This book brings together an international group of scholars to discuss the ramifications of Heidegger's Black Notebooks for philosophy and the humanities. In contrast to both those who seek to exonerate Heidegger and those who simply condemn him, they urge careful reading and rereading of his work to turn Heideggerian thought against itself.

Contemporary metaphysics is dominated by the view that every object belongs to a kind permanently in the sense that it cannot cease to belong to that kind without thereby ceasing to exist. For example, some philosophers think that a person is destroyed if they cease to be a person, a statue is destroyed if it ceases to be a statue, and so on. I believe that this standard view is false. Being a person, or a statue, or etc., is like (...) being a child: just as I did not cease to exist when I ceased to be a child, so people and statues need not cease to exist when they cease to be people and statues. Borrowing a term from Daniel Korman (who uses it in a similar but perhaps not identical way), I call this view phasalism because it entails that the kind-properties which ordinary objects instantiate are phase sortal properties, i.e., kind-properties that an object can instantiate for a temporary phase of its career. This dissertation is a partial defense of phasalism. I develop a phasalist metaphysics in detail, highlighting its virtues and rebutting objections along the way. After some stage-setting (Chapter 1), I defend a phasalist criterion of identity over time for ordinary objects (Chapter 2), as well as a phasalist account of the role that sortal properties play in the identity over time of ordinary objects (Chapter 3). Then I defend a phasalist-friendly approach to the identity over time of lumps, hunks, pieces, etc. of matter (Chapter 4). The material in these chapters amounts to a phasalist solution to certain material coincidence puzzles, such as the puzzle of the statue and the piece of clay. I go on to show that familiar puzzles about undetached parts (Chapter 5) and fission (Chapter 6) can be solved within the confines of my phasalist metaphysics as well. (shrink)

Unravels the philosophical, literary, and personal theaters of faith, self-deception, communion, difficult reality, and existential crisis in texts by Kierkegaard, Melville, Henry Bugbee, and others.

Subjectivity: exposure, care, response -- On self, others, goods, and final faith -- On style and pseudonymity -- A faith that defies self-deception -- On reflexivity, vision, and the self -- On faith, the maternal, and postmodernism -- Socratic self-sufficiency, Christian dependency -- On authenticity -- The garden of death: faith as interpersonal -- When is death?.

Heidegger's later thought is a thinking of things, so argues Andrew J. Mitchell in The Fourfold. Heidegger understands these things in terms of what he names "the fourfold"--a convergence of relationships bringing together the earth, the sky, divinities, and mortals--and Mitchell's book is the first detailed exegesis of this neglected aspect of Heidegger's later thought. As such it provides entré to the full landscape of Heidegger's postwar thinking, offering striking new interpretations of the atomic bomb, technology, plants, animals, (...) weather, time, language, the holy, mortality, dwelling, and more. What results is a conception of things as ecstatic, relational, singular, and, most provocatively, as intrinsically tied to their own technological commodification. A major new work that resonates beyond the confines of Heidegger scholarship, The Fourfold proposes nothing less than a new phenomenological thinking of relationality and mediation for understanding the things around us. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Literature, Fiction, and Truth Literary Cognitivism Thought Experiments Genres Learning by Supposing De se Suppositions.

Metaphysics is largely an a priori business, albeit a business that is sensitive to the findings of the physical sciences. This chapter has two aims. The first is to defend a particular conception of the methodology of a priori metaphysics by, in part, exemplifying that methodology and revealing its results. The second is to present a new account of holes. These two aims dovetail nicely. The chapter provides a better analysis of the concept ′hole′ that yields a more plausible metaphysical (...) story about holes. The authors defend a new, functionalist, analysis of holes, which, unlike its rivals, neither misidentifies nor renders them implausibly eliminativist about holes under various different metaphysical suppositions about the nature of space. In the process, the authors set out the complex relations between the intension of "hole," and its extension at various worlds under different suppositions about the nature of space. (shrink)

