Human one‐to‐one tutoring has been shown to be a very effective form of instruction. Three contrasting hypotheses, a tutor‐centered one, a student‐centered one, and an interactive one could all potentially explain the effectiveness of tutoring. To test these hypotheses, analyses focused not only on the effectiveness of the tutors' moves, but also on the effectiveness of the students' construction on learning, as well as their interaction. The interaction hypothesis is further tested in the second study by manipulating the kind of (...) tutoring tactics tutors were permitted to use. In order to promote a more interactive style of dialogue, rather than a didactic style, tutors were suppressed from giving explanations and feedback. Instead, tutors were encouraged to prompt the students. Surprisingly, students learned just as effectively even when tutors were suppressed from giving explanations and feedback. Their learning in the interactive style of tutoring is attributed to construction from deeper and a greater amount of scaffolding episodes, as well as their greater effort to take control of their own learning by reading more. What they learned from reading was limited, however, by their reading abilities. (shrink)

The goals of this study are to evaluate a relatively novel learning environment, as well as to seek greater understanding of why human tutoring is so effective. This alternative learning environment consists of pairs of students collaboratively observing a videotape of another student being tutored. Comparing this collaboratively observing environment to four other instructional methods—one‐on‐one human tutoring, observing tutoring individually, collaborating without observing, and studying alone—the results showed that students learned to solve physics problems just as effectively from observing tutoring (...) collaboratively as the tutees who were being tutored individually. We explain the effectiveness of this learning environment by postulating that such a situation encourages learners to become active and constructive observers through interactions with a peer. In essence, collaboratively observing combines the benefit of tutoring with the benefit of collaborating. The learning outcomes of the tutees and the collaborative observers, along with the tutoring dialogues, were used to further evaluate three hypotheses explaining why human tutoring is an effective learning method. Detailed analyses of the protocols at several grain sizes suggest that tutoring is effective when tutees are independently or jointly constructing knowledge: with the tutor, but not when the tutor independently conveys knowledge. (shrink)

