In the chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit entitled “The Certainty and Truth of Reason,” Hegel discusses and criticizes the distinction between the inner and the outer as it relates to the theories of physiognomy and phrenology. This discussion is the third “Observation of Reason” following the “Observation of Nature” and “Observation of the relation of self-consciousness in its purity and its relation to external actuality,” the latter being a brief discussion of the status of logical and psychological laws. The (...) general aim of these sections on reason consists of describing the particular stages or moments of self-consciousness as reason. The confidence and certainty with which self-consciousness as reason approaches and appropriates the world distinguishes the stages of reason from the earlier discussed moments of self-consciousness. In these earlier stages, which are described as the moments of the master and slave, stoicism, skepticism, and the unhappy consciousness, the relation of consciousness to the other, or to what consciousness perceives as other than itself, is essentially problematic. Each stage is an attempt of self-consciousness to come to grips with what is not itself, and to secure its freedom by maintaining itself in spite of, or at the expense of, the world. (shrink)

Caplan & Waters's arguments for separate working memory subsystems for “interpretive” and “post-interpretive” comprehension processes do not have a solid empirical basis. The likely involvement of a separate phonological loop makes their memory-load data irrelevant to theory evaluation, and the lack of statistical power from nonoptimal experimental designs and analyses unfairly reduces the chances of detecting the relevant interactions.

This is an extended essay review of Tanya and Jeffrey Bub’s Totally Random: Why Nobody Understands Quantum Mechanics: A serious comic on entanglement. We review the philosophical aspects of the book, provide suggestions for instructors on how to use the book in a class setting, and evaluate the authors’ artistic choices in the context of comics theory. Although Totally Random does not defend any particular interpretation of quantum mechanics, we find that, in its mode of presentation, Totally Random is a (...) beautiful expression and illustration of the information-theoretic interpretation and its value. (shrink)

BackgroundThe amount of research utilizing health information has increased dramatically over the last ten years. Many institutions have extensive biobank holdings collected over a number of years for clinical and teaching purposes, but are uncertain as to the proper circumstances in which to permit research uses of these samples. Research Ethics Boards (REBs) in Canada and elsewhere in the world are grappling with these issues, but lack clear guidance regarding their role in the creation of and access to registries and (...) biobanks.MethodsChairs of 34 REBS and/or REB Administrators affiliated with Faculties of Medicine in Canadian universities were interviewed. Interviews consisted of structured questions dealing with diabetes-related scenarios, with open-ended responses and probing for rationales. The two scenarios involved the development of a diabetes registry using clinical encounter data across several physicians' practices, and the addition of biological samples to the registry to create a biobank.ResultsThere was a wide range of responses given for the questions raised in the scenarios, indicating a lack of clarity about the role of REBs in registries and biobanks. With respect to the creation of a registry, a minority of sites felt that consent was not required for the information to be entered into the registry. Whether patient consent was required for information to be entered into the registry and the duration for which the consent would be operative differed across sites. With respect to the creation of a biobank linked to the registry, a majority of sites viewed biobank information as qualitatively different from other types of personal health information. All respondents agreed that patient consent was needed for blood samples to be placed in the biobank but the duration of consent again varied.ConclusionParticipants were more attuned to issues surrounding biobanks as compared to registries and demonstrated a higher level of concern regarding biobanks. As registries and biobanks expand, there is a need for critical analysis of suitable roles for REBs and subsequent guidance on these topics. The authors conclude by recommending REB participation in the creation of registries and biobanks and the eventual drafting of comprehensive legislation. (shrink)

Russian thought has long been a hybrid of native and imported forms—or more accurately, native values were first conceptualized and systematized according to Western European categories. This essay considers select entries in the Handbook (primarily those discussing Hegel, Solovyov, Tolstoy, and twentieth-century prose writers) not from the perspective of “pure” or abstract philosophy, arguably a Western achievement, but in the context of three traditional Russian virtues: tselostnost’ [wholeness], lichnost’ [personhood], and organichnost’ [organicity]. Each of these virtues, or values, is paradoxical, (...) easily misconstrued, and easily abused. The essay ends speculatively on two studies: the personalist implications of Paul Contino’s exploration of “incarnational realism” in Dostoevsky, and Iain McGilchrist’s work on left- and right-hemispheres of the brain as contexts for the place of Russian thought in the larger world. (shrink)

Abstract:This article explores how philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson embraces the concept of experience as a means to live life as an experiment in order to welcome opportunities for the creation of new knowledge. The author uses Emerson's writings to argue that progress of thought and society can be made when one questions archaic fact, sees action and knowledge as inseparable, and views fearless experiencing as an invaluable event that can transform learning and lives.

