The papers in this book address the broad issues of authority, leadership and organizational culture, whilst concentrating on other issues in-depth, such as inter-group conflict, and gender and race relations in the workplace.

Creations of the Mind presents sixteen original essays by theorists from a wide variety of disciplines who have a shared interest in the nature of artifacts and their implications for the human mind. All the papers are written specially for this volume, and they cover a broad range of topics concerned with the metaphysics of artifacts, our concepts of artifacts and the categories that they represent, the emergence of an understanding of artifacts in infants' cognitive development, as well as the (...) evolution of artifacts and the use of tools by non-human animals. This volume will be a fascinating resource for philosophers, cognitive scientists, and psychologists, and the starting point for future research in the study of artifacts and their role in human understanding, development, and behaviour.Contributors: John R. Searle, Richard E. Grandy, Crawford L. Elder, Amie L. Thomasson, Jerrold Levinson, Barbara C. Malt, Steven A. Sloman, Dan Sperber, Hilary Kornblith, Paul Bloom, Bradford Z. Mahon, Alfonso Caramazza, Jean M. Mandler, Deborah Kelemen, Susan Carey, Frank C. Keil, Marissa L. Greif, Rebekkah S. Kerner, James L. Gould, Marc D. Hauser, Laurie R. Santos, Steven Mithen. (shrink)

1 Knowledge and Justification This book is an investigation of one central problem which arises in the attempt to give a philosophical account of empirical ...

A comprehensive defence of the rationalist view that insight independent of experience is a genuine basis for knowledge.

One of the many problems that would have t o be solved by a satisfactory theory of empirical knowledge, perhaps the most central is a general structural problem which I shall call the epistemic regress problem: the problem of how to avoid an in- finite and presumably vicious regress of justification in ones account of the justifica- tion of empirical beliefs. Foundationalist theories of empirical knowledge, as we shall see further below, attempt t o avoid the regress by locating a (...) class of empirical beliefs whose justification does not depend on that of other empirical beliefs. Extemalist theories, the topic of the present paper, represent one species of foundationalism. (shrink)

Introduction -- Part I: The classical problems of epistemology -- Descartes's epistemology -- The concept of knowledge -- The problem of induction -- A priori justification and knowledge -- Immediate experience -- Knowledge of the external world -- Some further epistemological issues : other minds, testimony, and memory -- Part II: Contemporary responses to the cartesian epistemological program -- Introduction to part II -- Foundationalism and coherentism -- Internalism and externalism -- Quine and naturalized epistemology -- Knowledge and skepticism.

In her 2004 book Carol Gould addresses the fundamental issue of democratizing globalization, that is to say of finding ways to open transnational institutions and communities to democratic participation by those widely affected by their decisions. The book develops a framework for expanding participation in crossborder decisions, arguing for a broader understanding of human rights and introducing a new role for the ideas of care and solidarity at a distance. Reinterpreting the idea of universality to accommodate a multiplicity of (...) cultural perspectives, the author takes up a number of applied issues, including the persistence of racism, cultural rights, women's human rights, the democratic management of firms, the use of the Internet to enhance political participation, and the importance of empathy and genuine democracy in understanding terrorism and responding to it. Accessibly written with a minimum of technical jargon this is a major contribution to political philosophy. (shrink)

In this book, Carol Gould offers a fundamental reconsideration of the theory of democracy, arguing that democratic decision-making should apply not only to politics but also to economic and social life. Professor Gould redefines traditional concepts of freedom and social equality, and proposes a principle of Equal Positive Freedom in which individual freedom and social co-operation are seen to be compatible. Reformulating basic conceptions of property, authority, economic justice and human rights, the author suggests a number of ways (...) in which these principles could be realised in social institutions. She also discusses such issues as democratic control of technology, the nature of democratic personality, and the question of democracy in international relations. (shrink)

The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies introduces four new Advisory Board members—Laurence I. Gould, Kirsti Minsaas, Aeon J. Skoble, and Edward W. Younkins—as well as a new Associate Editor: Roger E. Bissell. This issue is dedicated to the memory of Advisory Board member and JARS contributor, the late Steven Horwitz.

In this book, Carol Gould offers a fundamental reconsideration of the theory of democracy, arguing that democratic decision-making should apply not only to politics but also to economic and social life. Professor Gould redefines traditional concepts of freedom and social equality, and proposes a principle of Equal Positive Freedom in which individual freedom and social co-operation are seen to be compatible. Reformulating basic conceptions of property, authority, economic justice and human rights, the author suggests a number of ways (...) in which these principles could be realised in social institutions. She also discusses such issues as democratic control of technology, the nature of democratic personality, and the question of democracy in international relations. (shrink)

Ben Laurence argues for a political philosophy that unifies theory and practice in pursuit of change. He shows that the task of political philosophy is not complete until the political philosopher asks the question "What is to be done?" and deliberates about the answer with agents of change.

