James D. Reid - The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.4 673-674 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by James D. Reid Metropolitan State College of Denver S. J. McGrath. The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006. Pp. xx + 268. Cloth, $69.95. Taking its clues from the (...) scholarly work of Kisiel, van Buren, and others on the religious origins of early Heidegger's phenomenology, blending philosophical interpretation and biographical insight, and drawing fruitfully from a wide range of historical and philosophical sources, McGrath's The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy offers a wide-ranging account of Heidegger's.. (shrink)

This volume -- a companion to Thomas Reid: Selected Philosophical Writings (2012) -- makes available material from Thomas Reid's autograph manuscripts and student notes of his lectures. It includes an introductory essay by Nicholas Wolterstorff.

In issue 6.1 of the Journal of Scottish Philosophy, James Van Cleve describes Thomas Reid's understanding of double vision and then presents a challenge to his direct realism found in works of David Hume based on double vision. The challenge is as follows: When we press one eye with a finger, we immediately perceive all the objects to become double, and one half of them to be remov'd from their common and natural position. But as we do not attribute (...) a continu'd existence to both these perceptions, and as they are both of the same nature, we clearly perceive, that all our perceptions [i.e., all the things we perceive] are dependent on our organs, and the disposition of our nerves and animal spirits. (THN: 210–211). (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

After decades of single issue movements and identity politics on the U.S. left, the series of large demonstrations beginning in 1999 in Seattle have led many to wonder if activist politics can now come together around a common theme of global justice. This book pursues the prospects for progressive political movements in the 21st century with case studies of ten representative movements, including the anti-globalization forces, environmental interest groups, and new takes on the peace movement.

We present a one per cent measurement of the cosmic distance scale from the detections of the baryon acoustic oscillations in the clustering of galaxies from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. Our results come from the Data Release 11 sample, containing nearly one million galaxies and covering approximately 8500 square degrees and the redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.7. We also compare these results with those from the publicly released (...) DR9 and DR10 samples. Assuming a concordance Λ cold dark matter cosmological model, the DR11 sample covers a volume of 13 Gpc3 and is the largest region of the Universe ever surveyed at this density. We measure the correlation function and power spectrum, including density-field reconstruction of the BAO feature. The acoustic features are detected at a significance of over 7σ in both the correlation function and power spectrum. Fitting for the position of the acoustic features measures the distance relative to the sound horizon at the drag epoch, rd, which has a value of rd,fid = 149.28 Mpc in our fiducial cosmology. We find DV = at z = 0.32 and DV = at z = 0.57. At 1.0 per cent, this latter measure is the most precise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey. Separating the clustering along and transverse to the line of sight yields measurements at z = 0.57 of DA = and H =. Our measurements of the distance scale are in good agreement with previous BAO measurements and with the predictions from cosmic microwave background data for a spatially flat CDM model with a cosmological constant. © 2014 The Author Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Professor of Moral Philosophy at Marischal College, Aberdeen, James Beattie (1735–1803) was one of the most prominent literary figures of late eighteenth-century Britain. His major works, An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (1770) and the two-canto poem The Minstrel (1771–1774), were two of the best-sellers of the Scottish Enlightenment and were key to Beattie’s role in the emergence of both the ‘Scottish School’ of Common Sense Philosophy and British Romanticism. Intellectual history scholarship on the Scottish (...) Enlightenment has tended to discuss Beattie in terms of his relationship to his fellow Aberdonian Thomas Read. While clearly important, his link with Reid does not exhaust our potential interest in Beattie. This article explores his extensive engagement with the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). In the process, it is argued that the Genevan’s works – especially the Confession of the Savoyard Vicar in Emile (1762) – played an important though little noticed role in both Beattie’s rhetoric and anti-scepticism in both the Essay and Minstrel. Moreover, Beattie’s initially praising stance on Rousseau as a potential friend to true religion indicates the complexity of the reception of the Genevan’s works in late eighteenth-century Britain. (shrink)