Many people object to genetically engineerehd (GE) food because they believe that it is unnatural or that its creation amounts to playing God. These objections are often referred to as intrinsic objections, and they have been widely criticized in the agricultural bioethics literature as being unsound, incompatible with modern science, religious, inchoate, and based on emotion instead of reason. Many of their critics also argue that even if these objections did have some merit as ethicalobjections, their quasi-religious nature means that (...) they are entirely irrelevant when interpreted aspolitical objections regarding what public policy ought to be. In this paper, we argue that this widespread view is false. Intrinsic objections have much more political import than has previously been recognized, and indeed the requirements of political liberalism and its associated idea of liberal neutrality, once properly understood, protect intrinsic objections from many of the most common objections. That is, policy-makers may not legitimately base public policy on grounds that are inconsistent with intrinsic objections, even when they believe those objections to be flawed in the ways mentioned above. This means that in the context of a political debate about GE food, the discussion should not center on the substantive merits of the intrinsic objections themselves but rather on the appropriate political norms for achieving democratically legitimate policy on issues that touch people’s deepest religious and moral beliefs. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Will to Nothingness: An Essay on Nietzsche's by Bernard ReginsterRobert GuayBernard Reginster, The Will to Nothingness: An Essay on Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. viii + 202 pp. isbn: 978-0-19-886890-3. Cloth, $80.00.One might imagine making a rough division between two different modes of modern European philosophy. In one, the way that the world seems to proceed belies the actual ground (...) of things; the task of philosophy is to uncover the sources of our misunderstanding and identify the categories that account for genuinely real processes. The other mode of philosophy questions the determinacy and stability of the categories through which we make sense of the world. Here the task of philosophy is not to settle on the right categories or the actual ground, but to gain some purchase on our confusions and self-deceptions when we try to make sense of things. There may be some philosophers (Hegel and Wittgenstein, perhaps) who try to straddle the divide here. But in general the divide is great enough that if an interpreter mistakes one mode for the other it would be costly: no matter how circumspect the particular claims are, all the interpretive results will be misguided. Something like this, I want to claim, is the case with Bernard Reginster's The Will to Nothingness.There are many detailed discussions in Reginster's book. For the purpose of this review, however, I want to focus on the general critical argument, [End Page 104] in part because there is already at least one excellent review of the book (Mark Migotti's in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, June 1, 2022), and in part because I think it goes wrong at the level of its entire approach. On Reginster's account GM is composed of a series of "psychological studies" (3) of a version of Christian morality and its central aspects. These psychological studies treat moral judgments as symptoms of affective states, and in this way uncover the functional role that moralities play in the affective lives of agents. Moralities are "designed" (12), as it were, for emotional regulation. Christian morality, in particular, expresses the ressentiment of those beset by feelings of impotence and serves their will to power. Genealogical critique proceeds by uncovering the actual function of morality and then showing how well (or rather poorly) morality fulfills its proper function. Moral beliefs are supposed to enhance the agents' feeling of power, but instead work to sicken and enervate them, and indeed morality "incites" (46) such a pernicious functioning.While I am sympathetic to the idea that genealogy offers a functional assessment of morality, I think that Reginster has taken the wrong approach here. So now I want to draw a broad contrast between Reginster's approach and an alternative one, and then offer six sets of reasons for favoring the alternative approach.On Reginster's account, Nietzsche is interested in specifying and analyzing a precise conception of morality, with all of its attendant normative judgments, metaethical commitments, characteristic beliefs about moral psychology, and so on. These features were all, as constitutive of the morality in question, familiar to the believers in that morality. The purpose, then, of a historical account of origins is to give a unitary explanation for the adoption of the morality in terms of a single underlying affective condition and drive. Agents adopt moralities because, whether they realize it or not, holding moral beliefs facilitates a form of emotional self-regulation. To criticize these beliefs Nietzsche makes a sort of inverted teleological argument. He identifies the essential function of the beliefs and shows that they work against the fulfillment of their own function.Here, by contrast, is a different way of thinking about what Nietzsche is doing. He is not interested in explaining the moral beliefs of reflective, fully developed agents. Instead, he wants to explain how the semantic resources that contribute to morality could have become available at all. The puzzle, for Nietzsche, is how the basic terms of morality could ever even seem to make sense. So the historical account of genealogy is meant to suggest [End Page 105] social... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Tragic as an Ethical CategoryRobert GuayTragedy is at the center of Nietzsche's conception of his mature philosophical project as the only alternative to the ascetic ideal, and thus as the only avenue for affirmation. It is not merely an aesthetic category, but one that encompasses the very character of self-determining (or "self-creating") agency. The tragic character of self-determining agency, I shall claim, stems from the conflict between the (...) local, practice-dependent character of our normative commitments and their transcendent purport. My argument will run as such. Becoming what one is, according to Nietzsche, is a matter of taking a particular place in a narrative of self-creation. Such narratives are teleological: they are structured by a kind of directionality (or, more broadly, by "ideals") that cannot, practically, be taken as arbitrary. But these narratives are inevitably incomplete, and so therefore are the norms and selves that depend on them.The very project of a genealogy of morals supports my first claim, that becoming what one is involves a matter of taking a particular place in a narrative of self-creation. 1 The Genealogy of Morals begins with the declaration that we are unknown to ourselves, and the explanation it provides of this shortcoming, that we have never sought ourselves, is expanded by means of a temporal metaphor: the bell-strokes of our life that we do not think to reckon until after they have passed. What we have failed to accomplish, and what the genealogy attempts to recover, is a diachronic account of who we are. This missing story covers the singular as well as the collective "we." The end of the story, Nietzsche [End Page 555] claims, is the "sovereign individual," 2 and this notion is presumably governed by his general claim: "all concepts in which an entire process is semiotically drawn together elude definition; only that which has no history is definable" (GM, 2.13). Of course it does not follow from this that everything indefinable has a history, but the special elusiveness of modern individuality seems due to the complexity of its narrative source. And not only individuality in general, but also the particular individual, seems to have a narrative basis. In the book subtitled "How one becomes what one is," in the section that promises the "real answer to the question, how one becomes what one is" (EH "clever," 9), Nietzsche offers this account of personal development:One must keep the entire surface of consciousness—consciousness is a surface—clean of any great imperatives. Beware even of every great word, every great posture! Sheer danger, that the instinct comes to "understand itself" too soon—meanwhile the organizing "idea" with a calling to rule grows and grows deep down—it begins to command, it slowly heads back from detours and wrong ways, it prepares single qualities and competencies that will one day prove to be indispensable as means to a whole—it in turn trains all subservient faculties before giving any hint of the dominating task, "goal," "end," "meaning."The individual, Nietzsche suggests, cannot be understood in terms of anything available to her consciousness, and not even in terms of any "great imperative" or "great word." Instead Nietzsche accounts for individuality, and in fact his own individuality, in terms of a meaningfulness available in terms of the familiar tropes of journeys and roads, and growing and commanding.This passage from Ecce Homo suggests not merely a narrative, but one with a teleology, even if only a retrospectively apparent one. Narratives of self cannot be random or arbitrary; their meaningfulness depends on the structure provided by some kind of directionality: in Nietzsche's words, a dominant "task" or "goal." This directionality is invoked by Nietzsche, for example, with the "teachers of the purpose of existence" of The Gay Science's opening section and with the famous "formula of our happiness" of The Antichrist's opening section: "a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal." The Genealogy of Morals provides a general account of this directionality in terms of a "progressus."I would like to say that even partial becoming useless, atrophying and degenerating, loss of meaning and purposiveness, in short... (shrink)

