INTRODUCTION When Liberalism was first published in 1911 a critical reviewer in the London Spectator observed, "It would be impossible to have the essential ...

Leonard Trelawney Hobhouse is considered one of the founders of sociology as a discipline. His four books which form Principles of Sociology are published here together for the first time - representing a synthesis of the philosophical and scientific methods of social inquiry. Although very scarce, the study by Hobson and Ginsberg is still regarded as the most comprehensive account of Hobhouse's life and works. There is also a memoir by Hobson and a selection of Hobhouse's (...) otherwise inaccessible writings. (shrink)

Leonard Trelawney Hobhouse is considered one of the founders of sociology as a discipline. His four books which form Principles of Sociology are published here together for the first time - representing a synthesis of the philosophical and scientific methods of social inquiry. Although very scarce, the study by Hobson and Ginsberg is still regarded as the most comprehensive account of Hobhouse's life and works. There is also a memoir by Hobson and a selection of Hobhouse's (...) otherwise inaccessible writings. (shrink)

Leonard Trelawney Hobhouse is considered one of the founders of sociology as a discipline. His four books which form Principles of Sociology are published here together for the first time - representing a synthesis of the philosophical and scientific methods of social inquiry. Although very scarce, the study by Hobson and Ginsberg is still regarded as the most comprehensive account of Hobhouse's life and works. There is also a memoir by Hobson and a selection of Hobhouse's (...) otherwise inaccessible writings. (shrink)

L. T. Hobhouse was fundamental to the New Liberal movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He authored many important works in the fields of philosophy, economics and social liberalism. First published in 1896, _The Theory of Knowledge_ considers the content and validity of knowledge, and the conditions on which our understanding of knowledge is based. It is a rich and important classic, which remains of value to students and academics with an interest in sociology, anthropology and (...) the philosophy of logic. (shrink)

The sudden death of Professor Hobhouse on June 21, at the age of sixty-four years, at Alençon, Normandy, is a heavy loss to science and philosophy. He combined in a rare degree great powers of metaphysical speculation and synthesis with capacity for painstaking and detailed research in many fields of empirical science. He was one of the pioneers of comparative psychology; he developed a technique of the greatest value in the handling of the vast and chaotic data of anthropology; (...) he laid the foundations of a scientific sociology; and he has attempted a synthesis of the results of his scientific and philosophical studies on a scale which must win for him a high place among the systematic thinkers of the world. As a teacher and a social leader he inspired love and reverence by the nobility of his thought and utterance, his passion for justice, his wise and tender humanity. Members of the Philosophical Institute have special cause to mourn his loss. When the Institute was founded in 1925, it was the unanimous wish of all connected with its foundation that Professor Hobhouse should be its chairman; and it has been a great piece of good fortune for the Institute to have had the benefit of his ripe wisdom and extensive experience during the first five years of its life. (shrink)

Abstract: While recent scholarship often makes the claim that Plato’s theology in the Laws is based upon inferences from observable features about the world, this interpretation runs into difficulties when one considers (1) the continuing importance that the Socratic turn undertaken in the Phaedo has for speculation in the Laws about the order of the cosmos and (2) the actual observations that Plato makes about the sublunar and celestial realms in the Laws. In light of these difficulties, I develop an (...) interpretation of the theology of the Laws that seeks to show the priority of soul to matter by means of an articulation of the fundamental orientation to the world that is manifest in human beings seeking shared understanding through λόγος. This fundamental orientation is characterized by the recognition that νοῦς, not personal ambition, should guide human action and thought, and I argue that this recognition supplies at least partial support for the belief that νοῦς is in control of the cosmos. This interpretation helps makes sense of difficult passages in the Platonic corpus that ground cosmology on piety (Laws 10.898c6, Philebus 28e2, Timaeus 29a4). The relationship of this philosophical piety to the piety required by the laws of Magnesia is, however, problematic, and it could appear that Plato bridges this gap by a prudentialist account of why the laws of the city should be considered divine. I broach this problem in the final section of this paper by way of an examination of the relationship between the second sailing (δεύτερος πλοῦς) of the Phaedo and the δεύτερος πλοῦς of the Statesman and the Laws. I conclude with the observation that both the Phaedo and the Laws make use of an enchantment (ἐπῳδή) that goes beyond the bounds of what λόγος can establish. (shrink)

Plato: The Academy Plato’s enormous impact on later philosophy, education, and culture can be traced to three interrelated aspects of his philosophical life: his written philosophical dialogues, the teaching and writings of his student Aristotle, and the educational organization he began, “the Academy.” Plato’s Academy took its name from the place where its members congregated, … Continue reading Plato: The Academy →.