Ismael aims for an understanding of the nature of an embedded perspective of agents in a world. If successful, this would explain a cluster of ways in which from an embedded perspective, we experience the world in an array of temporally asymmetric ways. Moreover, these are ways that have led many philosophers to rather metaphysically inflationary views about the nature of time, according to which time itself really is dynamical, and is characterized by the movement of an objectively (i.e., non-perspectival) (...) present. Ismael aims to explain these features of our experience without positing any such metaphysical picture. She argues that there are constraints which prevent us from taking this Olympian conception of the world and our place in it, and that these, jointly, explain why we experience the world in these temporally asymmetric ways. We take up two related questions. First, what it would mean to say that these constraints are not merely epistemic, and second, how far these constraints get us in explaining why we experience the world in these ways. (shrink)

Future-bias is the preference, all else being equal, for negatively valenced events be located in the past rather than the future, and positively valenced ones to be located in the future rather than the past. Strong risk aversion is the preference to pay some cost to mitigate the badness of the worst outcome. People who are both strongly risk averse and future-biased can face a series of choices that will guarantee them more pain, for no compensating benefit: they will be (...) pain pumped. Thus, combining these preferences is rationally impermissible. Dougherty (2011) argues that this gives us reason to think that future-bias is rationally impermissible. This argument, and a similar one presented by Greene and Sullivan (2015), relies on the idea that if several preferences are not rationally combinable, then in the absence of some explanation of why they are not combinable, we should conclude that (at least) one of them is rationally impermissible. We take up this question by, inter alia, reflecting on the empirical results of a study we ran that probes people’s risk averse and future-biased preferences. We argue that the data, in conjunction with other considerations, suggests that we should not infer from the irrationality of the combination of these preferences to the irrationality of one of the preferences singly. We also argue that given the descriptive data about these preferences, there is no reason to think that, if one of them is rationally impermissible, then it is future-bias. (shrink)

Source [1] Andrew E. P. Mitchell, Federica Galli, Sondra Butterworth. (2023). Editorial: Equality, diversity and inclusive research for diverse rare disease communities. Front. Psychol., vol. 14. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1285774. "It is also important to recognize that certain mental health disorders are classified as rare conditions and have their own cultural concepts of distress, as defined in the DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013)" and require “equal attention and support for individuals and their families, both physically and emotionally”. [1].

A confluence of scholarly interest has resulted in a revival of Thomistic scholarship across the world. Several areas in the investigation of St. Thomas Aquinas, however, remain under-explored. This volume contributes to two of these neglected areas. First, the volume evaluates the contemporary relevance of St. Thomas's views for the philosophy and practice of education. The second area explored involves the intersections of the Angelic Doctor’s thought and the numerous cultures and intellectual traditions of the East. Contributors to this section (...) examine the reception, creative appropriation, and various points of convergence between St. Thomas and the East. (shrink)

With stories, anecdotes, and a discussion about the strong connection between theory and best practices, this guide will help you understand the value of applying your knowledge of educational theory to your work as you refine your practices, create thoughtful curriculum, and do your best to raise the standards of early childhood education.

State and civil society -- Empire without state -- Politics of life -- Saint Foucault -- Blood-dried codes -- The state of immanence -- Virtual state-making -- When society prevails -- Political and economic theology -- Foucault's apologia of neoliberalism.

Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: surveying the landscape and defining terms -- The seventeenth-century denigration of tradition and a nineteenth-century response -- Michael oakeshott and the epistemic role of tradition -- Alasdair macintyre's tradition-constituted inquiry -- Michael polanyi and role of tacit knowledge -- The incoherence of liberalism and the response of tradition -- Afterword: a conservatism worth conserving, or conservatism as stewardship -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

Presents twenty-five papers written by different professionals from historians, philosophers, legal experts, political scientists, civil engineers to examine the aesthetics of technology and science.