An important task for every major philosopher is to offer us an understanding of the nature of mind. The essays in this volume discuss different aspects of the philosophical theories of mind put forward in the century and a half that followed Descartes' Meditations of 1641. These years, often referred to as the 'early-modern' period, are probably unparalleled for originality and diversity in conceiving the mind. The volume not only includes two essays on Descartes' own thinking, but there are also (...) examinations of what Spinoza, Malebranche, Locke, Berkeley, Reid, the Cambridge Platonists, and others, have to say about the nature of mind. The aim of the volume is to represent some of the best contemporary research and reflection on mind in early-modern philosophy. The contributors, who teach at a range of universities in mainland Europe, Great Britain and North America, are Margaret Atherton, Miran BozoviÄ, Petr GlombìÄek, Boris Hennig, James Hill, Nicholas Jolley, Jan Palkoska, G. A. J. Rogers, and Anthony Savile. All the essays appear here for the first time. (shrink)

Ardley aims to assist the re-discovery of James Oswald, Scottish common sense philosopher, Moderate churchman, and author of the two-volume Appeal to Common Sense in Behalf of Religion. He also makes surprising claims about Oswald's merits as a philosopher, and about the place Oswald merits in the history of philosophy. He writes that Oswald, "more than most writers of the eighteenth century, had things of the first order to put forward", that he was "one of the most gifted moral (...) writers of his age", and that he was "the most discerning of the Scots trio [Reid, Beattie, Oswald]". He views Oswald as a staunch defender of the "philosophia perennis" and thus as standing squarely, if unwittingly, in the tradition of Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas. And he takes Oswald to anticipate such disparate writers as Adam Smith, Burke and de Maistre, Maritain and Garrigou-Lagrange, and Kierkegaard. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 407-436 [Access article in PDF] Dilthey's Epistemology of the Geisteswissenschaften: Between Lebensphilosophie and Wissenschaftstheorie James Reid A great part of my life's work has been devoted to formulating a universally valid science which should provide the human sciences with a firm foundation and a unified internal coherency.... I am neither an intuitionist, nor a historicist, nor a skeptic. Dilthey to (...) Husserl, 29 June 1911 To show life as it is, that is what we strive for. To describe life: that is our goal.... We want to make life visible in its unfathomable depths, and in its unfathomable nexus. Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften 19: 330 In the dedication of the first volume of the Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften to his friend and philosophical interlocutor Count Yorck, Dilthey famously named what would become his lifelong philosophical preoccupation a Kritik der historischen Vernunft, the overarching aim of which is to provide "an epistemological foundation for the human sciences" that would "determine the interconnections among the particular human sciences, the limits within which knowledge is possible in these sciences, and the relation of their truths to one another." 1 For Dilthey, the liberation of historical consciousness from the "grey cobweb of abstract essences" spun by traditional metaphysics constituted one of the [End Page 407] major intellectual achievements of the nineteenth century. 2 However, as important as the concrete historical investigations of Ranke, Droysen, and Mommsen undoubtedly are, the Historical School nevertheless failed in Dilthey's eyes to grasp the essence of historical consciousness—its scope, limits and objective validity: Its study and evaluation of historical phenomena remain unconnected with the analysis of facts of consciousness; consequently, it has no grounding in the only knowledge which is ultimately secure; it has in short no philosophical foundation. 3A critique of historical reason, grasped as an epistemological analysis of "the capacity of man to know himself and the society and history which he has produced," is needed in order to provide for the Geisteswissenschaften a foundation equivalent to the one furnished by Kant for mathematical natural science in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. 4The epistemological dimension of Dilthey's project took shape as the elaboration of a basic science (Grundwissenschaft) identified, in the Einleitung at least, with descriptive psychology. 5 In an effort to delimit the province of the Geisteswissenschaften, Dilthey came to distinguish between outer experience and its objects and various levels of inner experience. Although Dilthey's thought developed considerably in the years after 1900, most notably in the direction [End Page 408] of a refinement of the relation between inner and outer experience, the distinction between these two fundamental modes of givenness remained central to his conception of the structure and methodology of the human sciences. 6 In a number of manuscripts, some published in Dilthey's lifetime, others (by far the majority) published after his death by former students, Dilthey envisages a comprehensive theory of consciousness and its objectifications that would shed light on the origins and ultimate validity of our knowledge of the historical world.As several commentators have pointed out, however, the epistemological dimension of Dilthey's project fails to capture the entire breadth of his achievement. 