Is economic liberty necessary for individuals to lead truly flourishing lives? Whether your immediate answer is yes or no, this question is deceptively simple. What do we mean by liberty? What constitutes the flourishing life? How are these related? How is economic liberty related to other goods that affect human flourishing? To answer these questions—and more—this volume brings to bear some of history’s greatest thinkers, interpreted by some of today’s leading scholars of their thought.

Lifelong learning should embrace more than instrumental purposes. Some late modern social formations threaten individual autonomy, subordinating the needs of 'agent' in a 'locality' to universalising rationality, necessary for growth in a globalized and virtualised economy. These phenomena are discussed and illustrated. Learning, now an 'economic' activity, could bind individuals in heteronymously defined lifeworlds. Prerequisites of an alternative conceptualisation are examined.

Abstract:The moral and political implications of new forms of organisation and resource allocation in education are explored. Markets, even when heavily regulated and administered, induce effects contrary to the values of individual and social freedom upon which public education is understood to be founded. Their ‘efficiency’ as allocative and distributive mechanisms is questioned and examined specifically in relation to the formative and constitutive role of community life in conferring identity and autonomy upon individuals. Competition, it is claimed, leads to stratification (...) of opportunities and outcomes. Putative efficiency gains may be outweighed by equity losses. (shrink)

The moral and political implications of new forms of organisation and resource allocation in education are explored. Markets, even when heavily regulated and administered, induce effects contrary to the values of individual and social freedom upon which public education is understood to be founded. Their 'efficiency' as allocative and distributive mechanisms is questioned and examined specifically in relation to the formative and constitutive role of community life in conferring identity and autonomy upon individuals. Competition, it is claimed, leads to stratification (...) of opportunities and outcomes. Putative efficiency gains may be outweighed by equity losses. (shrink)

A recent critique by Hughes and Tight argued that the 'Learning Society 'and related notions of productivity and change are 'myths'. In response, it is argued here that myth should not be confused with ideological distortion. The rhetorical dimension of current initiatives is a necessary feature of theoretical formulation, intended to influence public discussion and policy-making. The concepts of productivity and change are reconsidered in a wider historical dimension and the communitarian aspects of the project are shown to have a (...) more positive significance in the light of, for example, recent work by Beck and Giddens on 'reflexivity 'and 'risk'. It is acknowledged that faith in the application of technological solutions to societal learning challenges is frequently misplaced. But fear that the project's aims might be subverted by interests hostile to humane educational values is insufficient reason for such scepticism, which is too narrowly grounded and is misdirected. (shrink)

The stasis—this is our hypothesis—takes place neither in the oikos nor in the polis, neither in the family nor in the city; rather, it constitutes a zone of indifference between the unpolitical space of the family and the political space of the city. In transgressing this threshold, the oikos is politicized; conversely, the polis is "economised," that is, it is reduced to an oikos. This means that in the system of Greek politics civil war functions as a threshold of politicisation (...) and depoliticisation, through which the house is exceeded in the city and the city is de-politicized in the family.Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke reminded his listeners of an assumed relation between blackness and a "bad" kind of... (shrink)

Philosophy of biology has a long and honourable history. Indeed, like most of the great intellectual achievements of the Western World, it goes back to the Greeks. However, until recently in this century, it was sadly neglected. With a few noteworthy exceptions, someone wishing to delve into the subject had to choose between extremes of insipid vitalism on the one hand, and sterile formalizations of the most elementary biological principles on the other. Whilst philosophy of physics pushed confidently ahead, the (...) philosophy of biology languished. In the past decade, however, things have changed dramatically. A number of energetic and thoughtful young philosophers have made real efforts to master the outlines and details of contemporary biology. They have shown that many stimulating problems emerge when analytic skills are turned towards the life-sciences, particularly if one does not feeI con strained to stay only with theoretical parts of biology, but can range over to more medical parts of the spectrum. At the same time, biology itself has had one of the most fruitful yet turbulent periods in its whole history, and more and more biologists have grown to see that many of the problems they face take them beyond the narrow confines of empiric al science: a broader perspective is needed. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the inheritance of human handedness and cerebral lateralization within the more general context of structural biological asymmetries. The morphogenesis of asymmetrical structures, such as the heart in vertebrates, depends upon a complex interaction between information coded in the cytoplasm and in the genes, but the polarity of asymmetry seems to depend on the cytoplasmic rather than the genetic code. Indeed it is extremely difficult to find clear-cut examples in which thedirectionof an asymmetry is under genetic control. (...) As one possible case, there is some evidence that the direction, clockwise or counterclockwise, of rotation of the abdomen in certain mutant strains ofDrosophilais controlled by a particular gene locus, although there appears to be some degree of confusion on this point. By contrast, it is much easier to find examples in which thedegreebut not the direction of asymmetry is under genetic control. For instance, there is a mutant strain of mice in which half of the animals displaysitus inversusof the viscera. The proportion has remained at one half despite many years of inbreeding, suggesting that the mutant allele effectively cancels the normalsitusand allows the asymmetry to be specified in random fashion.Although this account does not deny that the right hemisphere of humans may be the more specialized for certain functions, it does attribute a leading or dominant role to the left hemisphere (at least in most individuals). We suggest that so-called “right-hemisphere” functions are essentially acquired by default, due to the left hemisphere's prior involvement with speech and skilled motor acts; we note, for instance, that these right-hemisphere functions include rather elementary perceptual processes. But perhaps the more critical prediction from our account is that the phenomenon of equipotentiality should be unidirectional: the right (lagging) hemisphere should be more disposed to take over left-hemisphere functions following early lesions than is the left (leading) hemisphere to take over right-hemisphere functions. We note preliminary evidence that this may be so. (shrink)

