This article is a prophetic and historical look at the prospects for spiritual direction and soul care in our contemporary setting. The thrust of this essay is to argue that soul care today needs to embrace three dimensions: the historical, the biblical, as well as the contemporary behavioral sciences. Otherwise our judgments will be imprisoned within our own culture if we have not traveled abroad in time as well as space, to understand the faith and devotion of God's people in (...) the cultures of the past. We will suggest five aspects of the history of Christian devotion that we need to “remember” today: the lives of the saints, the exercise of contrition, the memory of the Psalms, the basic use of figurative language, and the importance of letter-writing. (shrink)

With essays by David Hume, Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel kant, William Blake, Jeremy Bentham, Richard Whately, John Henry Newman, Karl Marx, James Whistler, Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, etc.

With essays by David Hume, Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel kant, William Blake, Jeremy Bentham, Richard Whately, John Henry Newman, Karl Marx, James Whistler, Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, etc.

Mill (1773-1836), British philosopher, political theorist, historian and psychologist was largely responsible for organizing the influential group of Bentham followers that became known as the 'philosophical radicals', which included David Ricardo, Joseph Hume, J. R. McCulloch, George Grote and John Austin. A prolific writer, Mill is remembered mainly as Bentham's chief disciple; for his influence on the radicals and in particular his son John Stuart Mill, the prominent utilitarian thinker. Thoemmes Press are making available two key philosophical works by this (...) eminent early nineteenth-century intellectual figure. A Fragment on Mackintosh is an important work in which Mill attacks Sir James Mackintosh, a leading Whig apologist and critic of the philosophical radicals. Mill defends the utilitarian ethical theory against Mackintosh's article on ethics in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. A Fragment colourfully demonstrates Mill's belief that the proper aim of human actions and practices was the promotion of human happiness and is a lucid illustration of his psychological and ethical theories. Privately printed in 1830 and subsequently published in 1835 (the delay was due to Mackintosh's death), this rare dissertation is a key work for all scholars of ethics. (shrink)

Within anthropology, as elsewhere in the human sciences, there is a tendency to divide knowledge making into two separate poles: conceptual (theory) vs. empirical (ethnography). In Theory Can Be More than It Used to Be, Dominic Boyer, James D. Faubion, and George E. Marcus argue that we need to take a step back from the assumption that we know what theory is to investigate how theory—a matter of concepts, of analytic practice, of medium of value, of professional ideology—operates in (...) anthropology and related fields today. They have assembled a distinguished group of scholars to diagnose the state of the theory-ethnography divide in anthropology today and to explore alternative modes of analytical and pedagogical practice. Continuing the methodological insights provided in Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be, the contributors to this volume find that now is an optimal time to reflect on the status of theory in relation to ethnographic research in anthropology and kindred disciplines. Together they engage with questions such as, What passes for theory in anthropology and the human sciences today and why? What is theory's relation to ethnography? How are students trained to identify and respect anthropological theorization and how do they practice theoretical work in their later career stages? What theoretical experiments, languages, and institutions are available to the human sciences? Throughout, the editors and authors consider theory in practical terms, rather than as an amorphous set of ideas, an esoteric discourse of power, a norm of intellectual life, or an infinitely contestable canon of texts. A short editorial afterword explores alternative ethics and institutions of pedagogy and training in theory. Contributors: Andrea Ballestero, Rice University; Dominic Boyer, Rice University; Lisa Breglia, George Mason University; Jessica Marie Falcone, Kansas State University; James D. Faubion, Rice University; Kim Fortun, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Andreas Glaeser, University of Chicago; Cymene Howe, Rice University; Jamer Hunt, Parsons The New School for Design and the Institute of Design in Umea, Sweden; George E. Marcus, University of California, Irvine; Townsend Middleton, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Deepa S. Reddy, University of Houston–Clear Lake; Kaushik Sunder Rajan, University of Chicago. (shrink)

