The process of urban landmark-based navigation has proven to be difficult to study in a rigorous fashion, primarily due to confounding variables and the problem of obtaining reliable data in real-world contexts. The development of high-resolution, immersive virtual reality technologies has opened exciting new possibilities for gathering data on human wayfinding that could not otherwise be readily obtained. We developed a research platform using a virtual environment and electroencephalography to better understand the neural processes associated with landmark usage and recognition (...) during urban navigation tasks. By adjusting the architectural parameters of different buildings in this virtual environment, we isolated and tested specific design features to determine whether or not they served as a target for landmarking. EEG theta band event-related synchronization/desynchronization over posterior scalp areas was evaluated at the time when participants observed each target building along a predetermined self-paced route. A multi-level linear model was used to investigate the effects of salient architectural features on posterior scalp areas. Our results support the conclusion that highly salient architectural features—those that contrast sharply with the surrounding environment—are more likely to attract visual attention, remain in short-term memory, and activate brain regions associated with wayfinding compared with non-salient buildings. After establishing this main aggregate effect, we evaluated specific salient architectural features and neural correlates of navigation processing. The buildings that most strongly associated extended gaze time, location recall accuracy, and changes in theta-band neural patterns with landmarking in our study were those that incorporated rotational twist designs and natural elements such as trees and gardens. Other building features, such as unusual façade patterns or building heights, were to a lesser extent also associated with landmarking. (shrink)

Republic IX 583c-585a presents something surprisingly unusual in ancient accounts of pleasure and pain: an argument in favour of the view that there are three relevant hedonic states: pleasure, pain, and an intermediate. The argument turns on the proposal that a person's evaluation of their current state may be misled by a comparison with a prior or subsequent state. The argument also refers to `pure' and anticipated pleasures. The brief remarks in the Republic may appear cursory or clumsy in comparison (...) with the Philebus , but this appearance is misleading. Rather, they are part of a neat dialectical argument against a potentially troubling set of opponents. Socrates' use of a topological analogy at 584d3-585a7 rounds off this section by clarifying and illustrating his position, preparing the ground for the final explanation of the pleasantness of the philosophical life at 585a-587c. (shrink)

James Adam was a Scottish classics scholar who taught at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. A strong defender of the importance of Greek philosophy in a well-rounded education, Adam published a number of Plato's works including Protagoras and Crito. This two-volume critical edition of the Republic was another major contribution to the field. Though his preface claims 'an editor cannot pretend to have exhausted its significance by means of a commentary,' Adam's depth of knowledge and erudite analysis of the Greek text (...) ensured that his edition remained the standard reference for decades to follow, and it remains a thought-provoking evaluation of one of the great works of Western thought. Volume 1 is devoted to Books 1–5, which discuss justice and the ideal society, while Volume 2 presents Books 6–10, on the place of the philosopher and questions of governance. (shrink)

James Adam was a Scottish classics scholar who taught at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. A strong defender of the importance of Greek philosophy in a well-rounded education, Adam published a number of Plato's works including Protagoras and Crito. This two-volume critical edition of the Republic was another major contribution to the field. Though his preface claims 'an editor cannot pretend to have exhausted its significance by means of a commentary,' Adam's depth of knowledge and erudite analysis of the Greek text (...) ensured that his edition remained the standard reference for decades to follow, and it remains a thought-provoking evaluation of one of the great works of Western thought. Volume 1 is devoted to Books 1–5, which discuss justice and the ideal society. (shrink)

James Adam was a Scottish classics scholar who taught at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. A strong defender of the importance of Greek philosophy in a well-rounded education, Adam published a number of Plato's works including Protagoras and Crito. This two-volume critical edition of the Republic was another major contribution to the field. Though his preface claims 'an editor cannot pretend to have exhausted its significance by means of a commentary,' Adam's depth of knowledge and erudite analysis of the Greek text (...) ensured that his edition remained the standard reference for decades to follow, and it remains a thought-provoking evaluation of one of the great works of Western thought. Volume 2 examines Books 6–10, which discuss the place of the philosopher and questions of governance. (shrink)

Pothos & Busemeyer (P&B) argue that classical probability (CP) fails to describe human decision processes accurately and should be supplanted by quantum probability. We accept the premise, but reject P&B's conclusion. CP is a prescriptive framework that has inspired a great deal of valuable research. Also, because CP is used across the sciences, it is a cornerstone of interdisciplinary collaboration.

