This volume -- a companion to Thomas Reid: Selected Philosophical Writings (2012) -- makes available material from Thomas Reid's autograph manuscripts and student notes of his lectures. It includes an introductory essay by Nicholas Wolterstorff.

The dominant framework for understanding selfhood in contemporary psychology has been one that privileges a highly individualistic conception of self. This is reflected in both the language and approaches of psychotherapy where the influence of contextual factors are given marginal consideration in order to maintain some type of 'objectivity' or 'neutrality' in counseling. We argue that an understanding of selfhood which does not take into account the 'relational' nature of selfhood as well as the cultural or historical context of the (...) client, will likely alienate clients who do not view their self through the individualized lenses of psychology. In order to deal with this problem, we adopt an approach to cultural psychology that views the self as a relational narrative. Such a narrative does not imply an unrestricted freedom to construct our self, but understands the limits to selfhood implied in the web of meanings constitutive of our culture and the web of relations from which our self emerges. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

How should we incorporate algorithms into humanistic scholarship? The typical approach is to clone what humans have done but faster, extrapolating expert insights to landfills of source material. But creative scholars do not clone tradition; instead, they produce readings that challenge closely held understandings. We theorize and then illustrate how to construct bad robots trained to surprise and provoke. These robots aren’t the most human but rather the most alien—not tame but dangerous. We explore the relationship between the reproduction of (...) tradition and the generation of surprise and then show how formalizing a particular humanistic theory as a Bayesian prior allows us to identify readings that disrupt it through a process of algorithmic abduction. Among the exploding universe of surprising (and mostly ridiculous) possible readings, algorithmic efficiency allows us to select readings that nonetheless garner substantial support from the total archive and so merit interpretation and engagement. It is in such interaction between alien and human readers that meaning is made and understanding disturbed; it is by extending alien readings to novel texts that the scholarly community tests the value of those readings. (shrink)

The social exchange theory of reasoning, which is championed by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, falls under the general rubric “evolutionary psychology” and asserts that human reasoning is governed by content-dependent, domain-specific, evolutionarily-derived algorithms. According to Cosmides and Tooby, the presumptive existence of what they call “cheater-detection” algorithms disconfirms the claim that we reason via general-purpose mechanisms or via inductively acquired principles. We contend that the Cosmides/Tooby arguments in favor of domain-specific algorithms or evolutionarily-derived mechanisms fail and that the notion (...) of a social exchange rule, which is central to their theory, is not correctly characterized. As a consequence, whether or not their conclusion is true cannot be established on the basis of the arguments they have presented. (shrink)

Herdt's Putting On Virtue has two chief aims. The first is to champion the virtue tradition against Christian moral quietism and modern deontological ethics. The second is to facilitate reconciliation between Augustinian and Emersonian virtue. To accomplish these tasks Herdt constructs a counter-narrative to Schneewind's Invention of Autonomy, in which Luther's resignation and Kant's innovation are tragic consequences of “hyper-Augustinianism”—a competitive conception of divine and human agency, which leads to excessive suspicion of acquired virtue. This review argues that Putting On (...) Virtue succeeds in its first aim but leaves its second intriguingly uncompleted. Despite this deficiency, however, this essay also argues that Putting On Virtue makes plausible Herdt's audacious suggestion that Augustinian and Emersonian perfectionism may be reconciled by bringing acquired and infused virtue under a single term. (shrink)

This is a reprint of Amartya Sen’s 1973 book on the measurement of inequality, plus an updated bibliography and index, and an annex by James Foster and Sen that summarizes and comments on the main developments since 1973. The book is superbly written and focuses on verbal discussion of the plausibility and significance of the conditions, theorems, and measures.

