Metaphysics and language: Quine, W. V. O. On the individuation of attributes. Körner, S. On some relations between logic and metaphysics. Marcus, R. B. Does the principle of substitutivity rest on a mistake? Van Fraassen, B. C. Platonism's pyrrhic victory. Martin, R. M. On some prepositional relations. Kearns, J. T. Sentences and propositions.--Basic and combinatorial logic: Orgass, R. J. Extended basic logic and ordinal numbers. Curry, H. B. Representation of Markov algorithms by combinators.--Implication and consistency: Anderson, A. R. Fitch (...) on consistency. Belnap, N. D., Jr. Grammatical propaedeutic. Thomason, R. H. Decidability in the logic of conditionals. Myhill, J. Levels of implication.--Deontic, epistemic, and erotetic logic: Bacon, J. Belief as relative knowledge. Wu, K. J. Believing and disbelieving. Kordig, C. R. Relativized deontic modalities. Harrah, D. A system for erotetic sentences. (shrink)

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

We are developing the Neurological Disease Ontology (ND) to provide a framework to enable representation of aspects of neurological diseases that are relevant to their treatment and study. ND is a representational tool that addresses the need for unambiguous annotation, storage, and retrieval of data associated with the treatment and study of neurological diseases. ND is being developed in compliance with the Open Biomedical Ontology Foundry principles and builds upon the paradigm established by the Ontology for General Medical Science (OGMS) (...) for the representation of entities in the domain of disease and medical practice. Initial applications of ND will include the annotation and analysis of large data sets and patient records for Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and stroke. (shrink)

Though ‘evil’ is often used loosely as merely the generic opposite of ‘morally good’, used precisely it is the worst possible term of opprobrium available. In this essay it is taken as applying primarily to persons, secondarily to conduct; evil deeds must flow from the volition to do something evil. An evil action is one so horrendously bad that no ordinary decent human being can conceive of doing it, and an evil person is one who knowingly wills or orders such (...) actions. Malignant evil—doing evil because it is evil—is not just possible but real, and is one of several kinds of evil delineated. There are incidental discussions of cruelty, Rosenbaum on Explaining Hitler, Baumeister on Evil, and Benn on wickedness. Footnotes1 Dedicated to Alan Gewirth, in honour of his 90th birthday, and in appreciation of his superb, illuminating, and ground-breaking philosophical work over many years. (shrink)

In environmental ethics, many approaches are searching for a justification of the protection of nature and biodiversity via an account of the intrinsic or inherent value of non-human nature, i. e. a justification that does not rely on the perspective of human beings. This leads to intricate problems regarding value theory. This paper proposes to avoid those problems by investigating explicitly anthropocentric pathways. It discusses what kinds of reasons for the protection of nature can be developed from the consistent practical (...) self-understanding of agents. First, it is argued that the practical commitments of agents necessarily involve some normative commitments to the protection of the generic conditions of agency, which are particularly relevant for the ecological conditions that enable us to act and to realise goals. Second, it is discussed whether the presence of non-human nature is particularly relevant from the perspective of philosophical anthropology. Is it not important for human beings to experience non-human nature as an environment that is not fully planned and designed by human beings? The general aim is to show that it is worthwhile to search for justifications of the protection of nature and biodiversity from the practical self-understanding of human beings. (shrink)

Kant's correspondence with his colleague and zealous disciple, Marcus Herz, was prophetic: only a few will understand the Critique of Pure Reason. Unfortunately, the problems are intractable and the necessary conceptual scheme to deal with the problems requires a "complete change of thinking in this part of human knowledge". But eventually people will "get over the initial numbness" Kant reassures another correspondent, Christian Garve. Fortunately, he suggests, there is a central question at the foundation of his difficult thought - (...) a question that is the key to his ideas. So what is this important question that Kant insists has been "stated clearly enough"? And how clear is it? I explore these issues in my paper. (shrink)

