In this book Harry Heft examines the historical and theoretical foundations of James J. Gibson's ecological psychology in 20th century thought, and in turn, integrates ecological psychology and analyses of sociocultural processes. A thesis of the book is that knowing is rooted in the direct experience of meaningful environmental objects and events present in individual-environment processes and at the level of collective, social settings. Ecological Psychology in Context: *traces the primary lineage of Gibson's ecological approach to William James's philosophy (...) of radical empiricism; *illuminates how the work of James's student and Gibson's mentor, E.B. Holt, served as a catalyst for the development of Gibson's framework and as a bridge to James's work; *reveals how ecological psychology reciprocally can advance Jamesian studies by resolving some of the theoretical difficulties that kept James from fully realizing a realist philosophy; *broadens the scope of Gibson's framework by proposing a synthesis between it and the ecological program of Roger Barker, who discovered complex systems operating at the level of collective, social processes; *demonstrates ways in which the psychological domain can be extended to properties of the environment rendering its features meaningful, publicly accessible, and distributed across person-environment processes; and *shows how Gibson's work points the way toward overcoming the gap between experimental psychology and the humanities. Intended for scholars and students in the areas of ecological and environmental psychology, theoretical and historical psychology, cognitive science, developmental psychology, anthropology, and philosophy. (shrink)

Moral latitude is only ever a matter of coincidence on the most popular decision procedure in the literature on moral uncertainty. In all possible choice situations other than those in which two or more options happen to be tied for maximal expected choiceworthiness, Maximize Expected Choiceworthiness implies that only one possible option is uniquely appropriate. A better theory of appropriateness would be more sensitive to the decision maker’s credence in theories that endorse agent-centred prerogatives. In this paper, we will develop (...) and defend a modified version of this view that allows for agent-centred prerogatives and supererogation as part of its verdicts about appropriateness. (shrink)

Harry G. Frankfurt begins his inquiry by asking, “What is it about human beings that makes it possible for us to take ourselves seriously?” Based on The Tanner Lectures in Moral Philosophy, Taking Ourselves Seriously and Getting It Right delves into this provocative and original question. The author maintains that taking ourselves seriously presupposes an inward-directed, reflexive oversight that enables us to focus our attention directly upon ourselves, and “[it] means that we are not prepared to accept ourselves just (...) as we come. We want our thoughts, our feelings, our choices, and our behavior to make sense. We are not satisfied to think that our ideas are formed haphazardly, or that our actions are driven by transient and opaque impulses or by mindless decisions. We need to direct ourselves—or at any rate to believe that we are directing ourselves—in thoughtful conformity to stable and appropriate norms. We want to get things right.” The essays delineate two features that have a critical role to play in this: our rationality, and our ability to love. Frankfurt incisively explores the roles of reason and of love in our active lives, and considers the relation between these two motivating forces of our actions. The argument is that the authority of practical reason is less fundamental than the authority of love. Love, as the author defines it, is a volitional matter, that is, it consists in what we are actually committed to caring about. Frankfurt adds that “The object of love can be almost anything—a life, a quality of experience, a person, a group, a moral ideal, a nonmoral ideal, a tradition, whatever.” However, these objects and ideals are difficult to comprehend and often in conflict with each other. Moral principles play an important supporting role in this process as they help us develop and elucidate a vision that inspires our love. The first section of the book consists of the two lectures, which are entitled “Taking Ourselves Seriously” and “Getting It Right.” The second section consists of comments in response by Christine M. Korsgaard, Michael E. Bratman, and Meir Dan-Cohen. The book includes a preface by Debra Satz. (shrink)

The aim of Massimiliano Tomba’s Insurgent Universality is to return to Marxism’s original historical vocation by freeing it from the hegemony of the exchange system and the encompassing agency of value. At the heart of this project appears the recognition that time, space and thus history have been captured by capitalism and transformed into categories of its own to organise people and social relationships for capital’s programme of accumulation. In this way, capital has been able to hijack history and invert (...) it into a representation of the real, into a historical trompe-l’œil instead of ‘presentify(ing) the past’. In this regard contemporising the past is an act of intervening in history and actualising it rather than representing it. Through this operation Tomba is able to retrieve an inventory of repressed and forgotten histories, which will unveil the sources of an ‘alternate legacy of modernity’ and radical political possibilities for the present. (shrink)

