In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Lessons of TheoryJay PariniOne does not have to look far these days to find someone bashing literary theory, and in some respects it deserves it. Joseph Epstein, for one, has almost never tired of picking away at the motives of those who engage in literary theory: “The major impulse of theory was suspicion,” he has said. “In this regard theory gave that portion of the professoriat who came (...) through the sixties unfulfilled, and those younger professors—women, ethnic minorities, homosexuals—who chose to squeeze all they could out of their self-created status of victimhood, a large and lovely outlet for their resentment.” The irony is that one hears in this semi-hysterical cri de coeur the very suspicion that the author is supposedly complaining about. Mr. Epstein, neither female nor gay, apparently feels passed over. Inadvertently, he has become the Victim himself.Literary theory—or just “theory”—has frightened a whole generation of intellectuals into early mental retirement, mostly because they have not the stamina or will to enter into appropriate conversation with their younger colleagues. Perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of the debate over theory has been this extension into the academy of what, in the sixties, used to be called the generation gap; indeed, many of the same dynamics seem to apply, with theorists pitting themselves against all forms of authority. “Never trust anyone under thirty” has been transmogrified into “Never trust anyone who doesn’t appreciate Foucault.”In the seventies, theory moved toward the center of the curriculum at most American graduate schools of literature, and it has remained in place for nearly a quarter of a century. The charge is often heard, perhaps with some justice, that students now spend more time reading [End Page 91] Foucault or Derrida than Shakespeare or Dante, and that this has created an imbalance. But even here, the situation is exaggerated; graduate students do indeed get a heavy dose of theory, yet one sees few undergraduate classrooms in the United States where anything resembling literary theory has displaced the teaching of canonical texts. For the most part what has happened is that the canon has been widened to include texts by previously overlooked writers—usually texts by women or minorities. Such a development hardly threatens to erase or even partially to occlude Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton.The charge that theory is unreadable is, for me, a more important criticism. (There’s a joke I like in this regard: Question: What do you get when you cross a deconstructionist with a mafioso? Answer: An offer you can’t understand.) Jargon has overwhelmed literary criticism to the point where the so-called Common Reader is now fiercely excluded from the conversations that take place in most professional journals and academic conferences, and the consequences of this exclusionary practice are profound. The most obvious effect is that serious literature itself, and thinking about literature and its place in the world, is removed from mainstream consumption. As a result, the general quality of our national discourse—in the arts as well as collateral areas, such as politics—is diminished.This said, I would still argue that an intellectual revolution of sorts has indeed occurred in the last thirty years, and that theory has permanently changed the ways that we—as readers and writers—go about our reading and, yes, our thinking. The peak of the battle over theory passed several years ago; in fact, we seem to have entered a “post-theoretical” moment, and so the time may have arrived for reassessing some of the lessons of theory. This “revolution” is pretty much a literal one: a turning of the wheel. But the wheel has been turning for a long time. Our ways of reading have been challenged almost continuously from the beginning of this century, when the belles-lettres style of criticism popular just after the Great War was dislodged by the philologists, and the philologists were attacked by the literary historians, and the historians were pushed temporarily to one side in the late forties and early fifties by the New Critics. And so forth. The history of criticism is simply a history of overturnings, or absorptions (I rather... (shrink)

Do the rich descriptions and narrative shapings of literature provide a valuable resource for readers, writers, philosophers, and everyday people to imagine and confront the ultimate questions of life? Do the human activities of storytelling and complex moral decision-making have a deep connection? What are the moral responsibilities of the artist, critic, and reader? What can religious perspectives—from Catholic to Protestant to Mormon—contribute to literary criticism? Thirty well known contributors reflect on these questions, including iterary theorists Marshall Gregory, James Phelan, (...) and Wayne Booth; philosophers Martha Nussbaum, Richard Hart, and Nina Rosenstand; and authors John Updike, Charles Johnson, Flannery O'Connor, and Bernard Malamud. Divided into four sections, with introductory matter and questions for discussion, this accessible anthology represents the most crucial work today exploring the interdisciplinary connections between literature, religion and philosophy. (shrink)

