This new volume of philosophical papers by Bernard Williams is divided into three sections: the first Action, Freedom, Responsibility, the second Philosophy, Evolution and the Human Sciences; in which appears the essay which gives the collection its title; and the third Ethics, which contains essays closely related to his 1983 book Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Like the two earlier volumes of Williams's papers published by Cambridge University Press, Problems of the Self and Moral Luck, this volume will (...) be welcomed by all readers with a serious interest in philosophy. It is published alongside a volume of essays on Williams's work, World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams, edited by J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison, which provides a reappraisal of his work by other distinguished thinkers in the field. (shrink)

In the mid twentieth century the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously asserted that games are indefinable; there are no common threads that link them all. "Nonsense," says the sensible Bernard Suits: "playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles." The short book Suits wrote demonstrating precisely that is as playful as it is insightful, as stimulating as it is delightful. Suits not only argues that games can be meaningfully defined; he also suggests that playing games is a (...) central part of the ideal of human existence, so games belong at the heart of any vision of Utopia. Originally published in 1978, The Grasshopper is now re-issued with a new introduction by Thomas Hurka and with additional material (much of it previously unpublished) by the author, in which he expands on the ideas put forward in The Grasshopper and answers some questions that have been raised by critics. (shrink)

How I became a philosopher -- To love, to love me, to love us.

Conscious experience is one of the most difficult and thorny problems in psychological science. Its study has been neglected for many years, either because it was thought to be too difficult, or because the relevant evidence was thought to be poor. Bernard Baars suggests a way to specify empirical constraints on a theory of consciousness by contrasting well-established conscious phenomena - such as stimulus representations known to be attended, perceptual, and informative - with closely comparable unconscious ones - such (...) as stimulus representations known to be preperceptual, unattended, or habituated. Adducing data to show that consciousness is associated with a kind of global workplace in the nervous system, and that several brain structures are known to behave in accordance with his theory, Baars helps to clarify many difficult problems. (shrink)

This book offers the fullest and most sophisticated account of Gert's influential moral theory, a model first articulated in the classic work The Moral Rules: A New Rational Foundation for Morality, published in 1970. In this final revision, Gert makes clear that the moral rules are only one part of an informal system that does not provide unique answers to every moral question but does always provide a range of morally acceptable options. A new chapter on reasons includes an account (...) of what makes one reason better than another and a second new chapter is devoted to the question of justifying violations of the rules. Moral impartiality, the moral ideals, and virtue and vice, are all treated in greater detail. Throughout, Gert attempts to answer all of the challenges that his work has provoked. (shrink)

An updated and expanded successor to Culver and Gert's Philosophy in Medicine, this book integrates moral philosophy with clinical medicine to present a comprehensive summary of the theory, concepts, and lines of reasoning underlying the ...

This paper explores a remarkable convergence of ideas and evidence, previously presented in separate places by its authors. That convergence has now become so persuasive that we believe we are working within substantially the same broad framework. Taylor's mathematical papers on neuronal systems involved in consciousness dovetail well with work by Newman and Baars on the thalamocortical system, suggesting a brain mechanism much like the global workspace architecture developed by Baars (see references below). This architecture is relational, in the sense (...) that it continuously mediates the interaction of input with memory. While our approaches overlap in a number of ways, each of us tends to focus on different areas of detail. What is most striking, and we believe significant, is the extent of consensus, which we believe to be consistent with other contemporary approaches by Weiskrantz, Gray, Crick and Koch, Edelman, Gazzaniga, Newell and colleagues, Posner, Baddeley, and a number of others. We suggest that cognitive neuroscience is moving toward a shared understanding of consciousness in the brain. (shrink)

This book brings together the stories of biographers, novelists, scholars, and artists as they have written about the journeys (some literal, some figurative) they have made to their subjects. Contributors include Elizabeth Wood, J.J. Wilson, Leah Glasser, Jane Lazarre, and Alice Walker.

The goal of this book is to recapture the diminished roles of affect, psychological needs, and the psychodynamic mechanisms that are crucial for understanding political behavior by explaining and extending the contributions of Harold D. Lasswell, the dominant figure in political psychology in the mid-twentieth-century. Although Lasswell was best known for applying psychodynamic theories to politics, this book also demonstrates how his framework accommodated for cognitive processes and social interactions ranging from communications to policy-making. The authors use Lasswell's contributions and (...) the debates over his ideas as a springboard for examining current policy, political, and leadership issues. _Revitalizing Political Psychology_ presents and extends four aspects of Lasswell's contributions to the field: the psychodynamic mechanisms drawn from psychoanalytic theory, the use of symbol associations to understand political propaganda, the analysis of "democratic character" for both the public and the elites, and the structure of belief systems. In so doing, the authors link personality and political communication theory to democratic practice. The authors also critique leadership studies using Lasswell's concerns over the risks to democratic accountability and the current preoccupation with strengthening the roles of charismatic and transformational leaders. Intended for researchers, practitioners, and students in the areas of political and historical psychology, political strategy, and political communication, the book's emphasis on psychodynamics also appeals to psychoanalysts and the material on leadership appeals to professionals in management and industrial/organizational psychology. (shrink)

