Research over the past half century has produced extensive evidence that observers cannot report or retain all of the details of their visual world from one moment to the next. During the past decade, a new set of studies has illustrated just how pervasive these limits are. For example, early evidence for the failure to detect changes to simple dot patterns (Phillips, 1974) and arrays of letters (Pashler, 1988) generalizes to more naturalistic displays such as photographs and motion pictures (e.g., (...) Levin & Simons, 1997; Rensink, O’Regan, & Clark, 1997; see Rensink, 2002 for a recent review). This failure to report changes (change blindness) can be induced in both simple and naturalistic displays, whenever the change co-occurs with a visual disruption such as an eye movement (Currie, McConkie, Carlson-Radvansky, & Irwin, 1995; Hollingworth, Schrock, & Henderson, 2001), image shift (Blackmore, Brelstaff, Nelson, & Troscianko, 1995), flashed blank screen (Rensink et al., 1997), blink (O’Regan, Deubel, Clark, & Rensink, 2000), transient (O’Regan, Rensink, & Clark, 1999; Rensink, O’Regan, & Clark, 2000), movie cut or pan (Levin & Simons, 1997; Simons, 1996), or an occlusion event (Levin, Simons, Angelone, & Chabris, 2002; Simons & Levin, 1998). Change blindness can also occur in the absence of a disruption, provided the change occurs gradually enough that it does not attract attention (Simons, Franconeri, & Reimer, 2000). -/- Failures of visual awareness have been induced in a number of ways. For example, observers often fail to report a visible but unexpected stimulus when attention is focused on some other object or event in the display (inattentional blindness). As for change blindness, inattentional blindness occurs for both simple (Mack & Rock, 1998; Most et al., 2001) and naturalistic stimuli (Simons & Chabris, 1999). Similarly, repeated instances of an item often go undetected when embedded in a rapid sequence (repetition blindness), a phenomenon that occurs for both words and pictures (Kanwisher, 1987; Kanwisher & Potter, 1990). Observers can also fail to detect a stimulus in a rapid stream of stimuli provided they had to perform an attention-demanding task shortly before the stimulus appeared (Shapiro, Arnell, & Raymond, 1997). The surprisingly large variety of conditions that induce failures of conscious perception reinforces the broad conclusion that we are often unaware of what would otherwise be fully-visible stimuli. -/- Along with an increased appreciation of the limitations of visual awareness has come a renewed interest in using these limitations to explore the nature of the representations and processes underlying our visual experience. Are these limitations due to failures of perception? Of attention? Of memory? What is preserved with and without awareness? -/- The papers in this special issue of the Journal of Vision provide examples of exciting new work on induced failures of visual awareness and the mechanisms that underlie them. For example, several papers examine whether observers are drawn to parts of a display by the stimulus features or whether top-down control or semantic comprehension influence search through a display. Others investigate the nature of and limits on the information that is preserved from one view to the next and how much information needs to be retained for effective perception and action. As guest editors, we hope that this special issue will illustrate how studying the relationship between visual awareness and visual representations can lead to important new insights into the nature of seeing. (shrink)

Change blindness is the striking failure to see large changes that normally would be noticed easily. Over the past decade this phenomenon has greatly contributed to our understanding of attention, perception, and even consciousness. The surprising extent of change blindness explains its broad appeal, but its counterintuitive nature has also engendered confusions about the kinds of inferences that legitimately follow from it. Here we discuss the legitimate and the erroneous inferences that have been drawn, and offer a set of requirements (...) to help separate them. In doing so, we clarify the genuine contributions of change blindness research to our understanding of visual perception and awareness, and provide a glimpse of some ways in which change blindness might shape future research. (shrink)

The startle reflex provides a revealing model for examining the ways in which evolved neurophysiology shapes personal experience and patterns of recurrent social interaction. In the most diverse cultural contexts, in societies widely separated by time and space, the inescapable physiology of the reflex both shapes the experience of startle and biases the social usages to which the reflex is put. This book describes ways in which the startle reflex is experienced, culturally elaborated, and socially used in a wide variety (...) of times and places. It offers explanations both for the patterned commonalities found across cultural settings and for the differences engendered by diverse social environments. Boo! will intrigue readers in fields such as psychological anthropology, medical anthropology, general cultural anthropology, social psychology, cross-cultural psychiatry, evolutionary psychology, and human ethology. (shrink)

