Do our lives have meaning? Should we create more people? Is death bad? Should we commit suicide? Would it be better if we were immortal? Should we be optimistic or pessimistic? Life, Death, and Meaning brings together key readings, primarily by English-speaking philosophers, on such 'big questions.'.

Do our lives have meaning? Should we create more people? Is death bad? Should we commit suicide? Would it be better to be immortal? Should we be optimistic or pessimistic? Since Life, Death, and Meaning: Key Philosophical Readings on the Big Questions first appeared, David Benatar's distinctive anthology designed to introduce students to the key existential questions of philosophy has won a devoted following among users in a variety of upper-level and even introductory courses.

In this paper, we reflect on current notions of engineering practice by examining some of the motives for engineered solutions to the problem of climate change. We draw on fields such as science and technology studies, the philosophy of technology, and environmental ethics to highlight how dominant notions of apoliticism and ahistoricity are ingrained in contemporary engineering practice. We argue that a solely technological response to climate change does not question the social, political, and cultural tenet of infinite material growth, (...) one of the root causes of climate change. In response to the contemporary engineering practice, we define an activist engineer as someone who not only can provide specific engineered solutions, but who also steps back from their work and tackles the question, What is the real problem and does this problem “require” an engineering intervention? Solving complex problems like climate change requires radical cultural change, and a significant obstacle is educating engineers about how to conceive of and create “authentic alternatives,” that is, solutions that differ from the paradigm of “technologically improving” our way out of problems. As a means to realize radically new solutions, we investigate how engineers might deploy the concept of praxis, which raises awareness in engineers of the inherent politics of technological design. Praxis empowers engineers with a more comprehensive understanding of problems, and thus transforms technologies, when appropriate, into more socially just and ecologically sensitive interventions. Most importantly, praxis also raises a radical alternative rarely considered—not “engineering a solution.” Activist engineering offers a contrasting method to contemporary engineering practice and leads toward social justice and ecological protection through problem solving by asking not, How will we technologize our way out of the problems we face? but instead, What really needs to be done? (shrink)

Current work in experimental biology revolves around a handful of animal species. Studying only a few organisms limits science to the answers that those organisms can provide. Nature has given us an overwhelming diversity of animals to study, and recent technological advances have greatly accelerated the ability to generate genetic and genomic tools to develop model organisms for research on host–microbe interactions. With the help of such models the authors therefore hope to construct a more complete picture of the mechanisms (...) that underlie crucial interactions in a given metaorganism (entity consisting of a eukaryotic host with all its associated microbial partners). As reviewed here, new knowledge of the diversity of host–microbe interactions found across the animal kingdom will provide new insights into how animals develop, evolve, and succumb to the disease. (shrink)

Examine the first-year student experience as so rarely seen from the community college perspective and increase the odds of the new-to-college students’ success. For three decades, U.S. higher education has paid increasing attention to the beginning college experience—to ensure that entering students make a successful transition to college. Yet, much of the extant research and practice literature focuses on the experience of first-year students entering four-year colleges and universities. Fulfilling the Promise of the Community College is an insightful publication that (...) provides a thought-provoking, idea-inspiring look at the unique characteristics of the community college and its students. In addition, it explores the barriers to success these students face as well as strategies for ensuring that their higher education goals can be achieved. Authors describe successful adaptations of faculty development initiatives, first-year seminars, common reading programs, academic and career advising, learning communities, and STEM initiatives in the community college setting. (shrink)

A perception-action system may underlie the mechanisms by which human speech exchange in social interaction is managed, as well as the evolutionary precursors of these mechanisms in closely related species. Some phenomena of interaction well-studied by sociologists are suggested as a point of departure for further research.

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-021-04780-w.

We prove, by explicit construction, that not all sets definable in polynomially bounded o-minimal structures have mild parameterization. Our methods do not depend on the bounds particular to the definition of mildness and therefore our construction is also valid for a generalized form of parameterization, which we call G-mild. Moreover, we present a cell decomposition result for certain o-minimal structures which may be of independent interest. This allows us to show how our construction can produce polynomially bounded, model complete expansions (...) of the real ordered field which, in addition to lacking G-mild parameterization, nonetheless still have analytic cell decomposition. (shrink)

