This book is collection of published and unpublished essays on the philosophy of religion by Howard Wettstein, who is a widely respected analytic philosopher. Over the past twenty years, Wettstein has attempted to reconcile his faith with his philosophy, and he brings his personal investment in this mission to the essays collected here. Influenced by the work of George Santayana, Wittgenstein, and A.J. Heschel, Wettstein grapples with central issues in the philosophy of religion such as the relationship of religious (...) practice to religious belief, what is at stake in the debate between atheists and theists, and the place of doctrine in religion. His discussions draw from Jewish texts as well as Christianity, Islam, and classical philosophy. The challenge Wettstein undertakes throughout the volume is to maintain a philosophical naturalism while pursuing an encounter with God and traditional religion. In the Introduction to this volume, Wettstein elucidates the uniting themes among the collected essays. (shrink)

An exploration of Immanuel Kant's account of war and the controversies that have arisen from its interpretation. This book brings the ideas of Kant's critical philosophy to bear on one of the leading political and legal questions of our age: under what circumstances, if any, is recourse to war legally and morally justifiable?

This book shows how the traditional concerns of political theory push it increasingly into the study of international relations. This is done, first, by demonstrating how many of the issues usually dealt with by political theory, such as democracy and justice, arise within an increasingly global context and, secondly, by considering how international issues, such as colonialism and war, are best illuminated by building on the work of political theorists. The book suggests that political theory and international relations theory can (...) now both be successfully engaged in as a joint enterprise only. (shrink)

The book is a comparative analysis of all the major social science/political science grand theories. It focuses on developmentalism, dependency theory, the world systems approach, Marxism, institutionalism, rational choice, psychoanalysis, political sociology, sociobiology, environmentalism, neuro-politics, transitions to democracy, and non-Western systems of analysis. To facilitate comparison and analysis, a common framework and outline are employed throughout. An integrating introduction and conclusion help tie the book together.

We contribute to the growing literature on white fragility by examining how the distinctively emotional manifestations of white fragility (which we dub ‘emotional white fragility’) make it more difficult for white people to have constructive, meaningful thoughts and conversations about race. We claim that emotional white fragility typically involves a failure of emotion regulation, or the ability to manage one’s emotions in real time. We suggest that this lack of emotion regulation can contribute to an unjust distribution of burdens that (...) can further entrench moral damage in the context of relationships as well as help support large-scale patterns of white supremacy. Given the serious implications of emotional white fragility, we suggest a number of emotion regulation techniques that one can deploy to mitigate the potential harms wrought by emotional white fragility. (shrink)

In challenging the prevailing paradigm for understanding how the human mind works, Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition is certain to stimulate fruitful debate.

Modes-of-being figure centrally in Heidegger's masterwork Being and Time. Testimony to this is Heidegger's characterisation of two of his most celebrated enquiries—the Existential analytic and the Zeug analysis—as investigations into the respective modes-of-being of the entities concerned. Yet despite the importance of this concept, commentators disagree widely about what a mode-of-being is. In this paper, I systematically outline and defend a novel and exegetically grounded interpretation of this concept. Strongly opposed to Kantian readings, such as those advocated by Taylor Carman (...) and Cristina Lafont, I interpret a mode-of-being as a universal that defines a district —that is, a natural class of entities that ought to be conceptualised in a special way. As such, every mode-of-being plays an important metaphysical and epistemic role: serving both to unify a natural class of a high degree of generality and as the interpretandum of an act yielding the basic-concepts pertaining to the entities therein. In explicating and arguing for this interpretation, I attribute a characteristically Aristotelian philosophical position to the early Heidegger, encompassing both metaphysical and epistemological realism and a conceptualist theory of universals. (shrink)

Howard J. Curzer presents a fresh new reading of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which brings each of the virtues alive. He argues that justice and friendship are symbiotic in Aristotle's view; reveals how virtue ethics is not only about being good, but about becoming good; and describes Aristotle's ultimate quest to determine happiness.

A speaker wishes to persuade a listener to take a certain action. The conditions under which the request is justified, from the listener’s point of view, depend on the state of the world, which is known only to the speaker. Each state is characterized by a set of statements from which the speaker chooses. A persuasion rule specifies which statements the listener finds persuasive. We study persuasion rules that maximize the probability that the listener accepts the request if and only (...) if it is justified, given that the speaker maximizes the probability that his request is accepted. We prove that there always exists a persuasion rule involving no randomization and that all optimal persuasion rules are ex-post optimal. We relate our analysis to the field of pragmatics. (shrink)

The first full-scale history of cognitive science, this work addresses a central issue: What is the nature of knowledge?

