In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:TRANSCENDENT MAN IN THE LIMITED CITY: THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF CHARLES N. R. McCOY ]AMES v. SCHALL, S.J. Georgetown University Washington, D. C. The history of political philosophy since the time of St. Thomas has been a history of successive failures to relate ethics to politics and of successive attempts to find a substitute for theology, either in politics itself... or in economics.... Men are today oppressed by false (...) theologies erected into political systems, and those who are not so oppressed are in risk of becoming so oppressed by an intellectual and moral inability to defend themselves. St. Thomas's political science will not give us the answers to problems of hydro-electric development or technological unemployment ; but it will give us the answer to the most vital of contemporary problems: how to secure the rational foundations of humane living. -Charles N. R. McCoy," St. Thomas and Political Science." 1 I IN WRITING ABOUT the small but rich corpus in political philosophy by Charles N. R. McCoy, the temptation is almost irresistible to call it, wittily, " The Real McCoy," or, more academically, a theoretic essay on the reasons for our " intellectual and moral inability to defend ourselves." The kind of being we are, no doubt, needs defense, needs an explication that justifies its unique givenness. Charles N. R. McCoy is not generally wellknown, though he has a small and (one hopes) growing number of admirers. The very cultural unlikelihood of his central theme, 1 On the Intelligibility of Political Philosophy: Essays of Charles N. R. McCoy, edited by James V. Schall, S.J. and John J. Schrems (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1989), p. 38. 63 64 JAMES V. SCHALL, S.J. which 1s m no sense Hegelian, that there is indeed a coherent philosophical intelligibility-a "structure "-to political philosophy, makes his work both unique, profoundly appealing, and perhaps even prophetic. McCoy was concerned to explain the transcendence of each person, each citizen, beyond the city, indeed beyond this world, without denying his exact political nature and the reasons for its limits. Man was both a political and a philosophical animal to whom more than either politics or philosophy was given. The dignity of the city was essentially revealed in its limits, in what good it could do with its own means while leaving other admitted goods untouched, in what questions it could legitimately bring up because of its experienced life, but still could not answer by itself. On reading him carefully in one's own pursuit of philosophic wisdom in an age replete with sundry mental and moral confusions, it is tempting to affirm that, at last, in political philosophy here is found a body of reflection which is indeed " the real McCoy." Here is a consistent examination of philosophic principle that accounts for the contours of the whole of the discipline in its most radical origins and clearest limits. McCoy's "reality" does not, to be sure, exist for most of the political science profession itself nor for Christian thinkers in the field of political thought. This situation is unfortunate on both counts. Political philosophy, for its part, has pursued in modern times the line of its own autonomy in rejecting the great tradition which affirmed the limited place of politics in the order of being, its position as a practical, not speculative science. Theology-itself seeking relevance in lieu of transcendence-has largely imitated this modern turn in political thought. The crisis in theology is, more than anything else, the result of a crisis in political philosophy, its evolution in modernity. Thus in a discipline in which so many of the ultimate human issues are either not confronted at all or are at best confused, in a theological environment which is itself largely infected with the theoretical deviations McCoy chronicled, this benign neglect of his work may turn out to be an advantage. McCoy's independence of these ideological movements, grounded POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF CHARLES N. R. MC COY 65 as it is in the philosophical tradition from which these movements systematically deviated, provides a new and fresh way of coming to terms with the meaning of political philosophy itself. In a spirit of... (shrink)

This is a book about how we see: the environment around us (its surfaces, their layout, and their colors and textures); where we are in the environment; whether or not we are moving and, if we are, where we are going; what things are good for; how to do things (to thread a needle or drive an automobile); or why things look as they do.The basic assumption is that vision depends on the eye which is connected to the brain. The (...) author suggests that natural vision depends on the eyes in the head on a body supported by the ground, the brain being only the central organ of a complete visual system. When no constraints are put on the visual system, people look around, walk up to something interesting and move around it so as to see it from all sides, and go from one vista to another. That is natural vision—and what this book is about. (shrink)

This authoritative volume provides a comprehensive road map of the important and rapidly growing field of emotion regulation.