Our recent opinion article [1] examined what change blindness can and cannot tell us about visual representations. Among other things, we argued that change blindness can tell us a lot about how visual representations can be used, but little about their extent. We and others found the ‘sparse representations’ view appealing (and still do), and initially made the overly strong claim that change blindness supports the conclusion of sparse representations [2,3]. We wrote our article because change blindness continues to be (...) taken as evidence for sparse – or even absent – representations, and we used O’Regan and Noë’s influential paper [4] as an example. However, as has been noted for some time [5–8], this conclusion is logically flawed: lack of ability need not be caused by lack of representation. (shrink)

Preparing the Next Generation of Oral Historians is an invaluable resource to educators seeking to bring history alive for students at all levels. Filled with insightful reflections on teaching oral history, it offers practical suggestions for educators seeking to create curricula, engage students, gather community support, and meet educational standards. By the close of the book, readers will be able to successfully incorporate oral history projects in their own classrooms.

This book is a readers' companion to Simone Weil's The Need for Roots. It includes comprehensive and illuminating essays from recognized Weil scholars from the United States, Canada, England, France, and Germany, addressing the most pressing historical and contemporary aspects of Weil's thought and striking proposals. These include her substituting obligations for rights as the moral basis of society, her critique of our uprootedness and her proposals for rootedness, her critique of our dangerous understanding of greatness, the importance of work (...) for society, and her critique of modern science. This companion reader relies on the latest and most reliable work on the history of the Weil manuscript as provided by French scholars. It is unique in its thorough examination of the book's issues, which center around a spiritual renewal, first of France, but more broadly of western democracies. It includes a comprehensive introduction to the issues important to understanding The Need for Roots. Also included in the appendices are a new translation of Weil's preliminary study of obligations that was meant as an introduction to her work (but always published separately) as well as a translation of an address by Free French leader Andre Philippe-an address that helped set the moral issues that Weil would come to address. The book is both a scholarly contribution to understanding Weil's book and a striking set of conversations about many of the most pressing contemporary issues surrounding the possibilities of a spiritual and moral renewal of Western norms. The ultimate point of this companion is to stress the importance of Weil's The Need for Roots. In a time of clashing ideologies, politics of identity, and a desire, somehow in all that, to find a path to community and a way of respecting all human beings, The Need for Roots is now, more than ever, a timely book and one that needs careful examination and reflection. (shrink)

Delving into the newly identified genre of the philosophical autobiography, Dr. Ronald J. Manheimer's 'Mirrors of the mind' takes both the neophyte and the initiated on a unique literary and philosophical journey through the works of important thinkers who have changed the world or, at least, how we perceive it. This guided tour of the life of the mind covers nine self-reflective narratives ranging from fourth century Augustine's 'Confessions' to 20th century Simone de Beauvoir's 'The prime of life.'"--Back cover.

In Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility Martha Nussbaum applies her capabilities approach (CA) to justice to non-human sentient animals (hereafter animals). The book is very much an e...

Belief in the divine origin of the universe began to wane most markedly in the nineteenth century, when scientific accounts of creation by natural law arose to challenge traditional religious doctrines. Most of the credit - or blame - for the victory of naturalism has generally gone to Charles Darwin and the biologists who formulated theories of organic evolution. Darwinism undoubtedly played the major role, but the supporting parts played by naturalistic cosmogonies should also be acknowledged. Chief among these was (...) the nebular hypothesis proposed by Pierre Simon Laplace in 1796, which explained the origin of the solar system as a natural development over extended periods of time. Ronald Numbers focuses on Laplace's theory as it affected American scientific thought. he first traces the history of Laplace's cosmogony chronologically, from its European inception to its demise about 1900. the last three chapters explore some of the theological and scientific consequences resulting from the acceptance of this cosmogony. Most significant was the change in the status of supernatural doctrine. When the nebular hypothesis lost credence at the end of the nineteenth century, those who had before tried to accommodate natural theory with supernatural doctrine no longer felt compelled to do so when faced with succeeding theories. The nebular hypothesis, it seems, had established natural law in the heavens. (shrink)