7 Dilthey's interest in the objective validity of historical investigation was subservient to broader concerns about the nature of human existence and its historicity, what Dilthey often referred to simply as Leben. 8 Life as it is revealed in the human sciences is the medium in which self-consciousness and self-knowledge, scientific and practical activity originate, and remains the abiding concern of the human sciences. At the most fundamental level of epistemological reflection, we encounter life as it is lived in pre-scientific and pre-reflective experience (Erlebnis). 9 Life, Dilthey consistently maintained, is the "prius" of thought: Knowledge (Erkenntnis) cannot go behind life, of which it is a function. Life always remains the presupposition of knowledge, i.e., of the consciousness or knowledge (Wissen) contained in life. As a presupposition of knowledge (des Erkennens) itself, life is [End... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 407-436 [Access article in PDF] Dilthey's Epistemology of the Geisteswissenschaften: Between Lebensphilosophie and Wissenschaftstheorie James Reid A great part of my life's work has been devoted to formulating a universally valid science which should provide the human sciences with a firm foundation and a unified internal coherency.... I am neither an intuitionist, nor a historicist, nor a skeptic. Dilthey to (...) Husserl, 29 June 1911 To show life as it is, that is what we strive for. To describe life: that is our goal.... We want to make life visible in its unfathomable depths, and in its unfathomable nexus. Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften 19: 330 In the dedication of the first volume of the Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften to his friend and philosophical interlocutor Count Yorck, Dilthey famously named what would become his lifelong philosophical preoccupation a Kritik der historischen Vernunft, the overarching aim of which is to provide "an epistemological foundation for the human sciences" that would "determine the interconnections among the particular human sciences, the limits within which knowledge is possible in these sciences, and the relation of their truths to one another." 1 For Dilthey, the liberation of historical consciousness from the "grey cobweb of abstract essences" spun by traditional metaphysics constituted one of the [End Page 407] major intellectual achievements of the nineteenth century. 2 However, as important as the concrete historical investigations of Ranke, Droysen, and Mommsen undoubtedly are, the Historical School nevertheless failed in Dilthey's eyes to grasp the essence of historical consciousness—its scope, limits and objective validity: Its study and evaluation of historical phenomena remain unconnected with the analysis of facts of consciousness; consequently, it has no grounding in the only knowledge which is ultimately secure; it has in short no philosophical foundation. 3A critique of historical reason, grasped as an epistemological analysis of "the capacity of man to know himself and the society and history which he has produced," is needed in order to provide for the Geisteswissenschaften a foundation equivalent to the one furnished by Kant for mathematical natural science in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. 4The epistemological dimension of Dilthey's project took shape as the elaboration of a basic science (Grundwissenschaft) identified, in the Einleitung at least, with descriptive psychology. 5 In an effort to delimit the province of the Geisteswissenschaften, Dilthey came to distinguish between outer experience and its objects and various levels of inner experience. Although Dilthey's thought developed considerably in the years after 1900, most notably in the direction [End Page 408] of a refinement of the relation between inner and outer experience, the distinction between these two fundamental modes of givenness remained central to his conception of the structure and methodology of the human sciences. 6 In a number of manuscripts, some published in Dilthey's lifetime, others (by far the majority) published after his death by former students, Dilthey envisages a comprehensive theory of consciousness and its objectifications that would shed light on the origins and ultimate validity of our knowledge of the historical world.As several commentators have pointed out, however, the epistemological dimension of Dilthey's project fails to capture the entire breadth of his achievement. 7 Dilthey's interest in the objective validity of historical investigation was subservient to broader concerns about the nature of human existence and its historicity, what Dilthey often referred to simply as Leben. 8 Life as it is revealed in the human sciences is the medium in which self-consciousness and self-knowledge, scientific and practical activity originate, and remains the abiding concern of the human sciences. At the most fundamental level of epistemological reflection, we encounter life as it is lived in pre-scientific and pre-reflective experience (Erlebnis). 9 Life, Dilthey consistently maintained, is the "prius" of thought: Knowledge (Erkenntnis) cannot go behind life, of which it is a function. Life always remains the presupposition of knowledge, i.e., of the consciousness or knowledge (Wissen) contained in life. As a presupposition of knowledge (des Erkennens) itself, life is [End... (shrink)