This paper is written from a perspective that is sympathetic to the basic idea of the capability approach. Our aim is to compare Martha Nussbaum’s capability theory of justice with Alan Gewirth’s moral theory, on two points: the selection and the justification of a list of central capabilities. On both counts, we contend that Nussbaum’s theory suffers from flaws that Gewirth’s theory may help to remedy. First, we argue that her notion of a (dignified) human life cannot fulfill the (...) role of a normative criterion that Nussbaum wants it to play in selecting capabilities for her list. Second, we question whether Nussbaum’s method of justification is adequate, discussing both her earlier self-validating argumentative strategy and her more recent adherence to the device of an overlapping consensus. We conclude that both strategies fail to provide the capabilities theory with the firm foundation it requires. Next, we turn to Gewirth’s normative theory and discuss how it can repair these flaws. We show how his theory starts from a fundamental moral principle according to which all agents have rights to the protection of the necessary preconditions of their agency. Gewirth’s justification of this principle is then presented, using a version of a transcendental argument. Finally, we explicitly compare Nussbaum and Gewirth and briefly demonstrate what it would mean for Nussbaum to incorporate Gewirthian elements into her capabilities theory of justice. (shrink)

This paper analyses the main challenges to the idea that we should and can represent future generations in our present policymaking. It argues that these challenges can and should be approached from the perspective of human rights. To this end it introduces and sketches the main features of a human rights framework derived from the moral theory of Alan Gewirth. It indicates how this framework can be grounded philosophically, sketches the main features and open questions of the framework and (...) its grounding, and shows how it can be used to deal with the challenges to the idea that future generations have rights that can be represented in our policymaking. (shrink)

Computer simulations show that an unstructured neural-network model [Shultz, T. R., & Bale, A. C. (2001). Infancy, 2, 501–536] covers the essential features␣of infant learning of simple grammars in an artificial language [Marcus, G. F., Vijayan, S., Bandi Rao, S., & Vishton, P. M. (1999). Science, 283, 77–80], and generalizes to examples both outside and inside of the range of training sentences. Knowledge-representation analyses confirm that these networks discover that duplicate words in the sentences are nearly identical and that (...) they use this near-identity relation to distinguish sentences that are consistent or inconsistent with a familiar grammar. Recent simulations that were claimed to show that this model did not really learn these grammars [Vilcu, M., & Hadley, R. F. (2005). Minds and Machines, 15, 359–382] confounded syntactic types with speech sounds and did not perform standard statistical tests of results. (shrink)

In this essay I evaluate Larry Alan Busk’s critique of contemporary democratic theorists and contemporary “democratic” politics in Democracy in Spite of the Demos in the context of Carl Schmitt’s critique of modern democracy. I argue that Busk shares Schmitt’s general conception of democracy and of the dangers attending any appeal to it. Though Busk presents Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno as alternatives to the current crop of democratic theorists, I demonstrate that Marcuse fell prey to the most significant (...) of the paradoxes and ambivalences that Schmitt prognosticated. Adorno, I argue, is less unsteady an ally, but one that stays further back from politics than Busk evidently wishes. In the end, Busk’s Schmittian critique of democracy and democratic theory extends further than he himself suggests and reveals, not to a solution to our problems, but a new way of understanding them and their severity. (shrink)

In the paper I attempt to close the gap between the tradition of contemporary radical democracy and that of the ideology critique of Critical Theory which is opened by Larry Alan Busk in his Democracy in Spite of the Demos. I argue that, on the one hand, it is not necessarily the case that the affirmation of the two ontological hypotheses Busk identifies as essential to radical democracy – that of the autonomy of the political and that of the (...) universality of doxa – need generate the ambiguities that his text critiques. On the other hand, I show how Adorno and Marcuse themselves remain committed to democracy, seeing socialization in the practice of the latter as fundamental to the development of critical-reflective consciousness. In the final instance, both radical democracy and Critical Theory can be seen to as committed to the same ideal of human autonomy, and equally useful resources for emancipatory thinking. (shrink)

