In this collection the authors have attempted to bring together a number of the essential papers in the subjective interpretation of probability theory; several of them—Borel's "Apropos of a theory on probability" and de Finetti's "Foresight: its logical laws, its subjective sources"—have never appeared before in English. Other articles include Venn's pioneering study as well as the more recent work of Ramsey, Koopman, and Savage. The editors provide an introduction which presents the three basic elements of any subjectivistic theory: probability (...) as degree of belief, the coherence of beliefs of an individual, and the notion of exchangeable events. A bibliography includes references to virtually all the more important works in subjective probability, with special emphasis on the development of the mathematical side of the theory. This anthology belongs on the shelf of any philosopher concerned with inductive logic, statistical inference, or the foundations of probability theory.—P. J. M. (shrink)

Pragmatism is America's best-known native philosophy. It espouses a practical set of beliefs and principles that focus on the improvement of our lives. Yet the split between classical and contemporary pragmatists has divided the tradition against itself. Classical pragmatists, such as John Dewey and William James, believed we should heed the lessons of experience. Neopragmatists, including Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Jürgen Habermas, argue instead from the perspective of a linguistic turn, which makes little use of the idea of experience. (...) Can these two camps be reconciled in a way that revitalizes a critical tradition? -/- Colin Koopman proposes a recovery of pragmatism by way of "transitionalist" themes of temporality and historicity which flourish in the work of the early pragmatists and continue in contemporary neopragmatist thought. "Life is in the transitions," James once wrote, and, in following this assertion, Koopman reveals the continuities uniting both phases of pragmatism. Koopman's framework also draws from other contemporary theorists, including Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Bernard Williams, and Stanley Cavell. By reflecting these voices through the prism of transitionalism, a new understanding of knowledge, ethics, politics, and critique takes root. Koopman concludes with a call for integrating Dewey and Foucault into a model of inquiry he calls genealogical pragmatism, a mutually informative critique that further joins the analytic and continental schools. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 12.1 (2004) 60-63 [Access article in PDF] Response to Bennett Reimer, "Once More with Feeling: Reconciling Discrepant Accounts of Musical Affect" Constantijn Koopman University of Nijmegen and Royal Conservatory of the Hague, The Netherlands Bennett Reimer has pointed out the crucial distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic meaning or, in his terminology, between inherent and delineated meaning. He has eloquently described how feeling in music (...) can be both of the inherent type and of the delineated type and has argued that both types of meaning can coexist. There is no point in denying the validity of either of them; rather the challenge is to develop a view which allows us to combine both perspectives of musical meaning into a unified musical practice.As far as I am concerned, Reimer has succeeded in his reconciliatory approach. Therefore, rather than providing criticism, I would like further to elaborate on the subject. First, I shall examine the difference between the two types of meaning Reimer has illustrated in his examples: feeling as a part of inherent meaning and feeling as portrayed or represented. Then, I shall briefly discuss the problem of articulating these two types of meaning and its educational implications.When reflecting on inherent and delineated meaning, I find that the dichotomy [End Page 60] goes beyond the opposition between intrinsic and extrinsic. We are also dealing with different versions of the concept of meaning; different meanings of 'meaning' so to speak. In the case of feelings, actions, or objects portrayed in music we have a rather unproblematic use of the meaning concept-meaning as reference. Music functions as a meaning bearer that directs our attention to something beyond itself. Musical structure is used to represent something that exists independently of music. With Charles S. Peirce, we might say that it serves the function of an "icon." The iconic sign has a form which is similar to the thing it denotes.1 Similarity may have the form of direct resemblance but it may also may be based on analogy. I guess that both kinds of portrayal were present in the Chinese swamp battle piece. Battle sounds can easily be imitated by musical instruments and violent movement and feelings can be represented by analogous tonal movement.With inherent meaning, things are different. Feelings are not pointed to and represented by musical structure; instead they are experienced by the person who engages in music. This is in line, I suppose, with Reimer's exposition; not only does he say that feeling is contained and expressed in sounds but also that feeling is undergone by the performer and the listener. What precisely is the place of inherent feeling in music? Feelings are not contained in the sense that they require an act of decoding so that by interpreting the musical structure we can decipher its affective contents. Nor is it appropriate simply to declare that musical feelings are caused by musical perception. Such an explanation suggests that feelings are a secondary phenomenon in music, a sort of byproduct of musical cognition; first the music is conceived in a cognitive act, then feelings are released. But in fact feeling is much more directly and actively involved in musical experience; it is vital to the constitution of the musical object. For example, to appreciate the specific character and import of themes and motifs we have to sense their affective value. We realize the power of rhythms by feeling them in our body. Chords and chord progressions are perceived as subtle qualities of tension and release. Only by feeling the curve of tension and release can we appreciate how the work progresses-whether the music is moving forward or coming to closure, whether a climax is prepared or there is consolidation, whether a case of closure is partial or final. Likewise, the perception of contrasting musical episodes-like soft versus rough, supple versus stubborn, warm versus frigid-involves the participation of feeling. In short, the function of feeling contributes a major part to the constitution of the musical... (shrink)

