In Paul and Image, Philip Erwin challenges conventional interpretations of First Corinthians by focusing on the role that ancient Roman visual culture played in the lives of Paul and those of the people of Corinth.

"Philip Rieff has become out most learned and provocative critic of psychoanalytic thinking and of the compelling mind and character of its first proponent.

The widespread impression that recent philosophy of science has pioneered exploration of the “social dimensions of scientific knowledge” is shown to be in error, partly due to a lack of appreciation of historical precedent, and partly due to a misunderstanding of how the social sciences and philosophy have been intertwined over the last century. This paper argues that the referents of “democracy” are an important key in the American context, and that orthodoxies in the philosophy of science tend to be (...) molded by the actual regimes of science organization within which they are embedded. These theses are illustrated by consideration of three representative philosophers of science: John Dewey, Hans Reichenbach, and Philip Kitcher.Author Keywords: Social dimensions of science; Logical positivism; Democracy; Context of discovery/justification; Goals of science. (shrink)

Foucault’s disciplinary society and his notion of panopticism are often invoked in discussions regarding electronic surveillance. Against this use of Foucault, I argue that contemporary trends in surveillance technology abstract human bodies from their territorial settings, separating them into a series of discrete flows through what Deleuze will term, the surveillant assemblage. The surveillant assemblage and its product, the socially sorted body, aim less at molding, punishing and controlling the body and more at triggering events of in- and ex-clusion from (...) life opportunities. The meaning of the body as monitored by latest generation vision technologies formed from machine only surveillance has been transformed. Such a body is no longer disciplinary in the Foucauldian sense. It is a virtual/flesh interface broken into discrete data flows whose comparison and breakage generate bodies as both legible and eligible (or illegible). (shrink)

Are we now in a position to give a "final accounting" of Freud's work? Before answering, I should say what this means, or rather what I mean. If we mean a verdict that is certain, in the sense that it could not possibly be overturned by new  ...

When asked to explain their solutions to a problem, both adults and children gesture as they talk. These gestures at times convey information that is not conveyed in speech and thus reveal thoughts that are distinct from those revealed in speech. In this study, we use the classic Tower of Hanoi puzzle to validate the claim that gesture and speech taken together can reflect the activation of two cognitive strategies within a single response. The Tower of Hanoi is a well‐studied (...) puzzle, known to be most efficiently solved by activating subroutines at theoretically defined choice points. When asked to explain how they solved the Tower of Hanoi puzzle, both adults and children produced significantly more gesture‐speech mismatches—explanations in which speech conveyed one path and gesture another—at these theoretically defined choice points than they produced at non‐choice points. Even when the participants did not solve the problem efficiently, gesture could be used to indicate where the participants were deciding between alternative paths. Gesture can, thus, serve as a useful adjunct to speech when attempting to discover cognitive processes in problem‐solving. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article examines how Christians who had been deprived of the direct sponsorship of the state articulated their claims for political and religious freedom. I examine four cases from the fifth and sixth century in the Eastern Roman Empire and Sasanian Iran. Here I argue that Scriptural models provided an important reservoir of political ideas that could be used by clerics to undermine state authority, whether to underscore the conditional nature of Roman claims to authority or to deny an equality (...) of religious freedom to non-Christian co-citizens. (shrink)

He then tries to show how the concept of meaninglessness, when interpreted in the manner he suggests, can be profitably used by philosophers, despite the many persuasive objections to its use that philosophers have raised in their disputes over it.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Domains of Microevolution and Macroevolution Changing Meanings of Macroevolution An Expanding Hierarchy of Selection Origins of Novelty Mass Extinctions Is Evolution Uniformitarian? Conclusions Postscript: Counterpoint References.

Scholars have cited the influence of Lucretius on Machiavelli as important to framing Machiavelli’s position on the freedom of political agents. Some scholars like Roecklin and Rahe argue that Machiavelli was a determinist based on Machiavelli’s rejection of the clinamen; others argue with Brown and Morfino that Machiavelli’s affirmation of Lucretian natural principles left room for the freedom of agents. However, this paper takes a different approach by arguing that Machiavelli successfully resists identification with either of these positions. I argue (...) here that Machiavelli affirms a notion of agency that reflects the influence of the Lucretian notion of mixed bodies where human actions emerge from an irreducible multiplicity of subjective and objective factors. I also argue that Machiavelli structures the narratives describing the actions of his agents in a way that supports interpreting their actions as both contingent and necessary. (shrink)

