What drives us to do good things, and to avoid doing bad? This book offers an integrative examination of the role of motivation in shaping moral cognition, judgement, and behavior.

This article traces the development of Sartre's metaphysics with three interrelated aims in mind. The first is to situate Sartre's metaphysical views in relation to those of his predecessors, his contemporaries, and current continental philosophy. The second is to show that Sartre's project informs some of the key changes he makes to his existentialism during his career. The third is to bring Sartre the metaphysician into dialogue with key thinkers in the current realism/antirealism debate in Continental philosophy by showing that (...) the defense of materialism he offers in his later work preserves many hard-won insights of phenomenology and has significant advantages over many contemporary articulations of realism. (shrink)

Global climate change raises profound questions for social and political theorists. The human impacts of climate change are sufficiently broad, and generally adverse, to threaten the rights and freedoms of existing and future members of all countries. These impacts will also exacerbate inequalities between rich and poor countries despite the limited role of the latter in their origins. Responding to these impacts will require the implementation of environmental and social policies that are both environmentally effective and consistent with the equality (...) and liberty of populations to which they are applied. This article considers whether global emissions trading, namely, the creation of a global market for tradable allowances conferring the right to emit a certain amount of greenhouse gas over a specified time period, is normatively defensible from a liberal egalitarian perspective. After a brief review of the theory and practice of emissions trading, a number of normative objections to the international trade in emissions allowances are analysed. These objections appeal to one, or a combination, of two claims. First, emissions trading schemes are likely to produce undesirable outcomes, such as environmental neglect, in the further future. I call these ‘instrumental objections’. Second, emissions trading schemes violate non‐consequential norms of justice and fairness. I call these ‘intrinsic objections’. It is argued that, when combined, instrumental and intrinsic objections indicate that instituting a global network of emissions trading schemes, as envisioned by a number of parties to the Kyoto Protocol and Copenhagen Accord, would be illegitimate in absence of significant procedural and consequential safeguards. (shrink)

Global climate change raises profound questions for social and political theorists. The human impacts of climate change are sufficiently broad, and generally adverse, to threaten the rights and freedoms of existing and future members of all countries. These impacts will also exacerbate inequalities between rich and poor countries despite the limited role of the latter in their origins. Responding to these impacts will require the implementation of environmental and social policies that are both environmentally effective and consistent with the equality (...) and liberty of populations to which they are applied. This article considers whether global emissions trading, namely, the creation of a global market for tradable allowances conferring the right to emit a certain amount of greenhouse gas over a specified time period, is normatively defensible from a liberal egalitarian perspective. After a brief review of the theory and practice of emissions trading, a number of normative objections to the international trade in emissions allowances are analysed. These objections appeal to one, or a combination, of two claims. First, emissions trading schemes are likely to produce undesirable outcomes, such as environmental neglect, in the further future. I call these ‘instrumental objections’. Second, emissions trading schemes violate non‐consequential norms of justice and fairness. I call these ‘intrinsic objections’. It is argued that, when combined, instrumental and intrinsic objections indicate that instituting a global network of emissions trading schemes, as envisioned by a number of parties to the Kyoto Protocol and Copenhagen Accord, would be illegitimate in absence of significant procedural and consequential safeguards. (shrink)

How do we prevent the next pandemic? Will governments successfully tackle climate change? Will they find ways to close the gap between the haves and have-nots and to eliminate poverty? Which solution - democratic or authoritarian - will determine the global governance of a flawed nation-state system? This unique contribution to global studies advances a multidisciplinary theory that the governments of all human societies are the tenuous outcome of the competing solutions to the Imperatives of Order, Welfare, and Legitimacy (OWL). (...) The OWL paradigm provides a common framework to evaluate the contrasting responses of the liberal democratic, Chinese, and Russian solutions to global governance. Underscored is the volume's contention that global governance is the overriding issue confronting nation-states and the diverse and divided peoples of what is now a global society for the first time in the evolution of the species. The volume addresses a wide spectrum of audiences, united in their shared resolve that the democracies prevail in a projected century-long struggle between democratic and authoritarian regimes to determine global governance. Scholars, teachers, students, elected officials, policy analysts, media professionals, and engaged citizens who make self-government work will profit from this visionary and provocative study. (shrink)