Incivility among physicians, between physicians and learners, and between physicians and nurses or other healthcare professionals has become commonplace. If allowed to continue unchecked by academic leaders and medical educators, incivility can cause personal psychological injury and seriously damage organisational culture. As such, incivility is a potent threat to professionalism. This paper uniquely draws on the history of professional ethics in medicine to provide a historically based, philosophical account of the professional virtue of civility. We use a two-step method of (...) ethical reasoning, namely ethical analysis informed by pertinent prior work, followed by identifying the implications of clearly articulated ethical concepts, to meet these goals. The professional virtue of civility and the related concept of professional etiquette was first described by the English physician-ethicist Thomas Percival (1740–1804). Based on a historically informed philosophical account, we propose that the professional virtue of civility has cognitive, affective, behavioural and social components based on a commitment to excellence in scientific and clinical reasoning. Its practice prevents a dysfunctional organisational culture of incivility and sustains a civility-based organisational culture of professionalism. Medical educators and academic leaders are in a pivotal and powerful position to role model, promote and inculcate the professional virtue of civility as essential to an organisational culture of professionalism. Academic leaders should hold medical educators accountable for discharge of this indispensable professional responsibility. (shrink)

It is fairly standard in accounts of the epistemology of perceptual knowledge to distinguish three main alternative positions: representationalism, phenomenalism, and a third view that is called either naïve realism or direct realism. I have always found the last of these views puzzling and elusive. My aim in this paper is to try to figure out what direct realism amounts to, mainly with an eye to seeing whether it offers a genuine epistemological alternative to the other two views and to (...) representationalism in particular. My main thesis will be that it does not—that what is right in direct realist views turns out to have little bearing on the central epistemological issue concerning perceptual knowledge. (shrink)

Here is the first book to present Karl Marx as one of the great systematic philosophers, a man who went beyond the traditional bounds of the discipline to work out a philosophical system in terms of a concrete social theory and politico-economic critique. Basing her work on the Grundrisse (probably Marx's most systematic work and only translated into English for the first time in 1973), Gould argues that Marx was engaged in a single enterprise throughout his works, specifically the (...) construction of a systematic and philosophical theory of society. Gould examines five basic themes of Marx's social ontology: society, labor, causality, freedom, and justice, in five separate chapters, preceded by an introductory chapter explicating thesis and methods. The book shows how Marx's ontology, or theory of social reality, may be reconstructed from concrete details of his account of the historical stages of social development and from his analyses and critiques of capitalist economy. It clarifies further the value theory underlying Marx's critique of modern society and explores the question of how philosophy can play a major role in understanding and resolving social issues. This book will be of interest to all students of society, since it raises issues of the relationship of technologies to society and of the forms and prospects for socialism as a possible future society. It has deliberately been written in a style that makes the difficult, technical issues accessible to undergraduates just beginning to read Marx, as well as, of course, graduate students of social theory and specialized scholars. The lay reader will also be drawn to the particular content of this book and will enjoy the lucid, straightforward presentation. Marx's Social Ontology proposes a solution to a long-standing problem in interpretations of Marx: the apparent dilemma of his insistence on the ideal of full self-realization of the individual and his equal insistence on the ideal of full self-realization of the community. This is a book of major significance dealing with topics of enduring and current interest. (shrink)

The historically most central epistemological issue concerning perception, to which this article will be almost entirely devoted, is whether and how beliefs about physical objects and about the physical world generally can be justified or warranted on the basis of sensory or perceptual experience—where it is internalist justification, roughly having a reason to think that the belief in question is true, that is mainly in question (see the entry justification, epistemic: internalist vs. externalist conceptions of). This issue, commonly referred to (...) as “the problem of the external world,” divides into two closely related sub-issues, which correspond to the first two main sections below. The first of these issues has to do with the nature of sensory experience and its relation to the physical world; it is typically (though as we shall see not altogether perspicuously) formulated as the question of what are the immediate objects of awareness in sensory experience or, in a variant but essentially equivalent terminology, of what is given in such experience. Perhaps the most historically standard, though not currently the most popular answer to this question has been that it is sense-data (private, non-physical entities that actually have the immediately experienced sensory qualities) that are the immediate objects of awareness or that are given. The second issue has to do with the way in which beliefs about the physical world are justified on the basis of such sensory experience. If it is concluded that physical objects are not themselves given, the two main answers to this question are representationalism or indirect realism (the view that the immediate objects of experience represent or depict physical objects in a way that allows one to infer justifiably from such experience to the existence of the corresponding “external” objects) and phenomenalism (the view.. (shrink)

