Making a Scientific Case for Conscious Agency and Free Will makes a series of arguments that certain human behaviors are impossible to explain in the absence of free will, and that free will emerges from materialistic processes of brain function. It outlines future directions for neuroscience studies that can harness emerging technologies and tools for systems-level analysis."--Page 4 of cover.

This study examined the relationship between the proportion of women serving on firms' boards of directors and the extent to which these same firms engaged in charitable giving activities. Using a sample of 185 Fortune 500 firms for the 1991-1994 time period, the results provide strong support for the notion that firms having a higher proportion of women serving on their boards do engage in charitable giving to a greater extent than firms having a lower proportion of women serving on (...) their boards. Further, the results suggest a link between the percentage of women on boards and firm philanthropy in the areas of community service and the arts, but found no link between women boardmembers and firm giving to support education or public policy issues. The implications of the findings and some areas for future research are discussed. (shrink)

Investigates the concept of recognition (anerkennen) under which term the German idealists discussed the Other, intersubjectivity, the interhuman.

Arthur Danto invokes his philosophy of history to authorize a reading of Nietzsche that his philosophy of history nevertheless undermines. Danto's Nietzsche was a system builder, for, “if only tacitly,” he submitted his thinking to the demands of the philosophical “discipline,” “where there is no such thing as an isolated solution to an isolated problem”. In his Analytical Philosophy of History, Danto invents a character he dubs “the Ideal Chronicler.” Danto's notion of a narrative sentence clarifies his idea that historical (...) understanding is retrospective; that it is a matter of assigning significance to earlier events in light of later ones – thus, a matter of placing earlier events within a story we wish to tell. Danto attributes the structural coherence of Nietzsche's writings both to historical understanding and to the systematizing tendencies of philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

Most views of personal identity allow that sometimes, facts of personal identity can be borderline or indeterminate. Bernard Williams argued that regarding questions of one’s own survival as borderline “had no comprehensible representation” in one’s emotions and expectations. Whether this is the case, I will argue, depends crucially on what account of indeterminacy is presupposed.

Explores convergences between the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and African American thought.

In arguing that Nietzsche's _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_ is a philosophical explanation of the possibility of modernism—that is, of the possibility of radical cultural change through the creation of new values—the author shows that literary fiction can do the work of philosophy. Nietzsche takes up the problem of modernism by inventing Zarathustra, a self-styled cultural innovator who aspires to subvert the culture of modernity by creating new values. By showing how Zarathustra can become a creator of new values, notwithstanding the forces (...) that hinder his will to innovate, Nietzsche answers the skeptic who proclaims that new-values creation is impossible. _Zarathustra_ is a story of repeated clashes between Zarathustra's avant-garde, modernist intentions and figures of doubt who condemn those intentions. Through a close reading of _Zarathustra_, the author reconstructs Nietzsche's explanation of the possibility of modernism. Showing how parody, irony, and plot organization frame that explanation, he also demonstrates the central significance of Zarathustra's speeches on the body and the will to power. The author argues that Nietzsche's critique of the modern philosophy of the subject revises Kant's concept of the dynamical sublime and makes allegorical use of the myth of Theseus, Ariadne, and Dionysus. He also proposes an original interpretation of the thought of eternal recurrence. Breaking with conventional Nietzsche scholarship, the author conceptualizes the thought not as a theoretical or a practical doctrine that Nietzsche endorses, but as a developing drama that Zarathustra performs. (shrink)

This book describes what the Jainas considered to be the way of life proper to a layman. It attempts to examine the contents of the principal Jaina Sravakacaras. As these texts are not well known and often not easily accessible, some information about.

In the remarks that follow I concentrate on Lorenzo Simpson's two books, Technology, Time and the Conversations of Modernity (cited as TTC) and The Unfinished Project: Toward a Postmetaphysical Humanism (cited as UP). Common to both works — what unites them, I believe — is a philosophical orientation that has been deeply influenced by Gadamerian hermeneutics. I begin with a discussion of UP.

A collection of 16 essays which assess the revival of development studies in relation to Aristotle.

Synthese 156 (3) (2007). Special issue ed. with Luc Bovens. With contributions by Max Albert, Branden Fitelson, Dennis Dieks, Igor Douven and Wouter Meijs, Alan Hájek, Colin Howson, James Joyce, and Patrick Suppes.

Although Elliot L. Jurist’s review of Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other was not unfavorable and indeed very helpful in showing the importance of the topic of recognition for contemporary philosophy, he nevertheless so fundamentally misrepresents my position that I am obliged to reply. For those who may have missed the review, the central issues are the following: Jurist asserts.

This edition of a recently discovered manuscript provides the first full look at Hegel's Philosophy of Subjective Spirit. The lectures of 1827 go far beyond Hegel's previously published Encyclopedia outline, and provide a new introduction to the Philosophy of Spirit. Robert Williams's translation will stimulate interest in a neglected area in Hegel scholarship, but one to which Hegel himself attached special importance and significance.