Identity has been addressed from diverse perspectives that range from a conceptualisation of it as a pre-existing and static notion to a view that regards it as dynamically constructed in interaction. In this work, we take the latter as the guiding principle for our investigation into the ways in which identity is co-constructed by Argentinian university students in casual conversations. The analysis is carried out on the premise that there is an unquestionable relationship between discourse, identity and social processes. Given (...) the nature of the topic, an eclectic theoretical framework has been employed. An exhaustive examination of the data reveals the different types of identities deployed by the participants, the linguistic resources and the discursive functions used in the negotiation of identities. The analysis also shows that the emerging identities can be heavily conditioned by the topics addressed by the interactants. (shrink)

Based on the author's nearly 30 years' of teaching introductory philosophy — and his observations of where beginning readers run into difficulty — this compact “primer” gives readers the basic tools they need to explore philosophical reading and writing for the first time. Provides insights and strategies for helping readers get started with reading, thinking about, and discussing philosophical concepts and writing short philosophical essays about what they've been reading and thinking; includes a new chapter that illustrates techniques for probing (...) beneath the expository surface of a given question to uncover the inevitable structure of presuppositions and problems underlying it. (shrink)

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize With a new preface by the author In his most powerful and important book, renowned psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton presents a brilliant analysis of the crucial role that German doctors played in the Nazi genocide. Now updated with a new preface, The Nazi Doctors remains the definitive work on the Nazi medical atrocities, a chilling exposé of the banality of evil at its epitome, and a sobering reminder of the darkest side of (...) human nature. (shrink)

Lorsque la revue m’a proposé de rédiger le compte-rendu du livre collectif coordonné par Isabelle Clair et Elsa Dorlin, j’ai tout de suite accepté. La rencontre avec Eleni Varikas a été pour moi l’une des plus belles expériences que j’ai pu vivre dans le monde universitaire. L’œuvre d’Eleni m’a particulièrement marquée et ses écrits sont au programme de mes cours de théorie politique et d’histoire des idées politiques dans une perspective féministe depuis de nombreuses années. Non seulement s...

Attitudinal- and stress theory are used to investigate the effect of ethical climate on job outcomes. Responses from 208 service employees who work for a country health department were used to test a structural model that examines the process through which ethical climate (EC) affects turnover intention (TI). This study shows that the EC–TI relationship is fully mediated by role stress (RC), interpersonal conflict (IC), emotional exhaustion (EE), trust in supervisor (TS), and job satisfaction (JS). Results show that EC reduces (...) (RS) and increases TS. Lower stress levels result in lower EE, higher JS, and lower TI. Also, supervisor trust (TS) reduces IC and EE. The structural model predicts 53.9% of the variance of TI. (shrink)

Leaders play a critical role in setting the tone for ethical climate in organizations. In recent years, there has been an increased skepticism about the role played by corporate executives in developing and implementing ethics in business practices. Sales and marketing practices of businesses, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry, have come under increased scrutiny. This study identifies a type of leadership style that can help firms develop an ethical climate. Responses from 333 salespeople working for a North American subsidiary of (...) an international pharmaceutical company were used to analyze the impact of instrumental leadership on ethical climate. We also examined the effect of ethical climate on effort, satisfaction with the supervisor, and job satisfaction. Managerial implications are provided. (shrink)

Context: Ernst von Glasersfeld collaborated with the Italian Operational School from the early 1960s when the project on the mechanization of higher human activities began. Problem: To analyze the cognitive processes in terms of a mnemonic-attentional dynamic and to study every thought content in light of the interdependence between observer and observed. Method: The project comprised two research areas: the linguistic translation, in which von Glasersfeld participated; and the semantic analysis of words, in which I participated. The common basis was (...) the analysis of attentional dynamisms. This allowed the syntactic complexity of a sentence to be transferred to the correlational structure of the thought. The semantic analysis, especially of the observational words, was based on the attentional dynamisms used for the categorization, perception, and representation processes. Results: The analysis of visual processes led to the “constitutive structures.” These structures allowed me to establish an operative didactic based on the awareness of mental operations. Implications: The comparison between von Glasersfeld’s and my experiences revealed the equivalence of some analyses, which was due to the common presumption that the experiential units depend on the operation performed by the perceiver. (shrink)

Recently published consensus recommendations on pediatric decision-making by Salter and colleagues (2023) did not address neonatal decision-making, due to the unique complexities of neonatal care. This essay explores three areas that impact neonatal decision-making: legal and policy considerations, rapid technological advancement, and the unique emotional burdens faced by parents and clinicians during the medical care of neonates. The authors evaluate the six consensus recommendations related to these considerations and conclude that the consensus recommendations apply to neonates.

