PREFACE I AM greatly indebted to my friends, Professor Dewar of Reading and Miss Maude G. May of Glasgow, for many corrections and suggestions while the following pages were passing through the press. W. M. D. PART I I INTRODUCTION Y. D.H.S. The most singular and deepest themes in the History of the Universe and Mankind, to which all the rest are subordinate, are those in which there is a conflict between Belief and Unbelief, and all epochs, wherein Belief prevails, (...) under, what form it will, are splendid, heart-elevating and fruitful. (shrink)

Although there has been critical analysis of how the informed consent process functions in relation to participation in research and particular ethical 'dilemmas', there has been little examination of consenting to more routine medical procedures. We report a qualitative study of 25 women who consented to surgery. Of these, nine were ambivalent or opposed to having an operation. When faced with a consent form, women's accounts suggest that they rarely do anything other than obey professionals' requests for a signature. An (...) interactionist analysis suggests that women's capacity to act is reduced by the hospital structure of tacit, socially-imposed rules of conduct. Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, capital and symbolic power/violence show how the practical logic that women apply confers a 'sense of place' relative to professionals. Women experience deficits in capital that constrain their ability to exercise choice. This work demonstrates the weakness of the consent process as a safeguard of autonomy. (shrink)

A key issue in economic discourse today is the relation between economic behaviour and morality. Few would want to deny that human beings are in some sense moral or ethical creatures, but the devil is in the detail. Should we think of economic behaviour as an essentially amoral process – a process adequately characterised by a means-ends rationality – into which any number of subjective ethical concerns or orientations may be intruded to give a particular action its determinate moral content? (...) Or is it rather the case that our moral being runs deeper than this, in the sense that all of our behaviour – ‘economic’ or otherwise – is enabled or capacitated by a competence that is fundamentally ethical in character? With new analyses of the work of Hobbes and Smith, Dixon and Wilson offer a fresh approach to the debate surrounding economics and morality with a novel discussion of the self in economic theory. This book calls for a change in the way that the relation between economic behaviour and morality is understood – from an understanding of morality as a kind of preference that informs certain types of other-regarding behaviour, to an idea of morality as a competence that enables or, rather, conditions the possibility of all forms of human behaviour, other-regarding or not. Offering a new insight on homo economicus, this book will be of great interest to all those interested in the history of economics and of economic thought. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 5, Issue 2, pp 251 - 272 The old _Das Adam Smith Problem_ is no longer tenable. Few today believe that Smith postulates two contradictory principles of human action: one in the _Wealth of Nations_ and another in the _Theory of Moral Sentiments_. Nevertheless, an Adam Smith problem of sorts endures: there is still no widely agreed version of what it is that links these two texts, aside from their common author; no widely agreed version of how, (...) if at all, Smith's postulation of self-interest as the organising principle of economic activity fits in with his wider moral-ethical concerns. We argue that the enduring Adam Smith problem may be solved by recourse to a realist perspective that recognises the different levels of social reality to which Smith refers in his discourse. Essential to Smith, we try to show, is the action-theoretic distinction between motive and capacity; between a typology of empirical human acts, on the one hand—self-love and benevolence in Smiths terminology—and the condition of possibility of all human action—what Smith calls the sympathetic principle—on the other. (shrink)

Aldo Leopold’s draft essay “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest” from 1923 shows that his initially expressed moral concerns were primary to his view of conservation. In addition, this early essay also challenged dominant perceptions of environmental degradation in the southwestern United States in the 1920s. For these reasons, it provides a framework for examining conservation as a moral issue in South and West Africa, especially in the nations of South Africa and Ghana, building on J. Baird Callicott’s summaries (...) of Yoruba and San environmental ethics in Earth’s Insights . In the context of poverty, traditional community taboos may have already supplied the social norms of conservation that Leopold desired, but they are marginalized by modernization. As in Leopold’s essay, mainstream perceptions of environmental degradation viewed through the lens of political ecology suggest that international market forces may be more ecologically disruptive than traditional peasant agriculture. Land ethics similar to Leopold’s are implicit within the political philosophies of two of the regions’ most respected recent leaders, Nelson Mandela , who promoted land reform, and Kwame Nkrumah , who promoted pan-Africanism over neocolonialism. Community-based solutions to conservation issues illustrate the successes, failures, and the challenging complexity of modernization in these subregions. (shrink)

