_John Dewey and Continental Philosophy_ provides a rich sampling of exchanges that could have taken place long ago between the traditions of American pragmatism and continental philosophy had the lines of communication been more open between Dewey and his European contemporaries. Since they were not, Paul Fairfield and thirteen of his colleagues seek to remedy the situation by bringing the philosophy of Dewey into conversation with several currents in continental philosophical thought, from post-Kantian idealism and the work of Friedrich Nietzsche (...) to twentieth-century phenomenology, hermeneutics, and poststructuralism. This unique volume includes discussions comparing and contrasting Dewey with the German philosophers G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer on such topics as phenomenology, naturalism, organicism, contextualism, and poetry. Others investigate a series of connections between Dewey and contemporary French philosophy, including the notions of subjectivity, education, and the critique of modernity in Michel Foucault; language and politics in Jacques Derrida; and the concept of experience in Gilles Deleuze. Also discussed is the question of whether we can identify traces of _Bildung_ in Dewey’s writings on education, and pragmatism’s complex relation to twentieth-century phenomenology and hermeneutics, including the problematic question of whether Heidegger was a pragmatist in any meaningful sense. Presented in intriguing pairings, these thirteen essays offer different approaches to the material that will leave readers with much to deliberate. _ John Dewey and Continental Philosophy_ demonstrates some of the many connections and opportunities for cross-traditional thinking that have long existed between Dewey and continental thought, but have been under-explored. The intersection presented here between Dewey’s pragmatism and the European traditions makes a significant contribution to continental and American philosophy and will spur new and important developments in the American philosophical debate. (shrink)

Ramsey famously pronounced that discounting “future enjoyments” would be ethically indefensible. Suppes enunciated an equity criterion implying that all individuals’ welfare should be treated equally. By contrast, Arrow accepted, perhaps rather reluctantly, the logical force of Koopmans’ argument that no satisfactory preference ordering on a sufficiently unrestricted domain of infinite utility streams satisfies equal treatment. In this paper, we first derive an equitable utilitarian objective based on a version of the Vickrey–Harsanyi original position, extended to allow a variable and uncertain (...) population with no finite bound. Following the work of Chichilnisky and others on sustainability, slightly weakening the conditions of Koopmans and co-authors allows intergenerational equity to be satisfied. In fact, assuming that the expected total number of individuals who ever live is finite, and that each individual’s utility is bounded both above and below, there is a coherent equitable objective based on expected total utility. Moreover, it implies the “extinction discounting rule” advocated by, inter alia, the Stern Review on climate change. (shrink)

This book reports recent landmark developments and the state of the art in NDS science in psychological theory and research.

In this collection the authors have attempted to bring together a number of the essential papers in the subjective interpretation of probability theory; several of them—Borel's "Apropos of a theory on probability" and de Finetti's "Foresight: its logical laws, its subjective sources"—have never appeared before in English. Other articles include Venn's pioneering study as well as the more recent work of Ramsey, Koopman, and Savage. The editors provide an introduction which presents the three basic elements of any subjectivistic theory: (...) probability as degree of belief, the coherence of beliefs of an individual, and the notion of exchangeable events. A bibliography includes references to virtually all the more important works in subjective probability, with special emphasis on the development of the mathematical side of the theory. This anthology belongs on the shelf of any philosopher concerned with inductive logic, statistical inference, or the foundations of probability theory.—P. J. M. (shrink)

In the past four years, a small but intense debate has transpired on the margins of mainstream scholarship in the discipline of Philosophy, particularly within the sub-field of American pragmatism. While most philosophical pragmatists dedicate their attention to questions concerning how ideas improve experience (or the theory-practice continuum), those participating in this exchange have shown greater concern for an issue that is, at its core, a theoretical matter: Does the theory of experience espoused by the classic American philosopher John Dewey (...) succumb to what contemporary analytic philosophers—for instance, Wilfred Sellars, Donald Davidson and John McDowell—call the Myth of the Given? One commentator, Scott Aikin, claims that Dewey relied on non-inferential and non-conceptual content or givens as perceptual inputs for cognitive experience. The upshot of Aikin’s objection is that these experiential givens constitute a proxy epistemological foundation for the beliefs that flow from inquiry—a position clearly in conflict with Dewey’s commitment to anti-foundationalism. The objection assumes a slightly different form in the hands of another scholar of American pragmatism, Colin Koopman. Gregory Pappas and David Hildebrand respond to Koopman’s version of the objection. The goals of this essay are to clarify the objection, highlight the stakes in the debate, identify misunderstandings of Dewey’s experiential metaphysics on both sides, and determine why the experiential givenism objection merits serious philosophical scrutiny in the future. (shrink)