Today, modern Western medicine is facing a quality-of-care crisis that is undermining the patient–physician relationship. In this paper, a notion of the epistemically virtuous clinician is proposed in terms of both the reliabilist and responsibilist versions of virtue epistemology, in order to help address this crisis. To that end, a clinical case study from the literature is first reconstructed. The reliabilist intellectual virtues, including the perceptual and conceptual virtues, are then discussed and applied to the case study. Next, a similar (...) method is employed to examine the responsibilist intellectual virtues, including curiosity, courage, honesty, and humility, and to apply them to the case study. To round out the discussion, the love of knowledge and both theoretical and practical wisdom are explored and applied to the case study. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of how the notion of an epistemically virtuous clinician addresses the quality-of-care crisis, in terms of the connection between ethical and intellectual virtues, and of the notion’s implications for medical education. (shrink)

It's sometimes useful to start with a quiz, even if it seems irrelevant to the issues at hand. Suppose you have to organize a tennis tournament with, say, 1025 players. Match winners will go on to the next round while losers bow out until all have been eliminated except, of course, the final champion. Your problem is this: How many matches must you book for this tournament?

A. E. Taylor states the widely held view that Plato’s Euthyphro posed a question which figured prominently in later ethical controversies: “It amounts to asking whether acts of piety, or more generally virtuous acts, derive their character of being right from the mere fact of being commanded or are commanded because they are antecedently intrinsically right.” I argue against this characterization of the Euthyphro. The argument Socrates deploys against Euthyphro’s third and most serious definition of holiness or piety (to hosion) (...) is not the opening round in the debate over divine command theory nor is a discussion of the nature of holiness ipso facto an exercise in ethical theory. (shrink)

In his early work, Martin Heidegger argues for a rigorous methodological atheism in philosophy, which is not opposed to religious faith but only to the impact of faith when one is philosophizing. For the young Heidegger, the philosopher, even though possibly a religious person, must be an atheist when doing philosophy. Christian philosophy, then, is a round square. In this essay, I unpack Heidegger’s methodological considerations and attempt to draw parallels with other traditions which argue for the possibility of a (...) Christian philosophy but at root concede Heidegger’s atheism. In conclusion, I propose that it is precisely Heidegger’s work which points to the inescapabiIity of and opens the door to religious philosophy. (shrink)

This collection of essays highlights the influence of Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg on art, spirituality, and culture. Opening with an essay by Spanish-language writer and metaphysician Jorge Luis Borges, from which the collection draws its name, the volume includes a description of Swedenborg's influence on Fyodor Dosteovsky by Czleslaw Mloscz; a look at Swedenborg from a mystical perspective from Wilson Van Dusen; the transcendentalist connection with Ralph Waldo Emerson in an essay by Eugene Taylor; and Buddhist scholar D. T. Suzuki's (...) describes similarities between Swedenborg's philosophy and Buddhism. Essays by Kathleen Raine on Swedenborg's poetic influence and Colin Wilson on the psychological perspective on Swedenborg's visions round out the collection. (shrink)

This book is a rounded well-informed study of violence, especially from a hermeneutical and social-studies perspective. It is relevant to peace studies. It raises key issues about the phenomenology of the person, of violence, of the foundations of ethics. Although it tends to skirt normative phenomenological, eidetic as well as moral issues they are always insistently on the edge of the rich discussions philosophical-hermeneutical issues and contemporary writings on these matters.

he rest of the world has made merry over the Chicago man's legendary saying that 'Chicago hasn't had time: to get round to culture yet, but when she does strike her, she'll make her hum.' Already the prophecy is fulfilling itself in a dazzling manner. Chicago has a School of Thought! -- a school of thought which, it is safe to predict, will figure in literature as the School of Chicago for twenty-five years to come. Some universities have plenty of (...) thought to show, but no school; others plenty of school, but no thought. The University of Chicago, by its Decennial, Publications, shows real thought and a real school. Professor John Dewey, and at least ten of his disciples, have collectively put into the world a statement, homogeneous in spite of so many coöperating minds, of a view of the world, both theoretical and ~practical, which is so simple, massive, and positive that, in spite of the fact that many parts of it yet need to be worked out, it deserves the title of a new system of philosophy. If it be as true as it is original, its publication must be reckoned an important event. The present reviewer, for one, strongly suspects it of being true. (shrink)

