When applied in the health sector, AI-based applications raise not only ethical but legal and safety concerns, where algorithms trained on data from majority populations can generate less accurate or reliable results for minorities and other disadvantaged groups.

This is the first critical study of The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze's most important work on language and ethics, as well as the main source of his vital philosophy of the event.James Williams explains the originality of Deleuze's work with careful definitions of all his innovative terms and a detailed description of the complex structure he constructs. This reading makes connections to his ground-breaking work on literature, to his critical but also progressive relation to the sciences, and to (...) his controversial denial of the priority of standard logics, human values and 'meaning' in thinking.This book will open new debates and develop current ones around Deleuze's work in philosophy, politics, literature, linguistics, cultural studies and sociology. (shrink)

Conversation analysts have noted that, in psychotherapy, formulations of the client's talk can be a vehicle for offering a psychological interpretation of the client's circumstances. But we notice that not all formulations in psychotherapy offer interpretations. We offer an analysis of formulations that are diagnostic: that is, used by the professional to sharpen, clarify or refine the client's account and make it better able to provide what the professional needs to know about the client's history and symptoms. In doing so, (...) these formulations also have the effect of shepherding the client's account towards subsequent therapeutic interpretation. In a coda, we notice that sometimes the formulations are designed discreetly. We examine one such discreet formulation in detail, and show how its very ambiguity can lead to its failure as a diagnostic probe. (shrink)

"A very good book indeed: there is scarcely an issue anyone has thought to raise about the topic which Childress fails to treat with sensitivity and good judgement....Future discussions of paternalism in health care will have to come to terms with the contentions of this book, which must be reckoned the best existing treatment of its subject."--Ethics. "A clear, scholarly and balanced analysis....This is a book I can recommend to physicians, ethicists, students of both fields, and to those most affected--the (...) patients themselves."--Edmund D. Pellegrino, John Carroll Professor of Medicine and Medical Humanities, Georgetown University Medical Center. (shrink)

Noted psychologist and philosopher develops his own brand of pragmatism, based on theories of C. S. Peirce. Emphasis on "radical empiricism," versus the transcendental and rationalist tradition. One of the most important books in American philosophy. Note.

A revised, expanded and fully up-to-date critical introduction to Deleuze's most important work of philosophyBy critically analysing Deleuze's methods, principles and arguments, James Williams helps readers to engage with the revolutionary core of Deleuze's philosophy and take up positions for or against its most innovative and controversial ideas.

A listener can offer an interpretation of what a speaker is currently saying. I distinguish between, on the one hand, proposing a candidate understanding that solves a manifest problem by offering new, relevant information; and, on the other hand, proposing a candidate understanding that does not seem to relate to any obvious obscurity in what the speaker is saying, and only offers material that the speaker clearly knows, or ought to know. Both kinds are interruptions to the progressivity of the (...) speaker’s project, but they differ qualitatitively. I argue that the former is affiliative and the latter disaffiliative, insofar as the latter calls attention to, and therefore invites correction or abandonment of, what the speaker is doing. I discuss what such a move might serve, and show how making it involves epistemic and deontological rights. (shrink)

Moral philosophy is the study of what morality is and what it requires of us. As Socrates said, it's about "how we ought to live"-and why. It would be helpful if we could begin with a simple, uncontroversial definition of what morality is. Unfortunately, we cannot. There are many rival theories, each expounding a different conception of what it means to live morally, and any definition that goes beyond Socrates's simple formula-tion is bound to offend at least one of them. (...) This should make us cautious, but it need not paralyze us. In this chapter, I will describe the "minimum conception" of morality. (shrink)

Do high-grade assessments have a use in marking episodes in mundane conversation? Inspection suggests that closing sequences in telephone conversations, when they include such embedded actions as making arrangements, have a slot which can be filled by a turn-initial high-grade assessment. I suggest that the high-grade assessment makes a special display of resuming a closing which had been suspended. I make a link between marked resumption in such mundane closings and more institutional agenda-marking, and speculate that using a resumptive high-grade (...) assessment might display a claim to `ownership' of the closedown sequence. (shrink)

How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" -- it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a (...) compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers. Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on. (shrink)

