Chapters
Ethics, Body Politic, and Neuroscience
This chapter, Ethics, Body Politic, and Neuroscience, is about moral sentiments, judgement, and the brain; the larger body politic as Holmes figures in all these considerations. There is no special region of the brain for moral sentiments or judgments. There are critical features of human experience...
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Naturalizing Decision Making: Heuristics and Concerns
This chapter, Naturalizing Decision Making, places human reasoning as core pieces of adaptation, aids and heuristics in problem solving. The metaphors are about adapting. Diverse metaphors underlie our considerations of the brain. They also underlie human decision making.
Bounded Choice, Human Freedom and Problem-Solving
Bounded Choice, Human Freedom and Problem Solving, emphasizes choice and context. Choice is constrained by context and capabilities. Holmes is well positioned in a pragmatist understanding of action and consequences.
Emersonian Sensibilities
Emersonian Sensibilities, Holmes’s better self perhaps is found in Emerson and Dewey: a poet who could dream of what might be possible grounded in a realism of a frail social evolution essential for an adaptive brain.
Duty, Surviving, Social Contact
Duty, Surviving, Social Contact, continues to depict the context in which Holmes developed his views and the emphasis on problem solving.
Holmes, Pragmatism and Nature
Holmes, Pragmatism and Nature, is a long and circuitous history with pragmatism. It begins first with something of the person, his influences, leading to the wider trajectory of American pragmatism.
Experience, Prediction, Surviving
Holmes, Pragmatism and Nature, is a long and circuitous history with pragmatism. It begins first with something of the person, his influences, leading to the wider trajectory of American pragmatism.
Introduction
In this chapter, we visit Holmes’s the Critical Experience in War, a Civil War, the trauma of which, impacted his brain and his sense of the world.
Conclusion: Pragmatism and the Law in the Age of Neuroscience
This book has had a two-fold goal. One is to link a consideration of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. to the larger Culture of Pragmatism, inquiry, and the Body politic. This has been the larger part of the book. The second is a consideration of neuroscience and the continuity of the law and science which ...
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