Shows how Singer's ethical theories threaten human values in a variety of ways.

This elaborate study of Kant's entire philosophical system is the published form of the author's doctoral dissertation and the first in a proposed series of four works on Kant. The overall plan of the book takes the reader from an explication of the general structure of Kant's system, to its epistemological underpinnings, its transcendental elements, and finally its metaphysical implications. There are seventy pages of appendixes.

In the past, philosophy, as it was brought to life originally by the ancient Greeks, was based on the audacious premise that the cosmos is intelligible, that human reason can come to understand reality at least in part. In the early to mid-twentieth century, however, philosophy was declared dead on both sides of the analytic-continental divide, so it seems appropriate to ask whether philosophy has a future and, if so, what sort of future this could and should be. In this (...) essay, I first look at the claims of philosophy’s demise and their philosophical milieu, focusing on Martin Heidegger, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Then I suggest a reason for the dire forecast, namely, the aftermath of what has been called the “Second Thirty Years’ War,” and respond to objections that can be raised against this explanation. Finally, I indicate the sort of future that I think we should envision for philosophy. (shrink)

Before now, there has been no comprehensive analysis of the multiple relations between A. Comte’s and J.S. Mill’s positive philosophy and Franz Brentano’s work. The present volume aims to fill this gap and to identify Brentano’s position in the context of the positive philosophy of the 19th century by analyzing the following themes: the concept of positive knowledge; philosophy and empirical, genetic and descriptive psychology as sciences in Brentano, Comte and Mill; the strategies for the rebirth of philosophy in these (...) three authors; the theory of the ascending stages of thought, of their decline, of the intentionality in Comte and Brentano; the reception of Comte’s positivism in Whewell and Mill; induction and phenomenalism in Brentano, Mill and Bain; the problem of the "I" in Hume and Brentano; mathematics as a foundational science in Brentano, Kant and Mill; Brentano’s critique of Mach’s positivism; the concept of positive science in Brentano’s metaphysics and in Husserl’s early phenomenology; the reception of Brentano’s psychology in Twardowski; The Brentano Institute at Oxford. The volume also contains the translation of the most significant writings of Brentano regarding philosophy as science. I. Tănăsescu, Romanian Academy; A. Bejinariu, Romanian Society of Phenomenology; S. Krantz Gabriel, Saint Anselm College; C. Stoenescu, University of Bucharest. (shrink)

The name of Franz Brentano is not yet a household word like that of Plato or Descartes, but readers of this volume may well begin to think it should be. From the informative and compelling introduction by Dale Jacquette to the closing essay by the late Karl Schuhmann, the book provides ample evidence of the importance of this thinker to virtually every area and every school of philosophy today. The evidence is incontrovertible, but perhaps the importance has yet to be (...) felt. A recent PBS production, “The Question of God,” features a cameo appearance by an actor playing Franz Brentano as a teacher of young Sigmund Freud, but so far the celebrity of his students has far outshone that of their teacher. Brentano’s philosophical grandchildren are quite diverse, as is obvious from even a short list of those influenced by his students or by his published works: Russell, Jung, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Derrida. One is left with the impression of both the discovery of a common philosophical wellspring and also the proximity of fertile philosophical fields. Jacquette does not exaggerate when he writes, “Readers … may come to see in Brentano’s descriptive psychology the possibility of a radically new philosophy of mind in thought and action, the metaphysics of socially intentional phenomena, and the expression of meaning in culture, a theory whose revolutionary potential has yet to be realized”. (shrink)

Geary is highly selective in his use of the literature on gender differences. His assumption of consistent female inferiority in mathematics is not necessarily supported by the facts.

The central thrust of this article is to prompt new consideration of how faith and reason are understood to be at work in the discipline of theological ethics. To bring into question contemporary assumptions, a close reading of Aristotle is undertaken to illuminate his understanding of phronesis as a uniquely self-involving way of thinking that is transformative of the thinker. Phronesis, which may be translated as mindfulness, is shown to distinguish what is essential to ethical thinking. This philosophical preparation may (...) clear a way for theology likewise to be understood anew. Kierkegaard’s reflection on Abraham’s experience of faith in Fear and Trembling discloses how theology is the working out by means of phronesis of the salvation disclosed to faith in the believer’s soul. In these two phenomena—mindfulness and faith—lies what is essential to the practice of Christian ethics. (shrink)

As the signs of the highest expectations of the world’s economy come crashing down around us and the dust settles on a sorrowing humanity led foolishly towards war as its only and immediate prospect, ethical thinking is called upon to hold open the way for us to find the truth by which we are to live, and to do so with intellectual acuity and pastoral sensitivity. What might this way be? This paper is written as a preliminary exploration of the (...) question of this way, and of the truth to which ethics is ordered, and it is written to enquire about the way that is being drawn out by a global ethics. (shrink)

