Louis Agassiz.--Address at the Emerson Centenary in Concord.--Robert Gould Shaw.--Francis Boott.--Thomas Davidson: a knight-errant of the intellectual life.--Herbert Spencer's autobiography.--Frederick Myers' services to psychology.--Final impressions of a psychical researcher.--On some mental effects of the earthquake.--The energies of men.--The moral equivalent of war.--Remarks at the peace banquet.--The social value of the college-bred.--The university and the individual: The Ph.D. octopus. The true Harvard. Stanford's ideal destiny.--A pluralistic mystic.

This article reviews Jan Narveson and James Sterba’s co-authored book Are Liberty and Equality Compatible?. Sterba argues that negative liberty requires that the poor have a right not to be interfered with in taking from the rich to fulfill their basic needs. Narveson argues that negative liberty means that people agree not to coerce others and that taking from anyone violates negative liberty. The authors not only differ on this point, but, as contractarians, on what terms reasonable people would (...) likely agree to in a “social contract.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:William James, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Art of New Religious IdealsKolby Knight (bio)And I don’t know a soul who’s not been batteredI don’t have a friend who feels at easeI don’t know a dream that’s not been shatteredOr driven to its knees...Oh, and it’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alrightYou can’t be forever blessedStill, tomorrow’s going to be another working dayAnd I’m trying to get some (...) restThat’s all, I’m trying to get some rest—Paul Simon, “American Tune” (1973) / Recreated by Allen Toussaint (2016)William James and W. E. B. Du Bois believed that an artful life could produce new and world-changing religious ideals. As cosmopolitan scholars who studied in the United States and Europe, both men confidently interlaced original interpretations of Shakespeare, Wagner, and Goethe into their academic accounts of individual and social behavior. Beyond their patronage of the arts, James and Du Bois also saw themselves as scientists and artists who had the responsibility to create new pathways and religious ideals at a time when many European and American intellectuals depicted Western civilization as the endpoint of history.This article explores the pragmatic visions of science, art, and religion respectively offered by James and Du Bois. Pragmatism, here, refers to an active mode of study that looks closely at the interaction between specific thoughts and behaviors in particular situations without assuming a standard of truth which influences or evaluates human life from the outside of experience. As pragmatists, James and Du Bois did not believe their work consisted of merely the explication and description of preexisting truths, but more importantly the religious creation of what James called “new facts,” including healthier habits of thought and practice.1 [End Page 71]In this article, I will trace how the two men, as religious naturalists and leaders in the development of a pragmatic social science at the turn of the twentieth century, challenged evolutionary theories which envisioned Western civilization as the highest standard of aesthetic and intellectual development. Part one demonstrates how James, as a psychologist who prioritized the study and development of “first-hand” experiences, worked against visions of science that saw “lower” emotions as a hindrance to impartial intellectual discovery. It also explores how James centered personal religious experiences in his effort to de-center “impersonal” scientific frameworks which depicted human behavior and thinking as beholden to evolutionary laws which transcended individual experience. Part two considers James’s dissatisfaction with the “bad habits” of his privileged intellectual class, and how his own experience of “soul-sickness” and “stage fright” led him to contest both celebratory histories of Western progress and institutional arrangements which juxtaposed his “mystifying” intellectual performances to the lives of everyday people.Part three moves to how Du Bois, as a sociologist and former student of James, refocused James’s religious pragmatism within the context of his experience of anti-Black racism in the United States. This section traces how Du Bois saw his intellectual career as a work of art which could empower Black individuals to see themselves beyond what David Lloyd describes as “the racial regime of aesthetics” which imagines the progress of “lower humans” as dependent on higher civilizational and educational agents. This section also offers a tripartite interpretation of Du Bois’s experience of “double-consciousness” that considers its aesthetic, social, and political dimensions.2 While James expressed a desire to discard his own sense of double-consciousness, Du Bois’s experience of anti-Black racism made his two-ness more enforced and insidious. The fourth section looks at Du Bois’s disillusionment with white standards of beauty and intelligence as an experience akin to what James described as “soul-sickness.” It shows that whereas James believed that his negative emotional experiences could lead him to “new religious ideals” taking shape within the spiritual energy [End Page 72] and discomforts of his own individual body, Du Bois’s negative experience of racism led him to immerse himself in the religious and artistic vitality of Black social worlds which resisted the oppressive mechanisms and caricatures of... (shrink)

