In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 30.1 (2000) 106-123 [Access article in PDF] The (Mis)Uses of Cannibalism in Contemporary Cultural Critique C. Richard King At least since 1979, when W. Arens demystified what he termed "the man-eating myth," cannibalism, once a fundamental feature of the anthropological imagination and a primary trope for interpreting cultural difference, has become subject to serious debate and lingering doubt [see Osborne]. Even as some anthropologists have sought to (...) recuperate anthropophagy as a tangible symbolic, ideological, and ritual complex [Brown and Tuzin; Conklin, "'Thus are our Bodies'"; Forsyth; Harris, Good to Eat 199-234; Sanday], a constellation of scholarly projects and popular works has complicated cannibalism by relocating it in the West. Perhaps most visibly, Hollywood cinema has reclaimed cannibalism. Although a handful of films have revived well-worn clichés of dark-skinned savages preparing to consume Westerners, as in King Solomon's Mines and Crocodile Dundee, others have cast the Western subject as cannibal to grapple with the horrors of reluctant cannibalism, as in Alive! [see Fiddes 121-31], to work through the transgressive and terrifying desires associated with psychopathic cannibalism, as in The Silence of the Lambs [Fuss; Halberstam], and importantly to parody the normative beliefs and behaviors of white, middle-class, heterosexual EuroAmericans, as in Eating Raoul and Parents. At the same time, an array of scholars, artists, and activists have invoked cannibalism to fashion critical perspectives on Western cultural practices. In his film Cannibal Tours (1987), Dennis O'Rourke encourages his audiences to think critically about tourists who travel to the Sepik River Valley to encounter reformed cannibals, asking implicitly who the cannibals are, the Melanesians who formerly (were thought to/claim to have) practiced anthropophagy or the tourists who travel to New Guinea to consume them [see Bruner]. Others have pushed the metaphor. Michael Ames, borrowing explicitly from O'Rourke, uses the cannibal to reframe ethnographic museums and their practices. Similarly, Jane Tompkins asserts that "Museums are a form of cannibalism made safe for polite society" [533]. More generally, Crystal Bartolovich playfully glosses consumerism as the cultural logic of the late cannibalism; bell hooks speaks of the EuroAmerican desires for and incorporation of things ethnic as "eating the other"; and Rosalind Morris suggests that cannibalism is the essential metaphor for late capitalism. More telling, however, are a set of overlapping critical projects that offer detailed theorizations [End Page 106] [Begin Page 108] of contemporary anthropophagy. Here, I will examine three that have had an important impact on discussions of tourism, museums, cultural appropriation, and consumption. Dean MacCannell, in an exciting exploratory review of the documentary Cannibal Tours, makes explicit what O'Rourke left unsaid: we are cannibals, and contemporary capitalism is neocannibalism. Perhaps more radically, Jack Forbes argues that Western civilization fosters cannibalism as an embodied, psychosocial condition or psychosis rooted in exploitation and consumption. Inspired at least in part by Forbes, Deborah Root rethinks Western civilization as cannibal culture.Although I am terribly sympathetic with these perspectives, particularly their political commitments and theoretical creativity, I am disturbed by the practices and effects that animate them. Indeed, as powerful as this critical field promises to be, it is at the same time troubling and dangerous. Although it defamiliarizes practices of cultural production and consumption, it does not enhance understanding of the contexts in which individuals and institutions deploy them and does less to effectively challenge or undermine them. In reframing beliefs and behaviors to accentuate productivity and power, it reinstates and reaffirms binaries and, worse, often turns on the same forms of appropriation.* * *Arguably, flesh eating has always promoted the elaborations of differences. Works central to the Western canon mobilize cannibalism to make (sense of) the world. Herodotus offers an early anthropophagic distinction:These Scythian husbandmen then occupy the country eastward for three days' journey.... Beyond this region the country is desert for a great distance; and beyond the desert Androphagi dwell.... The Androphagi have the most savage customs of all men; they pay no regard to justice, nor make use of any established law. They are nomads and wear a dress like a Scythian; they... (shrink)

