I present an account of the good life as one in which wholesale engagement in the social practices that human agents take up is the signature feature. I then argue that sport, because it is one of a select few human undertakings in which such full-blown action is the rule rather than the exception, is a paradigmatic example of such a good life. I close by claiming that equating the good life with wholehearted action is an especially promising way not (...) only to appreciate the contribution sport makes to our lives but to legitimize that contribution to would-be detractors. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay is motivated by the seeming contradiction that Korean unification is sought after by most Koreans yet speculations about the social and cultural changes it might bring are almost absent. This may be because Korean unification denotes a series of differences contrasted to the present—because it is a potent “master symbol” with one foot in utopian speculation and the other in policy studies. In this essay, I outline some of the complexities, starting with an examination of illustrations of (...) unification in textbooks for the tensions and contradictions they introduce. I then turn to fiction and film, sketching not only what some South Koreans hope will happen after unification with the North but, indeed, the limits of their imagination regarding what the future will hold for South Korea. In the end, I concur with Grinker that representations of unification are “utopian,” but I object to the association of “utopia” with a socially engineered straitjacket. On the contrary, the utopias projected here suggest stepping off a precipice into worlds unknown, futures defined by their radical difference from today. The end of the essay locates these more imaginative dimensions of Korean unification in the “hope” of Ernst Bloch. (shrink)

The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Sport is a landmark publication in sport studies. It goes further than any book has before in tracing the contours of the discipline of the philosophy of sport and in surveying the core themes, approaches and theories that form its disciplinary fabric. The book explores the ways in which an understanding of philosophy can inform our understanding of important prevailing issues in sport. Edited by two of the most significant figures in the development (...) of the philosophy of sport, Mike McNamee and Bill Morgan, and with contributions from many of the world’s leading sport philosophers, this is an invaluable companion reference volume for any course in the social scientific study of sport, and an essential addition to the bookshelf of any serious scholar of the philosophy and/or ethics of sport. (shrink)

In 1990, I voiced strong doubts about a bill entitled the Patient Self-Determination Act, which had been introduced in the U.S. Senate by John Danforth and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. I hoped to see it defeated. In 1991, after the bill had become a small part of a massive status adopted in the waning hours of the 101st Congress, I devoted countless hours to its implementation. I wanted to see it succeed. Why the change?

Specialized monographs can be useful sorts of things, but this book may not truly fit the bill. In it, Wolf-Devine offers an exegesis of Descartes' accounts of the physiology of the visual system and of our perception of light, color, situation, distance, size, and shape, along with some background discussion both of Descartes' predecessors and of Cartesian philosophy. While she also claims to be interested in the "big picture" changes in natural philosophy and epistemology to which Descartes's work contributes, (...) these concerns intrude on the work only intermittently. Still even with the more limited set of aims, the book may both overreach its monographic grasp and fall a bit short. (shrink)

According to Wringe 2006 we have good reasons for accepting the existence of Global Collective Obligations - in other words, collective obligations which fall on the world’s population as a whole. One such reason is that the existence of such obligations provides a plausible solution a problem which is sometimes thought to arise if we think that individuals have a right to have their basic needs satisfied. However, obligations of this sort would be of little interest – either theoretical or (...) practical – if they did not give rise, either directly or indirectly, to any kinds of reasons for individuals to behave in certain ways. -/- In this paper, I shall argue that in many situations, forward-looking global obligations give rise to an obligation on individuals to work towards bringing into existence and support an institutional system which will enable their obligations to be met. My argument for this conclusion involves two steps. In the first step, I address a general question about how collective obligations can give rise to individual obligations without being reducible to them, and which obligations they give rise to. Here I give a Kant-inspired argument, based on the principles that ‘ought implies can’ and that the content of the moral law is given by reflecting on how agents should legislate in a kingdom of ends, which is designed to show that collective obligations can give rise to individual obligations. In the second step I apply this principle to the case of global forward-looking obligations. (shrink)

I take it for granted that sense experiential states provide reasons for empirical beliefs; indeed this claim forms the first premise of my central argument for (CC). 1 The subsequent stages of the argument are intended to establish that a person has such a reason for believing something about the way things are in the world around him only if he is in some mental state or other with a conceptual content: a conceptual state. Thus, given that sense experiential states (...) do provide reasons for empirical beliefs, they must have conceptual content. (shrink)

This book provides a clear and helpful overview of the philosophical core of the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, one of the most significant and interesting philosophers of the late twentieth century.

