Perspectives on Quine, now available in paperback, is a collection of twenty-one new essays dealing with the thought of America's most distinguished living philosopher, Willard Van Orman Quine. After the editors' brief introduction to Quine's thought, the volume opens with an important new essay by Quine entitled Three Indeterminacies. The essays that follow, written by leading philosophers, are rich with insights into a wide variety of Quine's concerns ranging from logic and set theory to natural language, truth, evidence, natural kinds, (...) naturalized epistemology, and much more. Each essay concludes with a summary and response from Quine himself. (shrink)

This study examined the influence of corporate giving programs on the link between certain categories of corporate crime and corporate reputation. Specifically, firms that violate EPA and OSHA regulations should, to some extent, experience a decline in their reputations, while firms that contribute to charitable causes should see their reputations enhanced. The results of this study support both of these contentions. Further, the results suggest that corporate giving significantly moderates the link between the number of EPA and OSHA violations committed (...) by a firm and its reputation. Thus, while a firm's reputation can be diminished through its violation of various government regulations, the extent of the decline in reputation may be significantly reduced through charitable giving. (shrink)

Modularity has been the subject of intense debate in the cognitive sciences for more than 2 decades. In some cases, misunderstandings have impeded conceptual progress. Here the authors identify arguments about modularity that either have been abandoned or were never held by proponents of modular views of the mind. The authors review arguments that purport to undermine modularity, with particular attention on cognitive architecture, development, genetics, and evolution. The authors propose that modularity, cleanly defined, provides a useful framework for directing (...) research and resolving debates about individual cognitive systems and the nature of human evolved cognition. Modularity is a fundamental property of living things at every level of organization; it might prove indispensable for understanding the structure of the mind as well. (shrink)

This paper posits that organizational variables are the factors that lead to the moral decline of companies like Enron and Worldcom. The individuals involved created environments within the organizations that precipitated a spiral of unethical decision-making. It is proposed that at the executive level, it is the organizational factors associated with power and decision-making that have the critical influence on moral and ethical behavior. The study has used variables that were deemed to be surrogate measures of the ethical violations (OSHA (...) and EPA violations), the risky shift phenomenon (executive team size), banality of wrong-doing (reputation score for firms) and escalating commitment (tenure with the firm/change in revenue for declining firms). The research found that there were small correlations between ethical violations and the three organizational variables. (shrink)

Adolf Grünbaum has introduced into the literature [4], and several times revised and restated [5] [6], a description of a putative crucial experiment. The outcome of this experiment is supposed to be the conclusive falsification of an hypothesis to the effect that the geometry of a certain region of space, or of a certain surface, is Euclidean. Hereafter, in this paper, I shall refer to this example experiment, in any and all of the different versions of it that Grünbaum has (...) articulated, along with the argumentation with which he has supplemented it, as "Grünbaum's Falsification Example." I will be concerned with all versions of the experiment itself, but only with the most recent supplementary argumentation that Grünbaum has offered, since the ways in which this differs from earlier arguments reflect a taking into account, on Grünbaum's part, of points critics have raised and flaws that they have purported to find in some of those earlier arguments [7-11]. There are three separate important theses against which one or another version of Grünbaum's Falsification Example may be taken to have been directed. Each of these Grünbaum has either explicitly claimed to refute or at least left himself open to the interpretation that he has sought to refute, by means of the example. I propose to try to make clear that none of these three theses is refuted, or even threatened with counterevidence, by Grünbaum's Falsification Example. (shrink)