Although the economic thought of Marshall and Pigou was united by ethical positions broadly considered utilitarian, differences in their intellectual milieu led to degrees of difference between their respective philosophical visions. This change in milieu includes the influence of the little understood period of transition from the early idealist period in Great Britain, which provided the context to Marshall’s intellectual formation, and the late British Idealist period, which provided the context to Pigou’s intellectual formation. During this latter period, the pervading (...) Hegelianism and influences of naturalism arising from the ideas of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer were challenged by Hermann Lotze, a key transitional thinker influencing the Neo-Kantian movement, who recognised significant limits of naturalism, on the one hand, and the metaphysical tenor of absolute idealism, on the other, and attempted to provide a balance between the two. The goal of this paper is to make the provisional case for the argument that Pigou’s views on ethics were not only directly influenced by utilitarian thinkers like Mill and Sidgwick, but they were also indirectly influenced by Hermann Lotze, via the influence of the Neo- Kantian movement on late British idealism. To that end, Pigou’s essays in The Trouble with Theism (1908), including his sympathetic consideration of the ethics of Friedrich Nietzsche, reflect the influence of Lotze indirectly through the impact at Cambridge of: James Ward’s critique of associationist psychology, and consideration of the limits of naturalism including the critique of evolutionary ethics; Bertrand Russell’s rejection of neo-Hegelianism and, together with Alfred North Whitehead, the development of Logicism; and G.E. Moore’s critique of utilitarian ethics on the basis of the naturalistic fallacy and the development of his own intuitionist system of ethics. (shrink)

Romantic sensibility and political necessity led Humphry Davy, Britain's most prominent scientist in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, to pantheism: nature worship, involving for him a fervent belief in the immortality of the soul. Rapt with a vision of sublimity, from mountain tops or balloons, men of science in succeeding generations also found in pantheism a reason for their vocation and a way of making sense of their world. It should be seen as an alternative both to active (...) participation in church life (like Faraday's) and to a gritty agnosticism (like Huxley's), indicating again how subtle and complex relationships were between science and religion in the nineteenth century. (shrink)

In this work, McGilvray explains Noam Chomsky's rationalist view of human nature.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Adam Smith Reconsidered: History, Liberty, and the Foundations of Modern Politics by Paul SagarJames A. HarrisPaul Sagar. Adam Smith Reconsidered: History, Liberty, and the Foundations of Modern Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022. Pp. xii + 229. Hardback, $37.00.Paul Sagar's invigorating book is a reconsideration of Adam Smith in the sense that it challenges much that is received wisdom in current scholarship. First and foremost, it rejects (...) the idea that Smith was preeminently a moral philosopher concerned with the threat to civic virtue posed by commercial society, and yet intent on giving commercial society a moral vindication nevertheless. Sagar—rightly, in my view—wants us to recognize Smith as having been a political thinker. Too much work on Smith still assumes that there is not much to say [End Page 323] about his political thought because he regarded all but the most minimal government as an obstacle to the proper functioning of markets. Smith is supposed to be a "classical liberal" bent on preserving as much natural liberty as possible in the face of government's relentless overextension of its powers of regulation. In Adam Smith's Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), Donald Winch rejected that approach to Smith in favor of a portrait of the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations as an eighteenth-century thinker with an eighteenth-century thinker's concerns. Sagar's project is quite different. This is a book on Smith's political thought that does not once deploy the term 'Whig.' Sagar's Smith does not wholly float free of his historical situation—the questions he addresses are those posed by the end of feudalism and the advent of modernity—but situating him in the particular circumstances of Britain in the age of revolutions is not Sagar's concern. As Sagar sees it, the fundamental issues addressed by Smith's political thought concern the distinctive form taken by commercial society in the modern era. Smith, according to Sagar, held that all advanced societies are commercial societies. Commercial society as such needed no vindication. The question, rather, was what kind of commercial society a modern state wanted to be. That was a political question insofar as it was a question about the kind of freedom that mattered and about the kind of institutions needed to make that freedom a reality.Defined in maximally general terms, freedom for Smith was the absence of domination, where domination is understood as a lack of security in respect of one's physical safety and possessions. The condition of the poor and powerless had always been one of subjection to the will of the rich and powerful. What changed that, according to Smith, was implementation of the rule of law. This is in itself not a new reading of Smith, but what distinguishes Sagar's version of it is the care with which he examines both the place of the rule of law in Smith's historical account of the emergence of liberty in modern Europe and the precise nature of the connection between the rule of law and freedom. First, on Sagar's view, there needed to be a comprehensive picture of domination and slavery, which had been the normal condition of almost everyone for almost all of human history. Then there needed to be an explanation of how it was that, at one particular historical moment, domination was slowly but surely challenged by the emergence of law and law courts considered as independent of political power. In England, this was the story of the common law and of judges who held office for life, rather than at the pleasure of traditional possessors of power. It was the story of security in property, of the backing of property by law, and it was a largely urban story, of burghers who managed to enlist monarchs on their side in the battle against the barons. It was, in other words, in large part a medieval story, and one consequence is that there was more to say about the rise of liberty in the modern age than that it was caused inadvertently by... (shrink)