Michael L. Morgan is Emeritus Chancellor Professor at Indiana University and the Grafstein Visiting Chair in Jewish Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He has written extensively on ancient Greek philosophy, modern Jewish philosophy, and post-Holocaust theology and ethics.

This book advocates for the philosophical import of care in re-evaluating problems of humanitarianism in the context of the ongoing international refugee and forced migration situation. In doing so, it rethinks the human capacity to care about the suffering of distant others. At a time when emotional resources are running low, there is a need to recast what it means to care, with the aim of generating a productive movement against the rise of value fundamentalism globally—embraced in mantras of ‘good (...) and evil’ and ‘us and them’—and to confront xenophobia and oppressive politics. The author draws upon a wide array of rich traditions, including historical and contemporary writings on self-care and care of the other, to re-examine the intersection of care ethics and justice. She also rethinks the relationship between care and contestation, here analyzed in the aesthetic, ethical, political, and religious domains of human experience. From within the context of this contingent historical repetition of political oppression, the book constructs a reminder not only of what it feels like to care, but how and why we should act upon our care. Care Ethics and the Refugee Crisis is an important contribution to the growing literatures on care ethics and immigration/forced migration in philosophy. It will also appeal to scholars and advanced students working in other disciplines such as political science, refugee and migration studies, and social anthropology. (shrink)

I. Diverse interpretations.--II. Purpose and naturalism.--III. The realities of experience.--IV. An historical controversy.--V. The ideal construction of naturalism.--VI. The web of causation.--VII. The problem of life.--VIII. Mind and mechanism.--IX. The science of metaphysics of will.--X. Genetic psychology.--XI. The metaphysical postulate.--XII. Determinism and purpose.

1. Introduction -- 2. Edinburgh's university and medical schools in the early nineteenth century -- 3. Natural history in Edinburgh, 1779-1832 -- 4. Geology and evolution -- 5. Edinburgh and Paris -- 6. The legacy of the 'Edinburgh Lamarckians' -- 7. Conclusion.

This paper focuses on Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of the modern self, arguing that we are not as bereft of the resources to engage in rational thought about value as he makes out. I claim that MacIntyre’s argument presumes that philosophy has a much greater power to shape individuals and cultures than it in fact has. In particular, he greatly exaggerates the extent to which the character of the modern self has been an effect of the philosophical views of the self (...) that have been influential during the period, leading him to be overly pessimistic about its nature and powers. Finally, I argue that MacIntyre has provided us with no strong reason for thinking that a moral tradition structured by modern values could not be viable. (shrink)

In this book, Joseph G. Morgan examines the career of Wesley Fishel, a political scientist who vigorously supported American intervention in the Vietnam War, which he deemed a "great, and tragic, American experiment." Morgan demonstrates how Fishel continued to champion the prospect of an independent South Vietnam, even when Vietnamese resistance and infighting among American and Vietnamese leaders undermined this effort. Morgan also analyzes how opponents of the war questioned Fishel's scholarly integrity and his academic collaboration with (...) the US government in implementing Cold War policies. (shrink)

This short article starts with Alasdair MacIntyre’s famous critical remarks on human rights in After Virtue, and proceeds to ask whether in fact MacIntyre can be read against himself, taking a range of his own texts. This provides the basis for a sketch of a substantive account of human rights, more historicised and political than those for which MacIntyre has so little time. The article engages with some leading English Aristotelians-James Griffin and John Tasioulas in particular. MacIntyre has been a (...) Marxist: this article suggests that perhaps he still is and that a consistent Aristotelian is a Marxist, especially where human rights are concerned. (shrink)

This book equips readers with a sound understanding of the value-base of mental health care and provides them with the skills and knowledge to demystify complex values in decision-making in order to reach outcomes which are focused on the needs of service users. Engaging case examples and exercises link theory and practice throughout.