Trust in leadership is at all all-time low and the impact on organizational behavior and performance cannot be ignored or denied. As leaders, there is a way for you to reverse this trend. You can decide to establish and sustain trust in the workplace—by getting naked—not in the physical sense, but from the perspective of being authentic and transparent. Earning the trust and loyalty of those you are privileged to lead lays the groundwork for a high performing, motivated, and, engaged (...) culture . . . a definitive competitive advantage. Needless to say, culture is always a reflection of our leadership values and behavior. Through our words, decisions, and behavior, the culture is “sculpted.” In every case, culture is created either by intentional design or by default. If you aspire to make a profound, positive, and sustaining impact on your organization, the hearts and minds of those you lead must be earned. In a world and time where corruption, deceit, and ethical lapses are commonplace, we’ve never had a greater need for trusted, ethical leaders. If you choose to be a trusted leader, you have the opportunity to differentiate yourself and your organization and enjoy a sustainable competitive advantage while making the world a better place. (shrink)

Pain is an important focus for consciousness research because it is an avenue for exploring somatic awareness, emotion, and the genesis of subjectivity. In principle, pain is awareness of tissue trauma, but pain can occur in the absence of identifiable injury, and sometimes substantive tissue injury produces no pain. The purpose of this paper is to help bridge pain research and consciousness studies. It reviews the basic sensory neurophysiology associated with tissue injury, including transduction, transmission, modulation, and central representation. In (...) addition, it highlights the central mechanisms for the emotional aspects of pain, demonstrating the physiological link between tissue trauma and mechanisms of emotional arousal. Finally, we discuss several current issues in the field of pain research that bear on central issues in consciousness studies, such as sickness and sense of self. (shrink)

The facial expression of pain is the end product of a complex process that is, in part, emotional. The evolutionary study of facial expression must account for the social nature of human consciousness and should address the questions of why empathy exists, the adaptive importance of empathy, and whether facial expression is a mechanism of empathy and second-person consciousness.

The measurement of pain depends upon subjective reports, but we know very little about how research subjects or pain patients produce self-reported judgments. Representationalist assumptions dominate the field of pain research and lead to the critical conjecture that the person in pain examines the contents of consciousness before making a report about the sensory or affective magnitude of pain experience as well as about its nature. Most studies to date have investigated what Fechner termed “outer psychophysics”: the relationship between characteristics (...) of an external stimulus and the magnitude and nature of pain experience. In contrast, Fechner originally envisioned that “inner psychophysics” should investigate the relationship between physiological states and subjective experience. Despite the lack of established research tradition, inner psychophysics has a potential utility in elucidating underlying mechanisms for the production of phenomenal self-report. We illustrate this, using causal modeling analyses of the accuracy of self-reported pain ratings from our laboratory. We submit that the results are inconsistent with representationalist assumptions. Converging trends from several domains of consciousness studies seem to suggest that we need to abandon the unquestioned doctrine of representationalism and search for a more viable framework for understanding the generation of subjective self-report. (shrink)

This paper examines relationships between accountants’ personal values and their moral reasoning. In particular, we hypothesize that there is an inverse relationship between accountants’ “Conformity” values and principled moral reasoning. This investigation is important because the literature suggests that conformity with rule-based standards may be one reason for professional accountants’ relatively lower scores on measures of moral reasoning (Abdolmohammadi et al. J Bus Ethics 16 (1997) 1717). We administered the Rokeach Values Survey (RVS) (Rokeach: 1973, The Nature of Human Values (...) (The Free Press, New York)) and the Defining Issues Test (DIT) (Rest: 1979, Development in Judgment Moral Issues (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN)) to164 graduating accounting students enrolled in capstone courses at two universities in the Northeastern United States. As potential entrants into the accounting profession, these subjects bring their values and moral reasoning to bear on attitudes and behaviors in the workplace. We find a highly significant inverse relationship between “Conformity” values and principled moral reasoning (i.e., those who prefer Conformity values have lower levels of moral reasoning). However, we also find that accounting students as a group do not prefer Conformity values above other values such as Self-actualization and Idealism, and we find positive relationships between Self-actualization and Idealism values and moral reasoning. Implications for values and ethics research are discussed. (shrink)