What is the basis for arguing that a volunteer army exploits citizens who lack civilian career opportunities? How do we determine that a doctor who has sex with his patients is exploiting them? In this book, Alan Wertheimer seeks to identify when a transaction or relationship can be properly regarded as exploitative--and not oppressive, manipulative, or morally deficient in some other way--and explores the moral weight of taking unfair advantage. Among the first political philosophers to examine this important topic (...) from a non-Marxist perspective, Wertheimer writes about ordinary experience in an accessible yet philosophically penetrating way. He considers whether it is seriously wrong for a party to exploit another if the transaction is consensual and mutually advantageous, whether society can justifiably prohibit people from entering into such a transaction, and whether it is wrong to allow oneself to be exploited. Wertheimer first considers several contexts commonly characterized as exploitive, including surrogate motherhood, unconscionable contracts, the exploitation of student athletes, and sexual exploitation in psychotherapy. In a section outlining his theory of exploitation, he sets forth the criteria for a fair transaction and the point at which we can properly say that a party has consented. Whereas many discussions of exploitation have dealt primarily with cases in which one party harms or coerces another, Wertheimer's book focuses on what makes a mutually advantageous and consensual transaction exploitive and analyzes the moral and legal implications of such exploitation. (shrink)

Alan Sidelle's Necessity, Essence, and Individuation is a sustained defense of empiricism—or, more generally, conventionalism—against recent attacks by realists. Sidelle focuses his attention on necessity a posteriori, a kind of necessity which contemporary realists have taken to support realism over empiricism. Turning the tables against the realists, Sidelle argues that if there are in fact truths necessary a posteriori, it is not realism, but rather empiricism which provides the best explanation for them.

The formal sciences, particularly mathematics, have had a profound influence on the development of linguistics. This insightful overview looks at techniques that were introduced in the fields of mathematics, logic and philosophy during the twentieth century, and explores their effect on the work of various linguists. In particular, it discusses the 'foundations crisis' that destabilised mathematics at the start of the twentieth century, the numerous related movements which sought to respond to this crisis, and how they influenced the development of (...) syntactic theory in the 1950s. The book concludes by discussing the resulting major consequences for syntactic theory, and provides a detailed reassessment of Chomsky's early work at the advent of Generative Grammar. Informative and revealing, this book will be invaluable to all those working in formal linguistics, in particular those interested in its history and development. (shrink)

Some philosophical accounts imply that masturbation is inferior sexual activity. Against this, Soble argues that masturbation is central. Relying on the physical-anatomical indistinguishability of sexual act-types, he derives a Zeno-style paradox about sexual activity: either all sexual activity (even ordinary coitus) is masturbatory or none of it is (not even solitary masturbation). Soble argues for the first horn of the dilemma, thus ensuring that solitary masturbation is a member of the continuum of sexual activities. Going beyond anatomy, Soble also argues (...) that the central psychological features of paired sexual activity are normally exhibited also by solitary masturbation, which further establishes that solitary masturbation is on the continuum of sexual activity. Altogether, Soble's arguments support a "unary" model of sexuality, compelling us to take seriously the genuine sexual nature of solitary masturbation, a result that is important for the philosophy of sex, the scientific study of sexuality, and the politics of human sexuality. (shrink)

A centipede can walk until it thinks about howit does so. Thereafter it stumbles, over thesheer impossibility of the information andcoordination required. Life in the economy islittle different. Those engaged in productionand exchange discover, pragmatically, ways tomake them work. Those observing the processsee, realistically, the immense improbabilitythat it should do so. That most economies workin practice, but must pass such toughteleological tests to succeed in theory,highlights a difference between players' andspectators' outlook which may help to explainwhy the game has repeatedly (...) been thrown wideopen just when conclusive results seemed withinreach.Section 1 of this paper identifies the fourforms of realism which economists have tendedto adopt. Section 2 considers the pragmatism ofeconomic agents, when observed in action bypsychologists and management scholars notoverly steeped in economic theory. Theconcluding section reviews the ways in whicheconomists have tried to blur the distinction,by reclassifying agents as realistic or theirown views as pragmatic, and suggests that amore pragmatic economics might bridge thedivide. (shrink)