This chapter emphasizes four crucial differences that serve to distinguish the proto-Marxist interpretation from the standard post-Kantian framework. The first and foundational difference involves the existence of final causality or internal purposiveness in nature. The now-standard post-Kantian interpretation of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel presupposes Sellars's core distinction between the realm of "empirical description" and the "space of reasons", a distinction that necessarily presupposes the absence of final causality in nature. The proto-Marxist framework approaches Hegel as the first modern philosopher to (...) overcome the strained but stubbornly persistent fantasy of pure mechanism and to recognize the ineliminable role of Aristotelian final causes in even the most basic domains of nature. The third difference involves the nature of Hegel's dialectic. Fourth, these competing frameworks provide divergent accounts of the constitution of the object. The post-Kantian framework plainly acknowledges Hegel's tendency to talk about organisms, artworks, and institutions as purposively structured wholes that cannot be properly explained in terms of causal laws. (shrink)

The existence and extent of animal suffering provides grounds for a serious evidential challenge to theism. In the wake of the Darwinian revolution, this strain of natural atheology has taken on substantially greater significance. In this essay we argue that there are at least four neo-Cartesian views on the nature of animal minds which would serve to deflect this evidential challenge.

Many older people need external support for their daily living. A large minority of older adults with low or modest pension incomes face financial strains from the high cost of illness, and many older people in urban areas live in social isolation. Indeed, population aging has become a policy topic of concern. The policy debate since the end of the twentieth century about the future of public pensions and health and long‐term care programs has increasingly framed the growing numbers of (...) older people in alarmist terms. Unfounded claims about the unaffordability and unsustainability of social policies supporting older people have become common currency, often disguised as concerns about intergenerational justice. Such claims and concerns hinder clear thinking about proper social and fiscal policies, housing, health care, and labor markets to safeguard the well‐being of older people in aging societies. (shrink)

The ideological interface between Muslims and liberal educators undoubtedly is strained in the realm of sex education, and perhaps on no topic more so than homosexuality. Some argue that schools should not try to ‘undermine the faith’ of Muslims, who object to teaching homosexuality as an ‘acceptable alternative lifestyle’. In this article, I will argue against this monolithic presentation of Islam. Furthermore, I will argue that a narrow view of Islam is neglectful of gay and lesbian Muslims who are particularly (...) vulnerable to the unrepentant hostilities of their own communities. (shrink)

Environmental pragmatists such as Ben Minteer and Bryan Norton have argued that there is an anti-democratic strain to be found in the work of some nonanthropocentrists. I examine three possible sources of the pragmatists' concern: the claim that nonanthropocentrists know the political truth, the claim that those who disagree with their basic principle should be excluded from discussions of policy and the claim that their basic principle is self-evident. I argue here that none of these claims are objectionably anti-democratic (...) when understood properly. (shrink)

