In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reconstructing Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Classical Pragmatists by Chris VoparilRichard Kenneth AtkinsChris Voparil. Reconstructing Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Classical Pragmatists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xiv + 377. Hardback, $74.00.A house divided cannot stand, or so Jesus tells us. As far as I can ascertain, Jesus was right about many things (his followers perhaps less so). Accordingly, that the house early pragmatists built, with all (...) of its subsequent divisions and internecine controversies, still stands is something of an anomaly. Perhaps it is explained by the fact that pragmatists have also been blessed by peacemakers, among whom Chris Voparil is to be numbered. In this carefully researched and clearly written book, Voparil examines the ties that bind Richard Rorty to his pragmatist predecessors: C. S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Josiah Royce, and Jane Addams. The hope animating Voparil's book is that with a closer look at these ties he "can unsettle the current map of opposing pragmatist camps by uncovering previously obscured or overlooked alignments and common aims" (259). He argues that Rorty did not misunderstand his predecessors but "consciously radicalized" (280) their positions.The book is five chapters long, with each of the chapters devoted to Rorty's relationship to one of the five aforementioned classical pragmatists, in that order. There are also substantial introductory and concluding chapters. The more controversy-laden chapters are the first (on Peirce) and third (on Dewey). As Voparil explains in chapter 1, Peirceans are wary of Rorty's apparent antirealism. But to soothe the worries of wary Peirceans, Voparil argues that commitments to realism can be found in Rorty's early and later works and that some of the more outrageous statements from the middle period are exaggerations that are ultimately qualified, if not disavowed. The Peirce scholar may wish that Voparil had done more to distinguish different varieties of realism found in Peirce's writings, as Robert Lane has done in his recent Peirce on Realism and Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), but the crux of Voparil's argument is persuasive enough. Rorty did not deny that there is a world that affects us and that there is such a thing as "getting it right," even if he thought that varieties of representationalism about mental states and the correspondence theory of truth are not topics worthy of further discussion. Voparil does not [End Page 530] cite the footnote, but Rorty states the matter sufficiently clearly when he writes, "I think that [Nelson] Goodman's trope of 'many worlds' is misleading and that we need not go beyond the more straightforward 'many descriptions of the same world' (provided one does not ask 'And what world is that?'). But his point that there is no way to compare descriptions of the world in respect of adequacy seems to me crucial, and in the first two chapters of this book [Ways of Worldmaking] he makes it very vividly" (Consequences of Pragmatism [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982], xlvii). Rorty's point is that talk of "the world" can play no interesting explanatory role in our accounts of truth, representation, and the like just because we cannot now (or at any given future time) claim to have the final vocabulary to talk about the world. There is an interesting parallelism to Peirce's theory of induction here that Voparil does not explore. On Peirce's theory of statistical induction, we cannot claim at any given time that we have ascertained the real frequencies in nature, but we can be assured that in the long run we will eventually approximate them. Similarly, for Rorty, we cannot claim at any given time that we have the final vocabulary for describing the world, but that does not prohibit us from claiming that we can improve our descriptions of the world, where improvement is relative to some purpose. As Rorty concedes, the descriptions of nature that emerge in the modern period are better descriptions than those of the Aristotelian physics, given various purposes that we have (Consequences of Pragmatism, 191).Turning to chapter 3, Rorty's misappropriations and misrepresentations of Dewey's views have peeved Dewey scholars. In particular, Rorty... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Black Deconstruction: Russell Atkins and the Reconstruction of African-American CriticismAldon Lynn Nielsen (bio)“What does that signify?” “It don’t signify nothin’ Mr. Warner.”—Russell Atkins, MaleficiumThere are, everywhere unheard (as one might see deep in an electron microscope) rigidities violently breaking—Russell Atkins, WhicheverCritical debates about the applicability of recent literary theories to the reading of African-American writing have often been marked by curious lacunae. Despite the rapid proliferation (...) of critical texts addressing themselves to black writing, it remains the case that many critics come to black writing with methodologies and agendas already in hand, while few critics have taken upon themselves the task of rereading the critical history of African-American work in theory. This has often resulted in a sort of critical shortsightedness, with the field of black literary theory presented as a foreshortened, if now more level, playing field. While some have engaged in arguments about the question of whether or not African-American writing should be engaged by poststructuralist theorists (a question that seems to begin with the assumption that poststructuralism is a particularly white mode of mythology), the fact is that a form of deconstruction had been theorized by an African-American poet long before deconstruction had entered the American academy. That this fact is largely unknown among contemporary critics is the result of a continuing practice of not reading the theoretical work of black poets who have published outside the established circuit of the academic press. With the prominent exceptions of poets like Amiri Baraka, June Jordan, Larry Neal, and Haki Madhabuti, the critical writings of recent African-American poets have seldom been collected and circulated in any very effective way. Characteristically, Neal’s essays were gathered into a book posthumously, and Madhabuti’s have been published and distributed primarily through his own publishing house. Even Baraka’s collections have been allowed to pass out of print in most instances, only the books on music remaining readily available throughout his career. This may change for black poets who write in more mainstream modes in the near future. Now that Rita Dove has served a term as Poet Laureate of the United States and Derek Walcott has won the Nobel Prize, we might expect a modest increase in interest by publishers and readers in critical works by poets whose forms are less troubling than their content. And black poets who attain academic credentials and write scholarly/critical essays, such as Nathaniel Mackey and Harryette Mullen, may succeed in getting their works published by the university presses. However, surveys of shelves in bookstores and [End Page 86] libraries will confirm that there has been little concern among even university and small presses to collect and preserve the critical legacy of black experimentalists in the way that the essays of Charles Olson, Ed Dorn, or Robert Creeley have been maintained before a public.Russell Atkins has been one of the most prolific and demanding of black poets writing criticism and theory in the last four decades, but like Percy Johnston, central figure of the Dasein group of poets centered at Howard University in the 1950s, he has had to publish most of this work through his own magazine and workshop press, and there has never been a published collection of his critical work. The special Russell Atkins number of the Free Lance, a journal with which Atkins was associated for two decades, included a section surveying his work in critical prose, but little of that work has found its way into the broader critical discourse of literary scholars (it has fared a little better with musicologists), and Atkins’s prose is infrequently cited. As eccentric as Atkins’s prose can sometimes be, these works are important early signs of a break with the “rigidities” of traditional humanist discourse among African-American writers. Atkins’s statements on music, literature, politics, and education parallel the works by Baraka leading into and out of the Black Arts Movement, but Atkins, as he does in his verse, travels an independent and often disturbing path.Speaking of Anthony Braxton’s experimentalism, Ronald Radano observes that it “emerged from the changing landscape of urban American life, from... (shrink)

