The maxim to understand the law literally resembles Holmes ' Plain Meaning Approach. But these approaches should not be considered as the expression of a naïve legal epistemology. They rather stress that the law ought to be interpreted as it is understood by the prudent citizen. In this way, the ideal of the rule of law is best guaranteed.

This volume examines critical social philosophy today, furthering the dialogue between German critical theory and French post-structuralism, exploring the relationship between philosophy and social theory, and developing new approaches to theories of recognition, social hope, and modern power.

Propositions of law are based upon normative judgement. The interpretation and application of legal provisions rest upon a judgement that determines which weight must be attributed to some point of view or perspective. In this respect, legal theory has a normative character. Its normative character does not preclude legal theory from being a scientific discipline. The scientific character of legal theory is not located in the possibility of testing the correctness of its theories. Rather, legal theory owes it scientific character (...) to the shared standards of production and evaluation of legal arguments: the grammar of justice. (shrink)

This volume addresses the long-standing neglect of the category of labour in critical social theory and it presents a powerful case for a new paradigm based on the anthropological significance of work and its role in shaping social bonds.

The essays in this volume demonstrate how the performance of sincerity is culturally specific and is enacted in different ways in different media and disciplines, including law and the arts.

Sterelny’s Thought in a Hostile World ([ 2003 ]) presents a complex, systematically structured theory of the evolution of cognition centered on a concept of decoupled representation. Taking Godfrey-Smith’s ([ 1996 ]) analysis of the evolution of behavioral flexibility as a framework, the theory describes increasingly complex grades of representation beginning with simple detection and culminating with decoupled representation, said to be belief-like, and it characterizes selection forces that drive evolutionary transformations in these forms of representation. Sterelny’s ultimate explanatory (...) target is the evolution of human agency. This paper develops a detailed analysis of the main cognitive aspects. It is argued that some of the major claims are not correct: decoupled representation as defined doesn’t capture belief-like representation, and, properly understood, decoupled representation turns out to be ubiquitous among multicellular animals. However, some of the key ideas are right, or along the right lines, and suggestions are made for modifying and expanding the conceptual framework. (shrink)

This is a very important contribution to the slowly emerging literature on psychoanalysis and time. By examining the influences on Freud's thinking about time and the development of what were his mostly implicit ideas about temporality, Kelly Noel-Smith offers a lively and impeccably scholarly new way of understanding the background to current developments in psychoanalytic theory and practice." - Professor Stephen Frosh, Birkbeck, University of London, UK. "Dr Noel-Smith displays deep knowledge of Freud's oeuvre, the relevant Ancient Greek (...) sources that Freud drew upon, and modern philosophical thought. Her expertise is synthesized into a well-organized inquiry into what Freud thought about time. I learned a huge amount from reading this clear, well-informed and profound exposition." - Professor Charles Stewart, University College London, UK. Time and timelessness are fundamental principles of psychoanalysis yet Freud does not present a consolidated theory of temporality. In this book Kelly Noel-Smith pieces together Freud's scattered 'hints' and 'suspicions' about time and its negative, timelessness. She traces a careful temporal trail through Freud's published works and his daunting Nachlass, and provides a compelling reason as to why Freud kept his remarkable thoughts about time to himself. Kelly Noel-Smith combines a career in law with an academic interest in psychoanalysis and philosophy. (shrink)

We sent a questionnaire survey to a random sample of 125 correspondents to the BMJ who had previously sent a letter which had been rejected. The objective was to evaluate the policy of sending on some unpublished letters to the authors of the articles to which they referred. There were 94 replies, a response rate of 75%. The key finding was that although most respondents agreed with the policy, a third thought it unconstructive. A quarter of the respondents said that (...) the BMJ policy would discourage them from sending a letter to the journal for publication. This survey has led to a change of policy at the BMJ. Letters which are not published are not now sent on to the authors of the original articles. (shrink)

The "Notes of Dr. Smith's Rhetorick Lectures," discovered in 1958 by a University of Aberdeen professor, consists of lecture notes taken by two of Smith's students at the University of Glasgow in 1762-1763. There are thirty lectures in the collection, all on rhetoric and the different kinds or characteristics of style. The book is divided into "an examination of the several ways of communicating our thoughts by speech" and "an attention to the principles of those literary compositions which (...) contribute to persuasion or entertainment." The species of communication discussed include descriptive and narrative (or historical) composition, poetry, demonstrative oratory, panegyric, didactic or scientific language, deliberative oratory, and judicial or forensic oratory. The subjects addressed in his teachings include the style and genius of some of the best of the ancient writers and poets, especially the historians and the English classics. (shrink)