A true announcement of the law of creation, if a man were found worthy to declare it, would carry art up into the kingdom of nature, and destroy its separate and contrasted existence. The Common Core State Standards for the teaching of literature are now in effect in forty-four states and the District of Columbia. As is the case with previous standards developed at the state level since the 1990s, the Common Core State Standards are framed within a familiar formalist (...) paradigm for literature instruction specifying that high school students will read and study recognized literary works of art, exhibit knowledge of literary history, and demonstrate proficiency using authorized methods for critical.. (shrink)

The Great New Wilderness Debate is an expansive, wide-ranging collection that addresses the pivotal environmental issues of the modern era. This eclectic volume on the varied constructions of “wilderness” reveals the recent controversies that surround those conceptions, and the gulf between those who argue for wilderness "preservation" and those who argue for "wise use." J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson have selected thirty-nine essays that provide historical context, range broadly across the issues, and set forth the positions of (...) the debate. Beginning with such well-known authors as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold, the collection moves forward to the contemporary debate and presents seminal works by a number of the most distinguished scholars in environmental history and environmental philosophy. The Great New Wilderness Debate also includes essays by conservation biologists, cultural geographers, environmental activists, and contemporary writers on the environment. (shrink)

American transcendentalism is essentially a kind of practice by which the world of facts and the categories of common sense are temporarily exchanged for the world of ideas and the categories of imagination. The point of this exchange is to make life better by lifting us above the conflicts and struggles that weigh on our souls. As these chains fall away, our souls rise to heightened experiences of freedom and union with the good. Emerson and Thoreau are the two (...) most significant nineteenth century proponents of American transcendentalism. (shrink)

We want real relations of the mind and the heart; we want friendship; we want knowledge; we want virtue; a more inward existence to read the history of each other. Ralph Waldo Emerson fiercely championed life as a living, pulsating experiment perpetually engaged and situated in relations. Beginning with Emerson’s first publication, Nature, when he claims that “a ray of relations passes from every other being” and that the human being cannot be understood without other beings and other (...) beings cannot be understood without the human being, Emerson argued that an interconnectedness of being and energy makes life a project of making sense of self, other, and society, with each playing indispensable... (shrink)

This book presents a sympathetic yet critical treatment of the major philosophical attempts to define a viable project for philosophy in the face of historical changes. McCarthy, then, proposes a comprehensive, critical, and methodological strategy of epistemic integration that fully respects the progressive and pluralistic character of contemporary science and common sense. The programs of Frege, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Sellers, Dewey, Quine, and Rorty are carefully presented and an assessment is made of their merits and limitations. This assessment results in (...) a defense of Lonergan’s integrative strategy — a nuanced philosophical strategy around which a gathering center could be built. McCarthy presents Lonergan’s work as containing the firm outline and partial execution of a philosophical project continuous with philosophy’s historic purposes and equal to the exigences of the present. The book examines a broad range of seminal topics and, after extended dialectical treatment of them, develops a coherent account of their interdependence. These topics include psychologism, intentionality, the limits of naturalism, semantical and epistemic realism, historical belonging, epistemic invariance, foundational analysis, the limitation of logic and of the linguistic turn, generalized empirical method, the interdependence of mind and language, the interplay of nature and history, and the critical appropriation of tradition. (shrink)

