Nothing in our world seems more obvious, real, and commonsensical than the idea of self. This book is a fascinating examination of our assumptions about the deceptively simple concept of "self", of the many ways those assumptions are now being challenged, and of the possible new ways of being that may arise in their place.

"One can rarely read or hear commentary on art, popular culture, society, literature, or politics these days without being confronted by the mysterious term 'postmodern.' Unlike any other artistic, critical, or philosophical movement in history, postmodernism has come charging out of the ivory tower and into the minds and mouths of the public. The postmodern lens is now the one through which we all are expected to be able to view the world, but how many of us know what this (...) really means? The tenets of postmodernism are much more than a trendy system of thought or an academic dialogue. Rather, they offer practical tools for coming to terms with a world composed of vast amounts of unsettling information, daily interactions with unfamiliar cultures and beliefs, and a continuous and overwhelming set of choices. [This book] is a stimulating and accessible exploration of the complexities of postmodern thought--constructivism, deconstruction, irony, pluralism, multiculturalism--as diverse as the world it describes. Readers will discover the roots of postmodernism, what it does to cultural symbols and differences, and how it affects psychology, religion, and science in essays both profoundly serious and thoroughly entertaining. [The editor] acts as a guide to this difficult terrain by leading readers through each essay, describing new and provocative ideas in detail, dispelling confusion, and, most important, showing what this thinking has to offer everyone. [This book] is an indispensable handbook for the new cultural literacy of our emerging postmodern world"--. (shrink)

A collection of essays that provides an introduction to the emerging postmodern world. The reader is guided through the subject and shown how it affects psychology, philosophy, religion and science.

How do educators better reach their students, better capture their attention and imagination without sacrificing scholarship? Teachable Moments: Essays on Experiential Education examines the pedagogy of Prescott College, a school that has embraced experiential education and been finding success with it for over thirty years. These essays—from scholars in fields as wide ranging as religious studies, environmental science, psychology, dance, literature, adventure education, and peace studies—examine the challenges and, ultimately, the rewards of student-centered education.

For many decades, race and racism have been common areas of study in departments of sociology, history, political science, English, and anthropology. Much more recently, as the historical concept of race and racial categories have faced significant scientific and political challenges, philosophers have become more interested in these areas. This changing understanding of the ontology of race has invited inquiry from researchers in moral philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, and aesthetics. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of (...) Race offers in one comprehensive volume newly written articles on race from the world's leading analytic and continental philosophers. It is, however, accessible to a readership beyond philosophy as well, providing a cohesive reference for a wide student and academic readership. The Companion synthesizes current philosophical understandings of race, providing 37 chapters on the history of philosophy and race as well as how race might be investigated in the usual frameworks of contemporary philosophy. The volume concludes with a section on philosophical approaches to some topics with broad interest outside of philosophy, like colonialism, affirmative action, eugenics, immigration, race and disability, and post-racialism. By clearly explaining and carefully organizing the leading current philosophical thinking on race, this timely collection will help define the subject and bring renewed understanding of race to students and researchers in the humanities, social science, and sciences. (shrink)

In this paper, I summarize an emerging debate in the cognitive sciences over the right taxonomy for understanding cognition – the right theory of and vocabulary for describing the structure of the mind – and the proper role of neuroscientific evidence in specifying this taxonomy. In part because the discussion clearly entails a deep reconsideration of the supposed autonomy of psychology from neuroscience, this is a debate in which philosophers should be interested, with which they should be familiar, and to (...) which they should contribute. Here, I outline some of the positions being advocated, and reflect on some of the possible implications of this work both for scientific and folk psychology. (shrink)

These essays highlight the shifting sets of relationships which determine the forms taken by desire. They argue that the spread of the subject within and across geographic, ethnic, class and gender boundaries makes a difference to the ways in which desire is theorized, experienced and represented.