Introduction, W G Runciman Social Evolution in Primates: The Role of Ecological Factors and Male Behaviour, Carel P van Schaik Determinants of Group Size in Primates: A General Model, R I M Dunbar Function and Intention in the Calls of Non-Human Primates, Dorothy L Cheney & Robert M Seyfarth Why Culture is Common, but Cultural Evolution is Rare, Robert Boyd & Peter J Richerson An Evolutionary and Chronological Framework for Human Social Behaviour, Robert A Foley Friendship and the Banker?s (...) Paradox: Other Pathways to the Evolution of Adaptations for Altruism, John Tooby & Leda Cosmides The Early Prehistory of Human Social Behaviour: Issues of Archaeological Inference and Cognitive Evolution, Steven Mithen The Emergence of Biologically Modern Populations in Europe: A Social and Cognitive ?Revolution??, Paul Mellars Responses to Environmental Novelty: Changes in Men?s Marriage Strategies in a Rural Kenyan Community, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder Genetic Language Impairment: Unruly Grammars, M Gopnik, J Dalalakis, S E Fukuda, S Fukuda & E Kehayia The Emergence of Cultures among Wild Chimpanzees, Christophe Boesch Terrestriality, Bipedalism and the Origin of Language, Leslie C Aiello Conclusions, John Maynard Smith. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Cultural Context of Post-traumatic Stress DisorderCarolyn Smith-Morris (bio)Keywordspost-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), culture, medical anthropology, fight-or-flight responseIn his Clinical Anecdote, Dr. Christopher Bailey gamely imagines the evolutionary underpinnings of his patient's distressing lack of war wounds. As part of a careful and engaged discussion of care for his suffering patient, Dr. Bailey suggests that our evolved fight-or-flight response to the alarms of the African savannah may be at (...) work in Colin's distress. The fight-or-flight response is something of great interest to anthropologists, who rely on Darwin's theory of evolution to explain much in human experience. According to Dr. Bailey's application of the theory, Colin's visceral response to threat is protective in the presence of danger, but destructive (particularly to his mental health) in the absence of such challenges. So Dr. Bailey considers whether we may have an evolved “need” for threat, and that Colin's trauma is in part related to the lack of such threat in his wartime experience.According to Darwin's ideas, evolved traits may be adaptive but may also simply be random appearances that have not yet produced cause for evolutionary eradication. The fight-or-flight response, or any of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis events initiated under either acute or chronic stress, is therefore occurring in Colin's reactions to everyday frustrations, to wartime exposures, and even during the stressful nontrauma of feeling “wimpy.” Dr. Bailey's idea about an evolved need for threat is tautological. That need is not biological, but cultural.Although post-traumatic stress disorder is medically real, it is an event that develops in a particular place and time. Likewise, gender roles that demand scar battles and trophies of a certain form are culturally determined. Culture is central to this anecdote: a culture-specific occurrence of post-traumatic stress disorder and culturally driven gender roles for men, especially warriors. Stress is indeed present in Colin's life: our postindustrial culture's separation from everyday death and violence make episodes like war and combat all the more shocking or traumatic; the lack of social recognition for his service also seems to be one of Colin's stressors. Both the shock of warfare and the trauma of his social invisibility are as vivid to his evolutionarily informed body as is the presence of a crouching lioness in the room. So it is the host of cultural expectations, and his inability to mobilize social and cognitive resources to respond to them, that is wounding Colin. Talk therapy should draw out these cultural details [End Page 235] and, as Dr. Bailey has already begun to do, emplot Colin into a more heroic (his)story of his service to our nation.Related ArticlesFeature Article: Clinical Anecdotes: A Painful Lack of WoundsCommentary: The Nature of Proof in PsychiatryCommentary: Truth and Healing a Veteran's DepressionCommentary: Inappropriate RegretCommentary: The Cultural Context of Post-traumatic Stress DisorderCommentary: Explication or Explanation?Commentary: The Importance of What Psychiatrists Care AboutCommentary: Mourning or MelancholiaResponse: A Painful Lack of ConnectionCarolyn Smith-Morris Carolyn Smith-Morris is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Her work focuses on chronic disease and the health impacts of culture change and acculturative stress in North America. She is engaged in several research programs among migrating Mexican workers, among poor African-Americans in Dallas, and for the Gila (pronounced Hee-la) River Indian Community of Southern Arizona, a tribe that suffers from the highest recorded rates of type 2 diabetes in the world. She also holds a research fellowship with the Foundation for Community Empowerment, serves on the Board of the Society for Medical Anthropology, and is a fellow in the Society for Applied Anthropology. She published Diabetes Among the Pima in 2006 and has several articles detailing her applied research on diabetes, reproduction, health care ethics, and end-of-life care. She can be contacted via e-mail at: [email protected], C. 2009. A painful lack of wounds. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 16, no. 3:223–224. [End Page... (shrink)

