he tries to allay irrational attitudes that produce imprudent personal and... (shrink)

Kant’s philosophy is often treated as a closed system, without reference to how it was written or how Kant arrived at its familiar form, the critique. In fact, the style of the critique seems so artless that readers think of it as an unfortunate by-product—a style of stylelessness. In _Constituting Critique_, Willi Goetschel shows how this apparent gracelessness was deliberately achieved by Kant through a series of writing experiments. By providing an account of the process that culminated in his (...) three _Critiques_, this book offers a new perspective on Kant’s philosophical thought and practice. _Constituting Critique_ traces the stages in Kant’s development to reveal how he redefined philosophy as a critical task. Following the philosopher through the experiments of his early essays, Goetschel demonstrates how Kant tests, challenges, and transforms the philosophical essay in his pursuit of a new self-reflective literary genre. From these experiments, critique emerges as the philosophical form for the critical project of the Enlightenment. The imperatives of its transcendental style, Goetschel contends, not only constitute and inform the critical moment of Kant’s philosophical praxis, but also have an enduring place in post-Kantian philosophy and literature. By situating the _Critiques_ within the context of Kant’s early essays, this work will redirect the attention of Kant scholars to the origins of their form. It will also encourage contemporary critical theorists to reconsider their own practice through an engagement with its source in Kant. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Climate Justice: Ethics, Energy, and Public PolicyWillis JenkinsClimate Justice: Ethics, Energy, and Public Policy James Martin-Schramm Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010. 232 pp. $20.00Religious ethicists are sometimes tempted to interpret climate change as symptomatic of a civilizational corruption so deep that practical responsibility seems nearly impossible. In its considered treatment of energy options and policy responses, [End Page 198] Climate Justice works to make applied Christian ethics competent to (...) address climate change. By interpreting political possibilities with Christian commitments to justice, the book makes a distinctively practical contribution to the literature on Christianity and climate; it lifts an important theological voice in the growing subfield of climate ethics.The book begins by elaborating the general notion of ecological justice into workable criteria. Martin-Schramm describes four basic norms of ecojustice (sustainability, sufficiency, participation, and solidarity), from which he develops twelve energy policy guidelines (e.g., equity, adequacy). He then specifies those guidelines into fourteen criteria by which to assess the justice of climate action (e.g., historical responsibility, emissions verifiability).Subsequent chapters use those criteria to evaluate policy options. A chief difficulty in applying them lies in the tension between intergenerational and intragenerational claims. Global climate negotiations founder on disagreements about these undeveloped, plural dimensions of justice. Martin-Schramm therefore deploys criteria with a balancing objective: to develop obligations to the future while recognizing claims of the present poor and vulnerable, and while keeping the result within the bounds of North American political viability.For example, Martin-Schramm recognizes that the criterion of historical responsibility indicates that the United States should bear about one-third of the costs of climate transition. But he finds that the resulting figure ($331 billion) so outstrips realistic acceptance that he rejects financial transfer in favor of a “national obligation wedge” in which the nation compensates by pledging to reduce future emissions. Since those emission reductions are unlikely apart from a price on carbon, Martin-Schramm argues that justice mandates a fossil fuel tax. With an eye to political viability, he proposes beginning with a modest $5/ton (for comparison, the Stern Report estimates the social costs of carbon at $85/ton).Controversy in the details matters to the whole project because the point of Martin-Schramm’s approach is that a meaningful climate ethic should guide contextual action. Yet other accounts of climate justice will find a scandal of modesty on those contextual points. Martin-Schramm’s climate justice entails less economic transformation than the “Northern structural adjustment” demanded by the Latin American Council of Churches. It is also less ecocentric than accounts from indigenous theologians arguing that justice warrants rights for species at risk of extinction, and perhaps for Earth itself.While Climate Justice is a self-consciously North American account, the criteria it develops would be different and work more critically were the underlying account of justice dialogically constructed across economic, political, and theological borders. Were it pragmatic, in the sense of arising from projects from across those borders, rather than applied deductively, a Christian climate ethic would likely produce an account of justice with more critical demands on industrial infrastructure and on ecological consciousness. [End Page 199]In its self-limitation, however, lies the book’s practical promise. Martin-Schramm wants justice to illuminate effective ways toward real responsibility. His criteria for justice imply that advocating for impossible goals, or for objectives that would imperil other conditions of social justice, would amount to injustice. Making ethics matter for climate change, he shows, requires understanding what justice can do in context.The open question for this book’s project is how a self-limited ethic of applied justice relates to the deeper processes of social transformation obviously needed for adequate response. Martin-Schramm closes with an account of his work reforming the energy economy of Luther College, which should inspire every reader with a sense of what persistent, informed, and contextual action can accomplish.Willis JenkinsYale Divinity SchoolCopyright © 2012 The Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