What is education for? Should it produce workers or educate future citizens? Is there a place for faith schools - and should patriotism be taught? In this compelling and controversial book, Harry Brighouse takes on all these urgent questions and more. He argues that children share four fundamental interests: the ability to make their own judgements about what values to adopt; acquiring the skills that will enable them to become economically self-sufficient as adults; being exposed to a range of (...) activities and experiences that will enable them to flourish in their personal lives; and developing a sense of justice. He criticises sharply those who place the interests of the economy before those of children, and assesses the arguments for and against the controversial issues of faith schools and the teaching of patriotism. Clearly argued but provocative, On Education draws on recent examples from Britain and North America as well as famous thinkers on education such as Aristotle and John Locke. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the present state of education and its future. (shrink)

'Mass terms', words like water, rice and traffic, have proved very difficult to accommodate in any theory of meaning since, unlike count nouns such as house or dog, they cannot be viewed as part of a logical set and differ in their grammatical properties. In this study, motivated by the need to design a computer program for understanding natural language utterances incorporating mass terms, Harry Bunt provides a thorough analysis of the problem and offers an original and detailed solution. (...) An extension of classical set theory, Ensemble Theory, is defined, and this provides the conceptual basis of a framework for the analysis of natural language meaning which Dr Bunt calls Two-level model-theoretic semantics. The validity of the framework is convincingly demonstrated by the formal analysis of a fragment of English including sentences with quantified and modified mass terms. Separate chapters of the book are devoted to an axiomatic definition of Ensemble Theory and a detailed discussion of its status as a mathematical formalism. (shrink)

Wolfson's systematic presentation of the philosophy of Spinoza has long been a classic. It is with pride that we make it available again in a one-volume edition.

_Brill's Companion to the Reception of Presocratic Natural Philosophy in Later Classical Thought_ explores both explicit and hidden influences of Presocratic (6-4th c. BCE) early scientific concepts, such as nature, elements, principles, soul, organization, causation, purpose, and cosmos in Platonic, Aristotelian, and Hippocratic philosophy.

This paper aims to clarify the relationship between consciousness and attention through theoretical considerations about evolution. Specifically, we will argue that the empirical findings on attention and the basic considerations concerning the evolution of the different forms of attention demonstrate that consciousness and attention must be dissociated regardless of which definition of these terms one uses. To the best of our knowledge, no extant view on the relationship between consciousness and attention has this advantage. Because of this characteristic, this paper (...) presents a principled and neutral way to settle debates concerning the relationship between consciousness and attention, without falling into disputes about the meaning of these terms. A decisive conclusion of this approach is that extreme views on the relationship between consciousness and attention must be rejected, including identity and full dissociation views. There is an overlap between the two within conscious attention, but developing a full understanding of this mechanism requires further empirical investigations. (shrink)

This is a translation of the second chapter of F.W.J. Schelling's Abhandlungen zur Erlaüterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre. It is preceded by a brief introduction in which I situate the chapter within Schelling's oeuvre and suggest that it is not only an early articulation of Schellingian Naturphilosophie, but also prescient, anticipating Schelling's later positive philosophy.