In this eye-opening look at the doctor-patient decision-making process, physician and law professor Jay Katz examines the time-honored belief in the virtue of silent care and patient compliance. Historically, the doctor-patient relationship has been based on a one-way trust -- despite recent judicial attempts to give patients a greater voice through the doctrine of informed consent. Katz criticizes doctors for encouraging patients to relinquish their autonomy, and demonstrates the detrimental effect their silence has on good patient care. Seeing a growing (...) need in this age of medical science and sophisticated technology for more honest and complete communication between physician and patients, he advocates a new, informed dialogue that respects the rights and needs of both sides. In a new foreword to this edition of The Silent World of Doctor and Patient , Alexander Morgan Capron outlines the changes in medical ethics practice that have occurred since the book was first published in 1984, paying particular attention to the hotly debated issues of physician-assisted suicide and informed consent in managed care. (shrink)

Force Fields collects the recent essays of Martin Jay, an intellectual historian and cultural critic internationally known for his extensive work on the history of Western Marxism and the intellectual migration from Germany to America.

During John Dewey's lifetime, one public opinion poll after another revealed that he was esteemed to be one of the ten most important thinkers in American history. His body of thought, conventionally identified by the shorthand word "Pragmatism," has been the distinctive American philosophy of the last fifty years. His work on education is famous worldwide and is still influential today, anticipating as it did the ascendance in contemporary American pedagogy of multiculturalism and independent thinking. His University of Chicago Laboratory (...) School thrives still and is a model for schools worldwide, especially in emerging democracies. But how was this lifetime of thought enmeshed in Dewey's emotional experience, in his joys and sorrows as son and brother, husband and father, and in his political activism and spirituality? Acclaimed biographer Jay Martin recaptures the unity of Dewey's life and work, tracing important themes through the philosopher's childhood years, family history, religious experience, and influential friendships. Based on original sources, notably the vast collection of unpublished papers in the Center for Dewey Studies, this book tells the full story, for the first time, of the life and times of the eminent American philosopher, pragmatist, education reformer, and man of letters. In particular, _The Education of John Dewey_ highlights the importance of the women in Dewey's life, especially his mother, wife, and daughters, but also others, including the reformer Jane Addams and the novelist Anzia Yezierska. A fitting tribute to a master thinker, Martin has rendered a tour de force portrait of a philosopher and social activist in full, seamlessly reintegrating Dewey's thought into both his personal life and the broader historical themes of his time. (shrink)

This book expounds and defends a new conception of the relation between truth and meaning. Atlas argues that the sense of a sense-general sentence radically underdetermines its truth-conditional content. He applies this linguistic analysis to illuminate old and new philosophical problems of meaning, truth, falsity, negation, existence, presupposition, and implicature. In particular, he demonstrates how the concept of ambiguity has been misused and confused with other concepts of meaning, and how the interface between semantics and pragmatics has been misunderstood. The (...) problems he tackles are common to philosophy, linguistics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence, and his conclusions will be of interest to all those working in these fields. (shrink)

Reason and Value collects 15 new papers by leading contemporary philosophers on themes from the work of Joseph Raz. Raz has made major contributions in a wide range of areas, including jurisprudence, political philosophy, and the theory of practical reason; but all of his work displays a deep engagement with central themes in moral philosophy. The subtlety and power of Raz's reflections on ethical topics make his writings a fertile source for anyone working in this area. Especially significant are his (...) explorations of the connections between practical reason and the theory of value, which constitute a sustained and penetrating treatment of a set of issues at the very center of moral philosophy as it is practiced today. The contributors to the volume acknowledge the importance of Raz's contributions by engaging critically with his positions and offering independent perspectives on the topics that he has addressed. The volume aims both to honour Raz's accomplishments in the area of ethical theorizing, and to contribute to an enhanced appreciation of the significance of his work for the subject. (shrink)

This fresh look at the philosophy of language focuses on the interface between a theory of literal meaning and pragmatics--a philosophical examination of the relationship between meaning and language use and its contexts. Here, Atlas develops the contrast between verbal ambiguity and verbal generality, works out a detailed theory of conversational inference using the work of Paul Grice on Implicature as a starting point, and gives an account of their interface as an example of the relationship between Chomsky's Internalist Semantics (...) and Language Performance. Atlas then discusses consequences of his theory of the Interface for the distinction between metaphorical and literal language, for Grice's account of meaning, for the Analytic/Synthetic distinction, for Meaning Holism, and for Formal Semantics of Natural Language. This book makes an important contribution to the philosophy of language and will appeal to philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists. (shrink)