Classic analysis of the subject and the development of personal probability; one of the greatest controversies in modern statistcal thought.

Derrida wrote extensively on "the question of the animal." In particular, he challenged Heidegger's, Husserl's, and other philosophers' work on the subject, questioning their phenomenological criteria for distinguishing humans from animals. Examining a range of Derrida's writings, including his most recent _L'animal que donc je suis_, as well as _Aporias_, _Of Spirit_, _Rams_, and _Rogues_, Leonard Lawlor reconstructs a portrait of Derrida's views on animality and their intimate connection to his thinking on ethics, names and singularity, sovereignty, and the (...) notion of a common world. Derrida believed that humans and animals cannot be substantially separated, yet neither do they form a continuous species. Instead, in his "staggered analogy," Derrida asserts that all living beings are weak and therefore capable of suffering. This controversial claim both refuted the notion that humans and animals possess autonomy and contradicted the assumption that they possess the trait of machinery. However, it does offer the foundation for an argument-which Lawlor brilliantly and passionately defines in his book-in which humans are able to will this weakness into a kind of unconditional hospitality. Humans are not strong enough to keep themselves separate from animals. In other words, we are too weak to keep animals from entering into our sphere. Lawlor's argument is a bold approach to remedying "the problem of the worst," or the complete extermination of life, which is fast becoming a reality. (shrink)

The penal code of the Laws has attracted scholarly attention because it appears to advance a coherent theory of punishment. The Laws' suggestion that legislation follow the model of 'free doctors', as well as its discussion of the Socratic paradox, leads one to expect a theory of punishment that recommends kolasis and nouthetesis rather than timoria. In practice, however, the Laws makes use of the language of timoria and categorizes some crimes as voluntary. While the Laws provides a searching criticism (...) of contemporary Greek penal practices rooted in anger and retribution, Kleinias' dramatic participation in the discussion forces the qualified inclusion of these common beliefs. While the Laws provides a philosophic intervention intended to reform the injustices of contemporary penal practices, it ultimately suggests that educated doxa, not theoretical completeness, is the proper standard for establishing a workable penal code. (shrink)

In the wake of ethical scandals and close ethical scrutiny throughout business and the accounting professional today, Brooks/Dunn's BUSINESS & PROFESSIONAL ETHICS, 9E provides the ethical insights and strategies you need for corporate and professional success. Learn why ethical behavior is so important and how to recognize potential pitfalls that involve much more than memorizing rules. You master the skills to develop a corporate culture of integrity that maintains stakeholder support and enables directors and auditors to complete their jobs. You (...) also learn how to use ethical strategies to make decisions, as this edition examines the latest information on governance scandals, legal liability and professional accounting and auditing issues. More than 130 cases and readings highlight new and classic cases of fraud, bankruptcy and unprofessional practices to help you better understand appropriate codes of conduct and sound ethical reasoning while strengthening your persuasive and leadership skills for success. (shrink)

The author offers perspectives that can assist healthcare managers in achieving the highest ethical standards as they face their roles as healthcare providers, employers, and community service organizations. He also examines how to comply with relevant laws and regulations, provide high quality patient care with limited resources, and more.

Analyzes the meaning expressed in music, the social and psychological sources of meaning, and the methods of musical communication This is a book meant for ...

Dr Brandwood's book presents a factual and critical account of the more important of the various attempts that have been made to establish the order of composition of Plato's dialogues by analysing his diction and prose style. Plato's literary activity covered fifty years and there is almost no direct evidence, either external or internal, to help in establishing the relative order of his writings. Until the middle of the nineteenth century people were dependent on personal interpretation of the probable line (...) of development of Plato's thought and doctrines, but then a less subjective method was discovered, which relied instead on the observation of changes in Plato's prose style. Dr Brandwood examines the investigations of each scholar individually, checking the correctness of the methodology and the accuracy of the statistics, before arriving at fairly definite conclusions of his own, at least as far as the works of Plato's middle and old age are concerned. (shrink)

Building on recent formal work by Aleks Knoks, we explore how the idea that certain epistemic norms may be indeterminate could be implemented in a default logic.