James Mill (1773-1836) is today best known as Jeremy Bentham's chief disciple and John Stuart Mill's father. Yet Mill himself was a formidable and important Utilitarian thinker in his own right, who earned the respect of even those who disagreed with him. His range was enormous (historian, political philosopher, psychologist, educational theorist, and economist), repeatedly crossing the disciplinary boundaries we take for granted today. This volume presents a wide sampling of Mill's political writings and polemical essays. It begins with (...) his classic work, the Essay on Government, it also includes pieces on the protection of rights, the importance of education, the free press, the secret ballot, and government's use of punishment against those who violate the rights of fellow citizens. The collection concludes with Macauley's famous critique of the Essay, and Mill's heretofore unnoticed reply in his Fragment on Mackintosh (1835). This is the first time that such a selection of Mill's political works has appeared as one volume. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Edmund Burke and His Critics: The Case of Mary WollstonecraftJames ConniffA number of interesting questions concerning the development of English political thought in the French Revolutionary period remain matters of controversy. In this essay I propose to consider two of them: why did the Whigs split on the Revolution, and why and how did some of the disaffected Whigs reconcile with Edmund Burke. Various answers have been suggested. The (...) currently dominant position was first articulated some years ago when J. G. A. Pocock suggested that the revolutionary debate was largely a struggle between Whig ancient constitutionalists, Burke among them, and a republican alliance of disciples of Harrington and Machiavelli. 1 In his Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism Isaac Kramnick disagreed, arguing that the late eighteenth-century radicals should be seen as Lockeans pursuing “a new Liberal ideal, a society of achievement, a social order of competitive individualism in which social mobility was possible and the rightful reward for ingenious people of talent and hard work” was economic success crowned by wealth. 2 In his view English society was then characterized by a struggle in which the middle class, led by religious Dissenters, was rising to challenge the domination of the existing economic and political elite. For Kramnick such figures as Joseph Priestley, Thomas Paine, and Richard Price were advocates for this class, and their political theories represented its ideology. 3 According to Kramnick, these writers were intent on creating a practical science which could be used to promote the happiness of mankind through reform of the political system. Intent on rewarding merit, the radicals advocated the virtues of commercial civilization and [End Page 299] opposed the lazy indolence of both rich and poor. 4 Other scholars have followed Kramnick’s lead and sought to expand the reach of his thesis. In a recent biography of Paine, Jack Fruchtman treated Paine as a civic humanist, a radical critic of English society, and a defender of commercial republics. 5 Similarly, Joyce Appleby and Drew McCoy have employed republicanism to explain American politics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. 6It seems to me that the focus on the radical Whig’s critique of Edmund Burke is indeed a good place to start. In the preface to the English edition of The Rights of Man Paine maintained that “from the part Mr. Burke took in the American Revolution, it was natural that I should consider him a friend to mankind... but no sooner did he see the old prejudices wearing away, than he immediately began sowing the seeds of a new inveteracy, as if he were afraid that England and France would cease to be enemies.” 7 In Paine’s view Burke and his allies among the Old Whigs were simply hypocrites. They supported reform, he said, only when it benefitted themselves. Intent on their own self-interest, they could never admit that, “it is to a nation that the right of forming or reforming, generating or regenerating constitutions and governments belong;... those subjects... are always before a country as a matter of right....” 8 Yet as James Boulton has suggested, Paine actually spoke for only a relatively small segment of Burke’s critics. 9 Other more moderate Whigs like Philip Francis and James Mackintosh disagreed with Paine while also rejecting Burke’s violent rhetoric and what they perceived as his opposition to all reform. Over the course of the controversy these moderates maintained contact with Burke, argued respectfully with him, and often continued to work with him on other issues. Moreover, Burke and at least some of his critics shared a common commitment to progress achieved by gradual reform within a context of social stability. Where they differed most was in two areas of subordinate theoretical concern. First, within the common framework of progress, they debated matters of detail, timing, and pace. Second, they disagreed on a number of specific issues which involved such concepts as human nature, equality, the degree of flexibility within the social system, and the value of education, associated with progress. It is, I believe, the disagreement on these subordinate issues which [End Page 300] explains the Whig split. Their limited reconciliation followed in turn... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 147 Eric Andrew James The Representational Necropolitics of Black Women in Zombie Dystopia Video Games Though Stuart Hall defends popular representation as an important terrain of political struggle, he also argues that images of difference are dominated by “racialized regimes of representation” manifest in stereotypes and invisibilities.1 These ensure that marginal identities are reduced, essentialized, and rendered (...) other. One of the most powerful tools for this form of silencing in the popular representation repertoire is the notion of an established genre. In US popular culture, creators and critics alike often position people who experience multiple layers of oppression as constitutively outside the expectations of existing genres. Their absence is attributable not simply to creator racism but also to that genre’s relationships to intersecting categories of difference and domination, such as race and gender. Beginning with the preponderance of representational violence in popular media, this article draws from existing work by feminists of color in order to model a critique of US representational precarity. To illustrate the political tensions in popular US culture, I stage my intervention into a medium whose industry has had particularly fraught struggles with representation: video gaming. There, I focus specifically on 1. Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the Other,” in Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader, ed. Margaret Wetherell, Stephanie Taylor, and Simeon J. Yates. (London: Sage, 2001), 325–44. 148 Eric Andrew James recent attempts to represent Black women, whom the gaming industry has held up as emblematic of difference and diversity. 2 These attempts are marred by predictable disasters and pitfalls. In particular, I discuss how the representational politics of Black women in popular zombie dystopia games repeats a similar violence as the previous silencing of Black women in these spaces. The gaming industry’s struggles with representation in the wake of Gamergate are demonstrative of broader tensions in Black women’s representation in popular media. Thus, while I am focused on video games, I also intend this analysis to reflect on feminist studies of the relationship between genre and representation. I advance existing scholarship on video game representations of Blackness by theorizing violence enacted at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in game genres. Specifically, I position this intervention as a point of departure from TreaAndrea M. Russworm’s chapter in Gaming Representation: “Dystopian Blackness and the Limits of Racial Empathy in The Walking Dead and The Last of Us.”3 This chapter provides a compelling critique of the relationship between the dystopian game genre and Black representation, highlighting the lack of self-reflexivity in mass-market representations of Blackness. Expanding this project by taking another look at her objects of study—The Last of Us (2013– 2014) and Telltale’s The Walking Dead (2012)—I argue that taking Black women’s multiple jeopardy as foundational to the zombie dystopia genre offers a deeper look at the grammars of representational violence. My use of multiple jeopardy refers to Deborah K. King’s theorization of how multiple layers of oppression exponentially multiply individual disadvantages. As King describes, “The modifier ‘multiple’ refers not only to several, simultaneous oppressions but to the multiplicative 2. AnnaMaria Jackson-Phelps, “Representation Matters: Positive Portrayals of Black Women in Video Games,” Medium, February 28, 2017, https:// medium.com/legendary-women/representation-matters-positive-portrayals -of-black-women-in-video-games-c96cf9f66fdf; Jef Rouner, “Would You Believe There Have Been Only 14 Playable Black Women in Gaming?” Houston Press, June 5, 2015, https://www.houstonpress.com/arts/would-you-believethere -have-been-only-14-playable-black-women-in-gaming-7484017. 3. TreaAndrea M. Russworm, “Dystopian Blackness and the Limits of Racial Empathy in The Walking Dead and The Last of Us,” Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games, ed. Jennifer Malkowski and TreaAndrea M. Russworm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 109–28. Eric Andrew James 149 relationships among them as well.”4 These layers of oppression are often contradictory and may leave no avenues for action; the expectations placed on one for their race become impossible to fulfill because of the contradictory expectations placed on them for their gender or sexuality. This multiple jeopardy thus introduces... (shrink)