Both the psychology of perception and the philosophy of perception seem to show a new face when the process is considered at its own level, distinct from that of sensation. Unfamiliar conceptions in physics, anatomy, physiology, psychology, and phenomenology are required to clarify the separation and make it plausible. But there have been so many dead ends in the effort to solve the theoretical problems of perception that radical proposals may now be acceptable. Scientists are often more conservative than philosophers (...) of science. I end, therefore, as I began, with a plea for help. (shrink)

Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason is one of the great modern examinations of religion's meaning, function and impact on human affairs. In this volume, the first complete English-language commentary on the work, James J. DiCenso explains the historical context in which the book appeared, including the importance of Kant's conflict with state censorship. He shows how the Religion addresses crucial Kantian themes such as the relationship between freedom and morality, the human propensity to evil, the status (...) of historical traditions in relation to ethical principles, and the interface between individual ethics and social institutions. The major arguments are clearly and precisely explained, and the themes are highlighted and located within Kant's mature critical philosophy, especially his ethics. The commentary will be valuable for all who are interested in the continuing relevance of religion for contemporary inquiries into ethics, public institutions and religious traditions. (shrink)

Speakers often do not state requests directly but employ innuendos such as Would you like to see my etchings? Though such indirectness seems puzzlingly inefficient, it can be explained by a theory of the strategic speaker, who seeks plausible deniability when he or she is uncertain of whether the hearer is cooperative or antagonistic. A paradigm case is bribing a policeman who may be corrupt or honest: A veiled bribe may be accepted by the former and ignored by the latter. (...) Everyday social interactions can have a similar payoff structure (with emotional rather than legal penalties) whenever a request is implicitly forbidden by the relational model holding between speaker and hearer (e.g., bribing an honest maitre d’, where the reciprocity of the bribe clashes with his authority). Even when a hearer’s willingness is known, indirect speech offers higher-order plausible deniability by preempting certainty, gossip, and common knowledge of the request. In supporting experiments, participants judged the intentions and reactions of characters in scenarios that involved fraught requests varying in politeness and directness. (shrink)

Modern emotion theories emphasise the adaptive value of emotions. Emotions are by no means always helpful, however. They often must be regulated. The study of emotion regulation has its origins in the psychoanalytic and stress and coping traditions. Recently, increased interest in emotion regulation has led to crucial boundary ambiguities that now threaten progress in this domain. It is argued that distinctions need to be made between (1) regulation of emotion and regulation by emotion; (2) emotion regulation in self and (...) emotion regulation in others; and (3) conscious and nonconscious emotion regulation. Using a process model of emotion generation, this review considers promising research on basic processes and individual differences in emotion regulation and poses five theoretical challenges. (shrink)

Individuals and businesses make numerous payments every day. They sometimes have choices about what forms of payment to make or accept, and at other times are effectively forced to use a particular form. Often there is an asymmetric power relationship between payer and payee that raises the issue of whether one side unfairly exploits the other. Is it unethical exploitation for an employer to pay employees with a fee-laden payroll card over other more convenient forms of payment? Does the fee (...) structure of payment networks such as Visa and MasterCard unfairly exploit merchants? The bitcoin payment system is an ethical as well as technological evolution as it was designed to be an electronic payment system that does not rely upon trust. Can an entire payment system like bitcoin be “evil,” as charged by Krugman? Payment tools as such are ethically neutral, but can be used in an ethical or unethical manner. (shrink)