In the discussion about consequences of the release of genetically modified (GM) crops, the meaning of the term “environmental damage” is difficult to pin down. We discuss some established concepts and criteria for understanding and evaluating such damages. Focusing on the concepts of familiarity, biological integrity, and ecosystem health, we argue that, for the most part, these concepts are highly ambiguous. While environmental damage is mostly understood as significant adverse effects on conservation resources, these concepts may not relate directly to (...) effects on tangible natural resources but rather to parameters of land use or ecological processes (e.g., the concept of biological integrity). We stress the importance of disclosing the normative assumptions underlying damage concepts and procedures for the evaluation of damages by GM crops. A conceptualization of environmental damage should precede its operationalization. We recommend an unambiguous definition for damage developed earlier and recommend that evaluation criteria be based on this. However, a general damage definition cannot replace case-specific operationalization of damage, which remains an important future challenge. (shrink)

In her recent article, Does autonomy count in favor of labeling genetically modified food?, Kirsten Hansen argues that in Europe, voluntary negative labeling of non-GM foods respects consumer autonomy just as well as mandatory positive labeling of foods with GM content. She also argues that because negative labeling places labeling costs upon those consumers that want to know whether food is GM, negative labeling is better policy than positive labeling. In this paper, we argue that Hansens arguments are mistaken in (...) several respects. Most importantly, she underestimates the demands of respecting autonomy and overestimates the cost of positive labeling. Moreover, she mistakenly implies that only a small minority of people desire information about GM content. We also explore the extent to which her arguments would apply to the US context, and argue that any discussion of the relationship between autonomy and labeling should include not just considerations of consumer autonomy but also considerations of what we call citizen autonomy. (shrink)

ABSTRACTFor ten years, General Motors denied that an ignition switch that could easily be turned to ‘Off’ constituted a safety defect. Accidents, deaths and injuries resulted. Despite many, many suits against GM, the problem remained uncorrected. The explanations that have been proffered are interrogated in this article and others are suggested. It concludes that a bureaucratic legal department is partly to blame, and criticises how the legal department evaluated cases by their settlement value. It criticises GM’s culture of blaming drivers (...) for accidents. It concludes that the main problem at GM was not bureaucracy, but poor organisation of team management. GM was not organised for accountability without hierarchy. The article suggests that lawyers can play a key role in improving corporate decision making. (shrink)