Don't fence me in : Rorty and Sartre -- On freedom and action : Dewey and Sartre -- A (neo) American in Paris : Bourdieu and Mead -- Mead on cosmopolitanism, sympathy, and war -- W.E.B. Du Bois : double-consciousness, Jamesian sympathy, and the cosmopolitan -- Self-concept in the new sociology of ideas : reflections on Neil Gross's Richard Rorty : the making of an American philosopher -- Eros and self-determination -- What if Hegel's master and slave were women?

Over the last two decades J.N. Williams has developed an account of the absurdity of such utterances as Its raining but I dont believe it that is both intuitively plausible and applicable to a wide variety of forms that this so-called Moorean absurdity can take. His approach is also noteworthy for making only minimal appeal to principles of epistemic or doxastic logic in its account of such absurdity. We first show that Williams places undue emphasis upon assertion and belief: It (...) is similarly absurd for a person to accept a proposition P as a supposition for the sake of argument while denying that her state of mind is one of supposing P, yet Williams has no account of this. Williams approach is then modified to account for such a case. That modification employs a principle of doxastic logic that is at least plausible as the one on which Williams relies, while being unlike his principle in applying to cases other than belief. (shrink)

Presenting an understanding of the mind, emotions, and communication, Calm, Clear, and Loving invites an understanding of the transformation of mind, both in a meditative and therapeutic context. It is relevant to those dealing with histories of abuse and trauma, for those in the fields of mental health, and for those on meditative and spiritual evolution.

A biblically informed guidebook for Christians facing difficult health care decisions, from the making of life (infertility, organ donation, cloning) and taking of life (abortion, euthanasia) to the technologically driven faking of life (genetic engineering, etc.).

A biblically informed guidebook for Christians facing difficult health care decisions, from the making of life (infertility, organ donation, cloning) and taking of life (abortion, euthanasia) to the technologically driven faking of life (genetic engineering, etc.).

Andrew Simester’s new book, Fundamentals of Criminal Law: Responsibility, Culpability, and Wrongdoing, is a masterful analysis of the doctrines of the general part of the criminal law and the multiple, overlapping functions that those doctrines serve. Along the way, Simester makes explicit what criminal law theorists routinely presuppose—that the ordinary words “blameworthiness” and “culpability” pick out the same moral concept. This essay argues that this assumed equivalence is mistaken: two concepts are in play, not one. Roughly, to be blameworthy is (...) to be justly liable to blaming practices in virtue of being at fault, and to be culpable is to act in a fashion that manifests or issues from insufficient concern for morally weighty interests. Culpability is not identical to blameworthiness, but rather a ground of blameworthiness: to be culpable is one way to be at fault, thus one way to be blameworthy. More importantly, culpability is not the exclusive ground of blameworthiness; an agent can be at fault, hence blameworthy, without being culpable. This essay defends these conceptual claims and draws forth some implications for two theses that Simester advances: that it is morally permissible to punish persons for criminal negligence and that it is unjust to punish persons who don’t deserve it. (shrink)

In 1979, neuroscientists Libet, Wright, Feinstein and Pearl introduced the “delay-and-antedating” hypothesis/paradox based on the results of an on-going series of experiments dating back to 1964 that measured the neural adequacy [brain wave activity] of “conscious sensory experience”. What is fascinating about the results of this experiment is the implication, especially when considered in the light of Merleau-Ponty’s notions of “intentionality” and the “pre-reflective life of human motility”, that the body, and hence not solely the mind, is a thinking thing. (...) The experiments and conclusions of Libet et al. have attracted considerable academic attention and have been used in the development of psychological theories on automotivism and the adaptive unconscious. Moreover, they have engendered a series of important considerations in respect of the question of free will. This paper outlines the connections between the findings of Libet et al. and Merleau-Ponty’s ontology as presented in the Phenomenology of Perception. It is not our intention to argue that the former amounts to new wine in old bottles, but rather to show counterfactually that Merleau-Ponty’s ontology provides a theoretical framework which explains the experimental data obtained by Libet et al., and provides further speculative confirmation of the work stemming from neuro-physical research and emerging theories on the adaptive unconscious. (shrink)