There is a long and tortuous history of misinterpreting Smithian social theory. After rehearsing that history we offer here a way of understanding Smith that, unlike much of recent revisionist Smith scholarship, does not further add to this confusion. Our proposal is to understand the relation between moral and economic behaviour in Smith as analogous to the way in which Habermas makes strategic (and normatively oriented) behaviour parasitic on a more basic communicative competence. Given this analogy, it is ironic that (...) Habermas's own understanding of Smith's theory also leaves much to be desired. (shrink)

The old Das Adam Smith Problem is no longer tenable. Few today believe that Smith postulates two contradictory principles of human action: one in the Wealth of Nations and another in the Theory of Moral Sentiments . Nevertheless, an Adam Smith problem of sorts endures: there is still no widely agreed version of what it is that links these two texts, aside from their common author; no widely agreed version of how, if at all, Smith's postulation of self-interest as the (...) organising principle of economic activity fits in with his wider moral-ethical concerns. We argue that the enduring Adam Smith problem may be solved by recourse to a realist perspective that recognises the different levels of social reality to which Smith refers in his discourse. Essential to Smith, we try to show, is the action-theoretic distinction between motive and capacity; between a typology of empirical human acts, on the one hand—self-love and benevolence in Smiths terminology—and the (non-empirical) condition of possibility of all human action—what Smith calls the sympathetic principle—on the other. (shrink)

Today there is a thriving 'emotions industry' to which philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists are contributing. Yet until two centuries ago 'the emotions' did not exist. In this path-breaking study Thomas Dixon shows how, during the nineteenth century, the emotions came into being as a distinct psychological category, replacing existing categories such as appetites, passions, sentiments and affections. By examining medieval and eighteenth-century theological psychologies and placing Charles Darwin and William James within a broader and more complex nineteenth-century setting, (...) Thomas Dixon argues that this domination by one single descriptive category is not healthy. Overinclusivity of 'the emotions' hampers attempts to argue with any subtlety about the enormous range of mental states and stances of which humans are capable. This book is an important contribution to the debate about emotion and rationality which has preoccupied western thinkers throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has implications for contemporary debates. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Philosophy and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle: A Freedom Gaze by Anthony Sean NealKordell DixonPhilosophy and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle: A Freedom Gaze Anthony Sean Neal. Rowman & Littlefield, 2022.Philosophy and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle begins with a clear and concise establishment of its aim: to analyze and expand upon those figures mentioned when discussing the academic project of studying black people. Neal (...) broadens the account of black scholars examining racialized existence by centering his work on the modern era and its initiator W. E. B Du Bois. Neal develops an ethnic reflective canon that documents the long history of black thinkers attempting to define their blackness and advance the conception of freedom. This book does an excellent job of capturing the genealogical structure of the struggle for freedom. Within the work, Neal denotes that all relevant figures in this tradition are freedom gazers. These gazers are spectators of a radically imagined future liberated from the oppressive systems that encumber the persecuted. Du Bois's approach to freedom gazing uses academic training to examine his blackness and inevitably to solve the "race problem." What Neal provides the reader is a road map of the intellectual work of black scholars. This road map details the common themes among black thinkers and how these themes relate to Du Bois. Neal's intricate network of philosophers uses their experience and their expertise to write about what is necessary for black people to obtain freedom. Neal composes a complex and remarkable catalog of black scholars that demonstrates the interconnectedness and progression of black thought on oppression and liberation.In the second chapter, Neal elucidates why Du Bois is chosen as the inaugurator of the modern era. As a formally educated black man, Du Bois questions his experience and what tethers him to oppression. Neal uses Du Bois as a focal point, not because Du Bois is the first black person to document their struggle with their racialized existence, but because he believes that Du Bois is the first scholar to analyze the black experience completely. The holistic nature of Du Bois's study of the existential conflict that race can manifest within its subjects allows Du Bois's analysis to be used as a tool to unify other works that discuss race and the struggle for freedom. Neal expresses how other scholars such as Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, and Anna Julia Cooper all had work that takes up a similar task as Du Bois's but lacks the fullness of Du Bois's study. Here, Neal does not articulate clearly [End Page 87] how these figures are inadequate with respect to their work. It could be argued that each scholar named could be said to have accomplished a task similar to that of Du Bois. However, how these figures are studied throughout different disciplines gives the impression that their examination of race and freedom is much more focused on one specific field. This point speaks to how we interpret the work of these scholars and not to these scholars' work itself. Neal proceeds to describe Du Bois as a freedom gazer and explains how Du Bois's imagining of black persons as freed would allot a perceptual framework that motivates them to proclaim their right to mental and physical freedom. Further, Neal establishes that Du Bois's position as a freedom gazer allows him to expand the ethnic reflective canon. This canon includes Ida B. Wells, whose journalism on the lynching of black people during the Reconstruction era made headway on what social sciences could contribute to the struggle against injustice. Anna Julia Cooper is included in this canon; her radically imagined future was thought to be achieved through education. Wells and Cooper proceeded and directly influenced the work of Du Bois, creating a lineage of radical social thought. Neal maps his transition through the intellectual work of black scholars by using conceptions of peace, rebellion, revolution, and freedom as relational markers. The reader can identify the relationships among the varied work of freedom gazers despite the vast range of their spatiotemporal placement.In the third chapter, Neal examines the subjects Hubert Harrison, William H... (shrink)

