Richard Brandt is one of the most eminent and influential of contemporary moral philosophers. His work has been concerned with how to justify what is good or right not by reliance on intuitions or theories about what moral words mean but by the explanation of moral psychology and the description of what it is to value something, or to think it immoral. His approach thus stands in marked contrast to the influential theories of John Rawls. The essays reprinted in (...) this collection span a period of almost 30 years and include many classic pieces in metaethical and normative ethical theory. The collection is aimed at both those moral philosophers familiar with Brandt's work and at those philosophers who may be largely unfamiliar with his work. The latter group will be struck by the lucid unpretentious style and the cumulative weight of Brandt's contributions to topics that remain at the forefront of moral philosophy. (shrink)

This book applies Augustine's thought to current questions of teaching and learning. The essays are written in an accessible style and is not intended just for experts on Augustine or church history.

This book is a collection of secondary essays on America's most important philosophic thinkers—statesmen, judges, writers, educators, and activists—from the colonial period to the present. Each essay is a comprehensive introduction to the thought of a noted American on the fundamental meaning of the American regime.

This paper responds to the commentaries from Stacy Carter and Alan Cribb. We pick up on two main themes in our response. First, we reflect on how the process of setting standards for empirical bioethics research entails drawing boundaries around what research counts as empirical bioethics research, and we discuss whether the standards agreed in the consensus process draw these boundaries correctly. Second, we expand on the discussion in the original paper of the role and significance of the concept of (...) ‘integrating’ empirical methods and ethical argument as a standard for research practice within empirical bioethics. (shrink)

The essays in this volume apply philosophical analysis to address three kinds of questions: What are the implications of genetic science for our understanding of nature? What might it influence in our conception of human nature? What challenges does genetic science pose for specific issues of private conduct or public policy?

Is the societal-level of analysis sufficient today to understand the values of those in the global workforce? Or are individual-level analyses more appropriate for assessing the influence of values on ethical behaviors across country workforces? Using multi-level analyses for a 48-society sample, we test the utility of both the societal-level and individual-level dimensions of collectivism and individualism values for predicting ethical behaviors of business professionals. Our values-based behavioral analysis indicates that values at the individual-level make a more significant contribution to (...) explaining variance in ethical behaviors than do values at the societal-level. Implicitly, our findings question the soundness of using societal-level values measures. Implications for international business research are discussed. (shrink)

The question 'Why should I obey the law?' introduces a contemporary puzzle that is as old as philosophy itself. The puzzle is especially troublesome if we think of cases in which breaking the law is not otherwise wrongful, and in which the chances of getting caught are negligible. Philosophers from Socrates to H.L.A. Hart have struggled to give reasoned support to the idea that we do have a general moral duty to obey the law but, more recently, the greater number (...) of learned voices has expressed doubt that there is any such duty, at least as traditionally conceived. (shrink)

At the forefront of international concerns about global legislation and regulation, a host of noted environmentalists and business ethicists examine ethical issues in consumption from the points of view of environmental sustainability, economic development, and free enterprise.

It has frequently been argued that there must be a necessary and important difference between the methods of the natural and social sciences, or that an empirical method in social science must be supplemented by or is inferior to an interpretative method. Often these claims have been supported by arguments using premises derived from the early Heidegger or the late Wittgenstein. These arguments, in turn, tend either to be transcendental in form or to follow a hermeneutic argument strategy. This paper (...) argues that neither of these types of argument, based on Heideggerian or Wittgensteinian premises, can be used successfully to show an important or essential difference between natural and social science. It does this by examining arguments proposed by Peter Winch and Hubert Dreyfus, showing how they are fallacious and misconstrue the import of the premises upon which they are based, and generalizing these objections to the transcendental and hermeneutic styles of argument in this field as such. The paper concludes with a consideration of Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, which reaches conclusions in this area which are similar to those of this paper but which, it is argued, misconstrues the character of its own argument. (shrink)

In a recent article Richard Rorty has attempted to juxtapose Heidegger and Dewey. While finding significant points of agreement between the two, and by implication praising much of Heidegger’s work, Rorty also suggests a series of criticisms of Heidegger. The problems which Rorty finds with Heidegger can, I think, all be reduced to one basic criticism, which has two main sides. In Rorty’s view Heidegger can not really differentiate between Being and beings in the way that he wants, and (...) thus can give no sense to the word ‘Being’ other than the old metaphysical one. That is, Being and the ontological difference are metaphysical remnants, the last evaporating presence of the Platonic distinction of the real world and the apparent world. This is indicated in two ways. First, Rorty feels that Heidegger can make no real distinction between philosophy, which they both agree has ended, and ‘thinking’ in the specifically Heideggerian sense. Second, Rorty claims that it is impossible to distinguish ontic from ontological becoming. That is, the various epochs of Being which Heidegger distinguishes are, for Rorty, parasitic upon and reducible to the ordinary history of man’s activity in relation to things, material and social. As such, Heidegger’s account of ontological epochs is a species of idealistic reflection upon the history of man’s activity upon things. (shrink)