In this chapter, I present an analysis that re‐examines and reconstructs how Adorno reads Kierkegaard in his 1933 Habilitationsshrift, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic and why he reads him in the manner he does, and inquire what the Kierkegaard book may teach us about Adorno's later philosophic development. In the process of my analysis and in light of my answer to the latter question, we will come to understand Adorno's Kierkegaard reading through the following argument: (i) both a negative and (...) positive theology are present in Kierkegaard; (ii) Adorno embraces only the negative, apophatic and rejects the positive, cataphatic theology because Adorno reads the latter as an escape from worldly needs and action; and (iii) the negative theology that Adorno accepts is instructive of and bears an important relation to Adorno's 1970 Aesthetic Theory. The present chapter thus provides a summary of the most insightful and relevant scholarship on Adorno's intersection with Kierkegaard as well as a new argument about Adorno's Aesthetic Theory from rethinking this intersection. (shrink)

Many Epicurean arguments for the claim that death is nothing to us depend on the ‘Experience Constraint’: the claim that something can only be good or bad for us if we experience it. However, Epicurus’ commitment to the Experience Constraint makes his attitude to will-writing puzzling. How can someone who accepts the Experience Constraint be motivated to bring about post mortem outcomes?We might think that an Epicurean will-writer could be pleased by the thought of his/her loved ones being provided for (...) after his/her death. Warren has argued that this does not dissolve the puzzle, since it involves a hope which the Epicurean should take to be empty just as the fear of death is empty. However, if it is a necessary condition of an emotion’s being empty that it involve accepting a claim which is not only false but also harmful it is not clear that this hope is indeed ‘empty’: there is a crucial disanalogy between fearing death and hoping for the prosperity of one’s children here. And if emptiness does... (shrink)

I will briefly discuss the history of research-related projects that Mark Burgin and I worked on together. I will then discuss our joint research related to the circle of sense and nonsense. One paper was entitled In a search for deeper meanings: navigating the circle of Sense and Nonsense and in turn articulating logical varieties as knowledge illuminators and the second was entitled In the Circle of Sense and Nonsense, Including A Mathematic Model of Meaning. This research represents a bridge (...) between the media arts and sciences (my artwork) as a means of embodying ideas exploring a particular approach to meaning production and related computation, as well as Burgin’s concepts related to logical varieties and mathematical models of meaning. I will refer to the full papers and links because they present a very robust and full articulation of the concepts discussed here. In this paper, I will briefly touch on the areas of research, supply short definitions, and refer to the relevant historical publications. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Possibility of Falsity The Involvement of Generality Notes References.

Galvanised by events outside of his consulting room, David Morgan began The Political Mind seminars at the British Psychoanalytical Society in 2015 and their successful run continues today. A series of superlative seminars that examine the effects of the current upheaval going on worldwide, this book is the second to bring these seminars from leading thinkers to a wider audience. Leading politicians, writers, educators, psychoanalysts, psychologists, philosophers, psychotherapists, and psychologists are gathered together in this fascinating volume that investigates social (...) upheaval on the worldwide stage. Stimulating and thought-provoking, this is a must-read for every citizen asking just what is happening in the world today."--Publisher's description. (shrink)

Though underexplored in contemporary scholarship, the Victorian attempts to turn aesthetics into a science remain one of the most fascinating aspects of that era. In The Outward Mind, Benjamin Morgan approaches this period of innovation as an important origin point for current attempts to understand art or beauty using the tools of the sciences. Moving chronologically from natural theology in the early nineteenth century to laboratory psychology in the early twentieth, Morgan draws on little-known archives of Victorian intellectuals (...) such as William Morris, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and others to argue that scientific studies of mind and emotion transformed the way writers and artists understood the experience of beauty and effectively redescribed aesthetic judgment as a biological adaptation. Looking beyond the Victorian period to humanistic critical theory today, he also shows how the historical relationship between science and aesthetics could be a vital resource for rethinking key concepts in contemporary literary and cultural criticism, such as materialism, empathy, practice, and form. At a moment when the tumultuous relationship between the sciences and the humanities is the subject of ongoing debate, Morgan argues for the importance of understanding the arts and sciences as incontrovertibly intertwined. (shrink)