This paper looks at the history of identification in England over the past 1,000 years. It contends that techniques and technologies of identification do not identify a single entity but a number of forms of personality, including the juridical person, the citizen and the deviant. Individuals can be the bearers of more than one of these personalities at the same time, or over the course of their life. These personalities are created by social performances to which people are trained to (...) react conventionally. As such identity, and its identification, is a social and cultural phenomenon, rather than a ‘thing’. Each of the personalities noted above has been identified historically in differing ways -through possessions or techniques in the case of the juridical person, though the community in the case of the citizen, and on, or through, the body in the case of the deviant. In the contemporary world these distinctions are being effaced, as all forms of identification are being reduced to the body and the database. This levelling of social forms of being has implication for what it means to be a person in our society, and for public perceptions of new techniques and technologies of identification. (shrink)

This early work first published in 1912 by poet, philosopher, and gay activist, Edward Carpenter is both expensive and hard to find in its first edition. It details the changing ideas of masculinity and femininity in his contemporary culture and is thoroughly fascinating for anyone interested in social history. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using (...) the original text and artwork. (shrink)

Real change and real results for your school This book provides the practical tools and implementation guide to become a school that delivers. It fills the gap between intention and delivery. Every process in the book has been tested and refined across six countries. The book shares how to: blend research and practice to deliver results that matter in schools. develop a strong culture of leadership, trust and alignment. address the frustrations currently felt by teachers in a positive, productive way. (...) When a school community delivers together for their children, they feel the true joy of education. (shrink)

We estimate that 208,000 deep brain stimulation (DBS) devices have been implanted to address neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders worldwide. DBS Think Tank presenters pooled data and determined that DBS expanded in its scope and has been applied to multiple brain disorders in an effort to modulate neural circuitry. The DBS Think Tank was founded in 2012 providing a space where clinicians, engineers, researchers from industry and academia discuss current and emerging DBS technologies and logistical and ethical issues facing the field. (...) The emphasis is on cutting edge research and collaboration aimed to advance the DBS field. The Eighth Annual DBS Think Tank was held virtually on September 1 and 2, 2020 (Zoom Video Communications) due to restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The meeting focused on advances in: (1) optogenetics as a tool for comprehending neurobiology of diseases and on optogenetically-inspired DBS, (2) cutting edge of emerging DBS technologies, (3) ethical issues affecting DBS research and access to care, (4) neuromodulatory approaches for depression, (5) advancing novel hardware, software and imaging methodologies, (6) use of neurophysiological signals in adaptive neurostimulation, and (7) use of more advanced technologies to improve DBS clinical outcomes. There were 178 attendees who participated in a DBS Think Tank survey, which revealed the expansion of DBS into several indications such as obesity, post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction and Alzheimer’s disease. This proceedings summarizes the advances discussed at the Eighth Annual DBS Think Tank. (shrink)

This chapter examines the changes in the concept of substance and essence in British philosophy during the seventeenth century. It analyzes the roles played by substance and essence in different versions of scholastic and Aristotelian philosophy studied and taught during this period, and considers the criticism of Thomas Hobbes, Robert Boyle, and John Locke on these issues. The chapter suggests that Hobbes, Boyle, and Locke engaged with the context of scholastic logic and metaphysics in their discussions of substance and their (...) attempts to reject and replace theories of substantial form. (shrink)

Plants are commonly considered immobile, in contrast to humans and other animals. But vegetal existence involves many place-based forms of change: stems growing upward, roots spreading outward, fronds unfurling in response to sunlight, seeds traveling across wide distances, and other intricate relationships with the surrounding world. How do plants as sessile, growing, decaying, and metamorphosing beings shape the places they inhabit, and how are they shaped by them? How do human places interact with those of plants-in lived experience; in landscape (...) painting; in cultivation and contemplation; in forests, fields, gardens, and cities? Examining these questions and many more, Plants in Place is a collaborative study of vegetal phenomenology at the intersection of Edward S. Casey's phenomenology of place and Michael Marder's plant-thinking. It focuses on both the microlevel of the dynamic constitution of plant edges or a child's engagement with moss and the macrolevel of habitats that include the sociality of trees. This compelling portrait of plants and their places provides readers with new ways to appreciate the complexity and vitality of vegetal life. Eloquent, descriptively rich, and insightful, the book also shows how the worlds of plants can enhance our understanding and experience of place more broadly. (shrink)