The authors of the ‘Conversational Rollercoaster’ article give a vivid and engaging account of a difficult but worthwhile exercise: bringing live Conversation Analysis to the public in a Science Fair. Part of their motivation is a claim that CA is uniquely qualified for such exhibition: as a mode of enquiry, it has what they call a ‘public ethos’. I examine that part of their case and suggest that it might not be as waterproof as it appears. But, such qualms ought (...) not detract from the positive benefits of sharing CA’s attractions with the public. The manifest success of the event, and its grounding in solid CA practice, is enough reason to hope that others will be inspired to follow in these pioneers’ footsteps. (shrink)

This chapter reflects on the existential import of thinking about politics. It proposes that the existential import of thinking about politics is a double confrontation with the nothing. In short: for Arendt, politics is the relating of human beings to one another around the space of the world—the empty center of the polis—and hence a confrontation with the nothing. Thinking itself is engaging in the activity of dissolving, and—particularly in modern times—a dwelling in the gap between past and future, and (...) hence itself a confrontation with the nothing. Thinking about politics carries with it this double negative, which gives it its meaning, or existential import. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that the beginnings of an answer to the question of the meaning of thinking about politics lead back to Kant and to the negativity that belongs to his thought: the refusal of absolutes tied to the embrace of the absolute. (shrink)

Hubert Dreyfus has argued that cases of absorbed bodily coping show that there is no room for self-awareness in flow experiences of experts. In this paper, I argue against Dreyfus’ maxim of vanishing self-awareness by suggesting that awareness of agency is present in expert bodily action. First, I discuss the phenomenon of absorbed bodily coping by discussing flow experiences involved in expert bodily action: merging into the flow; immersion in the flow; emergence out of flow. I argue against the claim (...) that flow experience does not involve an awareness of agency for each of these features, while conceding that fluent agency does not involve self-awareness in the thetic sense. I challenge the assumption that the awareness of fluent agency must be understood in terms of a thetic awareness of agency. Instead, I develop an Anscombean account of the awareness of fluent agency in terms of the phenomenal character of knowing one’s aims. I respond to the challenge that if an Anscombean account of the awareness of agency is to succeed, then agents must be able to answer Anscombean questions. I consider the objection that awareness of agency is not a form of self-awareness by outlining an account of self-awareness as self-synthesis that is distinct from self-perception and self-ascription, but which makes room for self-awareness in expert bodily action. (shrink)

This first volume contains discussions of the brain, methods for analyzing behavior, thought, consciousness, attention, association, time, and memory.

Do Quine and Carnap distort the social nature of inquiry by privileging individual epistemic subjects? This objection is at the heart of Donald Davidson’s claim that Quine fails to grasp the significance of the concept of truth. In Carnap’s case, the objection may be detected in Charles Morris’s call to ground scientific philosophy in semiotics, the science of signs, rather than syntax, the formal investigation of languages. Drawing out the challenge from Morris’s proposal requires examining a neglected influence on this (...) neglected philosopher: his advisor George Herbert Mead’s social theory of mind. I argue that Morris and Davidson can both be understood as demanding that scientific philosophers socialize their conception of objectivity. (shrink)

For this 1897 publication, the American philosopher William James brought together ten essays, some of which were originally talks given to Ivy League societies. Accessible to a broader audience, these non-technical essays illustrate the author's pragmatic approach to belief and morality, arguing for faith and action in spite of uncertainty. James thought his audiences suffered 'paralysis of their native capacity for faith' while awaiting scientific grounds for belief. His response consisted in an attitude of 'radical empiricism', which deals (...) practically rather than ideologically with real-world phenomena. When facing a 'momentous' decision about belief, he says, we both can and must choose the best hypothesis. The first four essays apply this principle to religious faith, and the rest explore the pragmatic approach to such topics as determinism, ethics and individual achievement. James developed his ideas further in The Varieties of Religious Experience and Pragmatism, both of which are reissued in this series. (shrink)

