I claim that our desire to be special motivates us to suppose that if we were not God created, we must be self-created. I also claim that Stephen J Gould's claims about punctuated equilibrium, the absence of directional selection, and exaptations, when taken together, lead to kind of secular creationism. I introduce the notion of “adaptive effects” and argue that a focus on the actual physiological and psychological mechanisms that produce adaptations provides a way out of the exaptation dilemma.

Musing in Florence in June of 1858, Nathaniel Hawthorne said of himself, "I am sensible that a process is going on--and has been, ever since I came to Italy--that puts me in a state to see pictures with less toil, and more pleasure, and makes me more fastidious, yet more sensible of beauty where I saw none before." This is a book devoted to the reflective analysis of the enterprise in which many of us, like Hawthorne, find ourselves engaged: the (...) cultivation of our taste. Charles Wegener writes for and from the standpoint of thoughtful amateurs, those who, loving the beautiful and the sublime, wish to become more fully the sort of person to whom these goods reliably disclose themselves. Here traditional aesthetic analysis is redirected to a search for the norms that tell us how we use our intelligence, our imagination, and our senses in becoming "more fastidious, yet more sensible," exploring such concepts as disinterestedness, catholicity, communicability, austerity, objectivity, and authority. Finally, Wegener discusses questions about the relation of our aesthetic lives to other activities, norms, and human goods, arguing that taste, far from being a mere grace or luxury, is a necessary expression of that freedom which is at once the fruit and the condition of all culture. "This book should be required reading for anyone concerned with aesthetic education, for this is exactly what it is about, and I have come across no more searching investigation of the topic."--Hugo Meynell, Journal of Aesthetic Education "Using the analysis of aesthetic experience found in Kant's Critique of Judgment as a point of departure, Wegener has written a remarkably intelligent book which presents meaningful encounter with art as the "discipline of taste and feeling. The book reads not simply as an exposition but as a conversation in which the author thoughtfully and meticulously explores with the reader those norms that structure and define aesthetic experience. . . . The book occupies an important place in contemporary aesthetic discussion."--M. Feder-Marcus, Choice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Three Odes HORACE (Translated by Charles Martin) To Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa No fears, Agrippa: your exploits will be Saluted by a bard who will eclipse Homer in singing your command of ships, Your winning use of cavalry. It won’t be us. Gifts far surpassing mine Are to be found in Varius, who sings Achilles’ spleen, Ulysses’ wanderings At sea, or Pelops’ nasty line. Of loftiness, we have (...) a deficit, And so our Muse forbids us to pursue Praising your glory and our Caesar’s too, Lest, overwrought, we lessen it. Varius is fit to sing of Mars arrayed In armor, of Meriones in dust, Or of those gods that Diomedes thrust His lance through, with Athena’s aid. Ours, the wine bar and the local fray, The bachelorettes whose nails leave livid traces We later notice on their boyfriends’ faces And lightly sing of, in our way. (Odes i.6) arion 28.3 winter 2021 74 threee odes To Leuconoe Stop seeking what the gods prohibit us from apprehending, Leuconoe—the date on which it all comes to an ending. Better to toss the Dream Book and accept whatever comes, Whether Jove sends more winters, or the last we’ll know now drums The Tuscan Sea into submission on opposing cliffs. Be wise—decant this evening’s wine, curtail your hopeful ifs: Live in the moment: as we speak, now is becoming then; And insofar as possible, ignore tomorrow’s, “When….” (Odes i.11) To Iccius Iccius, are you hot for Arabian Loot now, devising tactics to subjugate The previously undefeated Kings of Sabaea? Forging new fetters For the ferocious Medes while previsioning Your oriental sex-slave, unguarded by The boyfriend whom you’ve slain in battle? What perfumed page from some royal palace, Whose father taught him Sinoform archery, Will be your Ganymede? Oh, deny falling Rivers the right to scale steep mountains, Tell us the Tiber can’t flow back upstream, When you—who were once so very promising, Rush to exchange your Works of Panaetius AND those Platonic scrolls you scoured bookstalls in search of—for Spanish armor! (Odes i.29)... (shrink)

