Christopher Boehm's always intriguing and stimulating work in biological anthropology in some ways revives the interest in reconstructing origins which preoccupied cultural anthropology in the last half of the nineteenth century. This essay falls into a difficulty the earlier studies encountered, a tendency to metaphysical speculation leading to assertions which do not readily lend themselves to the confirmation or disconfirmation procedures that allow scientific advance. More seriously, the notion of ‘common good’ is also less precise and nuanced than any theory (...) of morality and its origins requires. (shrink)

This article discusses a complexity-informed review and evaluation project. Complexity-informed methods and techniques are used to fashion understanding of the relationships and processes implicated between the service agencies constituting the Youth Accommodation Interagency - Nepean (YAIN) and their Resource Worker, the influence of these relationships and processes on the achievement of desired and required goals, and the potential for replication of these relationships and processes elsewhere. The article concludes with critical reflection regarding what was learnt from utilizing complexity in this (...) qualitative inquiry. (shrink)

The central feature of the narrative structure of Collingwood’s The Idea of History is the pivotal role accorded to Bradley, evident in the table of contents and in the two discussions of him. Few readers have noticed that, confusingly, the book’s first discussion of Bradley is a revision of the Inaugural Lecture “The Historical Imagination,” which constitutes the book’s second discussion of Bradley . The differences between these two presentations of Bradley are significant. The 1935 account seeks to portray the (...) Bradley of the Presuppositions of Critical History as a Copernican revolutionary in historical thought, even though the neo-Kantian transcendentalism promoted in the Lecture had been the core of Collingwood’s approach to philosophy of history from the mid-1920s, many years before he encountered Bradley’s essay. By 1935 this transcendentalism was in the process of self-destructing because of inner contradictions. By 1936, once Collingwood’s narrative and his criticisms of Bradley left the 1935 claims unsustainable, Collingwood shifted attention to Bradley’s later works, in an unsuccessful attempt to sustain the notion of his originality . Hitherto neglected Collingwood manuscripts held in the Bodleian prove that by 1940 Collingwood recognized this, so that the prominence Knox gave to Bradley in his editing of the IH is demonstrably not in accord with Collingwood’s views and plans for The Idea of History. Knox’s much-disputed claim that there was a radical shift to historicism in the later Collingwood is, however, confirmed, clear proof being adduced that in the later 1930s the attempt transcendentally to deduce universal and necessary presuppositions of historical knowledge is abandoned for a radically historicist account, paralleled by a demotion of “critical history” as the final form of “history proper” in favor of “scientific history.”. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe central feature of the narrative structure of Collingwood's The Idea of History is the pivotal role accorded to Bradley, evident in the table of contents and in the two discussions of him. Few readers have noticed that, confusingly, the book's first discussion of Bradley is a revision of the Inaugural Lecture “The Historical Imagination,” which constitutes the book's second discussion of Bradley. The differences between these two presentations of Bradley are significant. The 1935 account seeks to portray the Bradley (...) of the Presuppositions of Critical History as a Copernican revolutionary in historical thought, even though the neo‐Kantian transcendentalism promoted in the Lecture had been the core of Collingwood's approach to philosophy of history from the mid‐1920s, many years before he encountered Bradley's essay. By 1935 this transcendentalism was in the process of self‐destructing because of inner contradictions. By 1936, once Collingwood's narrative and his criticisms of Bradley left the 1935 claims unsustainable, Collingwood shifted attention to Bradley's later works, in an unsuccessful attempt to sustain the notion of his originality.Hitherto neglected Collingwood manuscripts held in the Bodleian prove that by 1940 Collingwood recognized this, so that the prominence Knox gave to Bradley in his editing of the IH is demonstrably not in accord with Collingwood's views and plans for The Idea of History. Knox's much‐disputed claim that there was a radical shift to historicism in the later Collingwood is, however, confirmed, clear proof being adduced that in the later 1930s the attempt transcendentally to deduce universal and necessary presuppositions of historical knowledge is abandoned for a radically historicist account, paralleled by a demotion of “critical history” as the final form of “history proper” in favor of “scientific history.”. (shrink)