Realism issues tend to be confusing because of the bewildering number of “definitions” of what realism is. A large part of the problem, I have argued in Realism and Truth (1997), is that doctrines that should be metaphysical have become entangled with epistemological and semantic doctrines. The various realism issues in biology do not seem to have that problem but there is still some unclarity about the nature of those issues, as David Hull notes. The most active of the issues (...) arise out of the debate between “species monists” who think that there is just one good “species concept” – one good account of what it is to be a species – and “species pluralists” who think that there are many. Hull finds the combinations of monism + realism and pluralism + antirealism “quite natural” but the combinations of monism + antirealism and pluralism + realism “somewhat strained.” Still, he notes that “real can be defined in such a way” as to remove these strains (1999: 25-6). So he sees the issue as partly a verbal one over definitions. (shrink)

One of the more draining aspects of being a clinical ethicist is dealing with the emotions of patients, family members, as well as healthcare providers. Generally, by the time a clinical ethicist is called into a case, stress levels are running high, patience is low, and interpersonal communication is strained. Management of this emotional burden of clinical ethics is an underexamined aspect of the profession and academic literature. The emotional nature of doing clinical ethics consultation may be better addressed by (...) utilizing concepts and tools from clinical psychology. Management of countertransference, the natural emotional reaction by the therapist toward the patient, is a widely discussed topic in the psychotherapeutic literature. This concept can be adapted to the clinical ethics encounter by broadening it beyond the patient-therapist relationship to refer to the ethics consultant's emotional response toward the patient, the family, or other members the healthcare team. Further, it may aid the consultant because a recognition of the source and nature of these reactions can help maintain ‘critical distance’ and minimize bias in the same way that a psychologist maintains neutrality in psychotherapy. This paper will offer suggestions on how to manage these emotional responses and their burden in the clinical ethics encounter, drawing upon techniques and strategies recommended in the psychotherapeutic literature. Using these techniques may improve consultation outcomes and reduce the emotional burden on the clinical ethicist. (shrink)

This article addresses recent strains of white nationalism rooted within anxieties over demographic replacement. More broadly, the article argues that the contemporary politics of white grievance cannot be reduced to an ahistorical desire for racial supremacy. Rather, these anxieties represent the political reflex to perceptions of loss on the part of historical white majorities—a loss that takes a distinctly melancholic form in both discourse and practice. To understand white nationalism as a melancholic politics is to recognize the pathologies that stem (...) from its underlying psychodynamics. At the affectual level, for instance, the subject of white grievance is constituted as the subject of politicized rage through its organizing narratives. And ultimately, the politics of melancholic whiteness raises significant challenges for a democratic polity. Most fundamentally, the melancholic fixation upon loss forecloses the futurity required by a democratic politics. Upon diagnosing these destructive pathologies, the article goes on to propose alternatives to approach civic change in less destructive, more democratically generative fashion. (shrink)

Writing in a special issue of this journal dedicated to the theme “Irish Utopias” almost a decade ago, Tom Moylan framed in explicitly spatial terms the historical complexity of the utopian problematic in the Irish context and posited the existence of “a ‘utopian’ strain in Irish culture”: “[The] proclivity to imagine … hopeful other places, to think possibility by way of places that are, simultaneously, specifically located, bounded, and yet open and potentially transformative takes many forms in the Irish (...) cultural heritage, morphing through time, often contradictory or conflictual, yet often incorporating an oblique, prismatic entry to a marvellous space that enables the writer, singer, or artist (or traveller... (shrink)

Derrick Darby’s Rights, Race, and Recognition and Ronald R. Sundstrom’s The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice are two recent efforts to answer the challenges that race and racism pose to liberal theory. Darby draws upon civil rights and abolitionist discourse to advance an “externalist” account of political rights, while Sundstrom explores the strains placed upon liberalism by recent demographic trends. In this review essay, I provide a brief account of their overall arguments, and offer some further (...) critical considerations. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper reviews the dynamics behind, and ethical issues associated with, the phenomenon of drug resistance. Drug resistance is an important ethical issue partly because of the severe consequences likely to result from the increase in drug resistant pathogens if more is not done to control them. Drug resistance is also an ethical issue because, rather than being a mere quirk of nature, the problem is largely a product of drug distribution. Drug resistance results from the over‐consumption of antibiotics (...) by the wealthy; and it, ironically, results from the under‐consumption of antibiotics, usually by the poor or otherwise marginalized. In both kinds of cases the phenomenon of drug resistance illustrates why health (care) – at least in the context of infectious disease – should be treated as a (global) public good. The point is that drug resistance involves ‘externalities’ affecting third parties. When one patient develops a resistant strain of disease because of her over‐ or under‐consumption of medication, this more dangerous malady poses increased risk to others. The propriety of free‐market distribution of goods subject to externalities is famously dubious – given that the ‘efficiency’ rationale behind markets assumes an absence of externalities. Market failure in the context of drug resistance is partly revealed by the fact that no new classes of antibiotics have been developed since 1970. I conclude by arguing that the case of drug resistance reveals additional reasons – to those traditionally appealed to by bioethicists – for treating health care as something special when making policy decisions about its distribution. (shrink)