ABSTRACT This article considers the second treatise of Schelling's Abhandlungen zur Erläuterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre, a lesser-known work from the early Schelling. Here, Schelling proposes to defend the critical position insofar as it purports to be a system based on human reason, but instead he issues a backhanded critique of the assumption on behalf of the critical philosophers to try and limit the bounds of pure reason by means of their own use of reason. Schelling then offers an alternative (...) way to think about the relationship of mind and matter in nature. This article argues that Schelling's actual explanation of the critical philosophy as a position founded by reasonable minds ultimately belies his promise to defend it, thus calling into question that Schelling's thought prior to 1800 was a mere reiteration of Kantian/Fichtean transcendentalism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionSchelling and the EnvironmentChelsea C. Harry (bio)Scientists overwhelmingly agree that climate change is anthropogenic, caused by our greenhouse gas emissions.1 Given the evidence that exists, we should be able to convince ourselves to change the everyday behaviors resulting in these emissions. If we hope to save ourselves, other animals, plants, and the environment from a devastating future, then why would we continue to use fossil fuels?The answer here (...) is not an easy one. And yet, the ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle, provides us with a possible cause. In his most famous work on ethics,2 Aristotle argued that being weak-willed, suffering from what he called, “akrasia,” is the reason we do things that we know we shouldn’t do. It is a condition that results when desire wins over reason. For example, I eat a chocolate bar when I know I should eat a salad because my desire for chocolate wins over what I have reasoned to be best for my health. Simply put, reason might be what distinguishes us from other animals and plants, but it is not always our most powerful faculty. It stands both to experience and to reason, then, that rational decision might not be what is going to get us out of this climate crisis. Then, what is?In this special issue, we hear from five contemporary scholars of the 18th–19th century German philosopher, F.W.J. Schelling, an oft-called “protean thinker” whose prolific, sometimes creative, and diverse works spanned over seventy years. A onetime roommate of Hegel and Hölderlin, Schelling’s works are lesser-known outside specialist circles, and yet one finds that his prescient insights continue to have much to offer. This is especially true vis-à-vis the climate crisis, as Schelling was the first post-Kantian philosopher to take nature seriously. He eschewed the modern, Kantian, and post-Kantian trend to focus on [End Page 1] ipseity, the self, and on what we as humans can rationally know. Instead, he returned to metaphysics and argued for a wholistic conception and experience of life—all life. For Schelling, humans are rational as an expression of nature, rather than as an exception to nature. As John Sallis put it so well as he argued for the Platonic influence in Schelling: “For what Schelling rewrites within the text of modern philosophy is a discourse on nature.”3 Sallis then reminds us that in Schelling’s 1809 text, Philosophical Investigations of the Essence of Human Freedom (“Die Freiheitschrift”), he openly criticizes post-Cartesian philosophy generally for its exclusion of nature; “All modern European philosophy since it began with Descartes has this common defect, that nature does not exist for it and that it lacks a living ground.”4 Schelling’s intention was to resolve the defect, and because of his efforts in this regard, his work has something to say to us about our relationship to the environment.The idea to think about what Schelling can offer us in our current climate crisis is hardly new. In 2014, the North American Schelling Society (NASS), hosted by Bruce Matthews and Bard College, thematized its third international conference on “Schelling in the Anthropocene,” asking scholars to think beyond modern philosophy’s legacy of the human/nature divide and to discuss Schelling’s contribution to the anthropogenic environmental crisis we currently face. Since then, published work on this topic includes: Bruce Matthews’s, “Schelling in the Anthropocene,”5 Christopher Lauer’s, “Confronting the Anthropocene,” 6 and Vincent Lee’s, “Schelling and the Sixth Extinction.”7 Other journals have published special issues on related topics, including McGrath et al. Schelling After Theory special issue of Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, McGrath et al. The Many Faces of F.W.J. Schelling special issue of Analecta Hermeneutica, Tritten et al. Nature, Speculation, and the Return to Schelling special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, and Bahoh, et al. Philosophies of Nature special issue of Comparative and Continental Philosophy. While this is by no means an exhaustive list, other contemporary thinkers who have been part of this conversation include: Kyla Bruff, Charlotte Alderwick, Manfred Frank, Markus Gabriel, Iain Grant,8 Lore... (shrink)

The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, has already caused large amounts of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and will continue to do so for manyyears after hostilities have ceased mainly because of the emissions linked to the rebuilding of destroyed or damaged housing, public buildings, infrastructure, factories, and the like. My aim in this paper is to discuss how in a time of climate emergency such emissions of war should impact the political morality of states initiating, continuing, and (...) ending war (through a just and enduring peace) as understood by just war theory (JWT). My point of departure is a study by Lennard de Klerk and six co-authors detailing the emissions of the first year of the Russo-Ukrainian war. (shrink)