Robert Knox (1791–1862) is typically remembered as the Edinburgh anatomist to whom the murderers Burke and Hare sold the bodies of their victims. This association brought Knox infamy and damaged his life and career. Before the Burke and Hare scandal, Knox was one of the most famous, original and influential anatomists in Britain. He was also something of a dandy with a sophisticated appreciation of the visual arts. His most significant writings on artistic subjects were his books A Manual (...) of Artistic Anatomy and Great Artists and Great Anatomists: A Biographical and Philosophical Study. Knox's interesting and independently minded opinions on the central artistic questions of his day were taken seriously by his contemporaries. His demotion in the official history of anatomy following his involvement with Burke and Hare, however, also removed him from the history of art theory in 19th century Britain. Knox was such a magnetic and impressive figure, though, that he has to be brought back to his era and his era is not complete without him. This paper discusses how Knox's writings on anatomy and biology shaped his contributions to art theory. It is a first step towards returning Knox, the art theorist, to the cultural life of 19th century Britain. (shrink)

SUMMARYThe duck-billed platypus, or Ornithorhynchus, was the subject of an intense debate among natural historians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Its paradoxical mixture of mammalian, avian and reptilian characteristics made it something of a taxonomic conundrum. In the early 1820s Robert Jameson, the professor of natural history at the University of Edinburgh and the curator of the University's natural history museum, was able to acquire three valuable specimens of this species. He passed one of these on (...) to the anatomist Robert Knox, who dissected the animal and presented his results in a series of papers to the Wernerian Natural History Society, which later published them in its Memoirs. This paper takes Jameson's platypus as a case study on how natural history specimens were used to create and contest knowledge of the natural world in the early nineteenth century, at a time when interpretations of the relationships between animal taxa were in a state of flux. It shows how Jameson used his possession of this interesting specimen to provide a valuable opportunity for his protégé Knox while also helping to consolidate his own position as a key figure in early nineteenth-century natural history. (shrink)

This response to Robert Knox’s very kind and constructive review1 of my 2008 book The Degradation of the International Legal Order: The Rehabilitation of Law and the Possibility of Politics gives me the opportunity not only to answer some of his criticisms, but also, on the basis of my own reflections since 2008, to fill in some gaps. Indeed, to revise a number of my arguments. First, I restate my attempt at a materialist account of human rights. Next I (...) explain why, for me, the right of peoples to self-determination is absolutely central to a materialist understanding of human rights; and also fill a serious gap in my own account in the book. This leads me not only to a reply to Robert Knox on the question of ‘indeterminacy’ in international law, but also to a disagreement with him on the use or misuse of the language of self-determination. My fourth section returns to our very different evaluations of the significance and meaning of the work of Yevgeny Pashukanis, and what, for me, is Pashukanis’s misunderstanding, for reasons consistent with his general theoretical trajectory, of Marx and Lenin on the Irish question. Finally, I present an outline of a re-evaluation of Marx’s principled position on self-determination. (shrink)