Fair trade has been researched extensively. However, our understanding of why consumers might be reluctant to purchase fair trade goods, and the associated potential barriers to the wider adoption of fair trade products, is incomplete. Based on data from 409 USA participants, our study demonstrates some of the psychological processes that underlie the rejection of fair trade products by conservatives. Our findings show that political conservatism affects fair trade perspective-taking and fair trade identity, and these latter two subsequently affect fair (...) trade purchase intention. The decrease in fair trade perspective-taking and fair trade identity are two psychological features that potentially shield conservatives from the appeals of fair trade products. We extend prior research on the effects of political ideology on consumption not only by demonstrating the predisposition of highly conservative consumers towards prosocial consumption, but also by showing the internal functioning of the conservative decision-making process. We further demonstrate that the effect of conservatism on fair trade purchase deliberation is moderated by age and income. Age reduces the negative effect of conservatism on fair trade perspective-taking, whereas income heightens the negative effect of conservatism on fair trade perspective-taking. Our results suggest that fair trade initiatives can target the conservative consumer segment in high-income countries with a greater chance of success when applying marketing strategies that make perspective-taking redundant and that aim at younger consumers with lower incomes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Testimony of Sense: Empiricism and the Essay from Hume to Hazlitt by Tim MilnesMargaret WatkinsTim Milnes. The Testimony of Sense: Empiricism and the Essay from Hume to Hazlitt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. viii + 278. Hardback. ISBN: 9780198812739. $91.00.In his brief autobiography, “My Own Life,” Hume reports that “almost all [his] life has been spent in literary pursuits and occupations” (E-MOL: xxxi). This is one (...) of at least ten places in this brief work in which he associates himself with “letters” or “literature”—as compared to at most four associations with philosophy. The moral to be inferred is not that Hume considered himself not to be a philosopher. Rather, he conceived of philosophy as a kind of literature. The Treatise was itself a “literary attempt.” Indeed, opposition between the “literary” and “philosophical” aspects of a text would have been foreign to Hume and his contemporaries—a notion for a later age, despite his occasional loose distinction between the relevant genres, as in his list of writings “historical, philosophical, or literary” in “My Own Life” (E-MOL: xxxvi).Yet despite Hume’s own understanding of the continuity between philosophy and literature, broadly conceived, it is still common for contemporary philosophers to ignore literary questions in their examination of Hume’s work, or to presume that one can easily distinguish the “philosophical” parts from the “literary” ones. Tim Milnes’s The Testimony of Sense is therefore a welcome addition to the Hume literature (pun intended). With a particular focus on the essay—a genre of great importance to Hume—Milnes contributes to the small set of engagements with Hume from the disciplinary perspective of English literature. With training in both philosophy and literature, as well as established expertise on Romanticism and its own essays, Milnes is well-qualified for the task. The Testimony of Sense includes sustained engagement with Hume’s contemporaries and successors, but for the purposes of this review, I engage the book primarily as a Hume scholar for Hume scholars.Milnes’s story plays out in three acts. The first establishes the need for public trust created by a skeptical crisis, itself a product of Hume’s criticism of the epistemic program of thinkers in the Cartesian and Lockean traditions. The second explains how the essays of the long eighteenth century constitute a response to that need in various ways. The third reveals in detail how the Romantic essayists, particularly William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, both respond to and deviate from the “neoclassical” essayists, typified by Hume and Samuel Johnson.The first chapter, “Self and Intersubjectivity,” lays the groundwork by articulating how Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, and Dugald Stewart identify the need for what we now call intersubjectivity. Milnes describes the common thread as a kind of “natural transcendentalism.” In what sense are these thinkers properly understood as [End Page 175] transcendentalists? The central idea seems to be that all posit things other than reason as “conditions of meaningful thought” (72). For Hume, it is the social, linguistic experience of a community of virtuous judges. The intricate relations between self and other essential to such a community get “internalized within the specular drama of the impartial spectator” (72) in Smith’s writing, which itself takes part in the drama through his “halting, qualified syntax” that mimics “everyday speech” (44). Reid posits a “prescience” of trust, which grounds our reliance on both human testimony and the uniformity of nature, itself undergirded by the design of a benevolent God. Stewart, who posits axiomatic truths that help constitute the “stamina of intellect,” goes furthest, actually calling these truths transcendental (55). This chapter also puts these eighteenth-century thinkers in conversation with twentieth-century theorists, including Habermas, Davidson, and Rorty.Chapter 2, “The Subject of Trust,” deepens the analysis by situating these “natural transcendentalisms” in the broader enlightenment context. In contrast to Descartes, Bacon, and Locke, who were suspicious of our reliance on the opinions of others, the eighteenth-century thinkers understand trust as prior to reason in various ways—though not prior to solidarity. The particulars in each case depend on their responses to skepticism and their accounts of the relation between... (shrink)

