After responding to several misreadings of Milbank’s project in Theology and Social Theory—e. g., that it dispenses with “truth” or “reality”, is sectarian, reads a social theory off the Bible, is ecclesially absolutist—the authors highlight several strands of Milbank’s argument to stress the resolutely theological character of this work. In Milbank’s narrative, modernity is defined as a theological problem in which forms of modern secular thought have usurped theology as the “ultimate organizing logic”; his theological response to this involves a (...) broadly Augustinian account of the relationship between nature and grace which requires a theology which can only be true if it is enacted: it is necessary for the Church to make an actual historical difference in the world. (shrink)

After responding to several misreadings of Milbank’s project in Theology and Social Theory—e. g., that it dispenses with “truth” or “reality”, is sectarian, reads a social theory off the Bible, is ecclesially absolutist—the authors highlight several strands of Milbank’s argument to stress the resolutely theological character of this work. In Milbank’s narrative, modernity is defined as a theological problem in which forms of modern secular thought have usurped theology as the “ultimate organizing logic”; his theological response to this involves a (...) broadly Augustinian account of the relationship between nature and grace which requires a theology which can only be true if it is enacted: it is necessary for the Church to make an actual historical difference in the world. (shrink)

The chapters published in this volume developed from presentations, and their associated discussions at a conference organised by the Scottish Branch of the British Psychological Society, held at Rothesay, Isle of Bute, Scotland in September 1987. The goal of the conference was to bring together workers across a wide area of neuropsychological research to discuss recent technological advances, developments in assessment and rehabilitation, and to address theoretical issues of current interest. Thus, the chapters in this book include contributions on the (...) use of Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography in neuropsychological research, studies of hemi spheric specialisation and cooperation, alcoholic and Alzheimer type dementia, prosopagnosia and facial processing, the assessment, management and rehabilitation of memory problems, the assessment of premorbid intellectual status and issues in developmental neuropsychology. Many of those engaged in research and clinical practice in neuropsychology encounter a range of topic at least as wide as this in their professional lives. The opportunity for researchers and clinicians to discuss some of the key issues in the field was invaluable and we hope that readers gain as much from the material presented here as the participants did from the meeting itself. (shrink)

For years, both psychologists and the general public have been fascinated with the notion that there are gender differences in cognitive abilities; even now, flashy cover stories exploiting this idea dominate major news magazines, while research focuses on differences in verbal, mathematical, spatial, and scientific abilities across gender. This new volume in the Counterpoints series not only summarizes and addresses the validity of such research, but also questions its ideology and consequences. Why do we search so intently for these differences? (...) And what are the social and cultural implications of this relentless emphasis? Do biological mechanisms, in fact, contribute to the male-female differences in cognition? These are just a few of the questions generated by this controversial topic as it is debated throughout the book. (shrink)

This seminal work by political philosopher C.B. Macpherson was first published by the Clarendon Press in 1962, and remains of key importance to the study of liberal-democratic theory half-a-century later. In it, Macpherson argues that the chief difficulty of the notion of individualism that underpins classical liberalism lies in what he calls its "possessive quality" - "its conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them." Under such a conception, (...) the essence of humanity becomes freedom from dependence on the wills of others; society is little more than a system of economic relations; and political society becomes a means of safeguarding private property and the system of economic relations rooted in property. As the New Statesman declared: "It is rare for a book to change the intellectual landscape. It is even more unusual for this to happen when the subject is one that has been thoroughly investigated by generations of historians.... Until the appearance of Professor Macpherson's book, it seemed unlikely that anything radically new could be said about so well-worn a topic. The unexpected has happened, and the shock waves are still being absorbed." A new introduction by Frank Cunningham puts the work in a twenty-first-century context. (shrink)

Multilevel research strategies characterize contemporary molecular inquiry into biological systems. We outline conceptual, methodological, and explanatory dimensions of these multilevel strategies in microbial ecology, systems biology, protein research, and developmental biology. This review of emerging lines of inquiry in these fields suggests that multilevel research in molecular life sciences has significant implications for philosophical understandings of explanation, modeling, and representation.