Historians are now generally agreed that the Darwinian recognition and institutionalization of the polygenist position was more than merely nominal.194 Wallace, Vogt, and Huxley had led the way, and we may add Galton (1869) to the list of those leading Darwinians who incorporated a good deal of polygenist thinking into their interpretions of human history and racial differences.195 Eventually “Mr. Darwin himself,” as Hunt had suggested he might, consolidated the Darwinian endorsement of many features of polygenism. Darwin's Descent of Man (...) was published in the same year that the Anthropological Institute was founded, and it was no coincidence that it was broadly congruent with Knoxian/ Anthropological race science. Recent scholarship has stressed the derivative character of the Descent, and Darwin's views on race were clearly influenced by the earlier interpretations of the abovecited Darwinians.196However, although the Descent was written in the light of the anthropological struggles of the 1860s, it is essential to acknowledge its origins in Darwin's notebooks of the late 1830s and early 1840s. A good deal of the congruence between Darwinian and Knoxian conceptions of race may be traced back to these early notebook constructions. As these document, Darwin, like Knox, brought to his very earliest conceptions of human evolution a “commitment to the idea of human races as discrete biological units with distinct moral and mental traits.”197 The young Darwin had been concerned with the same sorts of questions on racial biological and cultural differences that preoccupied Knox around the same time, and he was committed to as ruthless a naturalism. Apart from their individual and independent debts to Quetelet's “moral statistics,” both Darwin and Knox drew heavily on the general themes of struggle and adaptation in the contemporary “common context” of biological and social thought.198 Given their common context, the broad general similarities between the Knoxian laws of race antagonism and subordination and the Darwinian struggle for existence between races need occasion no strained historical explanation of direct influence.199Nevertheless, in more explicit ways, the Descent does show the conflation of Knoxian/Anthropological and Darwinian racial views, and Darwin located his discussion of these issues squarely within the dispute “of late years” between polygenists and monogenists.200 His mature views on race were shaped by the contemporaneous confrontations and negotiations between the Darwinians and the Anthropologicals. It is within this context that the minor historical puzzle of Darwin's failure to acknowledge Knox's “generic descent” may be explained. Apart from the difficulties of integration and interpretation of his scattered theoretical writings, Knox, through his adoption by Hunt and the Anthropologicals, became identified with anti-Darwinism and therefore with antievolutionism.201 Moreover, Knox, the disreputable and marginal “savage radical” and lately resurrected and equally unsavory “Anthropological,” was hardly an acceptable “precursor.” Yet, paradoxically, it was via the antithetical medium of the Anthropological platform that Knox's race science made an indirect and unacknowledged, but lasting, impact on the Darwinian anthropological model.In the Descent, Darwin argued that racial traits arose very early in the prehistory of man, were not biologically adaptive, and were therefore relatively fixed in character. By viewing race formation as a distant and closed episode of human history, Darwin endorsed the Knoxian categories of race as fixed and unalterable types. Although he thought it irrelevant whether human races were called species or subspecies, he conceded more to the Knoxian view than Huxley by granting that a naturalist confronted for the first time by specimens of Negro and European man “might feel himself fully justified in ranking the races of man as distinct species.”202 Consistent with the Knoxian interpretation, struggle, competition, and survival occurred between racial units rather than between individuals and, in Darwin's view, accounted for the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon and the inevitable triumph of the more intellectual and moral races over the lower and more degraded ones.Darwin was as insistent as Knox on the biological basis of intellectual and moral differences, and, through his tendency to reduce social and cultural differences to biology, he maintained the essential Knoxian/Anthropological link between race and culture.203 For above all, the Descent did much more than offer a naturalistic explanation of human evolution: it proffered social interpretation, justification, and prescription, and its timely appearance gave a powerful boost to the “moralizing naturalism” of Huxley and Galton, and to Spencer's “Social Darwinism.”204 We may draw a straight line from Knox's “moral anatomy,” through Hunt's “anthropology,” and on to “Social Darwinism” and the “social surgeons” of the eugenics movement.The Darwinians did not, of course, we their tendency to naturalize existing economic and social relations to Knox or Hunt and the Anthropologicals—they were simply reflecting the same general intellectual trend that had affected Knox and the Anthropologicals as well. And in the larger context, the forces that had created a climate receptive to Knox's racism had intensified: in the seventies, the need to justify white imperialism and class and racial inequalities was greater than ever. Scientific racism no longer appeared an aberration but the very essence of the scientific study of man, taking on a newfound respectability in the “new” evolutionary anthropology. But in more specific ways, through the struggle between the Darwinians and Anthropologicals for scientific and ideological hegemony, Knox's “moral anatomy” was institutionalized and perpetuated in late Victorian scientific racism. In the process, the delicate balance that Knox had maintained between his radicalism and his racism was outweighed by conservative institutional and social needs, and his “moral anatomy” was retooled — first by Hunt, and then by the Darwinians — to fit those needs. (shrink)

This paper examines public conflict over the rapid growth of the Tasmanian salmon aquaculture industry and associated environmental and social impacts. By conducting a media analysis, triangulated...

This important book charts the development of philosophical thinking about history over the past 250 years, combining extracts from key texts with new explanatory and critical discussion. The book is designed to make the work of thinkers such as Hume, Herder, Hegel, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Foucault accessible to students with no prior knowledge of Western philosophy. An introductory section is followed by nine further chapters exploring contrasting schools of thought. The volume reveals the origins of contemporary trends in the (...) discipline and relates wider philosophical reflections to the study of history itself. It also points to connections between philosophy of history and literary and cultural theory which have developed in recent decades. (shrink)

According to J. M. E. McTaggart, all that exists is spiritual, where spirituality is defined as “the quality of having content, all of which is the content of one or more selves”. In view of the importance which he thus assigns to selves, one properly expects of McTaggart a clear, certainly a consistent, account of what a self is. Yet the picture one receives remains clouded—clouded mainly by positions which may be contradictory within themselves, and by what plainly look to (...) be incompatibilities of one position with another. In this paper, I shall try to clarify, and insofar as possible to support, McTaggart’s doctrine. In part I shall be seeking to decide which ones, if any, of the seeming contradictions are genuinely unresolvable. And then, in case no one consistent doctrine can be educed, I shall ask which one of various alternative positions would be most in harmony with McTaggart’s system as a whole. (shrink)