ABSTRACTEric Funkhouser argues that beliefs can function as social signals. I argue that Funkhouser’s argument for this conclusion rests on a problematic definition of “signal,” and that on standard definitions, the imperceptibility of beliefs disqualifies them from counting as signals. However, I also argue that Funkhouser’s insights about the social functions of beliefs can be true even if his claim that beliefs are signals is false.

Beginning in The Gay Science, Nietzsche repeatedly exhorts his readers to laugh. But why? I argue that Nietzsche wants us to laugh because the emotion that laughter expresses, mirth, plays an important psychological-cum-epistemological role in his attack on traditional morality. I contend that Nietzsche views mirth as an attitude that is uniquely suited to rooting out beliefs that have covertly infiltrated our psychologies. And given that Nietzsche considers morality to be insidious, or to maintain its hold over us even after (...) we think that we have freed ourselves from it, we need mirth to expose its nefarious workings. Thus, while mirth is not the only attitude that Nietzsche recommends that we adopt toward the dictates of traditional morality – indeed, he suggests that we adopt many others as well – mirth nevertheless enjoys a privileged status within Nietzsche’s spirited polemics, which is why he dubs his philosophy a ‘gay science.’. (shrink)

A clever argument purports to show that we can directly perceive the emotions of others: (1) some emotional expressions are parts of the emotions they express; (2) perceiving a part of something is sufficient for perceiving the whole; (3) therefore, perceiving some emotional expressions is sufficient for perceiving the emotions they express. My aim in this paper is to assess the extent to which contemporary psychological theories of emotion support the first premise of this argument.

I expand upon Kristie Dotson's concept of “epistemic violence” by identifying another type of epistemic violence that arises in the context of nonverbal communication. “Emotional misperception,” as I call it, occurs when the following conditions are met: A misreads B's nonlinguistic expression of emotion, owing to reliable ignorance, harming B.

In this major reinterpretation, Howard Caygill argues that all of Benjamin's work is characterized by its focus on a concept of experience derived from Kant but applied by Benjamin to objects as diverse as urban experience, visual art, literature and philosophy. The book analyzes the development of Benjamin's concept of experience in his early writings showing that it emerges from an engagement with visual experience, and in particular the experience of colour. By representing Benjamin as primarily a thinker of (...) the visual field, Caygill is able to bring forward previously neglected texts on inscription and the visual field and to cast many of his more familiar texts, for instance the Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction in a new light. (shrink)

Matching in observational studies faces complications when units enroll in treatment on a rolling basis. While each treated unit has a specific time of entry into the study, control units each have many possible comparison, or “pseudo-treatment,” times. Valid inference must account for correlations between repeated measures for a single unit, and researchers must decide how flexibly to match across time and units. We provide three important innovations. First, we introduce a new matched design, GroupMatch with instance replacement, allowing maximum (...) flexibility in control selection. This new design searches over all possible comparison times for each treated-control pairing and is more amenable to analysis than past methods. Second, we propose a block bootstrap approach for inference in matched designs with rolling enrollment and demonstrate that it accounts properly for complex correlations across matched sets in our new design and several other contexts. Third, we develop a falsification test to detect violations of the timepoint agnosticism assumption, which is needed to permit flexible matching across time. We demonstrate the practical value of these tools via simulations and a case study of the impact of short-term injuries on batting performance in major league baseball. (shrink)

_The Two Pragmatisms - From Peirce to Rorty_ maps the main movements within the pragmatist tradition. Two distinct forms of pragmatism are identified, that of Peirce and that of the `second' pragmatism stemming from James' interpretation of Peirce and seen in the work of Dewey and above all Rorty. Both the influential work of Rorty and the way in which he has transformed contemporary philosophy's understanding of pragmatism are clearly explained. _The Two Pragmatisms - From Peirce to Rorty_ is essential (...) reading for those interested in the history of this increasingly influential movement, whether first-time philosophers or more advanced readers. (shrink)

In this explosive book, Howard Wainer uses statistical evidence to show why some of the most widely held beliefs in education today--and the policies that have resulted--are wrong.