This book examines the philosophical foundations of the realist view of the progress of science as cumulative. It is a view that has recently been faced with a number of powerful attacks in which successive scientific theories are seen, not as extending their scope and honing their explanations, but as incommensurable. There is, it is held, in principle no way of establishing that they are about the same things. From the voluminous literature on the topic, Dr Smith has selected (...) relevantly and incisively and his exposition of the contending arguments is vigourous and clear, without undue technicality. As an explication and defence of realism it will interest all those concerned with this basic question in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

In a two-tiered, or Dual Oughts, moral theory, the objective account of right and wrong is supplemented by decision guides designed to enable an agent, uncertain about the circumstances or consequences of her possible actions, to indirectly apply the objective theory by using an appropriate decision guide. But are the decision guides counsels of morality or counsels of rationality? Peter Graham argues they are counsels of pragmatic rationality. This paper shows Graham’s view is unsuccessful, and argues, based on the approach (...) recently developed in [Author] that decision guides must be seen as moral principles. An explanation is provided for why we may be tempted to interpret decision guides as principles of rationality. (shrink)

Humans have long been fascinated by the idea of visiting the past and of seeing what the future will bring. Time travel has been one of the most popular themes of science fiction. Most people have seen the TV series ‘Dr Who’ or ‘Quantum Leap’ or ‘Star Trek’. You’ve probably seen one of the ‘Back to the Future’ or ‘Terminator’ movies, or ‘Twelve Monkeys’. Time travel narratives provide fascinating plots, which exercise our imaginations in ever so many ways. But is (...) the idea of travelling forward and backward in time pure fantasy—or can it be done? To be sure, not all time travel scenarios are coherent. But we hope to persuade you that the most common objections to the very idea of time travel have no real force. (shrink)

There is unquestionably a plethora of details and mysteries regarding the mind and the body. However, with the advent of psychopharmacology (the study of how psychedelics inform or alter brain states) there are more issues at hand. Do psychedelics allow us to access deeper areas of our consciousness? Are we having a spiritual experience under the influence of psychedelics? Dr. Rick Strassman does not want to continue asking these rather conspiratorial-like questions. Instead, Dr. Strassman believes that there is one special, (...) endogenous psychedelic, synthesized within the human physiological framework: N, N-Dymthethyltryptamine. Dr. Strassman concludes that this chemical is produced within and around the pineal gland, and is often the catalyst for spiritual and religious experiences. I will explore this topic further under the framework of discovering whether a naturalistic type explanation of spiritual experiences accounts for all types of spiritual experiences and whether one may be rational or justified in believing in God if a naturalist could explain spiritual experiences. (shrink)

This thesis attempts to address the philosophical implications of the N, N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) research of Dr. Rick Strassman. Strassman concludes that the psychedelic properties of DMT represent a proper biological starting point for discussing spiritual and near-death experiences. My research attempts to incorporate philosophical elements from the philosophy of mind and philosophy of religion/mysticism to give an accurate account of some of the philosophical issues worth exploring for future research. One of the essential patterns in this thesis is to trace (...) the research and conclusions of Strassman, compare them with the philosophical issues in the contemporary philosophy of mind and to address the problems of spiritual qualia and mystical experience. Part of the issue stems from understanding a theoneurological (brain mediated prophetic/spiritual communication) account for spiritual experiences within the framework of naturalism/supernaturalism philosophy. Here, I decipher the problems of qualitative distinctions amongst spiritual and nonspiritual experiences and how consciousness plays an essential role in this process. (shrink)

The Augustan Age in Scotland was the half-century between the publication of Hume's Treatise on Human Nature and the death of Robert Burns in 1796. In this period Edinburgh was at her height as a cultural centre. This is a 1956 study of eminent Scot Adam Smith - author of The Wealth of Nations - and the Scotland in which he lived and wrote. It also examines the contribution which he and his fellow-countrymen made to the accomplishment of the (...) eighteenth century in many fields. Dr Fay begins with a brief account of Smith's life, and goes on to describe the eighteenth-century Kirkcaldy where he spent his youth, the Glasgow where he matured, and the Edinburgh which gave him fulfilment. We are told of the part Smith played in the development of Political Economy as a science, and the book closes with an account of his relationships with such men as Townshend, Gibbon and Benjamin Franklin. (shrink)