Rather than assume a unitary cybernetics, I ask how its disunity mattered to the history of the human sciences in the United States from about 1940 to 1980. I compare the work of four prominent social scientists – Herbert Simon, George Miller, Karl Deutsch, and Talcott Parsons – who created cybernetic models in psychology, economics, political science, and sociology with the work of anthropologist Gregory Bateson, and relate their interpretations of cybernetics to those of such well-known cyberneticians as Norbert (...) Wiener, Warren McCulloch, W. Ross Ashby, and Heinz von Foerster. I argue that viewing cybernetics through the lens of disunity – asking what was at stake in choosing a specific cybernetic model – shows the complexity of the relationship between first-order cybernetics and the postwar human sciences, and helps us rethink the history of second-order cybernetics. (shrink)

Jean-Paul Sartre, novelist, playwright, biographer, was undoubtedly one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century. Above all, however, he was an embodiment of the engagé intellectual, active in a variety of political causes, as well as an individual who attempted to live his life in accordance with the philosophy he professed. These interviews take Sartre on a wide-ranging tour of his philosophy and politics. Here we have Simone de Beauvoir challenging Sartre on his own attitude towards machismo and feminism; (...) and Sartre responding thoughtfully to questions which range from Freud, Marx, and the drama of Bertolt Brecht to the Cultural Revolution, Stalinism, the May 'Events' and of course, the US war on Vietnam. Their breadth remains a testimony to one man's attempt to make philosophical sense of the tumultuous world around him. (shrink)

Several studies (e.g., Becklen & Cervone, 1983; Mack & Rock, 1998; Neisser & Becklen, 1975) have found that observers attending to a particular object or event often fail to report the presence of unexpected items. This has been interpreted as inattentional blindness (IB), a failure to see unattended items (Mack & Rock, 1998). Meanwhile, other studies (e.g., Pashler, 1988; Phillips, 1974; Rensink et al., 1997; Simons, 1996) have found that observers often fail to report the presence of large changes in (...) a display when these changes occur simultaneously with a transient such as an eye movement or flash of the display. This has been interpreted as change blindness (CB), a failure to see unattended changes (Rensink et al., 1997). In both cases there is a striking failure to report an object or event that would be quite visible under other circumstances. And in both cases there is a widespread (although not universal) belief that the underlying cause has to do with the absence of attention. The question then arises as to how these effects might be related. Is CB the same thing as IB? If not, what is the relation between them? And given that these phenomena deal with failures of subjective perception, what can they teach us about the nature of our visual experience? In particular, what can they teach us about the role played by visual attention? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.4 (2003) 571-572 [Access article in PDF] Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi, editors. The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xxx + 292. Cloth, $65.00. Paper, $23.00. The goal of the Cambridge Companion to Philosophy series has been to "dispel the intimidation" that students and non-specialists often experience when faced with the works of a "difficult and (...) challenging thinker" (i). Indeed, Emmanuel Levinas would qualify as such a thinker, whose work is firmly rooted in two traditions: (1) the admittedly abstruse and seminal phenomenologies of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and (2) Judaism, including