“The great field for new discoveries,” said a scientific friend to me the other day, “is always the Unclassified Residuum.” Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular, and seldom met with, which it always proves less easy to attend to than to ignore. The ideal of every science is that of a closed and completed system of truth. The charm of most sciences (...) to their more passive disciples consists in their appearing, in fact, to wear just this ideal form. Each one of our various ologies seems to offer a definite head of classification for every possible phenomenon of the sort which it professes to cover; and, so far from free is most men’s fancy, that when a consistent and organized scheme of this sort has once been comprehended and assimilated, a different scheme is unimaginable. No alternative, whether to whole or parts, can any longer be conceived as possible. Phenomena unclassifiable within the system are therefore paradoxical absurdities, and must be held untrue. When, moreover, as so often happens, the reports of them are vague and indirect, when they come as mere marvels and oddities rather than as things of serious moment, one neglects or denies them with the best of scientific consciences. Only the born geniuses let themselves be worried and fascinated by these outstanding exceptions, and get no peace till they are brought within the fold. Your Galileos, Galvanis, Fresnels, Purkinjes, and Darwins are always getting confounded and troubled by insignificant things. Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena. And when the science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules. (shrink)

Sometime, at your leisure—if you want to know what philosophy is—go into a large bookstore and browse. Check a variety of books in psychology, anthropology, physics, chemistry, archeology, astronomy, and other nonfiction fields. Look at the last chapter in each book. In a surprising number of cases, you will find that the author has chosen to round out his work with a final summation of what the book is all about. That is, having written a whole book on a specialized (...) subject in which he is probably an authority, he finds that he also has ideas about the larger meaning of the facts that he has written about. The final chapter may be called “Conclusions,” “Epilogue,” “Postscript,” “My Personal View,” “Implications,” “Comments," ,“ “Speculations,” or (as in one case) “So What?” But in every instance, the author is trying to elucidate the larger implications of his subject matter and to clarify how he thinks it relates to other fields or to life. He has an urge to tell us the meaning of all his facts taken together. He wants to share with us the philosophic implications of what he has written. When he does this, the author has moved beyond the role of a field specialist. He is a philosopher. (shrink)

In the third century b.c.e., Eratosthenes of Cyrene made a famous measurement of the circumference of the Earth. This was not the first such measurement, but it is the earliest for which significant details are preserved. Cleomedes gives a short account of Eratosthenes’ method, his numerical assumptions, and the final result of 250,000 stades. However, many ancient sources attribute to Eratosthenes a result of 252,000 stades. Historians have attempted to explain the second result by supposing that Eratosthenes later made better (...) measurements and revised his estimate or that the original result was simply rounded to 252,000 to have a number conveniently divisible by 60 or by 360. These explanations are speculative and untestable. However, Eratosthenes’ estimates of the distances of the Sun and Moon from the Earth are preserved in the doxographical literature. This essay shows that Eratosthenes’ result of 252,000 stades for the Earth’s circumference follows from a solar distance that is attributed to him. Thus it appears that Eratosthenes computed not only a lower limit for the size of the Earth, based on the assumption that the Sun is at infinity, but also an upper limit, based on the assumption that the Sun is at a finite distance. The essay discusses the consequences for our understanding of his program. (shrink)

Legal inference is fundamental for building and verifying hypotheses in police investigations. In this study, we build a Natural Language Inference dataset in Korean for the legal domain, focusing on criminal court verdicts. We developed an adversarial hypothesis collection tool that can challenge the annotators and give us a deep understanding of the data, and a hypothesis network construction tool with visualized graphs to show a use case scenario of the developed model. The data is augmented using a combination of (...) Easy Data Augmentation approaches and round-trip translation, as crowd-sourcing might not be an option for datasets with sensible data. We extensively discuss challenges we have encountered, such as the annotator’s limited domain knowledge, issues in the data augmentation process, problems with handling long contexts and suggest possible solutions to the issues. Our work shows that creating legal inference datasets with limited resources is feasible and proposes further research in this area. (shrink)

Leibniz’s De incerti aestimatione, which contains his solution to the division problem, has not received much attention, let alone much appreciation. This is surprising because it is in this work that the definition of probability in terms of equally possible cases appears for the first time. The division problem is used to establish and test probability theory; it can be stated as follows: if two players agree to play a game in which one has to win a certain number of (...) rounds in order to win the pool, but if they break the game off before either of them has won the required number of rounds, how should the pool be distributed?Our article has two aims: it provides the readers with the first published English translation of De incerti aestimatione, and it also gives them a brief commentary that explains Leibniz’s philosophical and mathematical concepts necessary in order to understand this work. The translation is as literal as possible throughout; it shows how Leibniz struggled at times to find a solution to the division problem and how he approached it from different angles. The commentary discusses Leibniz’s views on four key concepts: fairness, hope, authority and possibility. The commentary then outlines how Leibniz attempted to solve the problem of division. (shrink)