Richard Rorty's pragmatism is a distinctively doubled philosophy formed at the twain of a rigorous antifoun‐dational philosophical perspective and a committed postmetaphysical cultural criticism. Rorty instead rigorously held to the line that no particular politics follows from anti‐foundational philosophy. Rorty's arguments against representationalism, foundationalism, and metaphysics‐first philosophy in Mirror are complex and not always easy to navigate without careful guidance. The risk of the approach in Mirror is that it could implicate Rorty in a foundationalist critique of foundationalism, or a (...) metaphysical critique of metaphysics. For ironism is the studied denial not of metaphysics itself, but only of strong forms of pro‐metaphysical argument. Rorty uses liberalism to avoid the metaphysical forbidding of metaphysics – substituting for it instead a liberal, perhaps even a critical, limiting of metaphysics. The most important insight of Contingency boils down to this: liberalism and ironism together give us something to strive for that the metaphysician would otherwise take as settled. (shrink)

This book reports recent landmark developments and the state of the art in NDS science in psychological theory and research.

Viewing Foucault in the light of work by Continental and American philosophers, most notably Nietzsche, Habermas, Deleuze, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, and Ian Hacking, Genealogy as Critique shows that philosophical genealogy involves not only the critique of modernity but also its transformation. Colin Koopman engages genealogy as a philosophical tradition and a method for understanding the complex histories of our present social and cultural conditions. He explains how our understanding of Foucault can benefit from productive dialogue with philosophical allies to (...) push Foucaultian genealogy a step further and elaborate a means of addressing our most intractable contemporary problems. (shrink)

Although living conditions have improved throughout history, protest, at least in the last few decades, seems to have increased to the point of becoming a normal phenomenon in modern societies. Contributors to this volume examine how and why this is the case and argue that although problems such as poverty, hunger, and violations of democratic rights may have been reduced in advanced Western societies, a variety of other problems and opportunities have emerged and multiplied the reasons and possibilities for protest.

We are now acutely aware, as if all of the sudden, that data matters enormously to how we live. How did information come to be so integral to what we can do? How did we become people who effortlessly present our lives in social media profiles and who are meticulously recorded in state surveillance dossiers and online marketing databases? What is the story behind data coming to matter so much to who we are? -/- In How We Became Our Data, (...) Colin Koopman excavates early moments of our rapidly accelerating data-tracking technologies and their consequences for how we think of and express our selfhood today. Koopman explores the emergence of mass-scale record keeping systems like birth certificates and social security numbers, as well as new data techniques for categorizing personality traits, measuring intelligence, and even racializing subjects. This all culminates in what Koopman calls the “informational person” and the “informational power” we are now subject to. The recent explosion of digital technologies that are turning us into a series of algorithmic data points is shown to have a deeper and more turbulent past than we commonly think. Blending philosophy, history, political theory, and media theory in conversation with thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, and Friedrich Kittler, Koopman presents an illuminating perspective on how we have come to think of our personhood—and how we can resist its erosion. (shrink)