Critical insights into Kierkegaard's influence on Barth's theology. Karl Barth was often critical of Søren Kierkegaard's ideas as he understood them. But close reading of the two corpora reveals that Barth owes a lot to the melancholy Dane. Both conceive of God as infinitely qualitatively different from humans, and both emphasize the shocking nearness of God in the incarnation. As public intellectuals, they used this theological vision to protect Christocentric faith from political manipulation and compromise. For Kierkegaard, this meant criticizing (...) the state church; for Barth, this entailed resisting Nazism. Meticulously crafted by a father-son team of renowned systematic theologians, Beyond Immanence demonstrates that Kierkegaard and Barth share a theological trajectory--one that resists cynical manipulation of Christianity for political purposes in favor of uncompromising devotion to a God who is radically transcendent yet established kinship with humanity in time. (shrink)

This is the first complete English translation of Gottlob Frege's Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, with introduction and annotation. The importance of Frege's ideas within contemporary philosophy would be hard to exaggerate. He was, to all intents and purposes, the inventor of mathematical logic, and the influence exerted on modern philosophy of language and logic, and indeed on general epistemology, by the philosophical framework.

Relying on a sexual encounter that he had once while in graduate school, Soble explores in this essay two important and under-explored ideas in sexual ethics. The first is whether there are sexual duties to others (including, even especially, to strangers), and what the source of such duties might be. He provides good reasons, rooted in both religious and secular thought, for believing that such duties exist. The second is whether there are supererogatory sexual actions—sexual actions that go beyond the (...) demands of duty—and what conditions an act needs to satisfy in order to be supererogatory. Soble uses the sexual encounter that opens the essay to test our intuitions about these two ideas and his own arguments, and to underscore the complications involved in attempting to find secure answers as to whether some sexual acts are dutiful, done from duty, or supererogatory. (This is a revised version of the essay in the 7th edition of The Philosophy of Sex.). (shrink)

Katrina Forrester’s book poses a problem for any reviewer that, I suspect, will be reflected in the experience of its readers. Unusually, the author is equally.

Bioethics, Volume 35, Issue 8, Page 779-786, October 2021.

In this paper, I highlight three objections to vice-based accounts of moral evil: (1) the worry that vice-based accounts of evil are explanatorily inadequate; (2) the worry that even extreme vice is not sufficient for evil; and (3) the worry that not all vices are inversions of virtue (and so vice-based accounts will struggle to explain the “mirror thesis”). I argue that it is possible to respond to these objections by developing a vice-based account of evil that draws on insights (...) from virtue (and vice) epistemology. In this way, I seek to defend the strategy of understanding evil in terms of vice, and to provide guidance on how best to develop such an account. I also briefly consider what vice-based accounts of moral evil might imply about evil in other normative domains where it is common to talk of virtue and vice, including the possibilities of epistemic evil and aesthetic evil. (shrink)

This book challenges the conventional wisdom that improving democratic politics requires keeping emotion out of it. Marcus advances the provocative claim that the tradition in democratic theory of treating emotion and reason as hostile opposites is misguided and leads contemporary theorists to misdiagnose the current state of American democracy. Instead of viewing the presence of emotion in politics as a failure of rationality and therefore as a failure of citizenship, Marcus argues, democratic theorists need to understand that emotions (...) are in fact a prerequisite for the exercise of reason and thus essential for rational democratic deliberation and political judgment. Attempts to purge emotion from public life not only are destined to fail, but ultimately would rob democracies of a key source of revitalization and change. Drawing on recent research in neuroscience, Marcus shows how emotion functions generally and what role it plays in politics. In contrast to the traditional view of emotion as a form of agitation associated with belief, neuroscience reveals it to be generated by brain systems that operate largely outside of awareness. Two of these systems, "disposition" and "surveillance," are especially important in enabling emotions to produce habits, which often serve a positive function in democratic societies. But anxiety, also a preconscious emotion, is crucial to democratic politics as well because it can inhibit or disable habits and thus clear a space for the conscious use of reason and deliberation. If we acknowledge how emotion facilitates reason and is "cooperatively entangled" with it, Marcus concludes, then we should recognize sentimental citizens as the only citizens really capable of exercising political judgment and of putting their decisions into action. (shrink)