At Republic 435c-d and again at 504b-e, Plato has Socrates object to the city/soul analogy and declare that a “longer way” is necessary for gaining a more “exact grasp” of the soul. I argue that it is in the Philebus, in Socrates’ presentation of the “god-given” method of dialectic and in his distinctions of the kinds of pleasure and knowledge, that Plato offers the resources for reaching this alternative account. To show this, I explore (1) the limitations of the tripartition (...) of the soul that Socrates’ own objections in the Republic suggest, (2) the route of the “longer way” through the Eleatic dialogues to the Philebus, (3) the procedures that constitute the “god-given” method and the structure of the eidetic field it discloses, and (4) the resources that, considered in light of the method, Socrates’ distinctions of the kinds of pleasure and knowledge provide for the more “exact grasp” of the soul. (shrink)

Change is the fundamental idea of evolution. Explaining the extraordinary biological change we see written in the history of genomes and fossil beds is the primary occupation of the evolutionary biologist. Yet it is a surprising fact that for the majority of evolutionary research, we have rarely studied how evolution typically unfolds in nature, in changing ecological environments, over space and time. While ecology played a major role in the eventual acceptance of the population genetic viewpoint of evolution in the (...) synthetic era (circa 1918-1956), it held a lesser role in the development of evolutionary theory until the 1980s, when we began to systematically study the evolutionary dynamics of natural populations in space and time. As a result, early evolutionary theory was initially constructed in an abstract vacuum that was unrepresentative of evolution in nature. The subtle synthesis between ecology with evolutionary biology (eco-evo synthesis) over the past 40 years has progressed our knowledge of natural selection dynamics as they are found in nature, thus revealing how natural selection varies in strength, direction, form, and, more surprisingly, level of biological organization. Natural selection can no longer be reduced to lower levels of biological organization (i.e., individuals, selfish genes) over shorter timescales but should be expanded to include adaptation at higher levels and over longer timescales. Long-term and/or emergent evolutionary phenomena, such as multilevel selection or evolvability, have thus become tenable concepts within an evolutionary biology that embraces ecology and spatiotemporal change. Evolutionary biology is currently suspended at an intermediate stage of scientific progress that calls for the organization of all the recent knowledge revealed by the eco-evo synthesis into a coherent and unified theoretical framework. This is where philosophers of biology can be of particular use, acting as a bridge between the subdisciplines of biology and inventing new theoretical strategies to organize and accommodate the recent knowledge. Philosophers have recommended transitioning away from outdated philosophies that were originally derived from physics within the philosophical zeitgeist of logical positivism (i.e., monism, reductionism, and monocausation) and toward a distinct philosophy of biology that can capture the natural complexity of multifaceted biological systems within diverse ecosystems—one that embraces the emerging philosophies of pluralism, emergence, and multicausality. Therefore, I see recent advances in ecology, evolutionary biology, and the philosophy of biology as laying the groundwork for another major biological synthesis, what I refer to as the Second Synthesis because, in many respects, it is analogous to the aims and outcomes of the first major biological synthesis (but is notably distinct from the inorganic and contrived progressive movement known as the extended evolutionary synthesis). With the general development of a distinctive philosophy of science, biology has rightfully emerged as an autonomous science. Thus, while the first synthesis legitimized biology, the Second Synthesis autonomized biology and afforded biology its own philosophy, allowing biology to finally realize its full scientific potential. (shrink)

This chapter examines Davidson's treatment of emotions as complexly bound up with cognitive states such as belief, rather than as being essentially opposed to such states. Emotions on Davidson's view can be justified, and can be both causes of and reasons for action. We also consider Davidson's elucidation and defense of David Hume's analysis of pride and similar affective states. Objections to that elucidation and defense are discussed, and it is explained how Davidson could rebut those objections. Davidson's theory is (...) then discussed in light of unconscious emotions, irrational emotions, and the possibility of nonhuman animals possessing emotions. (shrink)