Stanley Cavell's work is distinctive not only in its importance to philosophy but also for its remarkable interdisciplinary range. Cavell is read avidly by students of film, photography, painting, and music, but especially by students of literature, for whom Cavell offers major readings of Thoreau, Emerson, Shakespeare, and others. In this first book-length study of Cavell's writings, Michael Fischer examines Cavell's relevance to the controversies surrounding poststructuralist literary theory, particularly works by Jacques Derrida, J. Hillis Miller, Paul de (...) Man, and Stanley Fish. Throughout his study, Fischer focuses on skepticism, a central concern of Cavell's multifaceted work. Cavell, following J. L. Austin and Wittgenstein, does not refute the radical epistemological questioning of Descartes, Hume, and others, but rather characterizes skepticism as a significant human possibility or temptation. As presented by Fischer, Cavell's accounts of both external-world and other-minds skepticism share significant affinities with deconstruction, a connection overlooked by contemporary literary theorists. Fischer follows Cavell's lead in examining how different genres address the problems raised by skepticism and goes on to show how Cavell draws on American and English romanticism in fashioning a response to it. He concludes by analyzing Cavell's remarks about current critical theory, focusing on Cavell's uneasiness with some of the conclusions reached by its practitioners. Fischer shows that Cavell's insights, grounded in powerful analyses of Descartes, Hume, and Wittgenstein, permit a fresh view of Derrida, Miller, de Man, and Fish. The result is not only a revealing characterization of deconstruction but a much-needed and insightful introduction to Cavell's rich but difficult oeuvre. (shrink)

