Former Google advertising strategist, now Oxford-trained philosopher James Williams launches a plea to society and to the tech industry to help ensure that the technology we all carry with us every day does not distract us from pursuing our true goals in life. As information becomes ever more plentiful, the resource that is becoming more scarce is our attention. In this 'attention economy', we need to recognise the fundamental impacts of our new information environment on our lives in order (...) to take back control. Drawing on insights ranging from Diogenes to contemporary tech leaders, Williams's thoughtful and impassioned analysis is sure to provoke discussion and debate. Williams is the inaugural winner of the Nine Dots Prize, a new Prize for creative thinking that tackles contemporary social issues. This title is also available as Open Access. (shrink)

The Epicurean philosophical system has enjoyed much recent scrutiny, but the question of its philosophical ancestry remains largely neglected. It has often been thought that Epicurus owed only his physical theory of atomism to the fifth-century BC philosopher Democritus, but this study finds that there is much in his ethical thought which can be traced to Democritus. It also finds important influences on Epicurus in Democritus' fourth-century followers such as Anaxarchus and Pyrrho, and in Epicurus' disagreements with his own Democritean (...) teacher Nausiphanes. The result is not only a fascinating reconstruction of a lost tradition, but also an important contribution to the philosophical interpretation of Epicureanism, bearing especially on its ideal of tranquillity and on the relation of ethics to physics. (shrink)

This is the first critical study of The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze's most important work on language and ethics, as well as the main source of his vital philosophy of the event.James Williams explains the originality of Deleuze's work with careful definitions of all his innovative terms and a detailed description of the complex structure he constructs. This reading makes connections to his ground-breaking work on literature, to his critical but also progressive relation to the sciences, and to (...) his controversial denial of the priority of standard logics, human values and 'meaning' in thinking.This book will open new debates and develop current ones around Deleuze's work in philosophy, politics, literature, linguistics, cultural studies and sociology. (shrink)

This book presents a comprehensive, accessible survey of Western philosophy of music from Pythagoras to the present. Its narrative traces themes and schools through history, in a sequence of five chapters that survey the ancient, medieval, early modern, modern and contemporary periods. Its wide-ranging coverage includes medieval Islamic thinkers, Continental and analytic thinkers, and neglected female thinkers such as Vernon Lee (Violet Paget). All aspects of the philosophy of music are discussed, including music and the cosmos, music's value, music's relation (...) to the other arts, the problem of opera, the origins of musical genius, music's emotional impact, the moral effects of music, the ontology of musical works, and the relevance of music's historical context. The volume will be valuable for students and scholars in philosophy and musicology, and all who are interested in the ways in which philosophers throughout history have thought about music. (shrink)

The infant mortality rate in Liberia is 50 times higher than it is in Sweden, whilst a child born in Japan has a life expectancy at birth of more than double that of one born in Zambia. 1 And within countries, we see differences which are nearly as great. For example, if you were in the USA and travelled the short journey from the poorer parts of Washington to Montgomery County Maryland, you would find that ‘for each mile travelled life (...) expectancy rises about a year and a half. There is a twenty-year gap between poor blacks at one end of the journey and rich whites at the other’. (Marmot, 2004, p.2). There are two types of questions which it is important to ask about inequalities in health such as these. The first are social scientific questions about the extent of inequalities in health and the factors which are causally responsible for these inequalities. Examples of social scientific questions to ask might be: how do infant mortality rates in the UK differ according to social class? What is the difference in life expectancy between Japanese who emigrate to the US and those who remain in Japan? Why do civil servants in higher ranked jobs tend to live longer than civil servants in lower ranked jobs? The second type are normative questions about the reasons we have to care about inequalities in health. Important normative questions to answer are: which inequalities in health should we care about (all inequalities or merely some of them)? When is an inequality in health unjust? How should we weigh our concern for equality in health against other factors such as maximising the.. (shrink)

Linguistic anthropologists have studied emotion in societies around the world for several decades. This article defines the discipline, introduces its general relevance to emotion theory, then presents five of the most important contributions linguistic anthropology has made to the study of emotion.

Patients -- Clients -- Welfare assessment -- Clinical choices -- Achieving animal welfare goals -- Beyond the clinic.

Why is American punishment so cruel? While in continental Europe great efforts are made to guarantee that prisoners are treated humanely, in America sentences have gotten longer and rehabilitation programs have fallen by the wayside. Western Europe attempts to prepare its criminals for life after prison, whereas many American prisons today leave their inhabitants reduced and debased. In the last quarter of a century, Europe has worked to ensure that the baser human inclination toward vengeance is not reflected by state (...) policy, yet America has shown a systemic drive toward ever increasing levels of harshness in its criminal policies. Why is America so short on mercy? In this deeply researched, comparative work, James Q. Whitman reaches back to the 17th and 18th centuries to trace how and why American and European practices came to diverge. Eschewing the usual historical imprisonment narratives, Whitman focuses instead on intriguing differences in the development of punishment in the age of Western democracy. European traditions of social hierarchy and state power, so consciously rejected by the American colonies, nevertheless supported a more merciful and dignified treatment of offenders. The hierarchical class system on the continent kept alive a tradition of less-degrading "high-status" punishments that eventually became applied across the board in Europe. The distinctly American, draconian regime, on the other hand, grows, Whitman argues, out of America's longstanding distrust of state power and its peculiar, broad-brush sense of egalitarianism. Low-status punishments were evenly meted out to all offenders, regardless of class or standing. America's unrelentingly harsh treatment of trangressors--this "equal opportunity degradation"-- is, in a very real sense, the dark side of the nation's much vaunted individualism. A sobering look at the growing rift between the United States and Europe, Harsh Justice exposes the deep cultural roots of America's degrading punishment practices. (shrink)

