Is the United States "the land of equal opportunity" or is the playing field tilted in favor of those whose parents are wealthy, well educated, and white? If family background is important in getting ahead, why? And if the processes that transmit economic status from parent to child are unfair, could public policy address the problem? Unequal Chances provides new answers to these questions by leading economists, sociologists, biologists, behavioral geneticists, and philosophers.New estimates show that intergenerational inequality in the United (...) States is far greater than was previously thought. Moreover, while the inheritance of wealth and the better schooling typically enjoyed by the children of the well-to-do contribute to this process, these two standard explanations fail to explain the extent of intergenerational status transmission. The genetic inheritance of IQ is even less important. Instead, parent-offspring similarities in personality and behavior may play an important role. Race contributes to the process, and the intergenerational mobility patterns of African Americans and European Americans differ substantially.Following the editors' introduction are chapters by Greg Duncan, Ariel Kalil, Susan E. Mayer, Robin Tepper, and Monique R. Payne; Bhashkar Mazumder; David J. Harding, Christopher Jencks, Leonard M. Lopoo, and Susan E. Mayer; Anders Björklund, Markus Jäntti, and Gary Solon; Tom Hertz; John C. Loehlin; Melissa Osborne Groves; Marcus W. Feldman, Shuzhuo Li, Nan Li, Shripad Tuljapurkar, and Xiaoyi Jin; and Adam Swift. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.4 (2002) 677-696 [Access article in PDF] Bentham and Hobbes:An Issue of Influence James E. Crimmins Historians of political thought commonly assume that the similarities in the thought of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) are the product of Bentham's reading of Hobbes and infer that Bentham was in a certain sense a disciple of Hobbes. 1 This has been generally true (...) through the past one hundred years of scholarship, from the commentator writing at the end of the nineteenth century who had no doubt that Bentham's "chief ideas and methods are to be found in Hobbes," to the end of the last century when Gerald Postema insisted that Bentham was "a careful student of Hobbes." 2 In between George Sabine argued that Hobbes's political philosophy "affected the whole later history of moral and political thought," but its powerful "positive influence" was most fully felt in the nineteenth century when his ideas were incorporated into the thinking of the utilitarians. 3 The implication of Sabine's comment [End Page 677] was that Hobbes's influence was not always of the positive sort. In other words, if one can conceive of influence being positive then it can also be negative, and Hobbes had just such an influence on many who read him until his ideas became respectable in the hands of Bentham and his associates. 4 John Plamenatz concurred. Bentham, he wrote, "lived in the shadow of Hobbes" and, together with James Mill, came close to "an uncritical acceptance" of Hobbes's doctrines. 5 Because Bentham abandoned Hobbes's "vocabulary" (laws of nature, natural rights, covenant, and so forth) "the difference between them appears so much greater than it is," claimed Plamenatz. But eliminate the troublesome phrases from Hobbes's writings and what remains, save for Hobbes's extravagant fear of anarchy, is strikingly similar to the fundamental political doctrines of Bentham. 6At the heart of the syndrome of ideas that the utilitarians are assumed to have inherited from Hobbes is the belief that the methods of physical science were the proper models for political explanation. 7 William Bluhm wrote that the mechanistic and naturalistic framework in which Hobbes couched his theory was not to be approached in the literature of political theory until Bentham set forth his felicific calculus. Since the time of Hobbes, Bluhm argued, Bentham stands out as the great exception to the history of neglect that has been the general fate of mathematical forms of analysis in the study of politics (until the second half of the twentieth century). 8 Moreover, in postulating man as a rational actor motivated by selfish interest and in suggesting that it is in the interest of the ruler to govern in the majority interest as the best way of preserving his own power, Bluhm argued that Hobbes provided "an interesting echo... of a central Benthamic principle, [and thus] good evidence that Hobbes is the forerunner of Utilitarianism." 9 The views of Sabine, Plamenatz, and Bluhm found an impressive echo in John Bowle's influential Hobbes and his Critics, where Hobbes is described as "a forerunner of the Benthamite school of political thought." 10 It is with this kind of understanding in mind, that W. H. Greenleaf [End Page 678] commented, "it is no accident that the modern revival of interest in Hobbesian ideas is associated with the utilitarians...." 11Oddly, these commentators have remarkably few references to Hobbes in Bentham's writings to work with. This paucity of textual evidence was noted by an early reviewer of the first edition of Bentham's works, who chose rather to speak of the "coincidences" between the thought of Hobbes and Bentham, only pausing to note that such is the "slippery" nature of general reasonings of the kind Hobbes and Bentham attempted that it should not startle us to find one a monarchist and the other a republican. 12 Nevertheless, it is generally assumed that Bentham did read Hobbes and that much of what he read he assimilated into his... (shrink)