Some methodological adaptationists hijacked the term “exaptation,” and took an occasion of Stephen Jay Gould’s misspeaking as confirmation that it possessed an evolutionarily “designed” function and was a version of an adaptation, something it was decidedly not. Others provided a standard of evidence for exaptation that was inappropriate, and based on an adaptationist worldview. This article is intended to serve as both an analysis of and correction to those situations. Gould and Elisabeth Vrba’s terms, “exaptation” and “aptation,” as (...) originally introduced, are very useful, unlike the faded adaptationist echo of “exaptation” devised by the methodological adaptationists, which has made the term incoherent. We will discuss how exaptation relates to function, to aptation, and to adaptation, both primary and secondary. These ideas have been rendered practically useless through their mistaken definitions and misapplications by evolutionary psychologists. (shrink)

: In this paper, I investigate Leibniz's conception of final causation. I focus especially on the role that Leibnizian final causes play in intentional action, and I argue that for Leibniz, final causes are a species of efficient causation. It is the intentional nature of final causation that distinguishes it from mechanical efficient causation. I conclude by highlighting some of the implications of Leibniz's conception of final causation for his views on human freedom, and on the unconscious activity of substances.

IT IS WELL KNOWN THAT LEIBNIZ’S NOTION OF HARMONY plays a crucial role in his philosophical system. Leibniz drew on this concept of harmony in motivating, and explaining, numerous areas of his thought: everything from Leibnizian mathematics and metaphysics to ethics and social philosophy, incorporates the notion of harmony as a central descriptive and explanatory concept. While there has been much discussion of some the applications of harmony in Leibniz’s system– especially the mind-body harmony, and the so-called universal harmony of (...) simple perceiving substances–little attention has been paid to Leibniz’s very concept of harmony. Yet it seems important for understanding Leibniz’s holistic philosophy that we grasp this concept, for he employed the term “harmony” when describing so many features of the created world: there is a harmony between geometry and physics, between efficient and final causation, between nature and grace, to mention just a few. (shrink)

Summary The article discusses the decline of Aristotelian physics at the University of Paris in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. A course of physics remained essentially Aristotelian until the final decade of the seventeenth century, when it came under the influence of Descartes. But the history of physics teaching over this period cannot be properly appreciated if it is simply seen in terms of the replacement of one physical philosophy by another. Long before the 1690s, the traditional Aristotelianism of (...) the Schools had been forced to come to terms with the New Science to some degree, while the Cartesianism of the early eighteenth century was always alive to the challenges to Descartes's particular physical theories. Except in the early seventeenth century the physics course at Paris was always in a state of change. The replacement of Aristotelian by Cartesian physics too involved the development of a novel epistemology. Although both Aristotelian and Cartesian professors believed that natural philosophy was a science of causes based upon a priori principles, the latter had a far more probabilist conception of physics. (shrink)

Throughout his early writings, Leibniz was concerned with developing an acceptable account of God's relationship to the created world. In some of these early writings, he endorsed the idea that this relationship was similar to the human soul's relationship to the body. Though he eventually came to reject this idea, theanima mundi thesis remained the topic of several essays and correspondences during his career, culminating in the correspondence with Clarke. At first glance,Leibniz's discussions of this thesis may seem less important (...) in comparison to others, since it might seem like a topic which is far removed from what are regarded as his most important philosophical doctrines. I hope to show in what follows that such a view is mistaken. The large amount of attention Leibniz paid to this thesis is a sure indication of its importance to him. Further, as we shall see, his discussions of this thesis tum on some of his most interesting metaphysical topics, including the development of his thinking about the actual infinite, the structure of organic wholes, and the relationship between God and the created universe. In what follows, I examine these discussions chronologically, from the De Summa Rerum (1675-6), to the correspondence with Clarke (1715-6). (shrink)

A musical phrase, or, for that matter, a musical unit of any size or shape, becomes an image whenever we imagine it to be invested with a content whose origins lie outside music. Such a content, according to the theory developed here, constitutes the image's conventional significance; it accounts for whatever strikes us about the image as having a common and familiar ring. That being so, the origins in question must be coincident with the fundamental ideas--the archetypes--that have been traditionally (...) represented as underlying and unifying Western culture. As the theoretical constructs they are, arehctypes are never encountered directly. It is in the form of their local variants that we make contact with the archetypes, and it is at this local level that the present book sets its sights: style, the typical or shared element in the musical imagery of a time and place, is studies as a function of Zeitgeist, the complex of beliefs, values, and ideals of a community. The approach is both thematic and historical, in keeping with a key objective of archetypal criticism. Far from repudiating the popular notion that music expresses the human emotions, this study attempts to recast emotion theory by examining musical images for kinds of behavior from which we may infer not only emotion (pathos, effectus) but also personality (ethos). Ethical and affective distinctions are very sharply drawn, in an effort to clarify and widen the vocabulary of musical commentary, as well as to provide cultural and historical backing for contents long considered the cliches of musical expression. (shrink)

Nancy Jecker (2013) mounts a sustained and formidable critique of Norman Daniels's prudential lifespan account (PLA) as a reliable basis for justice between age groups in the responsible allocation...