Two Arabic Travel Books: Accounts of China and India and Mission to the Volga. By Abū Zayd al-Sīrāfī, edited and translated by Tim Mackintosh-Smith; by Ibn Faḍlān, edited and translated by James E. Montgomery. Library of Arabic Literature. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Pp. x + 312. $40.

The distinction between concept and intuition is of the utmost importance for understanding Kant’s critical philosophy. For, as Kant himself claimed, all the distinctive claims of this philosophy rest on, and develop out of, a detailed account of the way all our cognition of things requires both intuitions and concepts.

How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" -- it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a (...) compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers. Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on. (shrink)

Noted psychologist and philosopher develops his own brand of pragmatism, based on theories of C. S. Peirce. Emphasis on "radical empiricism," versus the transcendental and rationalist tradition. One of the most important books in American philosophy. Note.

Moral philosophy is the study of what morality is and what it requires of us. As Socrates said, it's about "how we ought to live"-and why. It would be helpful if we could begin with a simple, uncontroversial definition of what morality is. Unfortunately, we cannot. There are many rival theories, each expounding a different conception of what it means to live morally, and any definition that goes beyond Socrates's simple formula-tion is bound to offend at least one of them. (...) This should make us cautious, but it need not paralyze us. In this chapter, I will describe the "minimum conception" of morality. (shrink)

In this essay, we examine the grounds, nature and content, status, acquisition and role, and justification of gratitude in Kant's ethical system, making use of student notes from Kant's lectures on ethics. We are especially interested in questions about the significance of gratitude in Kant's ethics. We examine Kant's claim that gratitude is a sacred duty, because it cannot be discharged, and explain how this claim is consistent with his insistence that “ought” implies “can.” We argue that for Kant a (...) proper understanding of self-esteem is importantly related to, if not necessary for, possession of the virtue of gratitude. (shrink)

There are two prevailing interpretations of the status which Kant accorded his claims in the Critique of Pure Reason: 1) he is analyzing our concepts of cognition and experience; 2) he is making empirical claims about our cognitive faculties. I argue for a third alternative: on Kant's account, all cognition consists in a reflective consciousness of our cognitive faculties, and in critique we analyze the content of this consciousness. Since Strawson raises a famous charge of incoherence against such a position, (...) I begin by showing that this charge is misplaced. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper relates Kant’s account of pure apperception to the agential approach to self-knowledge. It argues that his famous claim ‘The I think must be able to accompany all of my represent...

Hubert Dreyfus has argued that cases of absorbed bodily coping show that there is no room for self-awareness in flow experiences of experts. In this paper, I argue against Dreyfus’ maxim of vanishing self-awareness by suggesting that awareness of agency is present in expert bodily action. First, I discuss the phenomenon of absorbed bodily coping by discussing flow experiences involved in expert bodily action: merging into the flow; immersion in the flow; emergence out of flow. I argue against the claim (...) that flow experience does not involve an awareness of agency for each of these features, while conceding that fluent agency does not involve self-awareness in the thetic sense. I challenge the assumption that the awareness of fluent agency must be understood in terms of a thetic awareness of agency. Instead, I develop an Anscombean account of the awareness of fluent agency in terms of the phenomenal character of knowing one’s aims. I respond to the challenge that if an Anscombean account of the awareness of agency is to succeed, then agents must be able to answer Anscombean questions. I consider the objection that awareness of agency is not a form of self-awareness by outlining an account of self-awareness as self-synthesis that is distinct from self-perception and self-ascription, but which makes room for self-awareness in expert bodily action. (shrink)

Do Quine and Carnap distort the social nature of inquiry by privileging individual epistemic subjects? This objection is at the heart of Donald Davidson’s claim that Quine fails to grasp the significance of the concept of truth. In Carnap’s case, the objection may be detected in Charles Morris’s call to ground scientific philosophy in semiotics, the science of signs, rather than syntax, the formal investigation of languages. Drawing out the challenge from Morris’s proposal requires examining a neglected influence on this (...) neglected philosopher: his advisor George Herbert Mead’s social theory of mind. I argue that Morris and Davidson can both be understood as demanding that scientific philosophers socialize their conception of objectivity. (shrink)

This first volume contains discussions of the brain, methods for analyzing behavior, thought, consciousness, attention, association, time, and memory.