The purpose of this thesis is not to present exhaustively the ethical doctrine of Plato, but to disclose one specific aspect in the development of his ethical thought. We shall attempt to show that Plato realized the necessity for a metaphysical foundation for his ethical theory. The search itself will begin in the early or Socratic dialogues, continue through such major works of the middle period as Phaedo and Symposium, and culminate in a definite resolution of the problem through the (...) doctrine of the Republic. The exposition will be developed in three stages: (1) an indication of the ways in which the need for a "metaphysical foundation of morals" is expressed or implied in the early dialogues; (2) an account of the development of Plato's metaphysical theory in dialogues of the middle period; and (3) the argument that this metaphysic was for Plato the completion and foundation of his ethical theory. (shrink)

The Scottish Enlightenment provided the fledgling United States of America and its emerging universities with a philosophical orientation. For a hundred years or more, Scottish philosophers were both taught and emulated by professors at Princeton, Harvard and Yale, as well as newly founded colleges stretching from Rhode Island to Texas. This volume in the Library of Scottish Philosophy demonstrates the remarkable extent of this philosophical influence. Selections from William Smith, John Witherspoon, Samuel Stanhope Smith, Archibald Alexander, Alexander Campbell, W.E. Channing, (...) James McCosh, and C.S. Peirce, together with the editor's introductory and explanatory material, provide the modern reader with unprecedented access to this period of intellectual formation. (shrink)

In issue 6.1 of the Journal of Scottish Philosophy, James Van Cleve describes Thomas Reid's understanding of double vision and then presents a challenge to his direct realism found in works of David Hume based on double vision. The challenge is as follows: When we press one eye with a finger, we immediately perceive all the objects to become double, and one half of them to be remov'd from their common and natural position. But as we do not attribute (...) a continu'd existence to both these perceptions, and as they are both of the same nature, we clearly perceive, that all our perceptions [i.e., all the things we perceive] are dependent on our organs, and the disposition of our nerves and animal spirits. (THN: 210–211). (shrink)

According to Arthur Danto, the crisis of modern art is not the abandonment of representation, nor an attempt at intentional “uglification,” but a struggle to escape the aesthetic objectification of artworks.1 This attempt at escape has led modern artists to hold an indifferent attitude toward beauty, an attitude that has resulted in the readymade: in Duchamp’s famous urinal and snow shovel, and Warhol’s perhaps more famous soup can. Danto’s account of this crisis in art is plausible—for what is one to (...) say vis-à-vis the beauty of objects in art galleries whose twins reside in washrooms and cupboards?—and if accepted identifies a related crisis in philosophy. From Plato to Schopenhauer, philosophers have largely .. (shrink)

Presents David Foster Wallace critiques philosopher Richard Taylor's work implying that humans have no control over the future and includes essays linking Wallace's critique with his later works of fiction.

In this thorough compendium, nineteen accomplished scholars explore, in some manner the values they find inherent in the world, their nature, and revelence through the thought of Frederick Ferré. These essays, informed by the insights of Ferré and coming from manifold perspectives—ethics, philosophy, theology, and environmental studies, advance an ambitious challenge to current intellectual and scholarly fashions.

In this thorough compendium, nineteen accomplished scholars explore, in some manner the values they find inherent in the world, their nature, and revelence through the thought of Frederick FerrZ. These essays, informed by the insights of FerrZ and coming from manifold perspectives—ethics, philosophy, theology, and environmental studies, advance an ambitious challenge to current intellectual and scholarly fashions.

Herdt's Putting On Virtue has two chief aims. The first is to champion the virtue tradition against Christian moral quietism and modern deontological ethics. The second is to facilitate reconciliation between Augustinian and Emersonian virtue. To accomplish these tasks Herdt constructs a counter‐narrative to Schneewind's Invention of Autonomy, in which Luther's resignation and Kant's innovation are tragic consequences of “hyper‐Augustinianism”—a competitive conception of divine and human agency, which leads to excessive suspicion of acquired virtue. This review argues that Putting On (...) Virtue succeeds in its first aim but leaves its second intriguingly uncompleted. Despite this deficiency, however, this essay also argues that Putting On Virtue makes plausible Herdt's audacious suggestion that Augustinian and Emersonian perfectionism may be reconciled by bringing acquired and infused virtue under a single term. (shrink)

This book is a collection of secondary essays on America's most important philosophic thinkers—statesmen, judges, writers, educators, and activists—from the colonial period to the present. Each essay is a comprehensive introduction to the thought of a noted American on the fundamental meaning of the American regime.