In recent years, Bayesian probability theory has emerged not only as a powerful tool for building computational theories of vision, but also as a general paradigm for studying human visual perception. This book provides an introduction to and critical analysis of the Bayesian paradigm. Leading researchers in computer vision and experimental vision science describe general theoretical frameworks for modeling vision, detailed applications to specific problems and implications for experimental studies of human perception. The book provides a dialogue between different perspectives (...) both within chapters, which draw on insights from experimental and computational work, and between chapters, through commentaries written by the contributors on each other's work. Students and researchers in cognitive and visual science will find much to interest them in this thought-provoking collection. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Breakdown of C i M phy " artes an eta sacs RICHARD A. WATSON WITHIN CARTESIANISMthere arose many problems deriving from conflicts between Cartesian principles. Inadequate attempts to solve these problems were crucial reasons for the breakdown of Cartesian metaphysics in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The major difficulties derived from the acceptance of a dualism of substances seated in a system which included epistemological (...) and causal likeness principles plus an ontological framework in which the categories of substance and modification were exhaustive. The major solutions involved either denying the likeness principles or altering the ontological framework. The first led to unintelligibility ; the second, culminating in Hume, opened the way to non-Cartesian metaphysics. The first section of this study contains a characterization of late seventeenth -century Cartesian metaphysics. The second is an exposition of Foucher 's four major criticisms of this system. In the third section, monistic solutions suggested in Descartes and by Spinoza, Foucher, Leibniz, and Locke are considered; in the fourth, the dualistic solutions of the orthodox Cartesians Rohault, R~gis, Desgabets, La Forge, Le Grand, and Arnauld; and in the fifth, the occasionalist solution of Malebranche. The sixth section is an analysis of these orthodox and occasionalist solutions, showing how each ultimately fails because of dependence upon the ontology of substance and modification. The seventh section is a consideration of Berkeley and Hume in the Cartesian context. A consideration of their systems as offering solutions to Cartesian problems illuminates in new light both the systems and the problems. In broad terms, this study moves from a consideration of problems arising from an ontology of two substances, to a consideration of problems arising from the ontological pattern of substance and modification. The Cartesians were concerned with relationships between two substances, but they saw no difficulties connected with the relationship between a substance and its modifications (or properties). Berkeley's treatment (deriving from Male- [177] 178 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY branche) of the relationships between mind and idea, and between mind and notion, is illuminated by a consideration of the extent to which he took these relationships for granted in the Cartesian way, and of the extent to which he saw difficulties in the relationship between substance and modification. The Berkeleian solution to Cartesian problems, like that of Malebranche before him, was not successful; Malebranche belittled, and Berkeley denied the dualism of substances, but neither philosopher could break entirely with the ontological pattern of substance and modification. The final breakdown of Cartesian metaphysics came with Hume, who, in providing the culmination of a most important trend in modern philosophy, opened the way to new metaphysics and became the father of contemporary philosophy. I A model late seventeenth-century Cartesian metaphysical system. The last grand expositor of the Cartesian philosophy was Antoine Le Grand who in 1694 published An Entire Body of Philosophy. The characterization of the late seventeenth-century Cartesian system given below follows Le Grand's exposition more closely than others, but it also incorporates elements from those of Rohault, R6gis, Desgabets, La Forge, Malebranche, and Arnauld.1 None of these philosophers professed a system of exactly the sort this characterization pictures, nor is it implied here that they do. The guide and rationale for drawing from them such a model Cartesianism is the polemical writing of Simon Foucher. Foucher's series of attacks upon Cartesianism (of which the second is his criticism of Malebranche of 1675, Critique de la Rdcherche de la veritd) give clearly the most important objections against Cartesian metaphysics.2The system outlined below, while more com1Le Grand, Antoine, An Entire Body of Philosophy According to the Principles of the Famous Renate des Cartes (London, 1694); Rohault, Jacques, Traitd de physique (Paris, 1671); R6gis, Pierre-Sylvain, Syst~me de philosophie, contenant la logique, la mdtaphysique, la physique et la morale (Lyon, 1690); Desgabets, Robert, Critique de la Critique de la Recherche de la veritd, oCt l'on decouvre le chemin qui conduit aux connoissances solides. Pour servir de rdsponse gtla Lettre d'un academicien (Paris, 1675); La Forge, Louis de, Traitd de l'dme humaine, de ses facultds et fonctions et de son union avec le corps, d'apr~s les principes de... (shrink)

Research focusing on the relationship between measures of Corporate Social Responsibility and company financial performance has led to mixed results in the North American context. In addition, the ethical attitudes and approaches toward CSR investments of both companies and rating agencies are not necessarily the same in Europe and the United States. In this study, we use CSR ratings issued by a major European CSR ratings agency to examine in a bi-directional manner the relationships between CSR ratings and financial performance (...) in the European context. By bi-directional, we mean an examination of the relationship between prior CSR ratings and subsequent accounting and financial performance and reciprocally, the impact of accounting and financial performance of year N − 1 on CSR ratings of year N. Our principal findings are: the greater the market capitalization of a company, the higher the Vigeo rating, the higher the risk of the company, the lower the Vigeo rating, and the greater the stock market return of a company, the lower the Vigeo rating. Based on these findings, we propose a concept of “political visibility” pursuant to which enterprises of a greater size are exposed to greater pressure to conform to norms of socially acceptable behavior, a concept of “priorities” in which enterprises that have resolved their most urgent financial needs have a greater ability to invest in CSR, a concept of “rating downgrading” which reveals the sanctioning role of the rating agency from an ethical standpoint. (shrink)