Issues concerning technological risk have increasingly become the subject of deliberative exercises involving participation of ordinary citizens. The most popular topic for deliberation has been genetically modified foods. Despite the varied circumstances of their establishment, deliberative “minipublics” almost always produce recommendations that reflect a worldview more “precautionary” than the “Promethean” outlook more common among governing elites. There are good structural reasons for this difference. Its existence raises the question of why elites sponsor mini-publics and if policy is little affected by (...) the results of deliberations, questions the possibility of deliberative legitimation of public policy. We make this argument by looking at mini-publics on GM foods in France, the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and Switzerland. Deliberative legitimation becomes plausible if elites can attenuate their Promethean outlook. This is possible if ecological modernization discourse pervades their politics; Denmark provides an illustration. (shrink)

We examined the public interest reports of General Motors from 1971 to 1990 and presented the contents thereof herein. The principal areas disclosed by GM during those years that are discussed in this paper were minorities, women, and employment issues, energy and the environment, international operations, automotive safety, and philanthropic activity. The purpose of this study was to examine the public interest report as a vehicle through which a firm might disclose information in the public interest. We concluded that there (...) were at least three principal forces driving GM's disclosures. They included public attention focused on, potential costs associated with, and the relative subjectivity of an issue.In reading their public interest reports, it became clear that GM is socially responsive in matters of public interest. Whether they are socially responsible is a judgment not within the scope of this study. However, we do not preclude the possibility that the report may serve as a vehicle which would build a certain momentum in public responsibility, and thus partially drive decisions made by management in social issues. (shrink)

Nozick analyzes fundamental issues, such as the identity of the self, knowledge and skepticism, free will, the foundations of ethics, and the meaning of life.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Democracy in an Uncertain World:Expertise as a Provisional Response to VulnerabilityRobert Smid (bio)In the final chapter of American Immanence, Michael Hogue writes that "[r]ather than asking the foundationalist question of what epistemology is needed to ground or justify democracy, the pragmatist asks what epistemology democracy entails. What 'way of knowing' follows from, or is appropriate to, democracy as an associational ethos of vulnerable life?"1 While Hogue and I have (...) explored similar themes in our research on the promises and perils of democracy, this statement identifies a key difference in our respective approaches that has significant implications for the role that democracy can and should play in inquiry as well as for its potential to revolutionize civilization as we know it in the Anthropocene.In what follows, I raise three interrelated points that interrogate that difference. The first pertains to the role of foundations, provisional or otherwise, in Hogue's work, and results in a challenge to the special status seemingly given to democracy and a proposed inversion of the relation he poses between epistemology and democracy. The second pertains to the role of education in a democracy. This is a dimension of traditional pragmatist discourse on democracy that is conspicuously absent in Hogue's book, yet one that has significant implications for his argument. In this section, I will draw out the Deweyan strains of that discourse that appear to inform Hogue's work and contrast them with a Peircean take that yields notably different outcomes. The third point addresses the relation between democracy and sovereignty, a relation that Hogue explicitly eschews but that I will argue maintains some validity within democratic discourse, albeit in a more modest and provisional form. Finally, I draw these three points together in a conclusion that affirms much of Hogue's argument—including the profound vulnerability manifested by the Anthropocene and the need for more resilient forms of associated life—but assert that democracy is no less vulnerable than any other aspect of our uncertain world and therefore cannot be expected to possess within itself all that is necessary for its ongoing development. Building on the inversion of democracy and epistemology in the first section, the constitutive role of education in a [End Page 30] democracy as laid out in the second section, and the argument for a mitigated sovereignty in the third section, I argue that professional expertise provides an acceptable and necessary default when democratic structures fail.I. Provisional FoundationsAs a theopolitics rooted in religious naturalism, Hogue's understanding of democracy is one that is "embodied, relational, and vulnerable."2 That is, knowledge, meaning, and value all emerge out of and are conditioned by their social context, and shift according to the interests and needs of those who lay claim to them. Accordingly, Hogue's argument for democracy is that it is the way of life that allows for the broadest possible participation in such constructions, and which responds most effectively to the conditions of uncertainty and vulnerability surrounding them. It comes as no surprise, then, that his account of democracy is antifoundational, recognizing not only that all inquiry begins in medias res, but also that it emerges from a wide variety of media and that, while one goal of democratic discourse may be to chart a coherent path forward, both the media and the proposed paths are subject to change at any moment. Such antifoundationalism is a fairly standard commitment in pragmatist and process discourse, and thus relatively uncontroversial in its own right. It is worth noting, however, that being committed to antifoundationalism and actually being antifoundationalist in practice are often two very different things, our best efforts to the contrary notwithstanding.It is clear from Hogue's book that he resists any foundationalist epistemology, opting instead to derive his epistemology from democratic practice. As noted above, he asks "[w]hat 'way of knowing' follows from, or is appropriate to, democracy as an associational ethos of vulnerable life?"3 While it is possible that there is one epistemology that is best suited to democracy understood in this way, that epistemology would not, by his account, stand on its own foundation but be contingent on one... (shrink)