In this work, I consider Aristotle's theory of universals in the Organon. I argue that, according to Aristotle, demonstrative knowledge presupposes the existence of real universals, and I defend a mereological interpretation of Aristotelian real universals. ;The work is divided into three parts. First, I demonstrate that Aristotle's theory of demonstrative knowledge presupposes the existence of universals and argue that the ontological status of universals cannot be determined from Aristotle's explications of his concept of a universal. Second, I reconstruct Aristotle's (...) semantics for universal affirmative premises and demonstrate that, according to Aristotle, every true universal affirmative premise involves a universal term that primarily signifies a universal concept and secondarily signifies either a real essence or a real genus. Third, I argue that real essences and genera are real universals and that real universals are wholes, each of the parts of which is a real particular. ;In chapter 1, I reconstruct two arguments from the Posterior Analytics that reveal important connections between Aristotle's theory of demonstrative knowledge, his philosophy of language, and his ontology in the Organon. In chapter 2, I argue that the ontological status of universals is underdetermined by the various explications of the concept of a universal $\lbrack\tau\`o\ \kappa\alpha\theta\'o\lambda o\upsilon\rbrack$ presented by Aristotle in the Organon. In chapter 3, the syntax of simple statements as presented in De Interpretatione is investigated. In chapter 4, I argue the semantic scheme for simple statements presented by Aristotle in De Interpretatione in conjunction with his excursus on concept acquisition in APst. B 19 provide the semantic grounds for the syntactic distinctions among simple statements. I establish the extensional features of Aristotle's semantics in chapter 5. In chapter 6, I present my interpretation of Aristotelian real universals, focusing solely on primary and secondary substances. I argue that, according to Aristotle, there are real universals that are wholes having for parts the essences or the parts of the essences of primary substances. (shrink)

In a number of membrane-bound viruses, ion channels are formed by integral membrane proteins. These channel proteins include M2 from influenza A, NB from influenza B, and, possibly, Vpu from HIV-1. M2 is important in facilitating uncoating of the influenza A viral genome and is the target of amantadine, an anti-influenza drug. The biological roles of NB and Vpu are less certain. In all cases, the protein contains a single transmembrane α-helix close to its N-terminus. Channels can be formed by (...) homo-oligomerization of these proteins, yielding bundles of transmembrane helices that span the membrane and surround a central ion-permeable pore. Molecular modeling may be used to integrate and interpret available experimental data concerning the structure of such transmembrane pores. This has proved successful for the M2 channel domain, where two independently derived models are in agreement with one another, and with solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) data. Simulations based on channel models may yield insights into possible ion conduction and selectivity mechanisms. BioEssays 20:992–1000, 1998. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

The negative impact of adverse experiences in childhood on neurodevelopment is well documented. Less attention however has been given to the impact of variations in “normative” parenting behaviors. The influence of these parenting behaviors is likely to be marked during periods of rapid brain reorganization, such as late childhood. The aim of the current study was to investigate associations between normative parenting behaviors and the development of structural brain networks across late childhood. Data were collected from a longitudinal sample of (...) 114 mother-child dyads, recruited from low socioeconomic areas of Melbourne, Australia. At the first assessment parenting behaviors were coded from two lab-based interaction tasks and structural magnetic resonance imaging scans of the children were performed. At the second assessment, approximately 18 months later MRI scans were repeated. Cortical thickness was extracted from T1-weighted images using FreeSurfer. Structural covariance networks were constructed from partial correlations of CT estimates between brain regions and estimates of network efficiency and modularity were obtained for each time point. The change in these network measures, from Time 1 to Time 2, was also calculated. At Time 2, less positive maternal affective behavior was associated with higher modularity, while negative maternal affective behavior was not related. No support was found for an association between local or global efficacy and maternal affective behaviors at Time 2. Similarly, no support was demonstrated for associations between maternal affective behaviors and change in network efficiency and modularity, from Time 1 to Time 2. These results indicate that normative variations in parenting may influence the development of structural brain networks in late childhood and extend current knowledge about environmental influences on structural connectivity in a developmental context. (shrink)