This essay will address a general philosophical concern about autonomy, namely, that a conception of autonomy focused on freedom of the will alone is inadequate, once we consider the effects of oppressive forms of socialization on individuals’ formation of choices. In response to this problem, I will present a brief overview of Diana Meyers’s account of autonomy as relational and practical. On this view, autonomy consists in a set of socially acquired practical competencies in self-discovery, self-definition, self-knowledge, and self-direction. This (...) account provides a distinction between choices that express unreflectively internalized social norms and those that are the result of a critical ‘self-reading’. I conclude that this practical conception of autonomy makes much higher demands upon nurses (and patients) than has previously been thought. In fact, if nurses are to be expected to genuinely promote autonomy, they are going to need specific training in counselling-type communication skills. (shrink)

In this scientific 'Credo', Peter Atkins considers the universal questions of origins, endings, birth, and death to which religions have claimed answers. With his usual economy, wit, and elegance, unswerving before awkward realities, Atkins presents what science has to say. While acknowledging the comfort some find in belief, he declares his own faith in science's capacity to reveal the deepest truths.

Many authors have argued that epistemic rationality sometimes comes into conflict with our relationships. Although Sarah Stroud and Simon Keller argue that friendships sometimes require bad epistemic agency, their proposals do not go far enough. I argue here for a more radical claim—romantic love sometimes requires we form beliefs that are false. Lovers stand in a special position with one another; they owe things to one another that they do not owe to others. Such demands hold for beliefs as well. (...) Two facets of love ground what I call the false belief requirement , or the demand to form false beliefs when it is for the good of the beloved: the demand to love for the right reasons and the demand to refrain from doxastic wronging. Since truth is indispensable to epistemic rationality, the requirement to believe falsely, consequently, undermines truth norms. I demonstrate that, when the false belief requirement obtains, there is an irreconcilable conflict between love and truth norms of epistemic rationality: we must forsake one, at least at the time, for the other. (shrink)

Abstract:In Charles Peirce and Modern Science, T.L. Short encourages us to read Peirce’s oeuvre in the spirit of philosophical experimentalism. The result is a rewarding and refreshing book that clarifies longstanding controversies and stakes out novel positions in the debates. In these comments, I subject Short’s statements regarding the validity of induction to critical scrutiny. I argue that while much of what he states is correct, he errs in holding that induction is invalid in the short run of an individual’s (...) life. (shrink)