David Hume's contributions span every branch of human inquiry: ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, political philosophy, aesthetics, religion, and economics. While reams of scholarship have been devoted to Hume's thought, his work on economics is still relatively unexplored. In this book, philosopher Margaret Schabas and intellectual historian Carl Wennerlind provide the definitive account of Hume's "worldly philosophy." Hume, they show, was intent on getting out of the armchair and ensuring that his philosophy had practical implications-to subdue superstition, soften religious zealotry, and (...) promote harmonious relations in modern society. Part of this endeavor involved material betterment, and Hume brought to his economic thought a richly astute understanding of human agency, of how our minds work and prompt our actions. The authors paint him as the quintessential proponent of liberalism and a dedicated supporter of commercial modernization. However, they note that he was not an unqualified enthusiast-he saw the potential of modern commerce to increase debt, fuel runaway inflation, and feed factionalism in political rule, for example, and he fretted over the potential for international conflicts to spiral out of control. Given Hume's friendship with Adam Smith, and his influence over nineteenth-century thinkers as prominent as Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx, a serious appraisal of this side of his oeuvre is long overdue. As two of Hume's closest readers, Schabas and Wennerlind offer just that in this delightfully wide-ranging exploration of the history of philosophy and modern economic thought. (shrink)

Margaret Wise Brown's The Important Book, which is a childrens' picture book, provides an excellent opportunity to discuss metaphysics. The book opens up for our reflection the viability of a certain metaphysical account of the nature of objects. In making a distinction between the important feature or property of an object and all the others that it simply is or has, The Important Book operates with the assumption that all objects have what metaphysicians call an essential property. As the (...) book has it, while there are many things that are true of any object, only one is essential to it. These other things are accidents or non‐essential properties of the object. Essentialism is the metaphysical view that objects have one property — their essential property — that cannot change while the object remains the same thing. (shrink)