In this chapter I offer a critique of the received way of thinking about responsibility for collective inaction and propose an alternative approach that takes as its point of departure the epistemic agency exhibited by people navigating impossible situations together. One such situation is becoming increasingly common in the context of climate change: so-called “natural” disasters wreaking havoc on communities—flooding homes, collapsing infrastructures, and straining the capacities of existing organizations to safeguard lives and livelihoods. What happens when philosophical reflection begins (...) here—in places where the institutions and practices that have emerged over the last century seem incapable of addressing the problems communities face now, and where people find themselves turning to one another for the sake of their own survival? (shrink)

Derrick Darby’s Rights, Race, and Recognition and Ronald R. Sundstrom’s The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice are two recent efforts to answer the challenges that race and racism pose to liberal theory. Darby draws upon civil rights and abolitionist discourse to advance an “externalist” account of political rights, while Sundstrom explores the strains placed upon liberalism by recent demographic trends. In this review essay, I provide a brief account of their overall arguments, and offer some further (...) critical considerations. (shrink)

Global health emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic are contexts in which it is critical to draw upon learning from prior research and to conduct novel research to inform real-time decision-making and pandemic responses. While research is vitally important, however, emergencies are radically non-ideal contexts for its conduct, due to exceptional uncertainty, urgency, disruption, health needs, and strain on existing health systems, amongst other challenges. This generates novel ethical challenges and a broader conception of research ethics is necessary to (...) effectively address the complexity of pandemic research contexts. Going beyond traditional approaches to research ethics centring on the design of specific studies, this broader conception requires consideration of fundamental questions relating to the exercise of power and influence throughout research pathways, and a broader attention to both salient ethical issues, and the ethical responsibilities of stakeholders. These include important questions about responsibilities to gather evidence and generate knowledge systematically during emergencies, to implement policy responses in ways that are amenable to evaluation, and even potential moral obligations to participate in research. In situations of heightened uncertainty, additional questions arise about what constitutes sufficient evidence to justify the development and implementation of policy responses, and the responsibilities of scientific and social science researchers involved in policy-making processes. The four cases in this chapter prompt reflection on evolving and at times competing values and responsibilities of policy-makers, regulators, health authorities and researchers during the design and conduct of research, and proposed early implementation of research findings. These cases highlight issues arising when conducting research of national importance in a pandemic, where researchers are required to liaise with authorities responsible for pandemic responses and address complex ethical issues, including protecting the interests of participants and publics when tensions arise between prioritising the completion of research and accelerating the rollout of novel health interventions. This chapter invites reflection on the practical ethical implications of commitments to undertake research during emergencies, including the nature and scope of the relevant responsibilities of a range of stakeholders. (shrink)

What does it mean for men to join with women in preventing sexual assault and domestic violence? This book, based on life history interviews with men and women anti-violence activists, illuminates both the promise of men's violence prevention work, as well as the strains and tensions that inhere, both for men as feminist allies, and for the women they work with.

War lays bare death and our relation to it. And in the wars—or more precisely the memories of war—of the twentieth century, images of the deaths of countless faceless or nameless others eclipse the singularity of each victim’s death as well as the end of the world as such that each death signifies. Marc Crépon’s _The Thought of Death and the Memory of War_ is a call to resist such images in which death is no longer actual death since it (...) happens to anonymous others, and to seek instead a world in which mourning the other whose mortality we always already share points us toward a cosmopolitics. Crépon pursues this path toward a cosmopolitics of mourning through readings of works by Freud, Heidegger, Sartre, Patocka, Levinas, Derrida, and Ricœur, and others. The movement among these writers, Crépon shows, marks a way through—and against—twentieth-century interpretation to argue that no war, genocide, or neglect of people is possible without suspending how one relates to the death of another human being. A history of a critical strain in contemporary thought, this book is, as Rodolphe Gasché says in the Foreword, “a profound meditation on what constitutes evil and a rigorous and illuminating reflection on death, community, and world.” The translation of this work received financial support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. (shrink)