Can we read emotions in faces? Many studies suggest that we can, yet skeptics contend that these studies employ methods that unwittingly help subjects in matching faces with emotions. Some studies present subjects with posed faces, which may be more exaggerated than spontaneous ones. And some studies provide subjects with a list of emotion words to choose from, which forces them to interpret faces in specific emotion terms. I argue that the skeptics’ challenge rests on a false assumption: that once (...) subjects leave the lab, they no longer receive help in matching faces with emotions. I contend that people receive as much help in the wild as they do in the lab. People unconsciously amplify their spontaneous expressions in the presence of others, thereby making them easier to read. And people teach children to interpret faces in the same specific emotion terms found in the experimenters’ word lists. I argue that we are good at readings emotions in faces because we can normally count on a little help from our friends. (shrink)

In his entertaining and informative book Graphic Discovery, Howard Wainer unlocked the power of graphical display to make complex problems clear. Now he's back with Picturing the Uncertain World, a book that explores how graphs can serve as maps to guide us when the information we have is ambiguous or incomplete. Using a visually diverse sampling of graphical display, from heartrending autobiographical displays of genocide in the Kovno ghetto to the "Pie Chart of Mystery" in a New Yorker cartoon, (...) Wainer illustrates the many ways graphs can be used--and misused--as we try to make sense of an uncertain world. Picturing the Uncertain World takes readers on an extraordinary graphical adventure, revealing how the visual communication of data offers answers to vexing questions yet also highlights the measure of uncertainty in almost everything we do. Are cancer rates higher or lower in rural communities? How can you know how much money to sock away for retirement when you don't know when you'll die? And where exactly did nineteenth-century novelists get their ideas? These are some of the fascinating questions Wainer invites readers to consider. Along the way he traces the origins and development of graphical display, from William Playfair, who pioneered the use of graphs in the eighteenth century, to instances today where the public has been misled through poorly designed graphs. We live in a world full of uncertainty, yet it is within our grasp to take its measure. Read Picturing the Uncertain World and learn how. (shrink)

Several factors related to fetal risk render it more or less acceptable in justifying constraints on the behavior of pregnant women. Risk is an unavoidable part of pregnancy and childbirth, one that women must balance against other vital personal and family interests. Two particular issues relate to the fairness of claims that pregnant women are never entitled to put their fetuses at risk: relative risks and relatives' risks. The former have been used—often spuriously—to advance arguments against activities, such as home (...) birth, that may incur risk; the latter implicate the nature of relationships in determining the acceptability of coercing or precluding activities. Motivated reasoning by clinicians and judges leads to inaccurate risk assessments, and judgments based on false claims to objectivity. Such judgments undermine the moral and legal standing of pregnant women and do not advance the interests of fetuses, pregnant women, families, or states. (shrink)

Oxford Scholarly Classics is a new series that makes available again great academic works from the archives of Oxford University Press. Reissued in uniform series design, the reissues will enable libraries, scholars, and students to gain fresh access to some of the finest scholarship of the last century.

According to the Perceptual Analysis of Emotional Expression, behaviors express emotions by making them perceptually manifest. A smile is an expression of joy because an observer who sees a smile can see joy. A pout is an expression of grief because an observer who sees a pout can see grief. And a growl is an expression of anger because an observer who hears a growl can hear anger. The idea is not simply that expressions can enable the perception of emotion, (...) but that expressions essentially do so. In the course of defending this analysis against challenges, I develop a novel account of the relationship between language and expression. (shrink)

_Hume's Naturalism_ provides a clear and concise guide to the debates over whether Hume's empiricism or his 'naturalism' in the tradition of the Scottish 'Common Sense' school of philosophy gained his upper hand. This debate is central to any understanding of Hume's thought. H.O. Mounce presents a beautifully clear guide to Hume's most important works, _The Treatise on Human Nature_ and _Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion_. Accessible to anyone coming to Hume for the first time, _Hume's Naturalism_ affords a much needed (...) overview of the key concepts of empiricism, causation, scepticism, reason and morality that are essential to any understanding of Hume's philosophy. (shrink)

In this new lexical survey of Kant's works, Howard Caygill presents Kantian concepts and terminology in terms that will introduce and clarify his ideas for students and general readers alike.