The past 25 years have seen a rapid growth of knowledge about brain mechanisms involved in visual mental imagery. These advances have largely been made independently of the long history of philosophical – and even psychological – reckoning with imagery and its parent concept ‘imagination’. We suggest that the view from these empirical findings can be widened by an appreciation of imagination’s intellectual history, and we seek to show how that history both created the conditions for – and presents challenges (...) to – the scientific endeavor. We focus on the neuroscientific literature’s most commonly used task – imagining a concrete object – and, after sketching what is known of the neurobiological mechanisms involved, we examine the same basic act of imagining from the perspective of several key positions in the history of philosophy and psychology. We present positions that, firstly, contextualize and inform the neuroscientific account, and secondly, pose conceptual and methodological challenges to the scientific analysis of imagery. We conclude by reflecting on the intellectual history of visualization in the light of contemporary science, and the extent to which such science may resolve long-standing theoretical debates. (shrink)

Thousands of youth suffering from acquired brain injury or other early-life neurological disease live, mature, and learn with only limited communication and interaction with their world. Such cognitively capable children are ideal candidates for brain-computer interfaces. While BCI systems are rapidly evolving, a fundamental gap exists between technological innovators and the patients and families who stand to benefit. Forays into translating BCI systems to children in recent years have revealed that kids can learn to operate simple BCI with proficiency akin (...) to adults. BCI could bring significant boons to the lives of many children with severe physical impairment, supporting their complex physical and social needs. However, children have been neglected in BCI research and a collaborative BCI research community is required to unite and push pediatric BCI development forward. To this end, the pediatric BCI Canada collaborative network was formed, under a unified goal to cooperatively drive forward pediatric BCI innovation and impact. This article reflects on the topics and discussions raised in the foundational BCI-CAN meeting held in Toronto, ON, Canada in November 2019 and suggests the next steps required to see BCI impact the lives of children with severe neurological disease and their families. (shrink)

The paper presents a new theory of perceptual demonstrative thought, the property-dependent theory. It argues that the theory is superior to both the object-dependent theory (Evans, McDowell) and the object-independent theory (Burge).

The Forge of the Spirit: Structure, Motion, and Meaning in the Japanese Martial Tradition. John J. Donohue. New York: Garland, 1991. 252 p. $37 (cloth).

Gerald Sykes -- Aldous Huxley -- Gerald Heard -- Christopher Isherwood -- John van Druten -- Marianna Masin -- J. Crawford Lewis -- Dorothy F. Mercer -- Kurt Friedrichs -- Swami Atulananda -- Jane Molard -- The Countess of Sandwich -- John Yale -- Joan Rayne -- Durgacharan -- Pravrajika Saradaprana.

