Introduction: The Anarchist -- The Minister: 1756-93 -- The Philosopher: 1793 -- The Activist: 1794-95 -- The Husband: 1796-99 -- The Educator: 1800-09 -- The Father:1810-19 -- The Pensioner:1819-36 -- The Legacy.

A substantial balance of evidence favours the view that human souls have libertarian free will, that is the freedom to choose between alternative actions, despite all causal influences acting on them. Free will thus entails soul indeterminism, which entails brain indeterminism. There is no reason to suppose that the same laws govern the behaviour of the brain as govern any other physical system, since the brain is different from any other physical system in being in causal interaction with a soul. (...) In any case, its indeterminism may be ensured by Quantum indeterminism. The main evidence for soul indeterminism is, however, the fact that human counter‐suggestibility would be compatible with determinism only on the assumption of an a priori very unlikely mechanism for the production of beliefs. New Appendices E, F, and G discuss the relevance to this topic of different interpretations of Quantum Theory, of Gödel's Theorem and of Libet's experiments. (shrink)

1. Buch. Methodik.--2. Buch. Metaphysik.--3. Buch. Psychologie.--4. Buch. Ethik.

The teaching of evolution has always been a controversial issue in the United States. Despite the fact that evolution is accepted by biologists all over the world and the evidence is beyond dispute, the percentage of Americans who do not accept evolution hovers around 40%. (P.14) However, it's important to note that there are positive trends on the horizon. For example, the percentage of Americans under the age of 30 who accept evolution increases to about 68%. While several factors contribute (...) to this increase in acceptance and understanding, it's fair to say that improvements in science education have contributed to the increase. In order to continue this trend, it's essential that today's science teachers present their evolution lessons with confidence and a good depth of understanding. And since teachers are each other's best resources, this book offers to give science teachers a glimpse into the classrooms of effective evolution educators. In the book's foreword, one of the world's most imminent educators of science education, Dr. Richard Dawkins, offers his insights about evolution education in America. The chapters of twelve veteran science teachers follow. Each teacher shares their educational journeys, their insights, and their best practices in the hopes they can positively contribute to the scientific literacy of our nation. All of these teachers are members of the Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science, TIES (www.tieseducation.org). Under the direction of its director, Bertha Vazquez, TIES has presented over 200 TIES workshops and webinars in all 50 US States in the last 6 years. The authors in this book are all TIES presenters. They represent the varied voices of America's evolution educators. The astounding success of TIES is a testament to the importance of teacher training in evolution education. It is our hope that this book contributes to this ongoing professional development. (shrink)

After a brief, personal reflection on Aron Gurwitsch's life and his many influences on my career, I devote this lecture to some of the central themes of a phenomenology of medicine. Its core is the clinical encounter, which displays a certain structure I term the asymmetry of power and vulnerability —a complex contextual imbalance characterized by multiple points of view, hence points for reflective entrance. These are then interpreted phenomenologically in terms of epoché and reduction, evidence, reflection, and other related (...) themes. I conclude with a suggestion about "the fundamental method" of phenomenology, free fantasy variation. (shrink)

Philosophy and literature enjoy a close, complex relationship. Elucidating the connections between these two fields, this book examines the ways philosophy deploys literary means to advance its practice, particularly as a way of life that extends beyond literary forms and words into physical deeds, nonlinguistic expression, and subjective moods and feelings.

When the modern artist is seen as moving about in a nebulous area between two opposing worlds, that of life or immediate experience and that of art or established truth, I think it is appropriate to discuss this activity in terms of metaphor. Indeed the present concern for metaphor in the academic and artistic communities is but one of many reflections of our sense that life is a process of the gradual attainment of knowledge through experience, whether sensuous or intellectual. (...) Like our artists, we strive to create a picture of our world, yet that picture is never complete; for we continually pass on to new experiences and new images of reality. Not only do we grow and change but our world seems to change with us. Although the truths revealed through our art are founded in our experience, they seem more permanent and public than the acts of discovery leading to them. A principle once established and integrated with a body of other established truths enters into recorded history perhaps to be revered, disputed, or reinterpreted, but nevertheless to remain. The individual experience or discovery, however, passes; with the individual, only the sense of the continuing search yields personal identity. In a changing world, metaphor renders the truth of experience as the truth of knowledge, for it is the means of passing from individual immediacy to an established public world; the new must be linked to the old, and the experience of any individual must be connected with that of his society. Excluding the possibility of the creation of entirely new worlds and the resultant transformation of all personal identities, acts of genius or dramatic breakthroughs in fields of study can affect our present world order only if they are joined to it by means of a powerful metaphor. Indeed establishing the metaphoric bridge itself may be considered the act of genius, and the entry into new areas of knowledge is its consequence. Richard Shiff is associate professor of art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Seeing Cézanne" and, with Carl Pletsch, "History and Innovation". (shrink)