Kant infamously claimed that all human beings, without exception, are evil by nature. This collection of essays critically examines and elucidates what he must have meant by this indictment. It shows the role which evil plays in his overall philosophical project and analyses its relation to individual autonomy. Furthermore, it explores the relevance of Kant's views for understanding contemporary questions such as crimes against humanity and moral reconstruction. Leading scholars in the field engage a wide range of sources from which (...) a distinctly Kantian theory of evil emerges, both subtle and robust, and capable of shedding light on the complex dynamics of human immorality. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that mass incarceration belongs to a category of social status interventions by which the modern state either withholds the ordinary protections and benefits of the law from outlawed groups or subjects them to private punishment based on their mere membership in those groups. In the US these groups include immigrants and resident Latinos, the homeless, the poor and poor blacks, sex workers, and ex-convicts. Outlawry is a fundamentally anti-democratic practice that cannot be justified in terms (...) of deterrence and is incompatible with public safety. (shrink)

It is sometimes claimed by open theists that, on Molinism, God controls who is saved and who is damned and that, as a consequence, God's judgement of us is unjust. While this charge is usually lumped under the problem of evil, it could easily be classified under the problem of soteriological luck. I argue that the open theist is impugned by this latter problem. I then show that the Molinist has a solution to both problems and consider objections to that (...) solution. (shrink)

A plausible explanation of the wrongfulness of threatening, advanced most explicitly by Mitchell Berman, is that the wrongfulness of threatening derives from the wrongfulness of the act threatened. This essay argues that this explanation is inadequate. We can learn something important about the wrongfulness of threatening (with implications for thinking about coercion) by comparing credible threats to some other claims of impending harm. A credible bluff threat to do harm is likely to be more and differently wrongful than making intentionally (...) false warnings about other sources of harm. This essay surveys some examples to secure this point, shows that Berman's moralized account of their wrongfulness is wanting, and offers the outline of an approach better suited to explain the wrongfulness of threatening.1. (shrink)

This essay presents a reading of the use of wonder in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. In this essay, I argue that not only did Hobbes incorporate the ancient conception of wonder into his design for the emotional apparatus of the modern sovereign state, but that when he did so he also transformed it and other concepts. Previous scholars have paid close attention to Hobbes’s confrontation with ancient philosophy, but there has been no sustained study of Hobbes’s use of (...) wonder, which was a concern of his over the entire course of his authorship. More broadly, this study opens up a place for the study of wonder in contemporary political theory as part of the broader reassessment of emotion. (shrink)

What, for Kant, is the semantic status of the proposition: Water is H2O? Is it analytic or synthetic? The question is not one of merely esoteric import since an answer to it would constitute a statement about the meaningfulness of all our scientific propositions. And, insofar as the Critique is a defense of the possibility of the natural sciences, it seems that we should be able to find in it the answer to our question. Further, we should be able to (...) find an answer to the question of whether or not Kant is a scientific essentialist. I attempt to show that he is not an essentialist despite the fact that his semantics of natural kind terms greatly resembles that of some contemporary authors who are essentialists and take their semantic theories to provide evidence for their views. One way to go about this would be simply to locate Kant's criteria for the analytic/synthetic distinction and then to place the proposition in the category dictated by those criteria. Rather than employ this method, I will examine instead some of Kant's own examples. The hope is that by means of the examples the criteria themselves will achieve a greater degree of clarity and that through this clarification Kant's position will emerge as a genuine alternative to contemporary positions. (shrink)