Self-regulated learning is critical for learning across tasks, domains, and contexts. Despite its importance, research shows that not all learners are equally skilled at accurately and dynamically monitoring and regulating their self-regulatory processes. Therefore, learning technologies, such as intelligent tutoring systems, have been designed to measure and foster SRL. This paper presents an overview of over 10 years of research on SRL with MetaTutor, a hypermedia-based ITS designed to scaffold college students’ SRL while they learn about the human circulatory (...) system. MetaTutor’s architecture and instructional features are designed based on models of SRL, empirical evidence on human and computerized tutoring principles of multimedia learning, Artificial Intelligence in educational systems for metacognition and SRL, and research on SRL from our team and that of other researchers. We present MetaTutor followed by a synthesis of key research findings on the effectiveness of various versions of the system on learning outcomes. First, we focus on findings from self-reports, learning outcomes, and multimodal data and their contributions to our understanding of SRL with an ITS. Second, we elaborate on the role of embedded pedagogical agents as external regulators designed to scaffold learners’ cognitive and metacognitive SRL strategy use. Third, we highlight and elaborate on the contributions of multimodal data in measuring and understanding the role of cognitive, affective, metacognitive, and motivational processes. Additionally, we unpack some of the challenges these data pose for designing real-time instructional interventions that scaffold SRL. Fourth, we present existing theoretical, methodological, and analytical challenges and briefly discuss lessons learned and open challenges. (shrink)

Individuals with Acquired Brain Injury (ABI) suffer chronic impairment across cognitive, physical and psycho-social domains, and the experience of anxiety, isolation and apathy has been amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. A qualitative evaluation was conducted of 14 individuals with ABI who had participated in series of COVID adapted group-based intervention(s) that had been designed to improve wellbeing. Eight themes were identified: Facilitating Safety, Fostering Positive Emotion, Managing and Accepting Difficult Emotions, Promoting Meaning, Finding Purpose and Accomplishment, Facilitating Social Ties, (Re)Connecting (...) to Nature, and Barriers to Efficacy. Findings are discussed with respects to recent theoretical developments in positive psychology and wellbeing science and support the use of online and outdoor interventions to enhance wellbeing in individuals living with ABI during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper makes a unique contribution to second wave positive psychology (PP2.0) through the application of recent advances in wellbeing science to an ABI population during the COVID-19 pandemic. In doing so, this paper lays the foundation for new interventions that not only reduce impairment and distress, but also create opportunities for meaning and enhanced wellbeing in people living with chronic conditions and those individuals living with ABI in particular. (shrink)

This book is a rebuttal of the common charge that the moral doctrine of utilitarianism permits horrible acts, justifies unfair distribution of wealth and other social goods, and demands too much of moral agents. Bailey defends utilitarianism by applying central insights of game theory regarding feasible equilibria and evolutionary stability of norms to elaborate an account of institutions that real-world utilitarians would want to foster. With such an account he shows that utilitarianism, while still a useful doctrine for criticizing (...) existing institutions, is far more congruent with ordinary moral common sense than has been generally recognized. A controversial attempt to support the practical use of utilitarian ethics in a world of conflicting interests and competing moral agents, Bailey's work uniquely bridges the abstract debate of philosophers and the practical, consequence-based debates of political scientists. (shrink)

