This paper explores a remarkable convergence of ideas and evidence, previously presented in separate places by its authors. That convergence has now become so persuasive that we believe we are working within substantially the same broad framework. Taylor's mathematical papers on neuronal systems involved in consciousness dovetail well with work by Newman and Baars on the thalamocortical system, suggesting a brain mechanism much like the global workspace architecture developed by Baars (see references below). This architecture is relational, in the (...) sense that it continuously mediates the interaction of input with memory. While our approaches overlap in a number of ways, each of us tends to focus on different areas of detail. What is most striking, and we believe significant, is the extent of consensus, which we believe to be consistent with other contemporary approaches by Weiskrantz, Gray, Crick and Koch, Edelman, Gazzaniga, Newell and colleagues, Posner, Baddeley, and a number of others. We suggest that cognitive neuroscience is moving toward a shared understanding of consciousness in the brain. (shrink)

Do our lives have meaning? Should we create more people? Is death bad? Should we commit suicide? Would it be better if we were immortal? Should we be optimistic or pessimistic? Life, Death, and Meaning brings together key readings, primarily by English-speaking philosophers, on such 'big questions.'.

Do our lives have meaning? Should we create more people? Is death bad? Should we commit suicide? Would it be better to be immortal? Should we be optimistic or pessimistic? Since Life, Death, and Meaning: Key Philosophical Readings on the Big Questions first appeared, David Benatar's distinctive anthology designed to introduce students to the key existential questions of philosophy has won a devoted following among users in a variety of upper-level and even introductory courses.

This collection is a festschrift prepared for Williams on his retirement from the White’s Professorship of Moral Philosophy at Oxford. The topics covered include equality, consistency, comparison between science and ethics, integrity, moral reasons, the moral system, and moral knowledge. Most of the chapters combine exegetical and critical ambitions. With contributions by J. E. J. Altham, Jon Elster, Nicholas Jardine, Ross Harrison, Christopher Hookway, John McDowell, Martin Hollis, Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen, and Charles Taylor, and replies by Bernard (...) Williams. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This article discusses the contributions of American industrial engineers Frank and Lillian Gilbreth to management thought. It suggests that the work of the Gilbreths represents a very modernist form of rationalization, of the measuring, categorization, recording, and governing of work, work methods, employees, and processes. The motion studies and uses of psychology stressed by the Gilbreths would seem to represent some of the most pronounced forms of governance of production in the history of management thought. Frederick Taylor’s mental revolution (...) entailed recourse to a ‘science’ of management as the ultimate arbiter of work processes. The committing of processes to writing and film would be Taylorized even more completely under Frank Gilbreth’s motion study, while workers would be enrolled more fully into the new labour process by the equally coercive and ideologized Taylorization of their minds in Lillian Gilbreth’s much more teacherly psychology of management. (shrink)

Bernard Williams distinguishes moral incapacities – incapacities that are themselves an expression of the moral life – from mere psychological ones in terms of deliberation. Against Williams I claim there are examples of such moral incapacity where no possible deliberation is involved – that an agent's incapacity may be a primitive feature or fact about their life. However Michael Clark argues that my claim here leaves the distinction between moral and psychological incapacity unexplained, and that an adequate understanding of (...) the kind of examples I suggest must involve at least some implicit reference to deliberation. In this paper I attempt to meet Clark's objection and further clarify my account of primitive moral incapacities by considering an example from Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. What this example shows, I argue, is how our characterization of an agent's response as a moral incapacity turns not on the idea of deliberation but on the way certain primitive incapacities for action are connected to a larger pattern of response in an agent's life, a pattern of response that itself helps to constitute our conception of that agent's character and the moral life more generally. (shrink)

This book discusses Thomistic commentary on the topics of physical premotion, grace, and the permission of sin, especially as these relate to the mysteries of predestination and reprobation. The author examines the fundamental tenets of the classical Thomistic account, and on this basis critiques the 20th century revisionist theories of Domingo Banez, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Francisco Marin-Sola, Jacques Maritain, Bernard Lonergan, and Jean-Herve Nicolas. In conclusion, the implications of the traditional view are considered in light of the spiritual life.