the Talmudic tradition, the philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, as well as Levinas's experience with rampant anti-Semitism in twentieth-century Europe. The imminent danger in producing a collection with the express intent of making a challenging thinker accessible is that the force of the thought may become undermined by the process of simplification. The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, however, achieves its goal as a book that not only elucidates Levinas but also provides numerous essays that even the Levinasian scholar will find useful.Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi are directly responsible for the success of the Companion. These two editors have proven themselves as adept collaborators in the area of Levinasian philosophy with their earlier contribution to Indiana University Press's series Studies in Continental Thought: Re-reading Levinas (Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi, editors [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991]). This new cooperative effort offers essays that introduce Levinas's thought from the perspective of some of the many fields upon which he has had an influence including the philosophy of language, art, feminism, Judaism, phenomenology, and the philosophy of religion.Even with the many tangential fields to which Levinas's thought contributes, the Companion often refers to Derrida's metaphor which describes Levinas's work as a wave, the "same" wave, crashing on the beach with increasing demand. Derrida, however, is also partly responsible for the intensifying return of Levinas's work. Derrida's critique of Levinas's Totality and Infinity was the impetus behind Levinas's subsequent focus on language and the problematic of "how" one speaks of that which is outside being. Certainly, the Companion could have spent the majority of its pages outlining this philosophical, textual conversation, but such an explication would have compromised the accessibility of this introductory text to the non-specialists to whom this series caters. The editors, instead, chose to avoid Derrida's difficult critique while having a significant concentration of essays that deal with Levinas's philosophy of language. This allows neophyte students of Levinas to discover his intricate thought on language without necessary knowledge of the context as well as provide those scholars interested in the debate access to the most contemporary thought on the matter—at least from the Levinasian perspective. Readers are assured, then, that the Companion covers the difficult concepts of the speaking face from the early period to the later distinction of the "saying" and the "said," inspired by Derrida's critique.The Companion, unfortunately, seems one sided concerning an important aspect of Levinas's philosophy. Throughout his entire corpus, Levinas attributes his thought to the seminal work of Edmund Husserl, continually inviting his readers to begin again with Husserl's phenomenology. Rudolph Bernet contributes to this collection an outstanding analysis of Levinas's critique of Husserl, describing some of the departures that Levinas makes from Husserl's phenomenology. The rest of the Companion, however, makes note to downplay Levinas's positive indebtedness to phenomenology. Hillary Putnam promises to explain Levinas with a "minimum of reliance on any prior knowledge of the two great 'H's (Husserl/Heidegger)" (40). Adhering to her word, in an otherwise insightful essay, means that the phenomenological issue remains superficial. While it is never absent, Bernet's essay seems to have set the tone, placing Levinas in a position of opposition with Husserl with a minimum of discussion of what Levinas has called his adherence to the "spirit" of phenomenology. To the Companion's credit... (shrink)