Achieving genuine engagement and understanding between communities with radically divergent worldviews is challenging. If there is no common ground on which to stand and have a discussion, the likely outcomes of an apparent intercultural disagreement are a stalemate, or the (sometimes colonialist) imposition of a single worldview, or a kind of relativistic tolerance that falls short of genuine engagement. In this paper, we suggest a way forward that takes as its starting point the philosophical discussion of deep disagreement, using the (...) example of taniwha (powerful water beings that must be treated with respect) to outline a strategy for building intercultural understanding and enabling constructive intercultural dialogue. (shrink)

This is a book for scholars of Western philosophy who wish to engage with Buddhist philosophy, or who simply want to extend their philosophical horizons. It is also a book for scholars of Buddhist studies who want to see how Buddhist theory articulates with contemporary philosophy. Engaging Buddhism: Why it Matters to Philosophy articulates the basic metaphysical framework common to Buddhist traditions. It then explores questions in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, phenomenology, epistemology, the philosophy of language and ethics as (...) they are raised and addressed in a variety of Asian Buddhist traditions. In each case the focus is on philosophical problems; in each case the connections between Buddhist and contemporary Western debates are addressed, as are the distinctive contributions that the Buddhist tradition can make to Western discussions. Engaging Buddhism is not an introduction to Buddhist philosophy, but an engagement with it, and an argument for the importance of that engagement. It does not pretend to comprehensiveness, but it does address a wide range of Buddhist traditions, emphasizing the heterogeneity and the richness of those traditions. The book concludes with methodological reflections on how to prosecute dialogue between Buddhist and Western traditions. (shrink)

Over a decade ago, John Sowa did the AI community the great service of introducing it to the Existential Graphs of Charles Sanders Peirce. EG is a formalism which lends itself well to the kinds of thing that Conceptual Graphs are aimed at. But it is far more; it is a central element in the mathematical, logical, and philosophical thought of Peirce; this thought is fruitful in ways that are seldom evident when we first encounter it. In one of his (...) major works on Existential Graphs, Peirce remarks that. (shrink)

Journal of Applied Philosophy, EarlyView.

The current study uses a sensemaking model and thinking strategies identified in earlier research to examine ethical decision making. Using a sample of 163 undergraduates, a low-fidelity simulation approach is used to study the effects personal involvement (in causing the problem and personal involvement in experiencing the outcomes of the problem) could have on the use of cognitive reasoning strategies that have been shown to promote ethical decision making. A mediated model is presented which suggests that environmental factors influence reasoning (...) strategies, reasoning strategies influence sensemaking, and sensemaking in turn influences ethical decision making. Findings were mixed but generally supported the hypothesized model. It is interesting to note that framing the outcomes of ethically charged situations in terms of more global organizational outcomes rather than personal outcomes was found to promote the use of pro-ethical cognitive reasoning strategies. (shrink)

This paper addresses some connections between conceptions of the will and the theory of practical reason. The first two sections argue against the idea that volitional commitments should be understood along the lines of endorsement of normative principles. A normative account of volition cannot make sense of akrasia, and it obscures an important difference between belief and intention. Sections three and four draw on the non-normative conception of the will in an account of instrumental rationality. The central problem is to (...) explain the grip of instrumental requirements even in cases in which agents do not fully endorse the ends they are pursuing. The solution I propose appeals to coherence constraints on the beliefs that condition the distinctive volitional stance of intention. (shrink)

In this commentary on Torbjörn Tännsjö’s Setting Health-Care Priorities, I argue that sufficientarianism provides a valuable perspective in considering how to set health care priorities. I claim that pace Tännsjö, sufficientarianism does offer a distinct alternative to prioritarianism. To demonstrate this, I introduce sufficientarianism and distinguish two forms: Tännsjö’s “weak sufficientarianism” and an alternative strong form of sufficientarianism that I call “revised lexical sufficientarianism.” I raise a problem for Tännsjö’s sufficientarianism, and advocate for the revised view on this basis. I (...) then demonstrate that in the area of population ethics, the revised view outperforms the other views Tännsjö considers. As such, I aim to demonstrate that sufficientarianism — understood as its own theory and not just as a form of prioritarianism — offers unique advantages in population ethics, and would have been a valuable complement to the other theories Tännsjö considers. (shrink)