"Margaret L. King has put together a highly representative selection of readings from most of the more significant—but by no means the most obvious—texts by the authors who made up the movement we have come to call the 'Enlightenment.' They range across much of Europe and the Americas, and from the early seventeenth century until the end of the eighteenth. In the originality of the choice of texts, in its range and depth, this collection offers both wide coverage and (...) striking insights into the intellectual transformation which has done more than any other to shape the world in which we live today. It is _simply the best introduction to the subject now available_."_ —Anthony Pagden, UCLA, and author of _The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters_ Contents:_ Chronology, Introduction _Chapter One - Casting Out Idols: 1620–1697_ _Idols, or false notions: _Francis Bacon, _The New Instrument_ _I think, therefore I am: _René Descartes, Discourse on Method _God, or Nature: _Baruch Spinoza, _Ethics_ _The system of the world: _Isaac Newton, _Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy_ _He searched for truth throughout his life: _Pierre Bayle, _Historical and Critical Dictionary_ _Chapter Two - _The Learned Maid: 1638–1740 _A face raised toward heaven:_ Anna Maria van Schurman, _Whether the Study of Letters Befits a Christian Woman_ _The worlds I have made:_ Margaret Cavendish, _The Blazing World_ _A finer sort of cattle:_ Bathsua Makin, _An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen_ _I warn you of the world:_ Madame de Maintenon, _Letter: On the Education of the Demoiselles of Saint-Cyr_, and _Instruction: On the World_ _The daybreak of your reason:_ Émilie Du Châtelet, _Fundamentals of Physics_ _Chapter Three - _A State of Perfect Freedom: 1689–1695 _The chief criterion of the True Church:_ John Locke, _Letter on Toleration_ _Freedom from any superior power on earth:_ John Locke, _Second Treatise on Civil Government_ _A white paper, with nothing written on it:_ John Locke, _Essay Concerning Human Understanding_ _Let your rules be as few as possible:_ John Locke, _Some Thoughts Concerning Education_ _From death, Jesus Christ restores all to life:_ John Locke, _The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures_ _Chapter Four - All Things Made New: 1725–1784_ _In the wilderness, they are reborn:_ Giambattista Vico, _The New Science_ _Without these Names, nothing can be known,_ Carl Linnaeus, _System of Nature_ _All the clouds at last are lifted:_ Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, _The Successive Advancement of the Human Mind_ _A genealogical or encyclopedic tree of knowledge:_ Jean le Rond d’Alembert, _Preliminary Discourse_ _Dare to know! :_ Immanuel Kant, _What Is Enlightenment?_ _Chapter Five - Mind, Soul, and God: 1740–1779_ _The narrow limits of human understanding:_ David Hume, _Anof a Book Lately Published_ _The soul is but an empty word:_ Julien Offray de La Mettrie, _Man a Machine_ _All is reduced to sensation:_ Claude Adrien Helvétius, _On the Mind_ _An endless web of fantasies and falsehoods:_ Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d’Holbach, _Common Sense_ _Let each believe that his own ring is real:_ Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, _Nathan the Wise_ _Chapter Six - Crush That Infamous Thing: 1733–1764_ _This is the country of sects:_ Voltaire, _Philosophical Letters_ _Disfigured by myth, until enlightenment comes:_ Voltaire, _The Culture and Spirit of Nations_ _The best of all possible worlds:_ Voltaire, _Candide_ _Are we not all children of the same God?:_ Voltaire, _Treatise on Tolerance_ _If a book displeases you, refute it! :_ Voltaire, _Philosophical Dictionary_ _Chapter Seven - Toward the Greater Good: 1748–1776_ _Things must be so ordered that power checks power,_ Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, _The Spirit of the Laws_ _Complete freedom of trade must be ensured:_ François Quesnay, _General Maxims for the Economic Management of an Agricultural Kingdom_ _The nation's war against the citizen: Cesare_ Beccaria, _On Crimes and Punishments_ _There is no peace in the absence of justice:_ Adam Ferguson, _An Essay on the History of Civil Society_ _Led by an invisible hand:_ Adam Smith, _An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations_ _Chapter Eight - Encountering Others: 1688–1785_ _Thus died this great man:_ Aphra Behn, _Oroonoko: or The Royal Slave_ _Not one sins the less for not being Christian: _Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, _Embassy Letters_ _Do you not restore to them their liberty?:_ Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, _Philosophical and Political History of European Colonies and Commerce in the Two Indies_ _Some things which are rather interesting:_ Captain James Cook, _Voyage towards the South Pole, and Round the World_ _The inner genius of my being:_ Johann Gottfried von Herder, _Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humankind_ _Chapter - Nine Citizen of Geneva: 1755–1782_ _The most cunning project ever to enter the human mind: _Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Human Inequality_ _The supreme direction of the General Will:_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract _Two lovers from a small town at the foot of the Alps,_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Julie, or the New Heloise_ _Build a fence around your child’s soul:_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Emile, or On Education_ _This man will be myself:_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Confessions_ _Chapter Ten - Vindications of Women: 1685–1792_ _No higher design than to get her a husband:_ Mary Astell, _Reflections on Marriage_ _The days of my bondage begin:_ Anna Stanisławska, _Orphan Girl_ _A dying victim dragged to the altar:_ Denis Diderot, _The Nun_ _Created to be the toy of man:_ Mary Wollstonecraft, _Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ _Man, are you capable of being just?:_ Olympe de Gouges, _Declaration of the Rights of Woman as Citizen_ _Chapter Eleven - American Reverberations: 1771–1792_ _I took upon me to assert my freedom:_ Benjamin Franklin, _Autobiography_ _Freedom has been hunted round the globe:_ Thomas Paine, _Common Sense_ _Endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights:_ Thomas Jefferson and Others, _Declaration of Independence_ _A safeguard against faction and insurrection:_ James Madison, _Federalist No. 10_ _An end to government by force and fraud:_ Thomas Paine, _The Rights of Man_ _Chapter Twelve - Enlightenment's End: 1790–1794_ _A partnership of the living, the dead, and those unborn:_ Edmund Burke, _Reflections on the Revolution in France_ _The future destiny of the human species:_ Nicolas de Condorcet, _A Sketch of a Historical Portrait of the Progress of the Human Mind_ Texts and Studies, Index. 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In this article, I offer a detailed examination of Margaret Macdonald's response to the Cartesian sceptical argument from dreaming. I show that Macdonald's views were not well understood by her contemporaries, and I suggest that this misunderstanding has led to her omission from subsequent discussions of this subject. I end with a brief demonstration of the fact that Macdonald's central claims have re-emerged in contemporary epistemology.