This paper offers an alternate explanation of cases from the doxastic wronging literature. These cases violate what I call the degree of inquiry right—a novel account of zetetic obligations to inquire when interests are at stake. The degree of inquiry right is a moral right against other epistemic agents to inquire to a certain threshold when a belief undermines one’s interests. Thus, the agents are sometimes obligated to leave inquiry open. I argue that we have relevant interests in reputation, relationships, (...) and the well-being of our social groups. These interests generate obligations against others to “do their homework” before closing inquiry. This alternate account makes better sense of puzzles that accounts of doxastic wronging fall prey to. (shrink)

The study examines the argumentative competencies of people with Asperger syndrome (AS) and compares this with those of normal – or what are called neurotypical (NT) – subjects. To investigate how people with AS recognise, evaluate and engage in argumentation, we have adapted and applied the empirical instrument developed by van Eemeren, Garssen and Meuffels to study the conventional validity of the pragma-dialectical freedom rule (van Eemeren, Gars- sen & Meuffels 2003a; 2003b; 2005a; 2005b; van Eemeren & Meuffels, 2002). Our (...) paper begins with some background information on Asperger syndrome and how it impacts upon communication and argumentation; then it addresses the research questions and methods used; thirdly, it presents some initial findings; finally, it will conclude with some im- plications for those people with AS, for those they come into contact with and for the pragma-dialectic model in general. (shrink)

Retributive theories of punishment argue that punishing a criminal for a crime she committed is sufficient reason for a justified and morally permissible punishment. But what about when the state gets lucky in its decision to punish? I argue that retributive theories of punishment are subject to “Gettier” style cases from epistemology. Such cases demonstrate that the state needs more than to just get lucky, and as these retributive theories of punishment stand, there is no anti-luck condition. I’ll argue that (...) Gettier-style cases demonstrate an impermissible instance of punishment, even though they meet the conditions of retributive theories of punishment. Retributive theories are, therefore, too weak. The safety condition from epistemology provides the anti-luck condition needed for permissible punishment. I argue that two forms of retributivism, rights-forfeiture and what I call standard retributivism, are both subject to Gettier-style cases. Unlike the literature on standards of proof, this paper argues that safety is a condition on punishment itself, i.e., in all nearby possible worlds, the accuser must correctly accuse the convicted for the crime they actually committed. (shrink)

The founder of both American pragmatism and semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce is widely regarded as an enormously important and pioneering theorist. In this book, scholars from around the world examine the nature and significance of Peirce’s work on perception, iconicity, and diagrammatic thinking. Abjuring any strict dichotomy between presentational and representational mental activity, Peirce’s theories transform the Aristotelian, Humean, and Kantian paradigms that continue to hold sway today and, in so doing, forge a new path for understanding the centrality of (...) visual thinking in science, education, art, and communication. The essays in this collection cover a wide range of issues related to Peirce’s theories, including the perception of generality; the legacy of ideas being copies of impressions; imagination and its contribution to knowledge; logical graphs, diagrams, and the question of whether their iconicity distinguishes them from other sorts of symbolic notation; how images and diagrams contribute to scientific discovery and make it possible to perceive formal relations; and the importance and danger of using diagrams to convey scientific ideas. This book is a key resource for scholars interested in Perice’s philosophy and its relation to contemporary issues in mathematics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, semiotics, logic, visual thinking, and cognitive science. (shrink)

Lacey J. Davidson (2023) raises several insightful objections to the group partiality account of wokeness. The paper aims to move the discussion forward by either responding to or developing Davidson’s objections. My goal is not to show that the partiality account is foolproof but to think about the direction of future discussion—future critique, modification, and response. Davidson thinks that the partiality account of wokeness does not sufficiently define wokeness, as the paper sets out to do. Davidson also alleges that the (...) account appropriates the term from minority communities. (shrink)

Mineral waters were a delicate and unstable product whose value as a remedy increased in early modern France. If it was once the prised luxury of the nobility travelling to the spa, the eighteenth century slowly watched it turned into a commodity. The waters became widely available in bottles and were sold in bureaus of distribution. Despite the logistical challenges of selecting and carrying the waters to their new urban public, many different springs made their way into most of France’s (...) cities. This took place under the watch and regulation of a uniquely dedicated institution, the Société de Médecine. This Société eventually settled its authority over the management of mineral waters, thanks to the backing of state power, the influence of the Academy and the newly recognized authority of chemists as analysts of waters. The purpose of this paper is to bring to light this overlooked institution and its essential role in the administration of mineral waters. Though it never eradicated fraud or succeeded in creating a full scientific and economic monopoly, it greatly broadened the budding trade of bottled water in France and gave a powerful incentive for chemists to better their mastering of the particularly challenging analysis of water. (shrink)