ABSTRACT This paper investigates influences upon the development of library classification systems in nineteenth-century Britain. Two case studies – Edward Edwards's ‘scheme of classification for a town library’ of 1859 and the Bibliotheca Lindesiana of the earls of Crawford who made a number of significant contributions to the development of library classification over a fifty-year period – are deployed to explore how classification schemes reflected the habituses of their creators and how they were shaped by their socio-economic, epistemological and (...) geographical contexts. The paper also investigates the discourse of classification, examining authors’ claims for the legitimacy, widespread applicability and superiority of their schemes, while revealing how these claims were compromised or modified by practical considerations. The case studies suggest that a modernizing narrative of a transition in the second half of the nineteenth century from an aristocratic, largely rural and amateur paradigm of knowledge formation to a bourgeois, urban and professional model requires significant modification: a more nuanced approach is required, which recognizes the permeability of geographic and social boundaries and the continued relevance of aristocratic libraries as key sites of knowledge formation until the end of the century. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Recent and Classic References at the Interface of Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Abnormal PsychologyArticlesAggernaes, A. 1972. The expanded reality of hallucinations and other psychological phenomena. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica 48: 220–238.Anonymous. 1991. Child sexual abuse and the limits of responsibility. Lancet 337: 890.Anonymous. 1993. Mental incapacity and medical treatment. Lancet 341: 1123–1124.Appelbaum, M. D., and A. Creer. 1993. Confidentiality in group therapy. Hospital and Community Psychiatry 44: 311–312.Beatson, J. A. 1993. (...) The psychiatrist and peer review—a psychodynamic review of the literature. Australia and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 27: 311–318.Berrios, G. E. 1987. Dementia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: a conceptual history. Psychological Medicine 17: 829–837.Blackburn, R. 1988. On moral judgments and personality disorders: the myth of psychopathic personality revisited. British Journal of Psychiatry 153: 505–512.Blackmon, W. D. 1993. Are psychoanalytic billing practices ethical? American Journal of Psychotherapy 47: 613–620.Blashfield, R. K., and J. G. Draguns. 1976. Evaluative criteria for psychiatric classification. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 85, no. 2: 140–150.Blashfield, R. K., J. Sprock, and A. K. Fuller. 1990. Suggested guidelines for including or excluding categories in the DSM-IV. Comprehensive Psychiatry 31, no. 1: 15–19.Blashfield, R. K., J. Sprock, D. Haymaker et al. 1989. The family resemblance hypothesis applied to psychiatric classification. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 177: 492–497.Borys, D. S. 1994. Maintaining therapeutic boundaries: the motive is therapeutic effectiveness not defensive practice. Ethics and Behavior 4, no. 3: 267–273.Brown, W. M. 1985. On defining disease. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 10: 311–328.Bub, J. 1994a. Is cognitive neuropsychology possible? Proceedings of the Biennial Meetings of the Philosophy of Science Association 1: 417–427.Bub, J. 1994b. Testing models of cognition through the analysis of brain-damaged performance. British Journal of Philosophy of Science 45, no. 3: 837–855.Buck, C. 1989. Problems with the Popperian approach: A response to Pearce and Crawford-Brown. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 42: 185–187.Buck, R. 1994. The neuropsychology of communication: spontaneous and symbolic aspects. Journal of Pragmatics 22, no. 3-4: 265–278.Camp, N. M. 1993. The Vietnam war and the ethics of combat psychiatry. American Journal of Psychiatry 150: 1000–1009.Crockett, C. 1961. Ethics, metaphysics, and psychoanalysis. Inquiry 4: 37–52.Dalton, E., K. Hopper, and S. Reiner. 1976. Ethical issues in behavior control. Values and Ethics in Health Care 2: 1–40.Faust, D. 1993a. Use and then prove, or prove and then use? Some thoughts on the ethics of mental health professionals’ courtroom involvement. Ethics and Behavior 3, no. 3-4: 359–380.Fodor, J., and E. Lepore. 1994. What is the connection principle? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54: 4.Foss, L. 1994. Putting the mind back into the body: a successor scientific medical model. Theoretical Medicine 15, no. 3: 291–313.Galletly, C. A. 1993. Psychiatrist-patient sexual relationships: the ethical dilemmas. Australia and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 27: 133–139.Glymour, C. 1994. On the methods of cognitive neuropsychology. British Journal of Philosophy of Science 45, no. 3: 815–835.Gottlieb, M. C. 1994. Ethical decision making, boundaries, and treatment effectiveness: a reprise. Ethics and Behavior 4, no. 3: 287–293.Gutheil, T. G. 1994. Discussion of Lazarus’s “How certain boundaries and ethics diminish therapeutic effectiveness”. Ethics and Behavior 4, no. 3: 295–298.Helme, T. 1993. A special defence—a psychiatric approach to formalising euthanasia. British Journal of Psychiatry 163: 456–466.Kovel, J. 1976–77. Therapy in late capitalism. Telos 30: 73–92.Lazarus, A. A. 1994a. How certain boundaries and ethics diminish therapeutic effectiveness. Ethics and Behavior 4, no. 3: 255–261.Lazarus, A. A. 1994b. The illusion of the therapist’s power and the patient’s fragility: my rejoinder. Ethics and Behavior 4, no. 3: 299–306.Lehrman, N. S. 1980. Psychiatric power and responsibility: Abuse and abdication, a proposed corrective conference. The Humanist 40: 9–13.Lockhart, T. 1992. Professions, confidentiality, and moral uncertainty. Professional Ethics: A Multidisciplinary Journal 1, no. 3-4: 33–52.Margolin, S. G. 1964. The scientific status of psychoanalytic clinical evidence (II). Inquiry 7: 37... (shrink)