A prominent view of psychopathic moral reasoning suggests that psychopathic individuals cannot properly distinguish between moral wrongs and other types of wrongs. The present study evaluated this view by examining the extent to which 109 incarcerated offenders with varying degrees of psychopathy could distinguish between moral and conventional transgressions relative to each other and to nonincarcerated healthy controls. Using a modified version of the classic Moral/Conventional Transgressions task that uses a forced-choice format to minimize strategic responding, the present study found (...) that total psychopathy score did not predict performance on the task. Task performance was explained by some individual subfacets of psychopathy and by other variables unrelated to psychopathy, such as IQ. The authors conclude that, contrary to earlier claims, insufficient data exist to infer that psychopathic individuals cannot know what is morally wrong. (shrink)

"Aristotle was a systematic writer who often cross-referred to the definitions of terms given elsewhere in his work. Book 5 of the Metaphysics is important because it consists of definitions of the main uses of key terms in Aristotle's philosophy, and it is extremely valuable to have a commentary on this important text by Alexander of Aphrodisias, the leading commentator of his school. Alexander provides a detailed commentary on all of the thirty terms analysed in Book 5, weighing alternative interpretations (...) of what Aristotle says one against another, defending Peripatetic views against actual and possible criticisms, and attempting to integrate what is said in Book 5 into the context of the Metaphysics as a whole."--Bloomsbury Publishing. (shrink)

This paper is based on a semantic foundation of quantum logic which makes use of dialog-games. In the first part of the paper the dialogic method is introduced and under the conditions of quantum mechanical measurements the rules of a dialog-game about quantum mechanical propositions are established. In the second part of the paper the quantum mechanical dialog-game is replaced by a calculus of quantum logic. As the main part of the paper we show that the calculus of quantum logic (...) is complete and consistent with respect to the dialogic semantics. Since the dialoggame does not involve the 'excluded middle' the calculus represents a calculus of effective (intuitionistic) quantum logic. In a forthcoming paper it is shown that this calculus is equivalent to a calculus of sequents and more interestingly to a calculus of propositions. With the addition of the 'excluded middle' the latter calculus is a model for the lattice of subspaces of a Hilbert space. (shrink)

This chapter presents an essay by W. E. B. Du Bois on the strivings of the American Negro. He cites the double-consciousness of the Negro, the sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength (...) alone keeps it from being torn asunder. He argues that the history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self—conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. (shrink)

In a preceding paper [1] it was shown that quantum logic, given by the tableaux-calculus Teff, is complete and consistent with respect to the dialogic foundation of logics. Since in formal dialogs the special property of the 'value-definiteness' of propositions is not postulated, the calculus $T_{eff}$ represents a calculus of effective (intuitionistic) quantum logic. Beginning with the tableaux-calculus the equivalence of $T_{eff}$ to calculi which use more familiar figures such as sequents and implications can be investigated. In this paper we (...) present a sequents-calculus of Gentzen-type and a propositional calculus of Brouwer-type which are shown to be equivalent to $T_{eff}$ . The effective propositional calculus provides an interpretation for a lattice structure, called quasi-implicative lattice. If, in addition, the value-definiteness of quantum mechanical propositions is postulated, a propositional calculus is obtained which provides an interpretation for a quasi-modular orthocomplemented lattice which, as is well-known, has as a model the lattice of subspaces of a Hilbert space. (shrink)