Sound and Grammar: A Neo-Sapirian Theory of Language by Susan F. Schmerling offers an original overall linguistic theory based on the work of the early American linguist Edward Sapir, supplemented with ideas from the philosopher-logicians Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz and Richard Montague and the linguist Elisabeth Selkirk. The theory yields an improved understanding of interactions among different aspects of linguistic structure, resolving notorious issues directly inherited by current theory from (post- ) Bloomfieldian linguistics. In the theory presented here, syntax is a (...) filter on a phonological algebra, not a linguistic level; linguistic expressions are phonological structures, and syntax is semantically relevant relations among phonological structures. The book shows how Neo-Sapirian grammar sheds new light on syntax-phonology interactions in English, German, French, and Spanish. (shrink)

Modern secularity as a historically specific hegemonic social formation that prevailed in the U.S. in the mid-20th century depended on and was, in part, constituted by the exclusion of fundamentalists and their Bible-based moral rhetorics from public life. This essay argues that the movements for temperance, prohibition, and prohibition repeal were an important context in which the political and cultural predominance of white theologically conservative Protestants was made, unmade, and finally gave way to emerging secular voices that repudiated Protestant campaigns (...) to "legislate morality." Science, reason, and an etiquette of civility and ecumenicism came together in the prohibition repeal movement as integral elements of the nascent normative religiousity and public morality that we know retrospectively as modern secularity. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore the architecture of downward causation on the basis of three central cases. We set out by answering the question of how top-down causation is possible in the universe. The universe is not causally closed, because of irreducible randomness at the quantum level. What is more, contextual effects can already be observed at the level of quantum physics, where higher levels can modify the nature of lower-level elements by changing their context, or even creating them. As (...) one moves up through higher levels, contextual effects on lower levels occur on various scales within nature, which is crucial in biology in general and the brain in particular. We then argue that there are important logical downward causes.objects have causal effects on material-energetic systems. It can be shown that abstract objects have measurable effects on lower levels, which needs to be accounted for by successful explanations of real phenomena such as intentional action. Intentional action has the form of deductive causation from logical structures to human agency. Without this assumption, we would not be warranted in believing that our physical theories latch onto a universe that is essentially the way we discover it to be. Denying top-down causation on account of the idea that the universe permits only bottom-up constitution of wholes from lower-level elements leads to undermining the very possibility of knowledge and science. Thus, it can be rejected as a global form of explanation. We sketch a model for mind-body interaction according to which the various levels of a human organism together enable the emergence of mental top-down effects. They are necessary conditions for the emergence of human mindedness. Once it is clear that downward causation is a widespread natural phenomenon, the apparent mystery of mental causation is, in principle, solved. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical investigation of the theological assumptions that lie within three forms of modern feminist ethics, with a view to challenging feminist ethics to enter the new theological possibilities opened up in postmodernity for the conceiving of god. The first part of the paper considers the conceiving of god in modern feminisms, in which theology becomes ethics. The consequences of this development are considered. The second part of the paper investigates the turn into postmodernity which hears the (...) saying of the death of god and the critique of onto-theology. This disturbance to the foundations of feminist ethics is understood as part of a wider critique of humanism manifest particularly in gender theory. That the end of the modern human subject might allow a conceiving of god through an understanding of the performative is the restored orthodoxy to which the paper points. (shrink)

The “exchange paradox”—also referred to in the literature by a variety of other names, notably the “two-envelopes problem”—is notoriously difficult, and experts are not all agreed as to its resolution. Some of the various expressions of the problem are open to more than one interpretation; some are stated in such a way that assumptions are required in order to fill in missing information that is essential to any resolution. In three experiments several versions of the problem were used, in each (...) of which the information given was sufficient to determine an optimal choice strategy when it exists or to justify indifference regarding keeping or trading when such a strategy does not exist. College students who were presented with the various versions of the problem tended to base their choices on simple heuristics and to give little evidence of understanding the probabilistic implications of the differences in the problem statements. (shrink)

The "two-envelopes" problem has stimulated much discussion on probabilistic reasoning, but relatively little experimentation. The problem specifies two identical envelopes, one of which contains twice as much money as the other. You are given one of the envelopes and the option of keeping it or trading for the other envelope. Variables of interest include the possible amounts of money involved, what is known about the process by which the amounts of money were assigned to the envelopes, and whether you are (...) allowed to know how much money is in the envelope in hand before deciding whether to keep or trade. In an earlier study, Butler and Nickerson found that when participants were allowed to know how much was in the envelope in hand, they generally elected to trade if that amount was small relative to the range of possibilities and to keep otherwise. The present experiments showed that this propensity was independent of the amount of money in the envelopes. Participants made decisions with a strong bias for avoiding the risk of losing by trading, particularly when the amount in hand was known and large relative to the range of possible amounts, regardless of the absolute value of the gamble. The results illustrate the dependence of thinking on the context in which it occurs, and demonstrate a tendency to treat quantities that are large or small relative to a particular context in which they are encountered as though they were large or small in a more general sense. (shrink)

Two experiments were conducted with variants of Wason's (1966) selection task. The common focus was the effect of differences in the sizes of the sets represented by P and not-Q in assertions of the form _If P then Q_ (conditional) or _All P are Q_ (categorical). Results support the conclusion that such set size differences affect the strategies people adopt when asked to determine, efficiently, the truth or falsity of such assertions, but they do not entirely negate the tendency to (...) select the term represented by P (the antecedent of the conditional or the subject of the categorical) in preference to the term represented by not-Q (the complement of the consequent of the conditional or the complement of the predicate of the categorical). Several possible explanations of this perseverance are considered. Results also support the conclusion that people find it easier to assess categorical assertions than logically equivalent conditional assertions. (shrink)