Robert Misrahi élabore une philosophie exigeante qui s'est toujours tenue à distance des modes traversant le champ intellectuel. Son propos est de définir les conditions d'accès de chacun et de tous à une existence heureuse. Mais le bonheur n'y est pas envisagé comme le résultat de simples techniques de développement personnel. Il est l'acte d'un sujet pleinement responsable de son existence, la prenant en charge, lui conférant du sens et se donnant les moyens de tracer son propre itinéraire. Connaître, (...) fonder, aimer, agir, créer sont les principales étapes qui jalonnent cet itinéraire. Ce livre s'ouvre par une série d'entretiens réalisés de janvier à juin 2011 : l'éthique, la liberté, le judaïsme, la jouissance d'être y sont, tour à tour, discutés. Il se poursuit par une présentation de concepts essentiels : la crise, le désir, l'existence, la réflexion. Ces concepts redéfinis par l'auteur constituent les pivots d'une philosophie originale et créatrice apte à relever les défis posés par notre modernité. (shrink)

Are mystical experiences primarily formed by the mystic's cultural background and concepts, as modern day "constructivists" maintain, or do mystics in some way transcend language, belief, and culturally conditioned expectations? Do mystical experiences differ in the different religious traditions, as "pluralists" contend, or are they identical across cultures? Twelve contributors here attempt to answer these questions through close examination of a particular form of mystical experience, "Pure Consciousness"--the experience of being awake but devoid of intentional content for consciousness. The contributors (...) analyze pure consciousness and other mystical experiences from historical Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, and Jewish sources, as well as from modern mystics. They demonstrate that pure consciousness poses serious conceptual problems for a contructivist understanding of mysticism. Revealing the inconsistencies and inadequacies of current models, they make significant strides towards developing new models for the phenomenon of mysticism, breaking new ground for our understanding of mysticism and of human experience in general. (shrink)

Winner of the 1975 National Book Award, this brilliant and widely acclaimed book is a powerful philosophical challenge to the most widely held political and social positions of our age--liberal, socialist, and conservative.

A revised edition of an undergraduate text for students in history of psychology courses. Designed for one semester, covers: the history of psychology in ancient philosophy, structuralism, neurophysiology, functionalism, behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and gestalt theories. The new edition has expanded.

Many theorists claim that if an agent benefits from an action that harms others, that agent has a moral duty to compensate those who are harmed, even if the agent did not cause the harm herself. In the debate on climate justice, this idea is commonly referred to as the beneficiary-pays principle . This paper argues that the BPP is implausible, both in the context of climate change and as a normative principle more generally. It should therefore be rejected.

In this book, Dr. Robert J. Levine reviews federal regulations, ethical analysis, and case studies in an attempt to answer these questions.

Many theorists claim that if an agent benefits from an action that harms others, that agent has a moral duty to compensate those who are harmed, even if the agent did not cause the harm herself. In the debate on climate justice, this idea is commonly referred to as the beneficiary-pays principle. This paper argues that the BPP is implausible, both in the context of climate change and as a normative principle more generally. It should therefore be rejected.

Robert Stern investigates how scepticism can be countered by using transcendental arguments concerning the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience, language, or thought. He shows that the most damaging sceptical questions concern neither the certainty of our beliefs nor the reliability of our belief-forming methods, but rather how we can justify our beliefs.