Theories of discourse bring to realism new ideas about how knowledge develops and how representations of reality are influenced. We gain an understanding of the conceptual aspect of social life and the processes by which meaning is produced. This collection reflects the growing interest realist critics have shown towards forms of discourse theory and deconstruction. The diverse range of contributions address such issues as the work of Derrida and deconstruction, discourse theory, Eurocentrism and poststructuralism. What unites all of the contributions (...) is a sense that it is essential to provide a realist alternative to the hitherto dominance of social constructionism, hermeneutics and postmodernism, over many of the issues discussed. By developing a realist perspective the different authors attempt to embed discourse within the structured nature of the reality of the world. Realism can situate language, discourse and ideology within context specific, or 'causally efficacious' circumstances. Realism can help to uncover issues of power, representation, and subjectivity and how discursive and other social practices produce real effects. This can help us understand the manner in which social structures are reproduced through various forms of ideology and discourse. And by knowing this, we can start to address questions concerning human emancipation and how the world is to be transformed. (shrink)

Bernard of Clairvaux observed that some goals can corrupt the activity of learning. Bernard’s claim is not only correct and important, but can be applied more widely to purposive activity in general. The exploration of his claim makes possible a consideration of the question, ‘How might different motivations affect, and indeed corrupt, the way in which we teach and learn?’ Although, pace Bernard, learning for learning’s sake does not corrupt the activity of learning, it may, however, as Aquinas’s account of (...) curiositas is used to show, corrupt the character of the scholar. In order to protect scholarship against such corruption we need to be wary in particular of the temptation to excessive specialisation. Finally, the question is raised of what it might mean to ‘refer’ or ‘order’ study to God, and in particular in what way one might characterise the relation between attending to study and attending to God. (shrink)

The distinction between essential versus accidental properties has been characterized in various ways, but it is currently most commonly understood in modal terms: an essential property of an object is a property that it must have, while an accidental property of an object is one that it happens to have but that it could lack. Let’s call this the basic modal characterization, where a modal characterization of a notion is one that explains the notion in terms of necessity/possibility. In the (...) characterization just given of the distinction between essential and accidental properties, the use of the word “must” reflects the fact that necessity is invoked, while the use of the word “could” reflects that possibility is invoked. The notions of necessity and possibility are interdefinable: to say that something is necessary is to say that its negation is not possible; to say that something is possible is to say that its negation is not necessary; to say that an object must have a certain property is to say that it could not lack it; and to say that an object could have a certain property is to say that it is not the case that it must lack it. (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.

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.

This is a paradigmatic work of contemporary philosophy.

A key and continuing concern within the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation is how to account for effective persuasion disciplined by dialectical rationality. Currently, van Eemeren and Houtlosser offer one response to this concern in the form of strategic manoeuvring. This paper offers a prior/passing theory of communicative interaction as a supplement to the strategic manoeuvring approach. Our use of a prior/passing model investigates how a difference of opinion can be resolved while both dialectic obligations of reasonableness and rhetorical ambitions of (...) argumentative success are simultaneously accommodated. The paper explores the model with particular reference to the pragma-dialectical rules of critical discussion, strategic manoeuvring and fallacious reasoning. (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)

ABSTRACT Rima Basu and I have offered separate accounts of wokeness as an anti-racist ethical concept. Our accounts endorse controversial doctrines in epistemology: doxastic wronging, doxastic voluntarism, and moral encroachment. Many philosophers deny these three views, favoring instead some ordinary standards for epistemic justification. I call this denial the standard view. In this paper, I offer an account of wokeness that is consistent with the standard view. I argue that wokeness is best understood as ‘group epistemic partiality’. The woke person (...) does extra epistemic work before forming a negative belief about a member of an oppressed social group. Just as we do extra epistemic work when forming belief about our friends, so the woke person does for members of oppressed social groups. I first outline the account. I then raise questions about the scope of wokeness and belief formation. After this, I demonstrate that the group partiality view is consistent with the standard view in epistemology. The partiality view, therefore, should appeal to epistemologists who have adopted the standard view because it is consistent with ordinary standards of justification. I conclude that wokeness as a concept in epistemology should not be controversial for those who endorse the standard view. (shrink)