Social cognition differs from general cognition in its focus on understanding, perceiving, and interpreting social information. However, we argue that the significance of domain‐general processes for controlling cognition has been historically undervalued in social cognition and social neuroscience research. We suggest much of social cognition can be characterized as specialized feature representations supported by domain‐general cognitive control systems. To test this proposal, we develop a comprehensive working model, based on an interactive activation and competition architecture and applied to the control (...) of action. As such, we label the model “ICON” (interactive activation and competition model for the control of action). We used the ICON model to simulate human performance across various laboratory tasks. Our simulations emphasize that many laboratory‐based social tasks do not require socially specific control systems, such as those that are argued to rely on neural networks associated with theory‐of‐mind. Moreover, our model clarifies that perceived disruptions in social cognition, even in what appears to be disruption to the control of social cognition, can stem from deficits in social representation instead. We advocate for a “default stance” in social cognition, where control is usually general, but representation is specific. This study underscores the importance of integrating social cognition within the broader realm of domain‐general control processing, offering a unified perspective on task processing. (shrink)

Richard Sorabji presents a unique exploration of the development of moral conscience over 2500 years, from the playwrights of classical Greece to the present. His virtuoso study of the development of pagan, Christian, and secular conceptions of conscience culminates in a consideration of the nature, value, and role of conscience today.

RICHARD SHEDENHELM responds to Robert Campbell's essay, "Ayn Rand and the Cognitive Revolution in Psychology" . He identifies the most likely source of the crow-counting experiment cited at the beginning of chapter seven of Ayn Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. He finds that the crow study was not at all an experiment, but instead an anecdotal account dating from the eighteenth-century French writer of animal behavior, Charles-Georges Leroy.

Current philosophies of art remain sadly dominated by visions of its end and lamentations of decline. Defining the very notions of art and the aesthetic as special products of Western modernity, they suggest that postmodern challenges to traditional high culture pose a devastating danger to Art's future. Richard Shusterman's new book cuts through the seductive confusions of these views by tracing the earthy roots of aesthetic experience and showing how the recent flourishing of aesthetic forms outside modernity's sacralized realm (...) of fine art evince the persistent presence of an artistic impulse far deeper and more durable than the modernist moment. Performing Live defends the abiding power of aesthetic experience by exploring its diverse roles, methods, and meanings, especially in fields marginal to traditional aesthetics but now most vibrantly alive in today's culture and new media. Ranging from rap, techno, and country music to cinema, cyberspace and urban design, Shusterman develops his radical theory of "somaesthetics," charting the complex network of bodily arts so prominent in contemporary life and self-styling. By blending concrete aesthetic analysis with insightful social critique, Shusterman, a well-known pragmatist philosopher, provides a rich menu and critical guide for today's pursuit of the art of living. (shrink)

In his new introduction, "Note on a Missing Text," Richard Wolin uses the absence from this edition of an interview with Jacques Derrida as a springboard for ...

In his essay “Painting Memories” , Michael Fried identifies memory as the privileged thematic that structures Charles Baudelaire’s Salon of 1846. But he then limits his investigation of this topic by focusing on the representation of “past” art, to the exclusion of the recollection of “past” experience. Fried thus isolates the theme of memory from the dialectic of life and art that characterizes its performance for Baudelaire. Such selective analysis not only reverses Baudelaire’s priorities but deflects his pointed comments on (...) modernity and naiveté, which in turn inform the example of Edouard Manet, Fried’s exemplary modernist painter. One wonders whether too much of Baudelaire and Manet is lost to this view. Perhaps the predilections of contemporary criticism have sanctioned Fried’s approach. For today we hesitate to ground art in experience, preferring to conceive of representations as signs fully engendered by and engendering other signs. Baudelaire was of a different mind; he lived through the dawning of our own age, but also in the fading light of another. He was heir to a tradition that regarded the forms of art as powerfully motivated by the experience of internalized ideas and sensations; for him, a master artist’s “signs” would appear more symbolic than allegorical, more immediate than mediated or distanced. As we deny artistic signs motivation in extralinguistic “experience,” we aggravate that perennial problem of origins which Fried himself invokes. It might be reformulated in this manner: all painting depends on a lineage of antecedent painting; yet, to succeed, a new work must transcend its filial bondage, as it compounds the effect of the “original” in its own originality. Vexation follows from this issue of the artistic source. Since memories of past art make possible the very creation of art, the creative event cannot assume priority over memory. And the matter of primordial memory, like the matter of an absolutely original art, is aporia. Fried does not pursue this matter ; but the question necessarily implies that both representations and memories, in constituting the “past,” must always be distanced. Distanced not from the present, which they enter and likewise constitute, but from those “original” experiential moments they purport to present. Richard Schiff is associate professor of art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Cézanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art and is currently working on a study of modernism in relation to classicism and a related study of photographic realism. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Seeing Cézanne” , “Art and Life: A Metaphoric Relationship” , and, with Carl Pletsch, “History and Innovation”. (shrink)