A sourcebook for developing and facilitating collaborative groups capable of continuously adapting to anticipate the evolving learning needs of students. Based on a theoretical foundation of schools as complex systems in which linear management models are no longer sufficient.

This paper develops a view of the content of perceptual states that reflects the cognitive significance those states have for the subject. Perhaps the most important datum for such a theory is the intuition that experiences are ‘transparent’, an intuition promoted by philosophers as diverse as Sartre and Dretske. This paper distinguishes several different transparency theses, and considers which ones are truly supported by the phenomenological data. It is argued that the only thesis supported by the data is much weaker (...) than those typically considered in the literature, and has no obvious implications for the existence of sensory intermediaries. It does, however, have implications for the content of perceptual experience. It is argued that combining the first personal project with the transparency intuition yields an error theory of perception. The counterintuitive implications of this error theory are mitigated, however, by an account of perceptual beliefs which allows for them to be true even if the perceptual states are non-veridical. (shrink)

Permissivism says that for some propositions and bodies of evidence, there is more than one rationally permissible doxastic attitude that can be taken towards that proposition given the evidence. Some critics of this view argue that it condones, as rationally acceptable, sets of attitudes that manifest an untenable kind of arbitrariness. I begin by providing a new and more detailed explication of what this alleged arbitrariness consists in. I then explain why Miriam Schoenfield’s prima facie promising attempt to answer the (...) Arbitrariness Objection, by appealing to the role of epistemic standards in rational belief formation, fails to resolve the problem. Schoenfield’s strategy is, however, a useful one, and I go on to explain how an alternative form of the standards-based approach to Permissivism – one that emphasizes the significance of the relationship between people’s cognitive abilities and the epistemic standards that they employ – can respond to the arbitrariness objection. (shrink)

Develops a theory of culture based on a metaphysics that elaborates on the Platonic and Confucian traditions. In Metaphysics of Goodness, Robert Cummings Neville extends Alfred North Whitehead’s project of cultural studies, which was based on a new metaphysics that Whitehead developed in Adventures of Ideas. Neville’s focus is value or goodness in many modes. The metaphysics treated in this book derive from the Platonic and Confucian traditions, with significant modifications of Whitehead, Peirce, Dewey, Confucius, Xunzi, and Zhou Dunyi. (...) Part one develops a theory of form based on a metaphysics of harmony. Part two elaborates a theory of art based on a metaphysics of beauty. Part three sketches a theory of personhood based on a metaphysics of obligation. Part four discusses civilization in a systematic way based on a metaphysics of flourishing. Throughout the book, Neville elaborates a theory of interpretation that is inspired by Peirce, Dewey, and Xunzi but is not limited to their ideas. While the reasoning of the book is concise, it employs methodologies from many kinds of philosophy, art criticism, ethics, and cultural studies, and sees philosophy as needing to learn from all these disciplines. “Neville’s work is informed by a lifelong engagement with the most important philosophers in history, including Plato, Aristotle, Whitehead, and Dewey. Here, he offers an important argument that there is beauty not only in how people see the world, but also in the world itself.” — Kevin Schilbrack, Appalachian State University. (shrink)

Why does performing certain tasks cause the aversive experience of mental effort and concomitant deterioration in task performance? One explanation posits a physical resource that is depleted over time. We propose an alternative explanation that centers on mental representations of the costs and benefits associated with task performance. Specifically, certain computational mechanisms, especially those associated with executive function, can be deployed for only a limited number of simultaneous tasks at any given moment. Consequently, the deployment of these computational mechanisms carries (...) an opportunity cost – that is, the next-best use to which these systems might be put. We argue that the phenomenology of effort can be understood as the felt output of these cost/benefit computations. In turn, the subjective experience of effort motivates reduced deployment of these computational mechanisms in the service of the present task. These opportunity cost representations, then, together with other cost/benefit calculations, determine effort expended and, everything else equal, result in performance reductions. In making our case for this position, we review alternative explanations for both the phenomenology of effort associated with these tasks and for performance reductions over time. Likewise, we review the broad range of relevant empirical results from across sub-disciplines, especially psychology and neuroscience. We hope that our proposal will help to build links among the diverse fields that have been addressing similar questions from different perspectives, and we emphasize ways in which alternative models might be empirically distinguished. (shrink)