The robustness of the classical tests on means (Z, t, and F) and variances (chi square and F) was investigated by obtaining 30,000 (or, sometimes, 10,000 or 150,000) values of the test statistic under assumption-violating conditions and comparing the actual proportion of Type I errors with the proportion expected when all assumptions are met. The sampling and testing conditions investigated were: population shape (L-shape or bell-shape), relative population variance (1 or 4), sample size (8, 16, or 24), nominal significance level (...) (.05,.01, or.001), and location of rejection region (left-tailed, right-tailed, or two-tailed). All tests on means were nonrobust under most of the investigated conditions, and one was nonrobust under all of them. Both tests on variances were extremely nonrobust under virtually all conditions. The worst nonrobustness of the one- and two-independent-sample Z and t tests rivaled or exceeded that of the notoriously nonrobust chi-square and F tests on variances. (shrink)

Making a show of conceding by using a three-part structure of proposition, concession and reassertion has the effect - in contrast to other ways of conceding - of strengthening one's own position at the expense of a counter-argument. This three-part structure can be also exploited so as to carry the battle to the enemy, as it were, and make the concession do more offensive work. We detail three such ways: Trojan Horses where the speaker imports a caricature of the opposition (...) into the conceded material; stings in the tail, where the speaker specifically overturns the concession they have just made in the original claim; and cheapeners, where the speaker works pragmatically to devalue even a positive endorsement of the opposition's case. In all their variety, what marks the concession as being hearably in the speaker's own interest is the robust, normative three-part proposition - concession - reprise structure. It is available for use in supporting or demeaning any position, whether mundane or explicitly ideological. (shrink)

A pioneer in early studies of the human mind and founder of that peculiarly American philosophy called Pragmatism, William James remains America's most widely read philosopher. Generations of students have been drawn to his lucid presentations of philosophical problems. His works, now being made available for the first time in a definitive edition, have a permanent place in American letters and a continuing influence in philosophy and psychology. The essays gathered in the posthumously published Essays in Radical Empiricism formulate (...) ideas that had brewed in James's mind for thirty years as he sought a way out of the philosophical dilemmas generated by the new psychology of the late nineteenth century. They constitute the explanatory core of his doctrine of radical empiricism, a doctrine that charts his course between the absolute idealism he could not accept and, at the other extreme, the law of associationism, which reduces knowledge to sheer contiguity of ideas. In his introduction John J. McDermott describes the historical background and the genesis of James's theory and considers the objections raised by its opponents. (shrink)

The alleged robustness of Z, t, and F tests against nonnormality and, when sample sizes are equal, of t and F tests against heterogeneity as well was investigated in a large-scale sampling study under conditions realistic to experimentation and testing in the behavioral sciences. Factors varied were: population shape (L or bell), σ1/σ2 (1/2, 1, or 2), size N of smallest sample (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, or 1,024), N1/N2 (1/3,1/2,1, 2, or 3), α (.05,.01, or.001), (...) and test tailedness (left, right, or two). In about 25% of the situations investigated, the test failed to meet a very lax criterion for robustness at every examined N value less than 100, and in 8% at every value less than 1,000; no test met the criterion in all of the situations studied before N=512. Robustness was strongly influenced by all of the factors investigated, and interactions among the influencing factors were often strong and complex. (shrink)

This paper is about the similarity between the appreciation of a piece of art, such as a cherished music album, and the loving appreciation of a person whom one knows well. In philosophical discussion about the rationality of love, the Qualities View (QV) says that love can be justified by reference to the qualities of the beloved. I argue that the oft-rehearsed trading-up objection fails to undermine the QV. The problems typically identified by the objection arise from the idea that (...) love-worthy qualities could be coarse-grained, when in fact they must be fine-grained. The analogy with appreciation of aesthetic qualities helps to draw out this point. Once the fine-grained nature of love-worthy qualities is properly understood, it is clear that critics of the QV cannot rely on the trading-up objection to motivate its rejection. Moreover, the paper’s core argument helps to illuminate the persistently aesthetic nature of interpersonal affections. (shrink)