How do concert pianists commit to memory the structure of a piece of music like Bach’s Italian Concerto, learning it well enough to remember it in the highly charged setting of a crowded performance venue, yet remaining open to the freshness of expression of the moment? Playing to this audience, in this state, now, requires openness to specificity, to interpretation, a working dynamicism that mere rote learning will not provide. Chaffin, Imreh and Crawford’s innovative and detailed research suggests that (...) the key to this skill is a declarative mental roadmap aiding musical performance. This hypothesis is neatly and unintentionally summarized by professional pianist Imreh, who states when learning a new piece of music “My fingers were playing the notes just fine. The practice I needed was in my head. I had to learn to keep track of where I was. It was a matter of learning exactly what I needed to be thinking of as I played, and at exactly what point. (shrink)

How do concert pianists commit to memory the structure of a piece of music like Bach’s Italian Concerto, learning it well enough to remember it in the highly charged setting of a crowded performance venue, yet remaining open to the freshness of expression of the moment? Playing to this audience, in this state, now, requires openness to specificity, to interpretation, a working dynamicism that mere rote learning will not provide. Chaffin, Imreh and Crawford’s innovative and detailed research suggests that (...) the key to this skill is a declarative mental roadmap aiding musical performance. This hypothesis is neatly and unintentionally summarized by professional pianist Imreh, who states when learning a new piece of music “My fingers were playing the notes just fine. The practice I needed was in my head. I had to learn to keep track of where I was. It was a matter of learning exactly what I needed to be thinking of as I played, and at exactly what point. . .” (Chaffin & Imreh 1997, p.326). (shrink)

Wisely, the authors begin this book by describing it as a polemic. They argue that most contemporary analytic metaphysics is a waste of time and resources since contemporary ‘neo-scholastic’ metaphysical theorizing cannot hope to attain objective truth given its penchant for making a priori claims about the nature of the world which are backed up by appeal to intuition. In engaging in this activity, metaphysicians have, the authors claim, abandoned hope of locating any interesting connection between their metaphysical pronouncements and (...) how our best empirical theories describe the world. Moreover, the success attained by empirical science just cannot be matched by metaphysical theorizing and so, faced with this asymmetry, empirical science wins: a priori metaphysical theorizing must give way to a naturalistic form of metaphysics, a positive account of which the authors attempt to elucidate in the second and third, rather lengthy chapters of the book.The first chapter consists of a statement of the authors’ negative view, a vigorous, sustained and sometimes withering attack upon contemporary a priori metaphysics. Most ire is reserved for those who indulge in what the authors call ‘pseudo-scientific metaphysics’; that is, those who pay lip service to keeping their metaphysical speculation in tune with physics, only to constrain their ontology in such a way that the entities and processes within it do not even play a role in current physical theory, or are in straightforward contradiction with it. Much philosophy of science and scientific metaphysics is too superficial and simplistic to deserve the name and bears more relation to ‘the philosophy of “A” Level chemistry’. The guilty in this respect include David Lewis, Jaegwon Kim, Jonathan Lowe, Donald Davidson, Jerry Fodor, Crawford Elder, Trenton Merricks among …. (shrink)