In this significant contribution to Hegel scholarship, Robert Williams develops the most comprehensive account to date of Hegel's concept of recognition. Fichte introduced the concept of recognition as a presupposition of both Rousseau's social contract and Kant's ethics. Williams shows that Hegel appropriated the concept of recognition as the general pattern of his concept of ethical life, breaking with natural law theory yet incorporating the Aristotelian view that rights and virtues are possible only within a certain kind of community. (...) He explores Hegel's intersubjective concept of spirit as the product of affirmative mutual recognition and his conception of recognition as the right to have rights. Examining Hegel's Jena manuscripts, his _Philosophy of Right_, the _Phenomenology of Spirit_, and other works, Williams shows how the concept of recognition shapes and illumines Hegel's understandings of crime and punishment, morality, the family, the state, sovereignty, international relations, and war. A concluding chapter on the reception and reworking of the concept of recognition by contemporary thinkers including Derrida, Levinas, and Deleuze demonstrates Hegel's continuing centrality to the philosophical concerns of our age. (shrink)

This paper considers W.E.B. Du Bois’s short story, “Jesus Christ in Texas,” in the perspective of his analysis of the concept of beauty in Darkwater (1920); his exposition of the idea that “all art is propaganda” in “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926); and his moral psychology of white supremacy. On my account, Du Bois holds that beautiful art can help to undermine white supremacy by using representations of moral goodness to expand the white supremacist’s ethical horizons. To defend this thesis, (...) he relies on an image of “the cross and the lynching tree” to revise imagery that he draws from Albrecht Dürer’s 1504 painting, “The Adoration of Kings.”. (shrink)

The main aim of this work was initially a modest one, 'to collect information as to the main facts of Hutcheson's life in Dublin prior to his appointment as Professor at Glasgow'. As the materials grew, however, and Scott's interest in Hutcheson deepened, the planned article expanded into a book that has since become the standard biography. The emphasis throughout is on the development of Hurcheson's thought in the context of an ongoing debate with his contemporaries.

This paper has three sections. 1) For Hegel, the true infinite is the fundamental concept of philosophy. The true infinite challenges current non-metaphysical interpretations of Hegel, as it challenged Kant’s restriction of cognition to finitude and attack on metaphysics. The consciousness of limit implies a transcendence of limit, and an infinite opposed to the finite shows itself to be finite. 2) Hegel accepts Kant’s approach to the God-question through practical reason, but rejects Kant’s postulates as incoherent. The content of the (...) God-postulate contradicts the subject-relative form of the postulate. Kant’s moral God is a spurious infinite. The true infinite is a self-determining, self-realizing, inclusive whole which sublates the subjective ‘ought to be’ of the postulate. 3) For both Hegel and Nietzsche the moral god is dead; both pursue the question of theology after the death of God. I explore Hegel’s account of tragedy and his conception of tragic reconciliation. The latter is not a comic, but an “anguished reconciliation, a disquieted bliss in disaster.” The death of God and reconciliation include negation and suffering, and are closer to tragic reconciliation than to Dante’s Divine Comedy with its impassible absolute that lacks serious opposition. (shrink)

Alfred Schutz identified two different approaches to the problem of intersubjectivity. The first is the transcendental, which maintains the primacy of subjectivity, and identifies the problem of the other as a transcendental problem. For example, in Husserl’s phenomenological idealism, all meaning is relative to a transcendental constituting subject. Hence the “problem of intersubjectivity” is to show how the other comes to be constituted, comes to be meant as a sense. The difficulty with such an approach is that if the other (...) is a meaning relative to and analogous to the constituting subject, the transcendence and irreducibility of the other to consciousness seem to be undermined. Transcendental idealism never reaches the “other” because the other is precisely what I do not constitute, but can only encounter. The recognition of the inadequacy of the transcendental approach leads to a second, namely, the other is encountered on the basis and background of the natural attitude and/or life-world. When the transcendental approach is abandoned, the “problem of the other” turns into a series of descriptions of either encounters or social situations. Ontology is replaced by critical theory of society. In either case, an ontology of intersubjectivity seems to be excluded. (shrink)

There is longstanding interest within anthropology and sociology in the meaning of humour, but little research that examines humour within fathers’ health experiences. This paper specifically analyses fathers’ stories about humour shared with other men, and the links between gender and health, in order to identify the implications for health‐care and future research. Findings indicate that humour is an important aspect of fathers’ experiences of social connectedness with other men. Indeed, for African‐Caribbean fathers specifically, humour was an important aspect of (...) their relationships with other ethnic minority men. Humour was also used to objectify, humiliate or ridicule others, for example in the form of sexualised or racist humour. However, fathers’ stories were also mediated by masculinities, it that masculinities enabled fathers to avoid disclosure of vulnerability regarding health experiences to others. The links between masculinities and health, the implications for interviewing fathers, and the implications for future research and healthcare practice with fathers are also discussed. (shrink)