This is a book about how we see: the environment around us (its surfaces, their layout, and their colors and textures); where we are in the environment; whether or not we are moving and, if we are, where we are going; what things are good for; how to do things (to thread a needle or drive an automobile); or why things look as they do.The basic assumption is that vision depends on the eye which is connected to the brain. The (...) author suggests that natural vision depends on the eyes in the head on a body supported by the ground, the brain being only the central organ of a complete visual system. When no constraints are put on the visual system, people look around, walk up to something interesting and move around it so as to see it from all sides, and go from one vista to another. That is natural vision—and what this book is about. (shrink)

Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason is one of the great modern examinations of religion's meaning, function and impact on human affairs. In this volume, the first complete English-language commentary on the work, James J. DiCenso explains the historical context in which the book appeared, including the importance of Kant's conflict with state censorship. He shows how the Religion addresses crucial Kantian themes such as the relationship between freedom and morality, the human propensity to evil, the status (...) of historical traditions in relation to ethical principles, and the interface between individual ethics and social institutions. The major arguments are clearly and precisely explained, and the themes are highlighted and located within Kant's mature critical philosophy, especially his ethics. The commentary will be valuable for all who are interested in the continuing relevance of religion for contemporary inquiries into ethics, public institutions and religious traditions. (shrink)

This authoritative volume provides a comprehensive road map of the important and rapidly growing field of emotion regulation.

A provocative work by medical ethicist James Hughes, Citizen Cyborg argues that technologies pushing the boundaries of humanness can radically improve our quality of life if they are controlled democratically. Hughes challenges both the technophobia of Leon Kass and Francis Fukuyama and the unchecked enthusiasm of others for limitless human enhancement. He argues instead for a third way, "democratic transhumanism," by asking the question destined to become a fundamental issue of the twenty-first century: How can we use new cybernetic (...) and biomedical technologies to make life better for everyone? These technologies hold great promise, but they also pose profound challenges to our health, our culture, and our liberal democratic political system. By allowing humans to become more than human - "posthuman" or "transhuman" - the new technologies will require new answers for the enduring issues of liberty and the common good. What limits should we place on the freedom of people to control their own bodies? Who should own genes and other living things? Which technologies should be mandatory, which voluntary, and which forbidden? For answers to these challenges, Citizen Cyborg proposes a radical return to a faith in the resilience of our democratic institutions. (shrink)

… an immense gulf is fixed between the domain of the concept of nature, the sensible, and the domain of the concept of freedom, the supersensible, so that no transition from the sensible to the supersensible is possible, just as if they were two different worlds.

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

Modern emotion theories emphasise the adaptive value of emotions. Emotions are by no means always helpful, however. They often must be regulated. The study of emotion regulation has its origins in the psychoanalytic and stress and coping traditions. Recently, increased interest in emotion regulation has led to crucial boundary ambiguities that now threaten progress in this domain. It is argued that distinctions need to be made between (1) regulation of emotion and regulation by emotion; (2) emotion regulation in self and (...) emotion regulation in others; and (3) conscious and nonconscious emotion regulation. Using a process model of emotion generation, this review considers promising research on basic processes and individual differences in emotion regulation and poses five theoretical challenges. (shrink)

Heidegger's Moral Ontology offers the first comprehensive account of the ethical issues that underwrite Heidegger's efforts to develop a novel account of human existence. Drawing from a wide array of source materials from the period leading up to the publication of Being and Time, and in conversation with ancient, modern, and contemporary contributions to moral philosophy, James D. Reid brings Heidegger's early philosophy into fruitful dialogue with the history of ethics, and sheds fresh light on such familiar topics as (...) Heidegger's critique of Husserl, his engagement with Aristotle, his account of mortality, the role played by Kant in the genesis of Being and Time, and Heidegger's early reflections on philosophical language and concepts. This lively book will appeal to all who are interested in Heidegger's early phenomenology and in his thought more generally, as well as to those interested in the nature, scope, and foundations of ethical life. (shrink)

Emotion regulation has the odd distinction of being a wildly popular construct whose scientific existence is in considerable doubt. In this article, we discuss the confusion about whether emotion generation and emotion regulation can and should be distinguished from one another. We describe a continuum of perspectives on emotion, and highlight how different (often mutually incompatible) perspectives on emotion lead to different views about whether emotion generation and emotion regulation can be usefully distinguished. We argue that making differences in perspective (...) explicit serves the function of allowing researchers with different theoretical commitments to collaborate productively despite seemingly insurmountable differences in terminology and methods. (shrink)

