Milgate and Stimson are first-rate historians of economic ideas."--Ian Shapiro, Yale University "This is a fascinating and elegant study of the development of political economy and its relationship to political thought.

Background: The factors influencing parents’ willingness to enroll their children in biobanks are poorly understood. This study sought to assess parents’ willingness to enroll their children, and their perceived benefits, concerns, and information needs under different consent and data-sharing scenarios, and to identify factors associated with willingness. Methods: This large, experimental survey of patients at the 11 eMERGE Network sites used a disproportionate stratified sampling scheme to enrich the sample with historically underrepresented groups. Participants were randomized to receive one of (...) three consent and data-sharing scenarios. Results: In total, 90,000 surveys were mailed and 13,000 individuals responded (15.8% response rate). 5737 respondents were parents of minor children. Overall, 55% (95% confidence interval 50–59%) of parents were willing to enroll their youngest minor child in a hypothetical biobank; willingness did not differ between consent and data-sharing scenarios. Lower educational attainment, higher religiosity, lower trust, worries about privacy, and attitudes about benefits, concerns, and information needs were independently associated with less willingness to allow their child to participate. Of parents who were willing to participate themselves, 25% were not willing to allow their child to participate. Being willing to participate but not willing to allow one’s child to participate was independently associated with multiple factors, including race, lower educational attainment, lower annual household income, public health care insurance, and higher religiosity. Conclusions: Fifty-five percent of parents were willing to allow their youngest minor child to participate in a hypothetical biobank. Building trust, protecting privacy, and addressing attitudes may increase enrollment and diversity in pediatric biobanks. (shrink)

Descartes's achievement is a radical reversal of the order of knowing, a subjectivism that places knowledge of the mind ahead of knowledge of material things, ...

Increasingly, the mind is being treated as a fit subject for scientific inquiry. As cognitive science and empirical psychology strive to uncover the mind's secrets, it is fitting to inquire as to what distinctive role is left for philosophy in the study of mind. This collection, which includes contributions by some of the leading scholars in the field, offers a rich variety of perspectives on this issue. Topics addressed include: the place of a priori inquiry in philosophy of mind, moral (...) psychology, consciousness, social dimensions of intentionality, the relation of logic to philosophical psychology, objectivity and the mind, and privileged access. (shrink)

The analytic method by which Descartes discovered the first principle of his philosophy—cogito, ergo sum—is a unique cognitive process of direct insight and nonlogical inference. It differs markedly from inductive as well as deductive procedures, but also from older models of the direct noetic apprehension of first principles, notably those of Plato and Aristotle. However, a critical examination of Descartes’s argument for the innateness of the idea of God shows that there are serious obstacles in the way of his employment (...) of the analytic method of discovery to reach this or any other conclusion about ideas that do not fall within the scope of ordinary human experience. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: The analytic method by which Descartes established the first principle of his philosophy is a unique cognitive process of direct insight and non-logical inference that differs markedly from the deductive model of noetic apprehension long associated with seventeenth-century rationalism. In this paper, it is shown that the same analytic process is at work in the Third Meditation proof of the innateness of the idea of God, where, however, there are serious doubts about its legitimacy.

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. We have changed, by insensible degrees, (...) our philosophy of economic life, our notions of what is reasonable and what is tolerable; and we have done this without changing our technique or our copybook maxims. Hence our tears and troubles. (shrink)

InLeibniz: Perception, Apperception, and Thought, Robert McRae alleges a flat “contradiction” at the heart of Leibniz's doctrine of three grades of monads: bare entelechies characterized by perception; animal souls capable both of perception and of sensation; and rational souls, minds or spirits endowed not only with capacities for perception and sensation but also with consciousness of self or what Leibniz calls “apperception.” Apperception is a necessary condition of those distinctively human mental processes associated with understanding and with reason. Insofar as (...) it is also a sufficient condition of rationality, it is not ascribable to animals. But apperception is a necessary condition of sensation or feeling as well; and animals are capable of sensation, according to Leibniz, who decisively rejected the Cartesian doctrine that beasts are nothing but material automata. “On the one hand,” writes McRae, “what distinguishes animals from lower forms of life is sensation or feeling, but on the other hand apperception is a necessary condition of sensation, and apperception distinguishes human beings from animals”. “We are thus left with an unresolved inconsistency in Leibniz's account of sensation, so far as sensation is attributable both to men and animals”. (shrink)

In two separate studies, published some four years apart, Robert McRae has argued the provocative thesis that the idea of extension is not to be numbered among the ideas accounted innate by Descartes, but among the adventitious. He has defended this view despite explicit statements to the contrary by Descartes both in the Correspondence and in the second part of the Principles of Philosophy. Against such evidence McRae has urged the overriding importance of the sixth Meditation, where, he alleges, Descartes (...) asserts “unequivocally… that the idea of extension is produced in us by bodies and is therefore not innate”. It is only in the later of the two studies that McRae's reasons for regarding the testimony of the sixth Meditation as authoritative are fully spelt out. Express statements to the contrary “must give away”, he writes, “for the proof of the existence of body by the adventitious idea of it is absolutely crucial to the Meditations”. In this paper I propose to challenge McRae's interpretation of the extension of the concept “innate idea”, while acknowledging his signal contribution to the clearing up of the intensional meaning, or rather meanings, of the concept of innateness. My thesis is that “extension” is an innate idea, though constraints of time will allow me to do little more than try to show that McRae's stated reasons for rejecting this view are not compelling. (shrink)