The idea that moral virtues form some sort of “unity” has received considerable attention from virtue theorists. In this paper, I argue that the possibility of unity among intellectual virtues has been wrongly overlooked. My approach has two main components. First, I work to distinguish the variety of different views that are available under the description of a unity thesis. I suggest that these views can be categorised depending on whether they are versions of standard unity or of strong unity. (...) Standard unity claims that the possession of one virtue implies possession of all the others. Strong unity claims that the virtues are, in some sense, all the same thing. By exploring what these different versions of unity would look like when applied to intellectual virtues, I aim to provide a menu of options for future work in virtue epistemology. I then develop and defend one of these options in more detail, arguing that the initially less plausible strong unity has merit when applied to the intellectual sphere. In these two ways, I aim to show that the possibility of unity among the intellectual virtues is deserving of serious consideration. (shrink)

Let X\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathcal{X }$$\end{document} be a set of outcomes, and let I\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathcal{I }$$\end{document} be an infinite indexing set. This paper shows that any separable, permutation-invariant preference order \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$$$\end{document} on XI\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathcal{X }^\mathcal{I }$$\end{document} admits an additive representation. That is: there exists a linearly ordered abelian group R\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} (...) \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathcal{R }$$\end{document} and a ‘utility function’ u:X⟶R\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$u:\mathcal{X }{{\longrightarrow }}\mathcal{R }$$\end{document} such that, for any x,y∈XI\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathbf{x},\mathbf{y}\in \mathcal{X }^\mathcal{I }$$\end{document} which differ in only finitely many coordinates, we have x≽y\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathbf{x}\succcurlyeq \mathbf{y}$$\end{document} if and only if ∑i∈Iu-u≥0\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\sum _{i\in \mathcal{I }} \left[u-u\right]\ge 0$$\end{document}. Importantly, and unlike almost all previous work on additive representations, this result does not require any Archimedean or continuity condition. If \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$$$\end{document} also satisfies a weak continuity condition, then the paper shows that, for anyx,y∈XI\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathbf{x},\mathbf{y}\in \mathcal{X }^\mathcal{I }$$\end{document}, we have x≽y\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathbf{x}\succcurlyeq \mathbf{y}$$\end{document} if and only if ∗∑i∈Iu≥∗∑i∈Iu\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${}^*\!\sum _{i\in \mathcal{I }} u\ge {}^*\!\sum _{i\in \mathcal{I }}u$$\end{document}. Here, ∗∑i∈Iu\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${}^*\!\sum _{i\in \mathcal{I }} u$$\end{document} represents a nonstandard sum, taking values in a linearly ordered abelian group ∗R\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${}^*\!\mathcal{R }$$\end{document}, which is an ultrapower extension of R\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathcal{R }$$\end{document}. The paper also discusses several applications of these results, including infinite-horizon intertemporal choice, choice under uncertainty, variable-population social choice and games with infinite strategy spaces. (shrink)

Despite immediate appearances, this book is not primarily a hermeneutical exercise in which the superiority of one interpretation of canonical texts is championed against others. Its origin lies elsewhere, near the overlap of history, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and social theory of the usual kind. Weber, Pareto, Freud, W. I. Thomas, Max Scheler, Karl Mannheim, and many others of similar stature long ago wondered and wrote much about the interplay between societal rationalization and individual rationality, between collective furor and private psychopathology—in short, (...) about the strange and worrisome union of “character and social structure” (to recall Gerth and Mills). Pondering the history of social thought in this century can lead to the unpleasant realization that such large-scale questions slipped away, especially from sociologists, sometime before World War II. Or, if not entirely lost, they were so transformed in range and rhetoric that a gap opened between contemporary theorizing and its European background. Perhaps this partly explains Weber’s continuing appeal. By dealing with him, one might again broach topics long at odds with “social science” of the last forty years.—From the Preface. (shrink)

Medical practitioners of all specialisms are identified by their professional titles. Their function is determined by their regulators, and subject to voluntary employment contracts....