The coming year introduces a notable name for commemoration-Simon Bolivar. Since his birth only two centuries have elapsed, it is true. Yet I propose to go back two millennia or more, to Rome: imperial Republic and world empire.The past is too much with us, so it may be objected anywhere, and not least in the New World. Why bring up “portions and parcels of the dreadful past” (I adopt the phrase of an English poet)? The lessons of history, it (...) will pertinently be observed, are either obvious or fallacious. That maxim need not deter rational enquiry. The experience of antiquity offers valid comparisons, if and when the social and political setting is similar. On that count, human history becomes real, alive, intelligible. (shrink)

This paper is a re-reading of Colin Radford's paper 'The Umpire's Dilemma', published in Analysis in 1985. It argues that Radford's dilemma has been unjustly ignored and has interesting (and problematic) implications for both intuitionism and Ronald Dworkin's constructive interpretationist jurisprudence.

This book, in language accessible to the general reader, investigates twelve of the most notorious, most interesting, and most instructive episodes involving the interaction between science and Christianity, aiming to tell each story in its historical specificity and local particularity. Among the events treated in When Science and Christianity Meet are the Galileo affair, the seventeenth-century clockwork universe, Noah's ark and flood in the development of natural history, struggles over Darwinian evolution, debates about the origin of the human species, and (...) the Scopes trial. Readers will be introduced to St. Augustine, Roger Bacon, Pope Urban VIII, Isaac Newton, Pierre-Simon de Laplace, Carl Linnaeus, Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, Sigmund Freud, and many other participants in the historical drama of science and Christianity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Twentieth-Century French PhilosophyRonald ShustermanTwentieth-Century French Philosophy, by Eric Matthews; 232 pp. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, $13.95 paper.Pace the habitual proverb, one of the best things about this volume is indeed its cover: a picture of Sartre lighting his pipe, in some Parisian cafe, in the midst of an animated discussion with Simone de Beauvoir and Mr. and Mrs. [End Page 188] Boris Vian. There is an (...) “arty” dimension to French philosophy which has mostly disappeared from English thought since the time of Russell. One could hardly imagine illustrating a history of recent English philosophy with (say) a picture of P. F. Strawson sitting in a bar with some rebellious trumpet-player-cum-novelist. Matthews manages to give the reader an exceptionally clear idea of the thought of those whom he considers to be the most significant French philosophers of our time. Perhaps the selection is too restrictive; some of the major figures who are completely—or almost completely—absent from this volume include Jacques Maritain, Michel Serres, Paul Ricoeur, Vladimir Jankélévitch, and Gilles Deleuze. Matthews’s work, however, is intended as an introduction, so his survey is necessarily light. The justification for the selection is that the essence of twentieth-century French thought involves an emphasis on subjectivity. This emphasis is examined in the work of Bergson who was the first of many to underline the role of the self and the body in our dealings with the world. Direct quotations of the major texts are infrequent; this, however, is probably for the best—or so one feels when one encounters examples such as “Value is the self in so far as the self haunts the heart of the for-itself as that which the for-itself is” (p. 76). Matthews excels at “translating” the ideas of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida and others into an English acceptable to even the most pedestrian ordinary language philosopher.Many readers may, however, be dissatisfied with some of Matthews’s classifications. Structuralism, for example, is represented here by Lacan and Foucault. Matthews correctly underlines Foucault’s “suspicion of a priori theorizing” (p. 149) but one has to remember that many of the great literary structuralists such as Barthes or Genette did base their work on abstract reasoning. In their hands, structuralism was hardly anti-scientific, so for someone coming to philosophy from literary theory, Matthews’s definition and examples are confusing. But perhaps these classifications are not essential to Matthews’s argument about the growth of subjectivity. It is indeed this subjectivity which emerges not only as Matthews’s thesis but as his target as well. He notes in Lacan’s philosophy the “lack of any serious argumentative support” and a “failure to offer empirical evidence for what looks like an empirical account” (p. 147). After a brief discussion of Foucault’s overall project, Matthews concludes that “one may feel a lingering suspicion that it is fatally flawed” (p. 156). This is frustrating and unfair; there is no point mentioning this flaw if one does not go on to work it out. Other philosophers get the same treatment. For example, Matthews argues against Lyotard’s picture of science as discredited: “Society might... find it hard to believe in science any more, without it being true that science was unbelievable” (p. 186). One may agree with Matthews on this point, but all of these rapid end-of-chapter dismissals remain rather superficial.Unfortunately, Matthews rarely builds the necessary bridges to make his study more illuminating. There is a passage on Bergson’s distinction between [End Page 189] “analysis” and “intuition” which is quite close to Russell’s distinction between “knowledge by description” and “knowledge by acquaintance.” Other such bridges could be built between Merleau-Ponty and pragmatism, or Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. There is a reason for the absence of these connections: Matthews’s basic premise is that there is something specific about French philosophy; too many obvious bridges to other thinkers would undermine his entire argument. One of Matthews’s goals is to demonstrate that it is “important to the understanding of works of philosophy... (shrink)

Provides a comprehensive introduction to the major philosophical theories attempting to explain the workings of language.

Musical Platonists identify musical works with abstract sound structures but this implies that they are not created but only discovered. Jerrold Levinson adapts Platonism to allow for creation by identifying musical works with indicated sound structures. In this paper I explore the similarities between Levinson's view and Kit Fine's theory of qua objects. Fine offers the theory of qua objects as an account of constitution, as it obtains, for example, between a statue and the clay the statue is made out (...) of. I argue that Fine's theory does not adequately characterize the constitution relation and that the problems it faces extend to Levinson's account of musical works as indicated structures. I develop an alternative theory of constitution, based on the notion of being made out of. This approach to constitution enables me to offer an account of musical works as abstract objects that are constituted by sound structures. I argue that my account has several advantages over the Levinson/Fine approach. (shrink)