Previous literature on advice-resistance in medicine and welfare has tended to focus on patients’ or callers’ inexplicit resistance. But clients also raise explicit objections, which put up a firmer barrier against the advisor’s efforts. In a novel look at resistance, we show that one important distinction among objections is their epistemic domain: whether the client’s objection is in their own world, or in the world of the practitioner. We show that the practitioner may try to manoeuvre the objection onto grounds (...) where their own expertise will win the day, in five ways: conceding the objection’s validity as a preface to moving on; proposing a ‘work-around’ that effectively repeats the original advice; selecting an aspect of it that could be remediated; correcting the client’s understanding of the challenges of the advice; and stressing the urgency of the original course of action. We discuss the distinction between objections to solicited and unsolicited advice, and the role of objections in revealing, and affirming, a service-user’s personal life-world contingencies. (shrink)

Many professional assessment devices are designed to harvest informants’ cognitions as stable, internally-represented, information-processed conceptions of the world. If one dissents from this notion of what beliefs, knowledge and opinions are, then one is freer to see how they are produced, in interaction, as artefacts that serve some interactional institutional purpose. I give an example from the recording of the ‘cognitions’ of a person with a learning disability, and try to show how they are shaped by institutional requirements as to (...) what is to count as recordable in the circumstances. ‘In the circumstances’ is an analyst’s stance: for the members involved, the cognitions are rock-solid discoveries, and will remain so until challenged. (shrink)

In interviews, it may happen that a respondent gives an answer which seems well formatted, but is not receipted as acceptable by the interviewer. In this article I examine one way in which interviewers display their diagnosis of the problem and act to bring about its solution. In the cases I describe, the interviewers defer revision of the question until they have established a new, more personalized basis for it, informed by their knowledge of the respondents' circumstances. There are three (...) things of interest. The first is how this actually works conversationally; it seems to be structured as an insertion sequence and played out by presequential turns which are highly projective of the respondent's agreement. The second is that the scenario that the interviewer inserts is a positive example of what would have been an answer to the `failed' original question. The third is that there is a difference between the original, general question and its subsequent, specific revision. I argue that all these features manifest interviewers' solution of their dilemma in choosing between literal and sensitive questioning. (shrink)

Standard test questions allow the questioner to confirm an answer as correct, displaying their greater epistemic authority over the answerer. But the instructional power of test questions may prompt their use even when that asymmetry is neutralized or reversed, and the recipient ought to know as much as, or indeed more than, the questioner. I describe how staff who support clients with intellectual impairment use what I call ‘recipient-side’ test questions, where the questioner claims final authority over matters in the (...) recipient’s experience, even though it is the recipient who has prior entitlement and access to it. When recipient-side test questions fail, questioners may revert to the standard test question asymmetry by hinting at, or openly asserting, their own epistemic authority. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt grasps modernity in terms of crisis and political modernity in terms of the crisis of authority. Because she ties the crisis of authority not simply to liberal political thought but to the entire Western philosophical tradition, Arendt responds to the crisis of authority with a critical modernism, i.e., a modernism that seeks to lay bare the gap between past and future that was covered up by the Roman trilogy of tradition, religion, and authority. This modernism is critical because (...) it intensifies rather than shies away from crisis. With this critical modernism, judgment emerges as the successor to authority, opening the door to a possible overcoming of metaphysics and of the estrangement of doing and thinking. Arendt’s reworking of a parable of Kafka’s dealing with the gap between past and future illustrates her turn to judgment and her attempt to overcome metaphysics. (shrink)

In a critique of Conversation Analysis’ treatment of context, Waring, Creider, Tarpey and Black invite us to see that, when understanding some stretch of interaction, speakers’ retrospective reports might be helpful. Two standard responses to Waring et al.’s argument are that 1) people’s personal accounts of contingent and fleeting moments of interaction are of a different order of event from the actions they produce in situ, and are matters of analysis in their own right; and that 2) CA does use (...) context, insofar as any analyst works with scenes in a culturally familiar landscape, bolstered by ethnographic accounts for help with local terminology or institutional agendas. (shrink)

The identity and diversity of individual objects may be grounded or ungrounded, and intrinsic or contextual. Intrinsic individuation can be grounded in haecceities, or absolute discernibility. Contextual individuation can be grounded in relations, but this is compatible with absolute, relative or weak discernibility. Contextual individuation is compatible with the denial of haecceitism, and this is more harmonious with science. Structuralism implies contextual individuation. In mathematics contextual individuation is in general primitive. In physics contextual individuation may be grounded in relations via (...) weak discernibility. (shrink)