Edited by Richard Grusin of the Center for 21st Century Studies, this is the first book to name and characterize—and therefore consolidate—a wide array of current critical, theoretical, and philosophical approaches to the humanities and social sciences under the concept of the nonhuman turn. Each of these approaches is engaged in decentering the human in favor of a concern for the nonhuman, understood by contributors in a variety of ways—in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, materiality, technologies, and organic and (...) geophysical systems. The nonhuman turn in twenty-first-century studies can be traced to multiple intellectual and theoretical developments from the last decades of the twentieth century: actor-network theory, affect theory, animal studies, assemblage theory, cognitive sciences, new materialism, new media theory, speculative realism, and systems theory. Such varied analytical and theoretical formations obviously diverge and disagree in many of their assumptions, objects, and methodologies. However, they all take up aspects of the nonhuman as critical to the future of twenty-first-century studies in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Unlike the posthuman turn, the nonhuman turn does not make a claim about teleology or progress in which we begin with the human and see a transformation from the human to the posthuman. Rather, the nonhuman turn insists (paraphrasing Bruno Latour) that “we have never been human,” that the human has always coevolved, coexisted, or collaborated with the nonhuman—and that the human is identified precisely by this indistinction from the nonhuman. Contributors: Jane Bennett, Johns Hopkins U; Ian Bogost, Georgia Institute of Technology; Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Brown U; Mark B. N. Hansen, Duke U; Erin Manning, Concordia U, Montreal; Brian Massumi, U of Montreal; Timothy Morton, Rice U; Steven Shaviro, Wayne State U; Rebekah Sheldon, Indiana U. (shrink)

Since the start of the twenty-first century, the political mainstream has been shifting to the right. The liberal orthodoxy that took hold in the West as a reaction to the Second World War is breaking down. In Europe, populist political parties have pulled the mainstream in their direction; in America, a series of challenges to the Republican mainstream culminated in the 2016 election of Donald Trump. In Key Thinkers of the Radical Right, sixteen expert scholars explain sixteen thinkers, providing an (...) introduction to their life and work, a guide to their thought, and an explanation of their work's reception. The chapters focus on thinkers who are widely read across the political right in both Europe and America, such as Julius Evola, Alain de Benoist, and Richard B. Spencer. Featuring classic, modern, and emerging thinkers, this selection provides a good representation of the intellectual right and avoids making political or value judgments. In an increasingly polarized political environment, Key Thinkers of the Radical Right offers a comprehensive and unbiased introduction to the thinkers who form the foundation of the radical right. (shrink)

This book offers a definitive and wide-ranging overview of developments in behavioral finance over the past ten years. In 1993, the first volume provided the standard reference to this new approach in finance--an approach that, as editor Richard Thaler put it, "entertains the possibility that some of the agents in the economy behave less than fully rationally some of the time." Much has changed since then. Not least, the bursting of the Internet bubble and the subsequent market decline further (...) demonstrated that financial markets often fail to behave as they would if trading were truly dominated by the fully rational investors who populate financial theories. Behavioral finance has made an indelible mark on areas from asset pricing to individual investor behavior to corporate finance, and continues to see exciting empirical and theoretical advances. Advances in Behavioral Finance, Volume II constitutes the essential new resource in the field. It presents twenty recent papers by leading specialists that illustrate the abiding power of behavioral finance--of how specific departures from fully rational decision making by individual market agents can provide explanations of otherwise puzzling market phenomena. As with the first volume, it reaches beyond the world of finance to suggest, powerfully, the importance of pursuing behavioral approaches to other areas of economic life. The contributors are Brad M. Barber, Nicholas Barberis, Shlomo Benartzi, John Y. Campbell, Emil M. Dabora, Daniel Kent, François Degeorge, Kenneth A. Froot, J. B. Heaton, David Hirshleifer, Harrison Hong, Ming Huang, Narasimhan Jegadeesh, Josef Lakonishok, Owen A. Lamont, Roni Michaely, Terrance Odean, Jayendu Patel, Tano Santos, Andrei Shleifer, Robert J. Shiller, Jeremy C. Stein, Avanidhar Subrahmanyam, Richard H. Thaler, Sheridan Titman, Robert W. Vishny, Kent L. Womack, and Richard Zeckhauser. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Ted Bundy and Dennis Rader Psychopaths versus Psychotics The Psychopath Language and the Emotional Brain Empathy, Lack of Shame, Insincerity Fantasies The Serial Killer and Nietzsche.