Spinoza Contra Phenomenology fundamentally recasts the history of postwar French thought, typically presumed to have been driven by a critique of reason indebted to Nietzsche and Heidegger. Although the reception of phenomenology gave rise to many innovative developments in French philosophy, from existentialism to deconstruction, not everyone in France was pleased with this German import. This book recounts how a series of French philosophers used Spinoza to erect a bulwark against the nominally irrationalist tendencies of phenomenology. From its beginnings in (...) the interwar years, this rationalism would prove foundational for Althusser's rethinking of Marxism and Deleuze's ambitious metaphysics. There has been a renewed enthusiasm for Spinozism of late by those who see his work as a kind of neo-vitalism or philosophy of life and affect. Peden counters this trend by tracking a decisive and neglected aspect of Spinoza's philosophy—his rationalism—in a body of thought too often presumed to have rejected reason. In the process, he demonstrates that the virtues of Spinoza's rationalism have yet to be exhausted. (shrink)

Winner of the 1975 National Book Award, this brilliant and widely acclaimed book is a powerful philosophical challenge to the most widely held political and social positions of our age--liberal, socialist, and conservative.

Theories of discourse bring to realism new ideas about how knowledge develops and how representations of reality are influenced. We gain an understanding of the conceptual aspect of social life and the processes by which meaning is produced. This collection reflects the growing interest realist critics have shown towards forms of discourse theory and deconstruction. The diverse range of contributions address such issues as the work of Derrida and deconstruction, discourse theory, Eurocentrism and poststructuralism. What unites all of the contributions (...) is a sense that it is essential to provide a realist alternative to the hitherto dominance of social constructionism, hermeneutics and postmodernism, over many of the issues discussed. By developing a realist perspective the different authors attempt to embed discourse within the structured nature of the reality of the world. Realism can situate language, discourse and ideology within context specific, or 'causally efficacious' circumstances. Realism can help to uncover issues of power, representation, and subjectivity and how discursive and other social practices produce real effects. This can help us understand the manner in which social structures are reproduced through various forms of ideology and discourse. And by knowing this, we can start to address questions concerning human emancipation and how the world is to be transformed. (shrink)

Despite the efforts of Bosanquet, Muirhead, Basch, and many others, it is still frequently stated or implied, in both popular and scholarly literature, that Hegel constructed his philosophy of the State with an eye to pleasing the reactionary and conservative rulers of Prussia in his day, and condoned, supported, and, through his teaching, became partly responsible for some of the most criticized features in “Prussianism” and even of present-day National-Socialism.5 Ijn this article I propose to give reasons for denying that (...) Hegel the man is justly accused of servility to the Prussian Government, and that there is any warrant in the text of his Philosophie des Rechts for the charge that Hegel the philosopher was an exponent of “Prussianism” and “ frightfulness.”. (shrink)

Robert Stern investigates how scepticism can be countered by using transcendental arguments concerning the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience, language, or thought. He shows that the most damaging sceptical questions concern neither the certainty of our beliefs nor the reliability of our belief-forming methods, but rather how we can justify our beliefs.

What is right in the corporation is not what is right in a man's home or in his church," a former vice-president of a large firm observes. "What is right in the corporation is what the guy above you wants from you." Such sentiments pervade American society, from corporate boardrooms to the basement of the White House. In Moral Mazes, Robert Jackall offers an eye-opening account of how corporate managers think the world works, and of how big organizations shape (...) moral consciousnss. Based on extensive interviews with managers at every level of two industrial firms and of a large public relations agency, Moral Mazes takes the reader inside the intricate world of the corporation. It is a world where hard work does not necessarily lead to success, but where sharp talk, self-promotion, powerful patrons, and sheer luck might; where intense competition is masked by cheerfully bland public faces; where intentions are cloaked and frankness is simply one of many guises; and where words are always provisional and accountability often depends on the ability to outrun mistakes. In this topsy-turvy world, managers must bring often unforgiving technology and always difficult people together to make money, an uncompromising task demanding continual compromises with conventional verities. Moral issues are translated into practical concerns and into issues of public relations. Sooner or later, managrs ask themselves: How does one act in such a world and maintain a sense of personal integrity? Moral Mazes is a brilliant, sometimes disturbing, often wildly funny study of corporate thinking, decision-making, and morality. It is an analytical work of great importance, one filled with compelling real life stories of the men and women charged with running the business of America. It is a book for anyone interested in how big organizations actually function, or who is concerned with the current moral malaise in our public life. (shrink)

Permissivism says that for some propositions and bodies of evidence, there is more than one rationally permissible doxastic attitude that can be taken towards that proposition given the evidence. Some critics of this view argue that it condones, as rationally acceptable, sets of attitudes that manifest an untenable kind of arbitrariness. I begin by providing a new and more detailed explication of what this alleged arbitrariness consists in. I then explain why Miriam Schoenfield’s prima facie promising attempt to answer the (...) Arbitrariness Objection, by appealing to the role of epistemic standards in rational belief formation, fails to resolve the problem. Schoenfield’s strategy is, however, a useful one, and I go on to explain how an alternative form of the standards-based approach to Permissivism – one that emphasizes the significance of the relationship between people’s cognitive abilities and the epistemic standards that they employ – can respond to the arbitrariness objection. (shrink)

This is a paradigmatic work of contemporary philosophy.