Abstract: We sometimes say our moral claims are "objectively true," or are "right, even if nobody believes it." These additional claims are often taken to be staking out metaethical positions, representative of a certain kind of theorizing about morality that "steps outside" the practice in order to comment on its status. Ronald Dworkin has argued that skepticism about these claims so understood is not tenable because it is impossible to step outside such practices. I show that externally skeptical metaethical (...) theory can withstand his attacks, thereby defending the possibility of this kind of metatheoretical method and showing that the additional objectivity claims still make sense as external claims. Four interpretations of the additional objectivity claims can still be understood externally: as secondary properties, as arguing for some form of causal correspondence, as explaining error, and under Blackburn's expressivism. In the end, Dworkin's argument can be turned against itself. (shrink)

Deconstruction and pragmatism constitute two of the major intellectual influences on the contemporary theoretical scene; influences personified in the work of Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty. Both Rortian pragmatism, which draws the consequences of post-war developments in Anglo-American philosophy, and Derridian deconstruction, which extends and troubles the phonomenological and Heideggerian influence on the Continental tradition, have hitherto generally been viewed as mutually exclusive philosophical language games. The purpose of this volume is to bring deconstruction and pragmatism into critical confrontation with (...) one another through staging a debate between Derrida and Rorty, itself based on discussions that took place at the College International de Philosophie in Paris in 1993. The ground for this debate is layed out in introductory papers by Simon Critchley and Ernesto Laclau, and the remainder of the volume records Derrida's and Rorty's responses to each other's work. Chantal Mouffe gives an overview of the stakes of this debate in a helpful preface. (shrink)

Nietzsche famously attacked traditional morality, and propounded a controversial ethics of 'life-enhancement'. Simon May presents a radically new view of Nietzsche's thought, which is shown to be both revolutionary and conservative, and to have much to offer us today after the demise of old values and the 'death of God'.

From political scandals at the highest levels to inflated repair bills at the local garage, we are seemingly surrounded with unethical behavior, so why should we behave any differently? Why should we go through life anchored down by rules no one else seems to follow? Writing with wit and elegance, Simon Blackburn tackles such questions in this lively look at ethics, highlighting the complications and doubts and troubling issues that spring from the very simple question of how we ought (...) to live. Blackburn dissects many common reasons why we are skeptical about ethics. Drawing on all-too-familiar examples from history, politics, religion and everyday personal experience, he shows how cynicism and self-consciousness can paralyze us into considering ethics a hopeless pursuit. But ethics is neither futile nor irrelevant, he assures us, but an intimate part of the nitty gritty issues of living--of birth, death, happiness, desire, freedom, pleasure, justice. Indeed, from moral dilemmas about abortion and euthanasia, to our obsession with personal rights, to our longing for a sense of meaning in life, our everyday struggles are rife with ethical issues, whether we notice it or not. Blackburn distills the arguments of Hume, Kant and Aristotle down to their essences, to underscore the timeless relevance of our voice of conscience, the pitfalls of complacency, and our concerns about truth, knowledge and human progress. Blackburn's rare combination of depth, rigor and sparkling prose, and his distinguished ranking among contemporary philosophers, mark Being Good as an important statement on our current disenchantment with ethics. It challenges us to take a more thoughtful reading of our ethical climate and to ponder more carefully our own standards of behavior. (shrink)

While most large companies around the world now have a code of ethics, reported ethical malpractice among some of these does not appear to be abating. The reasons for this are explored, using academic studies, survey reports as well as insights gained from the Institute of Business Ethics' work with large corporations. These indicate that there is a gap between the existence of explicit ethical values and principles, often expressed in the form of a code, and the attitudes and behaviour (...) of the organisation. The paper suggests that two basic reasons appear to be at the heart of the problem: ineffective ethics programmes and deficiencies in corporate culture. The paper concludes that successfully embedded corporate ethical values requires well-designed ethics policies, sustained ethical leadership and incorporation of ethics in organisational processes and strategy as part of an ethical culture at all levels of the organisation. It makes some practical suggestions on how this can be achieved. (shrink)

Marya Schechtman's The Constitution of Selves presented an impressive attempt to persuade those working on personal identity to give up mainstream positions and take on a narrative view instead. More recently, she has presented new arguments with a closely related aim. She attempts to convince us to give up the view of identity as a matter of psychological continuity, using Derek Parfit's story of the “Nineteenth Century Russian” as a central example in making the case against Parfit's own view, and (...) offers a form of narrative theory as a way out of the problem. In this paper I consider this new case, and argue that we should not be persuaded towards the narrative. (shrink)

Hart's "Ascription of Responsibility and Rights" is where we find perhaps the first clear pronouncement of defeasibility and the technical introduction of the term. The paper has been criticised, disavowed, and never quite fully redeemed. Its lurid history is now being used as an excuse for dismissing the importance of defeasibility.