Systematics based solely on structuralist principles is non-science because it is derived from first principles that are inconsistent in dealing with both synchronic and diachronic aspects of evolution, and its evolutionary models involve hidden causes, and unnameable and unobservable entities. Structuralist phylogenetics emulates axiomatic mathematics through emphasis on deduction, and “hypotheses” and “mapped trait changes” that are actually lemmas and theorems. Sister-group-only evolutionary trees have no caulistic element of scientific realism. This results in a degenerate systematics based on patterns of (...) fact or evidence being treated as so fundamental that all other data may be mapped to the cladogram, resulting in an apparently well-supported classification that is devoid of evolutionary theory. Structuralism in systematics is based on a non-ultrametric analysis of sister-group informative data that cannot detect or model a named taxon giving rise to a named taxon, resulting in classifications that do not reflect macroevolutionary changes unless they are sister lineages. Conservation efforts are negatively affected through epistemological extinction of scientific names. Evolutionary systematics is a viable alternative, involving both deduction and induction, hypothesis and theory, developing trees with both synchronic and diachronic dimensions often inferring nameable ancestral taxa, and resulting in classifications that advance evolutionary theory and explanations for particular groups. (shrink)

Unterschiedliche Szenarien, die neue Entdeckungen in der Genetik betreffen, bilden den Ausgangspunkt für diese Untersuchung. Um einen angemessenen Kontext zur Verfügung zu stellen, folgt nach einer kurzen Diskussion der schwierigen Beziehungen zwischen Philosophie und Medizin eine Reflexion über verschiedene Implikationen des neuen biologischen Wissens und der daraus resultierenden Technologien für die medizinische Praxis. Von besonderem Interesse sind dabei frühere Diskussionen dieser Implikationen von Genetikern, insbesondere im Hinblick auf eine Erneuerung der Evolutionstheorie und ihrer klinischen Applikationen sowie einen daraus hervorgehenden Disput (...) über in-vitro-Fertilisation, der den Ausgangspunkt für die gegenwärtigen Kontroversen über genetische Entdeckungen bildet. Danach werden einige zentrale Punkte angesprochen: Die Kontrolle über die Reproduktion des Menschen und neuerliche philosophische Debatten über die Signifikanz genetischer Entdeckungen für die philosophischen Fragen der Identität und des Rechts auf Privatheit. Danach wird die These aufgestellt, daß ein neues Modell, das der Molekularbiologie, sich im Bereich der Medizin ausgebreitet hat, das im Themenkreis von Ethik, Recht und Philosophie für das 21. Jahrhundert völlig neue Fragen aufwirft.Several scenarios involving new discoveries in genetics set the stage for an analysis. To provide a proper context, a brief discussion of the vexed relations between philosophy and medicine is followed by a reflection on several implications of new biological knowledge and its resulting technologies for medical practice. Of particular interest are earlier discussions by geneticists of these implications, especially for renewed assessments of evolution theory and clinical applications, and one resulting dispute, about in vitro fertilization, which sets the stage for current controversies occasioned by genetic discoveries. Attention is then given to several central issues: control over human reproduction and renewed philosophical disputes over the significance of genetic discoveries for philosophical questions of personal identity and privacy. It is then suggested that a new model, molecular biology, has come into place for medicine, presenting wholly novel questions for the twenty-first century in ethics, law and philosophy. (shrink)

There have been few tests of whether exposure to naturalistic or experimental disease-threat inductions alter disgust sensitivity, although it has been hypothesized that this should occur as part of disgust’s disease avoidance function. In the current study, we asked Macquarie university students to complete measures of disgust sensitivity, perceived vulnerability to disease, hand hygiene behavior and impulsivity, during Australia’s Covid-19 pandemic self-quarantine period, in March/April 2020. These data were then compared to earlier Macquarie university, and other local, and overseas student (...) cohorts, to determine if disgust sensitivity and the other measures, were different in the lockdown sample. The most consistent finding in the lockdown sample was of higher core disgust sensitivity, with some evidence of greater germ aversion on the PVD, and an increase in hand and food-related hygiene, but with little change in impulsivity. The consistency with which greater core disgust sensitivity was observed, suggests exposure to a highly naturalistic disease threat is a plausible cause. Greater disgust sensitivity may have several functional benefits and may arise implicitly from the threat posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. (shrink)

