"By linking Wittgenstein with Derrida, Staten suggests that the intellectual relevance of deconstruction is wider than the English-speaking public has...

Richesse et complexité d’une pensée intégrative mais non réductionniste Dans l’introduction de cet ouvrage, Marie Gaille met en lumière la dimension plurielle du parcours de Cabanis, « formé à la médecine et engagé dans l’histoire politique de son temps, […] auteur d’une réflexion sur les institutions de soin, les prisons et les hôpitaux autant que d’écrits épistémologiques et relatifs à l’enseignement de la médecine ». Cette pluralité d’approches, de thématiques de réflexion et de domaines d...

Traces the decentered formulation of self at the heart of Paul Ricoeur's philosophy from his earliest works to his most recent.

Detailed analysis of Schweitzer as a man and a philosopher, attempting to evaluate his contribution to a philosophy for modern civilization.

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

Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900), English philosopher and educator is today most famous for his Methods of Ethics first published in 1874 and considered by C. D. Broad among others to be the greatest single work on ethics in English. Besides philosophy, Sidgwick wrote on education, literature, political theory, the history of political institutions, and psychical research. He was also active in University politics, economics and administration, playing a large part in the founding of the first College for women - Newnham (...) College, Cambridge. Although Methods of Ethics is considered the most valuable of his writings - reprinted here in its first and last editions - his intellect is displayed in the full extent of his writings. Professor Marshall said in reference to his discussions of the proper functions of government in Principles of Political Economy that it was 'by far the best thing of the kind in any language'. In all his writings, Sidgwick is rigorous and cautious, reluctant to advance ideas without making sure of his ground. In common with Mill he was opposed to mystical and transcendental methods. This comprehensive collection brings together the most definitive editions of all his books and includes the standard biography written by his wife, as well as two volumes of previously uncollected essays and reviews. (shrink)

Werner Heisenberg was, from a technical point of view, the principal founder of quantum theory. He discovered in 1925 the completely amazing and wholly unprecedented solution to the puzzle: the quantities that classical physical theory was based upon, and which were thought to be numbers, must be treated not as numbers but as actions! Ordinary numbers, such as 2 and 3, have the property that the product of any two of them does not depend on the order of the factors: (...) 2 times 3 is the same as 3 times 2. But Heisenberg discovered that one could get the correct answers out of the old classical laws if one decreed that certain of the numbers that are used in classical physics to describe the physical properties of a material system are not ordinary numbers. Rather, they are actions having the property that the order in which they act matters! (shrink)

In the context of theories of the connection between mind and brain, physicalism is the demand that all is basically purely physical. But the conception of “physical” embodied in this demand is characterized essentially by the properties of the physical that hold in classical physical theories. Certain of those properties contradict the character of the physical in quantum mechanics, which provides a better, more comprehensive, and more fundamental account of phenomena. It is argued that the difficulties that have plagued physicalists (...) for half a century, and that continue to do so, dissolve when the classical idea of the physical is replaced by its quantum successor. The argument is concretized in way that makes it accessible to non-physicists by exploiting the recent evidence connecting our conscious experiences to macroscopic measurable synchronous oscillations occurring in wellseparated parts of the brain. A specific new model of the mind-brain connection that is fundamentally quantum mechanical but that ties conscious experiences to these macroscopic synchronous oscillations is used to illustrate the essential disparities between the classical and quantum notions of the physical, and in particular to demonstrate the failure in the quantum world of the principle of the causal closure of the physical, a failure that goes beyond what is entailed by the randomness in the outcomes of observations, and that accommodates the efficacy in the brain of conscious intention. (shrink)

ESSAY I. Of our Attachment to Objects of Distress. A Noted French critic, treating of poetry and painting, undertakes a subject attempted by others unsuccessfully, which is, to account for the strong attachment we have to objects of ...

The data emerging from the clinical and brain studies described above suggest that, in the case of OCD, there are two pertinent brain mechanisms that are distinguishable both in terms of neuro dynamics and in terms of the conscious experiences that accompany them. These mechanisms can be characterized, on anatomical and perhaps evolutionary grounds, as a lower level and a higher level mechanism. The clinical treatment has, when successful, an activating effect on the higher level mechanism, and a suppressive effect (...) on the lower level one. (shrink)

Chaldaea and Egypt.--China: duty and detachment.--The Indian annihilation of individuality.--Zarathushtra.--The prophets of Israel.--The heroic adjustment in Greek poetry.--Greek philosophers.--Intermediaries.--Jesus.--Paul.--Augustine.--The arrows are beyond thee.

Religious Investigations of William James.

This book’s basic argument is that the Freudian unconscious, far from constituting a radical break with the philosophy of consciousness, is merely the latest exemplar in a heritage of philosophical misunderstanding of the Cartesian cogito that interprets “I think, therefore I am” as “I represent myself, therefore I am” (in the classic interpretation of Heidegger, one of the targets of the book).

This work is organized alphabetically and more like a dictionary than an encyclopedia.

Alfred North Whitehead in his book Process and Reality describes the history of the universe in terms of a process of ‘creative advance into novelty.’ This advance is produced by a collection of happenings called ‘actual occasions’, or ‘actual entities’. Each actual entity has an associated actual world, and it arises from its own peculiar actual world. (PR 284). Two occasions are termed ‘contemporary’ if neither lies in the actual world of the other. A key issue is whether the words (...) in Process and Reality commit Whitehead to the relativity-theory idea that, at least in our present epoch, the creative advance into novelty is not serially ordered, or whether, alternatively, the logical developments in Part IV entail, at a deep metaphysical level, that the facts specified by two contemporary occasions become fixed and settled in some definite order. Irresolution on this basic question renders Whitehead’s theory obscure and plagued with controversy. I argue, in opposition to another paper in this issue, that Whitehead endorses the relativistic viewpoint, and consistently adheres to it. This makes Whitehead’s theory compatible with relativistic quantum theory. Combining Whitehead’s relativistic process theory with relativistic quantum field theory is therefore possible, and it holds the promise of producing a rationally coherent understanding far richer than what is provided by either theory alone of the relationships between the physically described aspects of the universe and human knowledge and intentions. (shrink)

Young children's early understanding of emotion was investigated by examining their use of emotion terms such as happy, sad, mud, and cry. Five children's emotion language was examined longitudinally from the age of 2 to 5 years, and as a comparison their reference to pains via such terms as burn, sting, and hurt was also examined. In Phase 1 we confirmed and extended prior findings demonstrating that by 2 years of age terms for the basic emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, (...) and fear are commonly used by children as are terms for such related states as crying and hurting. At this early age children produce such terms to refer to self and to others, and to past and future as well as to present states. Over the years from 2 to 5 children's emotion vocabulary expands, their discussion of hypothetical emotions gets underway, and the complexity of their emotion utterances increases. In Phase 2 our analyses go beyond children's production of emotion terms to analyses of their conception of emotion. We focus especially on when children use emotion terms to refer to subjective experiential states of persons. From their earliest uses of these terms in our data children. (shrink)