Judith Butler’s meditations on precarity have received considerable attention in recent years. This article proposes that an undertheorized strain of her argument offers productive resources for theorizing violence. The question extends beyond material acts, to ask how certain groups are rendered eligible for heightened, regularized violence – and, by extension, how liberal subjects are rendered complicit with policies at odds with their universalist commitments. At stake is a politics of sensibility that complicates and enriches juridico-institutionalist models. That said, when (...) Butler’s account is brought to bear on a wider range of cases, it encounters a set of questions it is not prepared to answer on its own terms. Accordingly, I propose some directions the argument would need to be expanded to do justice to its own normative intuitions. (shrink)

Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory is a largely valid critique of the rational choice approach to politics. Rational choice theory may be useful under some conditions, but a general characterization of these suggests that American political behavior is unpromising terrain. Some forms of behavior cannot without strain be treated as instrumental; some sources of behavior cannot be accomodated by any theory built wholly out of preferences and beliefs. Explaining cooperation, in particular, requires attention to normative, expressive, and intrinsic motivations (...) and social identification, and to the conditions in which they are mobilized. (shrink)

This paper launches a thought experiment the aim of which is to recover and defend an idea of nostalgia as something other than merely maudlin yearning after the days of yore. Much critical comment on nostalgia, in everyday parlance and in academic debate, begins from the standpoint that the time longed for was never really as it is now, nostalgically, imagined. The force and validity of this jibe is admitted in this paper, but it argues that the concept of nostalgia (...) can be reshaped and turned in quite different less reactive directions. A distinction between Nostalgia and nostalgias is coined in order to introduce a plural and critical version of nostalgic memory. The play of memory in nostalgias is exemplified through a focus on four topoi of experience which are strained, possibly even shattered, by the digitalisation and rationalisation of contemporary culture and society. Nostalgias of and for the body, nature, thought, and modernity itself are explored by comparison to themes of melancholy and utopia which arise in Frankfurt School critical theory as responses to a similarly perceived trauma and triumph of instrumental reason. I argue that ultimately the distinction between nostalgias and Nostalgia cannot be maintained - nostalgias are rather types or tropes of Nostalgia. However, through thinking Nostalgia along the lines of this neologism (nostalgias) we might come to see its dynamic and critical mnemonic potencies. Hence, the paper concludes that nostalgia ought not be simply contemned and dismissed as the conservative freezing of memories and images of a fake past. (shrink)

The rapid evolution of drug resistance remains a major obstacle for HIV therapy. The capacity of the virus for recombination is widely believed to facilitate the evolution of drug resistance. Here, we challenge this intuitive view. We develop a population genetic model of HIV replication that incorporates the processes of mutation, cellular superinfection, and recombination. We show that cellular superinfection increases the abundance of low fitness viruses at the expense of the fittest strains due to the mixing of viral proteins (...) during virion assembly. Moreover, we argue that whether recombination facilitates the evolution of drug resistance depends critically on how resistance mutations interact to determine viral fitness. Contrary to the commonly held belief, we find that, under the most plausible biological assumptions, recombination is expected to slow down the rate of evolution of multi‐drug‐resistant virus during therapy. BioEssays 26:180–188, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Talk of higher categories (ranks) like Genus and Family is ubiquitous in biology. Yet there is widespread skepticism about these categories. We can locate the source of this skepticism in the lack of “robust concepts” for these categories, robust theories of what it is to be in a certain category. A common defense of category talk is that its virtues are “just pragmatic and not theoretic”. But this strains credulity. We should suppose rather that talk of the higher categories does (...) theoretical work. What work? The paper proposes a “minimal concept” for a category, according to which the category is at least explanatory in marking out, in a rough and ready way, a level in the hierarchy of explanatory taxa. The skepticism is exaggerated. (shrink)

This essay engages an undertheorized form of democratic agency: the embodied spectacle that characterizes a strain of activist politics. Where an existing literature addresses “the spectacle” as a tactic of power, it does not do justice to how marginal groups have used radical bodily acts in order to intervene within the image-world of democratic politics. The essay argues that such performances represent a standing challenge to democratic theory and demand a more richly sensuous approach to how political claims are (...) made. Such forms of bodily theatre do not only “speak” in ways that exceed official civic discourses but, in so doing, they unsettle the space of citizenship. Ultimately, these bodies do something in being undone. (shrink)

This is a meticulous, thoughtful, and progressive analysis and defense of the central question: Does religious experience provide evidence for religious belief? He answers the question affirmatively, provided that religious experience can be shown to be veridical, noncontradictory, and coherent. In so doing, he echoes one strain of medieval and contemporary thinking, that having evidence and having faith are compatible. In the tradition of Anselm of Canterbury, faith seeks understanding.