With the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), global researchers were confronted with major challenges. The German National Pandemic Cohort Network (NAPKON) was launched in fall 2020 to effectively leverage resources and bundle research activities in the fight against the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. We analyzed the setup phase of NAPKON as an example for multicenter studies in Germany, highlighting challenges and optimization potential in connecting 59 university and nonuniversity study sites. We examined the ethics application (...) process of 121 ethics submissions considering durations, annotations, and outcomes. Study site activation and recruitment processes were investigated and related to the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infections. For all initial ethics applications, the median time to a positive ethics vote was less than two weeks and 30 of these study sites (65%) joined NAPKON within less than three weeks each. Electronic instead of postal ethics submission (9.5 days (Q1: 5.75, Q3: 17) vs. 14 days (Q1: 11, Q3: 26), p value = 0.01) and adoption of the primary ethics vote significantly accelerated the ethics application process. Each study center enrolled a median of 37 patients during the 14-month observation period, with large differences depending on the health sector. We found a positive correlation between recruitment performance and COVID-19 incidence as well as hospitalization incidence. Our analysis highlighted the challenges and opportunities of the federated system in Germany. Digital ethics application tools, adoption of a primary ethics vote and standardized formal requirements lead to harmonized and thus faster study initiation processes during a pandemic. (shrink)

A number of authors, Including Thomas Schelling and David Lewis, have envisaged a model of the generation of action in coordination problems in which salience plays a crucial role. Empirical studies suggest that human subjects are likely to try for the salient combination of actions, a tendency leading to fortunate results. Does rationality dictate that one aim at the salient combination? Some have thought so, Thus proclaiming that salience is all that is needed to resolve coordination problems for agents (...) who are rational in the sense of game theory. I argue against this position; rational agents will not necessarily aim for the salient. It remains to explain how the salient comes to be chosen by human beings. Various possibilities are noted. One involves a mechanism invoked by Hume and Wittgenstein in other contexts: we may project an unreasoned compulsion onto reason, falsely believing that rationality dictates our choice of the salient. (shrink)

This article offers a critique of Thomas Scanlon's well-known account of promissory obligation by reference to the rights of promisees. Scanlon's account invokes a moral principle, the "principle of fidelity". Now, corresponding to a promisor's obligation to perform is a promisee's right to performance. It is argued that one cannot account for this right in terms of Scanlon's principle. This is so in spite of a clause in the principle relating to the promisee's "consent", which might have been thought (...) to do the trick. Most likely this argument can be applied to all "moral principle" accounts of promissory obligation. An alternative both to these and to "social practice" accounts is needed. (shrink)

De vuelta a Raz: una réplica En Judging Positivism, sostengo que Joseph Raz cambió su posición en el tiempo y que esos cambios produjeron inconsistencias e incoherencias en su posición madura. La premisa clave que pone en marcha el argumento es la siguiente: la concepción de sistemas jurídicos en Practical Reason and Norms está basada en, y depende de, la tesis de que jueces tienen un deber de aplicar el derecho. Tratase de una concepción positivista del derecho que deriva de (...) una visión positivista del trabajo del juez. Problemas surgen para Raz cuando él introduce elementos morales en su concepción positivista de derecho. En particular, analizo las dificultades que Raz encuentra cuando introduce una teoría moral de la aplicación del derecho en Ethics in the Public Domain, y una teoría moralmente cargada de la autoridad en Morality of Freedom. André Coelho y Jorge Fabra-Zamora cuestionan mi crítica a los argumentos de Raz sobre la aplicación del derecho, mientras Thomas Bustamante plantea sus comentarios en mi critica de la autoridad en Raz. Al contestar a mis críticos, revisito mi interpretación de PRN, al paso que exploro las premisas fundacionales en discusión en estos debates. Rechazo la posibilidad de que todas presuposiciones fundacionales son igualmente valiosas: el análisis conceptual no normativo no es, en mi opinión, una metodología viable si se quiere contestar las cuestiones planteadas por Raz y Hart. Asimismo, investigo las dificultades que la teoría de la autoridad de Raz encuentra. (shrink)

In the 1860s, Dr. Louis Thomas Jérôme Auzoux introduced a set of papier-mâché teaching models intended for use in the botanical classroom. These botanical models quickly made their way into the educational curricula of institutions around the world. Within these institutions, Auzoux’s models were principally used to fulfil educational goals, but their incorporation into diverse curricula also suggests they were used to implement agendas beyond botanical instruction. This essay examines the various uses and meanings of Dr. Auzoux’s botanical teaching (...) models at the universities of Glasgow and Aberdeen in the nineteenth century. The two main conclusions of this analysis are: investing in prestigious scientific collections was a way for these universities to attract fee-paying students so that better medical accommodation could be provided and models were used to transmit different kinds of botanical knowledge at both universities. The style of botany at the University of Glasgow was offensive and the department there actively embraced and incorporated ideas of the emerging new botany. At Aberdeen, the style of botany was defensive and there was some hesitancy when confronting new botanical ideas. (shrink)

A review which, among other criticisms of Archer's book, discusses some philosophical problems concerning talk of the "self" in the human sciences.