A Marriage Made in Hell Where did they come from, these furiously self-righteous “social justice warriors”? The growing radicalism and intolerance on the American left is the result of the strange union of Nietzsche’s “will to power” and a secularized Puritan moralism. In this penetrating study, Mark T. Mitchell explains how this marriage made in hell gave birth to a powerful and destructive political and social movement. Having declared that “God is dead,” Friedrich Nietzsche identified the “will to power” (...) as the fundamental force of human life. There is no good or evil in a Nietzschean world—only the interests of the strong. Reason and the common good have no place there. The Puritan, by contrast, is morally rigorous, zealous to promote virtue and punish vice. America’s Puritan tradition, now thoroughly de-Christianized, has been reduced to a self-righteous moral absolutism that focuses on the faults of others, intent on avenging the sins of society, institutions, and the past in pursuit of the secularized ideals of equality, diversity, and social justice. As Nietzsche’s ideas have permeated our culture, a new generation of radicals has embraced the rhetoric and tactics of the will to power. But the strength of America’s residual Puritanism keeps them only half-baked Nietzscheans. More Christian than they care to admit, they cling to a moralism that Nietzsche would despise. The incoherence of their mixed creed dooms social justice warriors to perpetual frustration. Their identity politics generates ever more radical demands that can never be satisfied, further fracturing a society in desperate need of a unifying myth. We seem to be left with only two options, Mitchell concludes—Nietzsche or Christ, the will to power or the will to truth. The choice is bracingly simple. (shrink)

This study examines a moderated/mediated model of ethical leadership on follower job satisfaction and affective organizational commitment. We proposed that managers have the potential to be agents of virtue or vice within organizations. Specifically, through ethical leadership behavior we argued that managers can virtuously influence perceptions of ethical climate, which in turn will positively impact organizational members’ flourishing as measured by job satisfaction and affective commitment to the organization. We also hypothesized that perceptions of interactional justice would moderate the ethical (...) leadership-to-climate relationship. Our results indicate that ethical leadership has both a direct and indirect influence on follower job satisfaction and affective commitment. The indirect effect of ethical leadership involves shaping perceptions of ethical climate, which in turn, engender greater job satisfaction and affective organizational commitment. Furthermore, when interactional justice is perceived to be high, this strengthens the ethical leadership-to-climate relationship. (shrink)

In this essay, I revisit and extend my arguments for a view of science that is pluralistic, perspectival and pragmatist. I attempt to resolve mismatches between metaphysical assumptions, epistemological desiderata, and scientific practice. I consider long-held views about unity of science and reductionism, emergent properties and physicalism, exceptionless necessity in explanatory laws, and in the justification for realism. My solutions appeal to the partiality of representation, the perspectivism of theories and data, and the interactive co-construction of warranted claims for realism.

This chapter contains section titles: The Proliferation of Handles Why the Two‐Dimensionalist Needs Millikan's Positive Story Nodding Along to the Positive Story So What is There to Disagree About? When is a Term a Natural Kind Term? What Role Does the Deference to Naturalness Play in Natural Kind Terms and Concepts? The Commonality between Narrowly Similar Agents Some Arguments and Some Diagnoses Two Projects.

Taking a pragmatist stance toward the practices and products of science shapes our answers to central philosophical questions. In argue that from within a perspective consisting of goals, actions and questions, what we say there is and what we say it does, is justified by the ongoing interactions among representative models, causal experience and experiment, and conceptual frameworks in reaching a fallible convergence to what is real. I offer a non-dichotomous alternative. I propose an alternative to fundamentalist approaches, arguing that (...) what we are justified in claiming as real phenomena are the affordances constructed from the integration of top-down and bottom-up strategies. (shrink)

Intends to pursue phenomenology in a number of areas. Featuring the appearances of houses, landscapes, places, people and history, this title includes specific studies that coalesce into a more general theory about appearances, place and time and thereby provide a phenomenology of the everyday.

Basileia and tyrannis: exploding myths -- Arete and the right to rule -- Ruling families -- Rulers in the polis -- Epilogue: Athens, ruling and arete.