Ce catalogue de l’exposition qui s’est tenue au musée des Beaux-Arts de Bilbao de février à mai 2011 propose, sous la direction de Corinne Charles, une compilation d’articles et une étude en espagnol plus détaillée des objets exposés. Outre la qualité esthétique des reproductions, ce bel ouvrage est le premier du genre sur les représentations des femmes dans l’art à l’époque gothique. Son titre Hay más en ti, « Plus est en vous », reprend la devise de Louis de (...) Bruges (vers 1427-1492) incluant... (shrink)

At the very beginning of L’Homme-Machine, La Mettrie claims that Leibnizians with their monads have “rather spiritualized matter than materialized the soul”; a few years later Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, President of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and natural philosopher with a strong interest in the modes of transmission of ‘genetic’ information, conceived of living minima which he termed molecules, “endowed with desire, memory and intelligence,” in his Système de la nature ou Essai sur les corps organisés. This text first (...) appeared in Latin in 1751 under the title Dissertatio inauguralis metaphysica de universali naturae systemate, with the pseudonym Dr Baumann; it was translated by Maupertuis in 1754 as Essai sur la formation des corps organisés and was later included in his 1756 Œuvres under the title Système de la nature. Now, it is clear that Maupertuis was a kind of Leibnizian; and that his molecule possessed higher-level, ‘mental’ properties. In that sense he falls under the first category described by La Mettrie. But he was also involved in a debate on this issue with Diderot, who put forth a sustained critique of Maupertuis’ theory of the molecule in the additions to his 1753 Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature. Where Maupertuis attributes higher-level properties to his living minima, Diderot argues that these properties are ‘organizational’, i.e., they can only be properties of the whole. At issue here is the degree of commitment to a form of materialism. (shrink)

Pendant tout le XVIII° siècle et surtout à partir de 1741, il y eut diverses tentatives pour atteindre le sommet du Mont-Blanc. Le 3 août 1787 Horace-Bénédict De Saussure parvint à la cime du fameux mont et sut donner le plus grand retentissement à cet exploit tant dans les milieux mondain que scientifique.Afin de commémorer cet évênement, Charles François Exchaquet construisit des maquettes de la Vallée de Chamonix et du Mont-Blanc qui se vendirent dans toute l'Europe. A notre connaissance (...) il n'en subsiste plus que cinq exemplaires. L'un d'entre eux est la propriété du Cabinet de Minéralogie du Musée Teyler de Haarlem, Pays-Bas. Il est en parfait état de conservation et accompagné de documents originaux dont un de la main de C. F. Exchaquet. Cette maquette donne de précieux renseignements sur la technique des plans-reliefs, qui a précédé la représentation cartographique plane.SummaryDuring the whole of the eighteenth century, and especially since 1741, various attempts have been made to climb the Mont Blanc. On 3 August 1787, Horace-Bénédict De Saussure reached the summit of the famous mountain. His achievement had an impact on society at large, as well as in the scientific community. To commemorate the event, C. F. Exchaquet built maquettes of Mont-Blanc and the Valley of Chamonix, which he sold all over Europe.To our knowledge, only five of these models have been preserved. One of them, in a perfect state, is the property of the Mineralogical Cabinet of Teyler's Museum at Haarlem, in The Netherlands. Original documentation has been preserved, including one hand-written manuscript from Exchaquet himself.The study of both documents and maquette reveals interesting information on the technique of plan-relief before the traditional use of two-dimensional cartography. (shrink)