The Gifford Lectures were established in 1885 at the universities of St Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh to promote the discussion of 'Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term - in other words, the knowledge of God', and some of the world's most influential thinkers have delivered them. The 1901–2 lectures given in Edinburgh by American philosopher William James are considered by many to be the greatest in the series. The lectures were published in book form in (...) 1902 and have been reprinted many times. James, who was educated in the United States and Europe, and spent much of his career teaching philosophy at Harvard, was very influential in the development of modern psychology, and in these twenty lectures he explores the personal experience of religion. Some of the topics include religion and neurology, 'the sick soul', saintliness, and mysticism. (shrink)

From the older handbooks to the more recent scholarly literature, Gorgias's professions about his art are taken literally at their word: conjured up in all of these accounts is the image of a hearer irresistibly overwhelmed by Gorgias's apagogic and psychagogic persuasions. Gorgias's own description of his art, in effect, replaces our description of it. "His proofs... give the impression of ineluctability" . "Thus logos is almost an independent external power which forces the hearer to do its will" . "Incurably (...) deceptive," logos has an "enormous power" that acts upon opinion, which is "easy to change" . Surprisingly, the urge to describe or paraphrase Gorgias's art has caused commentators to overlook the very best witness of it that we have: its enactment, which is to say the performative value of Gorgias's writings, especially the speeches. For if Gorgias's literary remains do nothing else, they demonstrate how one can do things with words without being explicit about what is being done, even if this means contradicting, performatively, what is being said-as for instance in his statements, so unconvincingly made, about the ostensible aims of rhetoric. Was Gorgias persuasive in practice? Was persuasion even the goal? Is logos the solitary arbiter of reality that it is so often made out to be? Through close examination of Gorgias's Helen and parts of On Not-Being, I attempt to show that persuasion is manifestly not the goal of his arguments, which in the first instance are aporetic paradoxes that expose the difficulties of defining the nature of either language or reality, and which in the last instance are instruments of cultural demystification. The only deception at work in Gorgias's writings is that of the self-deception of their audience. It is this that gives these curiously revealing documents of fifth-century Greek culture their "dissuasive," not persuasive, character. (shrink)

In this unique work, James P. Sterba argues that traditional ethics has yet to confront the three significant challenges posed by environmentalism, feminism, and multiculturalism. He maintains that while traditional ethics has been quite successful at dealing with the problems it faces, it has not addressed the possibility that its solutions to these problems are biased in favor of humans, men, and Western culture. In Three Challenges to Ethics: Environmentalism, Feminism, and Multiculturalism, Sterba examines each of these challenges. In (...) the case of environmentalism, he argues that traditional ethics must incorporate conflict resolution principles that favor nonhumans over humans in a significant range of cases. In terms of feminism, he maintains that traditional ethics should rule out gendered family structures and implement an ideal of androgyny. In regard to multiculturalism, he contends that traditional ethics must endorse an ethics that is secular in character and that can survive an extensive comparative evaluation of both Western and non-Western moral ideals and cultures. The only textbook devoted to this topic, Three Challenges to Ethics is an engaging text for introductory courses in ethics and moral problems and is also interesting and provocative reading for scholars and general readers. (shrink)

Mental health practitioners, assessing children for possible psychiatric conditions, need to probe sensitive matters. We examine practitioners’ use of questions which try to clarify a given issue by offering alternative descriptions of how things are: one bland, and the other clearly undesirable in some way. The undesirable states of affairs can be described in serious terms or, while still undesirable, in less serious ones. We find that if an undesirable state of affairs is described in seriously negative terms, it tends (...) to be put as the first item in the pair of alternatives. We argue that this version of the familiar ‘optimistic questioning’ practice ensures that were the negative case to be chosen, it would be in spite of it being the more interactionally difficult answer to give. That makes the answer diagnostically more reliable. We discuss the pros and cons use of this practice in the environment of triage. (shrink)