Neste artigo mostra-se os resultados de uma busca em bases de dados internacionais sobre a teoria do agir comunicativo de Habermas na área da Administração de Organizações. A teoria de Habermas foi desenvolvida após a sua guinada linguística, de ruptura com a filosofia da consciência e a metafísica em 1981. Nela os usos da linguagem são modos de expressão e representação, mas também modo de construção de vínculos sociais. A partir desta teoria, Habermas desenvolve a ideia de discurso como agir (...) comunicativo orientado para o entendimento, e elabora uma ética do discurso e uma política deliberativa. A entrada da obra de Habermas na Administração antecede a sua guinada linguística, e deve ser destacado o uso da sua tese "Mudança estrutural da esfera pública". Neste artigo quer-se destacar as relações estabelecidas entre a filosofia da linguagem e a Administração, tanto em acordos teóricos quanto práticos. Entre os aspectos teóricos destaca-se os estudos teóricos do conhecimento, incluindo a epistemologia. Entre os aspectos práticos estão as questões da filosofia prática, a ética e a política. Quer-se assim apresentar o potencial da filosofia de Habermas para pesquisa e trabalho na Administração de Organizações. (shrink)

Kant, Hume, and the Interruption of Dogmatic Slumber offers an interpretation of Kant’s “confession,” in the Prolegomena, that “it was the objection of David Hume that first, many years ago, interrupted my dogmatic slumber.” It argues that Hume roused Kant not, as has often been thought, by challenging the principle “every event has a cause” that governs experience, but by attacking the principle of sufficient reason, the basis of rationalist metaphysics and of the cosmological proof of the existence of God. (...) This proposal makes it possible to reconcile Kant’s declaration about Hume with his later assertion that it was the Antinomy of pure reason that first woke him from dogmatic slumber, because the Antinomy, like Hume’s challenge, is directed against the dogmatic use of the principle of sufficient reason. The proposal put forward here also makes it possible to understand why Kant speaks of “the objection of David Hume” after mentioning Hume’s attack on metaphysics; for the “objection” that Kant has in mind, it is argued here, is a challenge to metaphysics, rather than to the foundations of empirical knowledge. (shrink)

ECONOMIA CRIATIVA: CONCEITO E RELAÇÃO COM O DIREITO.

It's early evening, a Friday night in October, and I have hauled myself off the couch to make dinner for my son and me. It's just us; the more active cooks in our family are away and the house is quiet. I've spent all afternoon immersed in scholarly literature about the history of home economics, and I chuckle at the irony as I pour premade marinara sauce over the noodles. I call up my son from the basement, where he's been (...) immersed in his own studies, and find myself musing about our beginnings together—that spring when he arrived twenty-three years ago just as the trees were beginning to bud. I mutter about how perplexing cooking and mothering have been for me, and realize that these glimpses of me as a young mother and ponderings of how to take up increasing responsibilities as a middle-aged Indigenous “academic auntie” bookend my seasons of Indigenous feminist growth. (shrink)

The roots of cognitivism lie deep in the history of Western thought, and to develop a genuinely post-cognitivist psychology, this investigation goes back to presuppositions descended from Platonic/Cartesian assumptions and beliefs about the nature of thought.

Modern information technologies, beginning with the fax and audiocassettes but now exemplified in satellite television and the Internet, have opened the public discourse of Islam to new voices and, more subtlely, to new practices. While media-savvy militants draw the attention of outside observers, a quieter drama is unfolding. Pious middle classes are extending conventional patterns of seeking out religious guidance into new channels, particularly the Internet; the continuous search for role models and reference groups is meeting increasingly modern ways of (...) providing those - namely, media and increasingly media that target specific needs of growing middle classes. These range from religious instructional material for children to be used by parents to religious advice columnists, both conventional and contemporary to sermons to selections of news. Once 'private' discourses are on public display, and this public world of Islam is decidedly intimate. Where scholars of print note an officialization of discourse that moves into that medium, and programmatic 'islamizers' of knowledge, politics, etc. generally pursue entextualization strategies, electronic communication is moving Islam into the marketplace and aligning its practices, both metaphorically in the sense that the range of public choice and alternatives expands and literally in the rise of businesses to service these demands. (shrink)

The contractarian theory elaborated by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice exploits the difference principle in a great many ways. Rawls argues that, when used as part of a set of guiding principles for structuring the basic institutions of society, it simplifies the problem of interpersonal comparisons (91-4)1, helps compensate for the arbitrariness of natural endowments (101-3), promotes a harmony of interests between citizens (104-5), reintroduces the principle of fraternity to democratic society (105-6), and, what is critical to his (...) contractarian theory, it is an essential part of the principles of justice which would be chosen by free, equal, and rational persons in the original position. (shrink)

A crucial objection to the doctrine of original sin is that it conflicts with a common intuition that agents are morally responsible only for factors under their control. Here, I present an account of moral responsibility by Michael Zimmerman that accommodates that intuition, and I consider it as a model of original sin, noting both attractions and difficulties with the view.