I chart the philosophical development of neglected figure Margaret Macdonald and situate that development in the context of mid-century analytic philosophy more broadly. I examine Macdonald’s changing attitude towards verificationism, and show that these changing views led her, in 1950 and beyond, to a very thorough appreciation of language use as capable of being employed in the execution of distinctive kinds of performative act. I compare Macdonald’s views with the far better known work of J. L. Austin, and I (...) emphasise the extent to which she has, despite her insightful contributions, been omitted from the history of philosophy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:The articles in the special issue ofBusiness Ethics Quarterly, “Normative Business Ethics in a Global Economy: New Directions on Donaldsonian Themes,” were written by a set of outstanding scholars: Margaret M. Blair, Joseph P. Gaspar, Nien-hê Hsieh, Peter L. Jennings, Marietta Peytcheva, Andreas Georg Scherer, Amy J. Sepinwall, Andrew Stark, Danielle E. Warren, and Manuel Velasquez. In this commentary I reply to my colleagues, arranging my reply around the following themes: 1) the corporate moral agent; 2) the idea of (...) a social contract for business; 3) managing ethics within corporations; and 4) values in business. I discuss each in turn. However, I reflect first on my idiosyncratic approach to business ethics. (shrink)

This paper examines four retellings of the Arthurian legend of Guinevere and Lancelot from a bio-evolutionary perspective. The historical and social conditions which provide contexts for the retellings are described, and those conditions are related to underlying male and female reproductive strategies. Since the authors of the selected texts, Chrétien de Troyes, Thomas Malory, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and William Morris, are all male, the assumption is made that these versions of the legend reflect male reproductive preoccupations and encode male (...) attitudes toward femaleness in general and toward female adultery in particular. (shrink)

Editorial Board: Karl P. Ameriks, Margaret Atherton, Frederick Beiser, Fabien Capeillères, Faustino Fabbianelli, Daniel Garber, Rudolf A. Makkreel, Steven Nadler, Alan Nelson, Christof Rapp, Ursula Renz, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Denis Thouard, Paul Ziche, Günter Zöller The series publishes monographs and essay collections devoted to the history of philosophy as well as studies in the theory of writing the history of philosophy. A special emphasis is placed on the contextualization of philosophical historiography into the areas of the history of science, culture, (...) and the wider scope of intellectual history. (shrink)

The History of Psychology: Fundamental Questions provides significant excerpts from the philosophers, theologians, and scientists who contributed to the development of psychology. It also includes more recent works covering issues and ideas in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Extensively classroom-tested, this anthology addresses a comprehensive range of topics, yet is suitable for use as a core text or as a supplement in a single-semester course on the history of psychology. The History of Psychology offers selections from: · Aristotle · St. (...) class='Hi'>Thomas Aquinas · Rene Descartes · John Locke · Immanuel Kant · Hermann Ebbinghaus · Charles Darwin · Margaret Floy Washburn · Wilhelm Wundt · Jean Piaget · B.F. Skinner · Noam Chomsky and many others. The readings encourage students to consider the foundations of psychology and the questions that led to its emergence as a distinct discipline. Going beyond the presentation and defense of a particular point of view, this collection gives students the opportunity to consider the fundamental questions of psychology. The book is organized into nine thematic sections that are presented chronologically. Each section includes works that cohere thematically to encourage discussion, highlight related topics, and stimulate the classic and more current debates within the field of psychology. Every reading is preceded by a brief biography of the author and a note about his or her range of interests and influence. Featuring original works from some of the most important figures in the history of psychology, The History of Psychology is ideal for undergraduate and graduate courses on history and systems in psychology and philosophy of psychology. (shrink)