In the late 1800s, Charles Darwin and other naturalists supported a blending view of inheritance whereby offspring possess a middling mix of their parents' traits. Many of these naturalists also argued that individuals pass at least some of their acquired characteristics to their descendants. Darwin proposed that acquired characteristics and other environmentally induced changes in a parent's hereditary material account in large part for the inheritable variations that drove evolution. Inspired by the evolutionary theories of his first cousin, Darwin, Francis (...) Galton developed hereditarian notions that helped to lay the foundation for both genetics and eugenics. Eugenics was endorsed by evolutionary geneticists such as August Weismann, Karl Pearson, W. F. R. Weldon, William Bateson, and Hugo de Vries, which, as a result, gave it enormous scientific credibility in America and Europe. This chapter explores the role of biology in the emergence of the eugenics movement in the Anglo-Saxon world. (shrink)

How can law ethically regulate a future of fast-changing technologies? From recent inventions to science fiction, Future Law explores how law, ethics and regulation must respond to new technologies that challenge the boundaries of our ethics.

This second half of a two-part essay examines how Proudhon’s ideas about monarchy changed during his 1858–62 Belgian exile and further evolved upon his return to France around the time of the 1863 legislative elections. If Proudhon justified monarchy’s role in state formation in the French pre-revolutionary past, he did not want the political liberalization of the Second Empire to lead to a return to a regime ressembling the July Monarchy. He attempted in the final years of his life to (...) develop a theory of constitutional evolution which could explain France’s internal political evolution since 1789 and Europe’s geopolitical evolution since the Vienna Settlement. This theory was designed to indicate why the teleological logic at work in both national and international developments since the French Revolution spelled the death knell for Napoleon III’s regime and pre-empted any regression to those political constitutions which came before the February 1848 Revolution in France. While developing these reflections, Proudhon continued to imagine alternative forms of political and social representation anticipating and influencing the way in which later theories of federalism and corporatism were discussed during the French Third Republic in a context of general dissatisfaction with parliamentary democracy. (shrink)

A key concern of global ethics is the equitable distribution of benefits and burdens amongst persons belonging to different populations. Until recently, the philosophical literature on global distribution was dominated by the question of how benefits and burdens should be divided amongst contemporaries. Recent years, however, have seen an increase in research on the scope and content of our duties to future generations. This has led to a number of innovative attempts to extend principles of distribution across time while retaining (...) a focus on the entitlements of the existing poor. In this article, I examine a key aspect of intergenerational justice, namely, the appropriate 'pattern' of well-being that should be obtained across generations. With the aid of research into the impacts of global climate change, I evaluate a number of rival accounts of the pattern of justice and go on to explore the merits of a 'global sufficientarian' ethic, which holds that as many persons as possible should enjoy a satisfactory level of well-being regardless of when or where they live. (shrink)

We explore and provide an account for a recently identified judgment anomaly, i.e., an order effect that changes the strength of intentionality ascriptions for some side effects (e.g., when a chairman's pursuit of profits has the foreseen but unintended consequence of harming the environment). Experiment 1 replicated the previously unanticipated order effect anomaly controlling for general individual differences. Experiment 2 revealed that the order effect was multiply determined and influenced by factors such as beliefs (i.e., that the same actor was (...) involved in bringing about both good and bad side effects) and philosophical training (i.e., more training was associated with smaller differences in judgment when harm followed help). Results provide more evidence that the folk's philosophically relevant intuitions are predictably fragmented and depend on the dynamic interplay between persons, process, and environments. Methodological and theoretical implications are discussed. (shrink)

We address how listeners perceive temporal regularity in music performances, which are rich in temporal irregularities. A computational model is described in which a small system of internal self‐sustained oscillations, operating at different periods with specific phase and period relations, entrains to the rhythms of music performances. Based on temporal expectancies embodied by the oscillations, the model predicts the categorization of temporally changing event intervals into discrete metrical categories, as well as the perceptual salience of deviations from these categories. The (...) model's predictions are tested in two experiments using piano performances of the same music with different phrase structure interpretations (Experiment 1) or different melodic interpretations (Experiment 2). The model successfully tracked temporal regularity amidst the temporal fluctuations found in the performances. The model's sensitivity to performed deviations from its temporal expectations compared favorably with the performers' structural (phrasal and melodic) intentions. Furthermore, the model tracked normal performances (with increased temporal variability) better than performances in which temporal fluctuations associated with individual voices were removed (with decreased variability). The small, systematic temporal irregularities characteristic of human performances (chord asynchronies) improved tracking, but randomly generated temporal irregularities did not. These findings suggest that perception of temporal regularity in complex musical sequences is based on temporal expectancies that adapt in response to temporally fluctuating input. (shrink)

Explores the history, significance, and future of tradition as a whole. This book reveals the importance of tradition to social and political institutions, technology, science, literature, religion, and scholarship.