Douglas R. Anderson's Philosophy Americana reads like a series of rescue attempts: an attempt to rescue academic teaching from institutional and bureaucratic logic; to rescue philosophers such as Bugbee and Royce from their pragmatist critics; to rescue the pragmatists themselves from their would-be champions among the postmodernists; to (in a related move) save Emerson from Cavell; to save country music from the charge that it is either politically retrograde or an experiential dead-end; and to save Kerouac and the Beats (...) from the charge of nihilism or its more enjoyable cousin, hedonism. Anderson connects his chapters through a common theme: the centrality of failure and loss to American culture and the need to both be at home in/with it and to move beyond its self-limiting aspects. Though this rubric may provide us with a clue as to Anderson's temperament as a writer it does not finally provide an adequate frame for the book, which reads more like a book of related essays than... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Michael Fischer ACCEPTING THE ROMANTICS AS PHILOSOPHERS The romanticsarenot widely regarded as philosophers, at least not in philosophy departments, where they are seldom taught.1 Some of the reasons behind this exclusion of the Romantics involve a general disdain for literature; other reasons suggest a more specific uneasiness with Romanticism itself—with its apparent interest in animism, its selfindulgence, its coolness toward reason, and, perhaps above all, its refusal to (...) abide by Kant's containment of skepticism. These complaints are not the invention of paranoid or obtuse academic philosophers (as some literary critics might like to think). In fact, some ofthese objections have dogged the Romantics from the beginning. There is something risky, or outlandish, about Romanticism that these criticisms bring out. I want here to pursue what is at stake in accepting the Romantics as philosophers. In discussing what may be threatening about Romanticism, I will be drawing on the work of Stanley Cavell. Unlike most professional philosophers, Cavell declares his indebtedness to the Romantics, but unlike some literary critics, he appreciates the dangers of the Romantic quest that he nevertheless joins. The Romantics often leave Cavell feeling nervous and wretched, as Thoreau left Emerson— and as Cavell leaves many of his own readers. Cavell affirms Romanticism while acknowledging the risks that have repelled some ofits critics: hence his usefulness to me here. The Romantics' quarrel with Kant perhaps best accounts for the contempt, or indifference, that Romanticism can inspire in academic philosophers. Cavell pictures Kant as arriving at a settlement with skepticism, a compromise that concedes the inaccessibility of things-inthemselves, while reassuring us of our right to say that "we do know the existence of the world, or rather, that what we understand as knowl179 180Philosophy and Literature edge is ofthe world."2 For Kant, again as Cavell portrays him, limiting knowledge—by relinquishing any claim to know things-in-themselves— is necessary to shoring up knowledge, to our still claiming that there is such a thing. By "knowledge" Kant, in effect, means science: he saves science by positioning it between skepticism (the denial of knowledge) and fanaticism or dogmatism (the expansion of knowledge beyond acceptable limits). By affirming the possibility of (scientific) knowledge, Kant thus contains skepticism, or at least curtails its damage. But by putting thingsin -themselves beyond knowledge, he also gives in to skepticism. According to Cavell, the Romantics balk at this trade-off, saying, in effect, "Thanks for nothing." 3 Knowledge of things-in-themselves is precisely the knowledge that the Romantics are most interested in. From this point ofview, Kant concedes too much to skepticism—and gets too little in return. Resisting Kant accordingly entails putting us back in touch with things, or bringing us face-to-face with them, which in turn means showing that we can face things or shy away from them, presumably as we can confront or avoid people. Cavell finds examples of Romantic writers facing things and even listening to them in Waiden, the "Intimations" ode, and other texts.4 But I want to focus here on a poem that Cavell does not mention, "Tintern Abbey," where Wordsworth speaks of that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on,— Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In Body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power ofjoy, We see into the life of things. (11. 37-49) By "things" Wordsworth means nothing less than "all objects of all thought" (1. 101), "all that we behold / From this green earth"(11. 1045 ), "all the mighty world / Of eye, and ear" (U. 105-6). He specifically mentions "setting suns" (1. 97), "the round ocean and the living air, / Michael Fischer181 And the blue sky" (11. 97-98) and he declares himself "a lover of the meadows and the woods, / And mountains" (11. 103-4). In these lines—and others I need not cite—the world... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Using Stanley CavellMichael FischerContending with Stanley Cavell, edited by Russell B. Goodman, 205 pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, $45.00Reading Cavell, edited by Alice Crary and Sanford Shieh, 262 pp. London: Routledge, 2006, $120.00Stanley Cavell, edited by Richard Eldridge, 260 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, $24.99.Stanley Cavell often speaks of inheriting and carrying on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other (...) writers. These writers help him move on in his own thinking, turning him around when he feels lost, provoking him when he gets discouraged or stuck. His indebtedness to J. L. Austin in the acknowledgements to Must We Mean What We Say? (1969) captures one way he benefits from all the writers who have influenced him: "To the late J. L. Austin I owe, beyond what I hope is plain in my work, whatever is owed the teacher who shows one a way to do relevantly and fruitfully the thing one had almost given up hope of doing."1 By taking up the work of the writers he values, Cavell hopes to undo what he sees as their neglect and misappropriation by the culture at large and by the academic profession. He makes his case for these writers not so much by exhortation as by his own use of them.The impact of Cavell's own writing on his readers continues to unfold, as these three books attest. Each is a helpful collection of essays by scholars in various fields discussing his work. Reading Cavell includes [End Page 198] an essay by Cavell ("The Wittgensteinian Event"), as does Contending with Stanley Cavell ("Passionate and Performative Utterance: Morals of Encounter"), which also features a response by Cavell to the other essays in the volume.The contributors in these three volumes all begin from the assumption that Cavell, like the writers who have influenced him, remains marginalized even