Leibniz’s De incerti aestimatione, which contains his solution to the division problem, has not received much attention, let alone much appreciation. This is surprising because it is in this work that the definition of probability in terms of equally possible cases appears for the first time. The division problem is used to establish and test probability theory; it can be stated as follows: if two players agree to play a game in which one has to win a certain number of (...) rounds in order to win the pool, but if they break the game off before either of them has won the required number of rounds, how should the pool be distributed?Our article has two aims: it provides the readers with the first published English translation of De incerti aestimatione, and it also gives them a brief commentary that explains Leibniz’s philosophical and mathematical concepts necessary in order to understand this work. The translation is as literal as possible throughout; it shows how Leibniz struggled at times to find a solution to the division problem and how he approached it from different angles. The commentary discusses Leibniz’s views on four key concepts: fairness, hope, authority and possibility. The commentary then outlines how Leibniz attempted to solve the problem of division. (shrink)

Leibniz’s De incerti aestimatione, which contains his solution to the division problem, has not received much attention, let alone much appreciation. This is surprising because it is in this work that the definition of probability in terms of equally possible cases appears for the first time. The division problem is used to establish and test probability theory; it can be stated as follows: if two players agree to play a game in which one has to win a certain number of (...) rounds in order to win the pool, but if they break the game off before either of them has won the required number of rounds, how should the pool be distributed?Our article has two aims: it provides the readers with the first published English translation of De incerti aestimatione, and it also gives them a brief commentary that explains Leibniz’s philosophical and mathematical concepts necessary in order to understand this work. The translation is as literal as possible throughout; it shows how Leibniz struggled at times to find a solution to the division problem and how he approached it from different angles. The commentary discusses Leibniz’s views on four key concepts: fairness, hope, authority and possibility. The commentary then outlines how Leibniz attempted to solve the problem of division. (shrink)

Structural realism is considered by many realists and antirealists alike as the most defensible form of scientific realism. There are now many forms of structural realism and an extensive literature about them. There are interesting connections with debates in metaphysics, philosophy of physics and philosophy of mathematics. This entry is intended to be a comprehensive survey of the field.

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)

For this 1897 publication, the American philosopher William James brought together ten essays, some of which were originally talks given to Ivy League societies. Accessible to a broader audience, these non-technical essays illustrate the author's pragmatic approach to belief and morality, arguing for faith and action in spite of uncertainty. James thought his audiences suffered 'paralysis of their native capacity for faith' while awaiting scientific grounds for belief. His response consisted in an attitude of 'radical empiricism', which deals (...) practically rather than ideologically with real-world phenomena. When facing a 'momentous' decision about belief, he says, we both can and must choose the best hypothesis. The first four essays apply this principle to religious faith, and the rest explore the pragmatic approach to such topics as determinism, ethics and individual achievement. James developed his ideas further in The Varieties of Religious Experience and Pragmatism, both of which are reissued in this series. (shrink)

One of the most influential men of his time, philosopher, psychologist, educator, and author William James (1842-1910) helped lead the transition from a predominantly European-centered nineteenth-century philosophy to a new "pragmatic" American philosophy. Helping to pave the way was his seminal book Pragmatism (1907), in which he included a chapter on "Truth," an essay which provoked severe criticism. In response, he wrote the present work, an attempt to bring together all he had ever written on the theory of knowledge, (...) including an article on the function of cognition, later polemic and expository contributions, and some replies to previous criticism. The result was a full and definitive expression of the pragmatist "epistemology" from James' point of view. In the book, he urges the reader to "turn away from abstractions, verbal solutions, fixed principles, and pretended absolutes and look for concreteness and facts, action and power," arguing that "the ultimate test for us of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires." For students, scholars--anyone interested in William James or the history of American philosophical thought--this book offers an in-depth exposition of the influential ideas of one of the greatest American thinkers. Unabridged republication of the edition originally published by Longmans, Green and Co., New York and London, 1909. (shrink)