Thomas Jefferson and Philosophy: Essays on the Philosophical Cast of Jefferson’s Writings is a collection of essays on topics that relate to philosophical aspects of Jefferson’s thinking over the years. Much historical insight is given to ground the various philosophical strands in Jefferson’s thought and writing on topics such as political philosophy, moral philosophy, slavery, republicanism, wall of separation, liberty, educational philosophy, and architecture.

One of the most fascinating and influential women in French history was Germaine de Staël. Raised in a stimulating intellectual environment by parents connected to the court of Louis XVI, she became an internationally known writer, intellectual, and political activist. As the engaging, intelligent host of a popular salon in Paris and through frequent travels, she met some of the leading Enlightenment figures of the day, many of whom became her friends and confidants: William Pitt the Younger, Benjamin Constant, (...) Lord Byron, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, and Czar Alexander I, to name a few. Later in life she gained much notoriety and had to flee the country because of her outspoken opposition to the tyranny of Napoleon Bonaparte. In this engrossing biography, Sergine Dixon traces both the personal and public life of this very accomplished woman. She recounts her early years in the waning years of the French royal court, the turbulent period of the French Revolution, her exiles to Switzerland and England, and her unwavering defense of republicanism during the reign of Napoleon. Analyzing her novels, correspondence, and writings on politics and the intellectual trends of the time, Dixon presents an appealing portrait of the woman whose life and career bridged the end of the Enlightenment and the beginning of Romanticism. (shrink)

In 1984, William Friedland proposed a Commodity Systems Analysis framework for describing the stages through which a commodity is transformed and how it acquires value. He challenged us to think of commodities as entities with a social as well as a physical presence. Friedland's argument enriched the concept of commodity production, but it remains essentially a supply side perspective.Since then, many commentators have argued that power is shifting from producers to consumers. Furthermore, some are claiming that, contrary to much (...) traditional Marxist thinking about how individuals find meaning through their productive capacities, it is now through consumption that individuals are identifying themselves. Given the significance of this view, it seems timely to extend Friedland's framework to incorporate the consumption perspective.In light of other claims that the distance between production and consumption is increasing, it is equally important to acknowledge the processes that structure the relationship between the two spheres. This entails using new retail geographical and cultural studies to explore further what takes place in distribution and exchange.This article describes a new model for understanding power in commodity systems, one that acknowledges the input and interests of a range of actors beyond the agricultural sector. The proposed cultural economy model also emphasizes a range of value adding processes that are wider than those that apply to commodity production. (shrink)

This chapter details the life of Thomas Brown, successor to Dugald Stewart in the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University. Brown died unexpectedly at a relatively young age, having published very little. However, his posthumously published lectures were highly acclaimed and very influential, both in Britain and abroad. This chapter investigates the sources of Brown’s thought, including his interest in Erasmus Darwin, and outlines the main features of his philosophical position. It thereby identifies his key importance to the nineteenth-century (...) continuation of a debate between followers of David Hume and Thomas Reid, a debate brought to new prominence by Sir William Hamilton’s attack on Brown in the Edinburgh Review. The chapter also offers some assessment of Brown’s philosophical significance. (shrink)

A critical discussion of DAVID WILSON and WILLIAM DIXON, A History of Homo Economicus. The nature of the moral in economic theory, London and New York, Routledge, pp. xviii+123 ISBN 978-0-415-59568-1. I declare agreement with one basic idea in this book, that economic discourse is performative, or economic theory is not pure theorìa. I add several objections to the historical reconstruction carried out os such authors as Malthus and Ricardo and I object to the definition adopted of homo (...) economicus. (shrink)