The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon is a reference tool that provides clear and incisive definitions and descriptions of all of Foucault's major terms and influences, including history, knowledge, language, philosophy and power. It also includes entries on philosophers about whom Foucault wrote and who influenced Foucault's thinking, such as Deleuze, Heidegger, Nietzsche and Canguilhem. The entries are written by scholars of Foucault from a variety of disciplines such as philosophy, gender studies, political science and history. Together, they shed light on concepts (...) key to Foucault and to ongoing discussions of his work today. (shrink)

According to a growing number of researchers, AI may pose catastrophic – or even existential – risks to humanity. Catastrophic risks may be taken to be risks of 100 million human deaths, or a similarly bad outcome. I argue that such risks – while contested – are sufficiently likely to demand rigorous discussion of potential societal responses. Subsequently, I propose four desiderata for approaches to the reduction of catastrophic risks from AI. The quality of such approaches can be assessed by (...) their chance of success, degree of beneficence, degree of non-maleficence, and beneficent side effects. Then, I employ these desiderata to evaluate the promises, limitations and risks of alignment research, timelines research, policy research, halting or slowing down AI research, and compute governance for tackling catastrophic AI risks. While more research is needed, this investigation shows that several approaches for dealing with catastrophic AI risks are available, and where their respective strengths and weaknesses lie. It turns out that many approaches are complementary and that the approaches have a nuanced relationship to approaches to present AI harms. While some approaches are similarly useful for addressing catastrophic risks and present harms, this is not always the case. (shrink)

This book educates whilst also challenging the contemporary schools of thought within philosophical and religious ethics. In addition, it underlines the fact that the substance of ethics in general and bioethics/healthcare ethics specifically, is much more expansive and inclusive than is usually thought. Bioethics is a relatively new academic discipline. However, ethics has existed informally since before the time of Hippocrates. The indigenous culture of African peoples has an ethical worldview which predates the western discourse. This indigenous ethical worldview has (...) been orally transmitted over centuries. The earliest known written African text containing some concepts and content of ethics is the “Declaration of Innocence” written in 1500 B.C., found in an Egyptian text. Ubuntu is an example of African culture that presents an ethical worldview. This work interprets the culture of Ubuntu to explain the contribution of a representative indigenous African ethics to global bioethics. Many modern scholars have written about the meaning of Ubuntu for African societies over centuries. Some scholars have viewed Ubuntu as the greatest contribution of African cultures to other world cultures. None of the scholars, however has explored the culture of Ubuntu as providing a representative indigenous ethics that can contribute to global bioethics as discussed in this book.​. (shrink)

Abstract“Force dynamics” refers to a previously neglected semantic category—how entities interact with respect to force. This category includes such concepts as: the exertion of force, resistance to such exertion and the overcoming of such resistance, blockage of a force and the removal of such blockage, and so forth. Force dynamics is a generalization over the traditional linguistic notion of “causative”: it analyzes “causing” into finer primitives and sets it naturally within a framework that also includes “letting,”“hindering,”“helping,” and still further notions. (...) Force dynamics, moreover, appears to be the semantic category that uniquely characterizes the grammatical category of modals, in both their basic and epistemic usages. In addition, on the basis of force dynamic parameters, numerous lexical items fall into systematic semantic patterns, and there exhibit parallelisms between physical and psychosocial reference. Further, from research on the relation of semantic structure to general cognitive structure, it appears that the concepts of force interaction that are encoded within language closely parallel concepts that appear both in early science and in naive physics and psychology. Overall, force dynamics thus emerges as a fundamental notional system that structures conceptual material pertaining to force interaction in a common way across a linguistic range: the physical, psychological, social, inferential, discourse, and mental-model domains of reference and conception. (shrink)

The majority of North American corporations awakened to the need for their own ethical guidelines during the late 1970s and early 1980s, even though modern corporations are subject to a surprising multiplicity of external codes of ethics or conduct. This paper provides an understanding of both internal and external codes through a discussion of the factors behind the development of the codes, an analysis of internal codes and an identification of problems with them.