In response to critical discussions of her Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights by William McBride, Omar Dahbour, Kory Schaff, and David Schweickart, Gould grants that globalization and U.S. Empire are intertwined, but she argues that this does not refute that global and transnational interconnections and networks are developing that are in need of substantive democracy. Gould further seeks to clarify two main interpretive misunderstandings of her critics. First, even though she rejects “all affected” as a criterion for determining (...) the participants of institutional decision-making, she does leave room for participation of the “affected” when the fulfillment of their basic rights is at stake. Second, she argues that her vision of democratizing economic institutions is not fundamentallydifferent from the traditional idea of workplace democracy. Other topics addressed are the normative grounding of human rights, the error of reducing human rights to positive law, and the incoherency of the notion that democracy can be imposed by the barrel of a gun. Finally, Gould maintains that empathy, if properly understood, should be extended to terrorists, while we should also strongly condemn their rejection of noncombatant immunity. [Abstract prepared by the Editors.]. (shrink)

First published over thirty years ago, "Classic Philosophical Questions" has presented decades of students with the most compelling classic and contemporary readings on the most enduring and abiding questions in philosophy. The anthology, topically arranged, uses debate and argument as vehicles to teach students the fundamentals of philosophy while also demonstrating that philosophy is a discourse spanning centuries. "James A. Gould" and "Robert J. Mulvaney" continue to provide students with interesting, intriguing essays from major philosophers in a distinctive presentation, (...) often involving a pro/con format, to ensure that both the apparent and subtle points of argument are both meaningful and clear. Features of this new edition: Sections on epistemology and metaphysics introduced earlier in this edition New readings from Martha Nussbaum and Martin Luther King, Jr. Concise, student-friendly introductions to each philosopher and reading Helpful study and reflection questions focus students' reading and improve comprehension. (shrink)

In our ‘The Professional Virtue of Civility and the Responsibilities of Medical Educators and Academic Leaders’,1 we provided an historically based conceptual account of the professional virtue of civility and the role of leaders of academic health centres in creating and sustaining an organisational culture of professionalism that promotes civility among healthcare professionals and between medical educators and learners. We emphasised that any adequate understanding of the virtues, including professional virtues, has cognitive, affective, behavioural and social components. Some of the (...) commentators expand on these components in important ways. Xuhao et al emphasises the importance of role models, especially in the hierarchical context of medical education.2 The hierarchy of faculty in the senior position and junior doctors and other learners below them has characterised medical education for centuries. Xuhao et al rightly call for academic leaders to shape this hierarchy in a morally responsible way, by becoming ‘exemplary role models’.2 Berry, a clinician manager, in critiquing our account, calls for an increased appreciation for the psychological and environmental factors that might explain why uncivil behaviour occurs.3 …. (shrink)

L’objet de cette contribution est de montrer comment le recours « aveugle » aux caractères et au formalisme transforme, pour Leibniz, l’exercice de l’attention. Plus précisément, il s’agira de montrer en s’appuyant sur divers opuscules que le formalisme permet à la fois d’épargner l’attention, de la concentrer, de l’élargir, de la séquencer et de la transformer en un exercice collectif.

Leibniz’s conception of the relativity of motion has been discussed at length for a very long time. This paper doesn’t aim to give a full solution to this question, but to contribute to the debate by clarifying how the principle of relativity is introduced, justified and used in the “Dynamica”. Four different principles are identified : one purely geometrical, and three (meta) physical principles, which express God’s wisdom : a principle of equivalence of hypotheses linked to the action/reaction principle, a (...) Galilean principle of relativity and a general principle which apply not only to rectilinear motions but also to circular ones. I argue that to appreciate the coherence of Leibniz’ approach, we should distinguish these principles more sharply than he himself did and pay more attention to their status : are they consequences of the definition of motion, consequences of the physical laws or necessary conditions for any physical theory? (shrink)

Cette étude s’annonce dans le prélude (p. 9-17) comme une réflexion délibérément affranchie des critères historiques et des écoles doctrinales pour dégager d’une « constellation » d’images choisies les lignes-forces de la notion complexe (« contradictoire », préfère l’auteur) de ravissement, qui épouse à la fois les termes de la dépossession et de la possession, de l’extériorité et de l’intériorité, de l’actif et du passif, de l’absence et de la présence, de la perte de soi et de sa conquête....