In this book, Dr. Robert J. Levine reviews federal regulations, ethical analysis, and case studies in an attempt to answer these questions.

ABSTRACT Genevieve Lloyd’s assessment of Spinoza’s rationalism shows how imagination and sensibility are integrated with reason in his metaphysics and equally makes clear how his philosophy illuminates a number of aesthetic works and political situations. This response considers the limitations of the aesthetic analogy she draws from Flaubert and also queries the contrast she sees between Spinoza’s account of reason and finitude and Pascal’s account of the same. Turning from Pascal, it concludes with a consideration of Spinoza’s response to Augustine’s (...) doctrine of original sin in the Political Treatise in order to indicate some problems that stem from a vision of politics grounded in a Spinozist metaphysics of multiplicity. (shrink)

This is the most important book on Hegel to have appeared in the past ten years. Robert Pippin offers a completely new interpretation of Hegel's idealism, which focuses on Hegel's appropriation and development of kant's theoretical project. Hegel is presented neither as a precritical metaphysician nor as a social theorist, but as a critical philosopher whose disagreements with Kant, especially on the issue of intuitions, enrich the idealist arguments against empiricism, realism and naturalism. In the face of the dismissal (...) of absolute idealism as either unintelligible or implausible, Pippin explains and defends an original account of the philosophical basis for Hegel's claims about the historical and social nature of selfconsciousness, and so of knowledge itself. (shrink)

One of our great behavioral scientists, the bestselling author of Behave, plumbs the depths of the science and philosophy of decision-making to mount a devastating case against free will, an argument with profound consequences Robert Sapolsky's Behave, his now classic account of why humans do good and why they do bad, pointed toward an unsettling conclusion: We may not grasp the precise marriage of nature and nurture that creates the physics and chemistry at the base of human behavior, but (...) that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Now, in Determined, Sapolsky takes his argument all the way, mounting a brilliant (and in his inimitable way, delightful) full-frontal assault on the pleasant fantasy that there is some separate self telling our biology what to do. Determined offers a marvelous synthesis of what we know about how consciousness works-the tight weave between reason and emotion and between stimulus and response in the moment and over a life. One by one, Sapolsky tackles all the major arguments for free will and takes them out, cutting a path through the thickets of chaos and complexity science and quantum physics, as well as touching ground on some of the wilder shores of philosophy. He shows us that the history of medicine is in no small part the history of learning that fewer and fewer things are somebody's "fault"; for example, for centuries we thought seizures were a sign of demonic possession. Yet, as he acknowledges, it's very hard, and at times impossible, to uncouple from our zeal to judge others and to judge ourselves. Sapolsky applies the new understanding of life beyond free will to some of our most essential questions around punishment, morality, and living well together. By the end, Sapolsky argues that while living our daily lives recognizing that we have no free will is going to be monumentally difficult, doing so is not going to result in anarchy, pointlessness, and existential malaise. Instead, it will make for a much more humane world. (shrink)

Classical American pragmatism: the pragmatist -- Enlightenment-and its problematic semantics -- Analyzing pragmatism: pragmatics and pragmatisms -- A Kantian rationalist pragmatism: pragmatism -- Inferentialism, and modality in Sellars's arguments against -- Empiricism -- Linguistic pragmatism and pragmatism about norms: an arc of -- Thought from Rorty's eliminative materialism to his pragmatism -- Vocabularies of pragmatism: synthesizing naturalism and -- Historicism -- Towards an analytic pragmatism: meaning-use analysis -- Pragmatism, expressivism, and anti-representationalism: -- Local and global possibilities.

Robert Hanna presents a fresh view of the Kantian and analytic traditions that have dominated continental European and Anglo-American philosophy over the last two centuries, and of the connections between them. But this is not just a study in the history of philosophy, for out of this emerges Hanna's original approach to two much-contested theories that remain at the heart of contemporary philosophy. Hanna puts forward a new 'cognitive-semantic' interpretation of transcendental idealism, and a vigorous defense of Kant's theory (...) of analytic and synthetic necessary truth, making this compelling reading for all who are interested in these fundamental philosophical issues. (shrink)