The subject of gratitude has gained traction in recent years in academic and popular circles. However, limited attention has been devoted to understanding what laypeople understand by the concept of gratitude; the meaning of which tends to have been assumed in the literature. Furthermore, while intrapersonal and interpersonal benefits of gratitude have been extolled in this growing body of research, there has been little assessment of the value laypeople place on gratitude themselves, or whether and how they think it might (...) be fostered. Since September 2012, our Attitude for Gratitude research project has been engaged in examining precisely how gratitude is conceptualised by the British public, what British people are grateful for, the value they place on gratitude, what kinds of people tend to be grateful, and whether and how they think gratitude might be promoted in British society. The project has incorporated a variety of methods to examine these questions, conceptually and empirically, canvassing the opinions of over 10,000 people in the UK. A key issue for our research has been to represent the views of British people across a range of ages, ethnicities and backgrounds that are representative of Britain today. We are strongly committed to the view that researchers should engage with laypeople to avoid superimposing a meaning and value on gratitude that does not reflect the views of the people the research purports to study. To this end, and to throw light on what British laypeople understand by the concept of gratitude, we carried out a series of empirical studies that complement the definitions of philosophers and psychologists with more everyday definitions of laypeople5. To examine the perceived value of gratitude we surveyed British people directly, making no prior assumptions about where gratitude might be evaluated in relation to other values and virtues. Finally, we sought to elicit suggestions from the British public themselves about how gratitude might be fostered in British society. Much recent research on gratitude has originated in the USA and therefore a further aim of the project was to assess the degree to which the understanding and evaluation of gratitude may differ between the USA and the UK. We sought to target the British public with these questions. (shrink)

Perception is fascinating and is inextricably bound up with all levels and kinds of thinking. Perceptual knowledge, descriptive data, serves as raw material for any and all processing operations. Certainly all kinds of constructing and processing operations await, e.g., imagining, describing, generalizing, comparing, day-dreaming, thousands of kinds. The mind is constantly at work with its symbols, such as images and language, formulating and focusing percepts out of sensory stimuli and then making thought and feeling constructs.

This article reflects on the problem of false belief produced by the integrated psychological and algorithmic landscape humans now inhabit. Following the work of scholars such as Lee McIntyre (Post-Truth, MIT Press, 2018) or Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall (The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread, Yale University Press, 2019) it combines recent discussions of fake news, post-truth, and science denialism across the disciplines of political science, computer science, sociology, psychology, and the history and philosophy of science that variously (...) address the ineffectiveness, in a digital era, of countering individual falsehoods with facts. Truth and falsehood, it argues, rather than being seen as properties or conditions attached to individual instances of content, should now be seen as collective, performative, and above all persuasive phenomena. They should be practically evaluated as networked systems and mechanisms of sharing in which individually targeted actions are combining with structural tendencies (both human and mechanical) in unprecedented ways. For example, the persuasive agency of apparent consensus (clicks, likes, bots, trolls) is newly important in a fractured environment that only appears to be, but is no longer ‘public’; the control of narratives, labels, and associations is a live, time-sensitive issue, a continuous contest, or ongoing cusp. Taking a social approach to truth yields observations of new relevance; from how current strategies of negative cohesion, blame, and enemy-creation depend crucially on binary ways of constructing the world, to how the offer of identity/community powerfully cooperates with the structural tendencies of algorithm-driven advertiser platforms towards polarisation. Remedies for these machine-learned and psychological tendencies lie in end-user education. So the Arts and Humanities, whether via comparisons with previous historical periods, or via principles of critical thinking and active reading, offer crucial resources to help counter what since 1997 silicon valley executives and scholars have called ‘persuasive technology’ (Fogg in Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What we Think and Do, Morgan Kaufmann, 2003; Hamari et al. (eds) in Persuasive Technology, Springer International Publishing, 2014; Harris in How a Handful of Tech Companies Control Billions of Minds Every Day, 2017; Lanier in Who Owns the Future? Simon & Schuster, 2014 and Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Picador, 2019). The article proposes a paradigm shift in public understandings of this new social environment: from a culture of discovery, where what matters is what exists or is in fact the case, to a culture of iteration, where what matters is what gets repeated. (shrink)

If early Caribbean philosophy is characterized by its pan-African flourishes, what is less well known is its flirtations with existentialism. Although C.L.R. James’s 1965 Heideggerian reading of Wi...