The significance of informed consent in research involving humans has been a topic of active debate in the last decade. Much of this debate, we submit, is predicated on an ideology of individualism. We draw on our experiences as anthropologists working in Western and non Western (Iban) health care settings to present ethnographic data derived from diverse scenes in which consent is gained. Employing classical anthropological ritual theory, we subject these observational data to comparative analysis. Our article argues that the (...) individualist assumptions underlying current bioethics guidelines do not have universal applicability, even in Western research settings. This is based on the recognition that the social world is constitutive of personhood in diverse forms, just one of which is individualistic. We submit that greater attention must be paid to the social relations the researcher inevitably engages in when conducting research involving other people, be this in the context of conventional medical research or anthropological field work. We propose, firstly, that the consenting process continues throughout the life of any research project, long after the signature has been secured, and secondly, that both group and individual dimensions of consent, and the sequence in which these dimensions are addressed, should be carefully considered in all cases where consent is sought. (shrink)

W. V. O. Quine's well-known attack upon the analytic-synthetic distinction is held to affect only one of the two species of analytic statements he distinguishes. In particular it is not directed at and does not affect the so-called logical truths. In this paper the scope of Quine's attack is extended so as to embrace the logical truths as well. It is shown that the unclarifiability of the notion of 'synonymy' deprives us not only of "analytic statements that are obtainable from (...) logical truths by the replacement of synonyms with synonyms" but of "logical truths" themselves. (shrink)

Exposure Therapy (ET) has demonstrated its efficacy in the treatment of phobias, anxiety and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), however, it suffers a high drop-out rate because of too low or too high patient engagement in treatment. Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET) is comparably effective regarding symptom reduction and offers an alternative tool to facilitate engagement for avoidant participants. Neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that both ET and VRET normalize brain activity within a fear circuit. However, previous studies have employed brain imaging (...) technology which restricts people’s movement and hides their body, surroundings and therapist from view. This is at odds with the way engagement is typically controlled. We used a novel combination of neural imaging and VR technology—Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) and Immersive Projection Technology (IPT), to avoid these limitations. Although there are a few studies that have investigated the effect of VRET on a brain function after the treatment, the present study utilized technologies which promote ecological validity to measure brain changes after VRET treatment. Furthermore, there are no studies that have measured brain activity within VRET session. In this study brain activity within the prefrontal cortex (PFC) was measured during three consecutive exposure sessions. N = 13 acrophobic volunteers were asked to walk on a virtual plank with a 6 m drop below. Changes in oxygenated (HbO) hemogl... (shrink)