In _Archaism and Actuality_ eminent Marxist historian Harry Harootunian explores the formation of capitalism and fascism in Japan as a prime example of the uneven development of capitalism. He applies his theorization of subsumption to examine how capitalism integrates and redirects preexisting social, cultural, and economic practices to guide the present. This subsumption leads to a global condition in which states and societies all exist within different stages and manifestations of capitalism. Drawing on Japanese philosophers Miki Kiyoshi and Tosaka (...) Jun, Marxist theory, and Gramsci’s notion of passive revolution, Harootunian shows how the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and its program dedicated to transforming the country into a modern society exemplified a unique path to capitalism. Japan’s capitalist expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, rise as an imperial power, and subsequent transition to fascism signal a wholly distinct trajectory into modernity that forecloses any notion of a pure or universal development of capitalism. With _Archaism and Actuality_, Harootunian offers both a retheorization of capitalist development and a reinterpretation of epochal moments in modern Japanese history. (shrink)

This response to Tomba’sMarx’s Temporalitieshomes in on its critical interrogation of linear conceptions of development which have distorted Marxism’s capacity to seize the present. The article foregrounds the resources on which Tomba draws, from Walter Benjamin’s theses on history to Marx’s account of the struggles over the working day, and enlists them in an encounter with the questions of unevenness, archaism and pre-capitalism in Postcolonial theory, as well as in the attempts to ‘overcome modernity’ that marked the thought and practice (...) of interwar fascism in Europe and Japan. (shrink)

This book is a contribution both to Aristotle studies and to the philosophy of nature, and not only offers a thorough text based account of time as modally potentiality in Aristotle’s account, but also clarifies the process of “actualizing time” as taking time and looks at the implications of conceiving a world without actual time. It speaks to the resurgence of interest in Aristotle’s natural philosophy and will become an important resource for anyone interested in Aristotle’s theory of time, of (...) its relationship to Aristotle’s larger project in the Physics, and to time’s place in the broader scope of Aristotelian natural science. Graduate students and scholars researching in this area especially will find the authors arguments provocative, a welcome addition to other recent publications on Aristotle’s Treatise on Time. ​. (shrink)

Harry Brighouse’s essay concludes Part I of the book by taking up one aspect of the task of clarifying the role of common education, by applying it to the teaching of patriotism in public schools. He asks whether liberal and cosmopolitan values are compatible with a common education aimed at fostering patriotic attachment to the nation. He examines numerous arguments recently developed to justify fostering patriotism in common schools from a liberal–democratic perspective, and finds them all wanting. However, even (...) if liberal–democratic arguments for teaching patriotism could be found that withstand the criticisms he advances, Brighouse argues that common schools should avoid using history as the vehicle for fostering patriotic loyalty, since even the most honest, clear-sighted, unsentimental attempts to teach national history are likely to degrade and undermine the other purposes that teaching history properly has. The chapter proceeds as follows: Section 6.1, discusses briefly the justifications of patriotism and the further arguments that patriotism is something that should be taught to children in school – and in particular the argument that history is an appropriate vehicle for teaching it; Section 2 casts doubt on the arguments for patriotism and even more doubt on the idea that it should be taught; Section 6.3 argues that history is a discipline particularly inappropriate for conveying patriotic feeling; Section 6.4 concludes. (shrink)

In the reckoning of historian Enzo Traverso, the accumulative inventory of the past’s crimes has exceeded the ‘frontiers of historical research’ and colonised the public sphere to ‘interpellate our present’. The quarrel over the crisis of historicism before World War ii has been superseded by postwar debates that have now spilled over into everyday life that demand recognition as instances of the continuing collision of claims of a past that refuses to pass and the formation of a new historical consciousness (...) in which collective memory of the crimes occupies a central position. Traverso’s purpose has been to repair this emergent dichotomy between historical practice and memoration, event and experience, as well as to overcome attending binary couplings like subjective and objective, individual and group in order to avoid falling into an unbridgeable antinomy that risks collapsing into contradiction. (shrink)

Despite the prominent argument for equal educational opportunity for women inWe examine carefully Plato’s argument for the equal nature of women in.