The purpose of this article is to discuss the several ways in which Atlas Shrugged is related to social change. It explains both how characters such as entrepreneurs and strikers introduce change in the novel as well as how Atlas Shrugged itself can be employed as a tool for bringing about change in the real world. The potential effects of the novel on readers are examined, as are the efforts of social movements that have embraced and incorporated the ideas found (...) therein into their own philosophy. (shrink)

This article reconsiders Sartre's seminal 1945 talk, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” and the stakes of the humanism debate in France by looking at the immediate political context that has been overlooked in previous discussions of the text. It analyses the political discussion of the term “humanism” during the French national elections of 1945 and the rumbling debate over Sartre's philosophy that culminated in his presentation to the Club Maintenant, just one week after France went to the polls. A consideration of (...) this context helps explain both the rise, and later the decline, of existentialism in France, when, in the changing political climate, humanism lost its centrality, setting the stage for new antihumanist criticisms of Sartre's work. (shrink)

The name recognition of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in France during the early twentieth century was used to rally left-wing syndicalists and right-wing neo-monarchists to the 1911–14 Cercle Proudhon, a small political organization whose creation was once considered to represent the origins of European ‘fascism’. Oddly, no scholars have examined what Proudhon’s actual ideas about monarchy were and how they might have related to his criticisms of existing forms of political representation. This first part of a two-part series examines Proudhon’s evolving consideration (...) of royalty from the July Monarchy until his exile in Belgium in 1858. It explores how Proudhon’s ideas about monarchy were impacted by his hostility to French liberal and republican attempts at electoral reform from 1838 until 1848. It then looks at how his assessment of monarchy began to change after his experience of the Second Republic and the latter’s experiment in universal manhood suffrage. For Proudhon, the ill-fated 1848-52 regime showed how democratic voting could contribute to a dangerous Caesarist personalization of state power and facilitate a fluid transition from republic to empire. During the early years of the Second Empire, Proudhon sometimes expressed nostalgia for liberal ideas of constitutional monarchy fashionable during the earlier 1814–48 era. He did not advocate restricting suffrage again like during the pre-1848 period, however. (shrink)

In the last decade, fierce controversy has arisen over the nature of sexual orientation. Scientific research, religious views, increasingly ambiguous gender roles, and the growing visibility of sexual minorities have sparked impassioned arguments about whether our sexual desires are hard-wired in our genes or shaped by the changing forces of society. In recent years scientific research and popular opinion have favored the idea that sexual orientations are determined at birth, but philosopher and educator Edward Stein argues that much of (...) what we think we know about the origins of sexual desire is probably wrong. Stein provides a comprehensive overview of such research on sexual orientation and shows that it is deeply flawed. Stein argues that this research assumes a picture of sexual desire that reflects unquestioned cultural stereotypes rather than cross-cultural scientific facts, and that it suffers from serious methodological problems. He considers whether sexual orientation is even amenable to empirical study and asks if it is useful for our understanding of human nature to categorize people based on their sexual desires. Perhaps most importantly, Stein examines some of the ethical issues surrounding such research, including gay and lesbian civil rights and the implications of parents trying to select or change the sexual orientation of their children. The Mismeasure of Desire offers a reasoned, accessible, and incisive examination of contemporary thinking about one of the most hotly debated issues of our time and adds a compelling voice of dissent to prevailing--and largely unexamined--assumptions about human sexuality. (shrink)

The formulation of propositional modal logic is revised by interposing a domain of structured propositions between the modal language and the models. Interpretations of the language (i.e., ways of mapping the language into the domain of propositions) are distinguished from models of the domain of propositions (i.e., ways of assigning truth values to propositions at each world), and this contrasts with the traditional formulation. Truth and logical consequence are defined, in the first instance, as properties of, and relations among, propositions. (...) -/- These definitions have certain interesting consequences. One is that they resolve a question that cannot be answered by the traditional analysis, in which Kripke models directly interpret modal language. The question is, is the reason a modal sentence has a different truth value at other possible worlds due to the fact that the sentence has a different meaning at that world or due to a change in the world? The philosophical conception elaborates the second answer. Another interesting consequence is that modal language, properly speaking, is not intensional, at least according to the classic tests for, and definitions of, intensionality. (shrink)