This is a collection of twenty-seven essays written by its author between 1962 and 1989 on topics in the history of science, the philosophy of science, and "the relevance of scientific practice to other parts of philosophy and culture". Twenty-one have been previously published, the remainder hitherto aired only as public presentations. The papers are gathered under six section-headings, including "Explanation," "Hume's Problem," "Logic and Causality," "Machines and Practices," "Scientific Knowledge--Its Scope and Limits," and "Science and Subjectivity"; yet their actual (...) range is both more diverse and less in keeping with prevailing currents in the philosophy of science than these tidily familiar rubrics suggest. "Explanation," for example, flirts with mainstream subject-matter in a much deserved encomium to Hempel's contributions in philosophy of science that reaches beyond the titular subject to the whole of Hempel's work. The section also embraces a discussion of General Systems Theory that distinguishes a doctrinaire, a prioristic approach to the study of science from a pragmatic-pluralistic version, urging the ills of the former and the virtues of the latter. It culminates in two presentations of the view that the theory of evolution rests on "circumstantial evidence" only as it involves the "logical fallacy" of "the inference of causes from effects" : the one is a historical piece on the little-known nineteenth-century naturalist, Phillip Henry Gosse, highlighting his creationistic "Omphalos" theory of the origins of biological species and the fossil record; the other is a short treatment of some conceptual issues involved in the creationist controversy. If the remaining five sections are not so heterogeneous in the scatter of subjects on which their articles touch, they are for the most part more idiosyncratic in the issues they address, the questions they raise, and the answers they suggest. Typical are "On Being in the Same Place at the Same Time," an argument for the ultimacy of subjectivity on the basis of relativity theory, and "Truth and Presence," explicating the attempt of Gaston Bachelard to blend science and poetry as complementary aspects of the human imagination. Sometimes they are also eyebrow-raising. "The Paradox of Induction and the Inductive Wager," would "show the impossibility of... logical proof [of the principle of induction]... by locating it among the paradoxes". Caw's case for paradox is simply that if inductive inference is legitimate then our past inability to justify such inference warrants the inductive conclusion that we shall never be able to justify it. But even if nothing else were suspect in this argument, its force is presumably at most probabilistic, making it hard to see how it could establish the "impossibility" of anything. Another paper, "Three Logics, or the Possibility of the Improbable," concerns "the logic of incredible events", touting the merits of so construing the natural world that events with zero probability occasionally occur and initiate spontaneous causal chains. Yet it is thoroughly unclear what interpretation of probability theory could both license identifying uncaused with impossible events and yet allow that such events may occur. Still another, "Rethinking Intentionality," includes the puzzling contention that "there can't be a science of intention because science presupposes intention". Unlike these last examples, most of the essays in the collection are provocative rather than upsetting, bearing the earmark of the independent, iconoclastic, speculative mind from which they spring, a former physicist not aligned with any of the current schools in philosophy of science, and more influenced by the classic giants of the Western philosophical tradition and by Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre than by empiricist philosophers of science or the recent analytic tradition. Thus, it is no surprise that the issues Caws addresses are nonstandard, and that his manner of addressing them embodies a looser, more broad-stroked, more humanistic, and more metaphysically self-conscious approach than is common in recent mainstream philosophy of science. This orientation doubtless accounts, too, for the somewhat subjective-idealistic stance, the view that one cannot definitively progress beyond one's own sensations and ideas, argued in "Yorick's World or the Universe in a Single Skull," and manifest in the tone, substance, and central thrust of a number of the essays in the collection. It is thus appropriate that Caws should have borrowed from this title to name the anthology itself.-Robert B. Barrett, Washington University in St. Louis. (shrink)

in the context of neville’s other work, the first thing to say about this book is that its main topic, the metaphysics of goodness, carries forward one of the major themes of his entire philosophical corpus, starting with his first article “Man’s Ends,” published in 1962. Together with his ontological theory of creation ex nihilo, Neville’s axiological-relational metaphysics—his metaphysics of harmony—is what most distinguishes his thought and unifies it as a system. Moreover, for Neville, axiology and ontology are integrally related (...) topics. My focus here, however, will be on his axiology.Within the context of modern thought, Neville’s insistence on the reality of goodness is enough to mark him as an outlier, but... (shrink)

In this book, Robert Neville brings together twenty essays that articulate and support his understanding of religion as "human engagement of ultimacy". Most of the essays were originally prepared during the same period in which he wrote his three-volume Philosophical Theology ; accordingly, many of the early chapters can serve as introductions to the latter work. In later chapters, Neville sharpens his view of religion in conversation with various friendly rivals, including philosophical theologians and pragmatists. Most of the essays (...) were originally prepared as talks for diverse audiences; as a result... (shrink)

Is reasoning about religious ritual tethered to ordinary, nonreligious human reasoning about actions? E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley’s ritual form hypothesis constitutes a cognitive approach to religious ritual – an explanatory theory that suggests people use ordinary human cognition to make specific predictions about ritual properties, relatively independent of cultural or religious particulars. Few studies assess the credibility ofrfhand further evidence is needed to generalize its predictions across cultures. Towards this end, we assessed culturally Chinese “special patient” (...) rituals in Singapore. Our findings strongly supportrfhpredictions for special patient ritual repeatability, reversibility, sensory pageantry and emotionality. (shrink)

Barrett et al. present four puzzles for the ZFEL-view of evolution that we present in our 2010 book, Biology’s First Law: The Tendency for Diversity and Complexity to Increase in Evolutionary Systems. Our intent in writing this book was to present a radically different way to think about evolution. To the extent that it really is radical, it will be easy to misunderstand. We think Barrett et al. have misunderstood several crucial points and so we welcome the opportunity (...) to clarify. (shrink)