In this article I seek to come to some understanding of the interlocutors in the first book of Plato’s Republic, particularly Cephalus. A more complete view of Cephalus not only provides some interesting ways to think about Plato and the Republic, but also suggests an interesting alternative to Plato’s view of justice. The article will progress as follows: First, I discuss Plato’s allegory of the cave. I, then, critique the cave allegory by applying the same kind of reasoning that O. (...) K. Bouwsma used to criticize Descartes’ evil genius. Next, I present what I think is a fruitful way to understand Cephalus. Finally, I draw some important conclusions regarding justice and offer some interesting critiques of Plato and Platonism. (shrink)

In the 5th century a number of sophists challenged the orthodox understanding of morality and claimed that practicing injustice was the best and most profitable way for an individual to live. Although a number of responses to sophistic immoralism were made, one argument, in fact coming from a pair of sophists, has not received the attention it deserves. According to the argument I call Immortal Repute, self-interested individuals should reject immorality and cultivate virtue instead, for only a virtuous agent can (...) win the sort everlasting reputation that makes a life truly admirable and successful. (shrink)

The task at hand is to review work on the history of early American pragmatism from the last ten years. However, writing on the history of pragmatism presents us with a different problem than, say, dealing with historical accounts of Mill’s Logic. The meaning of ‘pragmatism’ is routinely contested and, likewise, who is to count as a pragmatist is contested. The issue, of course, arose soon after William James named “pragmatism” in his 1898 talk at Berkeley titled “Philosophical Conceptions and (...) Practical Results.” The discussions of pragmatism that ensued in journals soon thereafter marked James, Charles Peirce, John Dewey, and F. C. S. Schiller as pragmatists. There were, as well, a number of “friends” of pragmatism such as Addison Moore. There were also clear-cut opponents of pragmatism including the likes of Paul Carus and James E. Creighton. But issues quickly muddied the waters. American idealist Josiah Royce, objecting to what he took to be the intellectually loose Jamesian-Schillerian strand of pragmatism, named them ‘pure pragmatists’, and then... (shrink)

"Plato and Nietzsche contra Phaedo-Platonism" would be an appropriate subtitle for this chapter, in which I develop a reading of Plato's Phaedo as a work of philosophical art, and Plato as a philosopher-artist (in a Nietzschean mode). The chapter includes an argument that, contrary to the standard reading, the Phaedo does not teach the doctrine of escape from the cycle of rebirth (pp. 151-160). As significant as this conclusion is in and for itself, it implies as well that Nietzsche cannot (...) appeal to this doctrine to condemn Socrates' attitude to life--though he does have other similar grounds on which to condemn him. My reading implies also that since in the Phaedo Plato subverts Socrates' style of philosophy, so objectionable to Nietzsche, we should take Plato as Nietzsche's ally in the struggle against Socrates rather than his enemy. (shrink)

Whitehead claims there is only one type of individual in the universe—the actual entity—but there are necessarily multiple tokens of this type. This turns out to be paradoxical. Nevertheless, a type of individuality that is necessarily plural because, for each token, relations to other tokens are constitutive is something familiar from ordinary language, everyday politics, and, not least, 19th century German social thought. Whitehead’s actual entity generalizes the notion of species-being we find in Fichte, Feuerbach, and Marx. The rationale for (...) the concept of species-being brings to light important social and political implications of Whitehead’s cosmology. (shrink)