though interest in his work has grown. But his isolation can be overstated. In an otherwise insightful essay on Cavell's literary criticism ("The Avoidance of Stanley Cavell" in Contending with Stanley Cavell ), Garrett Stewart laments "the regrettable undercirculation of Cavell's ideas" (p. 140) in literary studies and predicts that "mainstream literary scholars will increasingly have a hard time" with his writing—Stewart calls it "literary prose"—because it calls on reading skills that in the "epoch of cultural studies, discourse analysis, and the semiotics of social energy" have "atrophied" (p. 153). In the introduction to this same volume, Russell Goodman offers a more measured, less pessimistic assessment that gets Cavell's peculiar professional status exactly right: "Cavell occupies a curious position in all the fields in which he works: he is at the same time a major figure and one whose work people do not quite know how to use" (p. 3).In figuring out how to use Cavell, several contributors to these volumes begin by explicating his key ideas and texts. The writers in Stanley Cavell assess his contributions to several broad areas, including ethics, theory of action, philosophy of mind and language, aesthetics, and Shakespeare criticism. Reading Cavell and Contending with Stanley Cavell include essays on such central topics as his view of skepticism and his understanding of the ordinary. Of special note is Stephen Mulhall's close reading of the opening of The Claim of Reason, "On Refusing to Begin," in Contending with Stanley Cavell. One barrier to using Cavell remains his style, which readers either love or hate. Mulhall shows that the very features of Cavell's writing that some readers find most annoying—for example, his penchant for complicating and qualifying even the apparently most obvious point—in fact instruct us in how to read him. Mulhall astutely describes The Claim of Reason and Philosophical Investigations as modernist texts written in the absence of philosophical conventions that the writers can take for granted. Such writing must resemble "a half-built edifice whose form acknowledges both its origin in ruins and the completion it foreshadows" (p. 32)—but never attains.In addition to explicating Cavell, other contributors to these volumes extend his work to texts and issues he does not address. These... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Stanley Cavell and Criticizing the University from WithinMichael FischerStanley Cavell has spoken often of his "lifelong quarrel with the profession of philosophy" but he has said less about the university as a whole and its pressures on all academic disciplines, philosophy included. 1 In Cavell's work, "academic" or "professional" philosophy takes shape in an institutional context he has not yet fully analyzed. I want here to extrapolate from Cavell's (...) work a critical, yet sympathetic, response to the university that I think is especially needed today, when the rise of the so-called corporate university is intensifying some of the professional pressures that Cavell resists.Cavell's discomfort with academic philosophy stems in part from what he regards as its narrowness, specifically, its marginalization of Ludwig Wittgenstein and other philosophers, not to mention Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the comedies of remarriage, and other work that Cavell cares about. In his view, the professional marginalization of these writers partly results from their exemplifying what can seem to be a vague moral seriousness, even at times a prophetic urgency, that calls for something akin to conversion rather than issuing in specific conclusions or reforms. According to Cavell, academic philosophy, by contrast, subsumes moral concerns under ethics, a separate field in which the "point of conversation is getting the other to agree to, or to do, something." 2Although Cavell does not systematically analyze the institutional pressures on academic philosophy, he does drop some hints. As befitting a subject seeking legitimacy in the university, academic philosophy has aligned itself with teachable subjects such as science, as opposed to more elusive pursuits such as painting and creative writing, which [End Page 471] have been less at home in the university and where the necessity of university instruction may be less clear and the line between success and failure harder to draw. 3 What can be taught in academic philosophy is a method of analysis, mastery of which can be certified in students by professors and in professors by journals, promotion and tenure committees, and administrators. Subdividing philosophy into discrete fields such as ethics makes it even more manageable, or less susceptible to sweeping pronouncements that cannot be tested by experts. Finally, the interest in getting "the other to agree to, or to do, something" associates academic philosophy, or at least ethics, with measurable results and maybe even progress.The rise of the so-called corporate university has exacerbated the emphasis on teachable expertise and definable outcomes that I have been describing. Take the largest private university in the United States—the University of Phoenix—as a model that some state and non-profit private universities may be emulating as they struggle to cut costs, meet external expectations, and work with reduced budgets. At the University of Phoenix, the interest in measurable results gets recast as learning outcomes that teachers enable students to reach as efficiently as possible. Specialization narrows these learning outcomes to sharply defined skills, such as writing business memos, which students can master and build on. Finally, the emphasis on method does not simply depersonalize instruction; it reduces the need for instructors. Each instructor is tasked with teaching as many students as possible, sometimes through distance learning, with class size reaching a limit only when the learning outcomes cannot be delivered. Lacking tenure, these instructors can be replaced, like interchangeable parts, when they wear out or their student customers become too dissatisfied with them. At another rapidly growing for-profit university, DeVry, students unhappy with their instructors are assured, in the words of a campus dean, that "weak links" will be "fixed" in a "total quality management" environment. 4Along similar lines, Lindsay Waters has recently explored how "the corporate makeover of the university" and "the commercialization of higher education" have affected academic publishing. 5 Universities compete in an increasingly cutthroat marketplace and face an escalating insistence on results from state legislatures, federal agencies, accrediting associations, and boards. Capitulating to this "accountability culture" (EP, p. 20), bottom-line driven administrators have stepped up demands for faculty productivity, measured in quantitative terms by numbers of students taught, grants won, and, what most concerns Waters, books and [End... (shrink)