Because he was a Jesuit, Irish-born Edward Boyd Barrett (1883–1966) had to submit his writing to Jesuit censors, who were charged with making sure that nothing in the documents was contrary to Roman Catholic faith and morals. Drawing upon archival records, this article shows the complexities of the censorship process in the early 20th century. Boyd Barrett’s Motive Force and Motivation-Tracks (1911), an experimental study in will-psychology completed under Michotte, was threatened with withdrawal from circulation after an anonymous (...) review (which was not published) accused the book of modernism. In the 1920s, articles on psychoanalysis directed at a wide Catholic readership, received severe criticism by Jesuit censors, and some were not published. The article presents the censors’ objections and Boyd Barrett’s defense. One effect of censorship was to make psychoanalysis, at least in some formulations, acceptable to a Catholic readership. (shrink)

who would have thought that all four of the excellent commentators on Metaphysics of Goodness would have liked and approved its systematic character? Just when I thought I was the last systematic philosopher! The readers of The Pluralist might prepare for discussions of my system now. Nathaniel Barrett would like me to use Whitehead’s notion of intensity rather than Leibniz’s notion of density of being. Lisa Landoe Hedrick would like me to hew closer to Whitehead’s notion of the location (...) of possibilities than I do. Robert Smid would like me to give evil a permanent place in my system rather than turn out to be merely negative. Tyler Tritten would like me to admit that the Ultimate might be personal rather than... (shrink)