In his Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty (1717), the English deist Anthony Collins proposed a complete determinist account of the human mind and action, partly inspired by his mentor Locke, but also by elements from Bayle, Leibniz and other Continental sources. It is a determinism which does not neglect the question of the specific status of the mind but rather seeks to provide a causal account of mental activity and volition in particular; it is a ‘volitional determinism’. Some decades later, (...) Diderot articulates a very similar determinism, which seeks to recognize the existence of “causes proper to man” (as he says in the Réfutation d’Helvétius). The difference with Collins is that now biological factors are being taken into account. Obviously both the ‘volitional’ and the ‘biological’ forms of determinism are noteworthy inasmuch as they change our picture of the nature of determinism itself, but my interest here is to compare these two determinist arguments, both of which are broadly Spinozist in nature – and as such belong to what Jonathan Israel called in his recent book “the radical Enlightenment,” i.e. a kind of underground Enlightenment constituted by Spinozism – and to see how Collins’ specifically psychological vision and Diderot’s specifically biological vision correspond to their two separate national contexts: determinism in France in the mid-1750s was a much more medico-biological affair than English determinism, which appears to be on a ‘path’ leading to Mill and associationist psychology. (shrink)

The present book is intended to help students overcome difficulties by presenting Jaspers' thoughts in comparatively clear and straightforward fashion. While it denies that philosophy is "practical" in any cheap and obvious sense, it follows Jaspers in attempting to avoid the otiose and emphasize the relevance of philosophy to matters of ultimate concern. Those who wish a more theoretical and systematic presentation may well call to mind that, as Heidegger's followers express it, Jaspers, like Kierkegaard- and to some extent Sartre- (...) quite deliberately spurned the "ontological" in favor of the "ontic.". (shrink)

Ce livre étudie, à travers une série d'épisodes allant de la philosophie des Lumières à notre époque, le problème du matérialisme dans l'histoire de la philosophie et l’histoire des sciences. Comment comprendre les spécificités de l’histoire du matérialisme, des Lumières à nos jours, au sein de la grande histoire de la philosophie et de l’histoire des sciences ? Quelle est l’actualité de l’opposition classique entre le corps et l’esprit ? Qu’est-ce que le rire ou le rêve peuvent nous apprendre du (...) matérialisme ? En traversant l’histoire de ce concept jusqu’à l’émergence d’un « nouveau matérialisme » contemporain, l’ouvrage vise à revitaliser le matérialisme et sa lecture. -/- . (shrink)

This book is an examination of the inattention of business schools to moral education, addressing lessons learned from the most recent business corruption scandals and financial crises, and also questioning what we're teaching now and what should be considering in educating future business leaders to cope with the challenges of leading with integrity in the global environment"--Provided by publisher.

Discusses heaven, the Creation, forgiveness, vanity, the theology of romantic love, responsibility, and the life of Jesus.

The living body appears like an endlessly renewable reservoir of authenticity, hope, and taboo. But, for the sake of conceptual clarity, we are often been told that the (mere) body should be distinguished from the flesh. That is, it’s undeniable that I have a body; that I notice yours; that we worry about their birth and death and upkeep. But the flesh is a more transcendentalized, loaded concept – not least given its frequently religious background (incarnation: the Word made Flesh). (...) It is the body ‘kicked upstairs’, ‘bumped up’ one ontological level. Flesh is like a mantra, an obsessive leitmotif. Is the difference just one of abstraction? Indeed, crucial to the narrative of phenomenology (most obviously in Merleau-Ponty but really, throughout, including in enactivism), to the story of ancestor worship and identity it tells itself and its acolytes around the campfire, is a basic distinction between the merely physical body and the flesh as something requiring ‘mineness’, namely, an understanding of it as uniquely ‘my own’, a feeling of ‘what it is like to be embodied’. This goes back to the Husserlian distinction between Körper, ‘body’ in the sense of one body among others in a vast mechanistic universe of bodies, and Leib, ‘flesh’ in the sense of a subjectivity which is the locus of experience. In this essay I reflect on this vision of the body’s authenticity and its costs, and contrast it with insights derived from Georges Canguilhem, whose critique of mechanism/mechanicism is not done in the name of a wholescale organicism and/or an unproblematized éloge of embodiment and privacy. (shrink)