Higher education institutions in the United Kingdom are increasingly demanding that social work lecturers are ?registered? with the UK regulatory body, the General Social Care Council (GSCC) as a requirement of appointment for the post of social work lecturer. There are many compelling reasons for such an expectation but this paper argues that such action should not be undertaken uncritically. Using Colnerud's five categories of norms a number of tensions for the lecturer are explored that indicate that the current GSCC (...) codes of practice do not fully recognize the role of the social work lecturer. (shrink)

Agency and Imagination in the Films of David Lynch: Philosophical Perspectives offers a sustained philosophical interpretation of the filmmaker’s work in light of classic and contemporary discussions of human agency and the complex relations between our capacity to act and our ability to imagine.

HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, CRITICISM. Philosophy has a history because human life is historical. This truism assumes a deeper, more puzzling, and unsettling significance in the programmatic section 6 of Sein und Zeit, which promises nothing less than a Destruktion of the history of philosophy centered on a few pivotal figures and guided by the problem of temporality as the horizon and transcendental condition of any understanding and explicit interpretation of the sense of being. If the Seinsfrage cannot be formulated, let alone (...) answered, without this detour through the history of ontology, it is precisely because the philosophizing human being is its past, because the philosopher's past does not merely trail behind the present as a foregone conclusion but "always already advances ahead of it." Every effort to free ourselves from tradition and to begin with a tabula rasa "is pervaded by traditional concepts and...horizons and traditional angles of approach." An understanding shaped and governed by the past plays its enabling role whether the individual recognizes and welcomes it or not, whether he makes the past an object of study and cultivates an interest in tradition or abandons history to the historian or philosopher. An individual or a people or an entire era can lack historical consciousness, philosophy of history, and historiography, and can remain indifferent to tradition only because the human being is historical "in the ground of its being.". (shrink)

This book demonstrates instead the writers' use of irony and allegory in struggling against the deceitfulness of their own texts.

Fichte’s Jena Wissenschaftslehre is among the most significant products of that immensely fertile period spanning the publication of Kant’s first Critique and Hegel’s Phenomenology. Like many of Kant’s earliest disciples and critics, Fichte was preoccupied with puzzles that arose in connection with certain distinctions presupposed or drawn by Kant throughout the writings of the Critical period. Among the many distinctions developed with great care in the three Critiques, the most important for Fichte were those drawn between the various powers or (...) faculties of the human mind. Fichte came to recognize that a well-grounded philosophical science would have to account for the complex structure of human subjectivity without dividing the mind into a mere aggregate of lifeless mental faculties. As Fichte famously put it in the Grundlage, the aim of the Wissenschaftslehre is to introduce into “the whole human being that unity and connection that so many systems lack.” Despite obvious Romantic overtones, this quest for a single, unified account of the human mind amounted to the demand for a strictly scientific reconstruction of the Critical philosophy. On Fichte’s view, philosophy would be able to come forward as a rigorous science of living subjectivity, with the force and evidence of geometry, only as a closed system of propositions derived from a self-evident first principle. (shrink)

It examines three core questions. First, what is the scope and direction of neuroscientific inquiry?

One of the most fundamental distinctions in the field of emotion is the distinction between emotion generation and emotion regulation. This distinction fits comfortably with folk theories, which view emotions as passions that arise unbidden and then must be controlled. But is it really helpful to distinguish between emotion generation and emotion regulation? In this article, we begin by offering working definitions of emotion generation and emotion regulation. We argue that in some circumstances, the distinction between emotion generation and emotion (...) regulation is indeed useful. We point both to citation patterns, which indicate that researchers from across a number of sub-areas within psychology are making this distinction, and to empirical studies, which indicate the utility of this distinction in many different research contexts. We then consider five ways in which the distinction between emotion generation and emotion regulation can be problematic. We suggest that it is time to move beyond debates about whether this distinction is useful to a more specific consideration of when and in what ways this distinction is useful, and in this spirit, we offer recommendations for future research. (shrink)