According to a posteriori physicalism, phenomenal properties are physical properties, despite the unbridgeable cognitive gap that holds between phenomenal concepts and physical concepts. Current debates about a posteriori physicalism turn on what I call “the perspicuity principle”: it is impossible for a suitably astute cognizer to possess concepts of a certain sort—viz., narrow concepts—without being able to tell whether the referents of those concepts are the same or different. The perspicuity principle tends to strike a posteriori physicalists as implausibly rationalistic; (...) further, a posteriori physicalists maintain that even if the principle is applicable to many narrow concepts, phenomenal concepts have unique features that render them inferentially isolated from other narrow concepts ). I argue, on the contrary, that the case for the perspicuity principle is quite strong. Moreover, not only have versions of the PCS repeatedly failed, likely, all versions will, given the strange combination of lucidity and opacity that the PCS has to juggle. I conclude that a posteriori physicalists currently lack a principled objection to classic anti-physicalist arguments. (shrink)

The distinctions between A-series and B-series, between synchronic and diachronic identity and between perdurance and endurance are basic in the philosophy of time; yet they are flawed. McTaggart’s claim that the B-series is static and that a series has to be changing to be really temporal arises from a misunderstanding of temporal relations and of the task of ontological analysis. The dynamic appearance of the A-series results from the incompleteness of the analysis. “Synchronic identity” is synonymous with “strict identity”, which (...) has nothing to do with simultaneity. “Diachronic Identity” is another designation for persistence of an ordinary thing through time and change. Now, strict self-identity holds independently of whether a thing has a short or a long duration. Hence, diachronic identity is synchronic identity. Lewis’ distinguishes two kinds of ontological analyses of persistence, the perdurance and the endurance analysis. This dichotomy is in several respects not exhaustive. Above all, his definition of “persist” is inadequate being based on the notion of multiple temporal localisation which is apt with interrupted but misplaced with persistent, i.e., temporally continuous objects. (shrink)

According to the traditional Christian understanding, being devoted to God is partly constitutive of human welfare. I explicate this tradition view, in three stages. First, I sketch a general theory of well-being which I call ‘Platonic Personalist Perfectionism.’ Second, I show how being devoted to God is uniquely perfective. I discuss three different components of the posture of devotion: abnegation (surrender of one’s will to God), adoration (responding to God’s goodness with attention, love and praise), and existential dependence (receiving one’s (...) self-worth as an unmerited gift from God). All three components of devotion are perfective in a dual way: they are salvific (they remediate a great harm) and consummative (they confer a great benefit). Third, I respond to the objection that devotion involves subjugating oneself, and thus amounts to an all-things-considered harm, notwithstanding whatever benefits it confers. I argue that so long as one’s acts of abnegating, adoring, and existentially depending are acts of one’s own, then subjugation is not essential to devotion. However, devotion does diminish one if the object of one’s devotion is unsuitable. I argue that the only suitable object of devotion is the God of traditional theism. (shrink)

Ontological emergentists about consciousness maintain that phenomenal properties are ontologically fundamental properties that are nonetheless non-basic: they emerge from reality only once the ultimate material constituents of reality (the “UPCs”) are suitable arranged. Ontological emergentism has been challenged on the grounds that it is insufficiently explanatory. In this essay, I develop the version of ontological emergentism I take to be the most explanatorily promising—the causal theory of ontological emergence—in light of four challenges: The Collaboration Problem (how do UPCs jointly manifest (...) their collective consciousness-generating power?); The Threshold Problem: (under what circumstances do UPCs jointly manifest their collective consciousness-generating power?); The Subject Problem (which object is the bearer of emergent phenomenal states?); and The Specificity Problem (what determines which specific phenomenal state is generated?) In response to these challenges, I arrive at the following picture of ontological emergence. When UPCs that are parts of a suitably complex sensorimotor system become entangled, they jointly manifest a subject-forming power (where subjects are deeply unified composites of the UPCs responsible for generating them). The emergent subjects thereby formed exhibit a novel causal power: the power to generate phenomenal states, which they themselves instantiate: states that “interpret” what is going on in the brain. (shrink)

I review three problems that have historically motivated pessimism about artificial intelligence: (1) the Problem of Consciousness, according to which artificial systems function without the right sort of conscious oversight; (2) The Problem of Global Relevance, according to which artificial systems cannot solve fully general theoretical and practical problems; (3) The Problem of Semantic Irrelevance, according to which artificial systems cannot be guided by semantic comprehension. I connect the dots between all three problems by drawing attention to non-syntactic inferences—inferences that (...) are made on the basis of insight into the rational relationships among thought-contents. Consciousness alone affords such insight, I argue, and such insight alone confers positive epistemic status on the execution of the inferences. Only when artificial systems can execute inferences that are rationally guided by phenomenally conscious states will such systems count as intelligent in a literal sense. (shrink)