Introduction. The roots of liberal-democratic theory -- Problems of interpretation -- Hobbe : the political obligation of the market. Philosophy and political theory -- Human nature and the state of nature -- Models of society -- Political obligation -- Penetration and limits of Hobbe's political theory -- The Levellers : franchise and freedom. The problem of franchise -- Types of franchise -- The record -- Theoretical implications -- Harrington : the opportunity state. Unexamined ambiguities -- The balance and the gentry (...) -- The bourgeois society -- The equal commonwealth and the equal agrarian -- The self-cancelling balance principle -- Harrington's stature --Locke : the political theory of appropriation. Interpretations -- The theory of property right -- Class differentials in natural rights and rationality -- The ambiguous state of nature -- The ambiguous civil society -- Unsettled problems reconsidered -- Possessive individualism and liberal democracy. The seventeenth-century foundations -- The twentieth-century dilemma -- Appendix : Social classes and franchise classes in England, circa 1648. (shrink)

Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition.

Reissued here in its corrected second edition of 1864, this essay by John Stuart Mill argues for a utilitarian theory of morality. Originally printed as a series of three articles in Fraser's Magazine in 1861, the work sought to refine the 'greatest happiness' principle that had been championed by Jeremy Bentham, defending it from common criticisms, and offering a justification of its validity. Following Bentham, Mill holds that actions can be judged as right or wrong depending on whether they (...) promote happiness or 'the reverse of happiness'. Although attracted by Bentham's consequentialist framework based on empirical evidence rather than intuition, Mill separates happiness into 'higher' and 'lower' pleasures, arguing for a weighted system of measurement when making and judging decisions. Dissected and debated since its first appearance, the essay is Mill's key discussion on the topic and remains a fundamental text in the study of ethics. (shrink)

J.L. Mackie insists that ordinary evaluative thought presents itself as a matter of sensitivity to aspects of the world. And this phenomenological thesis seems correct. When one or another variety of philosophical non-cognitivism claims to capture the truth about what the experience of value is like, or (in a familiar surrogate for phenomenology) about what we mean by our evaluative language, the claim is never based on careful attention to the lived character of evaluative thought or discourse. The idea is, (...) rather, that the very concept of the cognitive or factual rules out the possibility of an undiluted representation of how things are, enjoying, nevertheless, the internal relation to 'attitudes' or the will that would be needed to count as evaluative. On this view the phenomenology of value would involve a mere incoherence, if it were as Mackie says--a possibility that then tends (naturally enough) not to be so much as entertained. But, as Mackie sees, there is no satisfactory justification for supposing that the factual is, by definition, attitudinatively and motivationally neutral. This clears away the only obstacle to accepting his phenomenological claim; and the upshot is that non-cognitivism must offer to correct the phenomenology of value, rather than give an account of it. -/- In Machie's view the correction is called for. In this paper I want to suggest that he attributes an unmerited plausibility to this thesis, by giving a false picture of what one is committed to if one resists it. (shrink)

Some philosophers argue that friendship can normatively require us to have certain beliefs about our friends that epistemic norms would prohibit. On this view, we ought to exhibit some degree of doxastic partiality toward our friends, by having certain generally favorable beliefs and doxastic dispositions that concern our friends that we would not have concerning relevantly similar non-friends. Can friendship genuinely make these normative demands on our beliefs, in ways that would conflict with what we epistemically ought to believe? On (...) a widely influential evidentialist approach to thinking about epistemic norms, friendship cannot normatively require things of our beliefs, because friendship cannot generate reasons for belief. And this is due, in part, to the alleged fact that we are incapable of forming beliefs directly in response to, or on the basis of, non-epistemic reasons. In this paper, I argue that this evidentialist response to alleged cases of conflict between friendship and epistemic norms fails. Instead, I argue that friendship cannot generate reasons for belief due to an underappreciated feature of friendship: that being a good friend constitutively involves forming attitudes about one’s friends that are appropriately responsive to the features that one’s friends have that appear to warrant those attitudes. I argue that this feature of friendship helps explain why friendship cannot give us reasons to have beliefs that are doxastically partial. (shrink)