William P. Alston argues in “Expressing” (1965) that there is no important difference between expressing a feeling in language and asserting that one has that feeling. My aims in this paper are (1) to show that Alston's arguments ought to have led him to a different conclusion—that “asserting” and “expressing” individuate speech acts at different levels of analysis (the illocutionary and the locutionary, respectively)—and (2) to argue that this conclusion can solve a problem facing contemporary analyses of expressing: the “no (...) show tell” problem, or the problem of accounting for utterances that report feelings truly without expressing them. Alston's paper made an important contribution 50 years ago, and a reimagining of it can make another important contribution today. (shrink)

I offer a novel view of the mechanisms underlying the spontaneous facial expression of emotion. According to my Social Amplification View, facial expressions result from the interplay of two processes: an emotional process that activates specific facial muscles, though not always to the point of visible contraction, followed by a social cognitive process that amplifies these activations so that they may function more effectively as social signals. I argue that SAV outperforms both the Neurocultural View and the Behavioral Ecology View, (...) as well as previously proposed syntheses of these views, in accounting for various empirical findings. (shrink)

A comprehensive introduction to formal logic, Logic and Philosophy: A Modern Introduction is a rigorous yet accessible text, appropriate for students encountering the subject for the first time. Abundant, carefully crafted exercise sets accompanied by a clear, engaging exposition build to an exploration of sentential logic, first-order predicate logic, the theory of descriptions, identity, relations, set theory, modal logic, and Aristotelian logic. And as its title suggests, Logic and Philosophy is devoted not only to logic but also to the philosophical (...) debates that led to the development of the field. Much new material has been added for the 13th edition. An introduction to set theory and its relationship to logic and mathematics, including philosophical issues, is now part of Chapter 13. Chapter 15 is an introduction to modal logic and Kripke semantics, concluding with a discussion of philosophical problems with any logical accommodation of modalities. Instructors who do not wish to present proof methods will find chapters on truth trees for both sentential and first-order logic, and a presentation of trees for modal logic. Special features of this text include presentations of the history of logic, alternatives to traditional methods of conditional and indirect proof, and a discussion of semantic problems with universal and existential instantiations. Throughout, the authors are sensitive to philosophical issues that arise from the relationship between ordinary language, symbolic logic, and justifications for the syntax and semantics of the various symbolic languages. Discussions range from the justification of the truth table for the sentential rendering of if... then statements to semantic and syntactic paradoxes, including some troubling paradoxes that arise in ordinary language (e.g., the so-called hangman or surprise quiz paradox). Logic and Philosophy includes ample material for a one-semester or two-semester course and provides a thorough preparation for more advanced logic courses. (shrink)

We show that for solvable games, the calculation of the strategies which survive iterative elimination of dominated strategies in normal games is equivalent to the calculation of the backward induction outcome of some extensive game. However, whereas the normal game form does not provide information on how to carry out the elimination, the corresponding extensive game does. As a by-product, we conclude that implementation using a subgame perfect equilibrium of an extensive game with perfect information is equivalent to implementation through (...) a solution concept which we call guided iteratively elimination of dominated strategies which requires a uniform order of elimination. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Number: C72. (shrink)

A new critical approach to Jewish thinking and praxis, drawing upon key thinkers such as Adorno, Wittgenstein, Gdel, Heidegger and Celan.

A number of experts receive noisy signals regarding a desirable public decision. The public target is to make the best possible decision on the basis of all the information held by the experts. We compare two ``cultures.'' In one, all experts are driven only by the public motive to increase the probability that the desirable action will be taken. In the second, each expert is also driven by a private motive: to have his recommendation accepted. We show that in the (...) first culture, every mechanism will have an equilibrium which does not achieve the public target, whereas the second culture gives rise to a mechanism whose unique equilibrium outcome does achieve the public target. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C72, D71. (shrink)

Anyone seeking a readable and relatively brief guide to logic can do no better than this classic introduction. A treat for both the intellect and the imagination, it profiles the development of logic from ancient to modern times and compellingly examines the nature of logic and its philosophical implications. No prior knowledge of logic is necessary; readers need only an acquaintance with high school mathematics. The author emphasizes understanding, rather than technique, and focuses on such topics as the historical reasons (...) for the formation of Aristotelian logic, the rise of mathematical logic after more than 2,000 years of traditional logic, the nature of the formal axiomatic method and the reasons for its use, and the main results of metatheory and their philosophic import. The treatment of the Gödel metatheorems is especially detailed and clear, and answers to the problems appear at the end. (shrink)

_The Two Pragmatisms - From Peirce to Rorty_ maps the main movements within the pragmatist tradition. Two distinct forms of pragmatism are identified, that of Peirce and that of the `second' pragmatism stemming from James' interpretation of Peirce and seen in the work of Dewey and above all Rorty. Both the influential work of Rorty and the way in which he has transformed contemporary philosophy's understanding of pragmatism are clearly explained. _The Two Pragmatisms - From Peirce to Rorty_ is essential (...) reading for those interested in the history of this increasingly influential movement, whether first-time philosophers or more advanced readers. (shrink)