The proposed volumes are aimed at a multidisciplinary audience and seek to fill the gap between law, semiotics and visuality providing a comprehensive theoretical and analytical overview of legal visual semiotics. They seek to promote an interdisciplinary debate from law, semiotics and visuality bringing together the cumulative research traditions of these related areas as a prelude to identifying fertile avenues for research going forward. Advance Praise for Law, Culture and Visual Studies This diverse and exhilarating collection of essays explores the (...) many facets both historical and contemporary of visual culture in the law. It opens a window onto the substantive, jurisdictional, disciplinary and methodological diversity of current research. It is a cornucopia of materials that will enliven legal studies for those new to the field as well as for established scholars. It is a 'must read' that will leave you wondering about the validity of the long held obsession that reduces the law and legal studies to little more than a preoccupation with the word. Leslie J Moran Professor of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London Law, Culture and Visual Studies is a treasure trove of insights on the entwined roles of legality and visuality. From multiple interdisciplinary perspectives by scholars from around the world, these pieces reflect the fullness and complexities of our visual encounters with law and culture. From pictures to places to postage stamps, from forensics to film to folklore, this anthology is an exciting journey through the fertile field of law and visual culture as well as a testament that the field has come of age. Naomi Mezey, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C., USA This highly interdisciplinary reference work brings together diverse fields including cultural studies, communication theory, rhetoric, law and film studies, legal and social history, visual and legal theory, in order to document the various historical, cultural, representational and theoretical links that bind together law and the visual. This book offers a breath-taking range of resources from both well-established and newer scholars who together cover the field of law's representation in, interrogation of, and dialogue with forms of visual rhetoric, practice, and discourse. Taken together this scholarship presents state of the art research into an important and developing dimension of contemporary legal and cultural inquiry. Above all, Law Culture and Visual Studies lays the groundwork for rethinking the nature of law in our densely visual culture: How are legal meanings produced, encoded, distributed, and decoded? What critical and hermeneutic skills, new or old, familiar or unfamiliar, will be needed? Topical, diverse, and enlivening, Law Culture and Visual Studies is a vital research tool and an urgent invitation to further critical thinking in the areas so well laid out in this collection. Desmond Manderson, Future Fellow, ANU College of Law / Research School of Humanities and the Arts, Australian National University, Australia. (shrink)

Richard Sorabji presents a fascinating study of Gandhi's philosophy in comparison with Christian and Stoic thought. He shows that Gandhi was a true philosopher, who not only aimed to give a consistent self-critical rationale for his views, but also thought himself obliged to live by what he taught.

In Hang The DJ, Amy and Frank meet via an online dating system that promises that if you stick with it, it will continue gathering information until it finds your soul mate, or “ultimate compatible other,” trumpeting a 99.8% success rate. In this chapter we explore the broad issue of digital relationships from the point of view of two particular philosophies of life: Stoicism and existentialism. The episode raises a multiplicity of philosophical issues concerning the choices we make about romantic (...) love. For example, does finding a perfect match really boil down to a formula? And if we could find such a formula, would that be a good way to find love? These two philosophical approaches help us to answer the question as to whether we should be relegating the task of finding a mate to computer algorithms. (shrink)

A central feature of our waking mental experience is that our attention naturally toggles back and forth between “external” and “internal” stimuli. In the midst of an externally demanding task, attention can involuntarily shift internally with no clear reason how or why thoughts momentarily shifted inward. In the case of external attention, we are typically exploring and encoding aspects of our external world, whereas internal attention often involves searching for and retrieving potentially relevant information from our memory networks. Cognitive science (...) has traditionally focused on understanding forms of internal and external attention separately, leaving a mystery about what sparks the seemingly automatic shifts between the two. Specifically, what shifts attentional focus from being outward‐directed to being inward‐directed? We present a candidate mechanism: Familiarity‐detection. (shrink)