It is commonly accepted that the golden rule—most often formulated as "do unto others as you would have them do unto you"—is a unifying element between many diverse religious traditions, both Eastern and Western. Its influence also extends beyond such traditions, since many non-religious individuals hold up the golden rule as central to their lives. Yet, while it is extraordinarily important and widespread, the golden rule is often dismissed by scholars as a vague proverb that quickly leads to absurdities when (...) one attempts to formulate it in clear terms. In this book, Harry J. Gensler defends the golden rule and addresses all of the major philosophic objections, pointing out several common misunderstanding and misapplications. Gensler first discusses golden-rule reasoning and how to avoid the main pitfalls. He then relates the golden rule to world religions and history, and to areas like moral education, egoism, evolution, society, racism, business, and medicine. The book ends with a discussion of theoretical issues . Ethics and the Golden Rule offers two introductory chapters, the first is simpler and the second more technical; a reader may start with either or both. One can then read any combination of further chapters, in any order, depending on one’s interests; but Chapters 13 and 14 are technical and assume one has read Chapter 2. This is "a golden-rule book for everyone," accessible to a wide readership. (shrink)

Introduction -- Historical essays -- The humanist brain : Alberti, Vitruvius, and Leonardo -- The enlightened brain : Perrault, Laugier, and Le Roy -- The sensational brain : Burke, Price, and Knight -- The transcendental brain : Kant and Schopenhauer -- The animate brain : Schinkel, Bötticher, and Semper -- The empathetic brain : Vischer, Wölfflin, and Göller -- The gestalt brain : the dynamics of the sensory field -- The neurological brain : Hayek, Hebb, and Neutra -- The phenomenal (...) brain : Merleau-Ponty, Rasmussen, and Pallasmaa -- Neuroscience and architecture -- Anatomy : architecture of the brain -- Ambiguity : architecture of vision -- Metaphor : architecture of embodiment -- Hapticity : architecture of the senses -- Epilogue: The architect's brain. (shrink)

Chronos in Aristotle’s Physics: On the Nature of Time argues that Aristotle’s Treatise on Time (Physics iv 10-14) is a highly contextualized account of time in so far as it is not a treatment of time qua time but a parallel account to Aristotle’s foregoing studies of nature, principles (192b13-22), motion (201a10-11), infinite (iii 4-8), place (iv 1-5), and void (iv 6-9) in the Physics i-iv 9. It offers a reading of Physics iv 10-11 with the aim of showing that (...) time, chronos, here has to do with time as an attribute of motion, as an interval, i.e., the type of time that, as Aristotle describes at 218a1, “is taken.” With support from a reading of Physics iv 14 and evidence from Aristotle’s greater philosophy of nature, it argues that time for Aristotle is derivative of the modal change of natural being. Time is then only ever potentially actual unless this change is apprehended, in most cases, by the working together of perception and intellection and, in some cases, by perception alone. (shrink)

The Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin called for a “psychological ecology” that would bring to light the social structures serving as the context for individual action and choice in everyday life. He envisioned social and physical environmental structures affecting the individual at a “boundary” within psychological experience (“the life space”). But how are we to conceptualize the manner in which such environmental structures influence individual experience and action? After all, the “nonpsychological” and the psychological domains are typically framed in quite different (...) conceptual language, and, in some cases, at different levels of analysis. This paper examines this question with respect to two bodies of work. In the case of perception, Fritz Heider’s pioneering analysis of perception, followed decades later by James Gibson’s ecological approach to perception, illuminated the significance of a medium for perceiving that conveys structure specific to environmental entities. As for action among community structures, Roger Barker’s research revealed the significance of the hierarchical structure of the environment of community life, and how some higher-order structures (behavior settings) can influence and constrain individual constituent actions nested within them. Recent treatment of the psychological boundary within the 4E cognition literature is also briefly and critically examined. (shrink)