First published over thirty years ago, "Classic Philosophical Questions" has presented decades of students with the most compelling classic and contemporary readings on the most enduring and abiding questions in philosophy. The anthology, topically arranged, uses debate and argument as vehicles to teach students the fundamentals of philosophy while also demonstrating that philosophy is a discourse spanning centuries. "James A. Gould" and "Robert J. Mulvaney" continue to provide students with interesting, intriguing essays from major philosophers in a distinctive presentation, (...) often involving a pro/con format, to ensure that both the apparent and subtle points of argument are both meaningful and clear. Features of this new edition: Sections on epistemology and metaphysics introduced earlier in this edition New readings from Martha Nussbaum and Martin Luther King, Jr. Concise, student-friendly introductions to each philosopher and reading Helpful study and reflection questions focus students' reading and improve comprehension. (shrink)

Applications of artificial intelligence/machine learning in health care are dynamic and rapidly growing. One strategy for anticipating and addressing ethical challenges related to AI/ml for health care is patient and public involvement in the design of those technologies – often referred to as ‘co-design’. Co-design has a diverse intellectual and practical history, however, and has been conceptualized in many different ways. Moreover, AI/ml introduces challenges to co-design that are often underappreciated. Informed by perspectives from critical data studies and critical digital (...) health studies, we review the research literature on involvement in health care, and involvement in design, and examine the extent to which co-design as commonly conceptualized is capable of addressing the range of normative issues raised by AI/ml for health care. We suggest that AI/ml technologies have amplified and modified existing challenges related to patient and public involvement, and created entirely new challenges. We outline three pitfalls associated with co-design for ethical AI/ml for health care and conclude with suggestions for addressing these practical and conceptual challenges. (shrink)

After reconstructing three arguments for Nietzsche’s descriptive analysis of the self as complex, this article clarifies some of greatness’s psychological conditions. It then offers three arguments for why we should not focus on these internal conditions when seeking to verify or to achieve greatness. First, Nietzsche’s descriptive analysis of the self renders introspection too coarse-grained and error-prone to verify the subtle type of unity required for greatness. Second, Nietzsche associates introspective appraisal of one’s psyche with a moral project that weakens (...) and represses the drives, such that inquiry into whether greatness’s internal conditions are satisfied typically speaks against their realization. Finally, the actions characteristic of Nietzsche’s great individuals prohibit introspective preoccupation with oneself. These arguments suggest that we should attend to outwardly directed accomplishments, rather than psychology, when appraising the greatness of others and seeking to become great ourselves. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 35.1 (2005) 119-135MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Evaluating Klossowski's Le BaphometIan JamesLiterature, under historical conditions which are not simply linguistic, has come to occupy a place which is always open to a kind of subversive juridicity. [...] This subversive juridicity supposes that self-identity is never assured or reassuring.—Jacques Derrida, "Préjugés: Devant la loi"The ControversyOn 14 June 1965, Roger Caillois resigned from the jury of the prestigious Prix des Critiques. (...) His resignation was provoked by the majority decision of the jury to award the critics' prize that year to Klossowski's final novel, Le Baphomet.1 Le Baphomet, a singular, Walter Scott-inspired tale about the Knights Templar, is set, initially at least, at the beginning of the fourteenth century just before the dissolution of the Templar Order at the behest of the then French king, Philippe Le Bel. After the historical prologue the action is transferred to a seemingly atemporal sphere, where the disembodied souls of the former Knights Templar await the moment when the Last Judgment will be pronounced and they will be reunited once more with their earthly bodies. The setting, tone, and style are at first gothic, but with the appearance of the disembodied spirit of Saint Teresa of Avila baroque elements begin to dominate and to mix with evocations of Masonic and esoteric ritual, Gnostic heresy, and theological but also philosophical discussion. These are accompanied by the appearance of Philippe le Bel himself and the figure of Friedrich Nietzsche, the "Antichrist," initially in the form of an anteater. With its unorthodox and often archaic vocabulary and syntax and, after the historical prologue, its discontinuous and fantastical narrative presentation, in which the boundaries between persons and identities appear permeable and insecure, Le Baphomet engages the reader in a textual experience that can be both baffling and obscure. It is also a work that can appear to lack any intellectual or formal coherence, one whose multiplicity and evident complexity may seem to promise rich possibilities of interpretation and literary value but whose narrative disorder and stylistic singularity can ultimately leave the reader frustrated with the sense of having been exposed to something of a literary mess.This, at least, was the view of Roger Caillois when he resigned in protest at the decision of the Prix des Critiques jury to confer its honor on Klossowski's novel. Caillois was himself a singular writer whose work can be situated at the intersection of a [End Page 119][Begin Page 120]number of disciplines, including mythology, sociology, aesthetics, biology, and literary criticism. He had known Klossowski since 1936, when they collaborated along with Georges Bataille and others in the antifascist avant-garde grouping Contre-Attaque and then later, again with Bataille, on the review Acéphale and in the Collège de sociologie.2 Defending his resignation from the Prix des Critiques jury a few days after the event, Caillois published an article in Le Monde in which he drew attention to what he saw as Le Baphomet's primary weakness: its poor formal organization and in particular what he perceived as its stylistic insufficiency and grammatical inaccuracy.3 Perhaps with the desire to avoid accusations of prudery or Puritanism he denied that the content of the work was the cause of his disapproval. The infatuation of certain Knights Templar with an adolescent page, Ogier de Beaséant, oblique references to possible acts of sodomy, together with the stylized description of scenes involving mutilation, penetration, and ejaculation are all elements of the narrative. On the content of the work Caillois writes: "Some may see in this a novelistic exposé of an original and subtle theology, others only mystico-pederastic rubbish. For a literary prize I hold solely to the literary value of a work." According to Caillois the content of such a work may be interesting or absurd depending on one's tastes but has nothing to do with its literary value. The invocation of literary value, here, necessarily implies a set of criteria for the judgment of the standing of a work... (shrink)