Now in a third edition, Introduction to Philosophy: Classical and Contemporary Readings is a highly acclaimed, topically organized collection that covers five major areas of philosophy--theory of knowledge, philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind, freedom and determinism, and moral philosophy. Editor Louis P. Pojman enhances the text's topical organization by arranging the selections into a pro/con format to help students better understand opposing arguments. He also includes accessible introductions to each chapter, subsection, and individual reading, a unique feature for an (...) anthology of this depth. While the book focuses on a compelling sampling of classical material--including selections from Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant--it also incorporates some of philosophy's best twentieth-century and contemporary work, featuring articles by Bertrand Russell, Richard Taylor, John Searle, Thomas Nagel, and others. This third edition contains an expanded glossary, more extensive section introductions, and twelve new selections: Karl Popper: "Epistemology without a Knowing Subject" Richard Rorty: "Dismantling Truth: Solidarity Versus Objectivity" Daniel Dennett: "Postmodernism and Truth" Bruce Russell: "The Problem of Evil: Too Much Suffering" David Chalmers: "Against Materialism: Can Consciousness Be Reductively Explained?" Baron Paul Henri d'Holbach: "A Defense of Determinism" Michael Levin: "A Compatibilist Defense of Moral Responsibility" Plato: Socratic Morality: "Crito" Herodotus: "Custom Is King" J. L. Mackie: "The Subjectivity of Values" Louis P. Pojman: "A Critique of Mackie's Theory of Moral Subjectivism" Thomas Nagel: "Moral Luck". (shrink)

Collective action, or the large-scale cooperation in the pursuit of public goods, has been suggested to have evolved through cultural group selection. Previous research suggests that the costly punishment of group members who do not contribute to public goods plays an important role in the resolution of collective action dilemmas. If large-scale cooperation sustained by the punishment of defectors has evolved through the mechanism of cultural group selection, two implications regarding costly punishment follow: (1) that people are more willing to (...) punish defecting group members in a situation of intergroup competition than in a single-group social dilemma game and (2) that levels of “perverse” punishment of cooperators are not affected by intergroup competition. We find confirmation for these hypotheses. However, we find that the effect of intergroup competition on the punishment of defectors is fully explained by the stronger conditionality of punishment on expected punishment levels in the competition condition. (shrink)

Throughout the text, the reader is reminded of the contribution of the Christian faith to matters of development and ethics.

The design of democratic institutions includes a variety of barriers to protect against the tyranny of the majority, including international human rights, cultural minority rights, and multiculturalism. In the twenty-first century, majorities have re-asserted themselves, sometimes reasonably, referring to social cohesion and national identity, at other times in the form of populist movements challenging core foundations of liberal democracy. This volume intervenes in this debate by examining the legitimacy of conflicting majority and minority claims. Are majorities a legal concept, holding (...) rights and subject to limitations? How can we define a sense of nationhood that brings groups together rather than tears them apart? In this volume, world-leading experts are brought together for the first time to debate the rights of both majorities and minorities. The outcome is a fascinating exchange on one of the greatest challenges facing liberal democracies today. (shrink)

In ”Skepticism,” Peter Klein distinguishes between the “Academic Skeptic” who proposes that we cannot have knowledge of a certain set of propositions and the “Pyrrhonian Skeptic” who refrains from opining about whether we can have knowledge. Klein argues that Academic Skepticism is plausibly supported by a “Closure Principle‐style” argument based on the claim that if x entails y and S has justification for x, then S has justification for y. He turns to contextualism to see if it can contribute to (...) the discussion between one who claims that we can have knowledge about some epistemically interesting class of propositions and the Academic Skeptic. He outlines the background of Pyrrhonian Skepticism, pointing out that the Pyrrhonist withholds assent concerning our knowledge‐bearing status because reason cannot provide an adequate basis for assent. He assesses three possible patterns of reasoning, and concludes that the Pyrrhonist view, that reason cannot resolve matters concerning the nonevident, is vindicated. (shrink)

Bioethics needs an expanded moral vision. It is now time for bioethics to take full account of the problems of health disparities and structural injustice that are made newly urgent by the COVID-19 pandemic and the effects of climate change. Nancy M. P. King, Gail E. Henderson, and Larry R. Churchill make the case for a more social understanding and application of justice, a deeper humility in assessing expertise in bioethics consulting, a broader and more relevant research agenda, and greater (...) appreciation of the profound health implications of global warming. (shrink)