With his clear and accessible prose, impeccable scholarship, and balanced Judgment, Roland Teske, SJ, has been an influential and important voice in Medieval philosophy for more than thirty years. This volume, in his honour, brings together more than a dozen essays on central metaphysical and theological themes in Augustine and other medieval thinkers. The authors, listed below, are noted scholars who draw upon Teskes work, reflect on it, go beyond it, and at times even disagree with it, but always in (...) a spirit of respectful co-operation, and always with the aim of getting at the truth. Essays on Augustine contributed by Gerald Bonner, Charles Brittain, Joseph Koterski, SJ, Joseph T. Lienhard, SJ, David Vincent Meconi, SJ, Ann A. Pang-White, Frederick Van Fleteren, Dorothea Weber, and James Wetzel. Essays on Bernard of Clairvaux, William of Auvergne, and other medieval themes contributed by John P. Doyle, William Harmless, SJ, John A. Laumakis, Edward P. Mahoney, and Philipp W. Rosemann. (shrink)

Herbert Spencer: Legacies explores and assesses the impact of the ideas and work of the great Victorian polymath Herbert Spencer across a wide range of disciplines. In the course of the essays a significant re-evaluation of his influence on Victorian and Edwardian thought is provided. Spencer's contribution to the fields of sociology, anthropology, psychology, biology and ecology are considered, alongside his influence on key figures in science and philosophy. The book brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to (...) explore Spencer's nuanced and complex ideas and will be invaluable for historians of science and ideas, and all those interested in the intellectual culture of the late Victorian and Edwardian period. Contributors: Peter J. Bowler, James Elwick, Mark Francis, Bernard Lightman, Chris Renwick, Vanessa L. Ryan, John Skorupski, Michael W. Taylor, Stephen Tomlinson, and Jonathan H. Turner. (shrink)

With his clear and accessible prose, impeccable scholarship, and balanced Judgment, Roland Teske, SJ, has been an influential and important voice in Medieval philosophy for more than thirty years. This volume, in his honour, brings together more than a dozen essays on central metaphysical and theological themes in Augustine and other medieval thinkers. The authors, listed below, are noted scholars who draw upon Teskes work, reflect on it, go beyond it, and at times even disagree with it, but always in (...) a spirit of respectful co-operation, and always with the aim of getting at the truth. Essays on Augustine contributed by Gerald Bonner, Charles Brittain, Joseph Koterski, SJ, Joseph T. Lienhard, SJ, David Vincent Meconi, SJ, Ann A. Pang-White, Frederick Van Fleteren, Dorothea Weber, and James Wetzel. Essays on Bernard of Clairvaux, William of Auvergne, and other medieval themes contributed by John P. Doyle, William Harmless, SJ, John A. Laumakis, Edward P. Mahoney, and Philipp W. Rosemann. (shrink)

This article is an evocatively written account of Bernard Baars’ latest ideas about the Global Workspace approach to consciousness, one he pioneered in his important book on the topic in 1988. He writes fluently and brings strong images to mind, especially with the metaphor of the ‘Working Theatre’. As with everything he writes, I enjoyed reading it. It is strong and heady stuff. When I finished I sat back and attempted to assess the claim that the best answer today (...) with which to understand the present evidence about consciousness is a ‘global workspace architecture’, especially along the lines of the Global Workspace of Baars. (shrink)

Bernard Williams distinguishes moral incapacities – incapacities that are themselves an expression of the moral life – from mere psychological ones in terms of deliberation. Against Williams I claim there are examples of such moral incapacity where no possible deliberation is involved – that an agent's incapacity may be a primitive feature or fact about their life. However Michael Clark argues that my claim here leaves the distinction between moral and psychological incapacity unexplained, and that an adequate understanding of (...) the kind of examples I suggest must involve at least some implicit reference to deliberation. In this paper I attempt to meet Clark's objection and further clarify my account of primitive moral incapacities by considering an example from Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. What this example shows, I argue, is how our characterization of an agent's response as a moral incapacity turns not on the idea of deliberation but on the way certain primitive incapacities for action are connected to a larger pattern of response in an agent's life, a pattern of response that itself helps to constitute our conception of that agent's character and the moral life more generally. (shrink)