This chapter argues that Hobbes believed that we have to assent inwardly as well as outwardly to the determinations of the sovereign, unless—surprisingly—we adhere to the Jewish or Christian religions. In those cases, we have made a civil covenant with God which in some respects trumps the covenant we have made to erect our normal commonwealth. The significance of this, the author claims, is that it brings out clearly the fact that our civil sovereign is internally authoritative because otherwise there (...) would have been no need for Hobbes to argue that God’s internal authority over the Jew or Christian itself rests on a civil covenant. (shrink)

Richard Smith; Skills: the middle way, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 21, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 197–201, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1.

Richard Sorabji presents a unique discussion of the development of moral conscience over a period of 2500 years, from the playwrights of the fifth century BCE to the present. He addresses key topics including the original meaning and continuing nature of conscience, the ideas of freedom of religion and conscience with climaxes in the early Christian centuries and the seventeenth, the disputes on absolution or 'terrorisation' of conscience, dilemmas of conscience, and moral double-bind, the reliability of conscience if it (...) is shaped by local custom, and modern opposition to the idea of conscience and its role in legislation. (shrink)

Richard Swinburne presents a new edition of the final volume of his acclaimed trilogy on philosophical theology. Faith and Reason is a self-standing examination of the implications for religious faith of Swinburne's famous arguments about the coherence of theism and the existence of God.By practising a particular religion, a person seeks to achieve some or all of three goals - that he worships and obeys God, gains salvation for himself, and helps others to attain their salvation. But not all (...) religions commend worship, and different religions have different conceptions of salvation. Faced with these differences, Richard Swinburne argues that we should practice that religion which has the best goals and is more probably true than the creeds of other religions. He proposes criteria by which to determine the probabilities of different religious creeds, and he argues that, while requiring total commitment, faith does not demand fully convinced belief. While maintaining the same structure and conclusions as the original classic, this second edition has been substantially rewritten, both in order to relate its ideas more closely to those of classical theologians and philosophers and to respond to more recent views. In particular he discusses, and ultimately rejects, the view of Alvin Plantinga that the 'warrant' of a belief depends on the process which produced it, and John Hick's contention that all religions offer valid paths to salvation. (shrink)

[Richard Wollheim] Any experiential view of pictorial meaning will assign to each painting an appropriate experience through which its mean can be recovered. When the meaning is representational, what is the nature of the appropriate experience? If there is agreement that the experience is to be described as seeing-in, disagreement breaks out about how seeing-in is to be understood. This paper challenges two recent interpretations: one in terms of perceived resemblance, the other in terms of imagining seeing. Neither view (...) gives a correct account of how the spectator distributes his attention between the marked surface and the represented object. /// [Robert Hopkins] I offer two, complementary, accounts of the visual nature of representational picturing. One, in terms of six features of depiction, sets an explanatory task. The other, in terms of the experience to which depiction gives rise, promises to meet that need. Elsewhere I have offered an account of this experience that allows this promise to be fulfilled. I sketch that view, and defend it against Wollheim's claim that it cannot meet certain demands on a satisfactory account. I then turn to Wollheim's own view, arguing that it suffers from crucial obscurities. These prevent it from meeting the explanatory commitments I describe, and are only exacerbated by the demands Wollheim himself imposes. (shrink)

Few twentieth-century thinkers have proven as influential as Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural and literary critic. Richard Wolin's book remains among the clearest and most insightful introductions to Benjamin's writings, offering a philosophically rich exposition of his complex relationship to Adorno, Brecht, Jewish Messianism, and Western Marxism. Wolin provides nuanced interpretations of Benjamin's widely studied writings on Baudelaire, historiography, and art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In a new Introduction written especially for this edition, Wolin discusses (...) the unfinished _Arcades Project_, as well as recent tendencies in the reception of Benjamin's work and the relevance of his ideas to contemporary debates about modernity and postmodernity. (shrink)

We describe the important role that the conjectures and questions posed at the end of the two editions of Gerald Sacks's Degrees of Unsolvability have had in the development of recursion theory over the past thirty years.

Richard Sorabji presents a fascinating study of Gandhi's philosophy in comparison with Christian and Stoic thought. He shows that Gandhi was a true philosopher, who not only aimed to give a consistent self-critical rationale for his views, but also thought himself obliged to live by what he taught.