¿Puede la tesis del reemplazo de Raz sobrevivir en el contexto de una teoría dworkiniana del derecho y de la adjudicación? Judging Positivism, de Margaret Martin, fornece una de las mejores reconstrucciones y una de las más interesantes críticas ya planteadas contra la influyente filosofía del derecho de Joseph Raz. En uno de los pasos centrales de su argumento, Martin desafía una sumisión central de Raz, que es el intento de combinar la tesis del reemplazo con la tesis de (...) la justificación normal. Mientras la primera exige que ciudadanos y oficiales excluyan de la deliberación cualesquiera razones de primer orden para la acción, la ultima invita consideraciones sobre legitimidad que no se puede examinar con independencia de las razones de primer orden que la tesis del remplazo pretende excluir. En este comentario crítico, yo acepto la crítica de Martin según la cual esas dos tesis no pueden ser aceptadas como argumentos conceptuales. Sin embargo, sugiero que aún existe un espacio para armonizarlas si se las acepta por razones normativas. Si hay un buen argumento para tratar razones jurídicas como un nivel intermedio de razones para la acción, entonces puede haber buenos argumentos circunstanciales para tratar razones institucionales como remplazantes en el sentido que Raz defiende en su teoría del derecho. (shrink)

Thomas Williams Note: This is a preprint of my introduction to the forthcoming translation by Margaret Atkins of Thomas Aquinas’s Disputed Questions on the Virtues (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy). The basic procedure was simple. The topic would be announced in advance so that everyone could prepare an arsenal of clever arguments. When the faculty and students had gathered, the professor would offer a brief introduction and state his thesis. All morning long an appointed graduate (...) student would take objections from the audience and defend the professor’s thesis against those objections. (And if the graduate student began to flounder, the professor was allowed to help him out.) A secretary would take shorthand notes. The next day the group would reassemble. This time it would be the professor’s job to summarise the arguments on both sides and give his own response to the question at issue. The whole thing would be written up, either in a rough-and-tumble version deriving from the secretary’s notes or in a more carefully crafted and edited version prepared by the professor himself. Records of such academic exercises have come down to us under the title ‘disputed questions’. (shrink)

The essays collected in this special issue of Critical Inquiry are devoted to reflection on the shifts in photographically based art practice, exhibition, and reception in recent years and to the changes brought about by these shifts in our understanding of photographic art. Although initiated in the 1960s, photography as a mainstream artistic practice has accelerated over the last two decades. No longer confined to specialist galleries, books, journals, and other distribution networks, contemporary art photographers are now regularly the subject (...) of major retrospectives in mainstream fine-art museums on the same terms as any other artist. One could cite, for example, Thomas Struth at the Metropolitan Museum in New York , Thomas Demand at the Museum of Modern Art , or Jeff Wall at Tate Modern and MoMA . Indeed, Wall's most recent museum show, at the time of writing, The Crooked Path at Bozar, Brussels , situated his photography in relation to the work of a range of contemporary photographers, painters, sculptors, performance artists, and filmmakers with whose work Wall considers his own to be in dialogue, irrespective of differences of media. All this goes to show that photographic art is no longer regarded as a subgenre apart. The situation in the United Kingdom is perhaps emblematic of both photography's increasing prominence and its increased centrality in the contemporary art world over recent years. Tate hosted its first ever photography survey, Cruel and Tender, as recently as 2003, and since then photography surveys have become a regular biannual staple of its exhibition programming, culminating in the appointment of Tate's first dedicated curator of photography in 2010. A major shift in the perception of photography as art is clearly well under way. (shrink)

One of us [Gilbert, M.. “Collective Belief and Scientific Change.” Sociality and Responsibility. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 37-49.] has proposed that ascriptions of beliefs to scientific communities generally involve a common notion of collective belief described by her in numerous places. A given collective belief involves a joint commitment of the parties, who thereby constitute what Gilbert refers to as a plural subject. Assuming that this interpretive hypothesis is correct, and that some of the belief ascriptions in question are (...) true, then the members of some scientific communities have obligations that may act as barriers both to the generation and, hence, the fair evaluation of new ideas and to changes in their community’s beliefs. We argue that this may help to explain Thomas Kuhn’s observations on “normal science”, and go on to develop the relationship between Gilbert's proposal and several features of a group of physicists working on a fundamental physical theory called “string theory”, as described by physicist Lee Smolin [Smolin, L.. The Trouble with Physics. Mariner Books: New York.]. We argue that the features of the string theory community that Smolin cites are well explained by the hypothesis that the community is a plural subject of belief. (shrink)

: The topic of organ transplantation is examined from the perspective of three authors: Robert Bellah, Jeremy Rifkin, and Margaret Jane Radin. Introduced by reflections on the development of the justification of organ transplantation within the Roman Catholic community and the various themes raised by the historical study in Richard Titmuss's The Gift Relationship, the paper examines how and in what ways the possible commodification of organs will affect our society and the impacts this may have on the supply (...) of organs. (shrink)