This volume emphasizes the diversity and fruitfulness of early modern mechanism as a program, as a concept, as a model. Mechanistic study of the living body but also of the mind and mental processes are examined in careful historical focus, dealing with figures ranging from the first-rank (Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Cudworth, Gassendi, Locke, Leibniz, Kant) to less well-known individuals (Scaliger, Martini) or prominent natural philosophers who have been neglected in recent years (Willis, Steno, etc.). The volume moves from early modern (...) medicine and physiology to late Enlightenment and even early 19th-century psychology, always maintaining a conceptual focus. It is a contribution to a newly active field in the history and philosophy of early modern life science. It is of interest to scholars studying the history of medicine and the development of mechanistic theories. (shrink)

Les sociétés démocratiques sont confrontées à l'émergence d'enjeux environnementaux décisifs qui concernent tant les modes de production, d'échange et de consommation que l'habitat, les transports, l'agriculture, l'industrie et même nos modes de vie. La prise en charge de ces enjeux ne saurait s'opérer simplement par des mesures ponctuelles ou locales. Elle doit aujourd'hui être repensée la temporalité de l'action politique, confrontée à une urgence qui ne cessera de s'accroître dans les prochaines années.

Charles Sanders Peirce has been characterized as the greatest American philosophic genius. He is the creator of pragmatism and one of the founders of modern logic. James, Royce, Schroder, and Dewey have acknowledged their great indebtedness to him. A laboratory scientist, he made notable contributions to geodesy, astronomy, psychology, induction, probability, and scientific method. He introduced into modern philosophy the doctrine of scholastic realism, developed the concepts of chance, continuity, and objective law, and showed the philosophical significance of the (...) theory of signs and mathematical logic. The present series is the first published edition of his systematic works. (shrink)

L'objectif est ici de déterminer la mesure dans laquelle nous serions aujourd'hui sortis des catégories conceptuelles sur lesquelles la pensée politique moderne s'est construite.

These volumes present the text of Abū Ma’͑šar’s _Great Introduction to Astrology_ in Arabic and Greek and the divergences in the Latin translations. It provides a fully-comprehensive account of traditional astrological doctrine and its philosophical bases.

Comment la pensée médiévale continue-t-elle à agir dans la philosophie juridico-politique moderne, c'est-à-dire dans un horizon intellectuel et historique qui n'est plus le sien? Telle est la question qui anime les contributions au présent ouvrage. Cette action persistante de la pensée médiévale, qui est en même temps transformation de ce qui agit, est étudiée dans le cadre de trois grandes problématiques. 1. Le transfert de la notion de plenitudo potestatis de l'ordre ecclésiastique à l'ordre politique. 2. Le déplacement d'un univers (...) qui trouvait son fondement en Dieu vers un univers qui comporte, non un, mais deux fondements possibles entre lesquels se développe une tension (laquelle deviendra plus tard une concurrence) : Dieu et l'homme. C'est dans le cadre de cette tension entre les deux fondements théologique et éthique que se forment les doctrines du sujet psychologique et affectif, d'une part, et du sujet de droit, d'autre part. 3. Enfin, la constitution d'une théorie du pouvoir politique sur les hommes qui n'est plus pensée dans les catégories de la propriété des choses alors que celles-ci fournissaient, au Moyen Age, le principe d'intelligibilité de celle-là. Ce volume entend ainsi apporter un éclairage nouveau sur la naissance et la constitution de la philosophie juridico-politique moderne. (shrink)