Abstract According to Russellianism, the content of a Russellian thought, in which a person ascribes a monadic property to an object, can be represented as an ordered couple of the object and the property. A consequence of this is that it is not possible for a person to believe that a is F and not to believe b is F, when a=b. Many critics of Russellianism suppose that this is possible and thus that Russellianism is false. Several arguments for this (...) claim are criticized and it is argued that Russellians need not appeal to representational notions in order to defeat them. Contrary to popular opinion, the prospects for a pure Russellianism, a Russellianism without representations, are in fact very good. (shrink)

In _Real Natures and Familiar Objects_ Crawford Elder defends, with qualifications, the ontology of common sense. He argues that we exist -- that no gloss is necessary for the statement "human beings exist" to show that it is true of the world as it really is -- and that we are surrounded by many of the medium-sized objects in which common sense believes. He argues further that these familiar medium-sized objects not only exist, but have essential properties, which we (...) are often able to determine by observation. The starting point of his argument is that ontology should operate under empirical load -- that is, it should give special weight to the objects and properties that we treat as real in our best predictions and explanations of what happens in the world. Elder calls this presumption "mildly controversial" because it entails that arguments are needed for certain widely assumed positions such as "mereological universalism". Elder begins by defending realism about essentialness. He then defends this view of familiar objects against causal exclusion arguments and worries about vagueness. Finally, he argues that many of the objects in which common sense believes really exist, including artifacts and biological devices shaped by natural selection, and that we too exist, as products of natural selection. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher. He is a central figure of modern philosophy, and set the terms by which all subsequent thinkers have had to grapple. He argued that human perception structures natural laws, and that reason is the source of morality. His thought continues to hold a major influence in contemporary thought, especially in fields such as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics.

In his preface Mr Wilson writes 'I feel that a great many adults … would do better to spend less time in simply accepting the concepts of others uncritically, and more time in learning how to analyse concepts in general'. Mr Wilson starts by describing the techniques of conceptual analysis. He then gives examples of them in action by composing answers to specific questions and by criticism of quoted passages of argument. Chapter 3 sums up the importance of this kind (...) of mental activity. Chapter 4 presents selections for the reader to analyse, followed by questions of university entrance/scholarship type. This is a book to be worked through, in a sense a text-book. (shrink)

Most contemporary metaphysicians are sceptical about the reality of familiar objects such as dogs and trees, people and desks, cells and stars. They prefer an ontology of the spatially tiny or temporally tiny. Tiny microparticles 'dog-wise arranged' explain the appearance, they say, that there are dogs; microparticles obeying microphysics collectively cause anything that a baseball appears to cause; temporal stages collectively sustain the illusion of enduring objects that persist across changes. Crawford L. Elder argues that all such attempts to (...) 'explain away' familiar objects project downwards, onto the tiny entities, structures and features of familiar objects themselves. He contends that sceptical metaphysicians are thus employing shadows of familiar objects, while denying that the entities which cast those shadows really exist. He argues that the shadows are indeed really there, because their sources - familiar objects - are mind-independently real. (shrink)

This book offers an introduction to the thought of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who is one of the most significant Christian writers of the Middle Ages. It pays particular attention to the Aquinas's context as a Dominican friar, devoted to the task of preaching the Christian gospel.

In _Real Natures and Familiar Objects_ Crawford Elder defends, with qualifications, the ontology of common sense. He argues that we exist -- that no gloss is necessary for the statement "human beings exist" to show that it is true of the world as it really is -- and that we are surrounded by many of the medium-sized objects in which common sense believes. He argues further that these familiar medium-sized objects not only exist, but have essential properties, which we (...) are often able to determine by observation. The starting point of his argument is that ontology should operate under empirical load -- that is, it should give special weight to the objects and properties that we treat as real in our best predictions and explanations of what happens in the world. Elder calls this presumption "mildly controversial" because it entails that arguments are needed for certain widely assumed positions such as "mereological universalism". Elder begins by defending realism about essentialness. He then defends this view of familiar objects against causal exclusion arguments and worries about vagueness. Finally, he argues that many of the objects in which common sense believes really exist, including artifacts and biological devices shaped by natural selection, and that we too exist, as products of natural selection. (shrink)