This article argues that Ralph Waldo Emerson employs metempsychosis (reincarnation or the transmigration of the soul into successive bodies) as a figurative template for human consciousness. Mapping various traditions from Hinduism, Pythagoreanism, Platonism, and Neoplatonism onto the vastness of the geological and biological records, Emerson translates metaphysics for modernity: he depicts the soul's journey through the chronological sequence of history as a poetic process that culminates in a tenuous form of self-knowledge.

John William Miller's radical revision of the idealistic tradition anticipated some of the most important developments in contemporary thought. In this study, Vincent Colapietro situates Miller's powerful but neglected corpus not only in reference to Continental European philosophy but also to paradigmatic figures in American culture like Lincoln, Emerson, Thoreau, and James.

Essays and poems explore the contemporary relevance of Emerson’s work and thought.

What does Emerson want for himself and for us, or, put another way, what does he do in his writings as a whole? Can we understand Emerson's writings today? One critic, F. O. Matthiessen, in his American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, pithily remarks that some of Emerson's philosophical essays are "generally unreadable";1 Len Gougeon, however, argues that we can know something about Emerson. Gougeon suggests that Emerson emphasizes (...) the individual and the American political sphere, noting Emerson's increased focus on the political climate as America approached civil war.2 Crucial to his argument is the transformation of Emerson the man into one of the most... (shrink)

Portraits of Confucius presents a major collection of Western perspectives on Confucius and Confucianism, stretching from the Jesuit missions of the 16th-century to the dawn of modern cross-cultural scholarship in the early 20th-century. With selections from over 100 figures covering the 1580s to the 1950s, this two-volume work features writing from American and European sources including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Bertrand Russell. Arranged chronologically, they represent methodologies that span philosophy, political (...) science, religious studies, sociology, anthropology, economic theory, linguistics, missionary texts, and works of popular moralism. Together they reveal important ideological trends in Western attitudes toward China-with Confucius becoming positioned at different times as anti-Christian or nearly Christ-like, while Confucianism is interpreted as something positive the West needs to adopt or as something negative that must be opposed. For scholars and students interested in the life, work and teachings of Confucius and the West's reception of Chinese philosophy, this is an indispensable reference resource. (shrink)

This book offers a philosophical reflection on the nature of language by reading some exemplary works of literature. Drawing on the thought of philosophers—especially Plato, Kant, Hegel, Emerson, Benjamin, Adorno, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, the author argues that language is the bearer of a utopian or messianic promise of happiness, and that by redeeming the revelatory power of words, the two writers in this study are contributing to the redemption of the promise of happiness in a world of reconciled antagonisms (...) and contradictions. (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)

This timely anthology contains five pieces of republished poetry (and one original poem) and eleven essays of varying length taking mostly contemporary stances on—and thus hoping to spur the on-going reception into the twenty-first century of—the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The assortment of the texts is heterogeneous, yet showing a slight philosophical emphasis: among the eleven essays, half a dozen are by authors trained in philosophy, a couple by literary scholars, and another couple by poets. The prose pieces (...) are previously unpublished, excluding the classical essays by Robert C. Pollock (published originally in 1958) and John J. McDermott (1980), as well as John Lysaker's thought-provoking meditation "Taking.. (shrink)

In this paper, drawing upon Tosaka Jun’s response to Interwar debates on historicism and his account of everydayness, I offer an explanation for why contemporary secular apocalyptic claims lack convergence by focusing on the historical dimension of such claims. Everydayness, organized the routines of work and rest, is shown to be the basis for a sense of historical time, and theoretical journalism is outlined as the kind of collective epistemic procedure needed to produce a collective sense of a community’s place (...) in historical time. I defend the claim that the cause of starkly opposed responses to apocalyptic claims is due to qualitative differences in the work and rest that organize the everyday temporality. In the absence of a theoretical journalism, whether one subscribes to an apocalyptic claim will be contingent on heterogeneous personal circumstance. I conclude by outlining a limit case of indigenous post-apocalyptic claims under settler-colonialism. (shrink)

In this paper I outline the PAIR account of joint attention as a perceptual-practical, affectively charged intentional relation. I argue that to explain joint attention we need to leave the received understanding of propositions and propositional attitudes and the picture of content connected to it behind and embrace the notions of subject mode and position mode content. I also explore the relation between joint attention and communication.

Morals from Motives develops a virtue ethics inspired more by Hume and Hutcheson's moral sentimentalism than by recently-influential Aristotelianism. It argues that a reconfigured and expanded "morality of caring" can offer a general account of right and wrong action as well as social justice. Expanding the frontiers of ethics, it goes on to show how a motive-based "pure" virtue theory can also help us to understand the nature of human well-being and practical reason.

This work is Emerson's set of essays published in 1860 just before the start of the Civil War: 'Fate,' 'Power,' 'Wealth,' 'Culture,' 'Behavior,' 'Worship,' 'Considerations by the Way,' 'Beauty,' 'Illusions.'.

This book fills a gap in studies of meaning by providing detailed case studies of attested corpus data on the meanings of words and phrases.