The role of epistemology in philosophy of religion has transformed the discipline by diverting questions away from traditional metaphysical issues and toward concerns about justification and warrant. Leaders responsible for these changes, including Plantinga, Alston and Draper, use methods and arguments fromScottish Enlightenment figures. In general theists use and cite techniques pioneered by Reid and non-theists use and cite techniques pioneered by Hume, a split reduplicated among cognitive scientists of religion, with Justin Barrett and Scott Atran respectively framing their (...) results in Reid’s and in Hume’s language and argument. This state of affairs sets our agenda. First we identify Reid’s use in the epistemology of religion and in the cognitive science of religion. Then we turn to Reid’s texts in an effort to assess the interpretations and extrapolations of Reid given by participants in these debates. The answers to our research questions shed light on what Reid would believe today, were he apprised of the latest research in epistemology of and cognitive science of religion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Truth Shall Make You FreireRobert CanterTeaching Contemporary Theory to Undergraduates, edited by Dianne F. Sadoff and William E. Cain; 271 pp. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1994; $19.75, paper.IThe newest title in the MLA’s Options for Teaching series, this publication is well-timed. Concerns about “classroom advocacy” and “politicized teaching” have recycled into near-critical mass, even in the mass media. The book is well-arranged, too, with a (...) solid sample of deconstructionist, New Historicist, Marxist, feminist, and cultural studies, and more mix-and-match theorists describing their classroom aims and means in twenty-one essays grouped into four sections. Sadoff and Cain offer elegantly evasive introductions—not only to these essays per se, but to the issues these essays purport to address. In “Surveying Theory,” David B. Downing, John Kucich, Susan S. Lanser, Lynette Felber, Donald G. Marshall, and Gary Waller lay broadly “anti-foundational” groundwork. In “Focusing,” Diana Fuss, Sandra A. Grayson, Beverly Lyon Clark, Evan Carton, Laurie A. Finke, Jonathan Arac, and Cary Nelson deconstruct things in more detail. In “Theory and Culture,” Huston Diehl, Cannon Schmitt and Donald Ulin, Lindon Barrett, Simon Gikandi, D. N. Rodowick, and Jan Gorak again widen the scope of “theorized teaching,” aiming regulation anticanonical shrapnel at every bastion of coded convention. And while readers may pause over [End Page 336] its backcover promise of “lively and accessible prose,” on the whole, the book is unusually readable for an MLA publication about theory.Since Teaching Contemporary Theory to Undergraduates is a how-to directed at true-believers, it might seem like critical blindsiding to address its fundamental assumptions rather than its tactical suggestions, to focus on its “theory” rather than on its pedagogy. Yet such a focus is not only fair but necessary. The pedagogy is in this book a pawn of the theory. And the theory is, at best, a lesson in how not to teach students how to learn. For despite all its noisy celebrations of methodological, cultural, ontological, and occasionally even human “difference,” the anthology is really a chorus of self-defeating dogma. 1 Like the virtue of variety, even the relative absence of jargon here works as much against as for the book, revealing self-contradictions so perfectly unwitting that they are twice as funny. It is a good thing, then, that the authors eventually contradict these claims, too—even if they know not that they do.The canon? In accordance with postmodern tradition, “the canon” can be calibrated to be whatever best attacks whatever other tradition a particular theorist is aiming at. It is a very modular “monolith.” And theorists never try to “overdetermine” definitions, anyway. The classroom? As an “overdetermined” site of class-struggle, “the classroom (and the academy at large) is... a social institution designed to reproduce the interests, values, and politics of the dominant social classes” (p. 104). Convention? Anything “mainstream” is so polluted with “the notion of mastery, of total and complete knowledge” that even assigning “mainstream” theorists in a theory class “reproduces that hegemony, no matter how critically we read them” (pp. 105, 61). The runoff of mainstream theorists quoted here—conventional MLA Style—makes the same point. Culture? As always already—and only—“a struggle between power and its disenfranchised shadow,” culture “systematically excludes and marginalizes disenfranchised social members” (pp. 263–64, 20–21).Education? As Paulo Freire has revealed, 2 on the one, bad, goatish, wrong Right-wing hand of God, there is the repressive “banking” model of education; on the other, good-shepherdish, right Left-wing side, there is the liberating “problem-posing” model. You are either a droning clerk bent on subduing students into serfdom, or you are a resistance fighter lighting fuses of freedom. “Instrumental activity” does “pedagogical violence,” making the teacher a tyrant and the student a victim, a “submissive imitator” in a “system” that’s “abidingly committed [End Page 337] to the vision of a white-supremacist oligarchy.” Even asking students what level of “guidance” they feel they need is imposing “rhetorical control” (pp. 32, 23, 222, 135).Facts? The fact is, they are “the discursive gestures of the dominant groups” (p. 222). Unless they are... (shrink)