In this paper we examine the effects of different competitive conditions on the determination and evaluation of strategies of corporatesocial responsibility (CSR). Although the mainstream of current thinking in business ethics recognizes that a firm should invest in social responsibility, the normative theory on how specific competitive conditions affect a firm’s social responsibility remains underdeveloped. Intensity of competition, risks to reputation and the regulatory environment determine the competitive conditions of a firm. Our central thesis is that differential strength of competition (...) produces differential moral legitimacy of firm behavior. When competition is fierce or weak, different acts or strategies become morally acceptable, as well as economically rational. A firm has to develop its own strategy of social responsibility, in light of its competitive position, as well as ethical considerations. (shrink)

Europe is inseparable from its history. That history has been extensively studied in terms of its political history, its economic history, its religious history, its literary and cultural history, and so on. Could there be a distinctively philosophical history of Europe? Not a history of philosophy in Europe, but a history of Europe that focuses on what, in its history and identity, ties it to philosophy. In the two volumes of Europe: A Philosophical History - The Promise of Modernity and (...) Beyond Modernity - Simon Glendinning takes up this question, telling the story of Europe's history as a philosophical history. In Part 1, The Promise of Modernity, Glendinning examines the conception of Europe that links it to ideas of rational Enlightenment and modernity. Tracking this self-understanding as it unfolds in the writings of Kant, Hegel and Marx, Glendinning explores the transition in Europe from a conception of its modernity that was philosophical and religious to one which was philosophical and scientific. While this transition profoundly altered Europe's own history, Glendinning shows how its self-confident core remained intact in this development. But not for long. This volume ends with an examination of the abrupt shattering of this confidence brought on by the first world-wide war of European origin - and the imminence of a second. The promise of modernity was in ruins. Nothing, for Europe, would ever be the same again. (shrink)

Religious atheism? -- The universe -- Religious freedom -- Death and immortality.

This book explores a much-neglected area of moral philosophy--the typology of immorality.

Simon Feldman explores how the concept of authenticity has become an unrealistic ideal founded on metaphysically confused notions of the self. In Against Authenticity, Feldman argues for the validity and value of inauthenticity in our lives, providing an exciting challenge for studies of ethics, metaethics, metaphysics, and moral psychology.

Husserl has finally begun to be recognized as the precursor of current interest in intentionality — the first to have a general theory of the role of mental representations in the philosophy of language and mind. As the first thinker to put directedness of mental representations at the center of his philosophy, he is also beginning to emerge as the father of current research in cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence.

I contend that Janet Kourany's "A Philosophy of Science for the Twenty-First Century" contains three levels of projects: (1) a naturalistic project, (2) a critical project, and (3) a political project. The naturalistic project is already well established. The critical project is less valued and less established within the profession, but seems a worthy and achievable goal. The political project, I argue, takes one outside the professional pursuit of the philosophy of science. The critical project encompasses both the evaluation of (...) scientific research programs and of empirical conclusions. I contend that the former is widely acknowledged as legitimate while the latter is unacceptable. (shrink)

Logical models of argument formalize commonsense reasoning while taking process and computation seriously. This survey discusses the main ideas which characterize di erent logical models of argument. It presents the formal features of a few main approaches to the modeling of argumentation. We trace the evolution of argumentationfrom the mid-80's, when argumentsystems emerged as an alternative to nonmonotonic formalisms based on classical logic, to the present, as argument is embedded in di erent complex systems for real-world applications, and allows more (...) formal work to be done in different areas, such as AI & Law, case-based reasoning and negotiation among intelligent agents. (shrink)