Natural philosophy encompassed all natural phenomena of the physical world. It sought to discover the physical causes of all natural effects and was little concerned with mathematics. By contrast, the exact mathematical sciences were narrowly confined to various computations that did not involve physical causes, functioning totally independently of natural philosophy. Although this began slowly to change in the late Middle Ages, a much more thoroughgoing union of natural philosophy and mathematics occurred in the seventeenth century and thereby made the (...) Scientific Revolution possible. The title of Isaac Newton's great work, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, perfectly reflects the new relationship. Natural philosophy became the 'Great Mother of the Sciences', which by the nineteenth century had nourished the manifold chemical, physical, and biological sciences to maturity, thus enabling them to leave the 'Great Mother' and emerge as the multiplicity of independent sciences we know today. (shrink)

The philosophical or metaphysical architecture of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is analyzed and diflussed. It is argued that natural selection was for Darwin a paradigmatic case of a natural law of change — an exemplar of what Ghiselin (1969) has called selective retention laws. These selective retention laws lie at the basis of Darwin's revolutionary world view. In this essay special attention is paid to the consequences for Darwin's concept of species of his selective retention laws. Although (...) Darwin himself explicity supported a variety of nominalism, implicit in the theory of natural selection is a solution to the dispute between nominalism and realism. It is argued that, although implicit, this view plays a very important role in Darwin's theory of natural selection as the means for the origin of species. It is in the context of these selective retention laws and their philosophical implications that Darwin's method is appraised in the light of recent criticisms, and the conclusion drawn that he successfully treated some philosophical problems by approaching them through natural history. Following this an outline of natural selection theory is presented in which all these philosophical issues are highlighted. (shrink)

Change happens, sometimes predictably as with demographic patterns, sometimes unpredictably as with the fall of the Berlin Wall, sometimes gradually and sometimes suddenly and violently. Cass R. Su...

Change happens, sometimes predictably as with demographic patterns, sometimes unpredictably as with the fall of the Berlin Wall, sometimes gradually and sometimes suddenly and violently. Cass R. Su...

This 2 part book, originally published in 1890, was written to help students of morals comprehend the significance of morals. The questions with which an historian of morals is chiefly concerned are the changes that have taken place in the moral standard and in the moral type, the degrees in which, in different ages, recognised virtues have been enjoined and practiced and the relative importance that in different ages has been attached to different virtues.

Today's students, more concerned about values than rules, strive to be serious persons, serious about their personal identity problems, interior selves, and needs as human beings.

In this provocative book, Edward Schiappa argues that rhetorical theory did not originate with the Sophists in the fifth century B.C.E, as is commonly believed, but came into being a century later. Schiappa examines closely the terminology of the Sophists—such as Gorgias and Protagoras—and of their reporters and opponents—especially Plato and Aristotle—and contends that the terms and problems that make up what we think of as rhetorical theory had not yet formed in the era of the early Sophists. His (...) revision of rhetoric’s early history enables him to change the way we read both the Sophists and Aristotle and Plato. Schiappa contends, for example, that Plato probably coined the Greek word for rhetoric; that Gorgias is a “prose rhapsode” whose style does not deserve the criticism it has received; that Isocrates deliberately never uses the Greek work for "rhetoric" and that our habit of pitting him versus Plato as “rhetoric versus philosophy” is problematic; and that Aristotle "disciplined" the genre of epideictic in a way that robs the genre of its political importance. His book will be of great interest to students of classics, communications, philosophy, and rhetoric. (shrink)

Mill predicted that “[t]he Liberty is likely to survive longer than anything else that I have written … because the conjunction of [Harriet Taylor’s] mind with mine has rendered it a kind of philosophic text-book of a single truth, which the changes progressively taking place in modern society tend to bring out in ever greater relief.” Indeed, _On Liberty_ is one of the most influential books ever written, and remains a foundational document for the understanding of vital political, philosophical and (...) social issues. In addition to its many useful appendices, this new edition includes a chronology, bibliography, and a substantial introduction which outlines Mill’s life and works, and sets this central work of 1859 in the context of both his own intellectual development and of the play of ideas and political forces in Victorian society. (shrink)