The Emancipation Proclamation is one of the most important documents in American history. As we commemorate its 150th anniversary, what do we really know about those who experienced slavery? In their pioneering book, Envisioning Emancipation, renowned photographic historian Deborah Willis and historian of slavery Barbara Krauthamer have amassed 150 photographs—some never before published—from the antebellum days of the 1850s through the New Deal era of the 1930s. The authors vividly display the seismic impact of emancipation on African Americans born before (...) and after the Proclamation, providing a perspective on freedom and slavery and a way to understand the photos as documents of engagement, action, struggle, and aspiration. Envisioning Emancipation illustrates what freedom looked like for black Americans in the Civil War era. From photos of the enslaved on plantations and African American soldiers and camp workers in the Union Army to Juneteenth celebrations, slave reunions, and portraits of black families and workers in the American South, the images in this book challenge perceptions of slavery. They show not only what the subjects emphasized about themselves but also the ways Americans of all colors and genders opposed slavery and marked its end. Filled with powerful images of lives too often ignored or erased from historical records, Envisioning Emancipation provides a new perspective on American culture. (shrink)

Near the homes of photographers John Willis and Tom Young is a paper mill that sits in the otherwise pristine and picturesque climes of western Massachusetts. For Willis and Young, this site is one of both aesthetic and philosophical contradictions: despite its verdant locale, the mill—with its ominous smoke stacks and countless bales of discarded paper—brings to mind the dreariness of industrialization and the impermanence of life itself. But the factory is actually one where such litter is reborn as reusable (...) paper. Willis and Young’s stunning black-and-white images, collected in this unforgettable volume, transform this mill and the innumerable mounds of recyclable waste it processes daily into an indelible and evocative landscape. Recycled Realities is not a jeremiad foretelling the consequences of excessive waste, rampant pollution, or unbridled consumption, but rather a profound meditation on the hidden meanings and connections that linger beneath the debris and detritus of everyday life. These astonishing and often surreal photos of discarded paper from the printed world trace the processes of emergence, revelation, and redemption that make the cycle of life possible. In their photographs, Willis and Young take that which we have discarded and create new forms of being in and of themselves: vibrant and ultimately life-affirming portraits of who we are as people and the realities that we constantly build—and rebuild—all around us. (shrink)

In the Ethics, Spinoza is not expressly concerned with skepticism and the possibility envisaged by Descartes that clear and distinct ideas or conceptions may not be true. There is reason for this, as he was of the opinion that, if as in the Ethics we proceed in our thinking in the right order, doubt will not arise. In his earlier works, however, he is concerned with skepticism and, in particular, with the questioning of clear and distinct ideas. In the Prolegomenon (...) in Part One of Descartes’ Principles, he sets forth what he takes to be Descartes’ attempt to allay doubts about clear and distinct perceptions. He finds there that Descartes does not succeed in answering an objection to his procedure, and he proposes an alternative way of escape from doubt. This alternative is also stated in the Improvement of the Understanding in the section on doubt or idea dubia ; and considerable light is cast upon it by his discussion in this section of the nature of doubt. Distinguishing genuine doubt and merely verbal doubt, i.e. professions of doubt when “the soul does not doubt,” he explains what leads to genuine doubt and how such doubt is to be removed. In my paper, I shall explicate the view stated in these passages and raise questions about the relations of this view to other views of Spinoza’s. I shall also be concerned with a short and cryptic passage earlier in the Improvement of the Understanding in which he deals with professions of doubt that, farther on, he deems merely verbal. In a final section, I shall assemble the views about skeptical doubt stated in the various places and give a summary statement of Spinoza’s attitude toward philosophical skepticism. (shrink)