There is a widely held view that the expressions ‘necessary truth’, ‘a priori truth’ and ‘analytic truth’ either express the same concept or, at least, refer to all and only the same items. Philosophers who hold this view, and who are sometimes described as ‘empiricists’, often draw the conclusion that the truths of logic and mathematics, if necessary, are also a priori and are, in some important sense, empty or not about the world. The subject matter of these disciplines, then, (...) is said to differ in a philosophically important way from that of the empirical sciences, such as physics or chemistry. Rationalists, in contrast, have traditionally held that some a priori truths, either of logic or mathematics, are synthetic and, hence, non-analytic: i.e., there are synthetic a priori truths. (shrink)

John Greenwood (this issue) claims that neglect of an important methodological distinction has contributed directly to the "epistemic impoverishment" of empirical studies of all forms of professional psychotherapy. I challenge this claim, as well as other important claims he makes about the efficacy of psychoanalysis and other forms of psychotherapy.

Treatments of the status of mercenary arms in Machiavelli typically concentrate on Machiavelli’s discussions of the theme of the ‘arms of others’ in chapters XII and XIII of the Prince. Generally they place special importance on the exaggerated disdain Machiavelli voices for mercenary arms, sometimes entirely passing over the related issue of auxiliaries, and sometimes grouping this issue together with Machiavelli’s treatment of mercenaries as constituting essentially the same issue – the arms of others. Further, though the importance of this (...) distinction between one’s own arms and the arms of others in Machiavelli is nearly universally recognized by commentators, the distinction receives unequal treatment. Commentators tend to place great emphasis on the theme and implications of ‘having one’s own arms’ while either adopting Machiavelli’s criticism of mercenary and auxiliary arms verbatim or simply passing over this related issue. As a result, no sustained analyses of Machiavelli’s reasoning on the arms of ‘others’ have appeared. This article addresses that gap. (shrink)

For those familiar with Machiavelli’s texts, Foucault’s interpretation of Macchiavelli in his 1978 lecture series Sécurité, Territoire, Population1 is surprising. Although Machiavelli figures prominently in five of the thirteen lectures,2 Foucault treats Machiavelli as if he were the author of only one book—The Prince—and his reading treats this complex text as if it covered only one topic: how to guarantee the security of the Prince. Clearly Foucault did not intend his interpretation of Machiavelli as a close exegesis. Other discussions of (...) Foucault’s treatment of Machiavelli have acknowledged the role Machiavelli plays in these lectures and even note the inadequacy of the interpretation given by Foucault, but most commentators do not pursue Foucault’s reading further.3 This investigation is not concerned with whether Foucault got Machiavelli right. Rather, Foucault’s reading of Machiavelli is noteworthy because it is partial and incomplete in a way reminiscent of Foucault’s reading of Hobbes in, Il faut défendre la société. This fragmentary character of Foucault’s inscription of Machiavelli as a forerunner of the history of biopolitique allows an innovative reading of the Florentine that connects Machiavelli’s thinking, however indirectly, on a trajectory that encounters, for instance, Foucault’s analysis of populations, the police state, and even his reading of liberalism during the 1978-­‐ 1979 lectures. My argument here is that the specific way Foucault’s inscribes Machiavelli in the history of gouvernementalité, while seeming to reject him, in fact acts to resuscitate, and thereby relay, a reading of Machiavelli as a thinker who articulates encounters among political practices engaged within a horizon of radical immanence. (shrink)

This paper examines the notion of the biopolitical body from the standpoint of Foucault’s logic of the security mechanism and the history he tells of vaccine technology. It then investigates how the increasing importance of the genetic code for determining the meaning and limits of the human in the field of 20th century cell biology has been a cause for ongoing transformation in the practices that currently extend vaccine research and development. I argue that these transformations mark the emergence of (...) a new kind of medical subject – the stabilized and infinitely reproducible human cell line – and that the practices and markets exploiting this new form of organism have had a destabilizing effect on the very biopolitical structures that engendered them and, in fact, mark a new way of conceiving the possibilities of cellular life. I call these new ways of organizing power that intervene in the logic of the security measure by mediating the relationship between populations and persons the microbiopolitical. (shrink)