Originated in the West, stakeholder theory is normatively anchored in Western value systems. Differences in value orientations and ethical systems in this global age call for culturally pertinent stakeholder theory. In this article, we argue that Confucianism forms an additional normative basis for stakeholder theory, appropriate for a Confucian context. We demonstrate it through application of Confucianism in major stakeholder relationships. The Confucian stakeholder theory provides a meaningful addition to the corpus of stakeholder literature.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Philosophy of Bishop Stillingfleet RICHARD H. POPKIN EDWARD STILLINGFLEET(1635-1699), the Bishop of Worcester, is known only as Locke's opponent. Although he was a leading figure in seventeenth century intellectual history, he is now almost completely forgotten.1 He is only mentioned once in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy as the first person to write against Deism. 2 His texts have been ditlicult to locate, and have hardly been studied. (...) Although Locke's answers to him comprise a large volume in Locke's Works, little interest has been shown in Stillingfleet's side of the story. His letters to Locke were last printed in the 1710 edition of his works. (I am now publishing a photoreproduction edition of the attacks on Locke, and a photoreproduction of the six volumes of his works is due soon.) In spite of this neglect, Stillingfleet was a quite interesting figure. He was not a simple moss-back, a religious reactionary, fighting progressive theories like Locke's. Rather, he was trying to maintain some basis for religious belief in the face of the intellectual upheavals in the seventeenth century. For over forty years he struggled against a wide range of philosophical and theological developments of the time that he saw as leading to scepticism and infidelity. Stillingfleet attempted to defend the reasonableness of Christianity in an intellectual world dominated by the new science, the new philosophy, the religious wars, the rise of irreligion, Bible criticism, and Spinozism. In the new scientific, philosophical and theological context he sought to show how an intelligent, reasonable man could maintain his religious views as more probable than their denials. And, he tried to show the perils involved in various new lines of thought. As he wrote to Locke, "in an age wherein the Mysteries of Faith are so much exposed by the Promoters of Scepticism and Infidelity, it is a thing of dangerous consequence to start such new methods of Certainty as are apt to leave men's minds more doubtJull than before." 3 Stillingfleet criticized various new views of thinkers like Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza and Locke, and tried to show that they were unreasonable and x No section is devoted to Stillingfleet in Charles de R~musat's Histoire de la Philosophie en Angleterre depuis Bacon jusqu'gt Locke, 2 vols. (Paris, 1875). He is of course briefly treated by Locke scholars, but only in relation to Locke. 2 Ernest C. Mossner, "Deism," Encyclopedia of Philosophy ('New York, 1967), II, 328. 3 Edward StiUingfleet,The Bishop o~ Worcester's Answer to Mr. Locke's Letter (London, 1697), pp. 37-38. [303] 304 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY destructive. Instead he advocated a commonsense philosophy incorporating Aristotelian and Stoic elements, as an adequate basis for a reasonable view of the world. Stillingflect's critique of empiricism, in its Epicurean and Lockean forms, revealed some of the basic difficulties in this emerging philosophy. His own views in some ways foreshadowed the counter-philosophy that Thomas Reid was to offer a century later against the full-blown empirical scepticism of Hume. And Hume's essay "Of Miracles" can, I believe, be seen as the reductio ad absurdum of Stillingfleet's commonsense philosophy. In this paper I shall try to sketch out Bishop Stilhngfleet's philosophy, and to indicate the role it played in the history of British empirical thought. The Bishop's attack on Locke only occurred at the very end of his long and fruitful intellectual career. (He died during the debate in 1699.) To appreciate why he was so concerned with exposing the sceptical and irreligious tendencies in Locke's thought, and the potential conflicts between empiricism and the tenets of Judeo-Christianity, one has to look at his entire theological and philosophical career. Stillingfleet was one of the most erudite divines of the seventeenth century, a leading member of the brilliant group of Anglican theologians, including, besides himself, William Chillingworth, Bishop John Wilkins (the founder of the Royal Society), and Archbishop John Tillotson.4 Stillingfleet was extremely sensitive to the fundamental issues being raised in the religious, scientific and philosophical debates of the time, and tried, like his fellow Anglican divines, to develop a commonsense semirational, semiempirical defense... (shrink)

The book discusses whether animals are designed according to the same rules that engineers use in building machines.