This is the most important book on Hegel to have appeared in the past ten years. Robert Pippin offers a completely new interpretation of Hegel's idealism, which focuses on Hegel's appropriation and development of kant's theoretical project. Hegel is presented neither as a precritical metaphysician nor as a social theorist, but as a critical philosopher whose disagreements with Kant, especially on the issue of intuitions, enrich the idealist arguments against empiricism, realism and naturalism. In the face of the dismissal (...) of absolute idealism as either unintelligible or implausible, Pippin explains and defends an original account of the philosophical basis for Hegel's claims about the historical and social nature of selfconsciousness, and so of knowledge itself. (shrink)

Robert Hanna presents a fresh view of the Kantian and analytic traditions that have dominated continental European and Anglo-American philosophy over the last two centuries, and of the connections between them. But this is not just a study in the history of philosophy, for out of this emerges Hanna's original approach to two much-contested theories that remain at the heart of contemporary philosophy. Hanna puts forward a new 'cognitive-semantic' interpretation of transcendental idealism, and a vigorous defense of Kant's theory (...) of analytic and synthetic necessary truth, making this compelling reading for all who are interested in these fundamental philosophical issues. (shrink)

One of our great behavioral scientists, the bestselling author of Behave, plumbs the depths of the science and philosophy of decision-making to mount a devastating case against free will, an argument with profound consequences Robert Sapolsky's Behave, his now classic account of why humans do good and why they do bad, pointed toward an unsettling conclusion: We may not grasp the precise marriage of nature and nurture that creates the physics and chemistry at the base of human behavior, but (...) that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Now, in Determined, Sapolsky takes his argument all the way, mounting a brilliant (and in his inimitable way, delightful) full-frontal assault on the pleasant fantasy that there is some separate self telling our biology what to do. Determined offers a marvelous synthesis of what we know about how consciousness works-the tight weave between reason and emotion and between stimulus and response in the moment and over a life. One by one, Sapolsky tackles all the major arguments for free will and takes them out, cutting a path through the thickets of chaos and complexity science and quantum physics, as well as touching ground on some of the wilder shores of philosophy. He shows us that the history of medicine is in no small part the history of learning that fewer and fewer things are somebody's "fault"; for example, for centuries we thought seizures were a sign of demonic possession. Yet, as he acknowledges, it's very hard, and at times impossible, to uncouple from our zeal to judge others and to judge ourselves. Sapolsky applies the new understanding of life beyond free will to some of our most essential questions around punishment, morality, and living well together. By the end, Sapolsky argues that while living our daily lives recognizing that we have no free will is going to be monumentally difficult, doing so is not going to result in anarchy, pointlessness, and existential malaise. Instead, it will make for a much more humane world. (shrink)

This is the first book-length study in any language to examine in detail and critically assess the second part of Kant's ethics- -an empirical, impure part, which determines how best to apply pure principles to the human situation. Drawing attention to Kant's under-explored impure ethics, this revealing investigation refutes the common and long-standing misperception that Kants ethics advocates empty formalism. Making detailed use of a variety of Kantian texts never before translated into English, author Robert B. Louden reassesses the (...) strengths and weaknesses of Kantian ethics as a whole, once the second part is re-admitted to its rightful place within Kant's practical philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the versatile LEGO minifigure to introduce some major themes, questions, and problems tackled in the "philosophy of the human person". It begins with the question of just what parts are involved in making a human person. After that, the chapter considers the problems surrounding any individual's continued existence over time, and also discusses the philosophical view according to which the acts of decision‐making and imaginative creation are the very things. The cheerful yellow LEGO minifig presents a wonderful (...) tool for exploring the human person, who similarly appears unique within the complicated systems of reality. The issue of personal identity is as problematic as it is important for understanding our nature as human individuals in an ever‐changing world. The chapter further provides examples that focus on the problem of personal identity, particularly identity over time. (shrink)