We have several intuitive paradigms of defeating evidence. For example, let E be the fact that Ernie tells me that the notorious pet Precious is a bird. This supports the premise F, that Precious can fly. However, Orna gives me *opposing* evidence. She says that Precious is a dog. Alternatively, defeating evidence might not oppose Ernie's testimony in that direct way. There might be other ways for it to weaken the support that Ernie's testimony gives me for believing F, without (...) the new evidence itself intuitively constituting reasons to believe one way or the other about Precious's flight ability. An example: Ursula tells me that Ernie has no idea what Precious's species is; he's just guessing. She may not herself want to or be in a position to weigh in about Precious's real species or flight ability. I call defeating evidence of this sort *undermining evidence. (shrink)

Під час проведення Круглого столу була розгорнута широка дискусія щодо можливостей досягнення миру в Україні, хоча питання ставилося і більш глобально: чи реально відвернути війну, тобто зняти її з порядку денного для людства взагалі. Були проаналізовані концепції західноєвропейських філософів, які підтримували Кантівську тезу щодо можливості «вічного миру». Заторкувалась тема розвитку технологічної цивілізації, яка начебто сприяє поширенню агресії і агресивної поведінки. Обговорювалось питання: чи можлива трансформація агресії, чи є способи каналізувати її в більш прийнятні форми, або через самовдосконалення людини. Пропонувалось звернутися (...) до практик співіснування, притаманні первісним спільнотам. Наголошувалося на нагальності завдання, яке полягає в тому, щоб знайти належні відповіді на виклики, які ставить перед людством війна в Україні. Або в більш ширшому плані: що має здійснити людство, щоб припинити ті війни, які вже розпочалися, або зробити для тих, хто їх розпочинає, дуже дороговартісною авантюрою. (shrink)

Two books bound together, from the religious period of one of the most renowned and representative thinkers. Written for laymen, thus easy to understand, it is penetrating and brilliant as well. Illuminations of age-old religious questions from a pragmatic perspective, written in a luminous style.

It is our job now - the job of this book - to influence and develop the unsettled discourse of human rights so as to complete the incomplete idea.

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.

Consider the following facts about the average, philosophically untrained moral relativist: (1.1) The average moral relativist denies the existence of “absolute moral truths.” (1.2) The average moral relativist often expresses her commitment to moral relativism with slogans like ‘What’s true (or right) for you may not be what’s true (or right) for me’ or ‘What’s true (or right) for your culture may not be what’s true (or right) for my culture.’ (1.3) The average moral relativist endorses relativistic views of morality (...) without endorsing relativistic views about science or mathematics. (1.4) The average moral relativist takes moral relativism to be non-relatively true and does not think there is anything contradictory about doing so. (1.5) The average moral relativist adopts an egalitarian attitude toward a wide range of moral values, practices and beliefs, claiming they are all equally legitimate or correct. (1.6) The average moral relativist often admonishes others to be more tolerant of those who engage in alternative ethical practices and to refrain from making negative moral judgments about them. (1.7) The average moral relativist sometimes makes negative moral judgments about the behavior of others—e.g., by harshly judging moral absolutists to be intolerant—but is less inclined to do so when the relativist’s metaethical views are salient in a context of judgment. (1.8) The average moral relativist takes anthropological evidence concerning the worldwide diversity of ethical views and practices to support moral relativism. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy brings empirical methods to philosophy. These methods are used to probe how people think about philosophically interesting things such as knowledge, morality, and freedom. This paper explores the contribution that qualitative methods have to make in this enterprise. I argue that qualitative methods have the potential to make a much greater contribution than they have so far. Along the way, I acknowledge a few types of resistance that proponents of qualitative methods in experimental philosophy might encounter, and provide (...) reasons to think they are ill-founded. (shrink)

From the bestselling author of Assholes: A Theory, a book that--in the tradition of Shopclass as Soulcraft, Barbarian Days and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance--uses the experience and the ethos of surfing to explore key concepts in philosophy. The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once declared "the ideal limit of aquatic sports...is waterskiing." The avid surfer and lavishly credentialed academic philosopher Aaron James vigorously disagrees, and in Surfing with Sartre he intends to expound the thinking surfer's view of (...) the matter, in the process elucidating such philosophical categories as freedom, being, phenomenology, morality, epistemology, and even the emerging values of what he terms "leisure capitalism." In developing his unique surfer-philosophical worldview, he draws from his own experience of surfing and from surf culture and lingo, and includes many relevant details from the lives of the philosophers, from Aristotle to Wittgenstein, with whose thought he engages. In the process, he'll speak to readers in search of personal and social meaning in our current anxious moment, by way of doing real, authentic philosophy. (shrink)

Louis Agassiz.--Address at the Emerson Centenary in Concord.--Robert Gould Shaw.--Francis Boott.--Thomas Davidson: a knight-errant of the intellectual life.--Herbert Spencer's autobiography.--Frederick Myers' services to psychology.--Final impressions of a psychical researcher.--On some mental effects of the earthquake.--The energies of men.--The moral equivalent of war.--Remarks at the peace banquet.--The social value of the college-bred.--The university and the individual: The Ph.D. octopus. The true Harvard. Stanford's ideal destiny.--A pluralistic mystic.