In the course of his long development, Kant's concept of matter changed somewhat, while his concept of scientific explanation changed considerably. Both developments achieved a coherent integration in Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. Using this developmental background, the present paper argues that the Foundations should be interpreted as an attempted rational reconstruction of the mechanics of Newton and Euler. Kant attempted to do this by constructing a concept of matter that would confer a Leibnizian intelligibility on Newtonian mechanics, and (...) also accord with Kant's theories on the nature of concepts and their role in scientific explanation. (shrink)

This book details the discovery and significance of the Shanghai Museum Zhou Yi, the Wangjiatai Gui cang, and the Fuyang Zhou Yi, including full translations of the texts and additional evidence that constructs a new narrative of the Yi ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Changing Functions, Moral Responsibility, and Mental IllnessCraig Edwards (bio)Keywordsmental illness, responsibility, character, dysfunction, personhoodI thank both Wakefield and Tomasini for their illuminating comments. Both commentaries are thought provoking and warrant a full response. However, as always, space is limited and I must make the all-too-predictable apology for not addressing both commentaries in full. Wakefield's contribution more directly engages with, and challenges, my claims, and so I focus on addressing (...) his concerns.ClarificationsWakefield correctly notes that I am interested in how mental illness (and illness generally) operates to remove moral responsibility for one's actions. Despite this, it seems at several points that he and I are talking about two different, albeit related, concepts of mental illness. 'Mental illness' is used to both explain and excuse certain behaviors, but these two functions, explanatory and exculpable, do not always operate simultaneously. As we discover biological explanations for apparently immoral behaviors, the question arises as to whether the explanation should remove the immorality and liability for punishment. The 'sick role' can be divided into two aspects. One is the role of deserving and warranting medical treatment. The other is the negation of moral responsibility. Wakefield's own example, pedophilia, involves the first sense of the sick role but not the second. Wakefield's use of this example is unusual, because it deftly highlights the limitation of his HD account. Pedophilia is a mental disorder in the sense of warranting treatment, and is a mental illness under Wakefield's model, but it is not something that negates moral responsibility. There is a sense of the term 'mental illness'—an important and, as I argue, an objective sense—that is relevant to establishing one's moral responsibility for such behaviors.In addressing my account of mental illness as though it contained two distinct answers, 'mental illness as dysfunction of rational agency, or 'mental illness as moral judgment,' it is unclear whether Wakefield takes them to be conjunctive or alternative. Hence it is worth reiterating in point form the structure of my account:1. Illness involves dysfunction;2. The 'proper function' of a bodily or psychological mechanism is determined by the purpose that we impose upon that mechanism (within the constraints of our biological needs);3. Dysfunction of rational agency is necessary, but not sufficient, for 'mental illness' in the normative sense relevant to negating moral responsibility; and [End Page 105]4. The distinction between 'mental illness' (in the above sense) and the many dysfunctions of rational agency for which we are morally responsible, turns upon (objective) normative facts rather than features internal to the dysfunctions themselves.Functions and ValueWakefield misses the point when he criticizes my comment that, although bodily mechanisms are fairly uniformly valued, there is substantial historical and cross-cultural variation in the way people value personhood. He notes—accurately, but irrelevantly—that people almost always place great value on their capacity for rational agency, probably more so than many aspects of their physical health. My comment, taken in context, has nothing to do with how much people value personhood, but has everything to do with what kinds of purposes people want their mental and physical processes to achieve. A heart has the same function for a Londoner today as it did for a Japanese peasant a thousand years ago, and although it is possible for us to want it to achieve other purposes, any culture that seriously imputes a different set of vital functions on the heart is likely to be rather disappointed. By contrast, our species has experienced vast changes in the demands we make of our rational and intellectual capacities—dysfunctions like dyslexia and alcoholism were irrelevant before the availability of written communication and alcohol.Wakefield's HD account is unable to deal with the relevance of such change. The link between evolutionary function and illness is tenuous in any event. Evolutionary explanations of specific mechanisms are often untestable, simply positing some evolutionary purpose that happens to fit our understanding of what the mechanism does. If we were to discover that alcoholism evolved as a means of increasing birthrates, or (perhaps more plausibly) that anxiety disorders occur among those for whom... (shrink)