Thought-intrusions, automatic inferences, and other unintended thought are beginning to play an important role in the study of psychiatric disease as well as normal thought processes. We examine one method for study of task-unrelated imagery and thought . TUIT likelihood was shown to be reliably measured over a wide range of vigilance tasks, to have high short-term and long-term test-retest reliability, and to be sensitive to information processing demands. Likelihood of TUITs was shown to be different as a function of (...) aging, hyperactivity, time of day, and level of depression. Thus, we now can reliably measure the influence of endogenous and exogenous influences on TUITs. In addition, TUIT measurement was proposed as a minimally interfering and natural second task for determining resource utilization in a primary task. Finally, this method was offered as a reliable approach to quantification of such mental states as obsessions and drug craving and addiction. (shrink)

Len Bartlotti did his doctoral research on proverbs, Islam, and identity among Pashtuns, and serves as Research Tutor at the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies. He served fourteen years in Asia and is founder and former Executive Director of the InterLit Foundation Publishers and Educational Consultants.

This research investigates gender differences in employer-sponsored medical insurance coverage among full-time male and female workers in the United States and assesses the relevance of human capital theory and its compensating differentials corollary in predicting coverage. Data are analyzed from a subsample of the Quality of Employment Survey, a national probability sample of workers in the United States. Results indicate that men were more likely to have medical insurance coverage from their employers than were women; however, gender differences were minimized (...) in a multivariate context when human capital and structural variables were controlled. Furthermore, human capital variables are, overall, weak predictors of whether both women and men received coverage. More generally, the data suggest that structural conditions of the occupation, rather than individual human capital, may be most relevant for future research. (shrink)

Originally published: Berkeley, Calif. : Stone Bridge Press, 1994.

A model of Zeno's dichotomy paradox is presented in Newtonian collision mechanics. One of several resolutions of the paradox illustrates the point that even in Newtonian ontology there is a spacetime weave. In a Newtonian system in which the base rules permit only spatial contact interactions, we find the mechanical emergence of action-at-a-distance effects.

This article reviews the research of “top rebirth scientist” Ian Stevenson on spontaneous past-life memory cases, focusing on three key problems with Stevenson’s work. First, his research of entirely anecdotal case reports contains a number of errors and omissions. Second, like other reincarnation researchers, Stevenson has done no controlled experimental work on such cases; yet only such research could ever resolve whether the correspondences found between a child’s statements and a deceased person’s life exceed what we might find by chance. (...) Finally, the best reincarnation research should at least meet the standards met by typical empirical research, but Stevenson’s methodology does not even meet the standards expected of third- or fourth-year college students. -/- 1. How Controlled Experimental Work is Possible -- 2. The Anecdotal Record - 2.1 Reincarnation and Biology - 2.2 The Imad Elawar Case -- 3. Conclusion. (shrink)

Since Mueller’s 1958 article calling Hegelian dialectics a “legend,” it has been fashionable to deny that Hegel used thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectics. But in truth, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit has 28 dialectics hidden on four outline levels, and The Philosophy of History has 10 more on three outline levels. In Phenomenology’s macrodialectic, Hegel’s nonsupernatural Spirit–all reality, everything in the universe, including man and artificial objects–advances from unconscious + union (thesis) to conscious + separation (antithesis) to a synthesis of conscious (from the antithesis) (...) + union (from the thesis). Previous interpretations of Phenomenology have missed this dialectic: they have assumed that Spirit’s journey begins with consciousness, whereas the journey actually begins in the primordial state of nature, before man arrives and provides Spirit with its Mind (the collective mind of man). Mind then misperceives itself as a multitude of separate alien “objects”–things other than itself. The macrodialectic and all other dialectics are based on Christianity’s Johannine separation-and-return mythology; all Hegelian dialectics separate from a concept in the thesis, going to that something’s opposite (antithesis), and then return to the thesis concept. Thus, in Hegel’s master-and-slave dialectic (God = master, man = slave), man advances from potential + freedom to actual + bondage (religiosity) to actual + freedom (atheism). Only Marx and Tillich understood Hegelian dialectics. Marx’s basic dialectic (one of four) saw history separating from and returning to Communism, going from communal ownership + poverty (primitive communism, or gens) to private ownership + wealth (slavery, feudalism, capitalism) to communal ownership + wealth (final communism). Tillich’s basic dialectic (one of many) separates from and returns to God, advancing from Yes to God + Yes to supernaturalism (theism) to No to God + No to supernaturalism (atheism) to Yes to God + No to supernaturalism (humanism: humanity is the nonsupernatural “God above the God of theism”). (shrink)

These three volumes assemble the most important essays written on Jacques Derrida's philosophy since he became established in 1967. These volumes make well-known essays easily available and also present many essays never translated in English.

This anthology promotes a new vision: American Philosophy as complex and constantly changing, enlivened by historically marginalized, yet never silent, voices.