This paper and its subsequent parts (Part II and Part III) build on an earlier publication (McKenna 1986). They suggest that important clinical data on the relationship between infantile constitutional deficits and microenvironmental factors relevant to SIDS can be acquired by examining the physiological regulatory effects (well documented among nonhuman primates) that parents assert on their infants when they sleep together.I attempt to show why access to parental sensory cues (movement, touch, smell, sound) that induce arousals in infants while they (...) sleep could possibly help one of many different subclasses of infants either to override certain kinds of sleep-induced breathing control errors suspected to be involved in SIDS or to avoid them altogether. I do not suggest that solitary nocturnal sleep “causes” SIDS, that all parents should sleep with their infants, or that traditional SIDS research strategies should be abandoned. However, using evolutionary data, I do suggest that an adaptive fit exists between parent-infant sleep contact and the natural physiological vulnerabilities of the neurologically immature human infant, whose breathing system is more complex than that of other mammals owing to its speech-breathing abilities. This “fit” is best understood, it is argued, in terms of the 4–5 million years of human evolution in which parent-infant contact was almost certainly continuous during at least the first year of an infant’s life. Thus, to dismiss the idea that solitary sleep has no physiological consequences for infants does not accord with scientific facts. (shrink)

Postnatal parent-infant physiological regulatory effects described in the previous paper (Part I) are viewed here as being biologically contiguous with events that occur prenatally, preparing and sensitizing the fetus to the average microenvironment into which the infant is expected, based on its evolutionary past, to be born. Following McKenna (1986), evidence (some of which is circumstantial) is presented concerning fetal hearing and fetal amniotic liquid breathing as they are affected both by maternal cardiovascular blood flow sounds in the uterus and (...) by fluctuating maternal blood sugar levels. These data are linked in turn to the infant’s postulated postnatal responsivity to parental sensory cues, including auditory and vestibular respiratory cues that may assist infants as they “learn” to breathe and, for some, to resist a SIDS event. Data on the respiratory and vocalizing behavior of normal and hearing-impaired persons are used to show that not all forms of human breathing are innate; some forms develop with experience. These data reveal how human infants learn, for example, to coordinate higher and lower brain respiratory nuclei in the context of learning initially to cry with intent and purpose and later to speak. Voluntary, cortex-based breathing emerges at the same time that infants are most likely to die from SIDS, between 2 and 4 months of age. This switch between voluntary and involuntary breathing during both sleep (while dreaming) and wake cycles, which depends on the integration of higher cortical and lower brain stem nuclei, is complex and is possibly the basis of the human species’ unique susceptibility to SIDS—a syndrome as yet unrecognized in other species. These human infant vulnerabilities, including delayed maturity, can explain in part why natural selection ought to favor increased infant sensitivity to parental sensory cues provided by a caregiver—stimuli available in the evolving parental care environment that included parent-infant co-sleeping for more than 4–5 million years of human evolution. (shrink)

Emotion regulation has the odd distinction of being a wildly popular construct whose scientific existence is in considerable doubt. In this article, we discuss the confusion about whether emotion generation and emotion regulation can and should be distinguished from one another. We describe a continuum of perspectives on emotion, and highlight how different (often mutually incompatible) perspectives on emotion lead to different views about whether emotion generation and emotion regulation can be usefully distinguished. We argue that making differences in perspective (...) explicit serves the function of allowing researchers with different theoretical commitments to collaborate productively despite seemingly insurmountable differences in terminology and methods. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the ethical-political dilemma in Kant’s work, sometimes expressed through the metaphor of the “crooked wood of humanity.” Kant separates external and internal freedom and the types of legislation each form of freedom requires (coercive and noncoercive). Yet, he also argues that corrupt political institutions adversely affect individual ethical development, and, reciprocally, corrupt inner dispositions of a populace adversely affect the establishment of just political institutions. I argue that a major way in which Kant addresses this vicious circle (...) is through ethical institutions, that is, noncoercive public resources for articulating and disseminating the principles of the moral law. I discuss the idea of an ethico-civil society or ethical community formulated in the Religion as an ideal model for ethical institutions mediating the ethical and the legal-political in a noncoercive, progressive manner. (shrink)