A revised, expanded and fully up-to-date critical introduction to Deleuze's most important work of philosophyBy critically analysing Deleuze's methods, principles and arguments, James Williams helps readers to engage with the revolutionary core of Deleuze's philosophy and take up positions for or against its most innovative and controversial ideas.

When we talk about intellectual property, it is often implicitly assumed that we are talking about private intellectual property. However, private property and the idea of private ownership do not exhaust the possibilities for accounts of ownership and of property. There are other ways that ownership can operate, such as common property. A resource is common property if its use is ‘governed by rules whose point is to make them available for use by all or any members of the society.’.

This is the first modern, annotated and scholarly edition of Jean-Baptiste Du Bos’ _Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting_, one of the seminal works of modern aesthetics in any language.

These essays argue that to have good character one needs to have at least developed a sense of empathy and self control.

This article discusses some philosophical theories of causation and their application to several areas of science. Topics addressed include regularity, counterfactual, and causal process theories of causation; the causal interpretation of structural equation models and directed graphs; independence assumptions in causal reasoning; and the role of causal concepts in physics. In connection with this last topic, this article focuses on the relationship between causal asymmetries, the time-reversal invariance of most fundamental physical laws, and the significance of differences among varieties of (...) differential equations in causal interpretation. It concludes with some remarks about “grounding” special science causal generalizations in physics. (shrink)

Why battles matter -- Accepting the wager of battle -- Laying just claim to the profits of war -- The monarchical monopolization of military violence -- Were there really rules? -- The death of pitched battle.

Despite its vigor, agrifood studies research faces two fault lines: the durability of disciplines, and challenges in engaging non-academic stakeholders. In this essay, I use the concept of boundary work from social studies of science and technology to reflect on the challenges and opportunities for more engaged interdisciplinary research in agrifood studies. I draw on recent field visits to several “sustainable food chain” research projects funded through the Rural Economy and Land Use Programme (RELU), an innovative interdisciplinary research initiative of (...) the UK Research Councils, to highlight the contradictory nature of boundary work in interdisciplinary research. Involving efforts both to bridge interfaces and to separate, exclude and manage other disciplines or stakeholders, boundary work is inherent to interdisciplinarity. Innovations in the organizational culture of projects and in the larger structural context for research can multiply the more generative potential of boundary work, and also yield more and better interdisciplinary research in agrifood studies. (shrink)

A number of philosophers with a metaphysical orientation have criticized Making Things Happen for its failure to provide an account of the metaphysical foundations or grounds or truth-makers for causal and explanatory claims. This dialog attempts to respond to these objections and to raise some general concerns about some of the rhetoric and argumentative strategies employed in contemporary analytic metaphysics. It also explores some issues having to do with the relationship between methodology, understood as a core concern of philosophy of (...) science, and analytic metaphysics. (shrink)

Noted psychologist and philosopher develops his own brand of pragmatism, based on theories of C. S. Peirce. Emphasis on "radical empiricism," versus the transcendental and rationalist tradition. One of the most important books in American philosophy. Note.

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 92 Heft: 2 Seiten: 530-533.

The reference of the postmodern task of thinking is Auschwitz, the abyss and discontinuity separating us from the world of our ancestors. As inhabitants of Planet Auschwitz our point of reference lacks all transcendental warrants; it is not a non-referable reference which constitutes the abyss we must enter, endure, and in which our intellectual and cultural tradition must be transformed. The private/public transformations which constitute the texts of this book attempt to depart from the dystopic individuality and public life resulting (...) from business-as-usual after Auschwitz. The three parts of the book are progressive reworkings of traditional metaphysics as adapted and modified by a modernism that refuses to grapple with its complicity. It is precisely that complicity which postmodern thinking takes up in its attempt to signify otherwise than the easy modernist translations and images of tradition. Thus it is a series of uneasy images imaging otherwise but never apart from modernity that take us away from complicity toward a transformed tradition. The uneasy images of this book are photogrammic combinations of photographs and texts, mutual supplements, pulling tradition through the Event against the persistent and murderous forces of contemporary idolatry and repression. (shrink)

Roughly half the essays in this collection engage directly with Augustine's theological animus and follow his thinking into self-division, perversity of will, grief, conversion, and the aspiration for transcendence.

German description: Johann Hinrich Claussen beschaftigt sich mit der uralten und dennoch aktuellen Frage nach dem Gluck: Was konnte das Gluck sein, und inwiefern stellt die Jagd nach dem Gluck ein sinnvolles Lebensziel dar?