We tend to suppose that the ancient Greeks had primitive ideas of the self, of responsibility, freedom, and shame, and that now humanity has advanced from these to a more refined moral consciousness. Bernard Williams's original and radical book questions this picture of Western history. While we are in many ways different from the Greeks, Williams claims that the differences are not to be traced to a shift in these basic conceptions of ethical life. We are more like the (...) ancients than we are prepared to acknowledge, and only when this is understood can we properly grasp our most important differences from them, such as our rejection of slavery. The author is a philosopher, but much of his book is directed to writers such as Homer and the tragedians, whom he discusses as poets and not just as materials for philosophy. At the center of his study is the question of how we can understand Greek tragedy at all, when its world is so far from ours. Williams explains how it is that when the ancients speak, they do not merely tell us about themselves, but about ourselves. _Shame and Necessity_ gives a new account of our relations to the Greeks, and helps us to see what ethical ideas we need in order to live in the modern world. (shrink)

La métaphore est un instrument indispensable pour les analyses scientifiques. Mais elle nécessite un usage réflexif qui en précise le statut car celui-ci peut être divers et n’est pas sans effet sur la théorie comme sur diverses pratiques. Ainsi, les analystes et acteurs des transports ont usé – et probablement abusé – du recours à la physique des fluides pour leurs métaphores. Aujourd’hui, les développements de la physique, par exemple dans les domaines des fractales ou de la percolation, ouvrent des (...) perspectives nouvelles et prometteuses. Cette évolution montre aussi que les chercheurs en sciences sociales auraient intérêt à renouveler les métaphores qu’ils emploient et qui sont souvent assez archaïques. Ainsi, la référence à des espaces à n dimensions et à l’hypertexte permet de faire rebondir les analyses de Georg Simmel, bridées par le recours à une géométrie plane trop sommaire.Metaphors are indispensable tools for scientific investigation. They should be used in such a way that their status as metaphor is clear, however, for their various uses are not without consequence for theory and practice. In the area of transportation, analysts and practitioners have drawn metaphors from the physics of fluids, but recent developments in the theories of fractals and percolation offer promising perspectives. Generally speaking, as these developments suggest, social scientists stand to benefit from renewing their current metaphors, which are often quite archaic. Thus, Georg Simmel’s analyses – which are constrained by the reference to plan – stand to be revitalized by a reference to N-dimensional spaces and to hypertext. (shrink)

In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx wondered how it was possible for the exchange of commodities to generate so much wealth for some and so much misery for the others. A similar question now haunts our discussions of financial markets: how can the expanding trade in financial securities create such extraordinary wealth for the financiers while creating increasing vulnerability for the rest of us? Taking a leaf out of Marx’s playbook, I propose in this essay to follow Moneybags to the (...) market and consider what he finds there. In the nineteenth century, Moneybags was able to purchase labor-power at its value while somehow generating more value merely from using it; by the late twentieth century, it appears that Moneybags is similarly able, in all good conscience, to acquire other people’s probability—their ability, that is, to make promises and to be believed—while somehow becoming more credible in the process. (shrink)

I. Réviser pour développer. 1. Du modèle bergsonien à la révision bergsonienne -- 2. De la révision bergsonienne au développement rationnel -- II. La dialectique généralisée. 1. Réflexions sur les synthèses dialectiques fichtéennes -- 2. Réflexions sur Schelling au temps de l'idéalisme transcendantal -- 3. Réflexions sur les dialectiques hégéliennes -- III. Les dialectiques juridiques. 1. L'approbation du contrat social par Kant et Fichte -- 2. Le refus de contrat social par Hegel.

The basic principles of scientific research from the great French physiologist whose contributions in the 19th century included the discovery of vasomotor nerves; nature of curare and other poisons in human body; more.

Hannah Arendt is famous for her influential and innovative analysis of totalitarianism. However, her thinking on political systems and ideologies is far from limited to this theorization. Arendt also criti-cizes modern liberalism and its ideological framework. Indeed, Arendt’s thought reveals many of the political consequences of world-lessness, the loss of the world in contemporary times, particularly in terms of a sense of disempowerment and the advent of a technical vision of politics. This article looks at the political effects of world-lessness, (...) exploring the emerging opposition between liberal post-politics and conservative hyper-politics. This critique of Arendt’s thought can help us better understand the issues and questions raised by liberalism. (shrink)