Scepticism about ought simpliciter is the view that there is no such thing as what one ought simpliciter to do. Instead, practical deliberation is governed by a plurality of normative standpoints, each authoritative from their own perspective but none authoritative simpliciter. This paper aims to resist such scepticism. After setting out the challenge in general terms, I argue that scepticism can be resisted by rejecting a key assumption in the sceptic’s argument. This is the assumption that standpoint-relative ought judgments bring (...) with them a commitment to act in accordance with those judgments. Instead, I propose an alternative account of our normative concepts according to which only ought simpliciter judgments commit one to acting in accordance with those judgments. In addition to answering the sceptical challenge, the proposal offers an independently motivated account of what makes a concept normatively authoritative. (shrink)

In addition to being one of the world's most influential philosophers, Aristotle can also be credited with the creation of both the science of biology and the philosophy of biology. He was the first thinker to treat the investigations of the living world as a distinct inquiry with its own special concepts and principles. This book focuses on a seminal event in the history of biology - Aristotle's delineation of a special branch of theoretical knowledge devoted to the systematic investigation (...) of animals. Aristotle approached the creation of zoology with the tools of subtle and systematic philosophies of nature and of science that were then carefully tailored to the investigation of animals. The papers collected in this volume, written by a pre-eminent figure in the field of Aristotle's philosophy and biology, examine Aristotle's approach to biological inquiry and explanation, his concepts of matter, form and kind, and his teleology. (shrink)

One of the great American pragmatic philosophers alongside Peirce and Dewey, William James (1842–1910) delivered these eight lectures in Boston and New York in the winter of 1906–7. Though he credits Peirce with coining the term 'pragmatism', James highlights in his subtitle that this 'new name' describes a philosophical temperament as old as Socrates. The pragmatic approach, he says, takes a middle way between rationalism's airy principles and empiricism's hard facts. James' pragmatism is both a method of (...) interpreting ideas by their practical consequences and an epistemology which identifies truths according to their useful outcomes. Furnished with many examples, the lectures illustrate pragmatism's response to classic problems such as the question of free will versus determinism. Published in 1907, this work further develops James's approach to religion and morality, introduced in The Will to Believe (1897) and The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), both reissued in this series. (shrink)

A quarter-century ago, during a period when belief in the robustness of classical tests on means was practically a professional shibboleth, a series of large, carefully controlled, and well-validated experiments and sampling studies (supplemented and supported by extensive mathematical derivations) dramatically showed that highly publicized claims of robustness were insufficiently qualified and that extreme nonrobustness could occur under perfectly reasonable experimental and testing conditions. When these findings were published in technical reports, they tended either to be ignored or to be (...) so misrepresented and distorted by those who cited them as to make them appear to support, rather than question, the very claims of robustness they tended to refute. Attempts to publish these iconoclastic results in many of the most renowned professional journals were met with rejection based upon reviewer comments so illogical or fatuous as to be interpreted only as an indication of either contrived obstructionism or pathetic professional incompetence. Eventual acceptance by a few refereed journals could, in every case, be interpreted as a political-type fluke. (shrink)

Robustness properties of three equality of variances tests, the jackknife procedure, the k-sample Box-Andersen test, and Levene’s z test, were investigated and compared in a Monte Carlo study employing small samples from underlying gamma distributions and gamma mixtures. Overall, the jackknife test yielded rejection proportions usually closer to nominal levels under departures from normality, but the Box-Andersen test performed relatively well when departures from normality were not extreme. Four recommendations regarding testing variances were offered.

James I. The Political Works of James I. Reprinted from the Edition of 1616. With an Introduction by Charles Howard McIlwain. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918. cxi, 354 pp. Reprinted 2002 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.

Former Google advertising strategist, now Oxford-trained philosopher James Williams launches a plea to society and to the tech industry to help ensure that the technology we all carry with us every day does not distract us from pursuing our true goals in life. As information becomes ever more plentiful, the resource that is becoming more scarce is our attention. In this 'attention economy', we need to recognise the fundamental impacts of our new information environment on our lives in order (...) to take back control. Drawing on insights ranging from Diogenes to contemporary tech leaders, Williams's thoughtful and impassioned analysis is sure to provoke discussion and debate. Williams is the inaugural winner of the Nine Dots Prize, a new Prize for creative thinking that tackles contemporary social issues. This title is also available as Open Access. (shrink)

The authors of this lively and thorough introduction to philosophy from a Christian perspective introduce you to the principal subdisciplines of philosophy, including epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, ethics and philosophy ...