This paper illuminates an underappreciated tension between two desiderata for moral disapproval. First, moral disapproval should aspire to openness. This means, among other things, that it should aspire not to require silence from wronged parties. Second, moral disapproval should aspire to decency. This means, among other things, that it should not predictably cause psychological harm in a way that alienates or isolates people from their moral community. I illustrate the tension between these desiderata within the context of online shaming, and (...) then show how that conflict generalizes. The shape of the conflict is this: in many cases, justice requires us to allow for highly public disapproval about an offender, but the publicity of that disapproval predictably fosters psychological harm, alienation, and isolation. To explain why many cases share this character, I appeal to psychological and philosophical research on the connections between shame, humiliation, aggression, isolation, and depression. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22.1 (2002) 251-254 [Access article in PDF] James Fredericks Interview The 2002 winner of the Frederick J.Streng Book Award is James Fredericks, professor ofTheological Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. Professor Fredericks received the award for his book, Faith Among Faiths: Christian Theology and the Non-Christian Religions, published by Paulist Press (New York) in 2001. Buddhist-Christian Studies asked James about his (...) writing of the volume.Buddhist-Christian Studies: Why did you write Faith Among Faiths?James Fredericks: I wanted to help Christians think about the problems that the "pluralist" view of religious diversity poses for inter-religious dialogue.How does the book do that?By making a sustained criticism of the claim that religions are differing interpretations of the same transcendent "Reality." This notion is a problem for a religion of revelation, like Christianity, but also for a religion like Buddhism that has a sophisticated critique of metaphysics. Pluralist thinkers impose a meta-religious grand narrative on all the religions and demand that the religions conform to this grand narrative in the name of "tolerance."This kind of thinking has roots in the European Enlightenment and has affinities with some strands of Hindu thought, especially the "neo-Hindu" thinkers. I do not think that this approach fosters dialogue in depth. If Buddhism and Christianity are varying interpretations of the same ultimate "Reality," then what does Buddhism have to teach Christians that is of genuine theological importance? The obvious differences that distinguish Buddhism from Christianity are of little theological interest to Christians because they are of no soteriological consequence. The pluralist approach is a dead end for dialogue.And the way forward?What I call "comparative theology." I think of this as an alternative to what Christians call the "theology of religions."What's the difference?Theologies of religion interpret the meaning of other religious traditions from within the perspective of Christian tradition. Karl Rahner's theology of the anonymous Christian and Karl Barth's rejection of all religions as "unbelief" are both examples of a theology of religion. John Hick's pluralist model of religions is also a kind of theology of religions. This entire project has reached an impasse within Christianity. As an alternative, I propose that Christians recognize that Buddhism and Christianity [End Page 251] are linked by some significant similarities and distinguished from each other by significant differences.How does that break the impasse?Christians have something of genuine value to learn by entering humbly into dialogue with Buddhists. By taking differences seriously, dialogue becomes a way for Christians to do their own theology collaboratively with Buddhists. In the medieval period, Christians did theology in dialogue with Aristotle and Plato. Today, I want Christians to do theology in dialogue with Nagarjuna and Dogen. Therefore doing theology comparatively is to step beyond the notion of a theology of religions. Comparative theology does not begin with the assumption that Buddhism is a relatively obscured form of the same truth Christians affirm (Rahner) or that Buddhism and Christianity are relatively equal expressions of a truth that transcends them both (Hick). The purpose of dialogue is not to show how we are all really trying to say the same thing. ForChristians, at least, dialogue with Buddhists is a genuinely demanding way of doing theology.Any other reasons for the book?Yes. To promote friendships among Buddhists and Christians. These "inter-religious friendships" are a good way for Christians to practice their faith. My own friendships with Buddhists, both here in the USA and in Asia, are central to my spirituality and my work as a theologian. In a sense, I have never been in dialogue with "Buddhism." All my dialogues have been with actual Buddhists, with all their personal strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures. I am happy to say that, over the years, I have had some skillful teachers who have taught me not only the Dharma, but also taught me new ways to think about Christianity.Was it a difficult book to write?My book was written after years of dialogue with Buddhists and much research and... (shrink)