Gene clustering is a useful exploratory technique to group together genes with similar expression levels under distinct cell cycle phases or distinct conditions. It helps the biologist to identify potentially meaningful relationships between genes. In this study, we propose a clustering method based on multivariate normal mixture models, where the number of clusters is predicted via sequential hypothesis tests: at each step, the method considers a mixture model of m components (m = 2 in the first step) and tests if (...) in fact it should be m - 1. If the hypothesis is rejected, m is increased and a new test is carried out. The method continues (increasing m) until the hypothesis is accepted. The theoretical core of the method is the full Bayesian significance test, an intuitive Bayesian approach, which needs no model complexity penalization nor positive probabilities for sharp hypotheses. Numerical experiments were based on a cDNA microarray dataset consisting of expression levels of 205 genes belonging to four functional categories, for 10 distinct strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. To analyze the method’s sensitivity to data dimension, we performed principal components analysis on the original dataset and predicted the number of classes using 2 to 10 principal components. Compared to Mclust (model-based clustering), our method shows more consistent results. (shrink)

The validity of an entailment has nothing to do with whether or not the components are true, false, necessary, or impossible; it has to do solely with whether or not there is a necessary connection between antecedent and consequent. Hence it is a mistake (we feel) to try to build a sieve which will “strain out” entailments from the set of material or strict “implications” present in some system of truth-functions, or of truth-functions with modality. Anderson and Belnap (1962, (...) p. 47). (shrink)

Individual and/or co-offenders fraudulent activities can have a devastating effect on a company’s reputation and credibility. Enron, Xerox, WorldCom, HIH Insurance and One.Tel are examples where stakeholders incurred substantial financial losses as a result of fraud and led to a loss of confidence in corporate dealings by the public in general. There are numerous theoretical approaches that attempt to explain how and why fraudulent acts occur, drawing on the fields of sociology, organisational, management and economic literature, but there is limited (...) empirical evidence published in accounting literature. This qualitative inductive study analyses perceptions and experiences of forensic accountants to gain insights into individual fraud and co-offending in order to determine whether the conceptual framework developed from literature accurately depicts the causes of fraud committed by individuals and groups in the twenty-first century. Findings from the study both support and extend the conceptual framework, demonstrating that strain and anomie can result in fraud, that deviant sub-groups recruit and coerce members by providing relief from strain, and that inadequate corporate governance mechanisms both contribute to fraud occurring, and provide the opportunity for fraudulent activities to be executed and often remain undetected. Additional factors emerging from this study were also identified as contributors to fraud, particularly relevant to the twenty-first century, and consequently, a refined conceptual framework is presented in the discussion and conclusion to the paper. (shrink)

We agree with Rachlin's aim to account for altruism within existing theory. However, his argument is implicitly dependent on social and cognitive constructs that are explicitly identified in other social-psychological theories. The account does not advance theory beyond available constructs (e.g., self-categorizations, motives, values, role-identities, and social structure), and Rachlin's implicit use of these strains the behaviorist account.

Husserl and Contemporary Thought contains twelve essays that address certain key themes in Husserl's thought, each in some way confronting issues critical to the Husserlian project. The essays first appeared in the 1982 volume of Research in Phenornenology. The "contemporary thought" in the title should be understood in a limited sense as refer- ring to certain strains of thinking pursued in the present decade, build- ing however on past research. The volume shows several directions in which contemporary thinkers are taking (...) Husserlian phenomenology. The most common direction is through an evaluative contrast between Husserl's vision and the ideas of other philosophers, some of whom listened to Husserl but went their own ways. The second direction taken is represented in a series of current works by active phenomenol- ogists. Some of these essays - and here we have the greatest concentra- tion on a single theme - expand upon Husserl's analyses concerning the temporality of human experience. Other essays take up the threads of long-standing debates among Husserl scholars. I will treat each group of essays - on other philosophers, on time, and on topics other than time in turn, although the essays do not follow this order in the volume. (shrink)