Combining the methods of the modern philosopher with those of the historian of ideas, Knud Haakonssen presents an interpretation of the philosophy of law which Adam Smith developed out of - and partly in response to - David Hume's theory of justice. While acknowledging that the influences on Smith were many and various, Dr Haakonssen suggests that the decisive philosophical one was Hume's analysis of justice in A Treatise of Human Nature and the second Enquiry. He therefore begins (...) with a thorough investigation of Hume, from which he goes on to show the philosophical originality of Smith's new form of natural jurisprudence. At the same time, he provides an over all reading of Smith's social and political thought, demonstrating clearly the exact links between the moral theory of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the Lectures on Jurisprudence, and the sociohistorical theory of The Wealth of Nations. This is the first full analysis of Adam Smith's jurisprudence; it emphasizes its normative and critical function, and relates this to the psychological, sociological, and histroical aspects which hitherto have attracted most attention. Dr Haakonssen is critical of both purely descriptivist and utilitarian interpretations of Smith's moral and political philosophy, and demonstrates the implausibility of regarding Smith's view of history as pseudo-economic or 'materialist'. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.3 (2002) 465-481 [Access article in PDF] The Physiology of Political Economy: Vitalism and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations Catherine Packham The Scottish Enlightenment has been described as uniting a concern with the origins and foundations of knowledge with a preoccupation with the useful application of knowledge in schemes of practical improvement. 1 Adam Smith's Inquiry into the Nature and Causes (...) of the Wealth of Nations, which combines a theoretical account of political economy with specific proposals on politico-economic matters, might seem to exemplify such a characterization. For some commentators at the time of its publication, however, Smith's lack of practical experience in the field of trade disqualified any claims he might make to authoritative knowledge. Sir John Pringle, for instance, military surgeon and friend of Smith's, thought that a man "who had never been in trade could not be expected to write well on the subject"; and while Dr. Johnson repudiated this, suggesting that all that was necessary was "extensive views," Pringle's opinion was not unusual. 2 Such objections, interrogating the very basis of Smith's expertise, reiterate, in the context of his work, the same kinds of questions regarding knowledge's provenance which preoccupied his age, and which were indeed addressed by Smith himself. Smith's own account of the formation of philosophical knowledge rests not on the authority of experience but on the role of the imagination; he understood systematic knowledge as an imaginative "machine" or work of fancy created to please and soothe a mind disturbed by phenomena which are observed but unexplained. 3 Smith's account of philosophical [End Page 465] knowledge, in which he would include his own Wealth of Nations, suggests that his own expertise should be judged not on the extent of his personal experience of the matters discussed but on the explanatory power and pleasurable nature of the system which he outlines. With its emphasis on the work of the philosophical imagination, his account also suggests that some of the sources for that system might be somewhat unexpected, a suggestion which this paper will pursue.Such questions concerning the genesis and formation of the new discourse of political economy instituted by Wealth of Nations have recurred in our own time, informing some of the more illuminating of recent work on Smith. Rejecting a tradition which assesses the significance of Wealth of Nations in terms of its anticipation of modern economic analysis, revisionist historians of political and economic thought have, since the late 1970s, offered more contextualist accounts of the work, tracing the relations between Smith's moral and economic philosophy and the contemporary discourses of natural jurisprudence and civic humanism. Other commentators have borrowed from literary scholarship to examine the textual and discursive conventions through which Smith's writings construct and sustain their meanings. 4 Such work has given a new emphasis to the textual and discursive nature of Smith's work as a means to understand its derivation, sources, and influences; it has replaced an older perception of Smith as inspired prophet-founder of the new political economy with an effort to interpret his work in the context of other, adjacent and contemporary forms of inquiry. Collectively, such work highlights the varied and disparate discourses which informed Smith's thinking on economic and other matters and seeks to understand how the complex and diverse forms of interaction with and assimilation of aspects of these philosophical and other discourses may have contributed to the formation of Smith's work—and hence, must also figure in our own attempts to read it.This paper, by exploring a strand of physiological language and imagery which runs through Wealth of Nations and considering it in the context of new developments in Scottish physiological research in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, also seeks to understand Smith's work by examining its relations with contemporary philosophical discourse. Where other recent accounts of Wealth of Nations have reassessed its relationship with moral, political and legal discourses, it will... (shrink)