An experimental, conceptually driven foray into the Patrician field, Ireland’s ubiquitous national apostle – a former captive – is utilised as a vehicle through which to explore a trinity of salient and interrelated themes within the Catholic and Protestant hinterlands of the Irish imagination: visions of imprisonment; of the island; and of imperialism. The reader is guided through aspects of Patrician literature, visits the island’s hallowed Patrician shrines, and is thus shown Purgatory. Insights into the imaginations exhibited by a range (...) of influential Irish ideologues and intellectuals – Gerry Adams; J.B. Bury; John Hume; Eóin MacNeill; Michael McCarthy; John Mitchel; Peadar O’Donnell; Tomás Ó Fiaich; John Ryan; William Ryan; Ian Paisley; Patrick Pearse; Oscar Wilde – are generated. The cognitive (and conspicuously Platonic) terraforming of the prison-cell into an island, and of the island into a giant prison – of either British or Vatican construction – that recurs in much Irish political thought and reflection, is observed. The concluding section involves historiographical reflection: Bury’s, and by extension St. Patrick’s, influence with regards the development of the discipline of Irish history is highlighted. That the island exhibits a distinctive intellectual micro-climate, one in which visions of Patrick act as a formidable ideological force, is implicit throughout. (shrink)

Science and religion pervade the 1973 horror The Exorcist (1973), and the film exists, as the movie’s tagline suggests, ‘somewhere between science and superstition’. Archival materials show the depth of research conducted by writer/director William Friedkin in his commitment to presenting and exploring emerging scientific procedures and accurate Catholic ritual. Where clinical and barbaric science fails, faith and ritual save the possessed child Reagan MacNeil (Linda Blair) from her demons. The Exorcist created media frenzy in 1973, with increased reports (...) in the popular press of demon possessions, audience members convulsing and vomiting at screenings, and apparent religious and specifically Catholic moral outrage. However, the official Catholic response to The Exorcist was not as reactionary as the press claimed. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Office of Film and Broadcasting (USCCB-OFB) officially and publicly condemned the film as being unsuitable for a wide audience, but reviews produced for the office by priests and lay Catholics and correspondence between the Vatican and the USCCB-OFB show that the church at least notionally interpreted it as a positive response to the power of faith. Warner Bros. Studios, however, were keen to promote stories of religious outrage to boost sales and news coverage – a marketing strategy that actively contradicted Friedkin’s respectful and collaborative approach to working with both religious communities and medical professionals. Reports of Catholic outrage were a means of promoting The Exorcist rather than an accurate reflection of the Catholic Church’s nuanced response to the film and its scientific and religious content. (shrink)

This article evaluates the predictions of an algorithmic-level distributed associative memory model as it introduces, propagates, and resolves ambiguity, and compares it to the predictions of computational-level parallel parsing models in which ambiguous analyses are accounted separately in discrete distributions. By superposing activation patterns that serve as cues to other activation patterns, the model is able to maintain multiple syntactically complex analyses superposed in a finite working memory, propagate this ambiguity through multiple intervening words, then resolve this ambiguity in a (...) way that produces a measurable predictor that is proportional to the log conditional probability of the disambiguating word given its context, marginalizing over all remaining analyses. The results are indeed consistent in cases of complex structural ambiguity with computational-level parallel parsing models producing this same probability as a predictor, which have been shown reliably to predict human reading times. (shrink)

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion.

This volume examines the phenomenon of the migration of philosophical texts and traditions into other cultures, identifies places where it may have succeeded, but also where it has not, and discusses what is presupposed in introducing a text or a tradition into another intellectual culture. -- Book Jacket.

