Proceedings of the Banff Congress on Theoretical Psychology. Philosophers and psychologists discuss the relative merits of their approaches to the study of consciousness.

The individual and society: Meerloo, J. A. M. Freedom--our mental backbone. Allport, G. Freedom. Marcuse, H. The new forms of control. Kerr, W. A. Psychology of the free competition of ideas. Eysenck, H. J. The technology of consent. Dewey, J. Toward a new individualism. Emerson, R. W. Self-reliance. Fromm, E. Freedom and democracy.--Religion and the inner man: St. Augustine. The freedom and the will. Mercier, L. J. A. Freedom of the will and psychology. Dostoyevsky, F. The grand inquisitor. Berdyaev, N. (...) Master, slave and free man. Buber, M. I and thou. Govinda, A. Time and space and the problem of free will. Prabhavananda, S. Control of the subconscious mind.--Philosophy and philosophical psychology: Bergson, H. Psychological determinism. James, W. The dilemma of determinism. Mill, J. S. The freedom of the will. Sartre, J. P. Being and doing: freedom. Wyschogrod, M. Sartre, freedom and the unconscious. May, R. Will, decision and responsibility: summary remarks. Knight, R. P. Determinism, "freedom," and psychotherapy. Royce, J. Meaning, value, and personality.--Selected bibliography (p. 393-408). (shrink)

What have Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Sanders Pierce, William James, John Dewey, Josiah Royce, George Santayana and Willard Van Orman Quine contributed to American philosophy? Edwards is without rival as the greatest philosopher/theologian of colonial America. Before Emerson, no other thinker remotely approaches Edwards in intellectual endowment, range of interests, or depth and subtlety of treatment of a variety of philosophical topics. Emerson and Thoreau together represent the high point of American transcendentalism. Charles Sanders (...) Peirce, William James, and John Dewey--the Big Three of American pragmatism--form a constellation of philosophers whose like has been seen neither before nor since their time. The brilliant, irascible Peirce may well be the greatest philosopher America has produced. Philosophical idealism reached its American zenith in Josiah Royce, a thinker whose vast erudition and formidable intelligence breathed new life into a point of view widely thought to be moribund. George Ssantayana is, with Emerson, the poet of American philosophy. Quine is one of America’s most distinguished living philosophers and very proudly the most influential. (shrink)

This collection of essays is dedicated to 'Joe' Karel Lambert. The contributors are all personally affected to Joe in some way or other, but they are definitely not the only ones. Whatever excuses there are - there are some -, the editors apologize to whomever they have neglected. But even so the collection displays how influential Karel Lambert has been, personally and through his teaching and his writings. The display is in alphabetical order - with one exception: Bas van Fraassen, (...) being about the earliest student of Karel Lambert, opens the collection with some reminiscences. Naturally, one of the focal points of this volume is Lambert's logical thinking and (or: freed of) ontological thinking. Free logic is intimately connected with description theory. Bas van Fraassen gives a survey of the development of the area, and Charles Daniels points to difficulties with definite descriptions in modal contexts and stories. Peter Woodruff addresses the relation between free logic and supervaluation semantics, presenting a novel condition which recovers desirable metatheoretic properties for free logic under that semantics. Terence Parsons shows how free logic can be utilized in interpreting sentences as purporting to denote events (true ones succeed and false ones fail) and how this helps to understand natural language. (shrink)

What if in discussion the critic refuses to recognize an emotionally expressed argument of her interlocutor as an argument, accusing him of having presented no argument at all. In this paper, we shall deal with this reproach, which taken literally amounts to a charge of having committed a fallacy of non-argumentation. As such it is a very strong, if not the ultimate, criticism, which even carries the risk of abandonment of the discussion and can, therefore, not be made without burdening (...) oneself with correspondingly strong obligations. We want to specify the fallacies of non-argumentation and their dialectic, i.e., the proper way to criticize them, the appropriate ways for the arguer to react to such criticism, and the appropriate ways for the critic to follow up on these reactions. Among the types of fallacy of non-argumentation, the emphasis will be on the appeal to popular sentiments. Our aim is to reach, for cases of non-argumentation, a survey of dialectical possibilities. By making the disputants themselves responsible for the place of emotion in their dialogues, we hope to contribute to a further development of the theory of dialectical obligations. (shrink)