St Augustine himself recognised in Retractationes that De Mendacio is a difficult text to understand, because its argument is both complex and dialectical. Understanding the treatise has been further complicated by St Thomas Aquinas’ reading of it in the light of Aristotle, and under the influence of a possibly flawed textual tradition. This article clarifies Augustine’s well known eight categories of lies to resituate them in the social experience of Augustine and his contemporaries. It shows that Augustine’s argument and (...) exegesis are strikingly exploratory and undogmatic. His hard-won conclusion is driven by a demanding understanding of sanctity. A synopsis of the argument of De Mendacio is appended. (shrink)

Margaret Cavendish is widely known as a materialist. However, since Cavendishian matter is always in motion, “matter” and “motion” are equally important foundational concepts for her natural philosophy. In Philosophical Letters (1664), she takes to task her materialist rival Thomas Hobbes by assaulting his account of accidents in general and his concept of “rest” in particular. In this article, I argue that Cavendish defends her continuous-motion view in two ways: first, she claims that her account avoids seeing accidents (...) as capable of generation and annihilation, which she argues is inconceivable; and second, she contends that according to Hobbes’s own view “rest” is an absurd conception since it cannot be drawn from experience. Beyond its function as a defense, I claim that Cavendish’s focused criticism of “rest” shows that she is a perceptive reader of Hobbes’s natural philosophy, insofar as her criticisms undercut the two a priori principles of Hobbesian physics. Finally, I show how her views developed in more detail in Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1663) and Observations upon Experimental Philosophy ([1666] 2001) avoid the worries she raises for Hobbesian materialism. (shrink)

This collection contains the following sixteen essays: "Some Pivotal Issues in Spinoza," by Paul Weiss; "The Deductive Character of Spinoza's Metaphysics," by Michael Hooker; "Spinoza's Ontological Proof," by Willis Doney; "Spinozistic Anomalies," by Jose Benardete; "Some Idealistic Themes in the Ethics," by Robert N. Beck; "Spinoza's Dualism," by Alan Donagan; "Objects, Ideas, and 'Minds': Comments on Spinoza's Theory of Mind," by Margaret D. Wilson; "Parallelism and Complementarity: The Psycho-Physical Problem in the Succession of Niels Bohr," by Hans Jonas; "Spinoza's (...) Political Philosophy: The Lessons and Problems of a Conservative Democrat," by Lewis S. Feuer; "Notes on Spinoza's Critique of Religion," by Hilail Gilden [[sic]] ; "Spinoza and History," by James C. Morrison; "Kant's Critique of Spinoza," by Henry E. Allison; "Hegel's Assessment of Spinoza," by Kenneth L. Schmitz; "Spinoza's Logic of Inquiry: Rationalist or Experientialist?" by Isaac Franck; "De Natura," by Stewart Umphrey; "Analytic and Synthetic Methods in Spinoza's Ethics," by Richard Kennington. (shrink)

Why would Sir Thomas More write a letter to Alice Alington under the name of Margaret More Roper? To answer that question, this essay examines the political and familial circumstances of the letter's composition, its artfully concealed design of forensic oratory, and use of indirect argument. A careful analysis of the letter's rhetorical strategy will reveal further that More crafted his defense of conscience with allusion to the question of counsel from Utopia, whether or not a philosopher should (...) enter into a king's service. In the Alington letter, from More's position as an imprisoned, former Chancellor of England, he revised civic humanism's call for political engagement into a powerful statement of defiance against King Henry VIII. (shrink)

The nature of light is a focus of Thomas Hobbes’s natural philosophical project. Hobbes’s explanation of the light of lucid bodies differs across his works, from dilation and contraction in Elements of Law to simple circular motions in De corpore. However, Hobbes consistently explains perceived light by positing that bodily resistance generates the phantasm of light. In Letters I.XIX–XX of Philosophical Letters, fellow materialist Margaret Cavendish attacks the Hobbesian understanding of both lux and lumen by claiming that Hobbes (...) has illicitly made abstractions from matter. In this paper, I argue that Cavendish’s criticisms rely on an incorrect understanding of the nature of Hobbesian geometry and the role it plays in Hobbes’s natural philosophy. Rather than understanding geometry as wholly abstract, Hobbes attempts to ground geometry in different ways of considering bodies and their motions. Furthermore, Hobbes’s own criticisms of abstraction suggest that he would share many of the worries she raises but deny that he falls prey to them. (shrink)