Ramsey famously condemned discounting “future enjoyments” as “ethically indefensible”. Suppes enunciated an equity criterion which, when social choice is utilitarian, implies giving equal weight to all individuals’ utilities. By contrast, Arrow (Contemporary economic issues. International Economic Association Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 1999a; Discounting and Intergenerational Effects, Resources for the Future Press, Washington DC, 1999b) accepted, perhaps reluctantly, what he called Koopmans’ (Econometrica 28(2):287–309, 1960) “strong argument” implying that no equitable preference ordering exists for a sufficiently unrestricted domain of infinite utility (...) streams. Here we derive an equitable utilitarian objective for a finite population based on a version of the Vickrey–Harsanyi original position, where there is an equal probability of becoming each person. For a potentially infinite population facing an exogenous stochastic process of extinction, an equitable extinction biased original position requires equal conditional probabilities, given that the individual’s generation survives the extinction process. Such a position is well-defined if and only if survival probabilities decline fast enough for the expected total number of individuals who can ever live to be finite. Then, provided that each individual’s utility is bounded both above and below, maximizing expected “extinction discounted” total utility—as advocated, inter alia, by the Stern Review on climate change—provides a coherent and dynamically consistent equitable objective, even when the population size of each generation can be chosen. (shrink)

Ramsey famously condemned discounting “future enjoyments” as “ethically indefensible”. Suppes enunciated an equity criterion which, when social choice is utilitarian, implies giving equal weight to all individuals’ utilities. By contrast, Arrow accepted, perhaps reluctantly, what he called Koopmans’ :287–309, 1960) “strong argument” implying that no equitable preference ordering exists for a sufficiently unrestricted domain of infinite utility streams. Here we derive an equitable utilitarian objective for a finite population based on a version of the Vickrey–Harsanyi original position, where there is (...) an equal probability of becoming each person. For a potentially infinite population facing an exogenous stochastic process of extinction, an equitable extinction biased original position requires equal conditional probabilities, given that the individual’s generation survives the extinction process. Such a position is well-defined if and only if survival probabilities decline fast enough for the expected total number of individuals who can ever live to be finite. Then, provided that each individual’s utility is bounded both above and below, maximizing expected “extinction discounted” total utility—as advocated, inter alia, by the Stern Review on climate change—provides a coherent and dynamically consistent equitable objective, even when the population size of each generation can be chosen. (shrink)

Stakeholder theory is widely recognized as a management theory, yet very little research has considered its implications for individual managerial decision-making. In the two studies reported here, we used stakeholder theory to examine managerial decisions about balancing stakeholder interests. Results of Study 1 suggest that indivisible resources and unequal levels of stakeholder saliency constrain managers’ efforts to balance stakeholder interests. Resource divisibility also influenced whether managers used a within-decision or an across-decision approach to balance stakeholder interests. In Study 2 we (...) examined instrumental and normative implications of these two approaches. We conclude by considering the contributions of this research. (shrink)

This article examines the regalist reforming critique and the curial defence of papal temporal dominion in the eighteenth-century Italian peninsula. The discussion examines the little-explored links between the justification for papal supremacy in the Church and the historico-theological defence of its theocratic rule. The refusal of the Curia to grant reform gave rise to a radical reforming movement which produced some astoundingly bitter anti-curial polemics little known outside Italian studies, but of some significance in the history of political thought.

The purported failures of ergodic theory (seen in its often proved ineptitude to ground a mechanical explanation of thermodynamics) are shown to arise from misconception of the functions served by scientific explanation. In fact, the predictive failures of ergodic theory are precisely its points of greatest physical utility, where genuinely new knowledge about actual physical systems can be obtained, once the links between explanation and reconstructive estimation are recognized.

Joseph Bracken examines key writings of process-oriented philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead along with systems-oriented thinkers such as Ludwig von Bertalanffy to create a systems-oriented understanding of the God-world relation that serves as a complement to Pope Francis’s reflections on the environmental crisis.

Open peer commentary on the article “Social Autopoiesis?” by Hugo Urrestarazu. Upshot: Although accepting Urrestarazu’s view of how autopoietic dynamics can be sought in the domain of the non-living, we see no reason to trace the social to autonomy. Rather, we stress that social systems happen all the time: they arise as people coordinate while also using the peculiarities of human languaging.