As with the problem of universals, late medieval thinkers were very concerned with the ontological status of relations, for they were central to numerous theological and philosophical problems. These relations were of various types: relations of identity, qualitative similarity, quantitative equality, causal relations, and intentional relations, such as those between knower and the object known. Each of these relations was taken to be an Aristotelian accident. Does it differ from the substance which is related? Broadly speaking, I have discovered four (...) alternative theories: as sentence of the form "a is related by a real relation R to b" is true only if the relation R is an extra-mental thing really distinct from a and b ; R only exists as a concept in a mind ; a and b exist in a certain real way ; the term "R" is connotative, signifying a directly and connoting b . Using printed sources and my critical edition of various codices, I ask the following thinkers whether a real relation is distinct from that which is related: Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, Henry of Ghent, Richard of Middleton, John Duns Scotus, Henry of Harclay, Hervaeus Natalis, and Peter Aurioli. (shrink)

I define ethical intuitionism as the view that it is appropriate to appeal to inferentially unsupported moral beliefs in the course of moral reasoning. I mention four common objections to this view, including the view that all such appeals to intuition make ethical theory politically and noetically conservative. I defend intuitionism from versions of this criticism expressed by R.B. Brandt, R.M. Hare and Richard Miller.

Marsh borrows Richard McKeon's methodological notion of the "problematic" approach to intellectual history. Concentrating on their dialectical character, English criticism from 1650-1800 is explored in the writings of the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Mark Akenside, David Hartley, and James Harris.—D. J. B.

What system of morals should rational people select as the best for society? Using a contemporary psychological theory of action and of motivation, Richard Brandt's Oxford lectures argue that the purpose of living should be to strive for the greatest good for the largest number of people. Brandt's discussions range from the concept of welfare to conflict between utilitarian moral codes and the dictates of self-interest.

The present volume is welcome for a dual reason; one that it marks the resumption, after a period of over twenty years, of the scholarly translations of St. Bonaventure, begun under Boehner; the second is the intrinsic value of the translation and lengthy introduction, almost a third of the book. Since the Saint Anthony Guild and Franciscan Herald Presses have published some of the shorter and more popular writings of the saint, it is fitting that the Franciscan Institute, noted (...) for its more technical philosophical and theological studies, should have chosen this series of disputed questions. They are undoubtedly one of Bonaventure's most mature and important writings, stemming from his days as the Franciscan regent master of theology at the University of Paris. The translator has already distinguished himself with a number of other articles and translations of the Seraphic Doctor. His scholarly and informative introduction falls into three chapters, one on the historical background, a second on the originality of Bonaventure's general trinitarian theology, and the third on the specific themes treated in this set of disputed questions. The first throws new light on the origin of the Dionysian and Richardian elements that separate Bonaventure's treatment of the trinity from that of Aquinas. Bonaventure became acquainted with pseudo-Dionysius and Richard of St. Victor through the Summa fratris Alexandri attributed to Alexander of Hales and the early Franciscan Masters at the Paris house of studies. Fontal plenitude, fecundity, and goodness, that figured largely in the Greek Fathers, are developed by Bonaventure in an original and personal way. The incompleteness of the Dionysian model is filled in by Richard's psychological analysis of love and his conception of personhood. Innascibility as the key characteristic of the Father is given a positive twist; it implies one who is first in an absolute sense as the summation of Parmenidean perfection and whose fontal plenitude is not only the source of the dual procession in the Trinity, but spills over into a richly diverse and continuing creation that bears in varying degrees the stamp of its triadic source. Man as microcosm mirrors this most of all, especially that man in whom the Logos, or macrocosm of archetypal ideas, became incarnate. It is only in treatment of the Son and his relationship to creation as exemplar cause that the distinctive influence of Augustine appears. In the final introductory chapter, the specific Trinitarian themes of unity, based on a dynamic rather than a static Aristotelian notion of deity, simplicity, infinity, eternity, immutability, necessity, and primacy are discussed and what emerges is a deeper appreciation of the synthetic genius of Bonaventure, who drew from such a myriad of sources, yet wove his material into a unique system in which philosophy functions not as a propadeutic to theology, but as an integral and essential part. For that reason the work is of far wider interest than an arcane theological study that only philosophers with a penchant for history might read with profit.--A.B.W. (shrink)

Richard Brandt is one of the most influential moral philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. He is especially important in the field of ethics for his lucid and systematic exposition of utilitarianism. This new book represents in some ways a summation of his views and includes many useful applications of his theory. The focus of the book is how value judgments and moral belief can be justified. More generally, the book assesses different moral systems and theories (...) of justice, and considers specific problems such as the optimal level of charity and the moral tenability of the criminal law. This book will be essential reading for all professional philosophers concerned with ethics, and will prove helpful to students as well. (shrink)