Despite widespread recognition of an emergent politics of data in our midst, we strikingly lack a political theory of data. We readily acknowledge the presence of data across our political lives, but we often do not know how to conceptualize the politics of all those data points—the forms of power they constitute and the kinds of political subjects they implicate. Recent work in numerous academic disciplines is evidence of the first steps toward a political theory of data. This article maps (...) some limits of this emergent literature with an eye to enriching its theoretical range. The literature on data politics, both within political theory and elsewhere, has thus far focused almost exclusively on the algorithm. This article locates a further dimension of data politics in the work of formatting technology or, more simply, formats. Formats are simultaneously conceptual and technical in the ways they define what can even count as data, and by extension who can count as data and how they can count. A focus on formats is of theoretical value because it provides a bridge between work on the conceptual contours of categories and the technology-centric literature on algorithms that tends to ignore the more conceptual dimensions of data technology. The political insight enabled by format theory is shown in the context of an extended interrogation of the politics of racialized redlining. (shrink)

The forceful impact of Michel Foucault’s work in the humanities and social sciences is apparent from the sheer abundance of its uses, appropriations, and refigurations. This article calls for greater self-conscious reflexivity about the relationship between our uses of Foucault and the opportunities afforded by his work. We argue for a clearer distinction between analytics and concepts in Foucault-inspired work. In so doing we draw on key moments of methodological self-reflection in Foucault’s Collège de France lectures and elsewhere. This distinction (...) helps identify different ways that Foucault might be put to productive use today as well as what can go wrong therein, a concern we develop with reference to Giorgio Agamben’s post-Foucaultian contributions to political theory. We are eager to open up a possibility that has been infrequently explored despite Foucault’s contemporary influence—-the idea that critique in and through Foucault is empirical critique. This idea can help facilitate a gain in reflexivity in the broader landscapes of contemporary theory, inquiry, and critique. (shrink)

First published in 1987. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The linguistic turn is a central aspect of Richard Rorty’s philosophy, informing his early critiques of foundationalism in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and subsequent critiques of authoritarianism in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. It is argued that we should interpret the linguistic turn as a methodological suggestion for how philosophy can take a non-foundational perspective on normativity. It is then argued that although Rorty did not succeed in explicating normativity without foundations (or authority without authoritarianism), we should take seriously (...) the ambition motivating his project. But taking that ambition seriously may require reconsidering the linguistic turn. (shrink)

This article compares three models for conceptualizing the political and ethical challenges of contemporary genetics, genomics, and postgenomics. The three analytical approaches are referred to as the state-politics model, the biopolitical model, and the infopolitical model. Each of these models is valuable for different purposes. But comparing these models in terms of their influence in contemporary discussions, the first is by far the dominant approach, the second is gaining in importance, and the third is almost entirely neglected. The widespread neglect (...) of the infopolitical dimensions of genetic sciences focused by the third model is puzzling in light of the fact that genetics, genomics, and postgenomics are all pre-eminent information sciences. The infopolitical model thus aims to bring into clearer view the specific political and ethical problems engendered by this informational nature of the genetic sciences. This model offers a way of understanding how ethically-salient and politically-fraught conceptual assumptions can be embedded in informational architectures such as algorithms and the formats (or data structures) upon which they rely. (shrink)

First published in 1987. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Engineering is 'the people-serving profession'. The work of engineers involves interaction with clients, other engineers, and the public at large. More than any other profession, their work also directly involves and affects the environment. This book makes the case that engineers have special professional obligations to protect and enhance the environment, and the authors - one, an engineer and the other, a philosopher - seek to provide an ethical basis for these obligations. In exploring these ethical issues, the authors aim (...) to show that engineers make a difference. The text opens with a series of case studies in which engineers face complex and challenging decisions about the environment. Succeeding chapters examine different ideas about environmental ethics for engineers, including professional codes and both modern and historical discussions of environmental responsibility. The book concludes with a collection of readings that complement the text. Students, as well as practising engineers, will find much of interest in this well-argued and thought-provoking book. (shrink)