For nearly two thousand years Buddhism has mystified and captivated both lay people and scholars alike. Seen alternately as a path to spiritual enlightenment, an system of ethical and moral rubrics, a cultural tradition, or simply a graceful philosophy of life, Buddhism has produced impassioned followers the world over. The Buddhist saint Nagarjuna, who lived in South India in approximately the first century CE, is undoubtedly the most important, influential, and widely studied Mahayana Buddhist philosopher. His many works include texts (...) addressed to lay audiences, letters of advice to kings, and a set of penetrating metaphysical and epistemological treatises. His greatest philosophical work, the Mulamadhyamikakarika--read and studied by philosophers in all major Buddhist schools of Tibet, China, Japan, and Korea--is one of the most influential works in the history of Indian philosophy. Now, in The Foundations of the Philosophy of the Middle Way, Jay L. Garfield provides a clear and and eminently readable translation of Nagarjuna's seminal work, offering those with little of no prior knowledge of Buddhist philosophy a view into the profound logic of the Mulamadhyamikakarika. Translated from the Tibetan, the tradition through which Nagarjuna's philosophical influence has largely been transmitted, Garfield presents a superb translation of Mulamadhyamikakarika in its entirety. Illuminating the systematic character of Nagarjuna's reasoning, as well as the works profundity, Garfield shows how Nagarjuna develops his doctrine that all phenomena are empty of inherent existence and essenceless. But, he argues, phenomena nonetheless exist conventionaly, and that indeed conventional existence and ultimate emptiness are in fact the same thing. This represents the radical understanding of the Buddhist doctrine of the two truths, or two levels of reality. Nagarjuna reinterprets all of Buddhist metaphysics and epistemology through this analytical framework--"a systematic and beautifully elegant philosophical dissection of reality." In turn, Garfield goes on to offer the only verse-by-verse commentary based upon the Indo-Tibetan Prasangika-Madhyamika reading of Nagarjuna, the school most influential in the development of Mahayana philosophy in Tibet, China, Korea, and Japan. Written specifically for the Western reader, the commentary explains Nagarjuna's positions and arguments in the language of Western metaphysics and epistemology, and connects Nagarjuna's concerns tho those of Western philosophers such as Sextus, Hume, and Wittgenstein. A fascinating and accessible translation of the foundational text for all Mahayana Buddhism text, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way will enlighten all those in search of the essence of reality. (shrink)

Although we usually identify our abilities to reason, to adapt to situations, and to solve problems with the mind, recent research has shown that we should not, in fact, detach these abilities from the body. This work provides an integrative framework for understanding how these abilities are affected by visceral reactions. Schulkin presents provocative neuroscientific research demonstrating that thought is not on one side and bodily sensibility on the other; from a biological point of view, they are integrated. Schulkin further (...) argues that this integration has important implications for judgements about art and music, moral sensibilities, attraction and revulsion, and our perpetual inclination to explain ourselves and our surroundings. (shrink)

The Covid-19 pandemic resulted in school closures around the world, leaving lasting negative impacts on many children. Given that such closures are justified public health measures, this raises the question of compensating children for school closures. In this article I address the question of compensation from the perspective of a popular theory of justice: luck egalitarianism. In doing so, I examine a problem with applying luck egalitarianism to children, called the agency assumption. I then argue this assumption results in a (...) dilemma for luck egalitarianism and suggest how this dilemma can be overcome. I argue that the resulting form of luck egalitarianism reveals something interesting about compensating children for school closures: luck egalitarianism requires us to address all bases of justice-relevant inequality among children—Covid-19-related and beyond. Although much of the current discussion of compensating children for such closures has focused narrowly on the need to make up for lost instruction time or to prevent reductions in educational achievement, I argue that a luck egalitarian conception of justice requires us to go beyond merely compensating children for educational losses and instead aim for radical equality in education. (shrink)

Ecologist Richard Levins argues population biologists must trade‐off the generality, realism, and precision of their models since biological systems are complex and our limitations are severe. Steven Orzack and Elliott Sober argue that there are cases where these model properties cannot be varied independently of one another. If this is correct, then Levins's thesis that there is a necessary trade‐off between generality, precision, and realism in mathematical models in biology is false. I argue that Orzack and Sober's arguments fail since (...) Levins's thesis concerns the pragmatic features of model building not just the formal properties of models. (shrink)

This volume collects Jay Garfield 's essays on Madhyamaka, Yogacara, Buddhist ethics and cross-cultural hermeneutics. The first part addresses Madhyamaka, supplementing Garfield 's translation of Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, a foundational philosophical text by the Buddhist saint Nagarjuna. Garfield then considers the work of philosophical rivals, and sheds important light on the relation of Nagarjuna's views to other Buddhist and non-Buddhist philosophical positions.