I suspect that my idea of what it would be like to take a course given by William Barrett is fairly accurate. The flyleaf of his new book reports that Barrett, now Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Pace University, received the Great Teacher Award at New York University. That note and a reading of Barrett's books, the classic Irrational Man, The Illusion of Technique, The Truants, and especially Death of the Soul, lead me to suspect that in (...) the classroom Barrett is as marvelous a communicator as he is on the written page. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to address the role of memory in past-life convictions. Although it is commonly accepted in the modern media - and popular western culture more generally - that people believe they have lived before because the memory contains detailed verifiable facts, little is known about how people actually reason about the veracity of their previous existence. To our knowledge, the current project is the most extensive research that probes the role of memory in past life (...) convictions. More specifically, we explore two questions. First, to what extent does memory lead to past-life belief, and is this conviction based on external validation or via the episodic sense of personal identity contained in the memory? Second, what is the conception of self on which one's current self is taken to be the same as the past-life self? -/- In what follows, we propose that memory plays an important role in convincing people that they have lived before. Fundamentally, this memory is episodic insofar as it represents the event as happened to the encoder. This memory contrasts with semantic memory - memory of facts...Further, we contend that it is the episodic sense of personal identity (rather than external validation) that typically contributes to the belief in a past life. Finally, we argue that the conception of self implicated in past-life belief is the non-trait conception. Of course, this fits naturally with the idea that the belief in a past life issues partly from the episodic sense of identity, since it is the non-trait conception of self that is implicated in the episodic sense of identity... -/- Our proposal in this chapter can be construed as a psychological extension of Reid's point in the context of past-life belief. People assume that they are the same person as someone in earlier times, despite large variations in the traits between those individuals, and they think this partly because of the testimony of their episodic memory. If our account is correct, then it makes the belief in a past life less bizarre, at least psychologically. For we are suggesting that the episodic sense of personal identity that led to your conviction that you existed at the time of your sixteenth birthday celebrations some decades ago, is also involved in other people's convictions that they existed 200 years ago. This proposal is also situated in recent cognitive approaches to the study of religion and religious experiences, which suggests that extraordinary convictions are often underpinned by the ordinary processes of social cognition (e.g. see Barrett 2000; Barrett 2007; Boyer 2001; Lawson and McCauley 1990; for reincarnation, see White Forthcoming-a,-b). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880Robert GrudinThe Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880, by D. G. Myers; 224 pp. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1996, $30.40 paper.D. G. Myers opens his history of creating writing instruction in America with an anecdote: When Vladimir Nabokov was proposed for a chair in literature at Harvard, Roman Jakobson objected. “What’s next?” he said. “Shall we appoint [End Page 529] (...) elephants to teach zoology?” This question not only provides Myers’s book with its title but also suggests a major issue of literary pedagogy: is the teaching of literature the province of philologists and theorists who interpret books, or is it the province of authors who write them? Jakobson the philologist implies that writers, who just produce the stuff, lack knowledge of interpretive method and thus have little business in the classroom. Others—writers and teachers alike—have thought differently and have over the past century fostered the growth of creative writing at American colleges and high schools.The Elephants Teach is a comprehensive and coherent effort to deal with a ponderous mass of history and discourse: the development of writing curricula since 1880 and the ongoing professional dialogue about the proper relationship between writing and teaching. The first four of his seven chapters deal with roots and preliminaries: the rise of literature instruction as philology after the Civil War, the inception of English composition at Harvard (championed by Adams Sherman Hill, Barrett Wendell, Dean Le Baron Briggs, and Charles Townsend Copeland), and the professional, cultural, and financial forces drawing writers to campuses in the early twentieth century. These chapters establish three major forces leading to the rise of the creative writing curriculum: the consensus that writing experience is of value to the individual and society, the reiterated conviction that literary instruction should consider the perspective of the writer, and the broad recognition by “serious” writers, who had little or no access to the mass market, that they could agreeably support themselves in the classroom. These forces would lead to what Myers correctly sees as a massive compromise: a complex of writing programs simultaneously satisfying students’ needs and allowing thousands of writers to pursue, if only by fits and starts, their professional calling.Myers then serves up the main course: a three-chapter narrative, stretching from the 1920s down to the present, of the history of creative writing as a so-named and self-conscious institution in American education. The opening of this section is not only informative but characteristic of the overall lucidity of Myers’s style: “Creative writing was first taught under its own name in the 1920s. It began in junior high school where it was originally conducted as an experiment to replace traditional English—grammar, spelling, penmanship, even literature classes—with something more appealing to young people. As such it was part of a broader movement to reform American education in the first half of the twentieth century. The cry was that subjects should not be taught, students should; the reform movement called itself progressive education. Creative writing was invented to transport progressive methods and materials into a junior-high-school English classroom. The man who invented it was a progressive educator—once well known, now largely forgotten—named Hughes Mearns” (p. 101). William Hughes Mearns (1875–1965) was himself a disciple of John Dewey, whose ideas formed the basis for progressive education in general. Adapting the Deweyan concept of learning as a spur to personal [End Page 530] development, Mearns saw writing “as the efficient cause of an education in which the final cause was personal growth” (pp. 104–11).After Mearns, Myers considers a somewhat more familiar chapter in history: the appearance of creative writing as a self-contained discipline on the college campus. Credit for the original initiative goes to Norman Foerster (1887–1972), who in 1930 took over the newly-founded School of Letters at the University of Iowa. A follower of Irving Babbitt and the “new humanism,” Foerster set out (in his own words) “to give all types of literary students a rigorous and appropriate discipline” (p. 126). Foerster’s “discipline” was a varied curriculum including... (shrink)