Traumatic events happen in every age, yet there is a particularly cataclysmic feeling to our own epoch that is so attractive to some and so terrifying to others. The terrible events of September 11th 2001 still resonate and the repercussions continue to this day: the desperation of immigrants fleeing terror, the uncertainty of Brexit, Donald Trump in the White House, the rise of the alt-right and hard left, increasing fundamentalism, and terror groups intent on causing destruction to the Western way (...) of life. If that were not enough, we also have to grapple with the enormity of climate change and the charge that if we do not act now, it will be too late. Is it any wonder many are left overwhelmed by the events they see on the news? Galvanised by the events outside of his consulting room, in 2015, David Morgan began The Political Mind seminars at the British Psychoanalytical Society and their successful run continues today. A series of superlative seminars, mostly presented by colleagues from the British Society plus a few select external experts, that examine a dazzling array of relevant topics to provide a psychoanalytic understanding of just what is going on in our world. This book is the first in The Political Mind series to bring these seminars to a wider audience. The Unconscious in Political and Social Life contains compelling contributions from Christopher Bollas, Michael Rustin, Jonathan Sklar, David Bell, Philip Stokoe, Roger Kennedy, David Morgan, M. Fakhry Davids, Ruth McCall, R. D. Hinshelwood, Renée Danziger, Josh Cohen, Sally Weintrobe, and Margot Waddell. They investigate so many vital issues affecting us today: the evolution of democracy, right-wing populism, prejudice, the rise of the far right, attitudes to refugees and migrants, neoliberalism, fundamentalism, terrorism, the Palestine-Israel situation, political change, feminism, austerity in the UK, financial globalisation, and climate change. This book needs to be read by all who are concerned by the state of the world today. Psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts with their awareness of what motivates human beings bring clarity and fresh insight to these matters. A deeper understanding of humanity awaits the reader of The Unconscious in Political and Social Life. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the inheritance of human handedness and cerebral lateralization within the more general context of structural biological asymmetries. The morphogenesis of asymmetrical structures, such as the heart in vertebrates, depends upon a complex interaction between information coded in the cytoplasm and in the genes, but the polarity of asymmetry seems to depend on the cytoplasmic rather than the genetic code. Indeed it is extremely difficult to find clear-cut examples in which thedirectionof an asymmetry is under genetic control. (...) As one possible case, there is some evidence that the direction, clockwise or counterclockwise, of rotation of the abdomen in certain mutant strains ofDrosophilais controlled by a particular gene locus, although there appears to be some degree of confusion on this point. By contrast, it is much easier to find examples in which thedegreebut not the direction of asymmetry is under genetic control. For instance, there is a mutant strain of mice in which half of the animals displaysitus inversusof the viscera. The proportion has remained at one half despite many years of inbreeding, suggesting that the mutant allele effectively cancels the normalsitusand allows the asymmetry to be specified in random fashion.Although this account does not deny that the right hemisphere of humans may be the more specialized for certain functions, it does attribute a leading or dominant role to the left hemisphere (at least in most individuals). We suggest that so-called “right-hemisphere” functions are essentially acquired by default, due to the left hemisphere's prior involvement with speech and skilled motor acts; we note, for instance, that these right-hemisphere functions include rather elementary perceptual processes. But perhaps the more critical prediction from our account is that the phenomenon of equipotentiality should be unidirectional: the right (lagging) hemisphere should be more disposed to take over left-hemisphere functions following early lesions than is the left (leading) hemisphere to take over right-hemisphere functions. We note preliminary evidence that this may be so. (shrink)

The history of cosmology is often understood in terms of the development of modern science, but Asian cosmological thought and practice touched on many aspects of life, including mathematics, astronomy, politics, philosophy, religion, and art. Because of the deep pervasion of cosmology in culture, many opportunities arose for transmissions of cosmological ideas across borders and innovations of knowledge and application in new contexts. Taking a wider view, one finds that cosmological ideas traveled widely and intermingled freely, being frequently reinterpreted by (...) scholars, ritualists, and artists and transforming as they overlapped with ideas and practices from other traditions. This book brings together ten diverse scholars to present their views on these overlapping cosmologies in Asia. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Written by renowned data science experts Foster Provost and Tom Fawcett, Data Science for Business introduces the fundamental principles of data science, and walks you through the "data-analytic thinking" necessary for extracting useful knowledge and business value from the data you collect. This guide also helps you understand the many data-mining techniques in use today.