Hilde Lindemann argues that personhood is the shared practice of recognizing and responding to one another. She calls this practice holding. Holding, however, can fail. Holding failure, by stereotyping for example, can inhibit others’ epistemic confidence and ability to recall true beliefs as well as create an environment of racism or sexism. How might we avoid holding failure? Holding failure, I argue, has many epistemic dimensions, so I argue that moral encroachment has the theoretical tools available to avoid holding failures. (...) The goal of this paper, therefore, is to articulate and understand the epistemology of holding in an attempt to remedy holding failure. I show that the virtue of wokeness emerges from an epistemic environment tainted with moral encroachment. I argue that as long as an individual is woke, she will have a tendency to avoid holding failures. Wokeness and moral encroachment, consequently, are fundamental to the epistemology of holding and consistent proper holding. (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)

Charles Sanders Peirce is generally regarded as the founder of pragmatism, and one of the greatest ever American philosophers. Peirce is also widely known for his work on truth, his foundational work in mathematical logic, and an influential theory of signs, or semiotics. Albert Atkin introduces the full spectrum of Peirce’s thought for those coming to his work for the first time. The book begins with an overview of Peirce’s life and work, considering his early and long-standing interest in logic (...) and science, and highlighting important views on the structure of philosophical thought. Atkin then explains Peirce’s accounts of pragmatism and truth examining important later developments to these theories. He then introduces Peirce’s full accounts of semiotics, examines his foundational work on formal and graphical logic, and introduces Peirce’s account of metaphysics, the least understood aspect of his philosophy. The final chapter considers Peirce’s legacy and influence on the thought of philosophers such as John Dewey and Richard Rorty, as well as highlighting areas where Peirce’s ideas could still provide important insights for contemporary philosophers. Including chapter summaries, suggestions for further reading and a glossary, this invaluable introduction and guide to Peirce’s philosophy is essential reading for those new to his work. (shrink)

We read with interest Dominic Wilkinson’s article “Frailty Triage: Is Rationing Intensive Medical Treatment on the Grounds of Frailty Ethical?” on the utility of the Clinical Frailty Score in...

Classical American pragmatism: the pragmatist -- Enlightenment-and its problematic semantics -- Analyzing pragmatism: pragmatics and pragmatisms -- A Kantian rationalist pragmatism: pragmatism -- Inferentialism, and modality in Sellars's arguments against -- Empiricism -- Linguistic pragmatism and pragmatism about norms: an arc of -- Thought from Rorty's eliminative materialism to his pragmatism -- Vocabularies of pragmatism: synthesizing naturalism and -- Historicism -- Towards an analytic pragmatism: meaning-use analysis -- Pragmatism, expressivism, and anti-representationalism: -- Local and global possibilities.

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.

The Joy of Philosophy is a return to some of the perennial questions of philosophy--questions about the meaning of life; about death and tragedy; about the respective roles of rationality and passion in the good life; about love, compassion, and revenge; about honesty, deception, and betrayal; and about who we are and how we think about who we are. Recapturing the heart-felt confusion and excitement that originally brings us all to philosophy, internationally renowned teacher and lecturer Robert C. Solomon (...) offers both a critique of contemporary philosophy and an invitation to engage in philosophy in a different way. He attempts to save philosophy from itself and its self-imposed diet of thin arguments and logical analysis to recover the richness and complexity of life in thought. Solomon defends the passionate life in contrast to the life of thoughtful contemplation idealized by so many philosophers, attempting to recapture the kind of philosophy that Nietzsche celebrated as a "joyful wisdom.". (shrink)

Comprehensie collection of historical and contemporary philosophies of technology, including Plato, Aristotle, St. Simon, Comte, Marx, Heidegger, Mumford, Foucault.

Charles Sanders Peirce is regarded as the founding father of pragmatism and a key figure in the development of American philosophy, yet his practical philosophy remains under-acknowledged and misinterpreted. In this book, Richard Atkins argues that Peirce did in fact have developed and systematic views on ethics, on religion, and on how to live, and that these views are both plausible and relevant. Drawing on a controversial lecture that Peirce delivered in 1898 and related works, he examines Peirce's theories (...) of sentiment and instinct, his defence of the rational acceptability of religious belief, his analysis of self-controlled action, and his pragmatic account of practical ethics, showing how he developed his views and how they interact with those of his great contemporary William James. This study will be essential for scholars of Peirce and for those interested in American philosophy, pragmatism, the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of action, and ethics. (shrink)