As Descartes noted, a proper account of the nature of the being one is begins with a basic self present in first-person experience, a self that one cannot cogently doubt being. This paper seeks to uncover such a self, first within consciousness and thinking, then within the lived or first-person felt body. After noting the lack of grounding of Merleau-Ponty’s commonly referenced reflections, it undertakes a phenomenological investigation of the body that finds the basic self to reside in one’s espoused (...) feelings and striving, both bodily in nature. It then examines the relationship of the lived body to the visual body and to the body studied by science. Two issues concerning that relationship are taken up. It is concluded that on the available evidence neither the apparent agency nor the apparent free will of the lived body is illusory. (shrink)

Covers all philosophers appearing in standard textbooks, from Thales to Augustine . A brief introduction to each thinker or school summarizes their major themes.

This article explores emotions and their relationship to ‘somatic responses’, i.e., one’s automatic responses to sensations of pain, cold, warmth, sudden intensity. To this end, it undertakes a Husserlian phenomenological analysis of the first-hand experience of eight basic emotions, briefly exploring their essential aspects: their holistic nature, their identifying dynamic transformation of the lived body, their two-layered intentionality, their involuntary initiation and voluntary espousal. The fact that the involuntary tensional shifts initiating emotions are irreplicatable voluntarily, is taken to show that (...) all emotions have an innate core, a conclusion corroborated by their strong similarities to somatic responses in dynamics, hedonic tone, and topology. The fact that emotions may be culturally reworked, is shown to be explicable in terms of their complex nature: their dependence on belief, their voluntary espousal, and their ready social transmittability. Finally, it is argued that emotions may plausibly be deemed the evolutionary descendants of somatic responses. (shrink)

This book contains fifteen essays all seeking to regain the original meaning of philosophy as the love of wisdom. _Mythos_ and _Logos_ are two essential aspects of a quest that began with the ancient Greeks. As concepts fundamental to human experience, _Mythos_ and _Logos_ continue to guide the search for truth in the twenty-first century.

Several differences between these two texts are evident even from such brief excerpts. Gardner’s story is told in the first person; the eighth-century tale is narrated in the third person. English itself has changed so much in the past twelve centuries that few readers can understand the original, so it must be translated into modern idiom. John Gardner, who died recently in a motorcycle accident, lived in a society that has little in common with that of the unknown author of (...) Beowulf. Not only is the atomic age filled with terrors undreamed by the Medieval mind, the Weltanschauung of each work is different. Although both draw upon Biblical texts to shape the background, Gardner’s existentialism contrasts sharply with the Christianity implicit in Beowulf. The very idea of presenting the story from the perspective of Grendel shows how fundamentally the two pieces diverge. (shrink)

This article examines the various Liar paradoxes and their near kin, Grelling’s paradox and Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem with its self-referential Gödel sentence. It finds the family of paradoxes to be generated by circular definition–whether of statements, predicates, or sentences–a manoeuvre that generates pseudo-statements afflicted with the Liar syndrome: semantic vacuity, semantic incoherence, and predicative catalepsy. Such statements, e.g., the self-referential Liar statement, are meaningless, and hence fail to say anything, a point that invalidates the reasoning on which the various paradoxes (...) rest. The seeming plausibility of the paradoxes is due to the fact that often the sentence used to make the pseudo-statement is ambiguous in that it may also be used to make a genuine statement about the pseudo-statement. Hence, if a formal system is to avoid ambiguity and consequent paradox and contradiction, it must distinguish between the two statements the sentence may be used to make. Gödel’s Theorem presents a further complication in that the self-reference involved is sentential rather than statemental. Nevertheless, on the intended interpretation of the system as a formalization of arithmetic, the self-referential Gödel sentence can only be an ambiguous statement, one that is both a pseudo-statement and its genuine double. Consequently, the conclusions commonly drawn from Gödel’s theorem must be deemed unwarranted. Arithmetic might well be formalized in a proper system that either excludes circular definition or introduces disambiguators. (shrink)