Argues that materialism, specifically eliminative materialism, is dependent on the immaterial language and immaterial experiential realm for its meaning. The mind/body dualism has been a bane to psychology. Eliminative Materialists eliminate the immaterial mind from study, thereby rejecting the dualism. However, in assuming biology reveals everything about human experience, eliminative materialists are faced with a presupposed dualism: biological language, which is supposed to replace any psychological language, is necessarily correlated with and dependent upon meaning in the psychological language. Further, the (...) nature of identity between the biological and psychological is either meaningless tautology or a dualism of explanatory realms. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

In his second appearance to Aeneas in Aeneid 4 Mercury drives the hero to flee Carthage with a false allegation that Dido is planning an attack, capping his warning with an infamous sententia about the mutability of female emotion. Building on a previous suggestion that Mercury's first speech to Aeneas is modelled on Athena's admonishment of Telemachus at the opening of Odyssey 15, this article proposes that Mercury's second speech as well is modelled on Athena's warning, in which the goddess (...) uses misdirection about Penelope's intentions and a misogynistic gnōmē about the changeability of women's affections to spur Telemachus’ departure from Sparta. After setting out how Virgil divides his imitation of Athena's speech verbally and thematically between Mercury's two speeches, the discussion turns to why both Athena and Mercury adopt these deceptive tactics. The speeches are shown to be culminations of the poets’ similar approaches to creating doubt and foreboding around the queens’ famed capacities for using δόλος. Common features in the ensuing hasty departures of Telemachus and Aeneas further confirm Virgil's use of Odyssey 15 in devising Aeneas’ escape from Carthage. (shrink)

Introduction Comparative psychology can generally be defined as the branch of psychology that studies the similarities and differences in the behavior of organisms. Formal definitions found in textbooks and encyclopedias disagree whether comparative psychologists restrict their work to the study of animals or include the study of human behavior. This paper offers an opinion on the major problem facing comparative psychology today – where we will find the next generation of comparative psychology students. Something must be done before we lose (...) access to an entire generation of psychology undergraduates. It is not enough to say that comparative psychology is being “absorbed” in other academic units such as “integrative biology”, “integrative study of animal behavior”, “evolutionary psychology”, “comparative cognition”, or “animal cognition.” Indeed, many of these topics are not primarily studied in psychology departments, wherein comparative psychology students have traditionally received joint training in the principles of behavior and comparative analysis, as applied to both humans and other animals. Consider, for example, the difference between comparative psychology and comparative cognition. Comparative cognition includes features of comparative psychology, but they are not identical. Comparative cognition represents a very specific theoretical position whose validity is based on certain suppositions such as the belief (by definition) that the internal cogni... (shrink)

Classifying species as ‘native’ or ‘alien’ carries prescriptive force in the valuation and management of ‘nature’. But the classification itself and its application are contested, raising philosophical and geographical questions about place, space, rights, identity and belonging. This paper discusses leading critiques of the native/alien paradigm, including its conceptual fluidity, dichotomous rigidity and ethical difficulties, as well as the incendiary charge of xenophobia. It argues that valorizing ‘native nature’ as inherently the ‘best nature’ is not only obsolete but impracticable in (...) the Anthropocene, and that the preeminence of biogeographic origins should be replaced with a pragmatic focus on species’ behavior. (shrink)

In this paper, I delineate two major problems facing reliabilist approaches in epistemology. I argue that Alvin Goodman's (1986) position fails to solve either problem. I then suggest an alternative reliabilist approach that ties truth-ratio assessments to particular, well-specified cognitive tasks. I claim that a well-specified cognitive task is an empirical hypothesis about a system that involves the specification of input and output types and nomic correlations (including statistical correlations) that underlie the system's performance. On my approach, one characterizes processes (...) by reference to the system's dispositions across the situations consistent with the task. Characterization is best understood as revealing a strategy or a set of strategies for generating outputs from inputs relying on certain nomic correlations associated with the task. (shrink)

Uses interviews with one hundred twenty-five leading male executives to determine how companies can be managed both profitably and ethically.