Alterations to cognitive function are often reported with depression and anxiety symptoms, yet few studies have examined the same associations with mental well-being. This study examined the association between mental well-being, depression and anxiety symptoms and cognitive function in 1502 healthy adult monozygotic and dizygotic twins, and the shared/unique contribution of genetic and environmental variance. Using linear mixed models, mental well-being was positively associated with sustained attention, inhibition, cognitive flexibility, motor coordination and working memory, whereas depression and anxiety symptoms were (...) associated with poorer sustained attention, inhibition, cognitive flexibility and executive function. Bivariate twin modelling showed well-being shared a small environmental correlation with motor coordination and a small genetic correlation with working memory. Trivariate twin modelling showed well-being shared a small genetic correlation with inhibition, whereas depression and anxiety symptoms shared a small environmental correlation with inhibition. The remaining variance was mostly driven by unique G and/or E variance. Overall, well-being and depression and anxiety symptoms show both independent and shared relationships with cognitive functions but this is largely attributable to unique G or E variance and small shared G/E variance between pairs of variables. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Joseph Priestley's Criticisms of David Hume's Philosophy RICHARD H. POPKIN ONE OF HUME'S MOST FAMOUS CRITICS, the great scientist Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), is scarcely mentioned or studied in the Hume literature.' Perhaps because of the course philosophy followed after Hume, the Scottish Common Sense critics and the German ones connected with Kant are given almost all of the attention. In this paper 1 shall try to correct this (...) oversight, and examine the background of Priestley's critique of Hume, both in terms of Priestley's scientific and religious views and in terms of Hume's influence at the time. I shall then evaluate the merits of Priestley's critique and attempt to determine whether it deserves further study or should be returned to the obscurity it has been in for almost two centuries. 2 Joseph Priestley was a nonconforming minister whose progressively radical views caused him to lose various posts. Eventually he became a millenarian, convinced that crucial signs of the end of the world were at hand: the events of the French Revolution; the purported discovery of the Lost Tribes in Afghanistan by Sir William Jones; plans or hopes for the Jews to return to Palestine and join forces with the Christians. After years of religious wanderings Priestley ended up a millenarian Unitarian, much in the tradition of Sir Isaac Newton, whose religious writing he used extensively, and of Newton's successor, William Whiston? Priestley taught science in various schools and was immensely influenced by David Hartley's Observations on Man. He found in Hartley's theory of association of ideas a naturalistic way of explaining human mental life. And in Hartley's millenarian views he located the sort of theology he was seeking. Priestly later reedited Hartley, including introductory essays about some of the more difficult aspects of his mechanistic psychology.' (Coleridge, who was deeply impressed by ' T. E. Jessop, A Bibliography of David Hume and of the Scottish Philosophy from l-)'ancis Hutcheson to Lord Balfour (New York, 1966), lists the titles of Priestley's works relevant to Hume. However, there appear to be no discussions of Priestley on Hume listed in this work or in Roland Hill, A Bibliography of David Hume from 1930 (York, 1971). E. C. Mossner, The Life of David Hume (Edinburgh, 1954), mentions Priestley's criticisms of Hume, but only as these were made in connection with criticisms of Beattie. Joseph Priestley, Memoirs of Dr. Joseph Priestley to the Year 1795, written by Himself, with a Continuation to the time of his decease by his son, Joseph Priestley, ed. T. Cooper (London, 1806). It is also of some interest that Priestley attacked Reid, Beattie, and Oswald a few years before challenging Hume. He seemed to think that he had disposed of the Scottish Philosophy for all time. Thus Priestley was certainly no part of the mainstream of Hume's opponents in Britain. See Memoirs, pp. 78-79n, and n. 16 below. ' On Priestley's career, see his Memoirs. Modern biographies deal principally with his scientific achievements and ignore or play down his theological concerns. For an extended discussion of Priestley's millenarian views, see Clarke Garrett, Respectable Folly (Baltimore, 1975), pp. 126-143. " Priestley, Hartley's Theory of the Human Mind, on the Principle of the Association of Ideas... (London, 1775). [437] 438 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Hartley, probably read Priestley's edition of his works.) For the most part, Priestley wrote long and controversial works on theology. His scientific achievements stem from his friendship with Benjamin Franklin and Richard Price, who encouraged him to write a history of discoveries in electricity. Franklin provided the resources for making the equipment. On the basis of the new material in his work, Priestley was nominated to the Royal Society by Franklin and Price. s Priestley's most famous scientific works came thereafter--his discovery of oxygen and his work on how the human body used oxygen. Later still, he became entangled in a controversy with Lavoisier over the phlogiston theory, Priestley upholding it, the French chemist opposing it. 6 Priestley was also active in politics, supporting radical causes. He supported John Wilkes, of whom Hume thoroughly disapproved, and was an early... (shrink)

"[This book] proposes new foundations for the Bayesian principle of rational action, and goes on to develop a new logic of desirability and probabtility."—Frederic Schick, _Journal of Philosophy_.