Spiritual messages of Jayēntira Sarasvati, Jagatguru Sankaracharya of Kamakoti, b. 1935, Hindu religious leader.

Scholars have long debated how exactly Aristotle thinks that agents acquire the distinctive archai (“principles” or “starting‐points”) that govern their practical reasoning. The debate has traditionally been dominated by anti‐intellectualists, who hold that for Aristotle all agents acquire their archai solely through a process of habituation in the nonrational soul. Their traditional opponents, the intellectualists, focus their argument on the case of the virtuous person, arguing that in Aristotle’s view virtuous agents acquire their archai through a process of reasoning. I (...) intervene in this debate in two main ways: first, I press a heretofore underappreciated objection against anti‐intellectualism, that it is inconsistent with Aristotle’s account of akrasia; and second, I urge that all sides in the debate would benefit from more sustained attention to Aristotle’s nonvirtuous character types. In the final section, I suggest that proper consideration of the full breadth of Aristotle’s account of character points in the direction of a new approach that I call “character pluralism,” according to which Aristotle’s moral psychology does not involve a single conception of psychic structure or moral development that is equally applicable to all character types. (shrink)

Journal of Global Ethics, Volume 9, Issue 3, Page 249-262, December 2013.

Catholics and libertarians make strange bedfellows. They sharply disagree on many issues. However, when it comes to intellectual property rights, they are surprisingly congruent, albeit for different reasons. The present paper traces out the agreement on patents between these two very different philosophies.

So far the "Science Wars" have generated far more heat than light. Combatants from one or the other of what C. P. Snow famously called "the two cultures" (science versus the arts and humanities) have launched bitter attacks but have seldom engaged in constructive dialogue about the central issues. In The One Culture?, Jay A. Labinger and Harry Collins have gathered together some of the world's foremost scientists and sociologists of science to exchange opinions and ideas rather than insults. The (...) contributors find surprising areas of broad agreement in a genuine conversation about science, its legitimacy and authority as a means of understanding the world, and whether science studies undermines the practice and findings of science and scientists. The One Culture? is organized into three parts. The first consists of position papers written by scientists and sociologists of science, which were distributed to all the participants. The second presents commentaries on these papers, drawing out and discussing their central themes and arguments. In the third section, participants respond to these critiques, offering defenses, clarifications, and modifications of their positions. Who can legitimately speak about science? What is the proper role of scientific knowledge? How should scientists interact with the rest of society in decision making? Because science occupies such a central position in the world today, such questions are vitally important. Although there are no simple solutions, The One Culture? does show the reader exactly what is at stake in the Science Wars, and provides a valuable framework for how to go about seeking the answers we so urgently need. Contributors include: Constance K. Barsky, Jean Bricmont, Harry Collins, Peter Dear, Jane Gregory, Jay A. Labinger, Michael Lynch, N. David Mermin, Steve Miller, Trevor Pinch, Peter R. Saulson, Steven Shapin, Alan Sokal, Steven Weinberg, Kenneth G. Wilson. (shrink)

At least two recent collections of essays – Postmodernism and the Enlightenment and What’s Left of Enlightenment?: A Postmodern Question – have responded to postmodern critiques of Enlightenment by arguing that Enlightenment philosophes themselves embraced a number of post-modern themes. This essay situates Kant’s essay Was ist Aufklärung in the context of this recent literature about the appropriate characterization of modernity and the Enlightenment. Adopting an internalist reading of Kant’s Aufklärung essay, this paper observes that Kant is surprisingly ambivalent about (...) who might be Enlightened and unspecific about when Enlightenment might be achieved. The paper argues that this is because Kant is concerned less with elucidating his concept of Enlightenment and more with characterizing a political condition that might provide the conditions for the possibility of Enlightenment. This paper calls this political condition modernity and it is achieved when civil order can be maintained alongside fractious and possibly insoluble public disagreement about matters of conscience, including the nature and possibility of Enlightenment. Thus, the audience for the Aufklärung essay is not the tax collector, soldier or clergyman, but rather the sovereign. Kant enjoins and advises the prince that discord and debate about matters of conscience need not entail any political unrest or upheaval. It is in this restricted sense that the Enlightenment essay is Kant’s Machiavellian moment. (shrink)