The avocado (Persea americana) is a major crop commodity worldwide. Moreover, avocado, a paleopolyploid, is an evolutionary “outpost” among flowering plants, representing a basal lineage (the magnoliid clade) near the origin of the flowering plants themselves. Following centuries of selective breeding, avocado germplasm has been characterized at the level of microsatellite and RFLP markers. Nonetheless, little is known beyond these general diversity estimates, and much work remains to be done to develop avocado as a major subtropical‐zone crop. Among the goals (...) of avocado improvement are to develop varieties with fruit that will “store” better on the tree, show uniform ripening and have better post‐harvest storage. Avocado transcriptome sequencing, genome mapping and partial genomic sequencing will represent a major step toward the goal of sequencing the entire avocado genome, which is expected to aid in improving avocado varieties and production, as well as understanding the evolution of flowers from non‐flowering seed plants (gymnosperms). Additionally, continued evolutionary and other comparative studies of flower and fruit development in different avocado strains can be accomplished at the gene expression level, including in comparison with avocado relatives, and these should provide important insights into the genetic regulation of fruit development in basal angiosperms. BioEssays 30:386–396, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Michael Haneke is one of the most important directors working in Europe today, with films such as Funny Games (1997), Code Unknown (2000), and Hidden (2005) interrogating modern ethical dilemmas with forensic clarity and merciless insight. Haneke's films frequently implicate both the protagonists and the audience in the making of their misfortunes, yet even in the barren nihilism of The Seventh Continent (1989) and Time of the Wolf (2003) a dark strain of optimism emerges, releasing each from its (...) terrible and inescapable guilt. It is this contingent and unlikely possibility that we find in Haneke's cinema: a utopian Europe. This collection celebrates, explicates, and sometimes challenges the worldview of Haneke's films. It examines the director's central themes and preoccupations--bourgeois alienation, modes and critiques of spectatorship, the role of the media--and analyzes otherwise marginalized aspects of his work, such as the function of performance and stardom, early Austrian television productions, the romanticism of The Piano Teacher (2001), and the 2007 shot-for-shot remake of Funny Games. (shrink)

On Michael Walzer's influential account, "dirty hands" characterizes the political leader's choice between absolutist moral demands (to abstain from torture) and consequentialist political reasoning (to do what is necessary to prevent the loss of innocent lives). The impulse to torture a "ticking bomb terrorist" is therefore at least partly pragmatic, straining against morality, while the desire to uphold a ban on torture is purely and properly a moral one. I challenge this Machiavellian view by reinterpreting the dilemma in the (...) framework of the Humean theory of justice and moral sentiment. By interpreting the ticking bomb scenario as a dramatic narrative, I argue that it appeals to properly moral sensibilities, which speak in favour of the use of force against the terrorist. The absolute ban on torture, by contrast, is an artificial virtue and a product of political prudence. On this account, the ticking bomb terrorist dilemma therefore imposes a different burden on the political leader from Walzer's version: an ethic of political responsibility demands that the political leader be prepared to sacrifice her moral soul by upholding the law against moral but politically imprudent demands to break it; while the ticking bomb romance appeals to her feelings of compassionate moral concern towards particular individuals. She dirties her hands morally, not by authorizing torture, but by allowing the terrorist's bomb to detonate and take the lives of the innocent. (shrink)

We are material beings in a material world, but we are also beings who have experiences and feelings. How can these subjective states be just a matter of matter? To defend materialism, philosophical materialists have formulated what is sometimes called "the phenomenal-concept strategy," which holds that we possess a range of special concepts for classifying the subjective aspects of our experiences. In Consciousness Revisited, the philosopher Michael Tye, until now a proponent of the the phenomenal-concept strategy, argues that the (...) strategy is mistaken. A rejection of phenomenal concepts leaves the materialist with the task of finding some other strategy for defending materialism. Tye points to four major puzzles of consciousness that arise: How is it possible for Mary, in the famous thought experiment, to make a discovery when she leaves her black-and-white room? In what does the explanatory gap consist and how can it be bridged? How can the hard problem of consciousness be solved? How are zombies possible? Tye presents solutions to these puzzles -- solutions that relieve the pressure on the materialist created by the failure of the phenomenal-concept strategy. In doing so, he discusses and makes new proposals on a wide range of issues, including the nature of perceptual content, the conditions necessary for consciousness of a given object, the proper understanding of change blindness, the nature of phenomenal character and our awareness of it, whether we have privileged access to our own experiences, and, if we do, in what such access consists. (shrink)