Recent empirical work on folk moral objectivism has attempted to examine the extent to which folk morality presumes that moral judgments are objectively true or false. Some researchers report findings that they take to indicate folk commitment to objectivism (Goodwin & Darley, 2008, 2010, 2012; Nichols & Folds-Bennett, 2003; Wainryb et al., 2004), while others report findings that may reveal a more variable commitment to objectivism (Beebe, 2014; Beebe et al., 2015; Beebe & Sackris, 2016; Sarkissian, et al., 2011; Wright, (...) 2018; Wright, Grandjean, & McWhite, 2013; Wright, McWhite, & Grandjean, 2014). However, the various probes that have been used to examine folk moral objectivism almost always fail to be good direct measures of objectivism. Some critics (Beebe, 2015; Pölzler, 2017, 2018) have suggested that the problems with existing probes are serious enough that they should be viewed as largely incapable of shedding any light on folk metaethical commitments. Building upon the work of Justin Khoo and Joshua Knobe (2018), I argue that many of the existing probes can be seen as good measures of the extent to which people think that the truth of one moral judgment excludes the possibility that a judgment made by a disagreeing party is also true and that the best explanation of the findings obtained using these measures is significant folk support for indexical moral relativism—the view that the content of moral judgments is context-sensitive. If my thesis is correct, many contemporary moral philosophers are deeply mistaken about the metaethical contours of folk morality in one very important respect. (shrink)

Yoga is hugely popular around the world today, yet until now little has been known of its roots. This book collects, for the first time, core teachings of yoga in their original form, translated and edited by two of the world's foremost scholars of the subject. It includes a wide range of texts from different schools of yoga, languages and eras: among others, key passages from the early Upanisads and the Mahabharata, and from the Tantric, Buddhist and Jaina traditions, with (...) many pieces in scholarly translation for the first time. Covering yoga's varying definitions across systems, models of the esoteric and physical bodies, and its most important practices, such as posture, breath control, sensory withdrawal and meditation, Roots of Yoga is a unique and essential source of knowledge. (shrink)

In 1896 William James published an essay entitled The Will to Believe, in which he defended the legitimacy of religious faith against the attacks of such champions of scientific method as W.K. Clifford and Thomas Huxley. James's work quickly became one of the most important writings in the philosophy of religious belief. James Wernham analyses James's arguments, discusses his relation to Pascal and Renouvier, and considers the interpretations, and misinterpretations, of James's major critics. Wernham shows (...) convincingly that James was unaware of many destructive ambiguitities in his own doctrines and arguments, although clear and consistent in his view that our obligation to believe in theism is not a moral but a prudential obligation -- a foolish-not-to-believe doctrine, rather than a not-immoral-to-believe one. Wernham also shows that the doctrine is best read as affirming the wisdom of gambling that God exists, a notion which James failed to distinguish from believing and which, among other things, he explicitly identified with faith. James's pragmatism, a theory concerning the meaning of truth, is shown to be quite distinct from the doctrine of The Will to Believe. In concentrating on a careful analysis of this doctrine of the will-to-believe, Wernham not only makes a major contribution to understanding James's philosophy, but also clarifies issues in the philosophy of religion and in the analysis of belief and faith. (shrink)

This new critical edition is an examination of William James's Essays in Radical Empiricism in light of the scientific naturalism prominent in James's Principles of Psychology (1890) and the subsequent development of Darwinian, functional psychology and functionalism in psychology, the philosophy psychology and the philosophy of mind.

James McCosh, the Scottish philosopher, graduated from the University of Glasgow, spent some time as a minister in the Church of Scotland but then returned to philosophy and spent most of his career at Princeton University. The eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment had many influential philosophers at its core. In this book, first published in 1875, McCosh outlines the theories of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers and identifies Scottish philosophy as a distinct school of thought. He summarises both the merits and the (...) possible criticisms of each philosopher's work and also gives detailed biographical information. Among the philosophers discussed are the influential David Hume, Thomas Reid and Adam Smith. The final chapter focuses on Sir William Hamilton, a philosopher who greatly influenced McCosh. (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)