This article offers the outlines of a historically-informed conception of critical inquiry herein named genealogical pragmatism. This conception of critical inquiry combines the genealogical emphasis on problematization featured in Michel Foucault's work with the pragmatist emphasis on reconstruction featured in John Dewey's work. The two forms of critical inquiry featured by these thinkers are not opposed, as is too commonly supposed. Genealogical problematization and pragmatist reconstruction fit together for reason of their mutual emphasis on the importance of history for philosophy. (...) In so fitting together they repair crucial deficits in both traditions as they currently stand on their own. The resulting conception of critical inquiry as simultaneously problematizational and reconstructive is offered as a first step toward a crucial philosophical task we face today: articulating normativity without foundations. (shrink)

This article aims to contribute to the discussion on the Europeanization of public spheres. It is the starting point for an investigation into the role of the media in transnational debate in Germany. The study aims to determine whether the media function as either a motor of or an obstacle to Europeanization of national public debate, compared to other actors. Drawing on empirical data from the project ‘The transformation of political mobilisation and communication in European public spheres’, we analyze the (...) communications through which political actors, civil society actors, and the media in Germany make public demands on European issues. Sources on which this investigation was built were the news and editorial section of two national quality newspapers, one tabloid and one regional newspaper in the period between 2000 and 2002. The findings show that the demands made by the media are generally more European in scope than those made by other political actors. Regarding the evaluation of EU integration and the frames that are advocated, the German press and the political elite are rather convergent. (shrink)

Gordon Baker and I had been colleagues at St John’s for almost ten years when we resolved, in 1976, to undertake the task of writing a commentary on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. We had been talking about Wittgenstein since 1969, and when we cooperated in writing a long critical notice on the Philosophical Grammar in 1975, we found that working together was mutually instructive, intellectually stimulating and great fun. We thought that we still had much to say about Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and (...) it seemed to us that misinterpretations of passages in the Investigations were so extensive that it would be worth trying to write a detailed analytical commentary. It is difficult to recapture the excitement of those early days in being among the first to work on the microfilms and, subsequently, on the photocopies of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass. We spent many hundreds of hours poring over the typescripts and the often only semi-legible manuscripts, fascinated and privileged to be able to try to follow the development of the thoughts of a great philosophical genius. We talked endlessly about what we had found in Wittgenstein’s manuscripts and typescripts, and debated how it should be understood. The first fruit of our labours was Wittgenstein – Understanding and Meaning. Its guiding idea was to draw attention to the manner in which Wittgenstein linked the concepts of meaning, understanding and explanation, and so to bypass the connections between meaning, truth and truth-conditions that so fascinated philosophers of the 1970s, and to abandon the red-herring of assertion-conditions and anti-realism. After a hiatus of four years, during which time we wrote a controversial book entitled Frege – Logical Excavations and a polemical book on contemporary philosophy of language – Language, Sense. (shrink)

: The revival of philosophical pragmatism has generated a wealth of intramural debates between neopragmatists like Richard Rorty and contemporary scholars devoted to explicating the classical pragmatism of John Dewey and William James. Of all these internecine conflicts, the most divisive concerns the status of language and experience in pragmatist philosophy. Contemporary scholars of classical pragmatism defend experience as the heart of pragmatism while neopragmatists drop the concept of experience in favor of a thoroughly linguistic pragmatism. I argue that both (...) positions engender formidable risks. After discussing the present impasse, I describe a third version of pragmatism which involves a reconstruction of the classical pragmatist concept of experience in light of the criticisms of foundationalism crucial to the neopragmatist linguistic turn. This third version of pragmatism does justice to both Rorty and Dewey by focusing on experience as a temporal field. (shrink)

Much attention is focussed on recent debates in contemporary political philosophy concerning the relative merits of ideal theory and non-ideal theory. In one of their many forms, these debates take shape as a realist challenge to idealistic or utopian approaches to normative political theory. This article shows that the philosophical tradition of pragmatism both instructively anticipates and also, more importantly, can today contribute to contemporary realism. It is shown how a political pragmatism, particularly one centred in William James’ work, helps (...) frame two key contributions that would be resources for the realist challenge to ideal theory. First is an orientation towards unruly pluralism as a feasibility condition that should constrain political theorising. Second is a procedural norm of inclusive tolerance that can help enact the motion of a liberal political vision under the constraints of unruly pluralism. (shrink)