What course of action do officers have when their conscience is in conflict with their duty? William A. Gouveia, Jr., describes the case of Col. David Hackworth, whose moral indignation at the conduct of the Vietnam War led him to public condemnation of the conflict, and the premature end of his brilliant military career. Gouveia argues that Hackworth's story has continuing relevancy and highlights important issues of the military?civilian relationship in a democracy.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A DIFFERENT METHOD; A DIFFERENT CASE: THE THEOLOGICAL PROGRAM OF JULIAN HARTT AND AUSTIN FARRER WILLIAM M. WILSON University of Virginia, OharlottesvUZe, Virginia, WRITERS COVERING the work of Julian Hartt or Austin Farrer-the :llew that there ar~generally find that the hest introduction is a straightforward acknowledgement that what is to come is unique. Basil Mitchell, for instance, has said that no matter how one catalogues contemporary theologians, a (...) footnote will be needed, reading " and then of course there is Austin Farrer." 1 Likewise, David Kelsey has said that Hartt's work "is not identi:firuble as a variant on any of the options on the present scene." 2 Those already aicquainted with Hartt and Farrer will no dorurbt agree with the sense o[ these assessments; but if they have heen carefol students they will demand, nev,ertheless, a slight qualification : Hartt,and Farrer.are unique as a party of two. Farrer is a " variant " on Hartt; Hartt belongs down in the footnote aibout Farrer. But from the claim that these two are unique it does not follow that their wo:vk is something akin to those bold " new theologies " fashioned from the innocent's quest for a faith untouched hy either the hands of tradition or the perplexities of our time. Farrer's: anchorage in tradition is obvious throughout his writing and clearly stated in the preiface to his first 1 ' Austin Marsden Farrer,' A Oelebmtion of Fa,ith, ed. Leslie Houlden (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1970), pp.13-14. 2" Christian Sense Making: Hartt's 'Theological Method and Imagination,"' The J owrna,Z of ReUgion Vol. 58 (4), October 1978, p. 428. 599 600 WILLIAM M. WILSON work. There he said that he was " possessed hy the Thomistic vision" and w:as incapable of "thinking it wrong."3 As to novelty, he had this to say:. •. it is indeed absurd to propose new grounds for belief in the existence of God. The belief has stood for more than ~.ooo years if we are to speak of the essentials of transcendental theism. If belief has been reasona9le it has had a reason, and our only business must be to draw this out and restate it.4 It is.fair to say, to 1be sure, that Farrer "drew out" and "restated " that reason in a. way unlike that of any other contemporary Thomist. There are some who would deny him even the label.5 And it is in this sense that Mitchell's statement about him must remain: If " transcendental," " Neo-," and " traditional " Thomist are three current categories, Farrer is a footnote to them. Hartt, unlike Farrer, has ne,ver labeled himself, hut none of his readers can miss his hostility to any pretense to novelty, even to those which have become our standard fare. The good ship theology (has taken) on a radioactive cargo, its company attracted by the dynamic and dazzle of it all. Relevance~ Historicism, several varieties of analysis, Secularism-what a promising manifest! 6 The " spirit of the age " is not to illuminate the gospel, according to Hartt, rather it is the gospel which illuminates the spirit of the age.7 s Finite and Infinite: A Philosophical Essay, Ibid., p. 1. 11 But see note 5 above. JULIAN HARTT AND AUSTIN FARRER 603 I. The Uniqueness of Hartt and Farrer In a recent encydopedia entry, David Kelsey arranges a useful chart of contemporary theology according to the answers given to " the array o:f decisions theologians must make in the course of doing theology." 12 According to Kelsey, theologians must decide the subject matter o:f theology, the importance o:f cultural context, the 1wudience, the significance of the theologian 's vantage point, the goals o:f theology and the best means o:f accomplishing them. For our purposes o:f identifying Hartt and Farrer, however, we need concentrate only on the first and the last-the question o:f subject matter and the question o:f the hest means £or attaining theological ends. The latter (being the last question the theologian must face) best :identifies the overall mind o:f the theologian at work. Thus, against the standard answers given here, I shall try... (shrink)

"Based on the reading of the only twelfth-century manuscript of the Enigma extant, Charleville MS. 114, and an examination of the fifteenth-century manuscript Uppsala C. 79." Revision of the editor's thesis, Catholic University of America, 1971, presented under title: The enigma fidei of William of Saint Thierry, a translation and commentary. Bibliography: p. 119-120.