Participants attempted to solve a modified version of Wason's selection task. Variables were: sizes of the sets referenced by a specified assertion, form of the assertion, thematic content of the assertion, and the need for sampling or not. In Experiment 1, participants were given enough information to determine the truth or falsity of the specified assertion with certainty; in Experiment 2, they had to rely on sampling and could not determine the assertion's truth or falsity with certainty. Performance was better (...) in Experiment 1 than in Experiment 2, but in both cases much better than what is typically obtained with the conventional selection task. The results support the hypothesis that performance of the selection task is sensitive to the sizes of the sets involved, add credence to the conclusion that framing the task in a thematically meaningful way can facilitate performance, and demonstrate that facilitation does not require deontic reasoning or a well-known convention being involved. The relationship between expressed confidence and level of performance is consistent with other studies showing the former to be a good predictor of the latter. (shrink)

The neglect of issues related to the economic status of minorities and women in introductory economics textbooks widely used in the United States is a problem rooted in the most fundamental theoretical propositions of mainstream economics. Despite the fact that the claims of both mainstream methodology and general equilibrium theory have been seriously questioned in recent years, introductory economics textbooks fail to incorporate into the principles curriculum those critical findings which would allow analysis of the economic problems of women and (...) minorities in the United States. This article compares mainstream and radical textbooks' treatments of race and gender issues to show how the radical approach to these economic questions overcomes many of the deficiencies of the mainstream approach. (shrink)

ABSTRACTTreating conditionals as probabilistic statements has been referred to as a defining feature of the “new paradigm” in cognitive psychology. Doing so is attractive for several reasons, but it complicates the problem of assessing the merits of conditional arguments. We consider several variables that relate to judging the persuasiveness of conditional arguments with uncertain premises. We also explore ways of judging the consistency of people's beliefs as represented by components of conditional arguments. Experimental results provide evidence that inconsistencies in beliefs (...) are more prevalent if the arguments’ components are spatially and temporally dispersed than if they are contiguous in space and time. This supports the idea that assuring the consistency among even a small number of beliefs is difficult to do, especially if the beliefs in question are not brought into consciousness at the same time; but consistency can be enhanced when beliefs are considered simultaneously or nea... (shrink)

Previous research in North America has supported the view that male involvement in committed, romantic relationships is associated with lower testosterone (T) levels. Here, we test the prediction that undergraduate men involved in committed, romantic relationships (paired) will have lower T levels than men not involved in such relationships (unpaired). Further, we also test whether these differences are more apparent in samples collected later, rather than earlier, in the day. For this study, 107 undergraduate men filled out a questionnaire and (...) collected one saliva sample (from which a subject’s T level was measured) at various times across the day. As in previous studies, men involved in committed, romantic relationships had lower salivary T levels, though only during later times of the day. Furthermore, additional analysis of the variation among unpaired subjects indicated that men without prior relationship experience had lower T levels than experienced men. Finally, while paired men as a group had lower T levels than unpaired men, those men at the earliest stage (less than six months) of a current relationship had higher T levels than unpaired men as well as men in longer-term relationships. These results suggest that variation in male testosterone levels may reflect differential behavioral allocation to mating effort. (shrink)

Brentano's thoughts on unity of consciousness are of central importance to an understanding of his psychology and of his ontology. By means of a reistic interpretation of his views on unity of consciousness, and in contrast with the Aristotelian approach to unity of consciousness, one begins to see the paradoxically objective and realistic spirit of Brentano's subjectivism in psychology.

The Aristotelian conception of the soul as Brentano understood it is examined, with respect to the nature of the soul and mainly to what Aristotle called the sensitive soul, since this is where the issue of the soul's corporeity becomes important. Secondly the difficulties are discussed which Brentano saw in the Aristotelian semi-materialistic conception concerning the intellectual, as distinct from the sensitive soul from Brentano's reistic point of view which and that it is an immaterial substance. Finally there follows a (...) presentation of what is taken to be Brentano's conception of the soul as it appears from a reistic interpretation of his analyses of the act of sensation and of the subject of sensation in order to shed some light on the reistic ontology that may be taken to underlie Brentanos's psychology. (shrink)

Franz Brentano took exception to the classic statement of the correspondence theory of truth, the thesis: veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus. His reasons for objecting to it, and his proposed revision of the thesis, are interesting considered in themselves as well as for the light they shed on Brentano's view of the relation between the thinker and the world. With regard to the former, it is shown how Brentano analyzes the adaequatio thesis word by word in order to demonstrate (...) what he takes to be its fundamental incoherence. With regard to the latter, it becomes apparent, by contrast with the Thomistic understanding of the adaequatio thesis, that Brentano's revision of it in the direction of a phenomenological theory of truth also involves a revised understanding of the nature of the thinker or knower. (shrink)