Aristotle believed that there were actually only three colours present in the rainbow, : of these, the first is produced by the dulling of white light when it is reflected in or obscured by a dark medium such as smoke, cloud, or water, and exemplified in the redness of the sun as seen through haze around the horizon. Successive failures of sight weaken the colour further, first to πράσινov and then to άλoυργóν. Between the first two colours a fourth, ξανθóν, (...) is often apparent, being the result of the juxtaposition of the two colours. This last statement, where it has not been ignored as one of the inexplicable or misguided things Aristotle says from time to time, has met with considerable criticism. (shrink)

Since the last quarter of the twentieth century there has been growing interest in women’s contributions to the histories of science, philosophy, and literature dating back to the very beginnings of these disciplines. This volume offers a contemporary, multinational, multidisciplinary exploration of some of these "hidden figures".

Kelly’s work was formed and developed in the context of the American philosophical movement known as pragmatism. The major figures to which this tradition is attributed are Charles S. Peirce, William James and John Dewey. In Personal Construct Psychology, Dewey was acknowledged by Kelly and by subsequent writers as perhaps his most important influence. It has recently become increasingly apparent, however that Peirce was a much more pervasive and crucial influence on James and Dewey than has previously been recognized. Kelly (...) did not mention Peirce but a close reading of the two writers reveals a remarkable correspondence and relationship between their two bodies of work. To set these two thinkers side by side proves to be an interesting and productive exercise. In this paper, after introducing Peirce and examining the relationship between him and Dewey, Kelly’s basic philosophical assumptions, as outlined at the beginning of Volume 1 of the Psychology of Personal Constructs, are used as a framework for exploring their similarities and differences. The result is an enrichment of our understanding of Kelly’s philosophy which allows us to make links with many different subsequent thinkers’ ideas and provides a basis for exploring the psychological aspects of the two men’s work. The latter forms the subject of Part II of this series which is in preparation. (shrink)

Kelly suggested that it was useful to consider anyone as functioning as a scientist, in the business of applying theories, making hypotheses and predictions and testing them out in the practice of everyday life. One of Charles Peirce’s major contributions was to develop the disciplines of logic and the philosophy of science. We can deepen and enrich our understanding of Kelly’s vision by looking at what Peirce has to say about the process of science. For Peirce, the essence of science (...) was the application of the laws of inference. He developed a much broader concept of logic, elaborating the processes of deduction and induction and adding to these the logic of hypothetical inference, or ‘abduction’, even as Kelly broadened it further in his “departure from classical logic”. Examining the implications of these three forms of inference allows us to elaborate the dynamics involved in the process of construing, ordinacy and the cycles of experience, creativity and decision making. This is the second of a three part series examining the relationship between the work of Peirce and Kelly. The third will include a look at phenomenology, bipolarity, the self, dialogical process and sociological considerations. (shrink)

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was a Roman Stoic philosopher, dramatist, statesman, and adviser to the emperor Nero, all during the Silver Age of Latin literature. The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca is a fresh and compelling series of new English-language translations of his works in eight accessible volumes. Edited by world-renowned classicists Elizabeth Asmis, Shadi Bartsch, and Martha C. Nussbaum, this engaging collection restores Seneca—whose works have been highly praised by modern authors from Desiderius Erasmus to Ralph Waldo Emerson—to his (...) rightful place among the classical writers most widely studied in the humanities. Written near the end of Seneca’s life, _Natural Questions _is a work in which Seneca expounds and comments on the natural sciences of his day—rivers and earthquakes, wind and snow, meteors and comets—offering us a valuable look at the ancient scientific mind at work. The modern reader will find fascinating insights into ancient philosophical and scientific approaches to the physical world, and also vivid evocations of the grandeur, beauty, and terror of nature. (shrink)