Si la raison moderne, declaree en son principe par Descartes comme libre affirmation personnelle de l'universel, generalise son application avec le projet rousseauiste d'une politique de la liberte, c'est dans l'ecartelement reconnu entre le volontarisme moral de celle-ci et le constat de son destin historique negatif. Depuis les deux revolutions marquees par l'heritage de Rousseau, celle, pratique, de 1789, et celle, theorique, de Kant, le developpement de la raison politique moderne est ordonne a la fondation et a la determination nouvelle (...) d'un droit essentiellement republicain. Les etudes composant le present recueil analysent les divers aspects et moments d'une telle raison politique moderne, de leur socle doctrinal a leur insertion historique. On s'est interroge notamment sur la signification concrete revetue par eux dans le contexte essentiellement francais, mais egalement europeen et mondial. (shrink)

El presente artículo explora los retos políticos que plantea la democracia directa. En el pensamiento político de Locke la democracia representativa consiste en el compromiso de mantener la estructura económica de laisser-faire, mientras que la democracia directa rousseauniana que demanda homogeneidad acaba por no ser muy democrática. La cuestión en juego es si puede haber un régimen político capaz de acoger tanto una participación inclusiva como la diversidad existente de los participantes. Se presentan dos respuestas diferentes a esta pregunta a (...) través de las obras de Jean-Luc Nancy y Jacques Rancière. (shrink)

Science can reinforce the healthy aspects of the politics of the policy process, to identify and further the public interest by discrediting policy options serving only special interests and helping to select among “science-confident” and “hedging” options. To do so, scientists must learn how to manage and communicate the degree of uncertainty in scientific understanding and prediction, lest uncertainty be manipulated to discredit science or to justify inaction. For natural resource and environmental policy, the institutional interests of government agencies, as (...) well as private interests, pose challenges of suppression, over-simplification, or distortion of scientific information. Scientists can combat these maneuvers, but must also look inward to ensure that their own special interests do not undermine the usefulness of science. (shrink)

Part I. Phenomenology -- Phenomenology and the return to beginnings -- Delimitations: phenomenology and the end of metaphysics -- Part II. Sallis's Plato interpretation -- Being and logos: reading the Platonic dialogues -- Chorology: on beginning in Plato's Timaeus -- Platonic legacies -- Part III. Art/Sallis -- Stone -- Shades-of painting at the limit -- Topographies -- Part IV. Sallis and other thinkers -- The gathering of reason -- Spacings-of reason and imagination in texts of Kant, Fichte, Hegel -- Echoes: (...) after Heidegger -- Crossings: Nietzsche and the space of tragedy -- Part V. Sallis speaks directly -- Double truth -- Force of imagination: the sense of the elemental -- On translation -- The Sallis/Derrida dialogue -- Derrida's "Tense" and Sallis's The verge of philosophy. (shrink)

Die "Paradoxien des Unendlichen" sind ein Klassiker der Philosophie der Mathematik und zugleich eine gute Einführung in das Denken des "Urgroßvaters" der analytischen Philosophie. Das Unendliche - seit jeher ein Faszinosum für die philosophische Reflexion - wurde in der Zeit nach der Grundlegung der Analysis durch Leibniz und Newton in der Mathematik zunächst als Problem betrachtet, das sich nicht vollkommen widerspruchsfrei behandeln lässt. Bernard Bolzano, der heute als "Urgroßvater der analytischen Philosophie" (Michael Dummett) gilt, zeigt in diesem klassisch gewordenen (...) Text jedoch, dass es beim Nachdenken über das Unendliche, sofern man begrifflich differenziert argumentiert und klare Definitionen zugrunde legt, keine echten Widersprüche gibt und sich die "Paradoxien des Unendlichen" auflösen lassen. Bolzano setzt sich zunächst mit den Unendlichkeitsbegriffen der Mathematik und der (idealistisch geprägten) Philosophie seiner Zeit auseinander, bevor er sich Schritt für Schritt die analytischen Grundlagen einer konsistenten Theorie des Unendlichen erarbeitet. Bereits einige Jahrzehnte vor Georg Cantors bis heute maßgeblicher mathematischer Unendlichkeitsdefinition gelingt Bolzano mit diesem Werk, dessen logische Klarheit und dessen Grad an philosophischer Durchdachtheit bis heute Beispielcharakter haben, die Rehabilitation des Unendlichen für die Philosophie der Mathematik. Die "Paradoxien des Unendlichen" wurden zuerst 1851 aus dem Nachlass herausgegeben. Diese Neuausgabe beruht auf dem der Erstausgabe zugrundeliegenden Manuskript. (shrink)

This book contributes to current bioethical debates by providing a critical analysis of the philosophy of human death. Bernard N. Schumacher discusses contemporary philosophical perspectives on death, creating a dialogue between phenomenology, existentialism, and analytic philosophy. He also examines the ancient philosophies that have shaped our current ideas about death. His analysis focuses on three fundamental problems: (1) the definition of human death, (2) the knowledge of mortality and of human death as such, and (3) the question of whether (...) death is nothing to us or, on the contrary, whether it can be regarded as an absolute or relative evil. Drawing on scholarship published in four languages and from three distinct currents of thought, this volume represents a comprehensive and systematic study of the philosophy of death, one that provides a provocative basis for discussions of the bioethics of human mortality. (shrink)