Michael Devitt is a distinguished philosopher of language. In this book he takes up one of the most important difficulties that must be faced by philosophical semantics: namely, the threat posed by holism. Three important questions lie at the core of this book: what are the main objectives of semantics; why are they worthwhile; how should we accomplish them? Devitt answers these 'methodological' questions naturalistically and explores what semantic programme arises from the answers. The approach is anti-Cartesian, rejecting the (...) idea that linguistic or conceptual competence yields any privileged access to meanings. This new methodology is used first against holism. Devitt argues for a truth-referential localism, and in the process rejects direct-reference, two-factor, and verificationist theories. The book concludes by arguing against revisionism, eliminativism, and the idea that we should ascribe narrow meanings to explain behaviour. (shrink)

Michael T. Ferejohn presents a new analysis of Aristotle's theory of explanation and scientific knowledge, in the context of its Socratic roots. Ferejohn shows how Aristotle resolves the tension between his commitment to the formal-case model of explanation and his recognition of the role of efficient causes in explaining natural phenomena.

All of the chapters have been written especially for the book by the leading scholars in the field.Michael I. Posner is Professor of Psychology at the ...

Michael Tye untangles the complex web of empirical and conceptual issues of the newly revived imagery debate in psychology between those that liken mental...

The central contention of The Implicit Mind is that understanding the two faces of spontaneity-its virtues and vices-requires understanding the "implicit mind." In turn, Michael Brownstein maintains that understanding the implicit mind requires the consideration of three sets of questions. First, what are implicit mental states? What kind of cognitive structure do they have? Second, how should we relate to our implicit attitudes? Are we responsible for them? Third, how can we improve the ethics of our implicit minds?

Michael Smith has written a series of seminal essays about the nature of belief and desire, the status of normative judgment, and the relevance of the views we take on both these topics to the accounts we give of our nature as free and responsible agents. This long awaited collection comprises some of the most influential of Smith's essays. Among the topics covered are: the Humean theory of motivating reasons, the nature of normative reasons, Williams and Korsgaard on internal (...) and external reasons, the nature of self-control, weakness of will, compulsion, freedom, responsibility, the analysis of our rational capacities, moral realism, the dispositional theory of value, the supervenience of the normative on the non-normative, the error theory, rationalist treatments of moral judgment, the practicality requirement on moral judgment and non-cognivist. This collection will be of interest to students in philosophy and psychology. (shrink)

The ideas of the German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege lie at the root of the analytic movement in philosophy; Michael Dummett is his leading modern critical interpreter and one of today's most eminent philosophers. This volume collects together fifteen of Dummett's classic essays on Frege and related subjects.

In this book, Michael Madary examines visual experience, drawing on both phenomenological and empirical methods of investigation. He finds that these two approaches—careful, philosophical description of experience and the science of vision—independently converge on the same result: Visual perception is an ongoing process of anticipation and fulfillment. Madary first makes the case for the descriptive premise, arguing that the phenomenology of vision is best described as on ongoing process of anticipation and fulfillment. He discusses visual experience as being perspectival, (...) temporal, and indeterminate; considers the possibility of surprise when appearances do not change as we expect; and considers the content of visual anticipation. Madary then makes the case for the empirical premise, showing that there are strong empirical reasons to model vision using the general form of anticipation and fulfillment. He presents a range of evidence from perceptual psychology and neuroscience, and reinterprets evidence for the two-visual-systems hypothesis. Finally, he considers the relationship between visual perception and social cognition. An appendix discusses Husserlian phenomenology as it relates to the argument of the book. Madary argues that the fact that there is a convergence of historically distinct methodologies itself is an argument that supports his findings. With Visual Phenomenology, he creates an exchange between the humanities and the sciences that takes both methods of investigation seriously. (shrink)

If my ability to react freely is constrained by forces beyond my control, am I still morally responsible for the things I do? The question of whether, how and to what extent we are responsible for our own actions has always been central to debates in philosophy and theology, and has been the subject of much recent research in cognitive science. And for good reason- the views we take on free will affect the choices we make as individuals, the moral (...) judgments we make of others, and they will inform public policy. Michael McKenna's text introduces this important subject with remarkable clarity, offering the first comprehensive overview of both incompatibilist and compatibilist stances. He begins by motivating both viewpoints, then provides classical accounts of each before giving students an in-depth examination of current scholarship in the free will debate. Topics covered include: the nature of free will the nature of determinism the nature of moral responsibility arguments for the incompatibility of free will and determinism arguments of the compatibility of free will and determinism libertarian theories of free will and moral responsibility compatibilist theories of free will and moral responsibility hard determinist and hard incompatibilist theories. (shrink)