We are immersed within an odorous sea of chemical currents that we parse into individual odors with complex structures. Odors have been posited as determined by the structural relation between the molecules that compose the chemical compounds and their interactions with the receptor site. But, naturally occurring smells are parsed from gaseous odor plumes. To give a comprehensive account of the nature of odors the chemosciences must account for these large distributed entities as well. We offer a focused review of (...) what is known about the perception of odor plumes for olfactory navigation and tracking, which we then connect to what is known about the role odorants play as properties of the plume in determining odor identity with respect to odor quality. We end by motivating our central claim that more research needs to be conducted on the role that odorants play within the odor plume in determining odor identity. (shrink)

This article investigates how Chaucer‘s Knight‘s and Squire‘s tales critically engage with the Orientalist strategies buttressing contemporary Italian humanist discussions of visual art. Framed by references to crusading, the two tales enter into a dialogue focusing, in particular, on the relations between the classical, the scientific and the Oriental in trecento Italian discourses on painting and optics, discourses that are alluded to in the description of Theseus Theatre and the events that happen there. The Squire‘s Tale exhibits what one might (...) call a strategic Orientalism designed to draw attention to the Orientalism implicit in his fathers narrative, a narrative that, for all its painstaking classicism, displays both remarkably Italianate and Orientalist features. Read in tandem, the two tales present a shrewd commentary on the exclusionary strategies inherent in the construction of new cultural identities, arguably making Chaucer the first postcolonial critic of the Renaissance. (shrink)

More particularly, the book evaluates the concept of moral exemplarity and its significance in philosophical and theological ethics as well as for ongoing research programs in the cognitive sciences.

This summary account of Hume’s life and works challenges the usual way of telling the story of Hume’s career. It is generally believed that what Hume most wanted to be was a philosopher and that Hume turned to politics and history because that desire was frustrated, principally by the reputation for atheism he had acquired as a result of his writings on religion. The author argues that, from the beginning, Hume was as interested in politics as he was in philosophy; (...) that a career as an independent man of letters, and not as a professional philosopher, was what he most wanted; and that that career was a success, with the History of England its triumphant culmination. Hume’s religious skepticism was no obstacle to his living the life that he most wanted to live, the life of a sophisticated and widely respected citizen of the European republic of letters. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, Carl Knight and Andreas Albertsen argue that Rawlsian theories of distributive justice as applied to health and healthcare fail to accommodate both palliative care and the desirability of less painful treatments. The asserted Rawlsian focus on opportunities or capacities, as exemplified in Normal Daniels’ developments of John Rawls’ theory, results in a normative account of healthcare which is at best only indirectly sensitive to pain and so unable to account for the value of (...) efforts of which the sole purpose is pain reduction. I argue that, far from undermining the Rawlsian project and its application to problems of health, what the authors’ argument at most amounts to is a compelling case for the inclusion of freedom from physical pain within its index of primary goods. (shrink)

One of the several good questions asked by Robin Mills in this short but rich book concerns the explanation of change in the intellectual climate of a particular time and place. In mid-seventeenth-...