Whittaker, following Siebeck, pointed out the important role Plotinus assigns to the functions of imagination in psychic life. Imagination is the terminus ad quern of all properly human conscious experience; it is that faculty of man without which there can be no conscious experience. The sensitive soul is an imaginative soul below which there is Nature, or vegetative soul, which acts without being conscious. When the functions of reason are added to sensation to produce a rational human being, there is (...) conscious discursive thought as well as conscious sensation; and since the sensitive soul cannot be responsible for the imaging of rational concepts, Plotinus asserts the existence of a conceptual imagination. (shrink)

Originally published in 1985, this distinguished and constructive critique of modern culture introduced into our language a brand-new term, ‘PN’, standing for ‘psychic nutrition’, which at the time promised to become a household expression. Drawing on his first-hand knowledge of oriental civilizations; on discoveries of Jung, especially his concept of psychic energy; on the ideas of the cultural anthropologists; and not least on the New Science implicit in microphysics and microbiology, E.W.F. Tomlin, whose philosophical books have been translated into several (...) languages, shows how the human psyche requires its own kind of nourishment just as urgently as the body needs food. In the industrial societies of the West, this need has often been ignored. Reformers, in their earnest though sometimes inept endeavours to create a better world, have too often exposed us to the dangers of psychic starvation and the noxious effects of what may be called ‘neg-PN’. Here lie the roots of violence and the lack of direction so conspicuously afflicting modern man and woman. Examples of PN, positive and negative, are given, lending the book an immediacy and practical character often lacking in studies of this kind. In the new scientific approach here adopted, the divisions between matter and life, and life and mind, are discarded, and the old conflict between science and religion shown to belong to an out-of-date world view. The result is a radical reappraisal of the nature and function of religion and art, the two great psychic forces in history. Indeed, the present crisis is shown to originate in the psychic sphere rather than in the political and economic order. Deeply felt and elegantly written, yet not lacking in wit and humour, the book ends with some concrete ideas on how a more balanced culture may be achieved. (shrink)

In this article, the author focuses on the allocation of decision-making authority between parents and physicians. She argues that parents should have substantial room to decide whether genetic testing is good for their child and that they may appropriately consider interests in addition to those of their child in making such choices. A physician, however, may refuse to act pursuant to parental views about testing, when in the physician's view, the parents' choices would pose a risk of significant harm to (...) the child. The balance of control between parents and physicians is illustrated by discussion of a series of case vignettes. Refusal to perform requested testing is most often warranted for testing for carrier status and for genetic predisposition to late onset disease. The author concludes her analysis by discussing why it is appropriate to give increasing deference to the views of the child as the child grows older. (shrink)

A recent addition to the growing corpus of Frege literature is Reinhardt Grossmann's metaphysical study of Frege's philosophical theories. Grossmann approaches Frege as a metaphysician whose philosophical concern centers around four main problems: the nature of logic, the analysis of various kinds of propositions, identity and truth. He has a genetic view of Frege's answers to these problems, and this is reflected in the arrangement and content of the chapters. In chapter I, Grossmann considers Frege's introduction of these problems in (...) the Begriffsschrift and his initial attempt at solutions in terms of the distinctions between thinking and judging, sentence and content, concept and object, function and argument. Grossmann here diagnoses Frege's alleged failure to recognize states of affairs as the fundamental shortcoming of these early views. (shrink)

This response to the articles by Breck, Amundsen, and Bresnahan is argued from a traditional Orthodox point of view, which accepts the historical Tradition of the Church and recognizes the relevance of this Tradition in the modern world. Traditional Orthodox ethics is grounded in a radical perception of the Resurrection of Christ. Many Western and Eastern commentators on Orthodox religion and spirituality have noted the centrality of the Resurrection to all facets of our Tradition. Thus the discussion of euthanasia should (...) be seen in the light of the Resurrection of Christ. (shrink)