Belief in Psychology tackles the knotty problem of how to treat the propositional attitudes states such as beliefs, desires, hopes and fears within cognitive science. Jay Garfield asserts that the propositional attitudes can and must play useful theoretical roles in the science of the mind and stresses the importance of their social context in this sophisticated and original argument.Garfield proposes his own alternative to the apparent dilemma of either scrapping the propositional attitudes or of making room for them within a (...) dimly foreseen, futuristic cognitive science. He provides a characterization of the nature of propositional attitudes conceived as psychological states, and of their role in cognitive science. They must, he argues, be understood as relations between their bearers and their environments, including, in the case of persons, their social and linguistic environments. Understanding them in this way is consonant with current practice in empirical cognitive science and provides a philosophically useful analysis of mental representation.Along the way, Garfield discusses the relationship between the enterprise of science and our commonsense conception of ourselves and the world, and the ways in which this relation constrains our understanding of the propositional attitudes, and illuminates a realistic interpretation of a psychology of representational states and processes. Belief in Psychology is the only book that adopts such a view, and it is unique in providing a sustained critique of eliminativism, instrumentalism, and computational individualism - the main competing proposals within philosophy of cognitive science for eliminating or reconciling propositional attitudes.Jay Garfield is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the School of Communications and Cognitive Science at Hampshire College and a co-director of the University of Massachusetts Cognitive Science Institute. He is a co-author of Cognitive Science: An Introduction and editor of Modularity in Knowledge Representation and Natural Language Understanding, both Bradford books. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

Conceptual Foundations of Radical Behaviorism is intended for advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate students in courses within behavior analytic curricula dealing with conceptual foundations and radical behaviorism as a philosophy. Each chapter of the text presents what radical behaviorism says about an important topic in a science of behavior, and then contrasts the radical behaviorist perspective with that of other forms of behaviorism, as well as other forms of psychology.

four ancestry, is that there are . A proposition may be true (and true only), false (and false only), both true and false, neither true nor false , ,.

One proposal to significantly reduce cardiovascular disease is the idea of administering a ‘polypill’—a combination of drugs that reduce the risk of heart disease and carry few side effects—to everyone over the age of 55. Despite their promise, population strategies like the polypill have not been well-accepted. In this article, I defend the polypill by appealing to fairness. The argument focuses on the need to fairly distribute the costs to individuals. While the fact that population strategies like the polypill impose (...) minor costs on everyone has primarily been used to criticize such strategies, I argue that it gives us a reason to support them. I argue that implementing a population strategy with the polypill contributes to the public good of ‘health system capacity’. I then explain that public goods have widely accepted obligations: they carry an obligation to fairly distribute the costs of the goods and prevent free-riding. Thus, we have at least one pro tanto moral reason to implement the polypill. As such, this article challenges the current literature on the topic, which has largely held adopting population strategies like the polypill to be unjustifiable. (shrink)

Origin of Species was published; he approached the end of his life just before Albert Einstein presented us with General Relativity. His lifetime saw the emergence of psychology as a discipline separate from philosophy, a birth attended by philosopher-psychologists such as his good friend William James. The work of Peirce, like that of the other American Pragmatists, reflects the ferment of the times. His thought bears the imprint of science, not the science of that Nineteenth Century which as Loren Eiseley (...) has remarked, "regarded the 'laws' of nature as imbued with a kind of structural finality, an integral determinism, which it was the scientists’ duty to describe," (Eisele, 1971) but rather, of science as open, as intrinsically revisable, as radically empirical. Working from the model of science in this latter sense, Peirce held that philosophy, and indeed logic.. (shrink)

The notion of modularity, introduced by Noam Chomsky and developed with special emphasis on perceptual and linguistic processes by Jerry Fodor in his important book The Modularity of Mind, has provided a significant stimulus to research in cognitive science. This book presents essays in which a diverse group of philosophers, linguists, psycholinguists, and neuroscientists - including both proponents and critics of the modularity hypothesis - address general questions and specific problems related to modularity. Jay L. Garfield is Associate Professor of (...) Philosophy in the School of Communications and Cognitive Science at Hampshire College. (shrink)