Bernard Williams questioned whether impartial morality “can allow for the importance of individual character and personal relations in moral experience.” Underlying his position is a distinction between factual and practical deliberation. While factual deliberation is about the world and brings in a standpoint that is impartial, practical deliberation is, he claims, radically first‐personal; it “involves an I that [is] intimately the I of my desires.” While it may be thought that Williams's claim implies an unpalatable Humean subjectivism, the present (...) article argues that this does not follow: That first‐person practical deliberation is directed both by the “I of my desires” and by the world. Drawing on Peter Winch's argument against the universalizability of moral judgments and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, the article argues that practical deliberations involve discovering value in the world, but that what is revealed about the world depends constitutively on the first‐person deliberations and decisions of particular agents. (shrink)

A discussion of egoism and altruism as related both to ethical theory and moral psychology. Williams considers and rejects various arguments for and against the existence of egoistic motives and the rationality of someone motivated by self-interest. He ultimately attempts to give a more Humean defense of altruism, as opposed to the more Kantian defenses found in Thomas Nagel, for example.

Let $D_{tt} $ denote the set of truth-table degrees. A bijection π: $D_{tt} \to \,D_{tt} $ is an automorphism if for all truth-table degrees x and y we have $ \leqslant _{tt} \,y\, \Leftrightarrow \,\pi (x)\, \leqslant _{tt} \,\pi (y)$ . We say an automorphism π is fixed on a cone if there is a degree b such that for all $x \geqslant _{tt} b$ we have π(x) = x. We first prove that for every 2-generic real X we have (...) X' $X' \le _{tt} \,X\, \oplus \,0'$ . We next prove that for every real $X \ge _{tt} \,0'$ there is a real Y such that $Y \oplus 0{\text{'}}\, \equiv _{tt} \,Y{\text{'}} \equiv _{tt} \,X$ . Finally, we use this to demonstrate that every automorphism of the truth-table degrees is fixed on a cone. (shrink)

The essays are arranged in two sections of ethical topics and a section on philosophy, evolution, and the human sciences that includes the title essay, “Making Sense of Humanity.” In World, Mind and Ethics, excellent pieces by Elster, Sen, Jardine, Hookway, McDowell, Nussbaum, Charles Taylor, Altham, and Hollis range even more widely: over ethics, political philosophy, and epistemology, reflecting some of the breadth of Williams’s interests.

Background: This article describes the types of community‐wide benefits provided by investigators conducting public health research in South Asia as well as their self‐reported reasons for providing such benefits.Methods: We conducted 52 in‐depth interviews to explore how public health investigators in low‐resource settings make decisions about the delivery of ancillary care to research subjects. In 39 of the interviews respondents described providing benefits to members of the community in which they conducted their study. We returned to our narrative dataset to (...) find answers to two questions: What types of community‐wide benefits do researchers provide when conducting public health intervention studies in the community setting, and what reasons do researchers give when asked why they provided community‐wide benefits?Findings: The types of community‐wide benefits delivered were directed to the health and well‐being of the population. The most common types of benefits delivered were the facilitation of access to health care for individuals in acute medical need and emergency response to natural disasters. Respondents' self‐reported reasons when asked why they provided such benefits fell into 2 general categories: intrinsic importance and instrumental importance. (shrink)

Anderson and Csima :245–264, 2014) defined a jump operator, the bounded jump, with respect to bounded Turing reducibility. They showed that the bounded jump is closely related to the Ershov hierarchy and that it satisfies an analogue of Shoenfield jump inversion. We show that there are high bounded low sets and low bounded high sets. Thus, the information coded in the bounded jump is quite different from that of the standard jump. We also consider whether the analogue of the Jump (...) Theorem holds for the bounded jump: do we have A≤bTB\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$A \le _{bT}B$$\end{document} if and only if Ab≤1Bb\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$A^b \le _1 B^b$$\end{document}? We show the forward direction holds but not the reverse. (shrink)