In this paper we explain our pretense account of truth-talk and apply it in a diagnosis and treatment of the Liar Paradox. We begin by assuming that some form of deflationism is the correct approach to the topic of truth. We then briefly motivate the idea that all T-deflationists should endorse a fictionalist view of truth-talk, and, after distinguishing pretense-involving fictionalism (PIF) from error- theoretic fictionalism (ETF), explain the merits of the former over the latter. After presenting the basic framework (...) of our PIF account of truth-talk, we demonstrate a few advantages it offers over T-deflationist accounts that do not explicitly acknowledge pretense at work in the discourse. In turning to the Liar Paradox, we explain how the quasi-anaphoric functioning that our account attributes to truth-talk provides a diagnosis of the Liar Paradox (and other instances of semantic pathology) as having no content—in the sense of not specifying any of what we call M-conditions. At the same time, however, we vindicate the intuition that we can understand liar sentences, thereby avoiding one standard objection to “meaningless strategy” responses to the Liar Paradox. With this diagnosis in place, we then, by way of treatment, introduce a new predicate, ‘semantically defective’, and show how the explanation we give for its application allows for a consistent, yet revenge-immune, (dis)solution of the Liar Paradox, and semantic pathology generally. (shrink)

A detailed account of certain traits of intellectual character—the epistemic virtues—and of their relation to the responsibility for one's beliefs.

What big questions and large‐scale narratives give coherence to the history of science? From the late 1970s onward, the field has been transformed through a stress on practice and fresh perspectives from gender studies, the sociology of knowledge, and work on a greatly expanded range of practitioners and cultures. Yet these developments, although long overdue and clearly beneficial, have been accompanied by fragmentation and loss of direction. This essay suggests that the narrative frameworks used by historians of science need to (...) come to terms with diversity by understanding science as a form of communication. The centrality of processes of movement, translation, and transmission is already emerging in studies of topics ranging from ethnographic encounters to the history of reading. Not only does this approach offer opportunities for crossing boundaries of nation, period, and discipline that are all too easily taken for granted; it also has the potential for creating a more effective dialogue with other historians and the wider public. (shrink)

The Metaphysical Club, a gathering of intellectuals in the 1870s associated with Harvard, is widely recognized as the crucible where pragmatism, America's distinctively original philosophy, was refined and proclaimed. Louis Menand's bestseller about the group was a dramatic publishing success. However, only three actual members - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Charles S. Peirce, and William James - appear in this book, alongside other thinkers such as John Dewey who were never in the Club. The Real Metaphysical Club tells the (...) full story of how this influential group shifted the course of philosophy in America. In addition to pioneering pragmatism, the group explored radical empiricism and idealism, and formulated personalism and process philosophy, equally important developments. This volume contains thirty-seven important writings dating from 1870 to 1885 by the real members of the Metaphysical Club. The first section centers on pragmatism and science; the second part collects writings of the lawyers; and the third part covers idealist and personalist philosophers. Many of these writings have never been reprinted before, and nothing like this impressive collection has ever been attempted. A general introduction provides a narrative history, and the editors' three introductions to the volume's sections vividly bring to life the intense meetings, sustained debates, and pioneering thought from the Metaphysical Club. (shrink)

What big questions and large‐scale narratives give coherence to the history of science? From the late 1970s onward, the field has been transformed through a stress on practice and fresh perspectives from gender studies, the sociology of knowledge, and work on a greatly expanded range of practitioners and cultures. Yet these developments, although long overdue and clearly beneficial, have been accompanied by fragmentation and loss of direction. This essay suggests that the narrative frameworks used by historians of science need to (...) come to terms with diversity by understanding science as a form of communication. The centrality of processes of movement, translation, and transmission is already emerging in studies of topics ranging from ethnographic encounters to the history of reading. Not only does this approach offer opportunities for crossing boundaries of nation, period, and discipline that are all too easily taken for granted; it also has the potential for creating a more effective dialogue with other historians and the wider public. (shrink)