The problem of the person may be described as the crux of Descartes' philosophy in the fairly obvious literal sense that it is the point of intersection of the two chief axes of the system, the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Mind. The actual, if not professed aim of the former is the ousting of the occult powers and faculties of Scholastic-Aristotelian physics by the mechanical concept of force or action-by-contact. The chief tenet of the latter is that (...) mind, whose essence is thinking, is clearly and distinctly conceivable apart from matter, the essence of which is extension. From this, by an illicit inference which need not concern us further, Descartes concludes that the mind is “really distinct” from matter, that is, a substance capable of existing apart from body in its own right. Where these two lines of thought meet, the problem of the person constitutes itself in the following manner. (shrink)

It will come as no surprise that I have a different interpretation of the four passages in which, McRae claims, Descartes “definitely includes extension and its modes in what is given through the senses”. In the first, Descartes includes extension, etc., among his ideas of corporeal bodies. This is not to say that he includes them among his adventitious ideas, though. All adventitious ideas are ideas of external bodies. But the converse is not true. Not all ideas of corporeal bodies (...) are ipso facto adventitious ideas, for, as I see it, the idea of the true and immutable nature of body is non-sensible and innate. McRae slides from “all adventitious ideas seem to be ideas of external bodies” to “all ideas of external bodies are adventitious”. (shrink)

My discussion has four parts. In section 1, I reconstruct Leibniz’s early position on freedom and show how various problems motivated significant changes in Leibniz’s views over a short period of time. In section two, I outline a series of notes by Leibniz entitled “De Libertate a Necessitate in Eligendo,” where Leibniz develops a rudimentary theory of contingency that resembles the infinite analysis theory developed around 1686. In section three, I consider some reasons for why Leibniz dropped the “Eligendo” view. (...) In section four, I look at the link that Leibniz develops between an infinite series of reasons and indemonstrability and suggest how the rudimentary theory of “Eligendo” eventually became the infinite analysis theory of contingency. (shrink)

It is a pleasure to all of us to hold forth upon subjects about which we know very little. It is particularly a temptation to university professors to get away from the subjects of their own chairs and lecture as dogmatically as their nature demands on subjects of other people's chairs. That is why I am speaking to-night about Psychology. As to Vice, the case is a little different. Even if my own experience is regrettably limited, I have for some (...) years studied the Chairman, and I bring my observations before a society full of persons whose range and profundity of knowledge will be sufficient to correct any hasty generalizations on my part. (shrink)

By reflecting on a variety of cartoon representations of teachers and their work, this paper outlines a semiotic approach to undertaking research on teachers' professional cultures.

_Nietzsche and the Dionysian_ argues that the Dionysian affect in Nietzsche’s early work can be linked to an originary interruption of self-consciousness articulated by the philosophical companion, who compels us to respond to the plurality of life they express by being ‘true to the earth’ and ‘becoming who we are’. Such an ethics, compelled by the Dionysian affect, grounds any future for humanity in the affirmation of the earth and life.

Some have argued that advances in the science of human decision-making, particularly research on automaticity and unconscious priming, would ultimately thwart our commonsense understanding of free will and moral responsibility. Do people interpret this research as a threat to their self-understanding as free and responsible agents? We approached this question by seeing how feelings of surprise mediate the relationship between personal sense of control and third-personal attributions of free will and responsibility. Across three studies (N = 1,516) we found that (...) people with a greater sense of personal control were more surprised at the results of experiments showing effects of unconscious priming on moral behavior. Surprise differentially mediated the relationship between personal control and attributions of free will and responsibility: people attributed less free will and more responsibility as they were more surprised. This suggests that people exhibit defensive thinking with respect to responsibility, but not free will. (shrink)

Why are we accountable for negligent wrongdoing? This paper develops a contractualist account of accountability for negligent wrongdoing rooted in maintaining self-trust. Displays of negligence threaten the self-trust needed to exercise planning agency. People thus have reason to take responsibility for being negligent to defeat higher-order evidence about the unreliability of one’s planning agency. Individuals are rationally required to take responsibility for negligence in virtue of the demands of planning agency. One novel implication of this view is that taking responsibility (...) for negligence grounds our holding others responsible for negligence. (shrink)

Timothy O’Connor has recently defended a version of libertarianism that has significant advantages over similar accounts. One of these is an argument that secures indeterminism on the basis of an argument that shows how causal determinism threatens agency in virtue of the nature of the causal relation involved in free acts. In this paper, I argue that while it does turn out that free acts are not causally determined on O’Connor’s view, this fact is merely stipulative and the argument that (...) he presents for this conclusion begs the question. (shrink)

In this defense of Reliabilism, I argue that there has been 'selection for' accurate indexical beliefs. I offer empirical evidence and examples to suggest that Steve Stich's defense of the opposite claim in The Fragmentation of Reason is misguided.