This article considers the use of ethnographic language in Procopius' Vandal Wars. In particular, it examines how self-control was employed as a flexible criterion for membership of a civilised, Roman world. We see this both in the sense of non-Romans imitating the self-controlled example of Belisarius and of Romans losing their self-control through imitating the luxury and tyranny of their Vandal opponents. In addition, the article argues for the Christianised character of this ethnographic language, which embraced the equation between right (...) belief, divine favour and self-control seen in the ecclesiastical historians, even if Procopius' understanding of right belief emphasises religious tolerance and humility over issues of dogma. (shrink)

This paper is underpinned by an epistemological question: What are the types and ways of knowing that can be entailed in reflective leadership in its fullest sense? The question is explored through a mapping exercise which outlines a geography of reflective leadership in terms of three variables: type of knowledge, problem focus, and mode of learning (incorporating the notion of embodied learning). Particular attention is given to recognising within the terrain of reflective leadership the epistemic credentials of spiritual learning and (...) experiential awareness of spirituality. This paper was given the award of best paper at the Philosophy of Management Conference, University of Oxford, 11th–14th July 2008. (shrink)

This thesis is concerned with Immanuel Kant's mature philosophy as a whole. My aim is to show the systematic relationship among Kant's three Critiques, and the continuity of these with the Inaugral Dissertation. I use recent interpretations of Kant's projects in the Critique of Pure Reason and I offer my own interpretation of the Critique of Judgment, in which I highlight the importance of the final Appendix in that work, to argue that the goal of these three works taken together (...) is to replace traditional metaphysics with a new approach entirely. In place of the traditional approach in which the principles of metaphysics are supposed to be principles of the objective order of things quite apart from the way they appear to us, Kant argues in favour of a system of subjective principles that he believes will nevertheless allow us to achieve the goals of metaphysics. The new metaphysics will not be knowledge-based, as traditional metaphysics had been. Rather Kant's system is primarily ethics-based. That is, the primary principles of Kant's metaphysical system are those of his rational ethics, which have the function of regulating our activity in, and organization of, the world. Instead of knowledge, ethics, and theology being uneasily coordinated parts of philosophy, as they are in traditional metaphysical systems, all three become integrated within an ethical, and essentially teleological, framework in Kant's system. Showing the role of the Critique of Judgment in bringing about this change, as well as showing the importance of teleology for Kant's philosophy, are both important goals of the thesis. (shrink)

First published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This article aims to open up the biographical black box of three experts working in the boundary zone between science, policy and public debate. A biographical-narrative approach is used to analyse the roles played by the virologists Albert Osterhaus, Roel Coutinho and Jaap Goudsmit in policy and public debate. These figures were among the few leading virologists visibly active in the Netherlands during the revival of infectious diseases in the 1980s. Osterhaus and Coutinho in particular are still the key figures (...) today, as demonstrated during the outbreak of novel influenza A (H1N1). This article studies the various political and communicative challenges and dilemmas encountered by these three virologists, and discusses the way in which, strategically or not, they handled those challenges and dilemmas during the various stages of the field’s recent history. Important in this respect is their pursuit of a public role that is both effective and credible. We will conclude with a reflection on the H1N1 pandemic, and the historical and biographical ties between emerging governance arrangements and the experts involved in the development of such arrangements. (shrink)

We provide empirical examples to conceptually clarify some items on Firestone & Scholl’s (F&S’s) checklist, and to explain perceptual effects from an attentional and memory perspective. We also note that action and embodied cognition studies seem to be most susceptible to misattributing attentional and memory effects as perceptual, and identify four characteristics unique to action studies and possibly responsible for misattributions.

Corporate codes of conduct are a practical corporate social responsibility (CSR) instrument commonly used to govern employee behavior and establish a socially responsible organizational culture. The effectiveness of these codes has been widely discussed on theoretical grounds and empirically tested in numerous previous reports that directly compare companies with and without codes of conduct. Empirical research has yielded inconsistent results that may be explained by multiple ancillary factors, including the quality of code content and implementation, which are excluded from analyses (...) based solely on the presence or absence of codes.This study investigated the importance of code content in determining code effectiveness by examining the relationship between code of conduct quality and ethical performance. Companies maintaining high quality codes of conduct were significantly more represented among top CSR ranking systems for corporate citizenship, sustainability, ethical behavior, and public perception. Further, a significant relationship was observed between code quality and CSR performance, across a full range of ethical rankings. These findings suggest code quality may play a crucial role in the effectiveness of codes of conduct and their ability to transform organizational cultures.Future research efforts should transcend traditional comparisons based on the presence or absence of ethical codes and begin to examine the essential factors leading to the effective establishment of CSR policies and sustainable business practices in corporate culture. (shrink)