The various roles proposed for emotion, whether psychological such as preparing for action or serving prior concerns, or biological such as protecting and promoting well-being, are easily shown to have an awkward number of exceptions. This paper attempts to explain why. To this end it undertakes a Husserlian phenomenological examination of first-person experience of two types of responses, the various somatic responses elicited by sensations (pain, cold, pleasure, sudden intensity) and the various personal directed emotions (grief, fear, affection, joy). The (...) analysis brings out the overall close structural symmetry between the two types of response and the strong hedonic, dynamic, and topological similarity between particular members from each of the two groups. The findings strongly suggest that emotions evolved from the more rudimentary involuntary somatic responses. The hypothesis finds further support in the fact that it explains both the biological unsoundness and anomalous archaic features that emotions often display. It also explains why emotions have no tidy function. (shrink)

This article is a sequel to ‘The Liar Syndrome’. It answers in detail the various criticisms of the latter expressed by Roy T. Cook in his article, ‘Curing the Liar Syndrome’, appearing in SATS/Nordic Journal of Philosophy, 3 (2): 126-141 (2002).

Are facts the only criteria that should determine an arbitrator's decision but are there other ethical criteria that ought to be used? Arbitrators are often faced with deciding issues like whether a person discharged already by a company for arson, should be reinstated or not to his old job. The problem, however, may not be the facts but that the company has discharged him to get rid of him so that it no longer has a problem while society does with (...) the arsonist at work elsewhere.Another problem involves the teaching of human resources management. Most of the current literature dealing with modern management reflects the belief that participatory management is good for management. Most of the evidence supporting such a claim is weak; there surely is very little evidence that such participation should include nonsupervisory employees. The discussion concerning the issue of participatory management could be raised if the participants stopped talking about the increased productivity that is supposed to result, but rather deal instead with the issue that such participation is a form of industrial democracy and therefore is good or bad depending upon a person's ethical judgments concerning such an issue. (shrink)

This article examines the various Liar paradoxes and their near kin, Grelling’s paradox and Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem with its self-referential Gödel sentence. It finds the family of paradoxes to be generated by circular definition–whether of statements, predicates, or sentences–a manoeuvre that generates the fatal disorders of the Liar syndrome: semantic vacuity, semantic incoherence, and predicative catalepsy. Afflicted statements, such as the self-referential Liar statement, fail to be genuine statements. Hence they say nothing, a point that invalidates the reasoning on which (...) the various paradoxes rest. The seeming plausibility of the paradoxes is due to the fact that the same sentence may be used to make both the pseudo-statement and a genuine statement about the pseudo-statement. Hence, if a formal system is to avoid ambiguity and consequent seeming paradox, it requires some sort of disambiguator to distinguish the two statements. Gödel’s Theorem presents a further complication in that the self-reference involved is sentential rather than statemental. Nevertheless, on the intended interpretation of the system as a formalization of arithmetic, the self-referential Gödel sentence can only be an ambiguous statement, one that is both a pseudo-statement and its genuine double. Consequently, the conclusions commonly drawn from Gödel’s theorem must be deemed unwarranted. Arithmetic might well be formalized in a proper system that either excludes circular definition or introduces disambiguators. (shrink)

This essay explores the nature of the most rudimentary form of empathy, interpersonal affective echoing, and attempts to give a cogent assessment of the roles it may play in human interactions. As an investigative background, it briefly sketches phenomenological findings with respect to feelings, to non-linguistic cognition, and to the analogical apperception of others. It then offers a phenomenological account of the basic structures of the experience of echoing another person’s feelings in a face-to-face situation. It also notes how echoing (...) differs from analogical apperception (while presupposing the latter), as well as from having one’s usual feelings and emotions. The relationship of echoing to sharing, caring, and morality is also briefly discussed. (shrink)

The modern era was dominated by conflicts between claims to certainty about justice and denials that certainty is warranted. The purpose of this book is to develop a postmodern alternative to both philosophies, one which is universal without being absolutist. The approach is _dialectical_ in Plato's sense of that term. Dialectic is both necessary and sufficient for the theoretical and the practical aspects of living. The primary symbol in this book is the Athenian Socrates who spent his days in the (...) Agora and his evenings in the houses of his friends, the active professionals of the world's first democracy. His questions were unabashedly philosophical, concerned with the most urgent matters. What is worth living for? What is worth dying for? Who is best suited to rule in the state? How should young people be educated? The nature of justice is closely connected with other questions of value, so the discussion freely moves from that central focus to related matters with the primary goal of developing a dialectical philosophy that is both applicable to life and open to all. _Universal Justice_ is concerned with _how_ to think about justice rather than _what_ to think about justice. (shrink)