Professor Robert John Barrett died suddenly, after a long and difficult illness, on January 12th, 2007. At the time of his death, at the age of 57, he was Head of the Discipline of Psychiatry at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, University of Adelaide. His passing was mourned by countless individuals in Australia and internationally. The celebration of his life, held in the University of Adelaide’s Bonython Hall, from which generations of scholars have received their parchments upon graduation, was (...) an emotive ritual of which Rob would have both approved and also enjoyed immensely. The Hall was filled to capacity, with over 1,300 people listening to a collection of his favourite music and tributes delivered by eight of his friends and family members. Dignitaries in full academic regalia, including the Vice-Chancellor, the immediate past and current Deans of Medicine, and the Head of School oversaw proceedings from an elevated position in the Hall, the symbolic meaning of which would have caused Rob to smile wryly. A reflection of his life in pictures, at the conclusion of the ceremony, before the pall-bearers carried his coffin to the hearse, evoked yet more tears and grief at the tragic and untimely loss of this man: an outstanding intellectual, wise mentor, gifted teacher, caring doctor, and true and loyal friend. (shrink)

Victorian poets Elizabeth Barrett (1806-1861) and Robert Browning (1812-1889) first fell in love through letters, which they began to write to each other in 1845 (Figures 1 and 2). Their growing relationship, slowly progressing from letter to first encounter and eventual secret marriage in 1846, is documented in two volumes of letters, with a plot that unfolds as warmly and compellingly as the best page-turner invented by a novelist. Both were master wordsmiths, so the beauty of their letters (...) is no surprise. But one reason Barrett Browning was such a prolific correspondent is that she spent much of her life housebound, due to an illness whose nature was never truly explained when she was alive and that has been .. (shrink)

During Hallowe'en of 1970, the Department of Philosophy of the Univer sity of Western Ontario held its annual fall colloquium at London, On tario. The general topic of the sessions that year was conceptual change. The thirteen papers composing this volume stem more or less directly from those meetings; six of them are printed here virtually as delivered, while the remaining seven were subsequently written by invitation. The programme of the colloquium was to have consisted of major papers delivered by (...) Professors Wilfrid Sellars, Stephan Korner, Paul Ziff and Hilary Putnam, with shorter commentary thereupon by Professors Robert Binkley, Joseph Ullian, Jerry Fodor and Robert Barrett, respec tively. And that is the way it happened, with one important exception: at the eleventh hour, Sellars and Binkley exchanged roles. This gave Binkley the rather unusual and challenging task of providing a suitable Sellarsian answer to a question not of his own asking - for Binkley's paper was written under Sellars' original title. Sellars' own contribution to the vo lume is perhaps more nearly what he would have presented as main speaker than a direct response to Binkley. However, it has seemed best, on balance, to attempt no further stylistic accommodation of the one paper to the other; their mutual philosophical relevance will be evident in any case. The editors would here like to extend special thanks to both Sellars and Binkley for their extraordinary efforts under the circumstances. (shrink)

Robert McCauley's Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not provides a summary interpretive statement of the standard model in cognitive science of religion, what I have previously called the HADD + ToM + Cultural Epidemiology model, along with a more general argument comparing religious cognition to scientific thinking and a novel framework for understanding both in terms of the concept of the maturationally natural. I here follow up on some observations made in a previous paper, developing them in (...) light of McCauley's own response to my previous arguments. (shrink)