This paper presents a new model for how the voting worked at the Athenian dramatic competitions, and demonstrates its viability mathematically. Previous proposals have either failed to take full account of the ancient sources or have not considered all the possible permutations of judging results. As is generally recognized, ten votes were cast, but in most circumstances not all were counted. Sections I-IV consider the tragic competition at the Dionysia, in which three competitors vied for the prize. For the questions (...) we consider, two likely cases are examined (when the votes are divided 4-3-3 and 5-3-2), then a random distribution covering all possible cases, and finally the situation when two competitors are favoured against a third (when the votes are divided 5-5-0, 5-4-1 and 4-4-2). Section I presents the proposal and situates it within the Athenian cultural context. Section II asks how many lots are typically drawn before a victory is obtained. Section III considers how other places are determined. Section IV introduces the question of 'fairness': does the person who receives the most votes actually win? Section V considers adjudication for comedies and at the Lenaia. Section VI considers dithyrambic competitions. (shrink)

This paper attempts to systematically characterize critical reactions in argumentative discourse, such as objections, critical questions, rebuttals, refutations, counterarguments, and fallacy charges, in order to contribute to the dialogical approach to argumentation. We shall make use of four parameters to characterize distinct types of critical reaction. First, a critical reaction has a focus, for example on the standpoint, or on another part of an argument. Second, critical reactions appeal to some kind of norm, argumentative or other. Third, they each have (...) a particular illocutionary force, which may include that of giving strategic advice to the other. Fourth, a critical reaction occurs at a particular level of dialogue (the ground level or some meta-level). The concepts here developed shall be applied to discussions of critical reactions by Aristotle and by some contemporary authors. (shrink)

Why do some physicians continue to treat patients who are clearly dying or persistently unconscious, while others consider medical intervention to be futile past a certain point? No doubt, medical decisions vary in part because clinical information is often ambiguous in individual cases and because it may support more than one reasonable interpretation of a patient's chances for survival or improvement if a particular treatment is administered. Also, cases vary considerably to the extent that a patient's or a family member's (...) preferences for treatment are communicated, understood, and implemented. But, beyond these contingencies, patients at the end of life may receive more, less, or different treatment because physicians themselves are social actors, individuals who bring to bear on their clinical decisions a variety of personal attitudes, values, concerns, and interests. Legal defensiveness, religious vitalism, authoritarianism, intolerance of ambiguity, and other traits may influence physicians’ behavior, but each may be concealed under the rubric of what is “medically indicated” or “medically appropriate.”. (shrink)

During the past three decades the Utrecht scholar Jaap Mansfeld has built up a formidable reputation in the field of the history of ancient philosophy. This state-of-the-art collection of articles is presented to him by colleagues and friends on his sixtieth birthday.

This book, written by four internationally renowned bioethicists and first published in 2000, was the first systematic treatment of the fundamental ethical issues underlying the application of genetic technologies to human beings. Probing the implications of the remarkable advances in genetics, the authors ask how should these affect our understanding of distributive justice, equality of opportunity, the rights and obligations as parents, the meaning of disability, and the role of the concept of human nature in ethical theory and practice. The (...) book offers a historical context to contemporary debate over the use of these technologies by examining the eugenics movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The questions raised in this book will be of interest to any reflective reader concerned about science and society and the rapid development of biotechnology, as well as to professionals in such areas as philosophy, bioethics, medical ethics, health management, law, and political science. (shrink)

Cho and Martinez-Martin provide a wide-ranging analysis of what they label “digital simulacra”—which are in essence data-driven AI-based simulation models such as digital twins or models used for i...

Selection on grandparental investment is more complex than Coall & Hertwig (C&H) propose. Patterns of investment are subject to an intergenerational conflict over how resources should be distributed to maximize fitness. Grandparents may be selected to distribute resources unevenly, while their descendants will be selected to manipulate investment in their own favor. Here we outline the evolutionary basis of this conflict.

We shall investigate the similarities and dissimilarities between old and new dialectic. For the ‘old dialectic’, we base our survey mainly on Aristotle’s Topics and Sophistical Refutations, whereas for the ‘new dialectic’, we turn to contemporary views on dialogical interaction, such as can, for the greater part, be found in Walton’s The New Dialectic. Three issues are taken up: types of dialogue, fallacies, and strategies. Though one should not belittle the differences in scope and outlook that obtain between the old (...) and the new dialectic, the paper will show that in many respects the old dialectic foreshadows the new dialectic. (shrink)

Criticism may degenerate into quibbling or nitpicking. How can discussants keep quibblers under control? In the paper we investigate cases in which a battle about words replaces a discussion of the matters that are actually at issue as well as cases in which a battle about minor objections replaces a discussion of the major issues. We survey some lines of discussion dealing with these situations in profiles of dialogue.