Debates over the relative priority of experience and language have been among some of the most vexed, but also generative, disputes in pragmatist philosophy over the past few decades. These debates have, however, run into the ground such that both positions find themselves at a definitive standstill. I argue for a rejuvenation of pragmatism by way of moving beyond both the experience option (here represented by Dewey) and the linguistic turn in pragmatism (here represented by Brandom). We can move beyond (...) these two categories, I argue, by resuscitating the categorical conception that has always been at the heart of pragmatism all along: action or, as I prefer to put it, conduct. In this paper, I develop an argument for “conduct pragmatism” on the basis of a return to William James’s earliest statements of pragmatism, statements that indeed occur prior to the official announcement of “pragmatism” in 1898. I draw on a dispute with Charles Sanders Peirce over the best interpretation of pragmatism as well as on a number of James’s early psychological writings from the 1880s leading up to the Principles of Psychology of 1890. These texts definitively establish that the early James was what I call a “conduct pragmatist” well before his radical empiricism facilitated what was only a late turn toward the “experience pragmatism” that would come to impress Dewey and later scholars of classicopragmatism. The early James thus represents, I argue, a promising seed for a new third generation of pragmatism that may find its way beyond the endings of both experientialism and lingualism, as well as their impasses with one another. (shrink)

Recent attention given to the upstart movement of experimental philosophy is much deserved. But now that experimental philosophy is beginning to enter a stage of maturity, it is time to consider its relation to other philosophical traditions that have issued similar assaults against ingrained and potentially misguided philosophical habits. Experimental philosophy is widely known for rejecting a philosophical reliance on intuitions as evidence in philosophical argument. In this it shares much with another branch of empiricist philosophy, namely, pragmatism. Taking Kwame (...) Anthony Appiah's forthright and cautious endorsement of experimental philosophy as my model, I show that experimental philosophy and pragmatist philosophy share more than adherents of either philosophical method have yet to allow. I then use this comparison to show how the new experimentalisms could benefit from a rereading of century-old pragmatist insights about philosophical methodology. (shrink)

A growing body of interpretive literature concerning the work of Michel Foucault asserts that Foucault’s critical project is best interpreted in light of various strands of philosophical phenomenology. In this article I dispute this interpretation on both textual and philosophical grounds. It is shown that a core theme of ‘the phenomenological Foucault’ having to do with transcendental inquiry cannot be sustained by a careful reading of Foucault’s texts nor by a careful interpretation of Foucault’s philosophical commitments. It is then shown (...) that this debate in Foucault scholarship has wider ramifications for understanding ‘the critical Foucault’ and the relationship of Foucault’s projects to Kantian critical philosophy. It is argued that Foucault’s work is Kantian at its core insofar as it institutes a critical inquiry into conditions of possibility. But whereas critique for Kant was transcendental in orientation, in Foucault critique becomes historical, and is much the better for it. (shrink)

William James's writings on morality form a vexed collection. Most philosophers regard James as having contributed primarily to epistemology, metaphysics, and psychology, viewing his moral philosophy as secondary, derivative, and accordingly uninteresting for contemporary debates. Among James's writings on moral matters, surely the most infamous is "The Will to Believe." Often read as primarily a contribution to epistemology or philosophy of religion,1 a number of critics spanning well over one hundred years of readership argue that "The Will to Believe" attempts (...) to foist an incredible ethics of belief, one that is problematic in that it defends believing in precisely that which has not been credited as being... (shrink)

Scholarship on the politics of new media widely assumes that communication functions as a sufficient conceptual paradigm for critically assessing new media politics. This article argues that communication-centric analyses fail to engage the politics of information itself, limiting information only to its consequences for communication, and neglecting information as it reaches into our selves, lives, and actions beyond the confines of communication. Furthering recent new media historiography on the “information theory” of Shannon and Wiener, the article reveals both the primacy (...) of communication in midcentury information theory, and also a striking resonance between these postwar communication theories and Habermas’s more recent communicative theory of democracy. To achieve a critical perspective beyond communication, the article proposes a media genealogy of the politics of subjects as a methodology for developing an analysis of how information formats us as subjects of data. (shrink)