Hume'sDialogues Concerning Natural Religion are still much with us. What appears to be the definitive edition was published by Professor Norman Kemp Smith in 1935 with a learned introduction which, among other things, assembled a mass of evidence pointing to the conclusion that Philo is to be identified with Hume himself, and that Hume in the Dialogues is deliberately trying to undermine the religious hypothesis. Though these conclusions have been widely accepted, Dr. B. M. Laing, in the April issue (...) of Philosophy, strenuously attacked them in an ingenious argument based in part on his already published thesis that Hume's fundamental philosophy is not really the scepticism so long assigned him. Dr. Laing takes the opportunity in passing to indicate his sympathy with the recent position of a distinguished British poet that Voltaire, also, has been traditionally abused in the assumption that on the question of religion he wrote with his tongue in his cheek. The present examination is not designed to inquire into this new mode of making the wicked pious; nor to push the question back from the Dialogues to Hume's basic philosophy; nor to press the writer's conviction [“The Enigma of Hume,” Mind, XLV pp. 334–349] that not only is Philo to be identified as Hume, but in addition, Cleanthes as Joseph Butler, and Demea as Samuel Clarke. The present purpose is solely to indicate certain unhistorical bases of Dr. Laing's attack on the more traditional view so ably championed by Professor Norman Kemp Smith. (shrink)

: Dr. Smith is an internist in private practice who works at an inner city clinic affiliated with a university hospital. He is also a member of the university faculty. Many of Dr. Smith’s patients have type 2 diabetes mellitus and struggle with health care and other costs. Thinking about opportunities to better serve his patients and advance his career, Dr. Smith considers conducting clinical research in his office. ACME is a respected pharmaceutical company that for decades (...) has engaged in research, development, and production of widely used drugs. Several of ACME’s oral agents for type 2 diabetes will soon go off patent. In an effort to retain its market share in this class of drugs, ACME wants to complete clinical trials expeditiously and obtain approval for its new oral hypoglycemic medicine. The company approaches Dr. Smith to be a coinvestigator in its multicenter clinical trial. (shrink)

Acknowledging his indebtedness to Tillich, Bultmann, and Bonhoeffer, Dr. Smith reviews the changes in man's estimate of his own relation to history and Christianity, and describes a "new man" who can find God through other people and the community they comprise.--E. T.

This is an unusual text-book in logic. Its scope is wider than most books of its kind, though many points are omitted owing to lack of space in a one-semester course. Dr. Smith aimed at giving more than a dry exposition of Aristotelian formal logic. About a third of the volume is devoted to induction, the division and order of the sciences, the experimental method, scientific theories, and an introduction to logistics. From beginning to end a new interest is (...) given to the matters treated of, by the introduction of numerous and varied examples in the form of exact and sometimes extensive quotations from great writers and thinkers. This is a valuable help for anybody who wants to present logic as a subject which really contributes to the general education of those who, for one reason or another, are led to take courses in it. The examples given serve admirably to show how logic is applied to normal reading and thinking—a point which is hardly conveyed by the continual use of artificially constructed arguments which are so schematic as to be unreal. The Elements of Logic might perhaps be considered a suitable text-book for students who take Logic in conjunction with an Arts or Science course; it could certainly be recommended as profitable extra reading for such people. (shrink)

Scholars have long been captivated by the parallels between birdsong and human speech and language. In this book, leading scholars draw on the latest research to explore what birdsong can tell us about the biology of human speech and language and the consequences for evolutionary biology. They examine the cognitive and neural similarities between birdsong learning and speech and language acquisition, considering vocal imitation, auditory learning, an early vocalization phase, the structural properties of birdsong and human language, and the striking (...) similarities between the neural organization of learning and vocal production in birdsong and human speech. After outlining the basic issues involved in the study of both language and evolution, the contributors compare birdsong and language in terms of acquisition, recursion, and core structural properties, and then examine the neurobiology of song and speech, genomic factors, and the emergence and evolution of language. Contributors: Hermann Ackermann, Gabriël J.L. Beckers, Robert C. Berwick, Johan J. Bolhuis, Noam Chomsky, Frank Eisner, Martin Everaert, Michale S. Fee, Olga Fehér, Simon E. Fisher, W. Tecumseh Fitch, Jonathan B. Fritz, Sharon M.H. Gobes, Riny Huijbregts, Eric Jarvis, Robert Lachlan, Ann Law, Michael A. Long, Gary F. Marcus, Carolyn McGettigan, Daniel Mietchen, Richard Mooney, Sanne Moorman, Kazuo Okanoya, Christophe Pallier, Irene M. Pepperberg, Jonathan F. Prather, Franck Ramus, Eric Reuland, Constance Scharff, Sophie K. Scott, Neil Smith, Ofer Tchernichovski, Carel ten Cate, Christopher K. Thompson, Frank Wijnen, Moira Yip, Wolfram Ziegler, Willem Zuidema. (shrink)