Eleventh-century Europe was dominated by a single political and economic elite with position based on control of the means of coercion; by the end of the fifteenth. century there were various elites with power based on control of some form of production. Theories based on trade, population, and the class struggle have been advanced to account for this change but are inadequate because they posit causal relationships running from some single independent factor. A different form of explanation emphasizes the network (...) of relationships among economic and political units. Here economic power is crucial. The development of new technology shifted the economic leverage of the nobility to the mer chants, then to town craftsmen, with detailed effects on all other economic relationships. The argument is primarily theoretical, not a reconstruction of events, and a mathematical model is provided. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.3 (2001) 260-274 [Access article in PDF] Second Thoughts on the Critiques of Big Rhetoric Edward Schiappa This note is divided into three parts. First, I explore some answers to the question "How did Rhetoric get so Big?" Second, I review some of the more important criticisms of a "globalized" or "universalized" view of rhetorical studies. Finally, I contend that the critiques of Big Rhetoric (...) do not withstand scrutiny and ought to be dismissed for insufficient evidence. While there certainly are important issues for scholars of rhetorical studies to consider about how to enhance the quality and importance of our work, such issues should not include the concern that rhetoric has grown too "big."By "Big Rhetoric" I refer only to the theoretical position that everything, or virtually everything, can be described as "rhetorical." I refer to the growth of rhetorical scholarship in communication studies and other disciplines as the "popularization" of rhetorical studies. 1 Theories associated with Big Rhetoric are credited with popularizing or at least rationalizing what Herbert W. Simons (1990) calls the "rhetorical turn" in a variety of disciplines. Within the journals and conventions of members of the National Communication Association (NCA), popularization is often characterized by studies of the form "the rhetoric of X," where X could literally be anything. Outside of the NCA-defined parameters of communication studies, popularization is evidenced by the apparently ever-increasing ranks of scholars who use "rhetoric" as a relevant and important term of art within their scholarship. By either measure, it can be argued fairly convincingly that "rhetoric" has become a widely used construct in scholarship. What I wish to engage is the disputed desirability of broad definitions and the related popularization of rhetoric. [End Page 260] 1. Whence big rhetoric? There are a number of narratives on the rise of Big Rhetoric already in print in communication studies (Simons 1990; Gaonkar 1990), rhetoric and composition (Berlin 1987; Young and Goggin 1993), and interdisciplinary publications (Roberts and Good 1993; Mailloux 2000; Nelson, Megill, and McCloskey 1987). Many accounts identify the 1960s as a turning point. For better or for worse, there was a confluence of changing rhetorical practices, expanding rhetorical theories, and opportunities for rhetorical criticism. The cultural clashes of the 1960s were felt perhaps most acutely on college campuses. The sufficiency of deliberative argument and public address can be said to have been called into question, whether one was an antiwar activist who hated LBJ's war in Vietnam or a pro-establishment stalwart trying to make sense of the rhetoric of protest and demonstration. Years later, scholars would characterize war itself as rhetorical. What counted as rhetorical practice was up for grabs.At about the same time, our understanding of rhetorical theory was being expanded. Here we can identify two main strands of thought. For ease of reference I will call one the symbolic interactionist rationale and the other the epistemological rationale. The symbolic interactionist rationale can be boiled down to a syllogism: All persuasive actions are rhetorical. All symbol/language-use is persuasive. Therefore: All symbol/language-use is rhetorical. Perhaps the two most significant pronouncements of this approach--for my generation of rhetoric scholars, at any rate--are by Richard Weaver and Kenneth Burke. Weaver claims that "language is sermonic" in the sense that whenever we offer a description or label a phenomenon, we are "preaching" a particular way of making sense of it (1970, 201-25). Burke, of course, has two famous (or infamous) statements in Rhetoric of Motives: first, that rhetoric is "the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols" (1950, 43); and second, that "something of the rhetorical motive comes to lurk in every 'meaning,' however purely 'scientific' its pretensions. Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric. And wherever there is 'meaning,' there is 'persuasion'" (1950, 172). Obviously, such pronouncements serve as encouragement to [End Page 261] those who would define rhetoric broadly, and arguably fueled the popularization of rhetorical studies within the ranks of NCA.The epistemological rationale is fueled... (shrink)