Resumo: Este artigo corresponde à segunda de duas partes que perfazem um estudo sobre a questão da teleologia nos apontamentos do jovem Nietzsche entre 1867 e 1869. No seu todo, o trabalho pretende oferecer uma leitura de três conjuntos de notas escritos pelo filósofo nesse período: Zu Schopenhauer, Zur Teleologie e Vom Ursprung der Sprache, com um claro enfoque nas notas sobre a teleologia, de 1868. Meu objetivo é tentar mostrar que, apesar das diversas críticas de Nietzsche à teleologia e (...) de sua aparente adesão ao darwinismo, sua posição é melhor compreendida como um tipo de vitalismo, que é receptivo à ideia de uma intencionalidade inconsciente na natureza, mas que recusa explicitamente a concepção antropomorficamente inflacionada de um designer divino. Nesta segunda parte do estudo, encerro minha análise, iniciada na primeira parte, do conjunto de notas reunidas sob o título Zur Teleologie e as contextualizo no horizonte das teses defendidas por Nietzsche no texto Vom Ursprung der Sprache, escrito cerca de um ano depois.: This paper corresponds to the second of two parts that make up a study on the question of teleology in the notes of the young Nietzsche between 1867 and 1869. On the whole, the study intends to offer a reading of three sets of notes written by the philosopher in that period: Zu Schopenhauer, Zur Teleologie, and Vom Ursprung der Sprache, with a clear focus on the notes on teleology of 1868. My aim is to show that, despite Nietzsche’s various criticisms of teleology and his apparent adherence to Darwinism, his position is best understood as a kind of vitalism, which is receptive to the idea of an unconscious intentionality in nature, but explicitly rejects the anthropomorphically inflated conception of a divine designer. In this second part of the study, I close my analysis of the set of notes collected under the title Zur Teleologie and contextualize them in the horizon of the theses defended by Nietzsche in the text Vom Ursprung der Sprache, written a year later. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological CategoryMax RosenkrantzThomas Dixon. From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. x + 287. Cloth, $60.00Thomas Dixon's From Passions to Emotions defends a provocative set of theses. (1) The concept of "emotion" is of relatively recent vintage, having been designed by secular Scottish writers in the (...) first half of the nineteenth century. (2) That concept embraces a range of phenomena that earlier Christian writers such as Augustine and Aquinas understood in terms of a manifold of concepts such as "appetites," "passions," "affections," and "sentiments." (3) The concept of "emotion" is too crude an instrument for understanding human psychology. Further, (4) today the secular conceptual framework has completely displaced the religious one. This has nothing to do with the former's greater proximity to the truth, as is shown by the persistence of cogent Christian theories in the second half of the nineteenth century, the period of secularism's triumph; and (5) The opposition between reason and emotion arises only when theorists begin to think of "emotions" rather than "appetites," "passions," "affections," and "sentiments." Christian writers did not see the passions as simply the enemies of reason.The basis for Dixon's argument is his interpretation of nineteenth-century psychological theory in the English speaking world. Specifically he argues that the concept of "emotion" was invented by the Scottish thinker Thomas Brown (1778-1820). Brown's innovation was then appropriated and developed by Spencer, Darwin, and William James. The foil for this story is the Christian tradition represented most compellingly by Augustine and Aquinas and carried on by a host of lesser nineteenth-century figures. In my judgment, the story thus told cannot bear the weight Dixon places upon it.The centerpiece of Dixon's argument is his claim that Brown "invents" (109) the emotions and thereby initiates a conceptual revolution in western thought. While Dixon may be right in asserting that Brown is the first to use the word 'emotion' in a systematic fashion, this achievement is merely terminological. Brown deploys the term to develop a mechanistic account of human nature, one in which the springs of action are located not in the will and reason, but in the emotions. Replace 'emotion' in the preceding sentence with 'passion' and one gets a concise characterization of Hobbes's view. Dixon is aware that Brown and others work within a Hobbesian framework (250) but does not attend to that framework. Thus his claims for the significance of the developments he describes fail to convince. The real innovation in psychological theory—as in so much else—took place in the seventeenth century.Just as Dixon overestimates the importance and originality of the Scottish writers he discusses, so too he overestimates the intellectual importance of Augustine and Aquinas. His presentation of their views (26-62) is accurate, but he does not note that they take over the Platonic-Aristotelian view of the soul according to which reason can and should penetrate, educate and direct the passions. Thus the guiding thought that structures the work—the nineteenth century witnesses an ultimately successful revolt against Christian psychology—must be rejected. The revolt is against ancient, pre-Christian modes of thought and is undertaken and largely won in the seventeenth century. The events Dixon describes are skirmishes in that larger campaign.The rest of the theses Dixon defends can be dispatched with more quickly. The idea that the modern concept of "emotion" is insufficiently subtle is averted to frequently, but never adequately defended. At no point does Dixon demonstrate, or even claim to demonstrate, that Christian thinkers recognized something secular thinkers miss. Roughly the same can be said for his claims about the persistence of Christian psychology in the nineteenth century. What Dixon means is not just that such thinkers exist, but that their thought remains vibrant. Again I see no argument for such a verdict. Finally, there is the matter of the opposition between reason and passion. To his credit Dixon rejects the view according to which almost all Western thought is hostile to the passions. As he shows, this... (shrink)